Operation Varsity: How Rivenhall's Gliders Broke Through German Lines (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798185278482)

On the morning of 24 March 1945, sixty gliders left an Essex airfield that most people have never heard of - and helped end the Second World War.

Few people know that Operation Varsity was the largest single-day airborne operation in military history. Larger than D-Day's airborne drops. More precisely planned than Market Garden. And yet, for eighty years, it has remained one of the most overlooked battles of the entire conflict - buried not by failure, but by the very success that should have made it famous.

Operation Varsity: How Rivenhall's Gliders Broke Through German Lines tells the full, human story of RAF Rivenhall - a forgotten Essex airfield that launched American fighter escorts, bridge-busting bombers, covert SOE supply drops, and ultimately sixty gliders carrying men who had already survived Normandy and the Ardennes into the heart of Germany's last defence.

What you are about to discover will change how you see the final months of the Second World War. Inside these pages you will meet the warrant officer who held a burning aircraft steady so his crew could survive. The private soldier who carried seventeen Bren magazines out of a glider and into a German village firefight. The Dutch woman parachuted back into occupied territory from this same runway, injured on landing, sworn to silence. And the twenty-seven men in a single glider who never reached the ground alive.

This is the story that success forgot.

Grounded in meticulous research including Imperial War Museum film footage, official war records, SOE archives, and personal testimonies, this book reconstructs the operation chalk number by chalk number - tracing individual gliders from an Essex runway to a German village and confirming, in the most human terms possible, that what was sent from Rivenhall arrived.

Whether you are a passionate military history reader, a student of the Second World War, or someone who believes that the people who gave everything deserve more than a footnote - this book was written for you.

The airfield is a quarry now. But for one morning in the last spring of the war, it was the starting point for something that changed the world. Get your copy today and give these men the remembrance they were always owed.

Author: Victor G. Johnson
ISBN-13: 9798185278482
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 07/02/2026
Pages: 200
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.42d