The 326th moved from Camp Mackall, North Carolina to Camp Shanks, New York, embarking overseas aboard the USS General George O. Squire. Together with the rest of the division, the regiment, as it did in World War I, landed at Le Havre, France in February 1945 and moved forward to a staging area. On March 1, 1945 the 326th was reorganized, gaining a third battalion from the deactivation of the 88th GIR. The 13th Airborne Division was originally selected to participate in Operation Varsity, the airborne component of Operation Plunder, codename for the Allied crossing of the Rhine River, alongside two veteran airborne divisions, the British 6th and the U.S. 17th. However, there was not enough transport aircraft available to transport all three divisions and so the 13th Airborne's role in the operation was dropped. Over the next few weeks, numerous other airborne operations were thought of, only to be quickly abandoned, and so the division did not see any combat action, due, as with the division's cancelation from Operation Varsity, to a shortage of transport aircraft. The Allies' rapid advance into Germany after March 1945 denied the need for airborne troops and the 13th Airborne Division was never used, instead being held in reserve by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander on the Western Front, for a possible airborne drop into Bavaria.