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The DZ was to be near Tournai, Belgium, just across the border from the French city of Lille. The aim was to open a path for the British Second Army in its drive across the Escaut Canal and into Belgium. Two days of intense briefings, hectic preparations, and marvelous food followed. But on September 1 the Guards Armored Division of the British Second Army captured Tournai, and the operation was canceled. There was the same relief as when the Chartres drop was canceled, but the determination of the high command to get the paratroopers into the action was so obvious to the men that even as they rode the bus back to Aldbourne, they acknowledged to each other that one of these times they would not be coming back from the airport.
The Allied armies continued to roll through France and Belgium. The Airborne Army's high command grew ever more desperate to get into the battle. It had the best troops in ETO, the best commanders, the highest morale, unmatched mobility, outstanding equipment. Officers and men were proved veterans who wanted another chance to show what paratroopers could do in modern war. The Airborne Army was by far Eisenhower's greatest unused asset. He wanted to keep the momentum of the advance going, he wanted to seize the moment to deliver a decisive blow before the Germans could recover from their six-week-long retreat through France. When Montgomery proposed to utilize the Airborne Army in a complex, daring, and dangerous but potentially decisive operation to get across the Lower Rhine River, Eisenhower quickly agreed, to the immense delight of the Airborne Army command.
Code name was MARKET-GARDEN. The objective was to get British Second Army, with the Guards Armored Division in the van, through Holland and across the Rhine on a line Eindhoven-Son-Veghel-Grave-Nijmegen-Arnhem. The British tanks would move north along a single road, following a carpet laid down by the American and British paratroopers, who would seize and hold the many bridges between the start line and Arnhem.
The British 1st Airborne Division, reinforced by the Poles, would be at the far end of the proposed line of advance, at Arnhem. The 82nd Airborne would take and hold Nijmegen. The 101st's task was to land north of Eindhoven, with the objective of capturing that town while simultaneously moving through Son toward Veghel and Grave, to open the southern end of the line of advance. The task of the 2nd Battalion of the 506th PIR was to take the bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal at Son intact, then join the 3rd Battalion in attacking Eindhoven, where it would hold the city and its bridges until the Guards Armored Division passed through.
It was a complicated but brilliant plan. Success would depend on execution of almost split-second timing, achieving surprise, hard fighting, and luck. If everything worked, the payoff would be British armored forces on the north German plain, on the far side of the Rhine, with an open road to Berlin. If the operation failed, the cost would be the squandering of the asset of the Airborne Army, failure to open the port of Antwerp (Eisenhower had to agree to put off the commitment of troops needed to open that port in order to mount MARKET-GARDEN), a consequent supply crisis throughout ETO, and a dragging out of the war through the winter of 1944-45.