When Dragons Flew

This is a truly stunning book. Over 272 glossy paper pages loaded with both colour and black-and-white photographs, many of them meticulously researched to provide additional explanations, down to who actually features in those photographs.

The book details the 1st Borders’ run up to Operation Market-Garden, and it’s participation in and around Arnhem and Oosterbeek in September 1944, the latter done on a day-by-day basis. This written account features and names many of the characters within the battalion, and the part they played in the fateful battle.

I cannot recommend this work highly enough to anyone who wants to explore the role played by one of the glider-borne Air-Landing battalions, who often get overlooked or over-shadowed by the more famous accounts of the Parachute battalions. Well-written, extremely well-researched, and presented in a very well laid out reader-friendly format, this work genuinely and truly adds a whole lot more information to one of the British Army’s already well-researched operations.