On March 24, 1945, more than 16,000 Allied paratroopers dropped into a storm of enemy fire on the eastern bank of the Rhine River. German antiaircraft guns tore through a column of transport planes and gliders stretching nearly 200 miles across the sky. Only days later, three American soldiers had earned the Medal of Honor, a Canadian medic had performed acts that would win him the Victoria Cross, and the largest single-day airborne assault in military history had cracked open the last natural