The proposal for a three-division airborne drop almost immediately resulted in a considerable fight between the overall commanders of Allied operations in support of the invasion, with Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory on one side and Montgomery and Eisenhower on the other. Leigh-Mallory argued, not very tactfully, that the paratroopers were going to be slaughtered by the Germans. According to him they would suffer upward of 95 percent casualties.

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Eisenhower countered with his belief that the airborne assault at night would not suffer such a high casualty rate, but that it did not matter what the casualty rate was so long as the airborne troops accomplished their mission. As the supreme Allied commander, he got his way. But that argument brought a special poignancy to his visit to the members of the 101st Airborne Division on June 5, 1944. As he talked to the young paratroopers, Eisenhower was well aware that he might be sending all those men to their deaths.

What exactly was to be the mission of the American 82nd and 101st Airborne and the British 6th Airborne? The British airborne troops had perhaps the most crucial mission in terms of Normandy’s geography. They were to seize the solid ground on the east side of the Orne River, while a specially trained gliderborne force was to seize the bridges over the Caen Canal and Orne at Benouville to achieve a linkup with the amphibious landings. The control of that ground, because of the swamps and marshy terrain lying farther east, would mean that the Germans could attack the British and Canadian beaches from the south, but not from the east. And that one direction — to the south — was more than enough to keep the Canadians busy when the murderous juvenile delinquents of the 12th SS Panzer Division ‘Hitlerjügend‘ arrived. The task of the American paratroopers was similar to that of the British: They were to keep the Germans off the backs of the soldiers making the Utah Beach landing and disrupt German communications throughout western Normandy.

The drops more than accomplished their mission and — to use that dreadful military euphemism — at ‘an acceptable cost.’ The British were luckier in that their drops were more concentrated, while the glider attack on the Caen Canal Bridge — remembered forever afterward as ‘Pegasus Bridge’ — and the Orne River Bridge succeeded beyond the planners’ wildest expectations. By late morning the commandos of Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, had linked up with the 6th Airborne and the hard ground on the east side of the Orne was relatively secure.

The American paratroopers were less lucky in that, due to weather, bad navigation and German anti-aircraft fire, the troop carrier pilots dropped them all over Normandy. While that may have had a direct impact on their cohesion as fighting forces, the small groups of paratroopers spread havoc and confusion throughout the Norman countryside. In particular, their actions distracted the attention of German commanders away from the landings, including that on Omaha Beach. Moreover, enough paratroopers landed near where they were supposed to that the airborne was able to accomplish its basic missions — Lieutenant Dick Winters’ assault on the German battery at Brécourt Manor near the Utah Beach landing site being a notable example.

Once they had accomplished their mission, the paratroopers were supposed to be withdrawn in preparation for their next mission. They were not. The two American divisions stayed on line well into June and took terrible casualties. The British 6th Airborne Division remained even longer, suffering so many losses that it was not available in September for the Holland operation.

Market-Garden
Operation Market-Garden, the failed attempt to liberate much of the Netherlands and seize a direct route into northern Germany, was the greatest airborne operation in history. But it was an ill-fated undertaking from the outset. The planning began just after Montgomery had stopped the advance of the XXX Corps north of Antwerp. An advance of just another 10 kilometers would have put the whole of the German Fifteenth Army in the bag and prevented most of that army’s participation in the late September battles. As early as September 5 and 6, Ultra decrypts had uncovered the fact that the Germans were planning to redeploy the 9th and 10th SS Panzer divisions in the Arnhem area for rest and refit — a fact that the Dutch underground and aerial reconnaissance confirmed during the week immediately before the operation was to begin.

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