Gen. Eisenhower announced that the air-borne landings in Holland were “going well” in this latest blow, a blow which might break the back of German resistance strained by the piling up demands of many fronts.
“One of the greatest air-borne operations in military history,” as it was described by Lt. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton, commander of the 1st Air Army, was said by the Germans to be centered at Nijmegen, only about 3 miles from the Dutch-German border and 12 miles northwest of Kleve, where the Siegfried Line is reported to end.
Other landings were reported by the enemy radio at Arnhem, 10 miles north of Nijmegen, where a bridge head would have been established across the famous water barriers of Holland—the Waal River and the Neder Ryn (Rhine).
While these reported landings apparently were designed to secure the crossings of these barriers to open the way to a crashing offensive into northern industrial Germany, the Nazis said yet other landings were made to the west at Tilburg and Eindhoven. There the sky-dropped troops would be only 10 to 15 miles beyond British troops stabbing across the Dutch border just south of both towns.
These latter aerial bridgeheads; were along the main road, railroad and water channels of escape for the Germans who have been putting up a stiff resistance to the west along the Schelde-Meuse Canal and the Schelde estuary in Southern Holland. Air forces dropped there also protected the left flank of the sky-borne force from counterattack.
The Paris radio reported other landings 9 miles north of The Hague near the coast.
At Nijmegen the Allied force would have to hold out against German counterattacks fully 40 miles north of the nearest bulge in Allied battle lines, and the Germans tried to convince their home population that the entire air-borne force had been surrounded and the units wiped out at seven places.
But supreme headquarters said landing places were flrmly secured barely 300 miles from Berlin and several Dutch towns were captured in the first few hours of fight.
And an Allied supporting attack was said by the Germans to have speared up to Neerpelt, 30 miles north of Maastricht and only 13 miles south of Eindhoven.
To the west, the British 2d Army was 2 miles north of the Dutch border in the drive from Gheel toward Tilburg.
The landing force apparently was greater than the D-day air-borne attack, but all that was known of its size was that it had been ferried to the droping points by 1,000 transports and gliders.
It was supported by 3.000 sorties of Allied aircraft which loosed a 4,000-ton bomb shower on German communications, flak positions and airfields just before and after the landings. German air force opposition was smothered.
The Evening Star, Washington, DC, September 18, 1944