WWII's Operation Market Garden, Take II

Hundreds of British, American and Dutch parachutists drifted out of blue skies over the central Netherlands on Saturday to mark the 65th anniversary of an ill-fated operation aimed at bringing a swift end to World War II.

The mass jumps over the Ginkelse Heath near the town of Ede honored the thousands of Allied troops who took part in air drops as part of "Operation Market Garden" in September, 1944.

The operation was British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's plan to drop paratroopers deep behind enemy lines in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands to capture and secure key roads and bridges so that Allied forces massed in Belgium could pour into Germany's industrial heartland and bring World War II to an early end.

But once on the ground, the Allied troops met with stubborn German resistance in and around the city of Arnhem and their advance stalled on a bridge there spanning the River Rhine, in a battle immortalized in the star-studded 1977 Hollywood film "A Bridge Too Far."

Thousands of Allied troops were killed, captured or wounded in the battles.

Veterans of the mission watched the parachute jumps and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk joined his Dutch counterpart Jan Peter Balkenende for a commemoration service in the town of Driel.

Saturday's jumps were the highlight of four days of commemorative events spread across the former battlefields in the southeastern Netherlands.

More than 500 British soldiers, 300 from the Netherlands, and nearly 100 from the United States along with others from France and Belgium took part in Saturday's jumps from 12 C-130 planes and a vintage DC3 Dakota from Britain, the Ministry of Defense in London said in a statement.