The 6th Airborne had suffered 590 killed and another 710 wounded or missing. German resistance was completely broken by the artillery barrage and in the first two hours of the operation the Allies lost only 31 men. Operation Plunder, the amphibious assault across the Rhine, was already underway. The Rhine was a formidable natural obstacle to the Allied advance, but if breached would allow the Allies to access the North German Plain and ultimately advance on Berlin and other major cities in Northern Germany. Operation Varsity Gets Off the Ground Final briefings took place on March 22 and 23. You are browsing in: ... No mention of any casualties on our side. The morning sky was gray on Saturday, March 24, 1945, when paratroopers of the U.S. 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s 1st … By March 1945, the Allied armies had advanced into Germany and had reached the River Rhine. On the 24th, dawn was just breaking as the British and Canadian troopers left for their respective airfields; in France, dawn revealed the 17th’s airfields as the spawning of a huge new airborne invasion. Within a couple of hours, the 507th had taken most of its objectives, taking 1,000 prisoners, destroying five tanks, and capturing or destroying several batteries of artillery.

Compared to other units in the 17th Airborne Division, the 507th Combat Team’s casualties had been light–about 150 killed and wounded. Operation Varsity, the largest airborne assault of the war now followed. Operation Varsity was the single largest airdrop during the war, but also produced the worst day for casualties as well. The bridges over the Issel had been successfully captured, although one later had to be destroyed to prevent its capture by counter-attacking German forces. This successful operation was the last major airborne paratroop drop of the war. By April 1945 the Nazi regime was broken, Hitler’s forces hopelessly damaged, and the Allies had closed in on all sides. All of the objectives that the airborne troopshad been tasked with had been captured and held, usually within only a few hours of the operation beginning.

Service: US Army. Out of their original 7,220 troops, the 6 th Airborne Division lost 1,400 men who were either killed, wounded, or missing in action. Some of the casualties of the Operations Varsity and Plunder are buried at the Reichswald Forest Cemetery. Some 40,000 paratroops were dropped by 1,500 troop-carrying planes and gliders.
Over 1,070 members of the 17th Airborne and the 6th British Airborne Divisions were killed and thousands more wounded on March 24, 1945.

With the success of Operation Varsity, the northern route into the industrial heart of Germany was now wide open. Operation Varsity was a successful large-scale airborne operation.

It’s expected that every wartime operation will come with casualties, but Operation Varsity experienced fewer losses than military experts anticipated.

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