The operation known as “Market Garden”—made famous in the book and film A Bridge Too Far—was the largest airborne assault in history up to that time, a high-risk Allied invasion of enemy territory that has become a legend of World War II, even as it still invites criticism from historians. Now a thrilling and revelatory new book re-creates the operation as never before, revealing for the first time the full adventures of the bold “Jedburgh” paratroopers whose exploits were almost unimaginably risky and heroic. Kicked off on September 17, 1944, Market Garden was intended to secure crucial bridges in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands by a parachute assault conducted by three Allied airborne divisions. Capture of the bridges would allow a swift advance and crossing of the Rhine by British ground forces. Jedburgh teams—Allied Special Forces—were dropped into the Netherlands to train and use the Dutch resistance in support of the larger operation. Based on new firsthand testimony of survivors and declassified documents, Abundance of Valor concentrates on the three teams that operated farthest behind enemy lines, the nine men whose treacherous missions resulted in deaths, captures, and hair-breadth escapes. Here in unprecedented detail are the heat and stench of fuel, oil, and sweat in the troop carriers going over, the remarkable (and misleading) initial success of the daylight parachute landings, and the deadly, brutally effective German response, particularly by crack SS armored units in the blood-soaked town of Arnhem. Abundance of Valor portrays with stunning verisimilitude the experiences of Lt. Harvey Allan Todd, who fought from a surrounded position against overwhelming numbers of the enemy before surviving capture, near-starvation, interrogation, and solitary confinement in German POW camps, and Maj . John “Pappy” Olmsted, who made a hazardous journey , in disguise, from safe house to safe house through enemy territory until finally reaching friendly lines. With piercing criticism of the mission’s ultimate failure from faulty use of intelligence—and Field Marshall Montgomery’s distrust of the Dutch underground— Abundance of Valor is a brutally honest and truly inspiring account of fighting men in a noble cause who did their jobs with extraordinary honor and courage.   A thoroughly enthralling book for serious students of World War II, this is the labor of love of a Special Forces veteran with a rare talent for writing and research. He tells the story of the handful of small Jedburgh Teams dropped into the Netherlands to lead local resistance groups in offensive action. They immediately got sucked into the disastrous failure of Operation Market Garden, better known as the Arnhem operation (see Cornelius Ryan’s classic A Bridge Too Far, 1974). After that mismanaged affair crumbled, they faced survival against long odds in the ranks of the hard-pressed Dutch Resistance, death at the hands of the still resilient German occupation troops, and in one case survival by a hair’s breadth as a POW endured not only confinement but also grueling marches from east to west ahead of the advancing Russians. For exhaustive studies of little-known episodes that add much to general WWII knowledge as well as provide enthralling reading, this book is hard to beat. --Roland Green   Will Irwin retired from the United States Army in January 2000 after a career of more than twenty-eight years, half of that in Special Forces. He has served as a research fellow at the RAND Corporation and now works as a defense consultant in the Washington, D.C., area. He maintains a home near Tampa, Florida. Chapter One the england game A string of events that would have a profound impact on the Jedburgh teams dropped into the Netherlands began more than two years earlier in the coastal Dutch city of The Hague, the nation’s bustling political center. On the cold, damp evening of Friday, March 6, 1942, Lieutenant Hubertus Gerardus Lauwers prepared to transmit a coded message to London on his clandestine radio from a building near the center of the city. He had often used this second-floor apartment at 678 Fahrenheitstraat, the home of a newly married couple named Teller, as a place to operate his radio. In fact, he had fallen into a routine of transmitting from the Teller home at six-thirty on alternate Friday evenings. It was from here that he had arranged his first drop of weapons and explosives for the Dutch underground, which had arrived only a week earlier. Now Lauwers set up his transmitter on a table in an unheated room of the apartment. Lauwers, thin-faced and bespectacled, rather frail-looking, was a twenty-six-year-old native of the Dutch East Indies, where he had been a journalist before the war. After the German invasion and occupation of the Netherlands, he had gone to England to join the exiled Dutch forces in the fight against the Nazis. There he had been recruited by Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), trained as