3rd Battalion, Parachute Regiment

At about midnight, C Company reaches the main station.

The 3rd Battalion is the last to move and has the longest way to go.

Dobie's 1st Parachute Battalion is not bound for the bridge at all.

Its task is the high ground north of Arnhem, which means Route Leopard, the northernmost road, and a march straight across the front of Craft's line.

The first carries the 2nd Parachute Battalion and a platoon of the 250th Airborne Light Composite Company, Royal Army Service Corps.

The second carries the 3rd Parachute Battalion and part of the 16th Parachute Field Ambulance.

Six minutes late, seventy-one more C-47s arrive.

They belong to the United States 61st Troop Carrier Group from Barkston Heath.

Lieutenant Colonel Frost packs the brass hunting horn he uses to rally his men into his combat kit and tells his Batman to load his golf clubs and dinner jacket into the staff car for dispatch to Holland with the battalion's ground party.

At Spalding, a little to the south-east, Lieutenant Colonel John Fitch's 3rd Parachute Battalion follows the same course after its spell helping local farmers, though slightly later.

Fitch holds his orders group on Friday, September 15th, 1944, with troop briefings the day after.

As a rule, British units stay in their camps until D-Day, then move by road to the airfields, though there is at least one sanctioned exception.

The journeys vary.

The 1st Parachute Battalion travels some 24 kilometres from Grimsthorpe to the 61st Troop Carrier Group's base at Barkston Heath.

The 2nd and 3rd Parachute Battalions at Grantham and Spalding lie about 13 and 48 kilometres from the 314th Troop Carrier Group's field at Saltby.

Most of the 1st Air Landing Brigade appears to move from Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire to temporary billets nearer the Western Tug airfields.