Tulsa WWII vet returns to site of huge Allied disaster

Operation Market Garden was the largest airborne assault in history at the time, September, 1944, and could have shortened World War II by six months had it succeeded.

But it didn't, and turned into one of the worst defeats suffered by the Allied armed forces in the war.

Col. Robert Powell, USAAF Ret., runs the Military History Museum in Broken Arrow.

He was a glider pilot who participated in Operation Market Garden, but doesn't remember much of what happened because his glider crash landed and he was knocked unconscious.

This week, he returned to the Netherlands to honor some his fellow veterans and those who fell battling the Nazis.

He'll fly back to Tulsa on Sept. 17, the 69th anniversary of the beginning of Market Garden.

The battle was memorialized in a famous 1977 Hollywood film called "A Bridge Too Far," based on a book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan.