Veterans Operation Market Garden get free trip to Anniversary

At 60th commemorations Battle of Arnhem

ARNHEM - Organizers of the 60th anniversary commemorations of the ill-fated September 1944 Operation Market Garden, have invited 400 veterans to attend the event free-of-charge. The Foundation Airborne Commemorations is paying for the travel and lodging of former soldiers from the U.K. and Poland and as as far as Canada, New Zealand, Australia.

Because of the average age of the veterans - between 80 and 85 - the foundation also will pay for some people travelling with and assisting the veterans, footing the travel bill for another 400 people. The former soldiers and their aides mostly will stay with host families in Arnhem and surroundings, others will be housed in neighbourhood hotels. Host families in the central part of the Netherlands also will welcome relatives of those who died in the airborne operation and the subsequent Battle of Arnhem, which in the Fall of 1944 failed to liberate the Netherlands.