24 BBC Richard Dimbleby

The battle order, the schedule of operations for this great airborne landing in Germany, took up a score of pages of typewritten full-scap with appendices and charts and timetables and maps. By reading it you could see how immensely complicated is such an operation, in fact how great a triumph today has been for Allied planning and execution.

The Germans had said that they were ready for airborne landings. They were not, I think, expecting anything quite as powerful and concentrated as this, the biggest airborne force ever carried in one attack. It was British and American flying parallel within easy sight of each other.

The Halifaxes and the Stirlings towing their horses and hammer cars, the Dakotas each drawing their two wacko gliders. Around us all, giving encouraging flashes in the sun, and the sun dashed the little fighters, British and American too. Some from bases in England, some from the forward airfields on the northwestern front. Slowly, I thought contemptuously, the

great air fleet moved into Germany. It was so long that the head of the procession was now passing us on its way out. A sterling shot by with flames coming from its belly, four white parachutes fled from it and opened and swayed off down to the riverbank. The sterling crashed in a great gout of flame. You thought of the human element then. I looked back to

see it through one of our rear windows and caught the eye of Bob Wade by engineer crouched over his apparatus. I knew that he'd seen it too. Ahead of us, German Flak was staining the sky with its blue-black ink spots. Another tug went down flaming. No one got out. The tail broke off a glider behind us and went spinning