Top Para supports Airborne Forces Heritage Trail

Lieutenant General Andrew Harrison, former Colonel Commandant of the Parachute Regiment, has endorsed the South Kesteven Airborne Forces' Heritage Trail with a video narration.

General Harrison’s glittering 35-year career with the Regiment took him all over the world with countless visits to Arnhem - but never to where his forbears trained and left for Operation MARKET GARDEN.

General Harrison visited Lincolnshire to record the narration for a video illustrating the Airborne story of South Kesteven in 1944. 

He visited St Vincent’s Church in Caythorpe - a shrine to Airborne Forces - Saltby airfield, Stoke Rochford Hall and the site of Easton Hall.

A private visit to Stoke Rochford Hall, the Headquarters of the 2nd Parachute Battalion where Lieutenant Colonel John Frost planned his Battalion’s assault on the road bridge at Arnhem, proved particularly poignant.

It was a rare opportunity for him to stand in the library where planning maps would have covered every table in the run-up to MARKET GARDEN, and to see the fireplace where evening high jinks included a practice jump and roll from the mantelpiece.

His was a career full of incidents. In 2000, he was posted to Sierra Leone as an unarmed UN Military Observer.  On the outbreak of civil war, he was captured and held for 12 days by rebels from the Revolutionary United Front. 

He subsequently escaped to a rebel-surrounded UN enclave, and after three months of isolation the group were relieved in a UK Special Forces/UN assault. 

In 2007, he organised the repatriation of UK deceased from Iraq and Afghanistan in 68 ceremonies.