In airborne operations vaster than those of D-Day, Gen. Eisenhower committed his parachute and glider troops to action in Holland yesterday "or the first time under their new unified command, while his ground troops pressed an all-out attack against Germany along their entire front.

Field Marshal Montgomery, meanwhile, told his men that they all would join their American allies on German soil "very soon." And announcing 400,000 prisoners captured, he said it was "becoming problematical how much longer he (the enemy) can continue the struggle."

From more than 1,000 planes and gliders, the U.S., British and Allied air troops who were welded last month into a single army under Lt. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton struck suddenly into Holland in a blow which German accounts depicted as a move to turn the northern flank of the Siegfried Line and nullify the Nazis' water defenses in the Netherlands.

The landings started at noon, and the Nazis reported them continuing last night. At the same time, Supreme Headquarters broadcast a dramatic message to the people of the Netherlands to rise against the German occupation forces. The landings were announced by SHAEF in a flash which recalled the No. I communique of D-Day in its terseness —"strong forces of the First Allied Air- borne Army were landed in Holland this (Sunday) afternoon."

And as was the case with the Normandy landings the only indications available immediately as to just where they were made were the reports the Germans issued. These placed them west of the Dutch-German frontier on the northern bank of the Rhine River, which flows by a tributary north westward and westward to the coast there, and in the areas of Tilburg, Eindhoven and Nijmegen, Holland.

The landings, placed by German account only a few miles ahead of British troops battling their way across the Albert and Escaut Canals, would make the canals useless as German defense lines and open land routes into Holland.

The Nazis indicated that the airborne operation was probably aimed also at "leap-frogging" the great water belt which separates northern and southern Holland—a belt described by some sources as far tougher for the attackers than the Siegfried Line, and as the Germans" strongest defense line in Western Europe.

The water belt from Nijmegen to the sea amounts to a defense barrier approximately 90 miles long, consisting of sea areas and territory crossed by three wide, swift rivers—the Meuse, Waal and Rhine—with wide flooded strips in between. Tilburg, about 30 miles southeast of Rotterdam, is on the main railway across southern Holland, and is about 20 miles from Eindhoven, the location of a large radio factory.

Nijmegen is three miles from the German border, and controls an important crossing of the Rhine. Possession of the crossing would enable Allied troops to separate German forces in northern Holland and northern Germany from those in the area of the Scheldt Estuary, including large numbers of troops already ferried across the estuary after escaping from the coastal corridor in Belgium.

A message from Gen. Eisenhower, broadcast to German forces in Holland, declared that "powerful Allied forces are fighting on Dutch soil," and warned the Germans not to commit atrocities against the Netherlands Forces of Resistance, fighting beside Allied forces as an army under his command.

Inside Germany, infantry and tanks of the American First Army were fanning out into open country beyond the broken Siegfried Line toward Cologne and the Rhine. Paris Radio said U.S. troops were 35 miles from Cologne after piercing the Siegfried Line on a 15-mile front.

The breakthrough was made east of Aachen and First Army troops were stabbing deeper in at least three other penetrations of the Siegfried Line along an 80-mile front — south of Aachen, in the Roetgen area, 40 miles farther south than the Prum region, and another 30 miles down the front near Bitburg, north of Trier.

The fall of Aachen itself, heavily fortified but cut off, was considered imminent. Captured German prisoners taken in the region south of Aachen included men sent from hospitals with unhealed wounds, and a few hundred deaf German soldiers whose officers had deserted them, according to a UP dispatch, which quoted a high U.S. officer as saying, "We've seen everything now except the Hitler maidens."

Third Army troops in the Moselle River area moved forward in strength, making considerable progress east of Nancy, and were some 30 to 40 miles from the Siegfried Line. Heavy fighting continued in the Metz area as Gen. Patton's armor attacked from the south and an infantry team attacked from the north. German defenders of the town showed every indication that they meant to fight it out.

From the Seventh Army front, a Reuter dispatch reported that Allied troops were less than 20 miles from the Belfort Gap which, according to prisoners, German troops have been ordered to defend to the last man."

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