(female narrator) He was a paratrooper and one inspiration for Robert Redford's character in he movie "A Bridge Too Far."

How did T. Moffatt Burriss, a high school teacher from a small Southern town, wind up playing a leading role in the largest airborne invasion in history?

(Moffatt Burriss) I wanted to go to Clemson, and if you went to Clemson, you took military.

(male singers) ♪ We're All-American ♪ ♪ and fight we will, boots in Paris, ♪ ♪ till all the guns of the foe are still... ♪♪ (male speaker) Growing up after World War II, it's almost inconceivable for us to comprehend what these soldiers experienced.

(narrator) September 17, 1944, T. Moffatt Burriss was flying over the North Sea.

Loaded down with 150 pounds of equipment and ammunition, Burriss was jumping behind enemy lines into Holland with nearly 35,000 other American, British, and Polish troops.

After D-Day, the Germans were in full retreat throughout the Netherlands.

The Allied goal was to deliver a backdoor blow to Hitler, control Holland's bridges, open the road into Germany, and end the war by Christmas.

The key was controlling a single 65-mile-long road that came to be known as Hell's Highway.

British field marshal Bernard Montgomery called his brainchild Operation Market-Garden, "market" referring to the invasion by air and "garden" to the ground operation to secure the bridges.

Moffatt Burriss was 24 years old and battle-hardened.

Every jump put his life on the line.

We knew it was going to be a rough mission.

I expected to make it.

(narrator) Burriss, in person and on paper, appeared to be just another guy, not a Hollywood-style war hero.

He was 5'7", a Clemson University graduate, working as a schoolteacher in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he knew he'd be called into action.

He was in the Army Reserve.

(Burriss) And on that Sunday morning, we happened to be sitting around the table chatting, and the radio comes on saying that Pearl Harbor had been bombed.

Well, all of us looked at each other and said, "Pearl Harbor?

Where's Pearl Harbor?"

Somebody said, "In the Philippines."

And my date, who later became my wife, Louisa Hay, said, "Oh, my goodness, "my brother just arrived "in the Philippines two weeks ago.

He's going to be in serious trouble."

Well, we tried to console her and say, "Oh, everything's gonna be all right," but we knew it wasn't.

We knew it was not going to be all right, and I remember driving home mostly in silence, wondering what was going to happen.

Then it dawned on me, I have a reserve commission and will probably be in the service.

Then the next day was Roosevelt's announcement that we were at war.

(narrator) At Fort Benning, Burriss volunteered for paratrooper training and became a member of the 82nd Airborne Division, the All-Americans.

(male speaker) The 82nd has a special place in America's heart.

Its whole history, from 1942 until today, is it's looking for the same kind of soldier, a leader who's willing to throw himself out of an airplane at 500 feet, beneath a parachute, and land in the darkness, anywhere in the world, in 18 hours.

In World War II, that was to fight the Germans.

(male speaker) I have a lot of pride in the entire outfit, and to be a captain in the paratroopers takes a pretty damned good man.

(narrator) Burris also demonstrated the style that would make him a leader.

He pushed recruits to be in the best shape.

Bob Tallon of Dillon, South Carolina, remembered: (Tallon, dramatized) "This was, without a doubt, "the worst exercise I had been through.

"Lieutenant Burriss was one tough officer.

"He gained my respect by enduring the same training he required."

(narrator) To Burriss, that training had one purpose: to bring men home alive.

Just over six months after Pearl Harbor, Burriss shipped out with the 3rd Battalion 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division.

It was the summer of 1942, and he had been ordered to North Africa.

Soon Burriss would participate in the invasion of Sicily, then spend two bloody months holding the beachhead at Anzio in Italy.

By D-Day, June 6, 1944, Burriss had shot Germans, seen friends die, and battled for endless nights without food or sleep.

Burriss and his unit were recovering in England from the beating they had taken in Anzio that June.

Less than four months after the D-Day invasion of Normandy, a C-47 transport plane was carrying his unit to their objective, the Grave bridge in the Netherlands.

Operation Market-Garden was underway.

(male speaker) I was six when I saw all these guys coming.

I was standing outside on the 17th of September, a beautiful Sunday.

All at once there was asunder from the west.

We did not know what was going to happen.

We saw planes very high.

Can you understand what noise that was?

And it went on and went on.

We saw airbornes standing in the door.

We waved, and then a few minutes later, we saw them jump at Grave.

It was unbelievable.

Operation Market-Garden primarily was to bridge that gap from the front lines to the Rhine River, capture a bridge across the Rhine River.

Then that opens up a doorway into Germany, so then you could pour the American army and the British army through that bridge into the heart of Germany.

(Hamer) This plan, Market-Garden, was devised in a matter of three days, and there lies the problem to start with, because when we look back at the airborne invasion of Normandy that happened on the 6th of June that year, they had spent months planning for it.

Part of the operational concept was to get the bridge.

The difficulty was you had one way in and everything had to work perfectly as the sequence went down.

(narrator) The numbers made the unprecedented mission that much dicier.

This was no stealth operation.

Planes took hits from enemy antiaircraft fire and went down.

(male film announcer) One transport plane is out of control.

It plunges to a crash!

[explosion booms] On the right, a parachute.

The pilot bailed out of the doomed plane.

♪ The purpose of this American airborne landing is a surprise attack to capture the strategic Nijmegen bridge across the Rhine.

♪ Rough glider landings are only to be expected.

Sometimes the boys get a shaking up.

♪ (narrator) Burris and his men would leap out of the plane's door, one jumper every second, practically on top of each other.

(Burriss) On Operation-Market Garden, when we jumped into Holland, several days earlier I'm talking to the chaplain, and I said, "Chaplain, why don't you jump with me sometime?"

He said, "Well, I haven't been invited."

I said, "Well, you are now."

So right behind me was the chaplain.

That made me feel a little better, having the chaplain right on my back, pushing me out the door.

(narrator) Jumping into combat meant they were easy targets.

And when we hit the ground in Holland, we landed exactly where we were supposed to land.

They were all aggressive guys.

They were used to jumping into the dead of night into enemy-held territory and shooting it out with bad guys, seizing terrain, fighting as need be, and were physically and mentally tough soldiers.

(narrator) Burriss and his men were to secure the bridge over the Maas-Waal canal.

It was, Burriss said, the easiest mission his unit had ever completed.

The next was more difficult.

(narrator) The 82nd were supposed to take the bridge over the Waal River at Nijmegen, but they couldn't get over the bridge.

Then came alarming news.

Eleven miles north and 64 miles behind German lines, British paratroopers at Arnhem were hemmed in by German Tiger tanks.

Support tanks were delayed on Hell's Highway south of Nijmegen.

The paratroopers were being slaughtered.

Every hour was critical if the unit or the mission were to be saved.

(Hamer) It was disastrous at Arnhem where the British airborne landed.

They didn't have enough at the beginning to take their objectives, and when they did land a day or two later, the game was almost up right there.

(narrator) The night of September 19th, Burriss met with Major Julian Cook and the other company commanders.

They were ordered to secure the Nijmegen bridge from both ends so British tanks could cross the Waal River and travel to Arnhem.

Burriss and his men would have to cross the Waal River to the north side and take out the German troops protecting it.

♪ [vehicular noise] Nijmegen has been the key to invading Western Europe since Roman times.

Charlemagne built a castle there.

It has always been a battleground.

Now Burriss and his unit were about to add a new chapter to that history.

It was an important operation for the whole of Europe, one of the major operations during World War II.

(narrator) On September 20th, Burriss and other officers went to a power plant on the south bank and climbed to the highest floor.

From there, Burriss could see what lay ahead.

My thought, when I looked out and what I saw, is, "If ever there was a suicide mission, this is it."

And the other company commanders thought the same thing.

I didn't think anybody'd be dumb enough to send us across with what we could see was on the other side.

These folks around Burriss had experienced some really horrendous actions in Italy, and so they were... kind of used to it, and they realized that they didn't have really much choice, but they had enough determination and a certain amount of, shall we say, optimism based on their past experience that, despite the difficulty of the mission, they believed that they could carry it out.

(narrator) Every hour was critical.

They would attack in daylight.

And as bad as it looked, things were about to get worse.

The British were providing boats to carry Burriss and his company across the river.

Finally, the boats arrived.

We didn't know the type boats that we had were going to be flimsy canvas boats.

(narrator) Each plywood and canvas boat was supposed to carry 16 men, fully equipped, 300 yards across the swift-flowing river.

But instead of 16 paddles, some had as few as 6.

Most of the men in Burriss's outfit had no idea how to paddle a boat.

Many couldn't swim.

They would have to paddle with rifle butts, which meant they wouldn't be able to fire at the enemy.

(Burriss) Those boats were not designed to carry 16 or 17 men, particularly with all of our equipment, our machine guns, our mortars, our ammunition.

They were not designed for that, but that's what we had.

That's what we had to use.

You've got guys paddling, guys praying, some guys trying to paddle with rifle butts.

During the night, the Germans moved in antiaircraft guns, 20 millimeters, smaller weapons, but disastrous to a river crossing, disastrous.

(Burriss) Men were crumpling in the boats, falling, some of 'em falling overboard.

Then the artillery and the mortars started hitting.

If they got hit by artillery, it would blow the boat out of the water.

In my boat, there were 17 men.

I was sitting on the back rung and was one of the lead boats crossing.

And an engineer was sitting right beside me using a paddle as a rudder to steer the boat.

We didn't know anything about paddling boats.

We'd never had any training doing it.

And the guys were slumping in our boat.

The one that was sitting next to me, I saw his wrist turn red, and he said, "Captain, take the rudder; I've been hit."

I reached over, and as I did, he caught a 20-millimeter explosive through his head; just blew his head off.

I was covered with his blood and brains, and I got shrapnel in my side.

And his shoulders fell over in the water, the current caught it and turned the boat upstream, and everybody started yelling, "Straighten out!

Straighten out!"

I had to reach down and catch his feet, which were hooked under the seat, and dump him overboard.

He was dead, blood coming out of the stump where his head was, streaming down in the water.

We had three men killed and seven wounded in my boat.

I watched their boats being shot out of the water, some of 'em being overturned, people being shot out of boats, whole boatloads going over side, trying to hang onto another boat and this kind of thing.

I remember seeing people floundering and swimming.

You know, we were fully armed.

(narrator) 250 men had shoved off the south bank of the Waal river.

Within 20 minutes, half of them were dead.

Captain Henry B. Keep wrote to his mother about the crossing: (Keep, dramatized) "It was a horrible picture, "this river crossing, set to the sound "of deafening roar of omnipresent firing, "this scene of defenseless, frail canvas boats "jammed to overflowing with humanity, "all striving desperately to cross the Waal River "as quickly as possible "and get to a place where at least we could fight, "This was fiendish and dreadful.

"We looked like a bunch of animals, "void of dignity and normalcy in our frantic effort to get across the river."

Thirty-six boats go across, and only eleven make it back.

And for those guys who are left, they've got to get out of the boat, get their gear, get behind the bank, reassemble, and then they've got to go another 600 yards or so literally in the face of constant enemy fire to take that position.

And that was an incredible operation and incredible gallantry shown by everybody who got up off that bank and took across.

When you're in the river, you've got limited options.

But when you get on the side and look up on that bank and see everybody shooting at you, that's when they put it together and went across the plain.

(chaplain, dramatized) "I was proud to be "the chaplain of such courageous men.

"I had never seen such a display of heroism as I saw in the crossing of the Waal River."

Everybody was just in a firing frenzy.

Your adrenaline was running, you were pumped up, and you were huffing and puffing, and, uh... it was... it was really something to behold.

(narrator) Then Burriss led a small band of men along the road to the highway bridge.

(Aarsen) The enemy is stunned.

They can't believe they've come across.

Paratroopers are aggressive.

(Burriss) After we crossed the rubble and knocked out the machine guns on the dike, we turned and started toward this bridge.

They were up in the structure of that arch.

They were firing down as we started across.

(narrator) Four hours after they had begun their river crossing, they reached the bridge.

(Burriss) We heard tanks coming across from the south end of the bridge going north.

We didn't know whether they were German or whether they were British tanks.

(narrator) The Germans, surprised by the relentless attack, failed to blow up the bridge, which was wired with explosives.

Burriss was certain that the British tanks would roll full speed to Arnhem, 11 miles away.

British paratroopers, known as the Red Devils, still desperately holding out, would get some aid and some hope.

Instead, the tanks stopped.

Burriss looked for the British officer in charge and found him, Captain Peter Carrington.

Burriss had risked his life to aid the British paratroopers.

Of his regiment, only 17 men had survived.

He could not believe that the British weren't willing to advance to help their own men.

He insisted that Carrington go to Arnhem.

Sorry, we have our orders.

We busted our asses getting here, half my men are killed, and you're just gonna stop... and...drink tea!

They weren't gonna go pell-mell into something that they weren't familiar with and didn't have adequate supplies and reinforcements.

So that is sort of the psychology, I think, that the tanks commander for the British had so that when Moffatt Burris got so frustrated that they were sitting down at this crucial moment to have tea, he couldn't understand.

So Captain Burriss, as well as the others, are very upset.

And the object that they're most upset with is the British officer that's in the tank, and so they're quite abusive to this officer, and they want him to move.

They threaten to shoot the officer to make him move, but he can't; he's waiting on those orders.

I put my tommy gun to his head and said, "Get this tank moving, or I'll blow your head off."

With that, he ducked in the tank, closed the hatch, and I couldn't get to him.

(narrator) It would be 18 hours before the Allied troops advanced to the bridge at Arnhem.

The British paratroopers, by that time, had been overpowered after 72 hours of nearly nonstop fighting.

Despite the historic scope of the air invasion, despite the individual acts of heroism and the heavy losses, the ultimate objective of Operation Market-Garden was lost.

Of the 10,000 British and Polish troops fighting at Arnhem bridge, more than 7500 were killed, captured, wounded, or missing.

The bridge at Arnhem became known as "the bridge too far."

Arnhem is not a "bridge too far," as depicted in the book and movie.

There was a general that was not willing to go far enough.

(narrator) The mission that was to end the war by Christmas instead made conditions far worse for many in Holland.

And Market-Garden, losing, meant that we, as a child, were in fighting area from September 1944 up to February 1945.

And I estimate that at least 1 million people had been killed in that period in German camps by German civilians, soldiers, during the last battle to the Rhine.

They were there and went into battle with their own young life at stake in 1944, and what Moffatt Burriss did with his colleagues was one of the most courageous actions in World War II, and they were heavily decorated for it.

(narrator) Burriss had more difficult days ahead.

He continued battling from a foxhole in Holland through October, then went on to fight from a frozen trench at the Battle of the Bulge.

He helped liberate a German concentration camp and was among the first Americans to reach Berlin.

Moffatt Burriss was awarded a Purple Heart and the Silver Star.

(Aarsen) How he led those soldiers and the fact he survived the war is partly luck, but it's also got to be a little skill.

(narrator) Burriss returned home to his wife Louisa.

They married in 1942 before he shipped out.

He had four children with Louisa, established a successful construction business, and ran for office.

Burriss served in the South Carolina legislature for 18 years.

Meanwhile, Operation Market-Garden became one of the best-known battles of World War II.

In 2000, Burriss published his own account, "Strike and Hold."

Four days shy of his 90th birthday, Burriss went back, to jump again.

Oh, I feel great and ready to go!

(Graaf) Jumping out of the air, when you're getting 90, that's serious business.

♪ (narrator) On that trip, he was accompanied by his children, grandchildren, and friends.

(female jumper) Whoa!

(Burriss) Yay!

How's your hip?

Yeah, it's okay.

All right!

He was one of the best officers in the 504.

♪ I'm really proud of you.

Thank you, buddy.

♪ (male speaker) The enormous sacrifice, commitment, determination, resilience of everyone who was involved here-- and that includes the Dutch people, who experienced such hardship, literally starvation at various points and times-- I think when you look back on that, you cannot fail to be inspired by their actions and to feel all that they did to regain freedom and that we must do the same to protect the freedoms that we enjoy as well.

♪ [commander shouts] [weapons clicking] ♪ (narrator) And Burriss finally came face to face with the man he blamed for not going far enough at the bridge over the Waal.

He and Lord Carrington shared a stage and finally, 65 years later, exchanged words.

(Burriss) We ran into Captain Carrington at a party honoring the queen.

As I was standing there talking to General Petraeus, Carrington walked up, and General Petraeus introduced us.

And I said, "Uh, General, we know each other.

We met on the bridge 65 years ago."

And Carrington said, "Oh...you're the chap that called me a yellow-livered coward."

And I said, "Is that what I said?"

And he said, "Yeah."

And he said, "You really didn't expect me to obey an order from a foreign commander, did you?"

I said, "Of course."

But that's the first time I had seen him in 65 years, the first conversation we had had.

He remembered me.

[laughs] I guess we kind of forgave each other a bit.

(narrator) For Moffatt Burriss, a life well lived didn't dim the memories of friends whose lives were lost.

In his memoir, Burriss lists by name every casualty of his regiment during World War II.

Forty-five of those men died between September 17 and September 28, 1944, in Operation Market-Garden.

♪ (male singers) ♪ ...chute-chutes-chutes.

♪ ♪ We're going up, up, up.

♪ ♪ We're coming down, down, down.

♪ ♪ We're All-American and proud to be, ♪ ♪ for we're the soldiers of liberty.

♪ ♪ Some ride their gliders to the enemy... ♪♪