Varsity Eighty Years On

By Prosper Keating

The last major parachute and air-landing operation of the Second World War took place eighty years ago on March 25th 1945. This was Operation Varsity. 

The Axis or, more precisely, the Germans had abandoned large-scale airborne operations as a consequence of the horrendous losses sustained by the Fallschirmjäger during the capture of Crete in 1941 but the Allies — the British and Americans — had developed the Allied Airborne capability. 

Operation Varsity’s success has been attributed to the enormous resources invested by the Allied leadership. 1,696 transport aircraft and 1,326 gliders carried 21,680 paratroopers and glider soldiers of two airborne divisions to their respective drop zones and landing zones near the German city of Wesel on the eastern side of the river Rhine. Some sources give different figures.

Varsity had been entrusted to American General Matthew Ridgway, commanding the 18th Airborne Corps, and his second-in-command Major General Richard ‘Windy’ Gale, previously in command of the British 6th Airborne Division. General Gale had received a DSO for his command of the 6th Airborne Division in Normandy. 

Left to fight as ground assault troops for three months, the 6th Airborne Division was finally withdrawn from north-western Europe after suffering some 4,500 casualties. Meanwhile, her sister division the 1st Airborne Division was fed onto the mince grinder in Holland in September 1944 as part of another scheme to seize bridges across rivers. 

In December 1944, Gale handed over to Major-General Eric Bols and was posted to the Headquarters of the grandly-named First Allied Airborne Army, commanded by US General Lewis H. Brereton. The planning of Operation Varsity  began immediately. The operation was in support of Operation Plunder, which was the. crossing by the Allies of the Rhine, led by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

The major two participants would be the 6th Airborne Division and the US Army’s 17th Airborne Division, which had seen its first action in the Battle of the Bulge. The two Allied divisions were brought together under the administrative command of the American XVIII Airborne Corps commanded by Generals Ridgway and Gale. 

There had been plans to include the US Army’s 13th Airborne Division but these were not implemented. However, the objectives, conceived with three airborne divisions in mind, were not changed. 

The 6th Airborne Division was tasked with capturing the villages of Hamminkeln and Schnappenberg, clearing German forces out of some of the Diersfordt Forest and taking three bridges over the river Issel. The 17th Airborne Division would take the village of Diersfordt and then clear the rest of the Diersfortd Forest of enemy forces. 

The Allied paratroopers and glider soldiers would then hold the territory they had cleared until relieved by advancing Allied ground forces — the British 21st Army Group — before joining the Allied advance into Germany. In general terms, Operation Varsity was successful although Windy Gale’s fears of high losses were to some extent vindicated.

The two divisions sustained some 2,000 casualties. There were errors, which is to be expected in any large military undertaking. One regiment of the 17th Airborne Division was dropped on a British DZ. 

There were attempts to reduce the risks faced by the airborne soldiers. The drops and landings were timed to take place after the amphibious crossing of the river by ground forces. Unlike Holland the previous autumn, the airborne forces were not landed too far in advance of the ground forces. 

Moreover, it was decided that the British and American airborne forces would be delivered in a single lift rather than successive waves, thus allowing the Germans less time to reorganise on the ground as around Arnhem. And this time, Allied High Command made sure that there were ample aircraft available to drop supplies. 

Operation Plunder began on the evening of March 23rd 1944 as British, Canadian and American ground forces crossed the Rhine in amphibious vehicles and boats, establishing bridgeheads on the eastern banks. Soon afterwards, the air armada carrying the men and equipment of the 6th and 17th Airborne Divisions began lifting off from airfields in England and France.

Figures vary but one recorded fact speaks volumes: after rendezvousing over the Belgian capital of Brussels and heading for Germany, the assorted transport aircraft and gliders stretched over 200 miles or 320 kilometres across the skies. It was timed by military observers as taking two hours and thirty-seven minutes to pass any given point. 

At 10:00 hours on the morning of March 24th 1945, the first elements of Operation Varsity began landing in Germany. For many of the British and American paratroopers and glider soldiers, it was their first experience of active service and battle. So much has been written about Varsity that it does not need rehashing here. But pause for a moment on Monday morning and think of the thunderous noise of those aircraft and of the men aboard them.

I shall be thinking of my uncle Prosper Keating, a Dubliner like me, who was on one of those gliders with the 1st Battalion, Royal Ulster Rifles. He had already survived a glider landing Normandy with the Anti-Tanks Platoon of 1 RUR and he would survive the Rhine Crossing too. He spoke very rarely of those times but he and his mates never saw their war as a waste of youth and life because of the slave labourers they liberated on the advance across Germany towards the Baltic. They haunted his dreams and sometimes his waking hours.