The sky of Holland filled with Allied parachuters last week. It was smooth and apparently initially successful—a rare thing for the first job of such a complex kind.

Rough-&-ready Lieut. General Lewis Hyde Brereton had fidgeted for weeks waiting for the moment to arrive. Seventeen times since his small-scale assists on D-day he had drawn up the detail of tactics for a historic stroke: the parachuting of an Allied army, a force of truly army size, capable of…