September 17, 1944. Parachutes of the 1st Allied Airborne Army open overhead as waves of paratroopers land in Holland during Operation Market Garden.

The idea behind Market Garden was brilliant if only it had been better carried out.

Recently we celebrated the sixty-fifth anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. To many of us who were alive in 1944 it seems as if it were a short time-hack ago in history.

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In this year of anniversaries, September marks the sixty-fifth anniversary of one of the war’s grandest and most frustrating military operations: the greatest airborne operation in history called Operation Market Garden. Sixty-five years on, Market Garden remains one of those moments in history where defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory by a series of events that combined to produce one of the greatest tragedies of the war. Market Garden was a squandered opportunity, if not to end the war in 1944, to certainly have changed its course. If not for human error its success would have eliminated the dreadful and costly Battle of the Bulge during which the US Army sustained the highest casualties of World War II.

In September 1944 the Allies planned a massive airborne operation in Holland to gain a bridgehead over the principal obstacle to an advance on the Ruhr, the mighty Rhine River. By outflanking the heavily defended German West Wall, the Allies would have had an unimpeded clear shot into the Ruhr. Moreover, once across the Rhine, the British ground commander, newly promoted Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery was convinced that Eisenhower would be obliged to give logistical priority to his single-thrust concept. Breaching the Rhine had important psychological implications as well. An Allied advance into the heart of the Reich in 1944 would have sent a clear signal that for Germany to continue the war would be futile.

On September 10, Eisenhower gave Montgomery a green light to mount a major airborne operation in Holland. Speed was urgent before the Germans could react and on that basis it was quickly approved for the following Sunday, September 17.

The operation was to be carried out by the newly-created First Allied Airborne Army (FAAA), commanded by Lt. Gen. Lewis Brereton, the high-living, marginally competent air commander whom the chief of the army air corps, Gen. H.H. “Hap” Arnold had plucked from the Philippines as the Japanese attacked, sent first to the Middle East and later to England to head the Ninth Air Force.

Whereas Brereton’s qualifications were debatable, his deputy, Lt. Gen. F.A.M. “Boy” Browning, was considered a pioneer in the evolution of British airborne operations. A qualified glider pilot who had briefly been the first commander of the 1st Airborne Division when it was formed in 1942, Browning was also the commander of the British airborne corps. On paper Browning had brilliant qualifications; in reality he lacked battle experience.

U.S. Army chief of staff, Gen. George Marshall, was a long-time advocate of airborne operations and emphatically on record favoring the creation of an Allied airborne army, as was Arnold, who pressed unrelentingly for a role for the vast U.S. Army Air Force troop carrier fleet that had been reluctantly created by the airmen to support airborne and glider operations, but which was currently sitting idle in England. Both exhorted Eisenhower to employ his airborne forces. By the summer of 1944 Eisenhower had little choice except to embrace the airborne concept thrust upon him by the creation of the First Allied Airborne Army, which became the Allied strategic reserve, a versatile force to be employed when and where Eisenhower and SHAEF decided. Once the decision was made to create such an organization, the pressure immediately mounted to find some means to employ it.

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