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When I was stationed at NATO Airbase Geilenkirchen in Germany, right on the border with the Netherlands, I used to go to a British history club meeting across the border in Heerlen. One night there was a British major who gave a talk on Operation Market-Garden, and he was offering a bus tour of the planned OMG invasion route, which I signed up for immediately.

The major has apparently made the study of the history of OMG his life's work, because he knew and incredible amount of detail on it. The bus tour followed the route that the British tanks were supposed to traverse, across all those canals and bridges to Arnhem. He stopped the bus at many points along the way to explain the disposition of German and Allied forces, pointing out the drop zones, individual battles -- he even knew where some of th e individual German machinegun nests had been placed.

He also had interviewed just about everybody alive who remembered OMG, including a lot of the Dutch villagers along the route. He told one story where he had interviewed a paratrooper who came down close to a Dutch farm house, narrowly dodging it but hitting a little shed and knocking it over. Some time after that he was interviewing a Dutch woman, who as a little girl saw the paratroopers coming down...and mentioned that one of them had knocked over her family's shed! He was able to link them up for a reunion.

The same major later gave a talk on the Falklands invasion, and has a British officer (junior officer at the time of the invasion) who led some of the Royal Marine forces that landed on the island.

That was a pretty good tour.

I forgot until just now: Today is the 75th anniversary of the start of Operation Market-Garden

AIRBORNE!