Operation Varsity

Oh my gosh.

It just seems weird to buy used medals like that, like, uh, the oak leaf, the three oak leafs for the landings at Normandy and two other land- uh, Market Garden and Operation Varsity.

Is it okay to get medals that were owned by somebody else, or is that gonna ...

It just seems weird.

Depending on what we talk about, uh, it's, like, third.

Uh, whatever metrics you use for largest airborne operation, Operation Varsity would be the largest for most men thrown out in one location, right?

Mm-hmm.

But Market Garden is larger for pure numbers of dudes chucked out of planes, by about 10,000.

I wish I'd asked that.

But the nature of these interviews would be a lot of the time, A load of detail about Pegasus Bridge, and then 10 minutes on the Rhine crossing, Operation Varsity.

Now, two oxen bucks, and obviously D Company, two oxen bucks, you know, on Pegasus Bridge.

It was an incredible operation.

It was, you know, the first guys basically on the ground in D-Day, first shots fired, all that kind of side of things.

But hardly anybody knows that that same battalion and that same company lost almost half of their strength in one, like pretty much one day of fighting during the Rhine crossing.

You know, they had over a hundred dead, hundreds of wounded.

And there was, so there was so much about Normandy and this seemed to be then pretty much the same thing I was coming across all the time going through these interviews.

Yeah, he's the commander of the British 6th Airborne Division.

And so he's, you know, a pretty key figure in Operation Varsity.

I think that it's, you know, like he has a very good relationship with Ridgway.

And I found that quite interesting and got a little insight, I think, into why he was an effective airborne commander.