Pegasus Bridge

6 June, 1944

by Stephen E. Ambrose

Introduction

This book is the result of  some 24 interviews, conducted between September  and December, 1983,  in Canada,   England, France  and Germany.  At that time I  had just  completed some  twenty years   of work   on  Dwight   Eisenhower,   during which  period  I examined something over two million documents.  In my next book I  wanted to work from  an entirely different  kind of source  material. I  have always been  impressed by  the work  of the  American  military  writer S. L. A. Marshall,   especially by  his use  of  post-combat  interviews   to   determine what  actually   happened  on   the battlefield.

My thought was, Why not do a post-combat interview forty years after the  event? Even taking into account all the tricks that memory plays, I felt that for  many of the participants, D-Day was the great day of their lives, stamped forever  in their memories. I  knew that was  the case with  Eisenhower, who went  on to two full terms as  President, but who  always looked back  on D-Day as  his greatest day, and could remember the most surprising details. I also wanted to come  down from the  dizzying heights  of the  Supreme Commander  and the  President to the company level, where the action is. Further, I wanted a company that was unusual and that played a crucial role, Pegasus Bridge was an obvious choice.

So I set out. My recorded interviews with John Howard took twenty hours,  spread over a period of some weeks. I  got almost ten hours of tape from  Jim Wallwork. My shortest interview was two hours.

Listening to the  old veterans was  fascinating. D-Day had  indeed burned itself indelibly into  their minds,  and they  very much  enjoyed having  an interested audience for their stories.

My  major problem,  it turned  out, was  the sequence  and timing  of events:  I sometimes got six, eight, or  ten individual descriptions of the  same incident. When the veterans differed it was only in small detail, but they often disagreed on when the specific incident took place, whether before this one or after  that one. By comparing all the transcripts later, by using such documentary  material as exists, and by constant re-checking with my sources, I worked out a  sequence of events and incidents that  is, I think, as close  to accurate as one can  get forty years later.

The key time, on  which everything else hinges,  is the moment the  first glider crashed. I  use 0016,  D-Day, as  that moment.  That was  the time at which John Howard's watch, and the watch of one of the privates, both stopped -  presumably as a result of the crash.

When I began  writing the book  I quickly realised  that the more  these men and women spoke for  themselves, the better.  I found myself  using more and  longer quotations than I had  ever used before. Gradually,  I realised that what  I was doing was putting their stories into a single narrative, rather than writing  my own book. Because this is, truly, a book written by the veterans themselves, I'm glad to say that the royalties are going to the Royal Greenjackets  Consolidated Charitable Fund (the Oxfordshire  and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry  became the 1st Battalion  of the  Royal Greenjackets  in the  late 1950s)  and the Airborne Forces Security Fund).

The informants (listed in the order the interviews were done)

Jim Wallwork, John  Howard, Wally Parr,  Dennis Fox, Richard  Todd, Nigel Poett, Nigel Taylor, M. Thornton, Oliver Boland, C. Hooper, E. Tappenden, Henry Hickman and Billy Gray (a joint interview),  David Wood, John Vaughan, R. Ambrose,  Jack Bailey, Joy  Howard, Irene  Parr, R.  Smith, H.  Sweeney, E.  O'Donnell, Therese Gondree, and Hans von Luck.

Prologue

SPRING, 1944

The  spring  of 1944  was  a unique  time  in European  history,  unique because virtually every European was anticipating a momentous event. That event was  the Allied invasion, and  everyone knew that  it would decide  whether the continent lived under Nazi domination.

By May of  that year the  war had reached  its decisive phase,  a phase in which invasion was inevitable. The British had been planning to return to Europe since they were kicked off in 1940. The  Russians had been demanding the opening of  a second front since the June of  1941, insisting that the Germans could  never be beaten without one. And  the Americans had been  in agreement with the  Russians since  their  entry  into  the  war.  Generals  George  Marshall  and  Dwight D. Elsenhower had argued forcefully for a second front in 1942 and 1943.

Despite the  commitment by  the three  great allies,  and despite intense public pressure, another strategy was followed. In November, 1942, the Allies landed in French North Africa,  a long way  from any major  German forces (not  to mention from any German cities).  In July of the  following year they landed  in Sicily, and two months later in southern  Italy. These operations ran into heavy  German opposition, but they did not put a significant strain on enemy manpower. Nor did they seriously weaken Germany's capacity  to make war: indeed, German  factories were producing tanks and guns at record  rates by the spring of 1944. And  their guns and tanks were  the best in the  world - as well  they might be, given  the Nazis' ability to draw on the  expertise and resources of all Europe.  In short, the  Allied operations  in the  Mediterranean during  1942 and  1943 were   more important for their political than their military results. They left Hitler with few problems either of production or of manpower.

But Hitler did have one major worry in the Spring of 1944, and that was a single point at which his fighting forces were vulnerable. He was well protected on the north, where his troops occupied Norway  and Denmark. To the south, the  immense barrier of the Alps stood between Germany and the Allied forces, who in any case were still  south of  Rome. Hitler  was not  even excessively  worried about his eastern flank: his armies were 600 miles east of Warsaw, and within 300 miles of Moscow. He had lost the Ukraine in 1943, much his biggest loss to date, but  for compensation he had held on in the Balkans and was still besieging Leningrad. On all fronts except one he had a deep buffer between himself and his enemies. That one exception was to the west.

The Allied forces building up in the United Kingdom, now 2,500,000 strong,  were the greatest threat to Cologne and Germany's industrial heartland. Not only were they  much  closer than  the  Red Army,  they  were operating  from  a virtually impregnable base and had far greater mobility than either the German or  Russian armies. But of course there was the English Channel between Hitler's Europe  and the armies gathering in the United Kingdom. Hitler knew, from intensive study of the plans for operation Sea Lion, a German invasion of Britain in 1940, just how difficult a cross-Channel attack would be.

Hitler did what  he could to  make it even  more difficult. Just  as the British started thinking  about returning  to the  Continent even  as they  were leaving Dunkirk, so did Hitler begin thinking then of how to repulse an invasion.  First the ports were fortified,  protected by big guns  on the cliffs, by  machine-gun emplacements,  by  trenches,  by  mine fields  and  barbed  wire,  by underwater obstacles, by every device known to German engineers. The Canadians learned  how effective  these  were at  Dieppe  in August,  1942,  when they  were  met by  a veritable wall of steel hurtling down on them from every direction. In 1943, the Germans began extending  the fortifications up  and down the  coast; in January, 1944,  with Rommel's  arrival to  take command  of Army  Group B,   construction reached an almost frenzied pace. The  Germans knew that the second front  had to come that  spring, and  that throwing  the invaders  back was  their single best chance to win the war.

Hitler had therefore  turned a staggering  amount of labour  and material, taken from all over Europe,  to the construction of  the Atlantic Wall. All  along the French and  Belgian coasts,  but especially  between Ostend  and Cherbourg,  the Germans had built or were building machine-gun pillboxes, trenches,  observation posts,  artillery  emplacements,   fortresses,  mine  fields,   flooded  fields, underwater obstacles of every  conceivable type, a communications  network. This was a  regular Maginot  Line, only  much longer  - truly  a gigantic undertaking unprecedented  in Western  history, and  comparable only  to the  Great Wall  of China.

If Elsenhower's forces could break  through that Wall, victory was  not assured, but it was at  least possible and even  probable. If they could  not get ashore, their chances were doubtful. Eisenhower said it well in his first report to  the Combined Chiefs of Staff: 'Every obstacle must be overcome, every  inconvenience suffered and  every risk  run to  ensure that  our blow  is decisive.  We cannot afford to fail.'

To meet the challenge, the United  States, Great Britain, and Canada all  turned the greater  part of  their energies  to the  task of  launching an  assault and establishing  a beach-head.  Their venture  was code-named  Operation  Overlord; nearly  every citizen  of the  three nations  involved made  a direct   personal contribution to launching it.

As a consequence, Elsenhower's problems did not include a shortage of  material. He had an  abundant supply of  tanks, guns, trucks.  His problem was  how to get them across the  Channel and into  battle. The tanks  and heavy artillery  could only be brought ashore gradually, especially on D-Day itself and for a few  days after that. Thus, the Allied forces would be at their most vulnerable after  the first wave had landed and before the follow-up waves got ashore with their tanks and guns. The troops themselves would be heavily outnumbered (by as much as  ten to one) in the first days of the  invasion, and as late as D-Day plus one  month the ratio would be five to one. But many of the German divisions, fifty-five  in all, were scattered all across France; many were immobile, and many were of  low quality. Furthermore, Elsenhower  could count on  the Allied air  forces to keep German movement to  a minimum, at  least in daylight.  And he had  chosen as the invasion site the area west of the  Orne River: this avoided the bulk of  German strength in France, which was north and east of the mouth of the Seine. In  that area, and most of all around the Pas de Calais, German defences were  strongest. In addition, the Germans had most of their panzer strength in the Pas de Calais.

Because the panzers were to the  east, the most dangerous flank of  the invasion for the Allies was  the left flank. It  was closest to the  major German counter -attack formations and  therefore the place  where Eisenhower expected  the most determined - and most dangerous - counter-attacks.

For immediate counter-attack  purposes, Rommel had  two armoured divisions,  the 12th  SS Panzer  and the  21st Panzer,  stationed in  and to  the east   ofCaen. Elsenhower's greatest fear was that Rommel would send those divisions, operating as a coordinated  unit, on a  counter-attack against his  left flank, code-named Sword Beach,  just west  of the  mouth of  the Orne  River. It was possible that those two  panzer divisions  would drive  the British  3rd Infantry  Division on Sword back into the sea.  It was also possible that,  on D-Day plus one or  two, additional panzer  divisions would  come into  Normandy to  participate in flank attacks along the beaches. They would strike first against Juno, then Gold,  and finally the American beaches at Omaha and Utah. With fighting going on along the beaches, all Elsenhower's loading schedules would be disrupted.

To  prevent such  a catastrophe,  Eisenhower expected  to delay  and harass  the German tanks  moving into  Normandy by  using the  Allied air  force, which  had complete command  of the  air. The  trouble was  that the  air forces  could not operate either at night or in bad weather. By themselves, they would not be able to isolate  the battlefield.  Eisenhower needed  some additional  way to protect Sword Beach and his critical left flank.

To solve his  problem, Eisenhower turned  to another of  the assets that  Allied control  of the  air made  available to  him -airborne  forces,  extraordinarily mobile and elite units. German success with paratroopers and gliderborne  troops in the first years of World War II had convinced the British and American armies of the need to create their own airborne divisions. Now Eisenhower had four such divisions available to him, the US  82nd and 101st Airborne and the  British 1st and 6th Airborne. He decided to  use them on his flanks: offensively  to provide immediate tactical assistance by seizing bridges, road junctions, and the  like; defensively to keep the Germans occupied and confused. The British 6th Airborne, dropping east of Sword Beach, had  another critical task: setting up a  blocking force to keep the German panzers away from the left flank.

Critical though those tasks were, they did not seem critical enough to George C. Marshall,  the US  Army Chief  of Staff.  Marshall was  so strongly  opposed  to Elsenhower's plan that he sent Eisenhower what amounted to a reprimand - and was certainly the  most critical  letter he  ever wrote  to his  protege. Marshall's criticism, and Elsenhower's response, bring out very clearly the advantages  and disadvantages of airborne troops.

Marshall pointed out that the role assigned to the airborne forces was basically defensive, and stated flatly that he did not like the concept at all. No attempt was being  made to  engage or  disrupt the  enemy's strategic  forces or counter -attack capability. Marshall told Eisenhower that when he was creating the  82nd and 101st, he had had great hopes for paratroopers as a new element in  warfare, but he  confessed that  his hopes  had not  been realised,  and now Elsenhower's plans made him despair. Marshall saw in the plan a wasteful dispersion of  three elite divisions, with two American on the right protecting Utah's flank and  one British on the left protecting Sword's  flank. He charged that there had  been a 'lack in conception' caused by  a piecemeal approach, with General  Omar Bradley insisting that he had to have  paratrooper help at Utah and General  Bernard Law Montgomery insisting that Sword Beach also had to have paratrooper aid.

This business of splitting up the paratroopers was all a mistake, Marshall  told Eisenhower. If  he were  in command  of Overlord,  he would  insist on one large paratrooper  operation,  'even to  the  extent that  should  the British  be  in opposition I would carry it out exclusively with American troops'. He would make the drop south ofEvreux, nearly seventy-five miles inland from Caen. There  were four good airfields near Evreux  which could be quickly taken,  making re-supply possible. 'This plan appeals to me', Marshall declared, 'because I feel that  it is a true vertical envelopment and  would create such a strategic threat  to the Germans that  it would  call for  a major  revision of  their defensive  plans.' Bradley's  and Montgomery's  flanks could  take care  of themselves,  in  short, because the  German tanks  would be  busy attacking  the airborne  troops around Evreux.  Such  a massive  drop  would be  a  complete surprise,  would  directly threaten  both the  crossings of  the Seine  and Paris,  and would  serve as   a rallying point for the French Resistance.

The only drawback Marshall  could see to his  plan was 'that we  have never done anything like this before, and frankly, that reaction makes me tired'. The Chief of Staff  concluded by  saying that  he did  not want  to put  undue pressure on Eisenhower, but did want  to make sure that  Eisenhower at least considered  the possibility of  making a  bolder, more  effective strategic  use of his airborne troops.

Elsenhower's reply was long and defensive. He said that for more than a year one of his favourite subjects for contemplation had been getting ahead of the  enemy in some important method of operation, and the strategic use of paratroopers was an  obvious  possibility.  Marshall's  idea,  however,  was  impossible.  First, Eisenhower insisted that  Bradley and Montgomery  were right: the  flanks of the invasion had to be protected  from German armoured counter-attacks. Second,  and even more important, a paratrooper force three divisions strong landing  seventy -five miles inland  would not be  self-contained, would lack  mobility and heavy fire-power, and  would therefore  be destroyed.  The Germans  had shown time and again that they did not fear a 'strategic threat of envelopment'. Using the road net of France,  Rommel could concentrate  immense firepower against  an isolated force and defeat it in detail.

Eisenhower cited the  Allied experience at  Anzio early in  1944 as an  example. They had landed  there in an  attempt to slip  around the German  line in Italy, thereby threatening both the rear of the German line and Rome itself. Eisenhower told Marshall that 'any military man required to analyse' the situation in Italy right after the Anzio landing 'would have said that the only hope of the  German was  to begin  the instant  and rapid  withdrawal of  his troops'.  Instead  the Germans attacked,  and because  the Anzio  force did  not have  enough tanks and trucks to provide mobile  striking power, the Allies  barely held out. And  they held out, Eisenhower emphasised, only because the Allies had command of the  sea and  could  provide support  in  both material  and  gunfire directly  onto  the beachhead. An inland airborne  force would be cut  off from all but  air supply, which could not provide enough tanks, trucks, heavy artillery, or bulldozers and other equipment to withstand German armoured attacks. It would be annihilated.

Eisenhower was unwilling  to take the  risk Marshall proposed.  He believed that paratroopers dropped near Evreux would not be a strategic threat to the Germans, that indeed they  would just be  paratroopers wasted, and  might even be  made a hostage, just as the  Anzio force had become.  'I instinctively dislike ever  to uphold the conservative  as opposed to  the bold', Eisenhower  concluded, but he would not change his plans. Marshall did not raise the subject again.

Nothing like  Marshall's plan  was ever  tried. At  Arnhem, in  September, 1944, three airborne divisions were used, but they were dropped many miles apart  with separate objectives.  Therefore we  cannot know  who was  correct, Eisenhower or Marshall.  But  Eisenhower  was  in command,  so  it  was  his plan  -admittedly conservative rather than bold - that was used.

Thus did the British 6th Airborne Division get its D-Day assignment. The task of carrying out that assignment fell to General Richard Gale, commander of the  6th Airborne. Gale decided to drop his  division east of the Orne River,  about five to seven miles inland, in the low  ground between the Orne and the River  Dives. The main  body would  gather in  and around  the village  of Ranville, and would guard the  bridges over  the Orne  Canal and  River. Specially-trained companies would capture and destroy the four bridges over the River Dives, then fall  back on Ranville; others would destroy the German battery at Merville.

Central  to  Gale's  plan was  taking  and  holding the  bridges  over  the Orne waterways, without  which the  6th Airborne  would be  unable to  receive tanks, trucks, and other equipment from the beaches. They were critical to the  success of the whole  invasion, and the  operation to take  and hold them  would require meticulous planning, rigorous training, and bold execution.

That operation is the subject of this book.

CHAPTER ONE

D-Day:0000 to 0015 hours

It  was a  steel girder  bridge, painted  grey, with  a large  water tower   and superstructure.  At  0000 hours,  June  5/6, 1944,  the  scudding clouds  parted sufficiently  to allow  the nearly-full  moon to  shine and  reveal the  bridge, standing starkly visible above the shimmering water of the Caen Canal.

On the bridge. Private Vern  Bonck, a twenty-two-year-old Pole conscripted  into the German army, clicked his heels sharply as he saluted Private Helmut Romer, a sixteen-year-old Berliner  who had  reported to  relieve him.  As Bonck went off duty, he met with  his fellow sentry, another  Pole. They decided they  were not sleepy and agreed to go to the local brothel, in the village ofBenouville, for a bit of fun. They strolled west along the bridge road, then turned south at the T junction, on the  road into Benouville.  By 0005 they  were at the  brothel, and within  minutes  they  were  knocking  back  cheap  red  wine  with  two  French prostitutes.

Beside the  bridge, on  the west  bank, south  of the  road, Georges and Therese Gondree and their two daughters slept  in their small cafe. Georges and  Therese were in separate rooms, not by choice but as a way to use every room and thus to keep the Germans from billeting soldiers with them. It was the 1,450th night  of the German occupation ofBenouville.

So far as the Germans knew, the Gondrees were simple Norman peasants, people  of no consequence  who gave  them no  trouble. Indeed,  Georges sold  beer, coffee, food,  and a  concoction made  by Madame  of rotting  melons and  half-fermented sugar, to the grateful German troops  stationed at the bridge. There were  about fifty  of  them, the  NCOs  and officers  all  German, the  enlisted  men mostly conscripts from East Europe.

But the Gondrees were  not as simple as  they pretended to be.  Madame came from Alsace and spoke German, a fact she successfully hid from the garrison. Georges, before acquiring the cafe, had spent twelve years as a clerk in Lloyd's Bank  in Paris  and spoke  English. Both  hated the  Germans for  what they  had done  to France, hated the life they led  under the occupation, feared for the  future of their eight-year-old daughter, and were  consequently active in trying to  bring German rule to an end. In their case, the most valuable thing they could do  for the Allies was to provide information  on conditions at the bridge. Therese  got information by listening to  the chit-chat of the  NCOs in the cafe;  she passed what she heard along to Georges, who  passed it to Madame Vion, director of  the maternity hospital, who passed it along  to the Resistance in Caen on  her trips to obtain medical supplies. From  Caen, the information was passed  onto England via Lysander aeroplanes, small craft that could land in fields and get out in  a hurry.

Only a  few days  before, on  June 2,  Georges had  sent through  this process a titbit Therese had overheard - that the button that would set off the explosives to blow the bridge was located  in the machine-gun pillbox across the  road from the anti-tank gun. He hoped that information had got through, if only because he would hate to see his bridge destroyed.

The man who would give that order, the commander of the garrison at the  bridge, was  Major Hans  Schmidt. Schmidt  had an  understrength company  of the   736th Grenadier Regiment of the 716th Infantry  Division. At 0000 hours, June 5/6,  he was in Ranville, a village two kilometres east of the Orne River. The river  ran parallel to the canal, about 400 metres  to the east, and was also crossed  by a bridge (fixed, and guarded by sentries but without emplacements or a  garrison). The Germans knew that the long-anticipated invasion could come at any time,  and Schmidt had  been told  that the  two bridges  were the  most critical points in Normandy because they  provided the only  crossings of the  Orne waterways along the Norman coast road.

Nonetheless, Schmidt  did not  have his  garrison at  full alert;  nor was he in Ranville on business.  Except for the  two sentries on  each bridge, his  troops were either sleeping in  their bunkers, or dozing  in their slit trenches  or in the machine-gun pillbox, or enjoying themselves at the Benouville brothel.

Schmidt himself was  with his girlfriend  in Ranville, enjoying  the magnificent food and drink of Normandy. He  thought of himself as a fanatical  Nazi, someone who was  determined to  do his  duty for  his Flihrer,  but he  seldom let  duty interfere with pleasure, and he had no worries that evening. His routine concern was  the possibility  that French  partisans might  blow the  bridges, but  that hardly seemed likely except in  conjunction with an airborne operation,  and the high winds and stormy weather of  the past two days precluded a  parachute drop. Having received orders to blow  the bridges himself if capture  seemed imminent, he had prepared the  bridges for demolition. But  he had not put  the explosives into their chambers, for fear of accident or the partisans. As his bridges  were almost  five miles  inland, Schmidt  reckoned he  would have  plenty of  warning before any Allied units reached  him, even paratroopers, because the  paras were notorious for taking a long time to form up and get organised after their  drops scattered them all over  the DZ. Thus, tonight  Schmidt could relax. He  treated himself to more wine, and another pinch.

At Vimont, east of Caen, Colonel  Hans A. von Luck, commanding the  125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division, was working on personnel reports at his  headquarters. The  contrast between  Schmidt and  von Luck  extended far beyond their activities at midnight. Schmidt  had gone soft from years of  cushy occupation duty;  von Luck  was an  officer hardened  by combat.  He had been in Poland in 1939 and commanded the leading reconnaissance battalion for Rommel  at Dunkirk in 1940. At Moscow in the winter of 1941, he actually led his  battalion into the outskirts of the city, the deepest penetration of the campaign. And  he had been with Rommel throughout the North African campaign of 1942-43.

There was  an equally  sharp contrast  between the  units von  Luck and  Schmidt commanded.  The  716th Infantry  was  a second-rate,  poorly  equipped, immobile division made up of a hotchpotch of Poles, Russian, French and other conscripted troops,  while  the 21st  Panzer  was Rommel's  favourite  division. Von  Luck's regiment, the 125th, was one of the  best equipped in the German army. The  21st Panzer Division had been destroyed in Tunisia in April and May, 1943, but Rommel had got  most of  the officer  corps out  of the  trap, and  around that nucleus rebuilt the  division. It  had all  new equipment,  including Tiger  tanks, self -propelled  vehicles   (SPV)  of   all  types,   and  an   outstanding  wireless communications  network. The  men were  volunteers, young  Germans  deliberately raised by  the Nazis  for the  challenge they  were about  to face,  tough, well -trained, eager to come to grips with the enemy.

There was  a tremendous  amount of  air activity  that night,  with British  and American bombers crossing the  Channel to bomb Caen.  As usual, Schmidt paid  no attention to it. Neither did von Luck, consciously, but he was so accustomed  to the sights and sounds  of combat that at  about 0010 hours he  noticed something none of his clerks did. There were about six planes flying unusually low, at 500 feet or less. That  could only mean they  were dropping something by  parachute. Probably supplies for the Resistance, von  Luck thought; he ordered a search  of the  area,  hoping to  capture  some local  resistance  people while  they  were gathering in the supplies.

Heinrich (now Henry) Heinz Hickman,  a sergeant in the German  6th (Independent) Parachute Regiment, was at that moment riding in an open staff car, coming  from Ouistreham on the coast towards Benouville. Hickman, twenty-four years old,  was a  combat veteran  of Sicily  and Italy.  His regiment  had come  to Normandy  a fortnight before;  at 2300  hours on  June 5  his company  commander had ordered Hickman to pick up four  young privates at observation posts  outside Ouistreham and bring  them back  to headquarters,  near Breville  on the  east side  of the river.

Hickman, himself a paratrooper, also had heard low-flying planes. He came to the same conclusion as von Luck, that they were dropping supplies to the Resistance, and for the  same reason -  he could not  imagine that the  Allies would make  a paratrooper drop  with only  half-dozen sticks.  He drove  on towards the bridge over the Caen Canal.

Over the Channel,  at 0000 hours,  two groups of  three Halifax bombers  flew at 7,000 feet  towards Caen.  With all  the other  air activity  going on,  neither German searchlights nor AA gunners noticed that each Halifax was tugging a Horsa glider.

Inside the lead glider. Private Wally Parr of D Company, the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (Ox and Bucks), a part of the Air Landing Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division of  the British army, was leading the  twenty-eight men in  singing. With  his powerful  voice and  strong Cockney  accent, Parr was booming out 'Abey, Abey,  My Boy'. Billy Gray,  sitting down the row  from Parr, was barely singing, because all that he could think about was the 'Jimmy Riddle' he had to do. At  the back of the glider.  Corporal Jack Bailey sang even  as he worried about the parachute he was responsible for securing.

The  pilot, twenty-four-year-old  Staff Sergeant  Jim Wall-work,  of the  Glider Pilot Regiment, anticipated casting off any second now that he had seen the surf breaking over  the Norman  coast. Beside  him his  co-pilot, Staff Sergeant John Ainsworth,  was  concentrating  intensely  on  his  stop  watch.  Sitting behind Ainsworth, the commander of D Company, Major John Howard, a  thirty-one-year-old former sergeant major and  an ex-cop, laughed with  everyone else when the  song ended and Parr  called out, 'Has  the Major laid  his kit yet?'  Howard suffered from  air  sickness and  had  vomited on  every  training flight.  This  flight, however, was an exception. Like his men,  he had not been in combat before,  but the prospect seemed to calm him more than it shook him.

As Parr started up 'It's a Long  Way to Tipperary', Howard touched the tiny  red shoe in  his battlejacket  pocket, one  of his  two-year-old son  Terry's infant shoes that he had brought along for good luck. He thought of Joy, his wife,  and of Terry and their baby daughter. Penny. They were back in Oxford, living near a factory, and he hoped there were no bombing raids that night. Beside Howard  sat Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, whose wife was  pregnant and due to deliver any  day (five other men in the company  had pregnant wives back in England).  Howard had talked Brotheridge into joining the Ox  and Bucks, and had selected his  platoon for the no. 1  glider because he thought  Brotheridge and his platoon  about the best in his  company. Another reason  was that they  were mostly Londoners  like himself. Howard loved the Cockney quick wit and cheerfulness.

One minute behind Wallwork's glider was no. 2, carrying Lieutenant David  Wood's platoon. Another minute behind that Horsa  was no. 3 glider, with Lieutenant  R. A. A. 'Sandy'  Smith's platoon. The  three gliders in  this group were  going to cross the coast near Cabourg, well east of the mouth of the Orne River.

Parallel to  that group,  to the  west and  a few  minutes behind, Captain Brian Friday  sat  with Lieutenant  Tony  Hooper's platoon,  followed  by the  gliders carrying the platoons  of Lieutenants H.  J. Tod' Sweeney  and Dennis Fox.  This second group was headed towards the  mouth of the Orne River. In  Fox's platoon. Sergeant M. C. 'Wagger' Thornton was singing 'Cow Cow Boogie' and - like  almost everyone else on all the gliders-chain-smoking Player's cigarettes.

In no. 2 glider, with the first group, the pilot. Staff Sergeant Oliver  Boland, who had just turned twenty-three a fortnight before, found crossing the  Channel an 'enormously emotional' experience, setting off as he was 'as the spearhead of the most colossal army ever assembled. I found it difficult to believe because I felt so insignificant.'

At 0007,  Wallwork cast  off his  lead glider  as he  crossed the coast. At that instant, the  invasion had  begun. There  were 156,000  men prepared  to go into France that day, by air and  by sea, British, Canadian, and American,  organised into some 12,000 companies. D Company led the way. It was not only the spearhead of the  mighty host,  it was  also the  only company  attacking as  a completely independent unit. Howard would  have no one to  report to, or take  orders from, until he had completed his principal task. When Wallwork cast off, D Company was on its own.

With castoff there was a sudden jerk, then dead silence.

Parr and his  singers shut up,  the engine noise  of the bomber  faded away, and there was a  silence broken only  by the swoosh  of air over  the Horsa's wings. Clouds covered the  moon; Ainsworth had  to use a  torch to see  his stop watch, which he had started instantaneously with castoff.

After casting off the Halifax bombers continued on towards Caen, where they were to drop their small bomb load on the cement factory, more as a diversion than  a serious attack. During  the course of  the campaign, Caen  was almost completely obliterated, with hardly a  brick left mortared to  a brick. The only  untouched building in the whole city was the cement factory. 'They were great tug pilots', says Wallwork, 'but terrible bombers.'

Howard's thoughts shifted  from Joy, Terry  and Penny to  his other 'family',  D Company. He thought of how deeply  involved he was with his platoon  commanders, his sergeants and corporals, and many  of his privates. They had been  preparing for this moment, together, for over two years. The officers and men had done all that he asked of them, and more. By God, they were the best damn company in  the whole British army! They had  earned this extraordinary role, they  deserved it. John was  proud of  every one  of them,  and of  himself, and  he felt a wave of comradeship come over him, and he loved them all.

Then his mind flashed through the dangers ahead. The anti-glider poles, first of all - air reconnaissance  photographs taken in the  past few days revealed  that the Germans were digging holes for the poles (called 'Rommel's asparagus' by the Allies). Were  the poles  in place,  or not?  Everything depended  on the pilots until the instant the glider had landed, and until that instant Howard was but a passenger. If the pilots could bring  D Company down, safely, within 400  metres of  the  objective,  he  was  confident  he  could  carry  out  his  first  task successfully. But if the pilots were  even one kilometre off course, he  doubted that he could do his job. Anything over a kilometre and there was no chance.  If the Germans  somehow spotted  the gliders  coming in,  and got  a machine-gun on them, the men would never touch the soil of France alive. If the pilots  crashed - into a tree, an embankment, or one of Rommel's asparagus - they might all well die even if their feet did touch ground.

Howard was always a  bad passenger; he always  wanted to drive himself.  On this occasion, as  he willed  Wallwork onto  the target,  he at  least had  something physical  to do  for diversion.  Held by  Howard on  one side  and the   platoon sergeant  on the  other. Lieutenant  Brotheridge released  his safety  belt  and leaned forward to open the door in front of them. The door slid up into the roof of the glider  and Brotheridge accomplished  this in one  hefty swoop. It  was a dicey  business  because   Howard  and  Sergeant   Oilis  were  hanging   on  to Brotheridge's equipment,  and when  the job  was done,  Brotheridge slumped back into his seat with a sigh of relief.

Looking down, once the door was open, the men could see nothing but cloud. Still they grinned at each  other, recalling the fifty-franc  bet they had made  as to who would be the first out of the glider.

As Brotheridge took  his seat again,  Howard's orders flashed  through his mind. Dated May 2, they were signed by Brigadier Nigel Poett and classified 'Bigot', a super-classification above  'Top Secret'.  (The few  who did  have clearance for 'Bigot' material were said to be 'bigoted'.)

'Your task is  to seize intact  the bridges over  the River Orne         and canal  at Benouville  and Ranville,  and to  hold them until         relief.... The capture  of the bridges  will be a  coup de  main         operation  depending largely  on surprise,  speed and  dash  for         success.  Provided  the bulk  of  your force  lands  safely, you         should have little difficulty in overcoming the known opposition         on the bridges. Your difficulties  will arise in holding off  an         enemy counter-attack on the bridges, until you are relieved.'

The relief would come  from the men of  the 6th Airborne Division,  specifically from the 5th Para Brigade and  especially its 7th Battalion. They would  land in DZs between the Orne  River and the River  Dives at 0050 hours,  roughly half an hour after Howard's  party. Brigadier Poett,  commanding 5th Para  Brigade, told Howard  that  he  could  expect organised  reinforcements  within  two  hours of touchdown. The paras would come through Ranville, where Poett intended to set up his Brigade headquarters for the defence of the bridges.

Poett himself  was only  two or  three minutes  behind Howard,  flying with  the pathfinders who would  mark the DZ  for the main  body of the  5th Para Brigade. There were  six planes  in Poett's  group -  the low-flying  planes von Luck and Hickman had heard. Poett wanted  to be the first to  jump, but at 0008 hours  he was struggling desperately to get the floor hatch open. He and his ten men  were jammed into an old  Albemarle bomber, which none  of them had ever  seen before. They were carrying so much equipment that they had to 'push and push and push to get in'. They had  then had a terrible  time squeezing together sufficiently  to close the hatch door. Now, over the Channel with the coast coming up, they could not get the damn thing open. Poett began to fear he would never get out at  all, that he would end up landing ignominiously back in England.

In no. 3 glider. Lieutenant Sandy Smith felt his stomach clinch as it did before a big sports event.  He was only twenty-two  years old, and he  rather liked the feeling of tension, because he was full of the confidence he used to feel before a match when he was a Cambridge rugger blue. 'We were eager', he remembers,  'we were fit. And  we were totally  innocent. I mean  my idea was  that everyone was going to  be incredibly  brave with  drums beating  and bands  playing and I was going to be the bravest among the brave. There was absolutely no doubt at all in my mind that that was going to be the case.'

Across the  aisle from  Smith, Captain  John Vaughan  of the  Royal Army Medical Corps  sat fidgeting.  He was  distinctly unhappy  when Smith  opened the  door. Vaughan was  a doctor  with the  paratroopers, had  many jumps  behind him,  had confidence in a parachute. But he had volunteered for this special mission,  not knowing what it was, and ended up in a plywood glider, an open door in front  of him,  and  no  parachute.  He  kept thinking,  'My  God,  why  haven't  I got  a parachute?'

Back in  Oxford, Joy  Howard slept.  She had  had a  routine day, taking care of Terry and  Penny, getting  them into  bed at  7 p.m.,  doing her housework, then spending a couple of hours by the radio, smocking Penny's little dresses.

On his last furlough, John had hidden his service dress uniform in a spare  room closet. He had then taken Terry's  shoe, kissed the children, started to  leave, and returned to kiss them once more. As he left, he told Joy that when she heard that the invasion had started, she could stop worrying, because his job would be finished. Joy had discovered  the missing shoe and  found the uniform. She  knew that the  invasion must  be imminent,  because leaving  the uniform behind meant that John did not expect to be dining in the officers' mess for the  foreseeable future.

But that had been weeks ago, and nothing had happened since. For two years there had been talk of an invasion, but  nothing happened. On June 5,1944, Joy had  no special feelings - she just went to  bed. She did hear air traffic, but  because most of the bombers based in  the Midlands were headed south, rather  than east, she was on the fringes of the great air armada and paid little attention to  the accustomed noise. She slept.

Down in the southeastern end of London, almost in Kent, Irene Parr did hear  and see the huge air fleet headed towards Normandy and she immediately surmised that the invasion had begun, partly because of the numbers, partly because Wally  -in a gross breach of security - had told  her that D Company was going to lead  the way, and he guessed  it would be in  the first week of  June, when the moon  was right. She did not know,  of course, exactly where he  was, but she was sure  he was in great danger,  and prayed for him.  She would have been  pleased, had she known, that  Wally's last  thoughts, before  leaving England,  were of her. Just before  boarding  Wallwork's  Horsa,  Wally  had  taken  a  piece  of  chalk and christened the glider the 'Lady Irene'.

Wallwork had crossed the coast well to the east of the mouth of the Orne  River. Although he was the pilot  of the no. 1 glider,  and nos. 2 and 3  were directly behind him, he was not leading the  group to the LZ - the Landing  Zone. Rather, each pilot was on his own, as the pilots could not see the other gliders in  any case. Boland remembers the feeling 'of  being on your own up there,  dead quiet, floating over the coast of France, and knowing that there's no turning back'.

Wallwork could not see the bridges, not even the river and canal. He was  flying by Ainsworth's  stop-watch, watching  his compass,  his airspeed  indicator, his altimeter. Three  minutes and  forty-two seconds  into the  run, Ainsworth said, 'Now!', and Wallwork threw the descending glider into a full right turn.

He looked out the window for a landmark. He could see nothing. 'I can't see  the Bois de Bavent', he whispered to Ainsworth, not wanting to upset his passengers. Ainsworth  snapped  back,  'For  God's sake,  Jim,  it's  the  biggest place  in Normandy. Pay attention.'

'It's not there', Jim whispered fiercely.  'Well, we are  on course anyway',  Ainsworth replied. Then  he started counting: '5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Bingo. Right one turn to starboard onto course'. Wallwork heaved over the  wooden steering  wheel and  executed another  turn. He  was now headed north, along the  east bank of  the canal, descending  rapidly. Using the  extra large 'barn door' wing flaps, he had brought the glider from 7,000 to about  500 feet, and reduced her airspeed from 160 mph to about 110 mph.

Below and  behind him,  Caen was  ablaze with  tracers, searchlights,  and fires started  by the  bombers. Ahead  of him,  he could  see nothing.  He hoped  that Ainsworth was right and they were on target.

That target was a small, triangular field, about 500 metres long, with the  base on the  south, the  tip near  the south-east  end of  the canal bridge. Wallwork could not see  it, but he  had studied photographs  and a detailed  model of the area so  long and  so hard  that he  had a  vivid mental  picture of what he was headed towards.

There was the bridge itself, with its superstructure and water tower at the east end the dominant feature of the flat landscape. There was a machine-gun  pillbox just north of  the bridge, on  the east side,  and an anti-tank  gun emplacement across the road from it. These fortifications were surrounded by barbed wire. At Wallwork's last briefing  with Howard, Howard  had told him  that he wanted  the nose of the Horsa to break  through the barbed wire, which otherwise  would need to be destroyed with bangalore torpedoes. Wallwork thought to himself that there was  not a  chance in  hell that  he could  land that  heavy, cumbersome,  badly overloaded,  powerless  Horsa with  such  precision over  a  bumpy and  untested landing strip he could  barely see. But out  loud he assured Howard  he would do his best. What he  and Ainsworth thought, however,  was that such a  sudden stop would result in 'a  broken leg or so,  maybe two each'. And  they agreed amongst themselves that if they got out of this caper with only broken legs, they  would be lucky.

Along with the constant concern about his location, and with the intense  effort to penetrate the darkness  and clouds, Wallwork had  other worries. He would  be doing between 90 and 100 mph when he  hit the ground. If he ran into a  tree, or an anti-glider pole, he would be dead, his passengers too injured or stunned  to carry out their task. And the parachute worried him, too. It was in the back  of the glider, held  in place by  Corporal Bailey. Wallwork  had agreed to  add the parachute at the  last minute, because  his Horsa was  so overloaded and  Howard refused to remove one more round  of ammunition. The idea was that  the arrester parachute would  provide a  safer, quicker  stop. Wallwork  feared that it would throw him into a nose-dive.

The control mechanism  for the chute  was over Ainsworth's  head. At the  proper moment, he would press an electric switch and the trapdoor would fall open,  the chute billow out.  When Ainsworth pressed  another switch, the  chute would fall away from the glider. Wallwork understood the theory; he just hoped he would not have to use the chute in fact.

At 0014 Wallwork called over his shoulder to Howard to get ready. Howard and the men linked  arms and  brought their  knees up,  following normal  landing drill. Everyone  knew the  floor of  the glider  would disintegrate  on landing.   Most everyone thought the obvious thoughts - 'No turning back now', or 'Here we  go', or 'This is it'. Howard recalled, 'I could see ole Jim holding that bloody great machine and driving it in at the last minute, the look on his face was one  that one could never forget. I could  see those damn great footballs of  sweat across his forehead and all over his face.'

Gliders 2 and  3 were directly  behind Wallwork, at  their one-minute intervals. The other group of Horsas was, however, now split up. Friday's no. 4 glider  had gone up the  River Dives rather  than the Orne  River. Seeing a  bridge over the Dives  at  about the  right  distance inland,  the  pilot of  no.  4 glider  was preparing to land. The  other two Horsas, on  the correct course, headed  up the Orne River. They had a straight-in  run. They would 'prang', a gliderman's  term for  touch-down,  pointed  south,  along  the  west  bank  of  the  river,  in a rectangular field nearly 1,000 metres long.

Brigadier Poett finally got his hatch  open (in another of those Albemarles  one of  Poett's officers  fell out  while opening  his hatch  and was  lost in   the Channel). Standing  over the  hole in  the floor  of the  bomber, a foot on each side, Poett could  not see anything.  He flew right  over the Merville  Battery, another critical target for the paras that night. Another minute and it was 0016 hours. The pilot flipped on the green light, and Poett brought his feet together and fell through the hatch into the night.

On the canal bridge. Private Romer and the other sentry were putting in  another night of routine pacing back and  forth across the bridge. The bombing  activity up at  Caen was  old stuff  to them,  not their  responsibility and  not worth a glance. The men in  the machine-gun pillbox dozed,  as usual; so did  the troops standing-to in the slit trenches. The anti-tank gun was unmanned.

In Ranville, Major Schmidt opened another bottle of wine. In Benouville, Private Bonck had finished his wine and  had gone into the bedroom with  his prostitute. He unbuckled his belt  and began to unbutton  his trousers as the  woman slipped out of her dress. On the road from Ouistreham, Sergeant Hickman and his group in the staff car sped  south, towards Benouville and  the bridge. At the  cafe, the Gondrees slept.

Wallwork was down to 200 feet, his  airspeed slightly below 100 mph. At 0015  he was halfway down the final run. About two kilometres from his target, the clouds cleared the moon. Wallwork could see the river and the canal - they looked  like strips of silver  to him. Then  the bridge loomed  before him, exactly  where he expected it. 'Well', he thought to himself, 'Igotchanow.'

CHAPTER TWO

D-Day minus two years

Spring, 1942, was a bad time for  the Allies. In North Africa, the British  were taking a  pounding. In  Russia, the  Germans had  launched a gigantic offensive, aimed at Stalingrad. In the Far East, the Japanese had overrun the American  and British  colonial possessions  and were  threatening Australia.  In France,  and throughout Western and  Eastern Europe, Hitler  was triumphant. The  only bright spot was that America had entered the  war. But to date that event had  produced only a few more ships, and no  troops, no planes, hardly even an increased  flow ofLend-Lease supplies.

Throughout much of the British army, nevertheless, boredom reigned. The official phoney war was from September of 1939 to May of 1940, but for thousands of young men who  had enlisted  during that  period, the  time from  spring, 1941  to the beginning of 1944 was almost as bad.  There was no threat of invasion. The  only British  army  doing  any  fighting at  all  was  in  the Mediterranean;  almost everywhere else, duties  and training were  routine - and  routinely dull. As  a result, discipline had  fallen off. But  discipline had suffered  anyway, partly because the War Office had feared to impose it too strictly in a democracy,  and partly because it was  thought to dampen the  fighting spirit of the  men in the ranks.

Obviously, many  soldiers rather  enjoyed this  situation: they  would have been more than content to stick out  the war lounging around barracks, doing  the odd parade or field march, otherwise finding ways of making it look as if they  were busy. But there were thousands who were not content, young men who had joined up because they really did want to be  soldiers, really did want to fight for  King and Country, really did seek some action and excitement. In the spring of  1942, their opportunity came: Britain had decided to create an airborne army under the command of Major-General F. A. M. 'Boy' Browning. This would be the 1st Airborne Division, and volunteers were being called for.

Browning had already become a legendary figure in the army. Noted especially for his tough discipline, he looked like  a movie star, dressed with flair,  and was married to the novelist  Daphne du Maurier. It  was she who in  1942 suggested a red beret for  airborne troops, with  Bellerophon astride winged  Pegasus as the airborne shoulder patch and symbol, pale blue on a maroon background.

Wally Parr was one of  the thousands who responded to  the call to wear the  red beret. He had joined the army in February, 1939, at the age of 16 (he was one of more than  a dozen  in D  Company, Ox  and Bucks,  who lied  about their  age to enlist). Posted to an infantry regiment, he had spent three years 'never doing a damn thing that really mattered. Putting up barbed wire, taking it down the next day, moving it. . . .Never fired a rifle, never did a thing'. So he  volunteered for airborne, passed the physical, and was accepted into the Ox and Bucks,  just then forming up as an air landing  unit, and assigned to D Company. After  three days in his new outfit, he asked for an interview with the commander, Major John Howard.

'Ah, yes, Parr', Howard said as Parr was marched into his office. 'What can I do for you?'

'I want to get out'. Parr stated.  Howard stared at him. 'But you just  got in.' 'Yes, sir', Parr responded, 'and I spent the lasty three days weeding around the barracks block. That's not what I came for. I want to transfer from here to  the paras. I want the real thing, what I volunteered for, not these stupid  gliders, of which we don't have any anyway.'

'Now you  take it  easy', Howard  replied. 'Just  wait.' And  he dismissed  Parr without another word. Leaving the  office, Parr thought to himself,  'I'd better be careful with this fellow'.

In truth, Parr as yet had no idea just how tough his new company commander  was. Howard was born  December 8, 1912,  eldest of nine  children in a  working-class London family.  From the  time John  was two  years old  until he  was six,  his father.  Jack Howard,  was off  in France,  fighting the  Great War.  When  Jack returned  he got  a job  with Courage  brewery, making  barrels. John's  mother, Ethel, a dynamic  woman, managed to  keep them in  clean clothes and  adequately fed. John recalls,  'I spent the  best part of  my childhood, up  to the age  of thirteen or fourteen,  pushing prams, helping  out with the  shopping, and doing all that sort of thing'.

John's one great pleasure in life was the Boy Scouts. The Scouts got him out  of London for  weekend camps,  and in  the summer  he would  get a fortnight's camp somewhere in the country.  His chums in Camden  Town did not approve:  they made fun of his short pants 'and generally  made my life Hell'. Not even his  younger brothers would stick with the Scouts. But John did. He loved the out-door  life, the sports and the competition.

John's other great passion  was school. He was  good at his studies,  especially maths, and won a scholarship to secondary school. But the financial situation at home was such that  he had to go  to work, so he  passed up the scholarship  and instead,  at age  fourteen, took  a full-time  job as  a clerk  with a  firm  of stockbrokers. He also took evening classes five nights a week in English, maths, accounting,  economics, typing,  shorthand, anything  that he  thought would  be useful in his work. But in the  summer of 1931, when he returned to  London from Scout camp, he discovered that his firm had been hammered on the stock  exchange and he was out of a job.

By this time the younger Howard children were growing, taking up more space, and the house was bursting. John  offered to move out, to  find a flat and a  job of his own. His mother would not hear of his breaking up the family, however, so he decided to run off and enlist in the army.

He went into  the King's Shropshire  Light Infantry. The  older soldiers, Howard found, were 'very rough and  tough. ... I freely admit  I cried my eyes out  for the first couple of nights when I was in the barracks room with these toughs and wondered if I'd survive.'

In fact, he began to stand out. In recruit training, at Shrewsbury, he  excelled in sports - cross-country running, swimming,  boxing, all things he had done  in the Scouts. To his great benefit  the British army of 1932, like  most peacetime regular  armies  everywhere,  was  fanatical  about  sports  competition between platoons, companies, battalions. When John joined his battalion, at  Colchester, the company commander immediately made him  the company clerk, a cushy job  that left him with plenty of free time  for sports. Then he was sent on  an education course, to learn to teach, and when he returned he was put to teaching  physical education and school subjects to recruits, and to competing both for his company and battalion in various events.

That was all right, but John's ambitions reached higher. He decided to try for a commission, based  on his  sports record,  his educational  qualifications - all those  night  courses  - and  his  high  scores on  army  exams.  But getting  a commission from the ranks  in the peacetime army  was almost impossible, and  he was turned down. He did get a promotion to corporal, and transferred to teach in the school at the Regimental Depot at Shrewsbury.

And he met  Joy Bromley. It  was a blind  date, John being  dragged along simply because his  buddy had  two girls  to look  after. Joy  was supposed  to be  his buddy's date, but John took one look at her and lost his heart forever. Joy  was only  sixteen (she  lied and  told John  she was  seventeen), slim  but with   a handsome figure, pert in her face, lively in her carriage, quick to laugh,  full of conversation. She had come on the  date reluctantly - her people were in  the retail trade in Church Stretton near  Shrewsbury, she had already been dating  a boy from Cambridge, and, as she told her friend, 'I'm not allowed to go out with soldiers'. 'Well, it's only for coffee', her friend persisted, 'and I've made  a promise'. So Joy went, and over the  coffee she and John talked, the words,  the laughs, the stories  bubbling out. At  the train station,  John kissed her  good -night.

That was in 1936, and a courtship ensued. At first it was secretive, Joy fearing her mother's disapproval. They met under  a large copper beech tree at  the foot of the garden at Joy's house. John  did not much care for this sneaking  around, however, and he decided to proceed on a direct line. He announced to Joy that he was going to  see her mother.  'Well, I nearly  died', Joy recalled.  'I thought mother wouldn't see him',  and if she did,  then 'she would flail  me for making such an acquaintance'. But Mrs Bromley  and John got along splendidly; she  told Joy, 'You've got a real man there'. In April, 1937, they were engaged, promising Joy's mother they would wait until Joy was older before marrying.

In 1938, John's enlistment  came to an end.  In June, he joined  the Oxford City Police force. After a tough, extended  training course at the Police College  in Birmingham, in which he came in second  of 200, he began walking the streets  of Oxford at  night. He  found it  'quite an  experience. You  are on your own, you know, anything can happen.'

It was here, on the streets of Oxford at midnight, with the young undergraduates staggering their way home, the occasional thief, the odd robbery, the accidents, the pub staying open  after closing hour, that  John Howard first came  into his own.  He had  already demonstrated  that he  was reliable,  exceedingly fit,   a natural leader in games, a marvellous athlete himself, in short one of those you would look to  for command of  an infantry platoon,  perhaps even a  company, in time of war. But  these qualities he shared  with thousands of other  young men. However admirable, they were hardly unique. What was unique was Howard's love of night. Not because it gave him an opportunity to indulge in some petty graft, or bash in a few heads - far from it. He loved the night because while walking  his beat he had to be constantly alert.

He was a man of the most extraordinary energy, so much energy that he could  not burn it off even with daily ten-mile runs and twenty miles of walking the  beat. What could  burn it  off was  the mental  effort required  at every corner, past every tree,  literally with  every step.  Expecting only  the unexpected, he was always on his own, with no one to turn to for reinforcements or advice. To be so intense, for such a long period of time, through the dark hours, brought  Howard to a full use of  all his gifts and powers.  He was a creature of  the night; he loved the challenge of darkness.

Howard stayed with the police until after the war began. On October 28,1939,  he and Joy were married. On December 2, he was recalled for duty as a full corporal with the 5th Battalion King's Shropshire Light Infantry, and within two weeks he was a  sergeant. One  month later  he was  Company Sergeant  Major. In April, he became  an Acting  Regimental Sergeant  Major, so  he jumped  from corporal   to regimental sergeant major in six months, something of a record even in  wartime. And in May, his Brigadier offered him a chance at a commission.

He  hesitated.  Being  Regimental  Sergeant  Major  meant  being  the  top  man, responsible only to the commanding  officer, the real backbone of  the regiment. Why give that up to be a subaltern? Further, as Howard explained to his wife, he did not have a very high opinion of the incoming second lieutenants and did  not think he wanted to be a part  of them. Joy brushed all his objections  aside and told him that he absolutely must try for the commission. Her reaction ended  his hesitance, and  he went  off to  OCTU -  Officer Cadet  Training Unit - in June, 1940.

On passing out, he requested the Ox and Bucks, because he liked the  association with Oxford and he liked light infantry. His first posting was to the Regimental Depot at Oxford. Within  a fortnight he feared  he had made a  terrible mistake. The Ox  and Bucks  were 'a  good county  regiment' with  a full  share of battle honours,  at  Bunker Hill,  in  the Peninsula,  at  the Battle  of  New Orleans, Waterloo, and in the Great War. Half the regiment had just come back from India. All the officers came from the upper classes. It was in the nature of things for them to be snobbish,  especially to a working-class  man who had been  a cop and had come up from the ranks. In brief, the officers cut Howard. They meant it  to be sharp and cruel, and it was, and it hurt.

After two weeks of the silent treatment, Howard phoned Joy, then living with her family in Shropshire. 'You'd  better plan to move  here', he told her.  'Because it's just horrible and I need some encouragement or I am not going to stick  it. I don't have to put up with this.' Joy promised him she would move quickly.

The following  morning, on  the parade  ground, Howard  was putting  four squads through different kinds of training. He  already had his men sharp enough  to do some complicated manoeuvres. When he dismissed the squads, he turned to see  his colonel standing behind him. In a quiet voice, the colonel asked, 'Why don't you bring your wife here, Howard?' It was a sure indication that the C.O. wanted  to keep him  in Oxford  and not  follow the  normal routine  of being  posted to  a Battalion. Within  a week,  they had  found a  flat in  Oxford and John had been accepted by his fellow officers.

Soon he was a captain with his own company, which he trained for the next  year. At the beginning of 1942, he learned that a decision had been taken for the  2nd Battalion of the Ox and Bucks to go airborne in gliders. No one was forced to go airborne;  every officer  and trooper  was given  a choice.  About 30  per  cent declined the opportunity  to wear the  red beret, and  another 20 per  cent were weeded out  in the  physical exam.  It was  meant to  be an  elite regiment. The sergeant major came to the Ox  and Bucks specially posted from the  outside, and he was everything a regimental  sergeant major from the Guards'  Honour Regiment should be. Wally Parr speaks of the man's overpowering personality: 'That  first day', says Parr, 'he called the  whole bleeding company together on parade.  And he looked at us, and we looked at him, and we both knew who was boss.'

Howard himself had to give up his company and his captaincy to go airborne,  but he did not hesitate.  He reverted to lieutenant  and platoon leader in  order to become an airborne officer.  In three weeks, his  colonel promoted him and  gave him command ofD Company. Shortly after that, in May of 1942, he was promoted  to major.

The men of D Company - half from the original Ox and Bucks, half from volunteers drawn from every branch of the army -came from all over the United Kingdom,  and from every  class and  occupation. What  they had  in common  was that they were young, fit, eager  to be trained,  ready for excitement.  They were the  kind of troops every company commander wishes he could have.

Howard's  platoon  leaders  also  came  from  different  backgrounds.  Two  were Cambridge  students  when  they  volunteered, and  one  was  a  graduate of  the University of  Bristol. But  the oldest  lieutenant, at  age twenty-six, was Den Brotheridge, who, like Howard,  had come up from  the ranks. Indeed, Howard  had originally recommended Den, then a  corporal at the Regimental Depot,  for OCTU. His fellow platoon leaders were a bit uneasy about Den when he first joined  up; as one of them explained, 'He wasn't  one of us, you know'. Den played  football rather than rugby.  But, the officer  immediately added, 'You  couldn't help but like  him'.  Den was  a  first-class athlete,  good  enough that  it  was freely predicted he would become a professional football player after the war.

Captain Brian  Friday was  Howard's second-in-command.  Six feet  tall, a  quiet steady type, Friday was ideal for the  job. He and Howard hit it off,  helped by the fact that Friday's father had  also been in the Oxford Police  force. Friday himself had been in the motor car trade. He was in his mid-twenties. Lieutenants Tod Sweeney and Tony Hooper were in their early twenties; Lieutenant David  Wood was all of nineteen years old, fresh out of OCTU. 'My gracious', Howard  thought to himself  when Wood  reported, 'he  is going  to be  a bit  too young  for the toughies in my company'. But, Howard added, 'David was so keen and bubbling with enthusiasm I thought, "well, we've got to make something of him". So I gave  him a young soldier platoon with mature NCOs.'

Sweeney describes himself and his fellow subalterns as 'irresponsible young men. Life was very light-hearted, there was a war on, lots of fun for us. John was  a dedicated and  serious trainer  and we  were rather  like young  puppies he  was trying to train.'

Brotheridge provided enthusiasm  and humour for  the group. He  would gather the platoon leaders together, then read to them from Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.  They could  scarcely get  through a  sentence without  breaking down in peals of laughter. Weekend evenings they would drop into the lobby of the  local hotel, where a good number of'dear old ladies from London, who wanted to  escape the bombing, had taken up residence for the duration'. Den and his cohorts would sit properly enough, but then Den would start whispering orders. The grandfather clock was the  objective - David  was to sneak  behind the sofa,  climb over the bar, go through the kitchen, and attack the clock from the rear; Tod should leap out the window, dash around to the door, end charge in to attack from the   side -and so on. Then Den would shout,  'Go', and the ladies watched aghast as  these young men dashed about.

Howard  was pleased  with his  company, officers  and men.  He especially  liked having so many Londoners in it.  The regiment moved to Bulford, where  D Company was given a  spider block, near  the barracks but  separate from it.  So, Howard notes, 'right from the first there was  an atmosphere of D Company being on  its own'. He set out to make it into both a family and a first-class combat unit.

In North Africa, Hans von Luck was fighting in the only war he ever enjoyed.  As commander  of  the  armed reconnaissance  battalion  on  Rommel's extreme  right (southern) flank,  he enjoyed  a certain  independence, and  so did  his British opposite number. The  two commanding officers  agreed to fight  a civilised war. Every day at 5  p.m. the war shut  down, the British to  brew up their tea,  the Germans their coffee. At  about 5:15, von Luck  and the British commander  would communicate over the radio. 'Well',  von Luck might say, 'we  captured so-and-so today, and  he's fine,  and he  sends his  love to  his mother,  tell her not to worry'. Once von Luck learned that the British had received a month's supply  of cigarettes. He offered to trade  a captured officer for one  million cigarettes. The British countered  with an offer  of 600,000. Done,  said von Luck.  But the British prisoner was outraged. He said the ransom was insufficient. He  insisted he was worth the million and refused to be exchanged.

One evening,  an excited  corporal reported  that he  had just  stolen a British truck, jammed  with tinned  meat and  other delicacies.  Von Luck  looked at his watch - it was past 6 p.m. -and told the corporal he would have to take it back, as he  had captured  it after  5. The  corporal protested  that this was war and anyway the troops were already gathering  in the goods from the truck.  Von Luck called Rommel,  his mentor  in military  academy. He  said he  was suspicious of British  moves  further south  and  thought he  ought  to go  out  on a  two-day reconnaissance. Could  another battalion  take his  place for  that time? Rommel agreed. The new battalion arrived in the morning.

That night, at 5:30  p.m., just as von  Luck had anticipated, the  British stole two supply trucks.

Heinrich Hickman, meanwhile, had gone through the campaigns in Holland,  Belgium and France of 1940 as a gunner on  an 88mm gun. In 1941, he volunteered for  the parachute regiment, and went to Spandau for jump school. In May, 1942, he was in the middle of his training.

In Warsaw, Vern Bonck was doing his best to stay out of the German  conscription net by working with extra efficiency at his lathe. Helmut Romer, fourteen  years old, was finishing his school year in Berlin.

At the bridge over the Caen canal, there were as yet no elaborate defences,  and only a tiny garrison. Still, the garrison was large enough to make the lives  of the people  ofBenouville, Le  Port, and  Ranville miserable.  The Germans helped themselves to  the best  of everything,  paid for  what they  did purchase  with nearly worthless printing-press  francs, took all  the young men  away for slave labour, made travel even within the country almost impossible, imposed a curfew, and shot  dissenters. By  May, 1942,  the Gondrees  had decided  to do something about it. Georges joined the local Resistance, which advised him to stay put and use his situation to gather information  on the bridges and their defence.  This he could easily do on the basis of what his wife heard in the cafe. Let there be no mistake  about this  action -  the Gondrees  knew that  if the Germans caught them, they would be first tortured, then hanged. But they persisted.

In May, 1942, Jim Wallwork was also  in training camp. Jim was a Manchester  lad who had volunteered for the army at age 19, in 1939. His father, who had been an artilleryman in the Great War, had advised him, 'Whatever you do, Jim, don't for God's sake  join the  infantry. Get  in the  artillery, the  biggest gun you can find; if possible, the  railway gun.' Naturally, Jim  ended up in the  infantry, bored to tears, although he did make  it to sergeant. He tried to transfer  out, into the Royal Air Force, but his commanding officer blocked the move because he wanted to keep Wallwork with him.

Then in early 1942,  when a call went  out for volunteers for  the Glider Pilots Regiment, Jim signed up. By spring he was training at Tilshead, Salisbury Plain. 'It was  rather rough',  he recalled,  'because I  was doing  my own  equipment, polishing my own  brass, going on  those God-awful run-marches,  and drills, and all sorts of that nonsense.' What he  most feared, what every man in the  Glider Pilots Regiment most feared, were the  letters, 'RTU'. They stood for Return  to Unit, and they  meant disgrace, failure.  Jim managed to  stick it, and  by May, 1942, he was at flight training school, learning to fly a small aeroplane.

Howard's own family was growing. Joy, living with relatives at Church  Stretton, was pregnant. During the war Howard was a virtual teetotaller, partly because he wanted to keep a clear mind, partly because 'I saw the mess a lot of people were getting into, making bloody fools of themselves, and I wanted to set an  example for my own  subalterns'. The child  was due in  late June but  not actually born until  July  12.  During the  fortnight  between  the due  date  and  the actual delivery, Howard was so irritable and bad-tempered that his subalterns found him unapproachable.  When  news  of  the  successful  delivery  arrived  in Bulford, everyone was so relieved that a huge party developed. Howard, drinking  straight shots of whisky 'to wet the baby's head', got royally drunk.

By July, Howard was pretty  much on his own, allowed  by his colonel to set  his own training pace and  schedule. Initially he put  the emphasis on teaching  the men the  skills of  the light  infantryman. He  taught them  to be marksmen with their rifles, with the light machine-gun, with the carbine and the pistol,  with the Piat and other  anti-tank weapons. He instructed  them in the many  types of grenades, their characteristics and special uses.

The basic weapons of  a gliderborne platoon of  thirty men included the  Enfield .303 rifle, the Sten carbine, the Bren light machine gun, 2" and 3" mortars, and the  Piat  (projector infantry  anti-tank).  The Enfield  was  the old  reliable British rifle. One or two men in each platoon were snipers, each equipped with a telescopic sight for his rifle. The Sten was a 9mm submachine gun that reflected Britain's inability  to produce  quality weapons  for her  troops. The  Sten was mass-produced, and distributed to thousands of fighting men, not because it  was good but because it was cheap.  It could be fired single-shot or  automatic, but the weapon frequently jammed and too often it went off on its own. In 1942 David Wood accidentally shot Den Brotheridge in the leg with his Sten, in fact,  after forgetting to put  the safety-catch back  on. Brotheridge recovered,  and indeed he, like  all the  officers, carried  the Sten  by choice.  Weighing only  seven pounds and measuring  thirty inches in  length, it had  an effective range  of a hundred yards and  used a box  magazine holding thirty-two  rounds. For all  its shortcomings, it was deadly in close-in combat - if it worked.

The Bren  gun was  a light  machine gun,  weighing twenty-three pounds, normally fired on the ground from  a tripod, but also from  the hip. It had an  effective range of 500 yards and  a rate of fire of  120 rounds per minute. There  was one Bren gunner per platoon; everyone  in the platoon helped carry  the thirty-round magazines  for  him.  In  rate  of  fire,  in  depend  ability,  and  by   other measurements, the Bren was inferior to  its German counterpart, the MG 34,  just as the Sten was inferior to the German Schmeisser.

The Piat was  a hand-held rocket,  fired from the  shoulder, that threw  a three -pound bomb through a  barrel at high trajectory  and a speed of  about 300 feet per second.  The hollow  charged bomb  exploded on  impact. Effective  range was supposed to be 100 yards, but the men of D Company could never get more than  50 yards out of the Piat. Being spring-loaded, Piats were inaccurate and subject to frequent  jamming.  They also  had  a nasty  habit  of glancing  off  the target unexploded. No one liked them very much, but all got proficient with them.

They all also learned to use a Gammon bomb, a plastic explosive charge developed from the 'Sticky Bomb' and designed  by Captain Gammon of the paratroopers.  You could throw one with a stick and it would cling to the clogs of a tank, or  even throw it by hand (as long as it did not stick to the hand). Except for the Piat, Gammon bombs were all a glider platoon  had to fight tanks, and the men  learned what they had to know about them. Much of the training was with live ammunition, which caused some accidents and an occasional death, but the British had learned from Dieppe  that it  was essential  to expose  green troops  to live ammunition before sending them into combat.

Howard taught his men about German weapons, how to use them, what they could do. He taught them how to  lay and find mines, how  to take them up. He  gave them a working knowledge of  elementary first aid,  of cooking in  a billy can,  of the importance of keeping clean. He made certain that they could recognise the smell of various poison gases,  and knew what to  do if attacked by  them. He insisted that every man in his company be proficient in the use of natural and artificial camouflage, and know how to read a topographical map. His men had to know how to use a field wireless,  how to drive various  army vehicles. Most of  all, Howard put the emphasis  on teaching them  to think quickly.  They were elite,  he told them, they were glider-borne troops, and wherever and whenever it was that  they attacked the enemy, they could be sure of the need for quick thinking and  quick response.

Howard's emphasis on technical training went a bit beyond what the other company commanders were doing,  but only just  a bit. Each  of Howard's associates  were commanding top-quality volunteers,  and were volunteers  themselves, outstanding officers.  What was  different about  D Company  was its  commander's mania  for physical fitness. It went beyond anything  anyone in the regiment had ever  seen before. All the regiment prided itself on being fit (one officer from B  Company described himself as a physical-fitness fanatic), but all were amazed, and a bit critical, of the way Howard pushed his company fitness programme.

D Company's day  began with a  five-mile cross-country run,  done at a  speed of seven or eight minutes to the  mile. After that the men dressed,  ate breakfast, and then spent  the day on  training exercises, usually  strenuous. In the  late afternoon, Howard insisted  that everyone engage  in some sport  or another. His own favourites were the  individual endeavours, crosscountry running,  swimming, and boxing, but he encouraged football, rugby, and any sport that would keep his lads active until bedtime.

Those were regular days. Twice a month, Howard would take the whole company  out for two  or three  days, doing  field\ exercises,  sleeping rough.  He put  them through gruelling  marches and  soon they  became an  outstanding marching unit. Wally Parr swears - and a number of  his comrades back him up - that they  could do twenty-two miles, in full pack, including the Brens, mortars and  ammunition, in under five  and one-half hours.  When they got  back from such  a march. Parr relates, 'you would have a foot inspection,  get a bite to eat, and then  in the afternoon face a choice: either play football or go for a cross-country run'.

All the officers, including Howard, did everything the men did. All of them  had been athletes themselves, and loved  sports and competition. The sports  and the shared  misery on  the forced  marches were  bringing officers  and men   closer together.  David Wood  was exceedingly  popular with  his platoon,  as was   Tod Sweeney, in his own  quiet way, with his.  But Brotheridge stood out.  He played the men's game, football,  and as a former  corporal himself he had  no sense of being ill at ease among the men. He would come into their barracks at night, sit on the bed of his batman. Billy Gray, and talk football with the lads. He got to bringing his boots along,  and shining them as  he talked. Wally Parr  never got over the sight  of a British  lieutenant polishing his  boots himself while  his batman lay back on his bed, gassing on about Manchester United and West Ham  and other football teams.

Howard's biggest problem  was boredom. He  wracked his brains  to find different ways of doing the  same things, to put  some spontaneity into the  training. His young heroes had many virtues, but  patience was not one of them.  The resulting morale problem extended far beyond D Company, obviously, and late in the  summer of 1942, General Gale  sent the whole regiment  to Devonshire for two  months of cliff  climbing, and  other strenuous  training. He  then decided  to march  the regiment back to Bulford, some 130  miles. Naturally, it would be a  competition between the companies.

The first two days were the hottest of the summer, and the men were marching  in serge, ringing with sweat. After the second day, they pleaded for permission  to change to lighter gear. It was granted, and over the next two days a cold,  hard rain beat down on their inadequately-covered bodies.

Howard marched  up and  down the  column, urging  his men  on. He  had a walking stick, an old army one  with an inch of brass  on the bottom. His company  clerk and wireless  operator, Corporal  Tappenden, offered  the major  the use  of his bike. He refused,  growling. 'I'm leading  my company'. From  gripping the stick his hands grew  more blisters than  Tappenden's feet, and  he wore away  all the brass on the end of it. But he kept marching.

On the morning of the fourth day, when Howard roused the men and ordered them to fall in, Wally Parr and his friend Jack Bailey waddled out on their knees.  When Howard asked them what they thought  they were doing, Wally replied that  he and Jack had worn away the bottom half  of their legs. But they got up  and marched. 'Mad bastard', the  men whispered among  themselves after Howard  had moved off. 'Mad, ambitious bastard. He'll get us all killed.' But they marched.

D Company got back to base on the  evening of the fifth day, marching in at  145 steps to the minute and  singing 'Onward Christian Soldiers'. Loudly.  They came in first in the  regiment, by half a  day. Howard had lost  only two men out  of 120. (His stick, however, became so worn that he had to throw it away.)

Howard had radioed ahead, and had hot showers and meals waiting for the men.  As the officers began to undress for their showers, Howard told them to button  up. They had to go do a foot inspection of the men, then watch to make sure they all showered properly, check on the quality and quantity of their food, and  inspect the barracks to see that  the beds were ready. By  the time the officers got  to shower, the hot water was gone; by the time they got to eat, only cold leftovers remained. But not a one of them had let Howard down.

'From  then  on',  Howard  recalls, 'we  didn't  follow  the  normal pattern  of training.' His colonel gave him even more flexibility, and the transport to make it meaningful. Howard started taking  his company to Southampton, or  London, or Portsmouth, to conduct street fighting exercises in the bombed-out areas.  There were plenty to choose from, and it did not matter how much damage D Company did, so all the exercises were with live ammunition.

Howard was putting together an oustanding light infantry company.

CHAPTER THREE

D-Day minus one year to D-Day minus one month

By the spring of 1943, the British airborne force had become large enough to  be divided into two divisions. The 1st Airborne went off to North Africa while  the 6th (the number was chosen to confuse German intelligence) was formed around the units that stayed behind, including the Ox and Bucks and D Company.

General Richard Gale,  known to everyone  as 'Windy' because  of his last  name, commanded 6th Airborne Division. A large, confident, experienced officer who had commanded the 1st Para Brigade, Gale had  a bit of the buccaneer about him,  and more than a bit of imagination to complement his professionalism.

Nigel Poett commanded the  5th Para Brigade. He  was a regular officer  from the Durham Light Infantry. A big, powerful  man, Poett was meticulous on detail  and an officer who led from the front.  The 3rd Para Brigade was commanded by  James Hill, a regular from the  Royal Fusiliers who had won  a DSO in North Africa.  D Company  was a  part of  the Airland-ing  Brigade, commanded  by Brigadier  Hugh Kindersley.[1] --- [1] After the war Kindersley became chairman of Rolls-Royce and was made a peer.

Training  intensified  under  Gale's prodding,  but  there  were few  complaints because the word was  that the division was  being prepared for the  invasion of France. Gale, through his training exercises, was trying to figure out what  the division was capable  of performing, while  simultaneously trying to  figure out exactly how he would use it to achieve his D-Day objectives.

At COSSAC (Chief  of Staff, Supreme  Allied Command), planning  for Gale's role, and  for the  invasion as  a whole,  had been  going on  for a  year, under  the direction of General  Frederick Morgan. By  the spring of  1943, Morgan and  his planners had settled on  Normandy, west of the  mouth of the Orne  River, as the invasion site. A variety of factors influenced the choice; the one that affected D Company and the 6th Airborne Division  was the need to protect the left  flank of the seaborne  invasion, where the  British 3rd Division  would be landing  on Sword Beach. That left flank was  the single most vulnerable point in  the whole invasion, because to the east, beyond Le Havre and the mouth of the Seine River, the Germans had  the bulk of  their armour in  the West. If  Rommel brought that armour  across the  Seine, crossed  the River  Dives and  the Orne  River,  then launched an all-out counter-attack against the exposed flank of 3rd Division, he might well roll  up the entire  invading force, division  by division. It  would take days for the  Allies to unload enough  tanks and artillery of  their own to withstand such a blow.

Morgan and his  people decided to  meet the threat  by placing the  6th Airborne between the Orne waterways and the  River Dives. There were many changes  in the COSSAC  plan  after January,  1944,  when Eisenhower  took  over SHAEF  (Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force) and Montgomery took over at 21st: Army Group, which commanded all the ground forces; the most important change was  the widening  of the  assault area  from three  to five  divisions. But  one  COSSAC decision that remained  unchanged was the  one that placed  6th Airborne on  its own, east of  the Orne  River, with  the task  of holding  off armoured  counter attacks. How to do it was left to General Gale.

D Company had begun  its flight training in  little Waco gliders. To  begin with Howard concentrated on exit drill. The  door was open before the glider  touched down and it  was 'move, move,  move' when the  glider hit the  ground. Again and again Howard reminded the  men that they were  'rats-in-a-trap' so long as  they were inside.

The chief novelty of flying  in a glider was one  Howard could not get over.  As General Sir Napier Crookenden wrote  in Dropzone Normandy: 'Since the  glider on the end of its  tug-rope moved in a  series of surges as  the tug-rope tightened and slackened, and was subject to the normal pitching, rolling and yawing of any aircraft, few men survived more than half an hour without being sick. The  floor was soon awash with vomit, and this in itself was enough to defeat the strongest stomach.' Howard could not get away from  being sick; he threw up on all  twelve of his training flights. Fortunately for  him, this was not like being  seasick, with its long recovery time. After being sick on a glider flight, Howard was fit and ready as soon as his feet hit the ground.

Howard's sickness gave the men a great laugh, something the company badly needed as it was in  danger of going stale.  Wally Parr described morale  in late 1943, when the Yanks began appearing:

'Then in  came the  big spending  Americans at  Tidworth and the         fights  that  used  to  take  place  in  Salisbury  was nobody's         business, 'cause from Tidworth you had  to go through Bulford by         transport  to  get  to   Salisbury,  and  they  were  stationed,         thousands of them,  mountains of planes  at Tidworth there   and         there was  sheer frustration all the time, you know, and it  was         nothing unusual to go in Saturday night, you've got a couple  of         bob in your pocket, a couple  of beers and then, of course,  the         fights usually started. In the majority of cases the birds  went         with the Yanks, 'cause the Yanks' had more money and could  show         them a good time.'

In barracks, there were worse fights, as Parr relates:

'We would be  sleeping, midnight, and  all of a  sudden the door         burst open and  in would  come a load of screaming  maniacs from         Sweeney's platoon, throw the beds up in the air, the whole  lot.         I'm talking  about "thunder-flashes"  that we   used to  use for         exercises  and that, just  throwing them about  the place, left,         right, smoke stuff, a lot  of it. It was sheer  vitality coupled         with total frustration.'

Parr, by  this time  a corporal  in charge  of the  snipers, could not stand the boredom any longer.

'Me and Billy Gray  and  another fellow was  bored one  night so         we decided, just for the fun of it,  we'd go and rob the   NAAFI         so we waited until  it was  pretty dark and then we drifted  off         to sleep and forgot it, then we woke up about  five o'clock  and         thought, ah, Hell,  we  might as well, so   we went over and  we         broke into the  NAAFI and  we  emptied it of   soap, soap powder         and   everything and  came back  with it  in sackfuls  which  we         spread  all  over the  cobblestones  and pavement.  A  nice rain         stirred it up. You've never  seen so much soap in all your life.         It was bonjour soap, personnel, oxydyl, everything was foam.'

Howard busted Wally back to private and sentenced him to a fortnight in jail; he put Billy Gray  and the other  man in the  jail for twenty-eight  days. Howard's colonel, Mike Roberts, wanted to RTU Private Parr, but Howard protested that the punishment was excessive, and  in any case told  Roberts, 'Parr might only  be a private but he is the man that when I get to the other side he will be  promoted straightaway, he is a born leader.'  Roberts let Howard keep Parr. There  were a number of similar cases; Howard called  them 'my scallywags' and says, 'when  we got to the other side, they were the best. In battle they were in their  natural environment. Unfortunately, most of them were killed because of their nature and their way of going about things.' He did re-promote Parr on D-Day plus two.

Howard's solution for boredom was to  keep the men physically exhausted, and  he drove himself  hardest of  all. He  would go  for long  periods with only two or three hours of sleep per day, preparing himself for what he anticipated would be a major problem in combat - making quick decisions with an exhausted mind.

Howard also set  out, on  his own,  to make  D Company  into a first-class night fighting unit. It was not  that he had any inkling  that he might be landing  at night, but  rather that  he reckoned  that once  in combat,  his troops would be spending a good deal of their time fighting at night. He was also thinking of an expression he had heard was used in the German army: 'The night is the friend of no man.' In the British army, the  saying was that 'the German does not  like to fight at night'.

The trouble was, neither did the British. (Nor did the Canadians, Americans,  or French for  that matter.)  The Russians  and Chinese  seemed to  be best in this night-fighting business, possibly because while  Western men were afraid of  the dark, having lived all iheir lives with electricity, Eastern men were accustomed to it.  Howard decided  to deal  with the  problem of  fighting in  unaccustomed darkness by turning night  into day. He would  rouse the company at  2000 hours, take the men for their run, get  them fed, and then begin twelve hours  of field exercises, drill, the regular paperwork - everything that a company in  training does in the course of a day. After a meal at 1000 hours, he would get them going on the athletic fields. At 1300 hours  he sent them to barracks. At 2000  hours, they were up again, running. This would go on for a week at a time at first;  by early 1944, said Parr,  'we went several weeks,  continuous weeks of night  into day  and every  now and  then he  would have  a change-around  week'. And   they gradually became accustomed to operating in the dark of night.

None of the ether companies in  the division were doing night into  day anything like so consistently, and this added to D Company's feeling of independence  and separateness. All the  sports fanaticism had  produced, as Howard  hoped that it would, ,\n extreme  competitiveness. The men  wanted D Company  to be first,  in everything, and they had indeed  won the regimental prizes in  boxing, swimming, cross-country, football, and  other sports. When  Brigadier Kindersley asked  to observe a  race among  the best  runners in  the brigade,  D Company had entered twenty runners and took fifteen of the first twenty places. According to Howard, Kindersley 'was just cock-a-hoop about it'.

That was exactly the response for which Howard and his company had been  working so hard.  The ultimate  competitive-*' ness  would come  against the Germans, of course,  but next  best was  competing against  the other  companies. D  Company wanted to be first among all the glider-borne companies, not just for the thrill of victory, but because victory in this contest meant a unique opportunity to be a part of  history. No one  could guess what  it might be,  but even the  lowest private could figure  out that the  War Office was  not going to  spend all that money building  an elite  force and  then not  use it  in the  invasion. It  was equally obvious  that airborne  troops would  be among  the first  to engage  in combat,  almost  certainly  behind  enemy lines  -thus  an  heroic  adventure of unimaginable dimensions.  And, finally,  it was  obvious that  the best  company would play a leading role in  the fighting. That was the thought  that sustained Howard and his company through the  long dreary months, now stretching into  two years, of training. The thought  sustained them because, whether consciously  or subconsciously, to a man they were aware that D-Day would be the greatest day of their lives. Neither what had happened before, nor what would come after,  could possibly  compare.  D Company  continued  to work  at  a pace  that  bordered on fanaticism in order to earn the right to be the first to go.

By spring, 1943, Jim Wallwork had  completed his glider pilot training, most  of it using Hotspurs; in the process he survived a gruelling course that less  than one-third of the volunteers passed. After  passing out, Wallwork and his  twenty nine fellow pilots went to Brize  Norton, an old peacetime aerodrome, 'and  that is where we saw our first wheel  glider which was the Horsa, and we  immediately fell in love with it'.

The  Horsa  was a  product  of Britain's  total  war effort.  In  1940, the  Air Ministry, responding to  the need to  conserve critical metals  and the need  to draw the wood-working industries into war-time production, ordered an all-wooden glider. The prototypes  were built at  what is now  Heathrow Airport; five  more were built at Airspeed's Portsmouth works, which went on to build 700 production models. The Horsa must have been  the most wooden aircraft ever built;  even the controls in the cockpit were masterpieces  of the woodworker's artistry. A  high wing monoplane with a large plexiglass nose and a tricycle landing gear, it  had a wing span of eighty-eight • feet and a fuselage length of sixty-seven feet. It could carry a pilot and a co-pilot, plus 28 fully-armed men, or two jeeps, or  a 75mm howitzer, or a quarter-ton truck.

The pilots were immensely  impressed by the Horsa,  especially by its size.  'It was like a big, black crow', said Wallwork. 'But when we first got in before  we ever  flew and  felt the  controls, saw  the size  of the  flaps, we  were  very impressed, particularly so since we were going to have to fly it.' The seats  in the cockpit  were side-by-side  and very  big; visibility  through the front and side was  excellent. Each  pilot had  proper dual  controls, and the instruments included an air-speed indicator, a turn and bank indicator, air pressure  gauge, compass, and altimeter.

'Flying a glider', according to Wallwork, 'is just like flying an aircraft.  The instruments and  controls are  the same;  the only  thing that  is short  in the glider is the rev counter and the temperature gauge. Really, flying a glider  on tow is just the same as flying  an aircraft except that the engine is  100 yards ahead and someone else is in control of the engine.'

The glider was tugged on a rope with  a Y arrangement; there was a line on  each wing that came together in front of the nose and ran on as a single line to  the bomber  doing  the tugging.  A  telephone line  ran  along the  rope,  making it possible for the pilot of the bomber and the glider pilot to communicate.

By mid-spring, Wallwork had qualified on Horsas,  one of the first to do so.  He was then shipped down to North Africa.

In March, 1943, Rommel called von Luck to come see him at his headquarters  near Benghazi. Von  Luck drove  up and  together they  dealt with  some of the supply problems. Then Rommel asked von Luck to go for a walk. Rommel regarded von  Luck almost as a second son, and he  wanted to talk. 'Listen', Rommel said. 'One  day you will remember what I am telling you. The war is lost.'

Von Luck  protested. 'We  are very  deep in  Russia', he  exclaimed. 'We  are in Scandinavia, in  France, in  the Balkans,  in North  Africa. How  can the war be lost?'

'I will tell you',  Rommel answered. 'We lost  Stalingrad, we will lose  Africa, with the body of our best trained armoured people. We can't fight without  them. The only thing we can do is to ask for an armistice. We have to give up all this business about the Jews, we have to change our minds about the religions, and so on, and we must get an armistice now at this stage while we still have something to offer.'

Rommel asked von Luck to fly to Hitler's headquarters and plead with the  Fuhrer to execute a  Dunkirk in reverse.  It was all  up in North  Africa for the Axis, Rommel said, and he wanted to save his Afrika Korps. Von Luck went, but did  not get past Field Marshal Jodi, who told von Luck that the Fiihrer was in political discussions  with the  Rumanians and  nobody wanted  to butt  in with   military decisions, 'and  anyway', Jodi  concluded, 'there's  no idea  at all to withdraw from North Africa'.  Von Luck never  returned to Tunisia.  Rommel flew out.  The Afrika Korps was destroyed or captured.

Von Luck went on to  teach at the military academy  for six months. Late in  the autumn of 1943 he got orders to join the 21st Panzer Division in Brittany as one of  the  two regimental  commanders.  He had  been  specially requested  by  the division commander, Brigadier-General Edgar Feuchtinger, who was close to Hitler and thus got the officers he  wanted. Feuchtinger was reviving 21st Panzer  from the dead, but his contact with Hitler made it a feasible task. His officers were exclusively veterans and the troops - almost 16,000 of them, as this was a  full strength  division  - were  volunteers,  young, eager,  fit.  The equipment  was excellent,  especially  the tanks.  In  addition, the  new  21st Panzer  had  an abundance of SPVs (self-propelled vehicles),  put together by a Major  Becker, a genius with transport who could transform any type of chassis into a SPV. On his SPVs he  would mount  all sorts  of guns,  but his  favourite was  the so-called Stalin organ, or rocket launcher with forty-eight barrels.

Von Luck set to with his regiment, giving the men extended night-training drills among  other exercises.  When Rommel  took command  of the  German 7th  Army  in Normandy  and Brittany,  he injected  badly needed  enthusiasm and  professional skill into the building of the Atlantic Wall.

Even Major Schmidt, guarding the bridges over the Orne waterways, caught some of the enthusiasm. He had come to Normandy some months earlier and quickly adjusted from frantic  Nazi to  a garrison  soldier ready  to enjoy  the slow pace of the Norman  countryside.  He  had put  his  men  to work  digging  bunkers  and slit trenches, and even an open machine-gun  pit; with Rommel's arrival, the pace  of construction speeded up, and the scope of the defensive emplacements was greatly increased.

In March, 1944, two  reinforcements arrived at the  bridge. One was Vern  Bonck, who had got caught by the Gestapo  in Warsaw, sent to a six-week training  camp, where he could hardly understand the  German NCOs, and then posted to  the 716th Infantry Division  on the  coast north  of Caen.  Helmut Romer  had finished his Berlin schooling, been drafted, sent to  training camp, and then also posted  to the 716th.

Heinrich Hickman spent most of 1943 fighting. He got out of North Africa just in time,  participated  in the  campaign  in Sicily,  then  fought at  Salerno  and Cassino. At Cassino his regiment took such heavy losses that it had to be pulled back to  Bologna for  rebuilding and  training recruits.  Through the  winter of 1943-4, Hickman and his parachute regiment, like Howard and D Company, like  von Luck and 21st Panzer, were training, training, training.

In June, 1943, Jim  Wallwork went to Algeria,  where he learned to  fly the Waco glider,  an  American-built  craft  that landed  on  skids.  These  carried only thirteen men,  were difficult  to handle,  and were  altogether despised  by the British Glider Pilots Regiment. The  pilots were delighted when they  heard that Oliver Boland  and some  others were  going to  fly a  few Horsas  down to North Africa, all the way from England. Wallwork told his American instructors,  'You, you be  here tomorrow,  you've got  to be  here to  see a  proper bloody glider. You'll really see something'. Then, 'by  golly, here came the first Halifax  and Horsa combination'. Turning to his instructor, Wallwork bellowed, 'Look at that, you bloody Yank, there's  a proper aeroplane, a  proper glider, that's a  proper thing. Oh, the truth of it!'

The Horsa cast off,  did a circuit, came  down, 'and broke its  bloody nose off. Imagine this. It was the first one in. Well, our American friends were delighted about that.'

On the day  of the invasion  of Sicily, Jim  flew a Waco  with a lieutenant, ten riflemen, and a hand-trailer full of ammunition. The tug pilots were  Americans, flying Dakotas,  which had  no self-sealing  tanks and  no armoured plate. Their orders were to avoid flak at all costs. When they approached the coast line  and flak began to  appear, most of  the American pilots  cast off their  gliders and turned back to sea. As a consequence of being let go too far out, twenty of  the twenty-four gliders never made  it to shore. Many  of the men were  drowned, and upon hearing this news, John Howard stepped up his swimming requirements.

In Jim's case, he kept telling the  Dakota pilot, 'Get in, get in'. But  instead the pilot turned away to sea, made a  second run, and told Jim to drop off.  Jim refused, seeing that the coast was too  far away, and he again yelled, 'Get  in, get in'. A third try, a third refusal  by Jim to be let go. On the  fourth pass, the Dakota pilot said  calmly but firmly, 'James,  I'm going now. You've  got to let go.' Jim  let go thinking  he could just  make it. He  did, skidding in just over the beach, on a little rough field, fairly close to an Italian  machine-gun nest. The Italians opened fire, 'and we  all jumped out; we knew by then  to get out of the glider quickly'. Jim turned his Sten gun on the Italians, thinking to himself, 'Right, this will  do you buggers'. He  pulled the trigger and  nothing happened. The Sten had misfired. But the Bren gun knocked out the opposition. As the section  then began  to unload  the glider,  the lieutenant  asked Wallwork, 'Well, where in the Hell are we? Do you know where we are?'

'As a matter of fact, sir', Jim replied, 'I think you should be congratulated. I think you are the first Allied  officer to attack the soft underbelly  of Europe through the toe of Italy.' Wallwork claims today that he was so confused by  all the passes he had made at the beach that he really did think he had come down on the Continent  proper. Later  that autumn,  he was  shipped back  to England, to participate in operation Deadstick.

Deadstick  was the  result of  decisions General  Gale had  made. Studying   his tactical problem, he had decided that the best way to provide protection for the left flank of Sword Beach would be to blow up the bridges over the River  Dives, through paratrooper assaults, then gather his  paras some five miles or so  west of  Dives,  in  a  semi-circle  around  the  waterway  bridges  at  Ranville and Benouville. Without those bridges, the Germans  could not get at the left  flank of the  invasion. Gale  could not  afford to  simply blow  up the  Orne bridges, however, because without them he would  have an entire airborne division in  the middle of enemy  territory, its back  to a major  water barrier, without  proper anti-tank weapons or other crucial supplies, and with no means of getting them.

The bridges had to be taken intact. Gale knew that they had a garrison  guarding them, and that  they had been  prepared for demolition.  Paras might be  able to take the bridges, and  could certainly destroy them,  but would probably not  be able to  capture them  intact. The  relative slowness  with which  a para attack could be  launched would  give the  Germans adequate  time to  blow the  bridges themselves. Gale concluded that  his only option was  to seize the bridges  by a coup de main, using Horsas, which could each set down twenty-eight fighting  men in an instant.  Best of all,  in gliders they  could arrive like  thieves in the night, without noise or light, unseen and unheard. Gale says in his memoirs that he got the idea of a coup de main by studying German glider landings at the Fort of Eben Emael in Belgium  in 1940, and the Corinth  Canal in Greece in 1941.  He was sure that if his glider  pilots and his company commander were  good enough, it could  be done.  He thought  the real  problem would  be holding  the bridges against counter-attack until the paratroopers arrived.

Gale briefed Brigadier Poett, explaining  his conclusions and his reasoning.  He told Poett he was putting ihe glider company under his, Poett's, command for the operation, because Poett's  would be the  para brigade that  got to the  gliders first.  He told  Poett, 'the  seizing of  the bridges  intact is  of the  utmost importance to the conduct  of future operations. As  the bridges will have  been prepared for demolition, the speedy overpowering of the bridge defences will  be your first objective and it is therefore to be seized by the coup de main party. You must accept risks to achieve this.'

Next  Gale  went to  Kindersley,  explained his  coup  de main  idea,  and asked Kindersley who was the  best company commander in  his brigade to carry  out the mission. Kindersley replied, 'I  think that all my  men are jolly good  leaders, but I think Johnny Howard might do  this one rather well.' They decided to  find out if he could.

Gale laid  on a  major three-day  exercise. D  Company was  assigned to  capture intact  three small  bridges and  defend them  until relieved.  It was  a  night assault, with much of the division landing all over the area. The glider  troops rode in  four trucks  and were  told by  umpires riding  with them when they had landed. They pranged  at 2300 hours  and after a  brief struggle with  the paras guarding the bridges,  D Company managed  to capture the  structures before they were blown.  'We had  a really  first-class fight',  Howard recalls, despite the blank ammunition. Windy Gale and Hugh Kindersley and Nigel Poett were all there, watching.

At the debriefing, on April 18, Gale praised the 'bridge prangers' as he  called D Company,  singling out  for special  citation the  company's 'dash and verve'. That was highly pleasing for Howard and  his men, of course, but what came  next was even better. Colonel Mike Roberts called Howard into his office and began to bring him into  the larger picture.  Roberts said D  Company would have  a 'very important task to carry  out when the invasion  started. You are to  capture two bridges, intact. The  bridges are about  a quarter of  a mile apart  and each is over fifty yards long.'  Looking up, Roberts stared  at Howard, then said,  'You will be  the spearhead  of the  invasion, certainly  the first  British fighting force to land on the Continent.' Usually a non-demonstrative man who spent  most of his time worrying,  Roberts was deeply moved.  He told Howard it  was a great honour for the Ox and Bucks to provide the company for such a task.

Roberts warned Howard that all the  information was Top Secret, and said  he had been brought in only because Gale  was laying on another, even larger  exercise. This had the code name MUSH, and it  would in fact be a rehearsal for D-Day  for the whole of the 6th Airborne Division. Howard should approach the exercise with that in mind. Further, Gale had decided on the basis of the previous exercise to strengthen D Company from  four to six platoons.  Roberts told Howard to  select any two platoons he wanted from the regiment.

Howard selected two platoons from B  Company, one commanded by Sandy Smith,  the other by  Dennis Fox.  Both lieutenants  were keen  athletes, perfectly fit, and popular with their men. Howard told Brian Friday, who knew Smith and Fox  rather better, to  extend the  invitation; Friday  pulled Smith  and Fox  out of  their quarters one evening 'and said to us  in great secrecy, "would you like to  join our little party which we're  going to do and we  can't tell you much more  than that but are you prepared to join D Company?" '

Smith and Fox looked at each other. They  both thought the army a bit of a  gas, and they especially disliked  regular soldiers, and most  of all they hated  the fanatics. John Howard was the leading fanatic in the regiment. Furthermore,  Fox and Smith enjoyed  'chasing women  and having  a good  time. We  were very  high spirited and  that bunch  of D  Company officers,  they used  to bore the living daylights out of us. Sweeney, Brotheridge, Hooper, Friday, Wood - we didn't want to get near them. And come to that, they thought us very peculiar.' But to  pass up a Top Secret special mission was unthinkable, and Smith and Fox joined up. To their  surprise,  they  merged  in  with  D  Company  immediately  and   without difficulty.

D Company was further reinforced by the addition of thirty sappers under Capidin Jock Neilson. The  sappers were Royal  Engineers, but also  paratroopers. Howard recalled that  when they  reported to  him, 'those  paraboys were quite definite about not landing in gliders'. Howard explains, 'There is a good healthy respect between the paraboys and the gliderboys, but I can't resist saying that  whereas a high percentage  of us would  willingly jump out  of a plane  on a chute  into battle, you would  have to go  a long way  to get a  glider-load of paraboys  to prang into battle in a Horsa'.

Before MUSH was held, D Company got  a two-week leave. Joy had by then  bought a small house  in Oxford,  where John  went to  see his  new-born daughter for the first time. It  was on this  occasion that John  left his service  dress uniform behind, and took Terry's  baby shoe with him.  On an earlier occasion,  in 1940, when  fear of  an invasion  was high,  John had  given her  a .45  revolver  and instructed her in its  use. When he left  after this leave, she  noticed that he had taken the bullets with him. She assumed he was afraid that he might not come back and she would kill herself out of love for him. Joy couldn't even lift  the pistol much less use it.

Den Brotheridge, Wally Parr and most  of the other chaps managed to  visit their families too.

At  the  end  of April,  everyone  reported  back to  Bulford.  All  leaves were cancelled until further notice,  and operation MUSH was  held. D Company was  to attack, capture, and hold a bridge until relieved  by the paras. It was a  night time operation,  and all  six platoons  and the  sappers participated. They were driven to the site of the manoeuvre, marched a couple of miles to their supposed LZ, then  told by  the umpire  with them  to lay  down and  wait for  his signal telling them  they had  pranged. They  were only  a few  hundred yards  from the bridge, which was being guarded by Polish paratroopers.

With the signal from the umpire, D Company began to move forward, silently, only to encounter barbed wire. After all  the obstacle practice the company had  had, cutting a way through the wire was  only a moment's work. Tony Hooper was  first through, and with his platoon rushed the bridge. Howard recalls, 'The Poles were firing and  swearing in  Polish at  Tony and  his chaps  as they tore across the bridge, as our chaps swore back in English. Then there was a colossal bang.' The umpires declared the bridge  had been blown. 'I  saw Tony on the  bridge arguing heatedly with an irate umpire who had  put him out of action together with  most of his platoon. The umpire won and  the men sat disconsolate on the bridge  with their helmets off.'

By  then,  paratroopers were  rushing  onto the  bridge.  The Poles,  hopelessly outnumbered, refused to  accept the umpire's  decision that the  bridge had been destroyed. When told in  no uncertain terms that  they must lay down  their arms they merely said, 'No speak English'  and went on scrapping. There were  several little fist-fights  which everyone  but the  harassed umpires  seemed to  enjoy. Several of the combatants finished in the drink.

The umpires declared that Sweeney's platoon  had been put out of action  by fire from Brotheridge's platoon. Sweeney had not recognised Brotheridge's men as they crept silently towards the bridge. Howard learned a lesson from the experience.

MUSH was a  well-conceived and well-conducted  rehearsal. The exercise  revealed problems, such as mutual recognition in the dark, but it also convinced  Howard, and his  many superiors  who watched,  that if  the Horsas  pranged on the right spot, the coup de main would work.

The sine qua non, of course, was getting the Horsas down in the right place.  To that end,  Jim Wallwork  and the  Glider Pilots  Regiment were  working day  and night,  literally, on  operation Deadstick.  In April,  1944, Wallwork  and  his fellow pilots  had done  a demonstration  for Gale,  operation Skylark,  landing their Horsas  on a  small triangle  from 6,000  feet. When  all the gliders were safely down, the GPR commanding  officer, Colonel George Chatteron, stepped  out of the  bushes. He  had General  Gale with  him. Chatteron  was boasting, 'Well, Windy, there you see it,  I told you my GPR  boys can do this kind  of thing any day.' Wallwork overheard the remark and thought, 'I wish we could, but that is a bit of asking.'

To make sure they could. Gale put them on operation Deadstick. Sixteen pilots of the GPR, two for each of the  six gliders going in on D-Day plus  four reserves, were posted to Tarrant Rushton in  Dorset, an RAF airfield where there  were two Halifax squadrons and a squadron of Horsas.  The men of the GPR were treated  as very special people indeed. They had their own Nissen hut, excellent food, and a captain delegated to them -  they were all staff sergeants  - to see to it  that their every want  was catered for.  As Oliver Boland  recalled it, 'we  were the most pampered group of people in the British army at the time'.

The  pilots  were  introduced  to their  tug  crews,  which  was an  innovation: previously the glider pilots had not known their tug pilots. The tug crews lived near the  GPR boys  at Tarrant  Rushton, and  they got  to know  each other. The glider pilots had the same crew on  each training flight, and this would be  the crew that tugged them on D-Day.

The training flights for  operation Deadstick were hellishly  difficult. Colonel Chatteron had the pilots  landing beside a small  L-shaped wood, a quarter  of a mile long down the long end, and a few yards along the angle. The pilots  landed with three gliders (carrying cement blocks for a load) going up the L and  three on the blind side. In  daylight, on a straight-in run,  it was a snap. But  then Chatteron  started  having them  release  at 7,000  feet  and fly  by  times and courses, using a stopwatch, making two or three full turns before coming in over the wood.  That was  not too  bad, either,  because -  as Wallwork explains -'in broad daylight you can always cheat a little'. Next Chatteron put coloured glass in their flying goggles  to turn day into  night, and warned his  pilots, 'It is silly of you to cheat  on this because you've got  to do it right when  the time comes'. Wallwork would nevertheless  whip the goggles off  if he thought he  was overshooting, 'but we began to play it fairly square, realising that whatever we were going to do it was going to be something important'.

By early May they were  flying by moonlight, casting on  at 6 000 feet, 7  miles from the wood. They flew regardless  of weather. They twisted and turned  around the sky, all  by stopwatch. They  did forty-three training  flights in Deadstick altogether, more than half of them at night. They got ready.

CHAPTER FOUR

D-Day  minus one month  to D-Day

On  May 2, Howard  was summoned  to 'Broadmoor', code name  for Gale's  planning headquarters, an old  country place full of rickety stairs  and low beams,  near Milston on Salisbury Plain.  It  was surrounded  by  barbed  wire   and military police  and  had   elaborate security precautions.   Once  inside,  Howard   was taken   to  Brigadier   Poett's  office.  Explaining that  D Company  was  being detached from  the Ox  and Bucks  and given  a special  assignment, Poett handed Howard his orders. They  were marked Bigot and  Top Secret, and they  instructed Howard 'to seize intact the bridges over the River Orne and canal at  Benouville and Ranville, and to hold them until relief.

The orders provided  ample information on  enemy dispositions that  Howard could expect to encounter, a garrison of about fifty men armed with four to six  light machine-guns, one or  two anti-tank guns,  and a heavy  machine-gun. 'A concrete shelter  is under  construction, and  the bridges  will have  been prepared  for demolition.' There was a battalion of the 736th Grenadier Regiment in the  area, with eight to twelve tanks under command, and with motor transport. At least one platoon would be  prepared as a  fighting patrol, ready  to move out  at once to seek information.  Howard should  expect the  enemy to  be 'in  a high  state of alertness. The bridge garrison  may be standing to,  and charges will have  been laid in the demolition chambers.'

At this point in his reading Howard may have wondered how on earth General  Gale expected him to seize intact bridges that were prepared for demolition. All  the enemy had to do was press a button or move a switch and up would go the bridges. Gale himself, in his 1948 book, The 6th Airborne Division in Normandy,  explains his thinking about this problem:

There is always or nearly always a slip between the cup and  the         lip:  orders are  vague: there  is uncertainty:  has the  moment         arrived  or  should one  wait?  Who is  the  individual actually         responsible both  for working  the switch  and for  ordering the         bridges to  be blown?  These questions  are age-old  and on  the         doubts that  might exist  in some  German mind  or minds  at the         critical moment I based  the plan. But a  moment or two was  all         that  I knew  we would  get. The  assault on  the bridges  must,         therefore, come like a bolt from the blue.

Howard's orders of May  2 informed him that  his initial relief would  come from the 5th Para Brigade, which would  drop northeast of Ranville at 0050  hours and then 'move forthwith  to take up  a defensive position  round the two  bridges'. Simultaneously, 3rd Para Brigade would drop  on the high wooded ground south  of Le Mesnil forest.  At 0600, the  British 3rd Infantry  Division would begin  its landings west of Ouistreham 'with objective Caen'. Attached to the 3rd  Division were Lord Lovat's Commandos,  who would move forward  as rapidly as possible  to establish a land link between the beaches and the paratroopers and  glider-borne troops in and around the bridges. The brigade of Commandos could be expected any time after 1100 hours.

To  carry out  his assignment,  Howard was  given his  own D  Company, plus  two platoons from B Company, a detachment of thirty sappers, one wing of the  Glider Pilots Regiment, and six  Horsa gliders. Poett's May  2 orders also gave  Howard the general outline of how he  should proceed: 'The capture of the  bridges will be a coup de  main operation depending largely  on surprise, speed and  dash for success. Provided the bulk  of your force lands  safely, you should have  little difficulty in overcoming the known opposition on the bridges. Your  difficulties will arise in holding off an enemy counter-attack on the bridges, until you  are relieved.' The counter-attack should be  expected any time after 0100  hours, or within an hour of landing, and the most likely line of approach for the  counter -attacking force would be from the west.

Howard was ordered to organise  his defensive position immediately after  taking the bridges, because 'it  is vital that the  crossing places be held,  and to do this  you will  secure a  close bridgehead  on the  west bank,  in addition   to guarding the bridges. The immediate defence of the bridges and of the west  bank of the canal must  be held at all  costs.' Poett's orders envisaged  more than a passive defence, however. 'You will harass and delay the deployment of the enemy counter-attack forces ... by offensive patrols', the orders read. 'Patrols  will remain mobile and offensive. Up to one third of your effective force may be used in this  role. The  remaining two  thirds will  be used  for static  defence and immediate counter-attack.'

Poett was also explicit in the orders as to the role of the sappers. Their  sole tasks,  in order  of priority,  were to  neutralise the  demolition  mechanisms, remove charges from demolition chambers, and establish ferries. He also promised that one  company of  the 7th  Para Battalion  of the  5th Para Brigade would be despatched 'with the utmost possible  speed', and would reach Howard's  position by 0230 hours. Once there, they would come under Howard's command until  arrival of the officer commanding the 7th Para Battalion.

Poett concluded his orders,  'The training of your  force will be regarded  as a first  priority  matter.' He  encouraged  Howard to  demand  special stores  and training facilities, and promised every possible help.

When Howard finished reading the orders,  Poett told him that he did  not intend to interfere with  D Company's preparation  for the coup  de main. Howard  would have the twin responsibilities of designing an effective training programme, and of making the detailed plan for the seizure of the bridges.

Howard could scarcely keep his feelings  to himself. He was concerned about  the various challenges he faced, of course,  and could imagine any number of  things going wrong. But  he was also  exhilarated, as he  had never been  before in his life; and he was tremendously proud that  D Company had been chosen to lead  the way on D-Day.

Poett next briefed Howard on operation  Overlord. Howard was amazed by the  size and scope of  the invading force,  and impressed by  the critical nature  of his bridges to success on the left  flank. He noted that the American  paratroopers, two divisions strong, were landing on the far right flank of the invasion in the Cherbourg peninsula. By the end of the briefing, Howard says, 'I knew absolutely everything about  the invasion  of Europe.  Where it  was to  be, who was taking part, how it was to be done, everything except the date.'

Poett gave Howard a  green pass, which allowed  him to enter Broadmoor  at will. But  Poett would  not allow  him to  take away  his orders,  the  reconnaissance photographs, maps,  or even  notes. Nor  was he  allowed to  tell his  second-in -command, Friday, about D  Company's mission, much less  any of the rest  of the officers. The need to keep his secret was a great strain for him.

Back at Bulford,  Howard concentrated the  training. Out on  Salisbury Plain, he used tape to lay out a river and a canal, with two bridges over them, all at the exact  distances of  his real  targets. Day  and night,  his platoons  practised capturing them: sometimes one platoon,  sometimes three, sometimes all six.  All the exercising was controlled by radio. Howard felt that above all his plan  had to  be flexible.  The gliders  were to  take off  at one-minute  intervals  line astern, but there was absolutely no guarantee which order they would land in, or even where they would land. If only one glider hit the target, that platoon  had to be prepared to do the job of all six platoons. Simultaneously, Howard  worked on the men not  to use their voices  before the fighting began.  Then, reminding them of the cost of silence in operation MUSH, Howard told them that as soon  as the first shot went off, they  should all start shouting their radio  call signs as loudly  as they  could. No.  1 glider  was Able,  no. 2  was Baker, no. 3 was Charlie, and so  on. Howard wanted  the men to  shout out their  identifications over and over, both to identify each  other and to give the Germans the  feeling that the enemy was there in great numbers.

From these exercises  over the taped-up  bridges and roads,  Howard decided that General Gale's plan for landing inside (between) the bridges rather than outside them, was correct. The LZs on the inside were awfully small, to be sure, and  so situated that  one group  of gliders,  at the  canal bridge,  would have to land facing north,  towards the  coast, the  other group  facing south, towards Caen, which required splitting the glider formations at take-off. These  disadvantages were outweighed by  two major advantages.  First, the inside  landing sites were smack against the bridges, instead of some distance away. Second, by having  all his platoons inside, Howard could call on them to support one another.

Broadmoor, meanwhile, was  collecting and putting  together intelligence on  the bridges and surrounding villages, and  making it available to Howard.  Thanks to Georges  Gondree,  Madame   Vion,  the  Resistance   in  Caen,  and   the  photo reconnaissance  of  the  RAF,  there was  a  rather  fabulous  amount available. Divisional intelligence was  able to tell  Howard who were  the collaborators in Benouville, who were Resistance. He knew,  as the Germans did not, that  Georges Gondree spoke English and his wife German. He was given a complete topographical report on the  area. He knew  that Benouville contained  589 residents, that  M. Thomas was the mayor, that the voltage was 110/200 3 phase AC - even that Madame Vion was considered something of an  autocrat. He was warned that from  the roof of the  Chateau de  Benouville, a  three-storey maternity  hospital, the Germans would  have a  commanding field  of fire   over the  valley of  the Orne  for  a considerable  distance.  And  many  in the  village,  Howard  found  out, looked sideways when Therese  Gondree walked past.  They were suspicious  of her German accent,  and did  not approve  of the  fact that  she lived  right next  to  the garrison and sold beer to the Germans.

Howard also learned from his intelligence summary that the fighting value of the garrison at the bridge had been assessed at '40 per cent static and 15 per  cent in a counter-attack role. Equipment consists of an unknown proportion of French, British and Polish weapons.' The last sentence read, 'This intelligence  summary will be destroyed by fire immediately after reading.'

Even  though  Howard  could  not take  the  air  reconnaissance  photographs out ofBroadmoor, he could go there to study them any time he wished. The RAF  people had set up a stereograph system for him to provide a three-dimensional view.  He could even see down into the enemy trenches along the eastern side of the canal. Poett went over the photographs with Howard. He kept telling him that he had  to capture those bridges in  a few minutes, before  they could be blown.  The role, even  the survival,  of the  6th Airborne  Division depended  on keeping   those bridges intact.

How good, and  how up to  date, was Howard's  intelligence? As good  as it could possibly be. Of  all the attributes  the British forces  demonstrated during the Second  World  War,  none  equalled  their  ability  to  gather,  evaluate,  and disseminate intelligence. At this vital task, they were unquestionably the  best in the world. The British government invested heavily in intelligence in all its various  forms, and  received a  handsome return.  John Howard  was one  of  the beneficiaries. Here are three examples of what he got:

In  early  May,  Rommel  visited  the  bridges.  He  ordered  an  anti-tank  gun emplacement built, and a  pillbox ringed by barbed  wire to protect it.  He also ordered more  slit trenches  dug. Work  began immediately,  and within  two days Howard  was  told  by  the  RAF  that  Jerry  was  installing  some   suspicious emplacements. Within a week, word came  via Gondree through Madame Vion to  Caen to SOE to Broadmoor to Howard that the gun emplacement had a 50mm anti-tank  gun in it, with some camouflaging over it, and that the pillbox was finished.

In mid-May, 21st Panzer Division moved from Brittany to Normandy, and on May  23 to the  Caen area,  with von  Luck's regiment  taking up  positions just east of Caen. On  May 24,  Howard knew  about the  movement of  the division. On May 25, Hickman's Independent Parachute Regiment moved into the area. Howard knew  about it the next day.

The intelligence people had  produced a model of  the area, twelve foot  square. Howard describes it as  'a work of art  - every building, tree,  bush and ditch, trench, fence etc. was there'. The  model was changed daily, in accordance  with the results of the morning reconnaissance flight. Thus on May 15 Schmidt knocked down two buildings along the canal, to  give him a better field of fire.  Howard saw the change on the model the next day.

Howard's visits  to Broadmoor  were characterised  by the  place's nickname. The Madhouse'. After  clearing numerous  check points  with his  green pass,  Howard recalls going in  and being struck  by 'the harassed  look on the  faces of many people walking  about the  building, obviously  up to  their eyes in last-minute changes in major plans'.

At the end of his early May  briefing, Poett had told Howard that he  could have anything he needed for his training programme. Taking Poett at his word,  Howard ordered  up German  opposition: soldiers  who would  defend the  bridge  wearing German  uniforms, using  German weapons  and tactics,  and insofar  as  possible shouting their orders  in German. He  obtained captured German  weapons, so that all his men were thoroughly familiar with what they could do, and how to operate them. He  had but  to snap  his fingers,  and trucks  would appear, to carry his platoons to wherever he wanted to go.

D Company got the best  of everything, except in food,  in which area it got  no special favours. There was very strict rationing throughout the country, and the food was bad; worse, there was not enough of it. Parr recalls:

Much of  your money,  spare money,  went  on  grub. I was always         hungry. You  worked so hard, you trained so hard that  the  grub         they gave you wasn't enough  to keep you going  and you   didn't         ask  what it  was, you  just grabbed  it and you just  shovelled         it down, as  simple as that.   So the first  thing you got  paid         you used to do  is make out for  the  NAAFI and get  chow. Yeah,         you  supplemented  your  diet with  your pay,  there's no  doubt         about that.

Howard was carrying some  heavy burdens, of which  the chief was being  the only man in the company who was 'bigoted'. Howard longed to put Brian Friday at least into the picture,  partly to share  the burden of  knowledge, partly so  that he could discuss his planning  with him. He did,  in fact, get permission  to brief Friday around May 21.

He was pushing the men hard now,  harder than ever, but no matter how  he varied the order of landing or direction of attack or other aspects of the exercise, it was always the  same make-believe bridges,  at the same  distances. Everyone was getting  bored  stiff. After  about  ten days  of  this, Howard  called  the men together  on the  parade ground  and told  them, 'Look,  we are  training for  a special purpose'. He did not  mention the invasion - he  hardly had to - but  he went on: 'You'll find that a lot of the training we are doing, this capturing of things like  bridges, is  connected with  that special  purpose. If  any of  you mention the word "bridges"  outside our training hours  and I get to  know about it, you'll be for the high jump and your feet won't touch before you land in the Glasshouse and  get RTU.'  (Wally Parr  told Irene  the next  evening, over  the telephone, that he would be doing bridges on D-Day.)

Von Luck, as noted,  had moved to the  east ofCaen, between the  River Dives and the Orne River. So had Hickman.  Von Luck planned, and practised, his  defences. He marked  out the  routes forward  to alternative  assembly areas behind likely invasion  points.  He laid  down  rest and  refuelling  areas, detailed  traffic control  units,  marked  bypasses  and  allotted  anti-aircraft  guns  for  road protection. Hickman meanwhile was  engaging in anti-paratrooper exercises.  Even Major Schmidt, at the bridges, was finally getting some sense of urgency. He was completing his bunkers,  and was almost  ready to get  around to putting  in the anti-glider poles. The  Gondrees watched all  this, and said  nothing, except to Madame Vion.

Howard asked the topographical people to search the map of Britain and find  him some place where a  river and a canal  ran closely together and  were crossed by bridges on the same  road. They found such  a spot outside Exeter.  Howard moved the company down there,  and for six days,  by day and by  night, attacked those Exeter bridges.  Townspeople came  to gape  as the  lads dashed  about, throwing grenades, setting  off explosives,  getting into  hand-to-hand combat,  cursing, yelling, 'Able, Able',  or 'Easy, Easy'  at the top  of their lungs.  Howard had them practise  every possible  development he  could imagine  - only  one glider getting down, or the  gliders landing out of  proper sequence, or the  dozens of other possibilities.  He taught  every man  the basic  rudiments of the sappers' jobs;  he instructed  the sappers  in the  functions of  the platoons;  he  made certain that  each of  his officers  was prepared  to take  command of the whole operation, and sergeants and corporals to take command of each platoon, if  need be.

Howard insisted that  they all become  proficient in putting  together and using the canvas boats  that they were  bringing along in  the event the  bridges were blown. Assault boat training was 'always good for morale,' according to  Howard, because  'somebody  inevitably went  overboard  and that  poor  individual never failed to make sure he wasn't the only one who got wet'.

The  hurling about  of grenades  and thunder-flashes  caused some  problems  and brought some fun.  Thunder-flashes were tossed  into the river,  to provide fish for supper.  The local  Council protested  at this  illegal fishing. The Council also protested that all  this running back and  forth over its bridges,  and all these  explosives  going off,  were  seriously weakening  the  structures. (They stand, solid, today.) A homeowner in the area had some tiles blown off his  roof by a mortar  smoke bomb. Irate,  he confronted Howard,  who passed him  along to Friday, who gave him the proper forms to fill in so that he could get the  tiles replaced. One month later,  sitting in a foxhole  in Normandy, Friday let  out a whoop of laughter. The mail had been delivered, and in it was a letter from  the homeowner, demanding to know when his roof would be fixed.

Out of all this practice and after consulting with his officers, Howard made his final  plan.  The  key  to  it  was to  put  the  pillbox  out  of  action while simultaneously getting a platoon onto the other side of the bridge. It had to be accomplished before  shots were  fired, if  possible, and  certainly before  the Germans were fully aroused. The pillbox was a key not only because of its firing power, but  because -  according to  information received  from Georges  Gondree -  that was  the location  of the  button that  could blow  the bridge.   Howard detailed three  men from  no. 1  glider (Brotheridge's  platoon) to  dash to the pillbox and throw grenades through the gun-slits. To take physical possession of the opposite  bank, Howard  detailed Brotheridge  to lead  the remainder  of his platoon on a dash across the bridge. Ideally, Howard wanted Brotheridge to  hear the thuds of the grenades in the pillbox as he was mid-way across the bridge.

No. 2  glider, David  Wood's platoon,  would clear  up the  inner defences,  the trenches, machine-gun nests  and anti-tank gun  pit along the  east bank. No.  3 glider, Sandy Smith's platoon, would cross the bridge to reinforce  Brotheridge. On the  river bridge,  the procedure  would be  the same,  with Friday  in no. 4 glider (Hooper's platoon), Sweeney in no. 5, and Fox in no. 6. All six  platoons were trained to do all six of the platoon tasks.

Each  glider would  carry five  sappers, the  thirty men  under the  command  of Captain R. K. Jock Neilson. The sappers' main job was to move immediately to the bridges, then hand-over-hand  themselves along the  bottom beams, cutting  fuses and disposing of explosives.

If all went well at both bridges, Howard intended to call two platoons from  the river bridge  over to  the canal  bridge, sending  one towards  Benouville as  a fighting patrol, and holding the other  in reserve. This was because the  threat he faced lay to the west. That was German-occupied territory, with a garrison of some sort in every village. The first counter-attack was likely to come from the west, possibly led  by tanks. To  the east, the  6th Airborne Division  would be dropping thirty minutes later and  setting up in Ranville to  provide protection in that direction.

The landing operation was John Howard's plan. His superiors let him work it  out himself,  then approved  his final  presentation. He  ran through  it again  and again, until the men were exhausted and  almost too tense and too bored to  care any longer.

But each time  he ran through  it, Howard saw  something he had  overlooked. One day, for example, he stopped an exercise and said he had been thinking, that  if so and so  happened, and such  and such, I'd  need volunteers to  swim the canal with  a  Bren gun  to  set up  flanking  fire, or  to  create a  diversion  with explosives. As Howard  remembers the occasion,  'competition for this  hazardous mission was high'. As Parr remembers it, he raised his hand before Howard  could call for volunteers. Howard impatiently told  him to put it down. Parr  waved it some more. 'Oh, all right Parr, what is it?' Parr replied that since Billy  Gray and Charlie  Gardner were  the two  strongest swimmers,  perhaps they should get this detail. 'Good idea, Parr', Howard  pronounced, and it was done. Parr  spent the remainder of the week staying far away from Gray and Gardner.

The last night in Exeter was a classic eve-of-battle event. Howard gave the  men the evening  off, and  they poured  into and  out of  Exeter's pubs.  There were fights, windows were broken. The Chief of Police got Howard on the phone, and he and Friday jumped into a jeep and tore into Exeter, about three miles away.  'As we crossed the  bridge we were  picked up by  the police for  speeding', recalls Howard, 'and we arrived at the station with police escort'. Howard went straight to the Chief's office and said, 'If you find Lieutenant Brotheridge he will soon tell you how to get the troops back'. Then Howard noticed the Chief's World  War I medals, 'and I knew the type of chap I was talking to, and I explained to  him in confidence that this  was likely to be  our last night out;  his attitude was absolutely wonderful'. The Chief called out the entire force on duty at the time and put  it to  rounding up  D Company  and escorting  it, gently,  back to  its transport and encampment.

Brotheridge, in fact,  turned out to  be no help,  although Howard had  sent him along with the men specifically to exert  a good influence. But he was too  much the footballer,  too much  like the  men, to  stay sober  on a  night like this. Besides, he had a lot  on his mind, and he  needed some mental relief. His  baby was due in less  than a month, but  he could not expect  to see his wife  before then, and who could tell about afterwards? He was proud that John had chosen him to lead the first platoon across the  canal bridge, but he had to be   realistic - everyone knew that the first man  over that bridge was the man most  likely to get shot. Not killed, necessarily, but almost certainly shot. That first man was equally likely to have the bridge blow up in his face.

To escape such thoughts, Brotheridge  had gone drinking with his  sergeants, and when Howard arrived was drunk. Howard  and Friday drove him back to  camp, while the trucks  took the  men home.  The people  of Exeter,  and their Police Chief, never made a complaint.

In late May,  D Company moved  to Tarrant Rushton.  In a wired-in  encampment on this  huge  base,  completely  secured,  the  company  met  Jim  Wallwork,  John Ainsworth, Oliver Boland, and the other glider-pilots. Howard immediately  found them impressive and was pleased to note that they were absorbed into the company as family members as quickly as the sappers had been.

How dependent D Company was on the pilots became quickly apparent after  arrival in Tarrant Rushton. Now that the company was properly sealed in, Howard was free to give his briefing. First to the  officers, then to the men, he explained  the operation.

Howard covered  the walls  of the  Nissen briefing  hut with  photographs of the bridges, and had the model in the middle of the room. As he talked, the eyes  of the officers  and men  opened wider  and wider  - at  the amount of intelligence available to them, at the crucial nature of their task, and at the idea of being the first men  to touch the  soil of France.  But what they  also noted was  the extreme smallness of  the LZs, especially  on the canal  bridge. Having examined the German trench system, and  discussed the Germans' weapons and  emplacements, the officers -  and later the  men - were  completely confident that  they could take the bridges  intact. They could,  that is,if- and  only if- the  pilots put them down on the right spots.

The pilots  were now  into the  last days  of Deadstick.  Calling on the British movie industry for help, the Air  Ministry had put together a film.  By flipping through thousands of photographs, each ever so slightly different, the producers made a 'moving picture' that depicted the actual flight the pilots would make on D-Day. There was a running commentary.

'The viewer felt as  if he were in  the cockpit and flying  the thing', Wallwork recalls. The commentary  told altitude, air  speed, bearing, location.  When the glider cast  off, 'you  got the  whole sensation  of diving  a thousand feet and seeing  the fields  of France  coming up  towards you'.  Level off,  check  your bearing, turn, check your  bearing, turn again, then  the bridges were in  view. 'You come into this fly-in,' as Wallwork describes the film, 'and you are  still on this bearing and the next thing  you saw was the tower of the  bridge getting nearer and nearer and then the film cuts out as you crash'. The pilots could see the film whenever they wanted, and  they watched it often. In his  orders Howard had been given very strict instructions about not using the glider pilots in any combatant role. He therefore gave them  the task of unloading the gliders  after the platoons had landed  and attacked in light  fighting order. The pilots  were then  to carry  the ammunition,  heavy equipment,  etc. up  to their  respective platoons. Howard was well aware that it was a job they would not like at all; he knew only too well that they were the type who would want to join in the initial assault and take part in any ensuing  battle. But the pilots had to be  got back to England  unscathed so  as to  be able  to fly  the 1st Airborne Division into action.

Howard briefed the men over and over, by sections and by platoons. He encouraged them  to  go  into the  hut  whenever  they wished,  examine  the  maps and  the photographs and  the model,  and talk  among themselves  about their  particular tasks.

On May 29,  he called the  reinforced company together  and issued escape  aids, 'very Boy Scoutish things', Howard says.  They included a metal file to  be sewn into the battle smock,  a brass pants button  that had been magnetised,  so that when balanced on a pin-head it became a tiny compass, a silk scarf with the  map of France on it, water-purifying tablets, and French francs. 'This sort of thing absolutely thrilled the troops to bits', Howard recalls: 'I have never seen such enthusiasm about such  simple things like  that'. Billy Gray  remembers that all the French money was gambled away in two hours.

All  the  officers were  issued  with more  sophisticated  escape wallets.  They included  large wads  of French  francs, which  were all  conveniently 'lost  in battle'. Howard says he lost his francs playing poker with a popular Army Padre.

That night, in Normandy, von Luck was conducting exercises, designed to  counter any landing,  even commando,  by an  immediate counter-attack.  That day.  Major Schmidt received a  shipment of slave  labourers from the  Todt Organization and put them to work  digging holes for anti-glider  poles, in what he  figured were the most likely LZs for gliders. He began with the areas around his bridges. The poles themselves had not yet arrived, but were expected daily.

On May 30, when Howard and all of D Company saw the photographic evidence of the holes, their first reaction was that somehow the great secret had got out,  that the Germans knew where they were  coming. Kindersley came down to visit  Howard, guessing correctly  that Howard  would be  in a  blue mood.  'I know about those photographs', he began, 'but there is nothing to worry about'. Howard voiced his fear: all those photographs taken by the  RAF for the movie for the pilots,  all those photographs each  morning, surely the  Germans must have  figured out that the bridges  were to  be attacked  because of  all the  reconnaissance activity. Kindersley  laughed  encouragingly.  'John',  he  said,  'we're  taking  similar photographs of every bridge or target between the Bay of Biscay and Dunkirk'.

That  relieved  one  worry.  Howard  went  to  Wallwork  with  the  other worry. 'Supposing  the poles  are put  into the  holes before  we land?  What will  our chances be?'

'That's just what we want, sir', Wallwork answered.

'What do you mean? What can you mean?' Howard asked.

Wallwork explained that  the gliders would  be overloaded, flying  into a narrow field with an embankment at one end.  They would be landing in the direction  of the embankment, and Wallwork was worried about hitting that. He continued, 'Now, those poles will take something off one wing, and something off the other   wing - it's  just damned  cheap plywood,  you know  -and will  pull us  up absolutely beautifully'.

Howard's face  brightened. 'Right',  he said,  'well, let's  get the  company on parade'. He called the men together,  let them mumble and rumble awhile  as they studied the aerial photographs, mostly about those holes, then explained to them what the Brigadier had told  him about photographing everywhere, not  just their bridges, and  then asked  Wallwork to  tell ..he  company what  he had just said about the poles being exactly what was needed. Wallwork did so, and the men were satisfied.

'Put it  down to  ignorance', Wally  Parr explains,  'call it  what you like, we could see the situation.  But Johnny Howard said  it could be done  and Wallwork said we could do it and that was  the end of the subject. If Johnny Howard  said we could do it, we could do it.'

Besides the poles, Wallwork  had to worry about  Howard's request that he  break through the barbed wire with the nose of his Horsa, a difficult enough task with an unloaded glider in  daylight on a runway.  And his glider -  all the  gliders - was badly overloaded, with thirty or thirty-one men in each, plus  ammunition. There were  also two  canvas assault  boats per  glider. The  sappers had  heavy equipment. The men were carrying up  to twenty pounds more ammunition each  than had been allotted, and still were trying to add more to their load.

Wallwork told Howard that  the extra weight would  increase air speed, and  thus landing speed. They would need a longer landing area than was available.  Howard told  Captain Neilson  of the  Royal Engineers  to get  rid of  some weight   by dropping  off  one sapper  per  glider, but  Neilson  convinced Howard  that  he absolutely  had to  have all  his sappers.  Howard removed  one boat  from  each glider. Not enough, Wallwork told him. Six hundred more pounds per glider had to go.

Howard reluctantly made his decision. Two privates from each platoon would  have to drop out. It was a 'terrible decision', he recalls. He gave it to his platoon commanders and told them to select  the men to be left behind.  In Brotheridge's platoon, Billy Gray  says, 'We all  started shouting, "Parr's  married, let Parr drop out. Let's get rid of Parr!" And Wally immediately did his nut, and he  was allowed to stay.'

The lieutenants made the choices. The  next day, Howard says, 'I had  men asking to see  me at  company office  and crying  their eyes  out; a big, tough, bloody airborne soldier crying  his eyes out  asking not to  be left behind.  It was an awful moment for them.'

At one of his briefings, Howard had as usual asked for questions. 'Sir', someone piped up, 'can't we have a doctor. We  are going in on our own and all.'  Howard thought that an excellent idea, asked Poett if he could get a volunteer from the divisional medical  staff, and  John Vaughan,  an PAMC  captain, came  to join D Company. That meant another private had to be bumped, but fortunately, a soldier in Smith's platoon had sprained his ankle playing football.

Vaughan has a nice anecdote to  illustrate Howard's exuberance in the last  days before the invasion.  On May 31  Vaughan and Howard  drove to Broadmoor,  Howard driving  much too  fast as  he always  did. When  they arrived,  who should   be standing  there as  Howard screeched  the brakes,  but Brigadier  Poett.  Howard leaped out of the jeep, did a  full somersault, and came down directly in  front of Poett. He  snapped into attention,  gave a full  and quite grand  salute, and shouted, 'Sir!'

That same night. Smith and Fox  sneaked out of Tarrant Rushton (neither  of them can recall  how they  managed it)  to have  dinner in  a local  hotel with their girlfriends (both remember the meal and the girls vividly).

That evening, Wallwork and the other pilots were given a special set of  orders. These said that the bearer was not responsible to anyone,  that  he was  to   be returned  to  the UK   by  the most expeditious   means,  and  that this   order overruled  all other orders. It was signed by General Montgomery himself.  Poett also told Howard privately, 'Whatever  you do, John, don't  let those pilots get into combat. They are much too valuable to be wasted. Get them back here.'

On June 3, Howard got his last intelligence report. Major Schmidt had  completed his defences; his trenches along the  canal bank were done, as was  the pillbox, and the anti-tank gun was in  place. The garrison consisted of about  fifty men, armed with  four to  six light  machine-guns, one  anti-aircraft machine-gun, an anti-tank gun, and  a heavy machine-gun  in its own  pillbox. A maze  of tunnels connected the  underground bunkers  and the  fighting posts.  More buildings had been torn down to  open fields of fire.  The anti-glider poles appeared  to have arrived, but were not in place yet.

That same day, Monty himself came  through Tarrant Rushton. He asked to  see the gliders and John Howard. He wanted to know if Major Howard thought he could pull off  the coup  de main,  and he  was obviously  acquainted with  details of  the operation. Howard assured him that the job would be done. Monty's parting remark was, 'Get as many of the chaps back as you can'.

General Gale paid a visit. He  gathered his airborne troops around him  and gave them his version of an inspirational talk. Jack Bailey can only recall one line: Gale said that 'the German today is like the June bride. He knows he is going to get it, but he doesn't know how big it is going to be.'

June 4 was to be the day, or rather the evening, to go. D Company was primed for it,  aching to  get going.  Everyone got  into battle  dress in  the  afternoon, checked weapons and equipment and prepared to go to the gliders, but soon  after midday word  came down  that the  mission was  off. Cancellation  had been  half -expected, what with  the high winds  and heavy rains  sweeping the countryside, but it was still  a major disappointment. John  Howard wrote in his  diary, 'The weather's broken - what cruel luck. I'm more downhearted than I dare show.  Wind and rain, how long will  it last? The longer it  goes on, the more prepared  the Huns will be, the  greater the chance of  obstacles on the LZ.  Please God it'll clear up tomorrow.'

Parr and his gang went to the  movies and saw Stormy Weather with Lena  Home and Fats Waller. The  officers gathered in  David Wood's room  and polished off  two bottles of whisky. Twice  Den Brotheridge fell into  a depressed mood, and  Wood could hear  him reciting  a poem  that began,  'If I  should die  .. .'  But his spirits soon recovered.

The following morning, June 5, the officers and men checked and rechecked  their weapons. At noon, Howard told them that  it was on, that they should rest,  eat, and then dress for  battle. The meal was  fatless, to cut down  on air sickness. Not much of  it was eaten.  Wally Parr says  'I think everybody  had gone off of grub for the first time possibly in years'.

Towards evening the men got into trucks  to drive to their gliders. They were  a fearsome sight. They each had  a rifle, a Sten gun,  or a Bren gun, six  to nine grenades, four Bren gun magazines. Some  had mortars, one in each platoon  had a wireless set strapped to his chest. They  had all used black cork or burnt  coke to blacken their faces. (One of the two black men in the company looked at  Parr when Parr handed him  some cork and said,  'I don't think I'll  bother'.) All of them, officers and  men, were so  fully loaded that  if they had  fallen over it might have been impossible to get up without help. (Each infantryman weighed 250 pounds, instead of  the allotted 210.)  Parr called out  that the sight  of them alone would be enough to scare the Germans out of their wits.

As the trucks drove towards the gliders. Billy Gray can remember 'the WAAFs  and the NAAFI girls along the runway, crying their eyes out'. On the trucks, the men were given their  code words. The  recognition signal was  V, to be  answered by 'for Victory'. Code word for the successful capture of the canal bridge was Ham, for the  river bridge  Jam. Jack  meant the  canal bridge  had been captured but destroyed, Lard the same for the river bridge. Ham and Jam. D Company liked  the sound of it, and as the men got out of their trucks they began shaking hands and saying, 'Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam'.

Howard  called them  together. 'It  was an  amazing sight',  he remembers.  'The smaller chaps were visibly sagging at the knees under the amount of kit they had to carry.' He  tried to give  an inspiring talk,  but as he  confesses, 'I am  a sentimental man at heart, for which reason I don't think I am a good soldier.  I found offering my thanks to these chaps - a devil of a job. My voice just wasn't my own.'

Howard gave  up the  attempt at  inspiration and  told the  men to  load up. The officers shepherded  them aboard,  although not  before every  man, except Billy Gray, took a  last-minute pee. Wally  Parr chalked 'Lady  Irene' on the  side of Wallwork's glider.  As the  officers fussed  over the  men outside, those inside their gliders began settling  in. One private bolted  out of his glider  and ran off into the night. Later, at  his court-martial, the private explained that  he had had an unshakeable premonition of his own death in a glider crash.

The  officers got  in last.  Before climbing  aboard, Brotheridge  went back  to Smith's glider, shook Smith's hand, and said, 'See you on the bridge, Sandy'.

Howard went  round to  each glider,  shook hands  with the  platoon leader, then called out some words of cheer. He had just spoken to the Wing Commander of  the Halifax squadron, he said, who had  told him, 'John, don't worry about  flak; we are going through a flak  gap over Cabourg, one that  we have been using to  fly supplies into the Resistance and to bring information and agents out'.

Finally Howard, wearing a pistol and  carrying a Sten gun, climbed into  his own glider, closed the door and sat down next to Brotheridge. He nodded to Wallwork. Wallwork told the Halifax pilot that everything was go. At 22.56 hours, June  5, they took off, the other gliders following at one-minute intervals.

At Vimont, east of Caen, Colonel von Luck had just come in from an exercise, and after a bite to eat sat down to do paperwork. In Ranville, Major Schmidt enjoyed his wine  and his  companion. At  the canal  bridge, Private  Bonck thought with relief that there was only an hour to  go and he was finished for the night.  In the bunker. Private Romer groaned in his sleep, aware that he would have to  get up soon to go on duty.

Sergeant Hickman drove eastwards over the bridge, identifying himself to  Bonck. He was  setting off  for the  coast to  pick up  the four  young soldiers. As he passed the  Gondree cafe,  he regretted  that the  curfew was  in force.  He had stopped in at the place the other day and rather liked it.

At the cafe, the Gondrees  went to bed. In Oxford,  Joy Howard did the same.  In London's East End, Irene Parr stayed up. She could hear planes gathering, and it sounded bigger than anything she had ever heard before.

CHAPTER FIVE

D-Day: 0016 to 0026 hours

Wallwork struggled with his great  wooden bird, swooping silently alongside  the canal, below the horizon, unseen and unheard. He was trying to control the exact instant at which the Horsa lost her contest with gravity. Wally Parr glanced out the open door and, 'God Almighty, the  trees were doing ninety miles an hour.  I just closed  my eyes  and went  up in  my guts.'  Wallwork could  see the bridge looming ahead of him, the ground rushing  up, trees to his left, a soft,  marshy pond to his right. He could see the barbed wire straight ahead. He was going too fast, and  was in  danger of  ploughing up  against the  road embankment. He was going to have to  use the chute, a  prospect he dreaded: 'We  didn't fancy those things at all. We knew they  were highly dangerous, nothing but gadgets  really, never tested.' But if he were to stop in time, he would have to use it.

At the same  time he was  worried about the  chute stopping him  too quickly and leaving  him short  of his  objective. He  wanted to  get as  far up  the LZ  as possible, into the barbed  wire if he could,  'not because Howard wanted  me to, not because I was  particularly brave or awfully  skilled, but because I  didn't want to be rear-rammed by no. 2 or no. 3 coming in behind me.'

As the wheels touched ground, Wallwork yelled at Ains-worth, 'Stream!' Ainsworth pushed the button, the chute billowed out, 'and by golly it lifted the tail  and shoved the nose wheel down'. The whole glider then bounced back up into the air, all three wheels now  torn off. 'But the  chute drew us back,  knocked the speed down tremendously, so in  two seconds or less  I told Ainsworth, "Jettison",  so Ainsworth pressed the tit  and away went the  parachutes and we were  only going along possibly at 60 mph.'

The Horsa hit ground again, this time  on its skids, which threw up hundreds  of friction sparks from  the rocks; Howard  and the other  passengers thought these were  tracer  bullets,, that  they  had been  seen  and were  being  fired upon. Suddenly, Howard recalls, 'there was  the most hellish din imaginable,  the most God Almighty crash'. The nose had buried itself in the barbed wire and crumbled.

The crash sent Wallwork and  Ainsworth flying forward. They were  still strapped in but their seats had broken loose and they went right out the cockpit and onto the ground. They  were thus the  first Allied troops  to touch French  soil on D -Day. Both, however, were unconscious.

Inside the glider the troops, the  sappers, and the company commander were  also unconscious. Howard had broken through his seat belt and was thrown against  the roof beams,  which jammed  his helmet  down over  his ears  and knocked him out. Private Denis Edwards thought he was dead.

Save for  an occasional  low moan,  there was  complete silence.  Private Romer, pacing on the  bridge, heard the  crash, but assumed  it was a  piece of wing or tail  from a  crippled British  bomber, a  not-unusual occurrence.  He went   on pacing.

D Company had achieved complete surprise. Wallwork and Ainsworth had taken no. 1 platoon  and  set  it  down  where it  was  supposed  to  be.  Their magnificent performance was praised by Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory, commanding the Allied air forces on D-Day, as the greatest feat of flying of World War II.

But with all the men knocked out, no. 1 platoon was in danger. Romer was turning at the west end of the bridge, beginning to pace towards the east. If he noticed the glider sitting there, not fifty yards  from the east end of the bridge,  and if he gave  the alarm, and  if the men  in the machine-gun  pillbox woke quickly enough, Howard and his men would be wiped out inside the Horsa.

To the men in the glider, it seemed afterwards that they must have been out  for minutes. Each man  was struggling to  regain consciousness, dimly  aware that he had a job to do  and that his life was  threatened. It seemed to each  of them a desperate, time-consuming process to clear the mind and get moving. Minutes,  at least, they all recall - three minutes some say, even five minutes according  to others.

In fact, they came to within eight or ten seconds. This was the critical moment, the  pay-off  for all  those  hours, weeks,  months,  years of  training.  Their physical fitness paid off first - they shook their collective heads, got rid  of the cobwebs,  and were  alert, eager  to go.  Few heavyweight  boxers could have recovered from such a blow so quickly.

Then their endless training paid off, as they automatically unbuckled, cut their way through the smashed  door, or hopped out  the back. Once again  it seemed to Parr, Bailey, Gray and the others that chaos reigned, that everyone was  getting in everyone else's way as  they tried to get out.  In fact, the exit was  smooth and swift.

Howard thought he was  injured or blind until  he pushed his helmet  up; then he realised that he could see and that he was all right. Feeling a wave of  relief, he watched  with pride  as No.  1 platoon  went through  its exit  drill. Howard scrambled out of the debris and saw the bridge looming over him, the barbed wire crushed at his feet. He was exhilarated. God bless those pilots.

Not a word was  spoken. Brotheridge got Bailey  and told him, whispering  in his ear, 'Get your chaps moving'. Bailey  and two others had the task  of destroying the machine-gun pillbox. They moved off. Then Brotheridge gathered the remainder of his platoon and began running for the bridge.

At that moment, glider no. 2 came  down, exactly one minute behind no. 1.  Pilot Oliver Boland could see Wallwork's Horsa ahead of him, 'and I didn't want to run up his arse', so  Boland used his chute  and hit his spoilers  hard, forcing his Horsa onto the ground. He had to swerve, to avoid hitting Wallwork and as he did so he broke the back of the glider. He stopped right on the edge of the pond,  a bit shaken but conscious. He called over his shoulder to his passengers,  'We're here, piss off and do what you're paid to do'.

The platoon commander, David  Wood, was thrown out  of the glider by  the impact along with his bucket of grenades and his Sten, bayonet fixed. (The bayonets had been  sharpened back  at Tarrant  Rushton, an  overly dramatic  gesture on  John Howard's  part, many  of the  men thought.)  His platoon  gathered around   him, exactly as  it was  supposed to  do, and  he went  forward to  where Howard  was waiting, just by the perimeter wire.

Howard and his wireless operator were lying on the ground, having just been shot at by a rifleman in the trenches on the other side of the road. Howard whispered to Wood, 'no. 2 task'. That meant  to clear the trenches on the eastern  or near side of the road. According to  Howard, 'Like a pack of unleashed  hounds Wood's platoon followed him across the road and  into the fray.' As they did so,  no. 3 glider crash-landed.

Like no. 1, no. 3 bounced, streamed  its chute, and came back down on  its skids with a resounding crash. Doc Vaughan, riding just behind the pilots, was  thrown straight through the  cockpit; his last  thought was what  a bloody fool  he had been to volunteer for  these damned gliders. He  ended up some feet  in front of the glider, really knocked out - it was well over fifteen minutes before he came to.

Lieutenant Sandy Smith was beside him. 'I went shooting straight past those  two pilots, through  the whole  bloody lot,  shot out  like a  bullet, and landed in front of the glider.' He was stunned,  covered with mud, had lost his Sten  gun, and 'didn't really know what the bloody hell I was doing'. Pulling himself up on his knees.  Smith looked  up and  into the  face of  one of his section leaders. 'Well', the corporal said quietly, 'what are we waiting for, sir?'

'And  this',  as Smith  analyses  the event  forty  years later,  'is  where the training comes in'. He  staggered to his feet,  grabbed a Sten gun,  and started moving towards the bridge. Half a dozen of his men were still trapped inside the crashed  glider; one  of them  drowned in  the pond,  the only  casualty of  the landing. It was 0018.

On the bridge. Private Romer had just passed his fellow sentry at the  mid-point and was approaching the eastern end as Brotheridge and his platoon came  rushing up the embankment. Just then a shot aimed at Howard broke the silence, and Romer saw twenty-two British airborne troops,  apparently coming from out of  nowhere. With their camouflaged battle smocks, their faces grotesquely blacked, they gave the most eerie sensation of blending savagery and civilisation. The civilisation was represented by the Stens and Brens and Enfields they carried at their  hips, ready to fire.

They were  coming at  Romer at  a steady  trot, as  determined a  group as Romer thought he would ever encounter. Romer could see in a flash, by the way the  men carried their  weapons, by  the look  in their  eyes and  by the  way their eyes darted around, all white behind  the black masks, that they  were highly-trained killers who were determined  to have their way  that night. Who was  he to argue with them, a sixteen-year-old schoolboy who scarcely knew how to fire his rifle.

Romer turned and ran back towards the west end, shouting 'Paratroopers!' at  the other sentry as he passed him. That sentry pulled out his Verey pistol and fired a flare; Brotheridge gave him  a full clip from his  Sten and cut him down.  The first German had just died in defence of Hitler's Fortress Europe.

Simultaneously, Bailey and  his comrades tossed  grenades into the  apertures of the machine-gun pillbox. There was an explosion, then great clouds of dust. When it settled. Bailey found no one living inside. He ran across the bridge, to take up his position near the cafe.

The sappers, by this time, were beginning to inspect the bridge for  explosives, and were already cutting fuses and wires.

Sergeant  Hickman was  driving into  Le Port.  He had  almost arrived  at the  T junction, where he would make a left  turn to go over the bridge, when  he heard Brotheridge's Sten. Hickman  told his driver  to stop. He  knew immediately that the  gun  was a  Sten  by its  distinctive,  easily recognisable  rate  of fire. Grabbing his Schmeisser, Hickman motioned to  two of his privates to get  on one side of  the road  leading to  the bridge,  while he  and the other two privates moved down the left side.

Romer's shout, the Verey pistol, and Brotheridge's Sten gun combined to pull the German troops manning  the machine-gun pits  and slit trenches  into full alert. The privates, all conscripted foreigners,  began edging away, but the  NCOs, all Germans, opened fire with their MG 34 and their Schmeissers.

Brotheridge, almost across  the bridge, pulled  a grenade out  of his pouch  and threw it at the machine-gun to his right.  As he did so, he was knocked over  by the impact of a bullet in his neck. Running just behind him came Billy Gray, his Bren gun at his hip. Billy also fired at the sentry with the Verey pistol,  then began firing towards  the machine-guns. Brotheridge's  grenade went off,  wiping out one of the gun pits; Gray's Bren, and shots from others crossing the bridge, knocked out the other.

Gray was standing on the end of the bridge, on the northwest corner. Brotheridge was lying in the middle of the road, at the western end of the bridge. Other men in the section were running over  the bridge. Wally Parr was with  them, Charlie Gardner beside him. In the middle  of the bridge, Parr suddenly stopped.  He was trying to yell 'Able, Able', as the men around him had started doing as soon  as the shooting broke out. But to his  horror, 'my tongue was stuck to the  roof of my mouth and I couldn't spit sixpence.  My mouth had dried up and my  tongue was stuck.'

Attempts  to  yell only  made  the sticking  worse,  and his  frustration  was a terrible thing to behold. His face was a fiery red, even through the burnt cork, from the choking and from his anger.  With a great effort of will, Parr  finally broke  his tongue  loose and  shouted, 'COME  OUT AND  FIGHT YOU   SQUARE-HEADED BASTARDS'. Pleased  with himself,  Parr started  yelling 'Ham  and Jam,  Ham and Jam', as he ran the  rest of the way, then  turned left to go after  the bunkers that were his task.

The moon emerged from  behind the clouds. As  it did, Sergeant Hickman  crept to within fifty metres of the bridge. He saw no. 1 platoon coming over:

... and they even frightened  me, the way they charged,  the way         they  fired, the  way they  ran across  the bridge.  I'm not   a         coward, but at that moment I  got frightened. If you see a  para         platoon in full cry, they frighten the daylights out of you.

And at night-time when you see  a para running with a Bren  gun,         and the next with  a Sten, and no  cover round my back,  just me         and four youngsters who had never been in action, so I could not         rely on them - in  those circumstances, you get scared.  It's my         own poor little life there. So I pull my trigger, I fire.

He fired at Billy  Gray, reloading his Bren  by the corner of  the bridge. Billy finished reloading and fired a clip  back. Both men were shooting from  the hip, and both were pointing their guns just a bit too high, so each sent a full  clip over the other man's  head. While Hickman put  another clip into his  Schmeisser and started spraying  the bridge. Billy  popped into the  barn on his  right. As soon as he got inside. Billy rested his  Bren gun on the wall and did his  Jimmy Riddle.

Hickman, meanwhile, had run out of  ammunition, and besides he was furious  with the bridge garrison, which was hardly putting up a fight at all. He was scornful of such troops -'they had a cushy life, all the war years in France. Never  been in danger, only did guard duty.' The British, Hickman concluded, had caught them napping, and he decided to get out of there. Motioning to his four privates,  he got back to the staff  car and sped towards Caen,  going the long way around  to get to his headquarters,  which were only a  few kilometres straight east.  Thus Hickman was the  first German to  pay the price  for the capture  of the bridge: what should have been a ten- or fifteen-minute ride took him six hours  (because he had to work his  way around bombed-out Caen), and  by the time he arrived  at his headquarters to report the landing, his major had long since been informed.

As Hickman turned to leave. Smith  came running across the catwalk on  the south side of the bridge, huffing more than he was running because he had wrenched his knee in  the crash.  Brotheridge's men  were throwing  grenades and firing their weapons, there was some German return fire. When Smith got to the other side, he saw a German throwing a stick grenade at him. As the German turned to leap  over the low courtyard wall in the front of the cafe. Smith gave him a burst with his Sten gun.  The German  slumped over  the wall,  dead. Simultaneously the grenade went off. Smith did not feel anything, but his corporal came up to inquire, 'Are you all right, sir?' Smith noticed  holes in his battle smock and  his trousers. Then he looked at his wrist. All the flesh had been torn away, there was nothing but bone. Smith's first thought  was, 'Christ, no more cricket.'  Curiously, his trigger finger still worked.

Georges Gondree had wakened  at the noise. Crawling  on his hands and  knees, he got to the window ledge and peered  over. Smith looked up from his wrist  at the movement, saw Gondree's head, swung the Sten towards him and let go a burst.  He pointed the Sten too high and merely shattered the window; bullets tore into the wooden beams, but they  did not hit Gondree,  who beat a hasty  retreat and took his family down into the basement.

When Private Bonck heard the first shots, he pulled on his clothes, grabbed  his rifle,  and dashed  out of  the brothel  and onto  the street.  His comrade  was already there, and together they ran down  to the T junction. After one look  at the fire-fight going on, they turned and ran back through Benouville on the road to Caen. When they  ran out of breath  they stopped, talked over  the situation, and fired off all their ammunition.  Then they ran back to Benouville,  there to report breathlessly that  British troops were  on the bridge  and that they  had expended all their ammunition before hurrying back to report.

At 0019 Brigadier Poett hit the ground, the first of the paratroopers to arrive. He had not  been able to  orientate himself during  his short drop,  and after a soft landing he undid his harness, gathered himself together, looked around, and realised he did not know where he was. The church tower at Ranville was supposed to be his recognition point, but he  was in a little depression in a  corn field and could not see it. Nor  could he see any of his  men. He had set out to  find them, especially his wireless operator, when he heard Brotheridge's Sten go off. That fixed his rendezvo"' point exactly in his mind and he began walking towards it, as fast as  a man could move  at night through a  corn field. On the  way he picked up one private.

Over  England,  at  0020,  Captain  Richard  Todd's  Stirling  bomber  began  to straighten out for its  run over the Channel.  Todd, twenty-four years old,  had set aside a promising acting career to join the paratroopers. Commissioned early in 1941, he  was in the  7th Battalion of  the 5th Brigade  of the 6th  Airborne Division. The colonel of  the battalion, Geoffrey Pine  Coffin, was in the  same group of Stirlings  as Todd -  they were on  their way to  reinforce the coup de main party at the bridge.

Todd was supposed to fly in Stirling no. 36, but as his stick jumped out of  its truck and started  to climb aboard  the aircraft, a  senior RAF officer  stepped forward and said he was  going along, and that this  plane would be no. 1.  Todd protested at this  decision, 'because we  had our plan  worked out, our  jumping plan, but you  can't argue with  somebody senior to  you. I was  lucky, in fact, because the first twenty  or so aircraft got  in with the help  of surprise, and when I was down there looking up at the others streaming in, the numbers in  the thirties were all  getting knocked down.  The one that  replaced me was  knocked down and all the chaps on it were lost, so I had a bit of luck that night.'

At 0020 hours. Fox and his platoon had an easy landing some 300 metres from  the river bridge.  According to  Fox, the  real leader  in the  platoon was Sergeant Thornton. 'In barracks he was a  quiet, unobtrusive man who would as  soon sweep the barrack  room himself  as order  a soldier  to do  it. But  in action he was absolutely  first-class,  and he  virtually  commanded the  platoon.  I was  the figurehead and did more or less what he told me to do.'

When they landed, Thornton reminded Fox that he had forgotten to open the  door; when Fox could not get it open, Thornton showed him how to do it. When they  got out and formed up,  a corporal was supposed  to move off with  the lead section. Fox following at the head of the other two sections. But the corporal just stood there. Fox approached him to ask what was the matter; the corporal replied  that he could see someone with a  machine-gun up ahead. 'To hell with  it', responded Fox, 'let's get cracking'. But the corporal still would not move.

Fox started off himself and almost immediately there was a burst of fire from an enemy MG 34. Everyone hit the ground.

'Then',  according to  Fox, 'dear  old Thornton  had got  from way  back in  his position a mortar going, and he put  a mortar slap down, a fabulous shot,  right on the machine-gun, so we just  rushed the bridge, all the chaps  yelling, "Fox, Fox, Fox Fox, Fox".'

They reached the east bank. Lieutenant Fox in the lead. There was no  opposition - the  sentries had  run off  when the  mortar was  fired. As  Fox stood  there, panting and drinking in his victory,  Thornton came up to him. Thornton  said he had set up the Bren gun on the inside of the bridge, so that he could cover  the advance party. Then he suggested to Fox  that it might be a good idea  to spread out a bit, instead  of standing all bunched  together on the end  of the bridge. Fox agreed and spread the men out.

At 0021, Sweeney's glider  was almost on the  ground. Sweeney called out,  'Good luck, lads. Don't forget that as soon as we land, we're out and no  hesitating'. Then he heard the glider  pilot say, 'Oh, damn it'.  The Horsa had hit a  slight air pocket and  dropped to the  ground sooner than  the pilot wanted  it to. The landing itself  was smooth,  but the  pilot apologised.  'I'm sorry, I've landed about 400 yards short.' Actually, he was closer to 700 metres short.

After his platoon had left the glider, Sweeney gathered the men and set off at a trot.  They  could  hear  the  battle going  on  for  the  canal  bridge. Almost immediately he fell into a drainage ditch and was soaked, but got out again  and started doubling forward. When the platoon reached the river bridge they charged across, shouting 'Easy, Easy,  Easy', at the top  of their lungs. Because  there was no opposition, Sweeney half-suspected that either Friday's or Fox's  platoon had got there before him, 'but I still had that awful feeling as I went over the bridge that the  thing might blow  up in our  face'. He left  one section at the west bank, crossing with the other two sections.

There, on the other side of the bridge, were Fox and his men, all shouting  back 'Fox, Fox, Fox'. The  calm of the scene  came as something of  a disappointment: 'we were all  worked up to  kill the enemy,  bayonet the enemy,  be blown up  or something and then we  see nothing more than  the unmistakable figure of  Dennis Fox'.

Sweeney had often seen  Fox standing, just like  that, during the practice  runs back at Exeter. Fox's  great concern on the  runs, like that of  all the platoon leaders, had always been the umpires and how they would rate his performance.

Sweeney raced up to Fox. 'Dennis, Dennis, how are you? Is everything all right?'

Fox looked him  up and down.  'Yes, I think  so. Tod', he  replied. 'But I can't find the bloody umpires.'

By 0021, the three platoons at the canal bridge had subdued most resistance from the machine-gun pits and the slit trenches - the enemy had either been killed or run off. Men previously detailed for the job began moving into the bunkers. This was not  the most  pleasant of  tasks, according  to Sandy  Smith: 'we  were not taking any prisoners or messing  around, we just threw phosphorus  grenades down and high-explosive grenades into the  dugouts there, and anything that  moved we shot.'

Wally Parr and Charlie  Gardner led the way  into the bunkers on  the left. When they were underground, Parr pulled open  the door to the first bunker  and threw in a  grenade. Immediately  after the  explosion, Gardner  stepped into the open door and  sprayed the  room with  his Sten  gun. Parr  and Gardner  repeated the process twice; then,  having cleaned out  that bunker, and  with their ear-drums apparently shattered for ever by the concussion and the sound, they went back up to the ground.

Their next task was to meet  with Brotheridge, whose command post was  scheduled to be the cafe, and take up firing positions. As they rounded the corner of  the cafe, Gardner threw  a phosphorus grenade  towards the sound  of sporadic German small-arms fire. Parr shouted at him,  'Don't throw another one of those  bloody things, we'll never see what's happening.'

Parr asked another member of his platoon, 'Where's Danny?' (To his face, the men all called him 'Mr Brotheridge' but they  thought of him and referred to him  as 'Danny'.)

'Where's Danny?' Parr repeated. The soldier  did not know, and said that  he had not seen  Brotheridge since  crossing the  bridge. 'Well',  Parr thought,  'he's here, Danny must be here somewhere'. Parr started to run around the cafe when he ran past a man lying  opposite the cafe in the  road. Parr glanced at him  as he ran on. 'Hang on', he said to  himself, and went back and knelt down.  'I looked at him, and it was Danny Brotheridge. His eyes were open and his lips moving.  I put me hand  under his head  to lift him  up. He just  looked. His eyes  sort of rolled back. He just choked and lay back. My hand was covered in blood.

'I just looked  at him and  thought, "My God,  what a waste!"  All the years  of training we put in to do this job-it lasted only seconds." '

Jack Bailey came running  up. 'What the hell's  going on?' he asked  Parr. 'It's Danny', Parr replied. 'He's had it'. 'Christ Almighty', Bailey muttered,

Sandy Smith, who had thought that everyone was going to be incredibly brave, was learning about war. He was astonished to see one of his best men, someone he had come to depend on heavily during exercises and who he thought would prove to  be a real leader on the other side, cowering and praying in a slit trench.  Another reported a sprained ankle from the  crash and limped off to seek  protection. He had not  been limping  earlier. Lieutenant  Smith lost  a lot  of illusions very fast.

On the other side of the bridge, David Wood's platoon was clearing out the  slit trenches and  the bunkers  on each  side of  the road.  Shouting 'Baker,  Baker, Baker' as they moved along, they shot  at any sign of movement in the  trenches. The task went quickly  enough, most of the  enemy having run away,  and soon the trenches were pronounced clear. Wood discovered an intact MG 34 with a  complete belt of ammunition on it, and detailed two of his men to take over the gun.  The remainder filled in the trenches, and Wood went back to report to Howard that he had accomplished his mission. As he moved back, congratulating his platoon along the  way, there  was a  burst from  a Schmeisser.  Three bullets  hit  virtually simultaneously in his left leg, and Wood went down, frightened, unable to  move, bleeding profusely.

Wallwork, meanwhile, had come to, lying on his stomach under the glider. 'I  was stuck. Ainsworth was stuck and I could hear him. I came round. Ainsworth  seemed to be in bad shape and yet he  would shout. All he could say was, "Jim,  are you all right, Jim? Are you all right, Jimmy?" and he was a sight worse than I  was, he was pinned under.'

Wallwork asked if Ainsworth could crawl out.  No. Well, could he get out if  the glider were picked up? Yes. 'And I  lifted the thing. I felt like I  was lifting the whole  bloody glider,  I felt  like Hercules  when I  picked this  thing up. Ainsworth managed  to crawl  out.' As  a medic  looked after Ainsworth, Wallwork began to unload ammunition from the glider and carry it forward to the  fighting platoons. He did not yet realise that his head and forehead had been badly  cut, and that blood was streaking down his face.

Over at  the river  bridge, Sweeney's  section on  the far  bank heard  a patrol coming up the towpath from the direction of Caen. The section leader  challenged the patrol with the password, 'V.  But the answer from the patrol  was certainly not 'for Victory', and  it sounded like German.  The entire section opened  fire and killed all four men. Later investigation showed that among them was a gagged British para, one of the pathfinders  who had been caught by the  German patrol, and who was evidently being taken back to headquarters for interrogation.

By 0022,  Howard had  set up  his command  post in  the trench  on the northeast corner of  the bridge.  Corporal Tappenden,  the wireless  operator, was  at his side. Howard tried to make out how the fire-fight was going at his bridge as  he waited for reports from the river  bridge. The first information to come  to him was nearly devastating: Brotheridge was down.

'It really shook me', Howard says, 'because it was Den and how much of a  friend he was, and because my leading platoon was now without an officer.' The next bit of news was just as bad: Wood, and his wireless operator and his sergeant,  were all wounded and out of action. Another runner reported that Lieutenant Smith had about lost his wrist, and had a badly wrenched knee to boot.

All three platoon leaders gone, and  in less than ten minutes! Fortunately,  the sergeants were thoroughly familiar with  the various tasks and could  take over; in Wood's platoon, a corporal took  charge. In addition. Smith was still  on his feet, although hardly mobile and in great pain. Howard had no effective officers at the canal bridge,  and did not know  what was happening at  the river bridge. Gloom might have given way to  despair had he known that his  second-in-command, Captain  Friday,  and one-sixth  of  his fighting  strength,  had landed  twenty kilometres away on the River Dives.

Howard kept asking  Tappenden if he  had heard anything  from nos. 4,  5, and 6. 'No', Tappenden kept replying, 'no, no'.

Over the  next two  minutes, there  was a  dramatic change  in the nature of the reports coming in, and consequently in Howard's mood. First Jock Neilson of  the sappers came  up to  him: 'There  were no  explosives under  the bridge,  John.' Neilson explained  that the  bridge had  been prepared  for demolition,  but the explosives themselves had not been put into their chambers. The sappers  removed all the firing  mechanisms, then went  into the line  as infantry. The  next day they found the explosives in a nearby shed.

Knowing that the bridge would not be blown was a great relief to Howard. Just as good, the firing was dying down, and from what Howard could see through all  the smoke and in  the on-again-off-again moonlight,  his people had  control of both ends of  the canal  bridge. Just  as he  realised that  he had  pulled off  Ham, Tappenden tugged at his battle smock. Message coming in from Sweeney's  platoon: 'We captured the bridge without firing a shot'.

Ham and Jam! D Company had done  it. Howard felt a tremendous exultation, and  a surge of pride in his company. 'Send  it out', he told Tappenden. 'Ham and  Jam, Ham and  Jam, keep  it up  until you  get an  acknowledgement.' Tappenden  began incessantly calling out, 'Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam'.

Tappenden was  beaming the  message towards  the east,  hoping that  it would be picked up by Brigadier Poett. What he and Howard did not know was that Poett had never found his wireless operator, and  was trudging towards them with only  one soldier to accompany him.

Hold until  relieved. Those  were Howard's  orders, but  one. Brigadier  and one rifleman did not constitute much of a relief.

CHAPTER SIX

D-Day: 0026 to 0600 hours

With the  bridges captured,  Howard's concern  shifted from  the offence  to the defence.  He  could  expect a  German  counterattack  at any  time.  He  was not concerned about  the safety  of the  river bridge,  because British paratroopers were scheduled to begin landing around Ranville within thirty minutes, and  they could take care of protecting that bridge. But to the front of the canal bridge, towards the west, he had no help  at all - and a countryside jammed  with German troops, German tanks,  German lorries. Howard  sent a runner  over to the  river bridge, with orders for Fox to bring his platoon over to the canal bridge.  When Fox arrived, Howard intended to push  his platoon forward to the T  junction, as the lead platoon. Howard wanted them to take a fighting patrol role, breaking up any enemy preparations for attack.

Howard knew  that it  would take  Fox some  time to  call his  men in from their firing positions, for  Sweeney to take  over, and for  Fox to march  the quarter -mile from one bridge to the other. But he could already hear tanks starting  up in Le Port. They headed south along the road to Benouville. To Howard's  immense relief, the  tanks did  not turn  at the  T junction  and come  down towards the bridge,  but  instead  continued  on  into  Benouville.  He  surmised  that  the commanders of  the garrisons  in the  two villages  were conferring. Howard knew that the tanks would be back.

Tanks coming down from the T junction were by far his greatest worry. With their machine-gun and cannon, German tanks could easily drive D Company away from  the bridges. To stop them he had only the Fiat guns, one per platoon, and the Gammon bombs. Parr came back to the CP from  the west end of the bridge to report  that he had heard tanks, and to announce that he was going back to the glider for the Fiat. 'Get cracking', Howard said.

Parr went down the  embankment, climbed into the  glider, and 'I couldn't  see a bloody thing, could I?  There was no torch,  I started scrambling around  and at last  I  found the  Piat.'  Parr picked  it  up, tripped  over  some ammunition, sprawled, got up again, and discovered the barrel of the Piat had bent. The  gun was  useless. Parr  threw it  down with  disgust, grabbed  some ammunition,  and returned to the CP to tell Howard that the Piat was kaput.

Howard yelled across  at one of  Sandy Smith's men  to make sure  they had their Piat. Jim Wallwork trudged by, loaded like a pack horse, carrying ammunition  up to the  forward platoons.  Howard looked  at Wallwork's  blood-covered face  and thought, 'That's a strange colour of camouflage to be wearing at night'. He told Wallwork 'he looked like a bloody Red Indian'. Wallwork explained about his cuts - by  this time,  Wallwork thought  he had  lost his  eye -  and went  about his business.

At about 0045, Dr  Vaughan returned to consciousness.  He pulled himself out  of the mud and staggered back to the glider, where he could hear one of the  pilots moaning. Unable  to get  the man  out of  the wreckage,  he gave  him a  shot of morphine. Then Vaughan walked towards the bridge, where he could hear  Tappenden calling out, 'Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam'.

Vaughan stumbled  his way  to the  CP and  found Howard  'sitting in this trench looking perfectly happy, issuing orders right and left'.

'Hello, Doc, how are you? Where  the hell have you been?' Howard  asked. Vaughan explained, and Howard told him to look after Brotheridge and Wood, who had  been brought by stretcher to a little lane about 150 yards east of the bridge.  (When Howard saw Brotheridge being carried past on the stretcher some minutes earlier, he could see that it  was a fatal wound. 'At  the top of my mind',  Howard says, 'was the fact that I knew that  Margaret, his wife, was expecting a baby  almost any time'.

Vaughan set  off for  the west  end of  the bridge.  There were shrieks of 'Come back. Doc,  come back,  that's the  wrong way!'  Howard pointed  him towards his destination, the  first-aid post  in the  lane. Before  letting the  still badly confused  Doc wander  off again,  Howard gave  him a  shot of  whisky from   his emergency flask.

Vaughan finally  made it  to the  aid post,  where he  found Wood  lying on  his stretcher. He examined the splint the medical orderly had put on, found it  good enough, and gave Wood  a shot of morphine.  Then he started staggering  down the road, again in  the wrong direction,  again raising cries  of 'Come back,  wrong way, unfriendly!'

Returning to the aid post, Vaughan  found Den Brotheridge. 'He was lying  on his back looking up at the stars and looking terribly surprised, just surprised. And I found  a bullet  hole right  in the  middle of  his neck.' Vaughan, recovering quickly from  his daze,  gave Brotheridge  a shot  of morphine  and dressed  his wound. Soon after that Brotheridge died,  the first Allied soldier to be  killed in action on D-Day.

All this time, Tappenden was calling out, 'Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam'. And as the Doc looked after Den and the several other casualties. Fox and his platoon  came marching in,  in good  order. Howard  told him,  'Number 5  task', and Fox began moving across the bridge. As he passed Smith he got a quick briefing - the  tiny bridgehead was secure for the moment, but hostile fire was coming from houses in both Le Port and Benouville, and tanks had been heard.

Fox remarked  that his  Piat had  been smashed  in the  landing. 'Take mine, old boy'. Smith said, and handed his Piat to Fox. Fox in turn handed it to  Sergeant Thornton.  Poor  Wagger  Thornton,  a man  slightly  smaller  than  average, was practically buried  under equipment  by now:  he had  on his  pack, his  grenade pouch,  his  Sten gun,  magazines  for the  Bren  gun and  extra  ammunition for himself. And now  he was getting  a Piat gun  and two Piat  bombs. Overloaded or not, he took the gun and followed Fox forward, towards the T junction.

At 0040, Richard  Todd and his  stick were over  the Channel. Todd  was standing over a hole in the  bottom of the Stirling bomber,  a leg on each side.  On each leg he  had a  kit bag,  one containing  a rubber  dinghy, the other entrenching tools. His Sten  was strapped to  his chest, and  he carried a  pack and a pouch full of grenades and plenty of extra ammunition. Todd's batman stood behind him, holding and trying to  steady him as the  Stirling took evasive action  from the flak. 'Quite a  lot of people  did fall out  over the sea  from evasive action', according to Todd.  His batman held  tight to him,  as the Channel  slipped past below.

At  precisely  0050,  exactly  on  schedule,  Howard  heard  low-flying  bombers overhead, at about 400 feet. To the  east and north ofRanville, flares - set  by the pathfinders-began to light the sky. Simultaneously, German searchlights from every village in  the area went  on. Howard recalls  the sight: 'We  had a first -class view of the division coming in. Searchlights were lighting up the  chutes and there was a bit of firing going on and you could see tracer bullets going up into the air  as the paras  floated down to  the ground. It  really was the most awe-inspiring sight. . . . Above all, it meant that we were no longer alone.'

Howard began blowing for  all he was worth  on his metal whistle.  Dot, Dot, Dot (pause). Dash. It was his pre-arranged  signal, V for Victory. Over and  over he blew it, and the shrill sound carried  for miles in the night air. This  meant a great deal to  the landing troops,  says Howard. 'Paras  who landed alone,  in a tree or a bog, in a farmyard, alone, and away from their own friends, could hear that whistle. It not only meant that the bridges had been captured, but it  also gave them an orientation.'

But it  would take  the paras  at least  an hour  to get  to the  bridges in any significant numbers; meanwhile, the tanks were rumbling in Benouville. Wallwork, returning to his glider for another load, went by the CP 'and there was  Howard, tooting on  his bloody  whistle and  making all  sorts of  silly noises'. Howard stopped blowing long enough to tell Wallwork to get some Gammon bombs up to  Fox and his men.

So, Wallwork says, it  was 'Gammon bombs! Gammon  bombs! Bloody Gammon bombs!  I bowled my flip line. I had already  been to look for the damned things  once and told Howard  that there  weren't any  in the  glider. But  he said, "I saw those Gammon bombs  on the  glider. Get  them!" so  back I  went panning  through this rather badly broken glider looking for the flaming things'.

As Wallwork switched on his torch  he heard a rat-tat-tat through the  glider. A German in a trench down the canal  had seen the light and turned his  Schmeisser on the glider. 'So off went the  light, and I thought, "Howard, you've had  your bloody Gammon bombs".' Wallwork grabbed a load of ammunition and returned to the bridge, reporting to Howard on his way past that there were no Gammon bombs. (No one ever figured out what happened to them. Wallwork claims that Howard  pitched them before take-off to lighten the load;

Howard claims that they were pinched by the men from nos 2 and 3 platoons.)

Tappenden kept calling 'Ham and Jam'.  Twice at least he really shouted  it out, 'Ham and Jam, Ham and BLOODY Jam'.

At 0052  the target  for Tappenden's  message, Brigadier  Poett, worked  his way through the  final few  metres of  corn and  arrived at  the river bridge. After checking with  Sweeney on  the situation  there, he  walked across  to the canal bridge.

Howard's  first thought,  when he  saw his  brigadier coming  towards him,   was 'Sweeney's going to get a bloody rocket from me for not letting me know,  either by runner or radio,  that the brigadier was  in the company area'.  Meanwhile he gave his  report, and  Poett looked  around. 'Well,  everything seems all right, John', Poett said. They crossed the  bridge and conferred with Smith. All  three officers could hear the tanks and  lorries in Benouville and Le Port;  all three knew that if help did not arrive soon, they could lose their precarious hold  on the bridge.

At 0052, Richard  Todd landed, with  other paras dropping  all around him.  Like Poett  earlier, Todd  could not  get orientated  because he  could not  see  the steeple of the Ranville church. Tracer bullets were flying across the DZ, so  he unbuckled and made for a nearby wood, where he hoped to meet other paras and get his bearings. He got them from Howard's whistle.

Major Nigel  Taylor, commanding  a company  of the  7 Para  Battalion, was  also confused. The first man he  ran into was an officer  who had a bugler with  him. The two had dropped  earlier, with Poett and  the pathfinders. Their job  was to find the rendezvous in Ranville, then start blowing on the bugle the  regimental call of the  Somerset Light Infantry.  But the officer  told Taylor, 'I've  been looking for this damned  rendezvous for three-quarters of  an hour, and I  can't find it'. They  ducked into a  wood, where they  found Colonel Pine  Coffin, the battalion commander. He too  was lost. They got  out their maps, put  a torch on them,  but  still could  not  make out  their  location. Then  they,  too, heard Howard's whistle.

Knowing where Howard was  did not solve all  Pine Coffin's problems. Fewer  than 100 men of  his more than  500-man force had  gathered around him.  He knew that Howard had the  bridges, but as  Nigel Taylor explains,  he also knew  that 'the Germans had a propensity for immediate  counter-attack. Our job was to get  down across that bridge, to the other  side. We were the only battalion  scheduled to go on that side, west of the canal. So Pine Coffin's dilemma was, should he move off with insufficient men to do the  job, or wait for the battalion to  form up. He knew he  had to get  off as quickly  as possible to  relieve John Howard.' At about 0110,  Pine Coffin  decided to  set off  at double-time  for the  bridges, leaving one man to direct the rest of his battalion when it came up.

In Ranville, meanwhile, Major Schmidt had decided he should investigate all  the shooting going on at his bridges. He grabbed one last plateful of food, a bottle of wine,  his girlfriend,  and his  driver, summoned  his motorcycle escort, and roared off for the river  bridge. He was in a  big, open Mercedes. As they  sped past his girlfriend's house, she screamed that she wanted to be let out. Schmidt ordered the driver to halt, opened the door for her, and sped on.

The Mercedes came on so fast that Sweeney's men did not have a chance to fire at it until it was already on the  bridge. They did open up on the  motorcycle that was trailing the car, hit it broadside, and sent it and its driver skidding  off into  the river.  Sweeney, on  the west  bank, fired  his Sten  at the  speeding Mercedes, riddling it and causing it to run straight off the road. Sweeney's men picked up  the driver  and Major  Schmidt, both  badly wounded.  In the car they found wine, plates  of food, lipstick,  stockings and lingerie.  Sweeney had the wounded Schmidt and his driver put  on stretchers and carried over to  the first -aid post.

By the  time he  arrived at  the post,  Schmidt had  recovered from  his initial shock. He began screaming, in perfect English, that he was the commander of  the garrison at the bridge, that he had let his Flihrer down, that he was humiliated and had lost his honour, and that  he demanded to be shot. Alternatively he  was yelling that 'You British  are going to be  thrown back, my Flihrer  will see to that, you're going to be thrown back into the sea'.

Vaughan got out a syringe of morphine and jabbed Schmidt with it, then set about dressing his wounds. The effect of the morphine, Vaughan reports, 'was to induce him to  take a  more reasonable  view of  things and  after ten  minutes more of haranguing me  about the  futility of  the Allied  attempt to  defeat the master race, he relaxed. Soon he was profusely thanking me for my medical  attentions.' Howard confiscated Schmidt's binoculars.

Schmidt's driver,  a sixteen-year-old  German, had  had one  leg blown  off. The other leg was just hanging -  Vaughan removed it with his scissors.  Within half an hour, the boy was dead.

By 0115, Howard had completed his defensive arrangements at the canal bridge. He had Wood's platoon with him at the east end along with the sappers, whom he  had organised into a reserve platoon patrolling between the two bridges. On the west side,  Brotheridge's platoon  held the  cafe and  the ground  around it,   while Smith's platoon  held the  bunkers to  the right.  Smith was  in command of both platoons, but  he was  growing increasingly  groggy from  loss of  blood and the intense  pain in  his knee,  which had  started to  stiffen. Fox  was up  ahead, towards the T junction, with Thornton  carrying the only working Piat that  side of the  bridge. The  paras of  the 7th  Battalion were  on their  way, but their arrival time - and their strength - was uncertain.

Howard could hear tanks. He was desperate to establish radio communication  with Fox, but  could not.  Then he  saw a  tank swing  slowly, ever  so slowly,  down towards the bridge,  its great cannon  sniffing the air  like the trunk  of some prehistoric monster. 'And it  wasn't long before we  could see a couple  of them about twenty-five yards apart moving  very, very slowly. They obviously  did not know what to expect when they got down to the bridges.'

Everything now hung in the balance. If the Germans retook the canal bridge, they would then drive on  to overwhelm Sweeney's platoon  at the river bridge.  There they could have set up a defensive perimeter, bolstered by tanks, so strong that the 6th Airborne Division would have found it difficult, perhaps impossible,  to break through. If  that happened, the  division would be  isolated, without anti -tank weapons to fight off von Luck's armour.

In  other  words a  great  deal was  at  stake up  there  near the  T  junction. Fittingly, as so much was  at stake, the battle at  the bridge at 0130 on  D-Day provided a fair test of the British and German armies of World War II. Each side had advantages and disadvantages. Howard's opponents were the company commanders in Benouville and Le Port. Like Howard,  they had been training for over a  year for this moment. They had been caught by surprise, but the troops at the  bridge had been their worst troops, not much  of a loss. In Benouville, the 1st  Panzer Engineering  Company  of the  716  Infantry Division,  and  in Le  Port  the 2nd Engineers,  were  slightly  better quality  troops.  The  whole German  military tradition, reinforced  by their  orders, compelled  them to  launch an immediate counter-attack. They had the platoons to do it with, and the armoured  vehicles. What they  did not  have was  a sure  sense of  the situation, because they kept getting conflicting reports.

Those conflicting  reports were  one of  the weaknesses  of the  German army  in France.  They  came  about  partly because  of  the  language  difficulties. The officers could not  understand Polish or  Russian, the men  could not understand much  German.  The  larger  problem was  the  presence  of  so many  conscripted foreigners in  their companies,  which in  turn reflected  Germany's most  basic problem in World War II.  Germany had badly overreached herself.  Her population could not provide  all the troops  required on the  various fronts. Filling  the trenches along the Atlantic Wall with  what amounted to slaves from East  Europe looked good on paper, but in practice such soldiers were nearly worthless.

On  the other  hand, German  industry did  get steady  production out  of  slave labour. Germany had been able to provide her troops with the best weapons in the world, and in abundance. By  comparison, British industrial output was  woefully inferior, both in quantity and quality  (the British, of course, were far  ahead of the Germans in aircraft and ship construction).

But although his arms were  inferior, Howard was commanding British  troops, and every man  among them  a volunteer  who was  superbly trained.  They were vastly superior to their opponents. Except for  Fox and the crippled Smith, Howard  was without  officers on  the canal  bridge, but  he personally  enjoyed one   great advantage over the German  commanders. He was in  his element, in the  middle of the night,  fresh, alert,  capable of  making snap  decisions, getting  accurate reports  from  his equally  fresh  and alert  men.  The German  commanders  were confused, getting conflicting reports, tired  and sleepy. Howard had placed  his platoons exactly where he had planned to  put them, with three on the west  side to  meet the  first attacks,  two in  reserve on  the east  side (including  the sappers) and one at the river bridge.  Howard had seen to it that his  anti-tank capability was exactly where he had planned  to put it, up near the T  junction. The German commanders, by  way of contrast, were  groping, hardly sure of  where their own platoons were, unable to decide what to do.

The problem was, how  could Howard's men deal  with those tanks? They  could not find their  Gammon bombs,  and hand-thrown  grenades were  of little  or no  use because they usually bounced  off the tank and  exploded harmlessly in the  air. Bren and Sten guns were absolutely  useless. The only weapon Howard had  to stop those tanks with was Sergeant Thornton's Piat gun.

That gun, and the fact that he had trained D Company for precisely this  moment, the first contact with tanks. Howard felt confident that Thornton was at the top of his form, totally alert, not the least bothered by the darkness or the  hour. And Thornton was fully proficient in the use of a Piat: he knew precisely  where he should hit the lead tank to knock it out.

Others were  not quite  so confident.  Sandy Smith  recalls 'hearing this bloody thing, feeling a  sense of absolute  terror, saying my  God, what the  hell am I going to do with these tanks coming down the road?' Billy Gray, who had taken up a position in an  unoccupied German gun pit,  saw the tank coming  down the road and thought, 'that was it, we would never stop a tank. It was about twenty yards away from us, because we were up on  this little hillock but it did give a  sort of field of fire straight up the road. We fired up the road at anything we could see moving.'

Gray was tempted to fire at the tank, as most men in their first hour of  combat would have done. But they had been trained not to fire; and they did what  their training dictated. They did not,  in short, reveal their positions,  thus luring the tank into the killing area.

Howard  had expected  the tanks  to be  preceded by  an infantry  reconnaissance patrol - that was the way he would have done it - but the Germans had  neglected to do so.  Their infantry platoons  were following the  two tanks. So  the tanks rolled forward, ever  so slowly, the  tank crews unaware  that they had  already crossed the front line.

The first  Allied company  in the  invasion was  about to  meet the first German counter-attack. It all came down to  Thornton, and the German tank crews.  Their visibility was  such that  they could  not see  Thornton, half-buried  as he was under  that  pile of  equipment.  Thornton was  about  thirty yards  from  the T junction, and he willingly admits that 'I was shaking like a bloody leaf!'  With the sound of the tank coming towards him, he fingered his Piat.

Thornton's confidence in  the gun was  low, given its  effective range of  about fifty yards.

You're a dead loss if you try to go further. Even fifty yards is         stretching it, especially  at night. Another  thing is that  you         must never, never miss. If you  do you've had it because by  the         time you reload the thing and  cock it, which is a bloody  chore         on its own,  everything's gone, you're  done. It's drilled  into         your brain that you mustn't miss.

Thornton wanted to shoot at the shortest possible distance.

And sure enough, in about three minutes, this bloody great thing         appears. I was more hearing it  than seeing it, in the dark,  it         was rattling away there, and it turned out to be a Mark IV  tank         coming  along pretty  slowly, and  they hung  around for  a  few         seconds to  figure out  where they  were and  what was happening         ahead.  Only had  two of  the bombs  with me.  Told myself   you         mustn't miss. Anyhow, although I was shaking, I took an aim  and         bang, off it went.

The tank had just turned at the T junction.

I hit him round  about right bang in  the middle. I made  sure I         had him right in the middle.  I was so excited and so  shaking I         had to move back a bit.

Then all hell broke loose. The explosion from the Piat bomb penetrated the tank, setting off  the machine-gun  clips, which  started setting  off grenades, which started setting  off shells.  Everyone who  saw the  tank hit  testifies to  the absolute brilliance, the magnificence, of  the fireworks that followed. As  Glen Gray points out in his book The Warriors, a battlefield can be an  extraordinary visual display, with  red, green, or  orange tracers skimming  about, explosions going  off here  and there,  flares lighting  up portions  of the  sky. But  few warriors have ever  seen such a  display as that  near Benouville bridge  before dawn on D-Day.

The din, the light show, could be heard and seen by paratroopers many kilometres from the bridge. Indeed, it provided an orientation and thus got them moving  in the right direction.

When the tank went off, Fox took protection behind a wall. He explains:

You couldn't go very far  because, whiz-bang, a bullet or  shell         went straight past you. But finally it died down and  incredibly         we heard this man crying out. Old Tommy Clare couldn't stand  it         any longer and he  went straight out up  to the tank and  it was         blazing away and he found the driver had got out of the tank and         was lying beside it still conscious. Both legs were gone, he had         been hit in the knees getting out .Clare was always kind, and an         immensely strong fellow (back in barracks he once broke a  man's         jaws by just one blow). He  hunched this poor old German on  his         back  and took  him to  the first-aid  post. I  thought it   was         useless of course, but, in fact, I believe the man lived.

He did, but only for a few more hours. He turned out to be the commander of  the 1st Panzer Engineering Company.

The fireworks show went on and on - altogether it lasted for more than an   hour - and it  helped convince the  German company commanders  that the British  were present in great strength. Indeed, the lieutenant in the second tank withdrew to Benouville, where he reported that the British had six-pounder anti-tank guns at the bridge. The German officers decided that they would have to wait until  dawn and a clarification  of the situation  before launching another  counter-attack. Meanwhile, the lead tank smouldered, blocking the enemy's movements towards  the bridge. John Howard's men had won the battle of the night.

By the time the tank went up, at  about 0130 hours, Poett's men of the 5th  Para Brigade, led by Pine Coffin's 7th Battalion, with Nigel Taylor's company leading the way, were double-timing towards the bridge - at less than one-third of their full  strength.  The  paras knew  they  were  late, and  they  thought  from the fireworks that Howard was undergoing intensive attacks. But, as Taylor explains, 'it's very difficult  to double in  the dark carrying  a heavy weight  on uneven ground'.

When they got on the road leading to the bridges, they ran into Brigadier Poett, who was headed back  towards his CP in  Ranville. 'Come on Nigel',  Poett called out  to  Taylor in  his  high-pitched voice.  'Double,  double, double.'  Taylor thought the  order rather  superfluous, but  in fact  his men  did break into 'a rather shambling run'.

Richard  Todd was  in the  group. He  recalls the  paratrooper medical   officer catching up with him, grabbing him by the arm, and saying, 'Can I come with you? You see I'm not  used to this sort  of thing.' The doctor  'was rather horrified because we passed a German who had had his head shot off, but his arms and  legs were still waving about and strange noises were coming out of him, and I thought even the doctor was a bit turned over by that'.

Todd remembers  thinking, as  he was  running between  the river  and the  canal bridges,  'Now we're  really going  into it,  because there  was a  hell of   an explosion and a terrific amount of firing, and tracers going in all  directions. It looked  like there  was a  real fight  going on.'  Major Taylor thought, 'Oh, Lord, I'm going to have to commit my company straight into battle on the trot'.

When  7th Battalion  arrived at  the bridge,  Howard gave  the leaders  a  quick briefing. The paras then went across,  Nigel Taylor's company moving out to  the left, into  Benouville, while  the other  companies moved  right, into  Le Port. Richard Todd took up his position on a knoll just below the little church in  Le Port,  while  Taylor  led  his  company  to  prearranged  platoon  positions  in Benouville, cutting the main road from  Caen to the coast at Ouistreham.  Taylor recalls that, except for the tank  exploding in the background, within the  hour 'everything was absolutely  dead quiet'. The  Germans had settled  down to await the outcome of the 'battle' at the T junction.

A German motorcycle started up and the driver came around the corner, headed for the T junction. Taylor's men were on  both sides of the road, 'and they've  been training for God knows how many years to kill Germans, and this is the first one they've seen'. They all opened up. As the driver went into shock from the impact of a half-dozen or more bullets, his big twin-engined BMW bike flipped over  and came down on him. The throttle was stuck on full, and the bike was in gear.  'It was absolutely roaring its head off, and every time it hit the ground the  thing was  bucking,  shying about.'  The  bike struck  one  of Taylor's  men,  causing injuries that  later resulted  in death,  before someone  finally got the engine shut off. It was about 0230 hours.

At 0300 hours, Howard got a radio message from Sweeney, saying that Pine  Coffin and his battalion  headquarters were crossing  the river bridge,  headed towards the canal. Howard immediately started walking east, and met Pine Coffin half-way between the bridges. They walked back to the canal together, Howard telling Pine Coffin what had happened  and what the situation  was, so that by  the time they arrived at the canal bridge Pine Coffin was already in the picture.

As he crossed the bridge. Pine Coffin queried Sergeant Thornton. Nodding towards the burning tank, the colonel asked, 'What the bloody hell's going on up there?'

'It's only a bloody old tank going  off, Thornton replied, 'but it is making  an awful racket'.

Pine  Coffin grinned.  'I should  say so.'  Then he  turned right,  to make  his headquarters on an  embankment facing the  canal, right on  the edge of  Le Port near the church. Howard followed soon afterwards to attend an '0' group  meeting called by  Pine Coffin.  Returning to  the bridge,  Howard reconnoitred lines of approach and likely counter-attack areas. While he did so he became mixed up  in fighting going  on between  7 Para  and the  enemy, and  only vigorous  swearing prevented him being shot by a para corporal.

After unloading the Horsa he had flown in as no. 2 glider pilot, Sergeant Boland went off exploring. He headed south, walking beside and below the tow path,  and got to the outskirts of Caen. His may have been the deepest penetration ofD-Day, although as Boland points out,  there were scattered British paras  dropping all around him, and some of the paras possibly came down even closer to Caen. At any event, it would be some weeks later before British and Canadian forces got  that far again.

Boland says 'I decided I had better go back because it was bloody dangerous, not from the  Germans but  from bloody  paras who  were a  bit trigger-happy. They'd landed all over the place, up trees. God knows where, and were very  susceptible to  firing  at  anybody  coming from  that  direction.'  After  establishing his identity by using the password, Boland led a group of paras back to the bridge.

When he arrived,  he saw Wallwork  sitting on the  bank. 'How are  you, Jim?' he asked. Wallwork  looked past  Boland, saw  the paras,  and went  into a  rocket. 'Where have you  been till now?'  he demanded. 'We'd  all thought you  were on a forty-eight-hour pass. The bloody war is over.'

'The  paras  thought they  were  rescuing us',  Boland  says. 'We  felt  we were rescuing them.'

The  arrival  of  the  7th  Battalion  freed  D  Company  from  its   patrolling responsibilities on the west bank and allowed Howard to pull his men back to the ground between the two bridges, where they were held as a reserve company.

When Wally  Parr arrived,  he set  to examining  the anti-tank  gun emplacement, which  had been  unmanned when  the British  arrived and  practically  unnoticed since. Parr discovered a labyrinth  of tunnels under the emplacement,  and began exploring with  the aid  of another  private. He  discovered sleeping  quarters. There was nothing in the first two compartments he checked, but in the third  he found a  man in  bed, shaking  violently. Parr  slowly pulled  back the blanket. 'There was this  young soldier lying  there in full  uniform and he  was shaking from top to toe.' Parr  got him up with his  bayonet, then took him up  onto the ground and put him in the temporary  POW cage. Then he returned to the  gun pit, where he was joined by Billy Gray, Charlie Gardner, and Jack Bailey.

On his  side of  the bridge,  across the  road. Sergeant  Thornton had persuaded Lieutenant Fox that there  were indeed Germans still  sleeping deep down in  the dugouts. They set off together, with a torch, to find them. Thornton took Fox to a rear  bunkroom, opened  the door,  and shone  his light  on three Germans, all snoring, with their  rifles neatly stacked  in the corner.  Thornton removed the rifles, then covered  Fox with his  Sten while Fox  shook the German  in the top bunk. He snored  on. Fox ripped  off the blanket,  shone his torch  in the man's face, and told him to get up.

The German took a long look at Fox.  He saw a wild-eyed young man, dressed in  a ridiculous camouflage smock,  his face blackened,  pointing a little  toy gun at him. He concluded that one of his buddies was playing a small joke. He told Fox, in  German,  but  in a  tone  of  voice and  with  a  gesture that  required  no translation, to bugger off. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

'It took  the wind  right out  of my  sails', Fox  admits. 'Here  I was  a young officer, first bit of action, first German I had seen close up and giving him an order and receiving such a devastating  response, well it was a bit  deflating.' Thornton, meanwhile, laughed so hard he  was crying. He collapsed on the  floor, roaring with laughter.

Fox looked at  him. 'To Hell  with this', the  lieutenant said to  the sergeant. 'You take over.'

Fox went back  up to ground  level. Shortly thereafter,  Thornton brought him  a prisoner who spoke a bit of  English. Thornton suggested that Fox might  like to interrogate him. Fox began asking him about his unit, where other soldiers  were located, and so on. But the  German ignored his questions. Instead, he  demanded to know, 'Who are you? What are you doing here? What is going on?'

Fox tried to explain that he was  a British officer and that  the German  was  a prisoner.  The German  could not  believe  it. 'Oh, come on, you don't  mean it, you can't, well how did you land, we didn't hear you land, I mean where did  you come  from?'  Poor   Fox  suddenly   realised  that   he  was  the    one  being interrogated,  and  turned the   proceedings back   over to   Thornton, but  not before admiring photographs of the prisoner's family.

Von Luck was  furious. At 0130  hours he received  the first reports  of British paratroopers in his area and immediately put his regiment on full alert. Locally he  counted  on  his  company commanders  to  launch  their  own counter-attacks wherever the British had  captured a position, but  the bulk of the  regiment he ordered to assemble northeast of Caen. The assembly went smoothly enough, and by 0300 von Luck had gathered his men and their tanks and their SPVs, altogether an impressive force.  The officers  and men  were standing  beside their  tanks and vehicles, engines running, ready to go.

But although  von Luck  had prepared  for exactly  this moment  - knew  where he wanted to go, in  what strength, over what  routes, with what alternatives  - he could not give the  order to go. Because  of the jealousies and  complexities of the German high command, because Rommel disagreed with Rundstedt, because Hitler was contemptuous  of his  generals and  did not  trust them  to boot, the German command structure was a hopeless muddle. Without going into the details of  such chaos, it is sufficient to note  here that Hitler had retained personal  control of the armoured divisions. They could  not be used in a counter-attack  until he had personally  satisfied himself  that the  action was  the real  invasion. But Hitler was sleeping, and no one ever liked to wake him, and besides the  reports coming into the German headquarters were confused and contradictory, and in  any case hardly alarming enough to suggest that this was the main invasion. A  night -time paratrooper drop might just be a  diversion. So no order came to von  Luck to move out.

'My  idea,  after I  got  more information  about  the parachute         landings, and the gliders, was that a night attack would be  the         right way to counter-attack, starting at 3 or 4 in the  morning,         before the British could  organise their defences, before  their         air force people could come,  before the British navy could  hit         us. We were quite familiar with  the ground and I think that  we         could have been able to get through to the bridge. The  ultimate         goal would be to cut off Howard's men from the main body of  the         landings.  Then the  whole situation  on the  east side  of  the         bridge would  have been  different. The  paratroopers would have         been isolated  and I  would have  communications with  the other         half of the 21st Panzer Division.'

But von Luck  could not act  on his own  initiative, so there  he sat. He  was a senior officer in an army that  prided itself on its ability to  counter-attack, and leading  one of  the divisions  Rommel most  counted upon  to lead the D-Day counter-attack. Personally quite certain of what he could accomplish, he had his attack routes all laid out. Yet  he was rendered immobile by the  intricacies of the leadership principle in the Third Reich.

Towards dawn, as von Luck waited impatiently, his men brought him two  prisoners and a motorcycle. The  prisoners were glider-borne troops  who had come in  with the first wave of  6th Airborne, east ofRanville.  A German patrol had  captured these two, and taken the motorcycle from the wrecked glider. Von Luck looked  at the motorcycle. To his amazement, it was his. He had used it in North Africa  in 1942 and lost it to the British in Tunisia in 1943; the British had brought  the bike back to England, then brought it over to the Continent for the invasion. So von Luck got his bike back, and he used it till the end of the war. But he still could not move out.

The  Gondrees, too,  were immobilised  in the  cellar of  their cafe.   Therese, shivering in her  nightdress, urged Georges  to return to  the ground floor  and investigate. 'I am not a brave man',  he later admitted, 'and I did not  want to be shot, so I went upstairs on all fours and crawled to the first-floor  window. There I heard talk outside but could not distinguish the words, so I pushed open the window and peeped  out cautiously. I saw  in front of the  cafe two soldiers sitting near my petrol pump with a corpse between them.'

Georges was seen by  one of the paras.  'Vous civile?' the soldier  kept asking. Georges tried to assure him that he  was indeed a civilian, but the man  did not speak French and Georges, not knowing what was going on, did not want to  reveal that he spoke English.  He tried some halting  German, that got nowhere,  and he returned to the cellar, to  await daylight and developments. Meanwhile  Howard's men dug trenches in his garden.

By  about  0500,  Sandy  Smith's  knee  had  stiffened  to  the  point  of  near -helplessness, his arm had swollen to more than twice normal size, his wrist was throbbing with pain.  He approached Howard  and said he  thought he ought  to go over to the first-aid post and have his wounds and injuries looked after.  'Must you go?' asked Howard,  plaintively. Smith promised that  he would be back  in a minute. When  he got  to the  post, Vaughan  wanted to  give him morphine. Smith refused. Vaughan said he could not go  back to duty anyway, because he would  be more of a nuisance than a help. Smith took the morphine.

Thus when Howard, returned from his hectic reconnaissance expedition, called for a meeting of platoon leaders at his CP, just before dawn, the full weight of the officer loss he had suffered struck him directly. Brotheridge's platoon (no.  1) was  being commanded  by Corporal  Caine, the  sergeant out  of action  and  the lieutenant dead.  Both Wood's  and Smith's  platoons (nos.  2 and  3) were  also commanded  by corporals.  The second-in-command,  Brian Friday,  and the  no.  4 platoon leader. Tony Hooper, had not been heard from. Only nos. 5 and 6 (led  by Sweeney and Fox) had their full complement of officers and NCOs. There had  been a dozen casualties, plus two dead.

Howard had not called his platoon leaders together to congratulate them on their accomplishment, but rather  to prepare for  the future. He  went through various counter-attack routes  and possibilities  with them,  in case  the Germans broke through the lines  of the 7  Para. Then he  told them to  have everyone stand-to until first light. At dawn, half the men could stand down and try to catch  some sleep.

As the sky began to brighten, the light revealed D Company in occupation of  the ground between the two bridges. It had carried out its mission.

The Germans  wanted the  bridge back,  but their  muddled command  structure was hurting  them badly.  At 0300,  von Luck  had ordered  the 8th  Heavy  Grenadier Battalion, which was one of his forward  units located north of Caen and on  the west side of the Orne waterways,  to march on Benouville and retake  the bridge. But, as  Lieutenant Werner  Kortenhaus reports,  despite its  name the 8th Heavy Grenadier Battalion  had with  it only  its automatic  weapons, some  light anti -aircraft  guns,  and  some  grenade  launches.  No  armour.  Nevertheless,  the Grenadiers attacked, inflicting casualties on Major Taylor's company and driving it back into  the middle of  Benouville. The Grenadiers  then dug in  around the Chateau and waited for the arrival of panzers from 21st Panzer Division.

Lieutenant Kortenhaus, who  stood beside his  tank, engine running,  recalls his overwhelming thought over the last two  hours of darkness: Why didn't the  order to move come? If we had  immediately marched we would have advanced  under cover of darkness. But Hitler was still sleeping, and the order did not come.

CHAPTER SEVEN

D-Day: 0600 to 1200 hours

Georges Gondree, in his cellar,  welcomed 'the wonderful air of  dawn coming  up over the land'. Through a hole in the cellar he could see figures  moving about. 'I could hear   no guttural orders,  which  I always  associated with  a  German working-party',  Gondree later  wrote, so  he asked  Therese to  listen to   the soldiers talk  and determine whether  they were speaking  German or not. She did so  and  presently  reported that  she  could  not understand  what  they   were saying. Then  Georges  listened  again, 'and   my heart  began  to  beat quicker for I thought I heard the words "all right".'

Members of the 7th Battalion began knocking at the door. Gondree decided  to  go up and  open it  before it  was battered  down. He  admitted two  men in  battle smocks, with  smoking Sten  guns and  coal-black faces.  They asked, in  French, whether there were  any Germans in  the house. He  replied that there  were not, took them into the bar and thence, with some reluctance on their part, which  he overcame with smiles and body  language, to the cellar. There he  pointed to his wife and two children.

'For a moment  there  was silence.  Then one  soldier  turned to the   other and said, "It's  all  right,  chum". At   last I  knew  that  they were  English and burst  into   tears.' Therese   began  hugging  and  kissing   the paratroopers, laughing and crying  at the same  time. As she  kissed all the  later  arrivals, too, by  mid-day  her  face was   completely black.  Howard  remembers that 'she remained like that  for  two or  three days  afterwards,  refusing to clear   it off, telling everybody  that this was   from the British  soldiers and she   was terribly proud of it'.

Forty years later, Madame Gondree remains the number-one fan of the  British 6th Airborne Division. No man who was there on D-Day has ever had to pay for a drink at her  cafe since,  and many   of the  participants have  been back  often. The Gondrees  were the first  family to be  liberated in France,  and they have been generous in expressing their gratitude.

Free  drinks   for  the    British  airborne   chaps  began    immediately  upon liberation, as Georges   went out into   his garden and   dug up 98   bottles of champagne that he  had buried in  June 1940, just  before the Germans   arrived. Howard describes the  scene: 'There was  a helluva lot  of cork-popping went on, enough so that it was heard on the other side of the canal'. Howard  was on  the cafe side of the bridge, consulting with Pine Coffin. The cafe had by then  been turned into the regimental aid post. So, Howard says, 'by the time I got back to D Company  I was  told that  everybody wanted  to report  sick.  We stopped that lark, of  course.' Then  Howard confesses,  'Well, I didn't go back until I  had had a  sip,  of  course, of  this wonderful  champagne'. A   bit embarrassed, he explains: 'It really was something to celebrate'.

Shortly after   dawn, the   seaborne invasion   began. The   largest armada ever assembled, nearly 6,000 ships of all types, lay off the Norman coast. As the big guns from the warships pounded the beaches, landing craft moved  forward towards the coastline, carrying the first of  the 127,000 soldiers who  would cross  the beach  that day. Overhead,  the largest air  force ever assembled, nearly  5,000 planes, provided cover. It  was a truly awesome display of  the productivity  of American, British and  Canadian factories, its  like  probably never  to be seen again. Ten years later, when he  was President of the United States,  Elsenhower said that another  Overlord was impossible,  because such a  buildup of military strength on such   a narrow front  would be far   too risky in  the nuclear  age - one or two atomic bombs would have wiped out the entire force.

The invasion stretched  for some sixty  miles, from Sword  Beach on the  left to Utah Beach  on the  right. German  resistance was  spotty, almost nonexistent at Utah  Beach,  quite  effective  and  indeed  almost  decisive  at  Omaha  Beach, determined but  not irresistible  at  the  British and  Canadian beaches,  where unusually high  tides  compressed  the landings   into narrow  strips  and added greatly to the  problems of German  artillery and small-arms  fire. Whatever the problems, the invading forces overcame the initial opposition, and  made a  firm lodgement everywhere   except  at  Omaha.  On   the far   left,  in the fighting closest to Howard and D  Company, a bitter battle was underway  in   Ouistreham. Progress towards Caen was delayed.

Howard describes the landings from D Company's point of view:

The barrage coming in was  quite terrific. It was as  though you         could feel the  whole of the  ground shaking towards  the coast,         and this was  going on like  Hell. Soon afterwards  it seemed to         get  nearer.  Well,  they  were  obviously  lifting  the barrage         further inland as our boats and  craft came in, and it was  very         easy standing there and hearing all this going on and seeing all         the smoke over  in that direction,  to realise what  exactly was         happening and keeping our fingers crossed for those poor buggers         coming by sea. I  was very pleased to  be where I was,  not with         the seaborne chaps.

He quickly stopped indulging in sympathy for his seaborne comrades, because with full light sniper activity picked up dramatically, and movement over the  bridge became highly dangerous.  The general direction  of the fire  was from the  west bank,  towards Caen,  where there  was a  heavily-wooded area  and two  dominant buildings, the  chateau that  was used  as a  maternity hospital,  and the water tower. Where any specific sniper was located, D Company could not tell. But  the snipers had the bridge under a tight  control, if not a complete grip, and  they were beginning to  fire on the  first-aid post, in  its trench beside  the road, where Vaughan and his aides were  wearing Red Cross bands and obviously  tending wounded.

David Wood, who  was laying on  a stretcher, three  bullets in his  leg, recalls that the first sniper  bullet struck the ground  near him and he  thought he was going to be hit next. 'Then a  shot which was far too close for  comfort thudded into the ground right next  to my head, and I  looked up to see that  my medical orderly  had drawn  his pistol  to protect  his patient,  and had   accidentally discharged it and very nearly finished me off.'

Smith was  having his  wrist bandaged  by another  orderly. He  tells of how the orderly stood up  and was shot  'straight through the  chest, knocked absolutely miles  backwards. He  went hurtling  across the  road and  landed on  his  back, screaming, "take my grenades  out, take my grenades  out". He was frightened  of being shot again, with grenades in  his pouches.' Someone got the grenades  out, and he survived,  but Smith remembers  the incident as  'a very low  point in my life. I remember  also, I thought  the next bullet  was going to  come for me. I felt terrible.' Vaughan, bending over a  patient, looked up in the direction  of the sniper, shook his fist, and declared, 'This isn't cricket'.

Later that morning. Wood  and Smith were evacuated  to a divisional aid  post in Ranville, where they were also shot at and had to be moved again.

Parr, Gardner, Gray, and  Bailey were in the  gun pit, trying to  figure out how the anti-tank gun worked. Howard had trained them on German small-arms, mortars, machine guns, and grenades, but not on artillery. 'We started figuring it  out', Parr recalls,  'and we  got the  breech out,  all the  ammo you want downstairs, brought one shell up, put it in, closed the breech. Now', they wondered, 'how do you fire it?'

The four soldiers were standing in the gun pit. Because of its roof, the snipers could  not  get at  them.  They talked  it  over, trying  to  locate the  firing mechanism. Finally  Gardner asked,  'What's this?',  and pressed  a push button. 'There  was  the  biggest  explosion, the  shell  screamed  off  in the  general direction of Caen and, of course, the  case shot out of the back and  if anybody had stood there it would have caved their ribs in. That's how we learned to fire the gun.'

After that. Parr gleefully admits, 'I had the time of my life firing that  gun'. He and his mates were certain that  the sniping was coming from the roof  of the chateau.  Parr began  putting shells  through the  top floor  of the   building, spacing them along. There  was no discernible decrease  in the volume of  sniper fire, however, and the location of the snipers remained a mystery. In any  case, the snipers were very good shots and highly professional soldiers.

Parr kept shooting, but Jack Bailey tired  of the sport and went below, to  brew up his first cup of  tea of the day. Every  time Parr fired, the chamber  filled with dust,  smoke, and  loose sand  came shaking  down. Bailey  called up, 'Now, Wally, no firing  now, just give  me three minutes'.  Bailey took out  his Tommy cooker, lit it, watched as the water  came to a boil, shivered with pleasure  as he thought how good that tea was going to taste, had his sugar ready to pop into it, when suddenly, 'Blam'.  Wally had fired again.  Dust, soot, and sand  filled Bailey's mug of tea, and his Tommy cooker was out.

Bailey,  certain Wally  had timed  it deliberately,  came tearing  up,  looking  - according  to Parr  - 'like  a bloody  lunatic'. Bailey  threatened Parr  with immediate dismemberment, but at heart Bailey is a gentle man, and by keeping the gun between himself and Bailey, Parr survived.

Howard dashed across  the road, bending  low, to find  out what Parr  was doing. When he realised that Parr was shooting at the chateau, he was horrified. Howard ordered Parr to cease fire immediately,  then explained to him that the  chateau was a maternity hospital.  Parr says today, with  a touch of chagrin,  'that was the first and only  time I've ever shelled  pregnant women and newborn  babies'. After  the war,  reading a  magazine article  on German  atrocities in  occupied Europe, Parr came across a prime  example: it seemed, according to the  article, that before  withdrawing from  Benouville, the  Germans had  decided to give the village a  lesson and  methodically shelled  the maternity  hospital and ancient chateau!

Howard never  did convince  Parr that  the Germans  were not  using the roof for sniping. As Howard returned to his CP, he called out, 'Now you keep that  bloody so-and-so quiet. Parr, just  keep it quiet. Only  fire when necessary, and  that doesn't mean at imaginary snipers.'

Soon Parr was shooting into the trees. Howard yelled, 'For Christ's sake.  Parr, will you  shut up!  Keep that  bloody gun  quiet! I  can't think  over it.' Parr thought to himself, 'Nobody told me it was going to be a quiet war'. But he  and his mates  stopped firing  and started  cleaning up  the shell casings scattered through the gun pit. It had suddenly occurred to them that if someone slipped on a case while he was carrying a shell, and if the shell fell point downwards into the brim-full ammunition room,  they and their gun  and the bridge itself  would all go sky high.

By 0700, the British 3rd Division was landing at Sword Beach, and the big  naval gunfire had lifted to start pounding both Caen and behind the beaches, en  route passing over  D Company's  position. 'They  sounded so  big', Howard  says, 'and being poor bloody infantry, we had never been under naval fire before and  these damn great shells came sailing over, such a size that you automatically  ducked, even in the pillbox, as one went over and my radio operator was standing next to me, very perturbed about this and finally Corporal Tappenden said, "Blimey, sir, they're firing jeeps".'

Someone brought in two prisoners, described by Howard as 'miserable little  men, in  civilian clothes,  scantily dressed,  very hungry'.  They turned  out to  be Italians,  slave  labourers in  the  Todt Organization.  Long,  complicated sign -language communication finally revealed that they were the labourers designated to  put the  anti-glider poles  in place.  They had  been doing  their job,   on Wallwork's LZ,  and appeared  quite harmless  to Howard.  He gave  them some dry biscuits  from  his  forty-eight-hour  ration pack,  then  let  them  loose. The Italians,  Howard  relates, 'immediately  went  off towards  the  LZ where  they proceeded in putting up  the poles. You can  just imagine the laughter  that was caused all the way around to see these silly buggers putting up the poles.'

More questioning then revealed that the Italians were under the strictest orders to have  those poles  in the  ground by  twilight, June  6. They  were sure  the Germans would be  back to check  on their work,  and if it  were not done, 'they were for the bloody high jump, so  they'd better get on with it, and  surrounded by our laughter, they got on with it, putting in the poles'.

At about 0800, Spitfires  flew over, very high,  at 6,000 or 7,000  feet. Howard put out ground-to-air signals, using silk scarves and parachutes spread over the ground, that  meant, 'We're  in charge  here and  everything's all right'. Three Spitfires - wearing, like all the other Allied aircraft that participated in the invasion,  three white  bars on  each wing  -peeled off,  dived to  1,000  feet, circled the bridges doing victory roll after victory roll.

As they pulled away, one of them dropped an object. Howard thought the pilot had jettisoned his reserve petrol tank, but he sent a reconnaissance patrol to  find out what it was. The patrol came back, 'and to our great surprise and amusement, it was the early editions from Fleet  St. There was a scramble for them  amongst all the  troops, especially  for the  Daily Mirror,  which had  a cartoon  strip called "Jane", and they were all scuffling for Jane. There were one or two moans about there being no mention of the invasion or of D Company at all.'

Throughout the morning, all movement in D Company's area was done crouched over, at a full sprint. Then, shortly after 0900, Howard experienced

... the wonderful sight of three tall figures walking down the road. Now, between the bridges you v/ere generally out of line of the snipers, because of the trees along this side of the canal, and these three tall figures came marching down very smartly and they turned out to be General Gale, about six foot five inches, flanked by two six-foot brigadiers - Kindersley on one side, our own Air Landing Brigade commander, and Nigel Poett, commanding the 5th Para Brigade, on the other. And it really was a wonderful sight because they were turned out very, very smartly, wearing berets and in battle dress, and marching in step down the road. Richard Todd said that 'for sheer bravado and bravery it was one of the most memorable sights I've ever seen', and all the other men agreed.

Gale had come down  by glider, about 0300,  and established his headquarters  in Ranville. He and his brigadiers were  on their way to consult with  Pine Coffin, whose 7th Battalion was  hotly engaged with enemy  patrols in Benouville and  Le Port. Gale called  out to D  Company, as he  marched along, 'Good  show, chaps'. After a briefing from Howard, Gale and his companions marched across the bridge. They were shot at but not hit, and they never flinched.

As  they disappeared  into Pine  Coffin's headquarters,  two gun-boats  suddenly appeared, coming up from  the coast headed towards  Caen. They were coming  from the small  harbour in  Ouistreham, which  was under  attack by  elements of Lord Lovat's Commando brigade. The gun-boats were obviously aware that the bridge was in unfriendly hands, because the lead boat came on at a steady speed, firing its 20mm cannon  at the  bridge. Parr  could not  shoot back  with the anti-tank gun because the bridge  and its superstructure  blocked his field  of fire. Corporal Godbold, commanding no. 2 platoon, was  on the bank with a Piat.  Howard ordered his men to hold their fire until the gun-boat was in Godbold's range. Then  some of 7  Para on  the other  side started  firing at  the boat.  Godbold let go, at maximum range,  and to  his amazement  he saw  the Piat  bomb explode inside the wheelhouse. The gunboat turned sideways, the bow plunged into the para bank, the stern jammed against D Company's side.

Germans started running off the stern, hands high, shouting 'Kamerad,  Kamerad'. The captain, dazed but defiant, had to be forced off the boat. Howard  remembers him as being eighteen or nineteen; very tall, and speaking good English. 'He was ranting on  in English  about what  a stupid  thing it  was for  us to  think of invading the continent, and  when his Flihrer got  to hear about it  we would be driven back into the sea. He was making the most insulting remarks and I had the greatest  difficulty  stopping my  chaps  from getting  hold  and lynching  that bastard on the spot.'  But Howard knew that  intelligence would want to  see the young officer immediately, so  he had the prisoner  marched off towards the  POW cage  in  Ranville. 'And  he  had to  be  frog-marched back  because  he was  so truculent and shouting away all the time.'

The  sappers  looked  around  the  boat,  examining  equipment,  searching   for ammunition and guns.  One ofthem^a 19-year-old  named Ramsey, found  a bottle of brandy and stuck it  in his battle smock.  His commander, Jock Neilson,  noticed the bulge  and asked  what it  was. The  sapper showed  him and Neilson took it, saying, 'You are not old enough for that'. The sapper complains, 'I never saw  a drop of that bloody brandy'.

Near Caen, von Luck was close to despair. The naval bombardment raining down  on Caen was the most tremendous he had  seen in all his years at war.  Although his assembly  point was  camouflaged and  so far  untouched, he  knew that  when  he started to move  - when he  finally got the  order to go  - he would  be spotted immediately  by  the  Allied  reconnaissance  aircraft  overhead,  his  position reported to the big ships out in the Channel, and a torrent of shells would come down on his head.

Under the circumstances, he doubted that  he could get through the 6th  Airborne and recapture the bridges. His superiors agreed with him, and they decided  that they would destroy the bridges and thus isolate the 6th Airborne. They began  to organise a gun-boat  packed with infantry,  meanwhile sending out  frogmen and a fighter-bomber from Caen to destroy the bridge.

At about 1000, the  German fighter-bomber came flying  directly out of the  sun, over the  river bridge,  skimming along  just above  the trees  lining the road, obviously headed for the  canal bridge. Howard dived  into his pillbox; his  men dived into trenches. They  poked their heads out  to watch as the  pilot dropped his bomb.  It was  a direct  hit on  the bridge  tower, but  it did not explode. Instead it clanged  onto the bridge  and then dropped  into the canal.  It was a dud.

Howard comments, 'What a  bit of luck that  was... and what a  wonderful shot by that German pilot'. The dent is there on the bridge to this day.

The two  frogmen were  easily disposed  of by  riflemen along  the banks  of the canal. On the ground, however, the Germans were pushing the British back.  Nigel Taylor's was the only company of 7th Battalion in Benouville. It was desperately understrength and very hard pressed by the increasingly powerful German  counter -attacks. The two companies in Le Port were similarly situated and, like Taylor, were having to give up some ground.

As the Germans moved forward, they began putting some of their SPVs into action. These vehicles  belonged to  von Luck's  regiment, but  were attached to forward companies that were expected to act  on their own initiative rather than  report back to the regimental assembly area. The British called the rocket launchers on the SPVs  'Moaning Minnies'.  What they  remember most  about them, Howard says, 'apart from the frightful noise, was  the tremendous accuracy'. He was sure  the Germans were directing their fire from the  top of the chateau, but he could  do nothing about it.

Between explosions, Wally Parr  dashed across the road  to see Howard. 'I  got a feeling', he  panted, 'that  there is  somebody up  there on  that water  tower, spotting for the Minnies'. He explained  that the water tower, located near  the maternity hospital, had a ladder up to the top, and that he could see  something up there. Wouldn't Howard please give him permission to have a go at it?  Howard agreed. 'And you couldn't see Wally's arse for dust', as Parr dashed back across the road to his gun.

Parr bellowed  out, 'NUMBER  ONE GUN!'  As he  did so,  there was  one of  those strange lulls that occur in so many battles. In the silence Parr's booming voice carried across the battlefield,  from Le Port to  Benouville, from the canal  to the river. Now, as Howard points out,  there only was one gun; as Parr  rejoins, it was the only substantial gun they  had around the bridges at the time,  so it really was  the number  one gun.  Parr then  put his  crew through  a drill that constituted  a  proper  artilleryman's  fire order.  '700,  One  Round.  Right 5 degrees', and so on, all orders proceeded by 'NUMBER ONE GUN'. Finally, 'PREPARE TO  FIRE.' All  around him,  the soldiers  -German as  well as  British -   were fascinated spectators. 'FIRE!'

The gun roared,  the shell hurtled  off. It hit  the water tower  head-on. Great cheers went up,  all around, berets  and helmets were  tossed into the  air, men shook hands joyfully.  The only trouble  was, the shell  was armour-piercing. It went in  one side  and came  out the  other without  exploding. Streams of water began running out  the holes, but  the structure was  still solid. Parr  blasted away  again, and  again, until  he had  the tower  spurting out  water in  every direction. Howard finally ordered him to quit.

When  Gale,  Kindersley, and  Poett  returned from  their  conference with  Pine Coffin, they told  Howard that one  of his platoons  would have to  move up into Benouville and take a position in the line beside Taylor's company. Howard chose no. 1 platoon. He also sent Sweeney and Fox with their platoons over to the west side, to take a  position across from the  Gondree cafe, where they  should hold themselves ready to counter-attack in  the event of a German  breakthrough. 'And we thought',  Sweeney says,  'that this  was a  little bit  unfair. We'd had our battle throughout the night. Para had come in and taken over the position and we rather felt  that we  should be  left alone  for a  little bit  and that the 7th should not be calling on our platoons to come help it out.'

Sweeney  and Fox  settled down  by a  hedge. Back  at Tarrant  Rushton, a   week earlier, Sweeney and Richard Todd had met, because of a confusion in their names - in the British army all Sweeney s were nicknamed Tod, and all Todds were known as Sweeney, after the famous barber in London, Sweeney Todd. On the occasion  of their meeting, Sweeney  and Todd laughed  about the coincidence.  Todd's parting words had been, 'See you on D-Day'.  On the outskirts of Le Port, at  1100 hours on D-Day,  as Sweeney  rested against  the hedge,  'a face  appeared through the bushes  and  Richard Todd  said  to me,  "I  said I'd  see  you on  D-Day",  and disappeared again'.

Over in  Benouville, no.  1 platoon  was hotly  engaged in  street fighting. The platoon  had gone  through endless  hours of  practice in  street fighting,   in London, Southampton, and elsewhere, and had gained experience during the  night, in the  fighting around  the cafe.  Now it  gave Taylor's  company a much-needed boost, as it started driving Germans out of buildings they had recaptured.

Corporal Joe Caine was  in command. 'He was  a phlegmatic sort of  a character'. Bailey remembers; 'nothing  seemed to perturb  him'. They saw  an outhouse in  a small field. 'Cover me', Caine said to Bailey. 'I'm going to have a crap.'

He dashed  off to  the outhouse.  A minute  later he  dashed back. 'I can't face that', Caine  confessed. There  was no  hole in  the ground,  only a bucket, and nothing to sit on. The bucket looked as if it had not been emptied in weeks.  It was overflowing. 'I can't face that', Caine repeated.

By about  mid-day, most  of the  7th Battalion  had reported  in for  duty, some coming singly, some in  small groups. Enough arrived  so that Pine Coffin  could release Howard's  platoons. Howard  brought them  back to  the area  between the bridges. The snipers remained active, sporadically the Moaning Minnies  showered down, battles were raging in Benouville, Le Port, and to the east ofRanville.  D Company was  shooting back  at the  snipers, but  as Billy  Gray confesses,  'We couldn't see them, we were just guessing'.

But limited though D Company's control was, it held the bridges.

CHAPTER EIGHT

D-Day: 1200 to 2400 hours

At noon. Sergeant Thornton was sitting in a trench, not feeling so good. He  was terribly tired, of course, but what  really bothered him was the situation.  'We were stuck there  from twenty past  twelve the night  before, and the  longer we were there, the more stuff  there was coming over from  Jerry, and we were in  a small sort of circle and things were getting bloody hot, and the longer you  sit anywhere, the more  you start thinking.  Some of them  blokes were saying  oh, I don't suppose  I'll ever  see the  skies over  England again,  or the skies over Scotland or the skies over Wales or the skies over Ireland.' Wally Parr recalls, 'the day went on very, very, very wearing. All the time you could feel  movement out there and closer contact coming.'

In  Benouville and  Le Port,  7th Battalion  was holding  its ground,  but  just barely. Major  Taylor had  survived the  fire-fights of  the night.  He had also survived, shortly after  dawn, the sight  of a half-dozen  prostitutes, shouting and waving and blowing kisses at his troops from the window of the room  Private Bonck  had vacated  six hours  earlier. By  mid-day, the  action had  hotted  up considerably, and Taylor not only had infantry and SPVs to deal with, but tanks.

'As the first tank crept round the corner', Taylor remembers, 'I said to my Piat man, "Wait,  wait." Then,  when it  was about  forty yards  away, "Fire!" And he pulled the trigger, there was just a click, and he turned round and looked at me and said, "It's bent, sir".'

A corporal, seeing the situation, leapt  out of his slit trench and  charged the tank, firing from the hip with his Sten.  When he got to the tank, he slapped  a Gammon bomb on it and ran off.  The tank blew up and slithered across  the road, blocking it.

Taylor, by this point, had a slashing splinter wound in his thigh. He managed to get up  to a  first-floor window,  from which  spot he  continued to  direct the battle.  Richard  Todd  was half  a  mile  away, but  he  heard  Taylor shouting encouragement  to   his  troops   even  at   that  distance.   Nobody  had   any communications, the radios  and field telephones  having been lost  on the drop. Taylor sent a runner over to Pine Coffin, to report that he had only thirty  men left, most of them  wounded, and could anything  be done to help?  That was when Pine Coffin told Howard to send a D Company platoon into Benouville.

There had as yet been no determined German armoured attacks - von Luck was still waiting  for  orders  in  his  assembly  area  -  which  was  fortunate  for the paratroopers, as they had only Piats and Gammon bombs with which to fight tanks. But  panzers  could  be  expected  at  any  time,  coming  down  from  Caen into Benouville, or perhaps up from the coast into Le Port.

The panzers had their own problems. Shortly after noon, von Luck was  unleashed. Exactly as he had feared, his columns were immediately spotted and shelled. Over the course of the next couple of hours, his regiment was badly battered. On  the west side of the Orne waterways, the other regiment of 21st Panzer Division also rolled  into action,  one part  of it  almost reaching  Sword Beach,  while  one battalion moved off to attack Benouville.

None of these tanks  was operating at anything  like full efficiency because  of the Allied air power and  naval shelling. Lieutenant Werner Kortenhaus,  who was in one of the tanks, reports that  because of strafing activity by the RAF,  the tanks had to advance  with their hatches down.  'With only a narrow  gap to look out through', he  says, 'the panzer  driver was almost  always disorientated. We tended to go around in circles'.  Thus the attacks lacked the coordinated  punch they should have had.

In Le Port, Todd  was trying to dislodge  a sniper from the  church tower. There was open  ground around  the church,  'so there  was no  way of  rushing it, and anyway we had very few chaps on the ground at this time. So Corporal Killean,  a young Irishman, volunteered to have a go and see if he could get there with  his Piat. And he  mouseholed through some  cottages, going inside  them and knocking holes through from one to the other so he was able to get to the end cottage. He ran out and got his Piat under a hedge and he let fly a bomb, and he hit a  hole right where he wanted to in the church  tower. He let off two more. And after  a while he reckoned that he had indeed killed the sniper.'

Killean dashed to the church. But before entering, he took off his helmet and he said, 'I'm sorry to see what I have done to a wee house of God'.

Major Taylor kept glancing at his watch. Relief was supposed to arrive from  the beaches, in  the form  of 3  Division or  the Commandos,  by noon.  It was  1300 already, and neither 3 Division nor the Commandos had arrived. 'That was a  very long wait', Taylor recalls. 'I know the longest day and all that stuff, but this really was  a hell  of a  long day.'  At his  CP, which  he had  moved into  the machine-gun pillbox  after getting  Bailey to  clean up  the mess  he had  made, Howard too kept checking the time, and wondering where the Commandos were.

In Oxford, Joy  Howard was up  shortly after dawn.  She was so  busy feeding and bathing and pottying the little ones that  she did not turn on the radio.  About 10 a.m. her neighbours,  the Johnson's, knocked and  told her that the  invasion had started.  'We know  Major Howard  will be  in it  somewhere', they said, and insisted that  Joy and  the children  join them  for a  celebration lunch.  They lifted the baby chairs over the fence, and treated Joy to a brace of  pheasants, a gift from friends in the country,  and a bottle of vintage wine they  had been saving for just this occasion.

Joy kept thinking  of John's last  words, that when  she heard the  invasion had started she would know that his job  was done. They hardly gave her any  comfort now, because she realised that for all she knew she was already a widow. As best she could, she  put such thoughts  out of her  mind, and enjoyed  the lunch. She spent the afternoon at  her chores, but with  her attention concentrated on  the radio. She never heard John's name mentioned, but she did hear of the  parachute drops on the eastern flank, and assumed John must be part of that.

Von Luck's panzers were rolling now, or rather moving forward as best they could through  the exploding  naval shells  and the  RAF strafing.  Major Becker,  the genius with vehicles who had built the outstanding SPV capability in von  Luck's 125th  Regiment, led  the battle  group descending  on Benouville.  His  Moaning Minnies were firing as fast as he could reload them.

By  1300 the  men at  the bridge,  and those  in Benouville  and Le  Port,  were beginning to  feel disconcertingly  like the  settlers in  the circled-up  wagon train, Indians whooping all around them  as they prayed for the cavalry  to show up. They  had enough  ammunition to  throw back  probing attacks,  but could not withstand an all-out assault - not alone anyway.

Tod  Sweeney  was  gloomily  considering the  situation,  sitting  next  to Fox. Suddenly he nudged Fox. 'Listen', he said. 'I can hear bagpipes.' Fox scoffed at this: 'Oh, don't be stupid, Tod, we're  in the middle of France, you can't  hear bagpipes.'

Sergeant  Thornton,  in  his trench,  told  his  men to  listen,  that  he heard bagpipes. 'Go on', they replied, 'what are you talking about, you must be bloody nuts.' Thornton insisted that they listen.

Howard, at his  CP, was listening  intently. Back at  Tarrant Rushton, he.  Pine Coffin,  and the  commander of  the Commandos,  the legendary  Lord Lovat,   had arranged for recognition signals when  they met in Normandy. Lovat,  arriving by sea, would blow his bagpipes when he approached the bridge, to indicate that  he was coming. Pine Coffin's bugler would blow back, with one call meaning the road in was clear, another that it was contested, and so on.

The sound of the bagpipe became unmistakable; Pine Coffin's bugler answered with a call that meant there was a fight going on around the bridges.

Lovat's piper. Bill Millin, came into view, then Lovat. It was a sight never  to be  forgotten. Millin  was beside  Lovat, carrying  his great  huge bagpipe  and wearing  his beret.  Lovat had  on his  green beret,  and a  white sweater,  and carried a walking stick, 'and he strode along', Howard remembers, 'as if he  was on a flaming exercise back in Scotland'.

The Commandos came on,  a Churchill tank with  them. Contact had been  made with the beachhead, and the  men of D Company  were ecstatic. 'Everybody threw  their rifles down', Sergeant Thornton remembers, 'and kissing and hugging each  other, and I've seen men with tears rolling down their cheeks. I did honestly. Probably I was the same. Oh, dear, celebrations I shall never forget.'

When Georges Gondree saw Lovat coming, he got a tray, a couple of glasses, and a bottle of champagne then went dashing  out of his cafe, shouting and  crying. He caught up to Lovat, who was nearly  across the bridge, and with a grand  gesture offered him champagne. Lovat gave a  simple gesture of 'No, thanks', in  return, and marched on.

The sight was too much for Wally  Parr. He ran out to Gondree, nodding  his head vigorously and saying, 'out, oui,  oui'. Gondree, delighted, poured. 'Oh  dear'. Parr says, 'that was good champagne. Did it go down easy'.

Lovat met Howard at  the east end of  the bridge, piper Millin  just behind him. 'John', Lovat said as  they shook hands, 'today  history is being made'.  Howard briefed Lovat, telling him that once he got his troops over the canal bridge  it was clear sailing. But, Howard warned,  be careful going over the bridge.  Lovat nevertheless marched his  men across, and  as a consequence  had nearly a  dozen casualties. Vaughan, who treated them,  noted that most were shot  through their berets and killed instantly. Commandos  coming later put on their  steel helmets to cross the bridge.

The last  of the  Commandos to  pass through  handed over  to Howard a couple of bewildered-looking German soldiers, wearing  only their underwear. They  had run for it when D Company stormed the bridge, then hidden in a hedge along the canal towpath. When they saw the Commandos  coming from the coast they decided  it was time to give themselves up. A Commando Sergeant handed them over to Howard  with a wide grin and said, 'Here you are, sir, a couple of the Panzoff Division!'

A few of  the tanks coming  up from the  beaches went on  into Benouville, where they set up a solid defensive line.  Some crossed the bridges to go to  Ranville and the east,  to bolster the  6th Airborne Division  in its fight  against 21st Panzer Division.

The Germans tried a counter-attack coming  straight up the canal. At about  1500 hours, a gun-boat came  from Caen, loaded with  troops. Bailey saw it  first and alerted Parr, Gray  and Gardner, manning  the anti-tank gun.  They had a  heated discussion about range, but  when they fired they  were thirty yards short.  The boat started to turn, they fired again, and hit the stern. The boat chugged off, back towards Caen, trailing smoke.

From about mid-afternoon  onwards, the situation  around the bridge  stabilised. The 8th Heavy Grenadiers, and Major Becker's battle-group, had fought  bitterly. But,  as Kortenhaus  admits, 'we  failed because  of heavy  resistance. We  lost thirteen tanks out of seventeen!'  The Germans continued sniping and  firing the Moaning Minnies, but they were no longer attacking in any strength.

'It was a beautiful evening', Nigel Taylor remembers. At about 1800 hours,  when he was sure his position in  Benouville was secure, he had himself  carried down to the Gondree cafe, so that he could be tended to at the aid post. When his leg wounds were bandaged he hobbled outside and sat at a table just beyond the front door. 'And  Georges Gondree  brought me  a glass  of champagne,  which was  very welcome indeed after that  sort of day, I  can tell you. And  then that evening, just before it got dark, there was a tremendous flight of aircraft, hundreds  of British aircraft.  They came  in and  they did  a glider  drop and a supply drop between the bridges and the coast on our side of the canal. It was a  marvellous sight, it really was.  They were also dropping  supplies on chutes out  of their bomb doors, and then it seemed only a very few minutes afterwards that all these chaps in jeeps, towing anti-tank guns  and God knows what, were coming  down the road through Le Port, and over this bridge.'

Taylor sipped  his champagne,  and felt  good. 'At  that moment  I can  remember thinking to myself, "My God, we've done it!" '

Among the gliders were the  men of Brigadier Kindersley's Airlanding  Brigade, D Company's parent outfit. The companies, with their heavy equipment, began moving across the  bridge, towards  Ranville and  beyond to  Escoville, which they were scheduled to attack  that night or  the following morning.  As the Ox  and Bucks marched past. Parr, Gray and the  others called out, 'Where the hell  you been?' and 'War's over', and 'A bit late for parade, chaps', and other such nonsense.

Howard's orders were to hand over to a seaborne battalion when it came up,  then join the Ox and Bucks in Ranville. About midnight, the Warwickshire Regiment  of 3 Division arrived. Howard briefed the commander. Parr handed over his  antitank gun to a sergeant, showing  him how to work it.  'I was a real expert  on German artillery by this time'. Parr says.

Howard told his men to load up. Someone  found a horse cart - but no horse.  The cart was a big, cumbersome thing, but the men had a lot to carry. All their  own equipment, plus the German gear they had picked up (every soldier who could  had changed his  Enfield for  a Schmeisser,  or his  Bren for  an MG 34), filled the cart.

D Company  started off,  headed east,  towards the  river bridge  and over it to Ranville. Howard was no  longer under the command  of Pine Coffin and  Poett; he reverted to his regular chain of command and hereafter reported to his battalion colonel, Mike Roberts. He had carried out his orders, and almost exactly  twenty -four hours  after his  men stormed  the bridge,  he handed  over his objectives intact and secure.

Jack Bailey found it hard to leave. 'You see', he explains, 'we had been there a full day and night. We rather felt that this was our bit of territory'.

CHAPTER NINE

D-Day plus one to D-Day plus ninety

Benouville was as  far inland as  the British seaborne  units got on  D-Day. The original plan  had been  to drive  the armour  coming in  over the beaches right through  Benouville,  along  the  canal.  road,  straight  into  Caen.  But  the fierceness of the  opposition at Benouville  and Le Port  and Ranville convinced the British high command that prudence required going over to the defensive. And that was what they did for the next seven weeks, attempting only once - late  in July, in Operation Goodwood - to breakout.

D Company's role in this defensive phase of the battle was unspectacular. It had none of the excitement,  or satisfaction that was  inherent in the coup  de main operation, but produced  far higher casualties.  D Company, in  short, became an ordinary infantry company.

The process  began just  after midnight,  in the  first minutes  of June  7. The company  marched  away  from  the bridges,  pulling  the  cart  loaded with  the implements of war behind it. But the cart continually ran off the road, and  the swearing. Jack  Bailey says,  was the  most spectacular  he ever  heard. (And he became a regimental  sergeant major in  the post-war army,  so he heard  a lot.) Eventually, D Company gave up on  the cart. Every man shouldered what  he could, some of the equipment was left behind in the hated cart, and off they marched.

It was a depleted company that marched along towards Ranville. Howard had landed in Normandy  twenty-four hours  earlier with  181 officers  and men.  His battle casualties, considering that he had  been in continuous action, were  remarkably small - two  men killed and  fourteen wounded. One  platoon remained unaccounted for.

His  administrative  losses,  however, had  been  heavy.  After unloading  their gliders, and after the Commandos had opened a road, the glider pilots were under orders to go down to the beaches and use their special orders from Montgomery to get  themselves  back to  England.  In the  afternoon,  the pilots  had  done as ordered,   depriving   Howard   of  another   ten   men.[2]   As  communications improved between Benouville and  the  coast, his  sappers were taken   from him, to  rejoin their parent  units.  That cost almost   two dozen men.  And  as soon as the march ended, he  would  have  to turn  over Fox's  and  Smith's  platoons to  B  Company - another forty  men  gone. His reinforced company  in  the early hours  of June 6 had numbered 181; in the early hours of June 7 it numbered  76. And when Fox   and Smith returned  to B Company,  Howard's only officer  fit for duty was Sweeney. All the others were either dead, wounded, or missing. --- [2] At the beach, Oliver Boland was interviewed by a newspaper reporter and gave     a brief  account of  what happened  at the  canal bridge.  The Times ran the     article the next day, giving D Company its first publicity. There would be a     great  deal to follow.

D Company marched around Ranville. It was dark, there were numerous bends in the roads  and  a  profusion  of crossroads,  and  paratroopers  scurrying  in every direction.  D  Company got  lost.  Howard called  for  a break,  then  talked to Sweeney. He was worried that they had not met the regiment yet, and he did  want to take the company down the road. 'Will you go ahead with a couple of chaps and see if you can make contact with the regiment, then come back here and report?'

Sweeney set off with Corporal  Porter and one private. 'Herouvillette,'  Sweeney reports, 'was  a very  eerie place.  There were  pigeons going  in and  out, and parachutists still dangling from  buildings, dead bodies.' Sweeney  was supposed to turn in Herouvillette,  but he missed the  turn, wandered about for  an hour, finally found the right road, and set off for Ranville and the regiment.

One hundred  yards down  the road,  he saw  a dark  shape ahead. Motioning for a quiet, careful advance, he moved towards it. There was a clang of a steel  door, indicating a German  armoured vehicle ahead.  Sweeney and his  men had practised for  exactly  this situation  during  the years  at  Bulford. Sweeney  pulled  a grenade,  threw  it,  and  started  running  back  towards  Herouvillette, while Corporal Porter provided covering fire with his Bren gun.

Sweeney says, 'now the other chap was  a big, slow farm lad who couldn't  really run at all. He had  never done anything athletic and  as we were going down  the road, he passed me, which I felt very upset about, this chap passing me. I said, "Here, private, wait for me". It seemed  to me to be quite wrong that  he should be racing past me down the road.'

The Germans, meanwhile,  had sprung to  life. Tracer bullets  were whizzing past Sweeney and the private. Porter kept blazing away with his Bren. Sweeney and the private  ducked  behind  a  building to  wait  for  Porter,  but the  fire-fight continued and Sweeney decided he had  to report back to Howard, with  or without Porter. Howard confessed to Sweeney that  as he had listened to the  fire-fight, his thought had been 'My God, there goes the last of my subalterns'.

Sweeney told Howard that there was no point in heading down the road.  'Wherever the regiment had got to it  hasn't gone down the road towards  Herouvillette and I've just run  into an armoured  car and lost  Corporal Porter.' Howard  agreed, saying that they would  go back the other  way and find the  regiment. They did, and discovered that they  had never been lost:  the regiment had camped  for the night in a different  location from the one  Howard had been told  about. He had marched near it twice in the last two hours. It was 0300 hours.

When Howard  reported to  battalion headquarters,  to his  great delight  he saw Brian Friday and Tony Hooper. They told  him of how they had realised they  were at the  wrong bridge,  how Hooper  had become  a prisoner  and was then freed as Friday killed his  captors with his  Sten gun. They  had set off  cross-country, through swamps  and over  bogs, hiding  in barns,  engaging in  fire-fights with German patrols, joining up with  paratroopers, finally making it to  Ranville. D Company  now had  twenty-two more  men, and  two more  officers, including   his second-in-command. Howard reorganised the company into three platoons, under the three remaining officers.

By 0400, the platoon commanders had put their men into German bunks, then  found beds in a chateau for themselves. After two hours of sleep they were on the road by 0630. When it came to the road junction and the left turn towards  Escoville, there was Corporal Porter sitting on the side of the road with his Bren gun.  He looked at Sweeney and said, 'Where did you get to, sir?' Sweeney apologised  but explained that he really had to get back and report.

D Company moved on  towards Escoville when they  suddenly came under very  heavy fire. They took  some casualties before  setting out cross-country,  and finally got to the farm Howard had picked as his company headquarters. He put his  three platoons into position and they immediately came under mortar, SPV, tank, sniper and artillery fire. They were being attacked by the 2nd Panzer Grenadiers of von Luck's 125th Regiment of the  21st Panzer Division. 'And these  people', Sweeney is frank to  say, 'were a  different kettle of  fish to the  people we had  been fighting  at  the  bridges'.  Casualties were  heavy,  but  D  Company held  its position.

About  1100  hours,  Howard  started to  make  another  round  of his  platoons. Sweeney's was the first  stop. Howard began studying  the enemy with his  German binoculars, 'then there was a  zip and I was knocked  out'. He had a hole  right through his helmet, and there was enough  blood to convince the men that he  was mortally wounded.[3] --- [3] Howard's helmet, complete  with bullet-holes front and  back, is now in  the     museum at Pegasus Bridge. He still bears the scar.

When that word went around in Sweeney's platoon, the men's reaction was to start organising patrols  to find  and kill  the sniper  who had  shot their Major. In relating this incident, Tappenden commented:  'Every man in the company  admired Major Howard more  than almost anyone  alive. He was  a man who  knew that if he couldn't  do  it, you  couldn't  do it,  and  you weren't  asked  to do  it.  We worshipped   him  and   we  wanted   revenge'.  Fortunately,   Howard   regained consciousness within a half hour - he  had only been creased - and told  the men to hold their positions.

By mid-afternoon, the Germans had pushed forward their attack, to the point that there were German tanks between Hooper's platoon and the other two. Orders  came down from battalion to withdraw to Herouvillette. The retreat was carried out in fairly good order, considering the pressure and considering that Howard had lost nearly half his fighting strength in half a day.

Parr and Bailey  covered the retreat.  When they pulled  back behind a  chateau, Parr gasped out to the Padre standing there with the wounded, 'Let's get  going. They are right behind us.' The Padre replied that he was going to stay with  the wounded, be taken prisoner with them, so that he could be with them in their POW camp.  Bailey  and  Parr  organised  some  of  the  men,  found  some improvised stretchers, and carried the wounded back to Herouvillette. 'It wasn't far'. Parr says, 'only three-quarters of a mile'.

When they got there, the rest of the  men were lined up in the ditch all  facing the  direction from  which the  Germans would  be attacking.  'And the  sergeant major, almost with tears in his eyes,  was striding up and down and saying  in a great booming voice, "Well done, lads. Well done. Wait till the bastards come at us this time. We'll mow 'em down. I'm proud of you. Well done." ' It was a scene more reminiscent of World War I than World War II.

When the Germans  did come, D  Company mowed them  down as if  it was the Battle ofMons all  over again.  But that  only highlighted  the transformation that had taken place in D Company's  role. On June 6 it  had been at the cutting  edge of tactical innovation and technological possibilities.  On June 7 it was  fighting with the  same tactics  ordinary infantry  companies used  throughout the  First World War.

Howard set up  headquarters in Herouvillette,  and the company  stayed there for four days. They were always under attack by mortar and artillery fire, sometimes having to fight off tanks and infantry. By the end of four days, they were  down to less than fifty fighting men.

The company moved twice more, then settled down into defensive positions it  was to hold  for almost  two months.  'The only  thing we  could do  was to send out fighting  patrols every  night to  bring back  prisoners', Howard  says. On  one patrol he  took with  Wally Parr,  they found  themselves in  the area where the Battle of Breville  had just been  fought. In the  moonlight they could  see the scattered corpses  of men  who had  been killed  by an  artillery concentration. Howard and Parr found one  group of six men, sitting  in a circle in their  half -completed slit-trench, playing cards. They were still sitting up, holding their cards, and they had no bullet or shrapnel wounds. But they were all dead, killed by concussion.

During this period, Howard says, 'the  biggest problem I had was keeping  up the morale of the troops because we had always got the impression that we would soon be withdrawn from Normandy to come back and refit in the UK for another airborne operation'. After all, the glider pilots had been withdrawn and were already  in England.

Another morale problem came from the constant shelling. 'Chaps began to go  bomb -happy', Howard says.

At first many of us tended  to regard it as a form  of cowardice         and we were highly critical. I remember that I tended to take  a         very tough and almost unfeeling line about it. But after a time,         when  we began  to see  some of  our best  and most   courageous         comrades going under,  we soon changed  our minds. We  could see         that it was a real sickness. Men would hide away and go  berserk         during bombardments, and  they became petrified  during attacks.         They could not be used for patrols, or even sentry duty, and the         only answer was to hand  them over to the Medical  Officer, who,         once  he  was satisfied  it  was a  genuine  case, had  the  man         evacuated as  a casualty.  It was  pathetic to  see good  men go         down.

Howard himself almost went under. By D-Day plus four, he had gone for five  days with  almost  no sleep,  and  his losses  in  Escoville and  Herouvillette  were heartrending.  'I  felt  terribly  depressed  and  pessimistic',  Howard admits, 'feeling quite  sure that  the Allied  bridgehead was  going to  collapse on our vulnerable left flank.  However, once the  CO and the  MO persuaded me  what was wrong, with quiet threats  of evacuation, I luckily  shook myself out of  it. It was an awful experience.'

Howard learned a lesson from the  experience. He got regular, if short,  periods of sleep for himself, and he saw to it that the platoon leaders arranged regular rest  periods for  everyone in  turn, especially  after attack  or shell   fire. Another  manifestation of  the pressure  was some  self-inflicted wounds,  shots through the leg or  foot 'usually said to  have occurred when cleaning  weapons. They were very  difficult to prove.'  Howard found that  keeping up morale  when casualties  are  heavy is  always  difficult and  he  did what  he  could. 'Good discipline and  esprit de  corps goes  a long  way towards  overcoming it, but I found keeping the men well occupied was as good a cure as any. Active aggressive patrolling, sniping parties, marches behind the line and above all keep everyone in the picture. Glean all  you can from HQ by  way of information about how  the battle is going and have regular meetings with the men to pass it on.'

Howard went to HQ not  only to find out what  was going on, but to  do all those little things a good company commander  does. He made certain there were  plenty of cigarettes, for example, with an  extra supply after a battle or  a shelling. He also ensured the prompt arrival and distribution of the mail ('Essential  for maintaining good morale'), sending runners back to HQ for the mail if he thought he could  save a  few minutes.  Getting fresh  bread was another morale-booster, though the first shipment did not arrive until about D plus 25. 'I was astounded over how much we longed for it.'

Cleaning weapons became almost an  obsession. First thing in the  morning, after the dawn  stand to  and breakfast,  everything came  out - rifles, machine-guns, Piats, mortars,  grenades, ammunition  - and  everything was  cleaned, oiled and inspected. Many of the men had a Schmeisser by this time.

During this period, Howard says, 'one thing  I could never get used to were  the smells of battle. Worst of these was dead and putrefying bodies. The men, friend and foe, were buried, but there was dead livestock everywhere just rotting away. In the middle of summer it was  hell. At one chateau a stable full  of wonderful racehorses was caught in a burning building. The appalling smell from that place spread over a very wide area, and it was sickening. We eventually dealt with  it by loads of lime, but you can imagine the flies that pyre attracted.'

But the  biggest morale  problem of  all was  a nagging  question in every man's mind: 'Why are  we being wasted  like this? Surely  there must be  other bridges between here and Berlin that will have to be captured intact.'

It is indeed a mystery why the  War Office squandered D Company, a unique  group in  the  British  army. Huge  sums  had  been spent  on  its  training, and  its combination of training, skills, and hand-picked officers was unsurpassed.

Despite  all this,  the War  Office sacrificed  D Company  to the  German  guns. Sweeney was wounded, Friday was wounded, Hooper was wounded - by August none  of D Company's original officers were left, save Howard himself. All the  sergeants and  the  sergeant-major  were gone.  Thornton  had  a leg  wound  and  had been evacuated; so had Parr.

On D  plus 11,  Howard was  wounded again,  receiving shrapnel  in his back. His driver took him  back to an  aid post where  a surgeon removed  it, and when  he finished, the doctor told Howard to lie there for a while. Mortar rounds started coming in, and everybody  ran for cover. Howard  looked around. He was  alone in the farmhouse  operating-room. He  jumped off  the table,  put on  his shirt and battle smock,  and went  outside. Finding  his driver  taking shelter  under the jeep, he told him, 'Let's get back to the company. It's quieter there than it is here.'

Howard's return  to the  front lines  was followed  by some  confusion as to his whereabouts. All  the documentation  at the  aid post  showed that  he had  been evacuated to England, and as a  result his mail was diverted to  hospital there. The daily letters he had been getting from Joy suddenly stopped coming. This was the period when  Vis and V2s  were raining down  on England and  he was tortured with thoughts other death and the loss of his children. That experience,  Howard says, 'nearly sent me round the bend'.

It was worse for Joy. She got a telegram from the War Office which was  supposed to read, 'Your husband has suffered a mortar wound and is in hospital'. In  fact it  read, 'Your  husband has  suffered a  mortal wound  and is  in hospital'.  A frantic Joy was told that he was in such-and-such hospital. She called there and was told he never arrived.  No one knew where he  was. For two weeks before  the matter was worked out, and they started receiving letters from each other again, John and Joy suffered terribly.

Sergeant Hickman  was fighting  across from  D Company  once again.  He gives  a description of what it was like from the German point of view:

There was man-to-man fighting, fighting in the rubble along  the         streets. You didn't know who was running in front of you and who         was  running behind  you, you  couldn't recognise  anything  and         everybody ran.  In the  daytime we  took position,  and night we         moved either to the left, to  the right, back. I had a  map case         in my belt. The  map made no difference  to me because I  didn't         know where I was. So you were moved two kilometres to the  left,         two kilometres to the right, three kilometres forwards, or  back         again. Every day you counted  your men, one section had  two men         left, another three. I was a platoon commander with five men  to         command.

On  September 2,  while trying  to swim  the Orne  River, Hickman  was  wounded, captured, interrogated, and sent on to a POW camp in England.

Von Luck was  also having a  bad time. Every  two or three  days he would launch armoured attacks, but  every time his  tanks moved, observers  in balloons would spot him,  radio to  the big  ships offshore  and the  planes overhead, and down would come naval gunfire and strafing Spitfires.

On July 18, there  was the biggest bombardment  von Luck ever experienced,  from bombers, naval  warships, and  artillery. This  was part  of operation Goodwood, designed to break through the German  lines, capture Caen, and drive on  towards Paris. As the  barrage moved past  him, von Luck  set out for  the front on  his motorcycle.  He arrived  at a  battery of  smoking 88mm  guns pointing  skyward, commanded by a Luftwaffe  major. Off to his  right, less than a  kilometre away, von Luck could see twenty-five British tanks moving forward. He pointed them out to the  battery commander  and said,  'Major, depress  your guns  and kill those tanks'. The major refused.  He said he was  a Luftwaffe officer, and  his target was bombers, not tanks. Von Luck repeated his order. Same response.

Von Luck pulled his  pistol, pointed it between  the major's eyes at  a six-inch range, and said,  'Major, in one  minute you are  either a dead  man or you will have won a medal'.  The major depressed his  guns, started shooting, and  within minutes had crippled twenty-five British tanks. Shortly thereafter, Monty called off operation Goodwood.

In late August, 21st Panzer Division was pulled out of the Normandy battle.  Von Luck and his men were  sent over to the Rhone  Valley to meet the threat  of the invading forces in southern France.

At the end of August the British broke through and had the Germans on the run. D Company was  part of  the pursuit.  It reached  a village  near the Seine, where Howard established his headquarters in  a school and received the  schoolmaster. The Frenchman said he wanted to show some appreciation for being liberated. 'But I've got nothing of any value that I can give you', he confessed to Howard. 'The Germans took everything of value before they left, in prams and God knows  what, but the one thing I can give you is my daughter.'

And bringing out his eighteen-year-old  daughter, he offered her to  Howard. 'It was  so  pathetic',  Howard  remembers. He  declined,  but  he  also thinks  the schoolmaster passed  his daughter  on down  to the  other ranks  - and that they accepted the gift.

The following day, on the Seine itself, Howard came into a village 'where we saw all these girls with all  their hair cut off and  tied to a lamp post.  It was a gruesome  sight, really.'  He wondered  if that  kind of  humiliation was  being handed out  to the  prostitutes back  in Benouville,  who had  been as  eager to please the British troops  as they had the  Germans. Or to the  young mothers in the  maternity hospital.  Whose babies  could those  be, anyway,  with all  able -bodied Frenchmen off in slave labour or POW camps?

Howard thought it unfair of the French  to take out all their frustrations on  a single segment of society. Almost everyone in France had got through the  German occupation by doing  whatever it was  that he or  she did quietly  and without a fuss. One of the  things young girls do  is establish romantic attachments  with young boys,  and there  were only  young German  boys around.  The girls  had no choice, but to Howard's dismay they had  to bear the brunt of the first  release of pent-up outrage  following the liberation  celebration. Those Frenchmen  with guilty consciences did most of the hair cutting.

On September 5, after three months of continuous combat, D Company was withdrawn from the lines. It travelled by truck to Arromanches, was driven out to Mulberry Harbour, climbed  up scramble  nets aboard  ships, and  set sail for Portsmouth. Then by truck to Bulford, where the members of the company moved back into their old rooms and took stock of their losses. Howard was the only officer still with them. All  the sergeants  and most  of the  corporals were  gone. D  Company had fallen from its D-Day strength of 181 to 40.

CHAPTER TEN

D-Day plus three months to D-Day plus forty years

After one night at Bulford, the company went on leave. Howard drove up to Oxford for a reunion with his family and  a glorious rest. On the morning of  September 17, he relates, T got up and saw all these planes milling around with gliders on them, and of course  I knew that something  was on'. The planes  were headed for Arnhem. Howard knew that Jim Wallwork and the other pilots were up there, and he silently wished him good luck.

Howard did not know it, but Sergeant Thornton was also up there, with a stick of paratroopers. When Thornton was evacuated from Normandy, he had a quick recovery from his wound. Then, rather  than wait for the Ox  and Bucks to return, he  had transferred to the  1st Airborne Division,  gone through his  jump training, and was going  in with  Colonel John  Frost's 2nd  Battalion. Thornton fought beside Frost at Arnhem bridge for four days, and was captured with him.

Howard could hardly  imagine such a  thing, but none  of those gliders  overhead carried coup  de main  parties, not  for the  bridge at  Arnhem, nor  the one at Nijmegen. It  seems possible  that had  D Company  been available, someone would have thought to lay on  coup de main parties for  the bridges. If they had  been there to take the bridge at  Nijmegen, the American paratroopers would not  have had  to fight  a desperate  battle for  it. Rather,  they could  have set  up  a defensive perimeter, with the  strength to spare to  send men over to  Arnhem to help out. At Arnhem,  with glider help, Frost  could have held both  ends of his bridge, greatly simplifying his problems.

But it was not to be. D Company had not been pulled out of Normandy until it was an exhausted, battered, remnant of its old self, and evidently no other  company could  take its  place. Certainly  there were  no coup  de main  parties in  the gliders over Howard's head. He watched  them straighten out and then head  east, and he again wished them good luck.

In late September, 1944, ten days after Arnhem, Howard reported back to  Bulford and set out to rebuild D Company, brought up to full strength by reinforcements. Howard's job was to make the recruits into genuine airborne soldiers. He started with basics -  physical and weapon  training. By mid-November,  he was ready  to take the  recruits on  street-fighting exercises,  to get  his men accustomed to live ammunition. He selected an area  of Birmingham, arranged for bunks for  the men, and returned to Bulford.

On Friday, November 13,  Howard decided to spend  the night with Joy,  as Oxford was  on the  route to  Birmingham. He  brought with  him two  Oxford  residents. Corporal Stock and his new second-in-command. Captain Osborne, together with his batman. Although  Stock was  his driver,  Howard insisted  on taking  the wheel, because, although a good driver, Stock did not drive fast enough.

At about  5:30, just  as dusk  was falling,  they met  a Yank  convoy of six-ton trucks on a  narrow, twisting road.  They were on  a right hand  bend. Suddenly, with no warning, Howard  'saw this six-ton truck  in front of me.  He'd lost his place in the convoy and he was  obviously leap-frogging up, and it was all  over so quickly.'

They had a head-on crash. Howard was jammed behind the steering-wheel, and  both legs, his right hip, and his left knee were smashed up. Osborne suffered similar injuries, but the other two escaped with cuts and bruises.

Howard was taken to hospital in Tidworth, where he was on the critical list  for nearly six weeks. Joy made many  long journeys to visit him. In  December, using his  connections  with  the  Oxford police,  Howard  got  himself  moved to  the Wingfield hospital in Oxford. He remained there until March, 1945.

D Company went on to fight in the  Battle of the Bulge, then led the way  on the Rhine crossing and participated in the  drive to the Baltic. Most of  the glider pilots were at Arnhem, then flew again in the Rhine crossing.

When  Howard came  out of  hospital, he  was using  crutches. By  the time   his convalescent  leave was  nearly over,  so was  the war  in Europe.  But when  he reported for duty, he learned that the  Ox and Bucks were going to the  Far East for another glider operation. The  battalion commander asked Howard if  he could get fit in time.  It seemed the authorities  wanted to promote him  and make him second-in-command of the battalion.

Howard immediately started a training programme on a track near his home. On the second day of trying to run laps, his right hip seized up and the leg went dead. He had not allowed his injuries to heal properly, and the strain on the hip from the running caused  it to jam,  which stopped the  nerves running down  the leg. Howard went  back into  hospital for  further operations.  When he  got out this time, the war in Asia was over.

He wanted to stay in the army, make  a career of it, 'but before I knew  where I was I was kicked out of the army, invalided out. My feet just didn't touch'.

Howard went into the Civil  Service, first with the National  Savings Committee, then with the Ministry of Food, and finally with the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1946 he had an audience with the King at Buckingham Palace. On June 6, 1954, the tenth anniversary of D-Day,  he received a Croix  de Guerre avec Paime  from the French government, which had already  renamed the bridge. From that  day onward, its name has been 'Pegasus Bridge'. Later the road between the bridge and the LZ was named 'Esplanade Major John Howard'.

Howard served as a consultant for Darryl  Zanuck in the making of the film,  The Longest Day. Played by Richard Todd, he had a prominent role in the film,  which of course delighted him. He was  less happy about Zanuck's penchant for  putting drama ahead  of accuracy:  Zanuck insisted  that there  had to  be explosives in place under the bridge, and it was  he, not Howard, who prevailed at the  bridge on this occasion. In the film, the sappers are seen pulling out explosives  from under the bridge and throwing them into the canal. Zanuck also romanticised  the arrival  of Lovat  and his  Commandos, quite  falsely depicting  their  bagpipes playing as they crossed Pegasus Bridge.

Howard retired in 1974, and he and  Joy live in a small but comfortable  home in the tiny village of Burcot, about eight miles from Oxford. Terry and Penny  live close enough for  the grandchildren to  pay regular visits.  The Howards do  not travel much, but John manages to  return to Pegasus Bridge almost every  year on June 6. His  hip and legs  are so mangled  that he needs  a walking-stick to get around, and then only moves with  great pain, but all his enormous  energy flows out again when he sees his bridge, and greets Madame Gondree, and starts talking to those  of his  men who  have made  it over  for this  particular anniversary. Sweeney and Bailey are usually there,  and sometimes Wood and Parr and  Gray and always some of the others.

Von Luck spent the remainder of  the autumn of 1944 fighting General  Le Clerc's French armoured division. In mid-December he was involved in the fighting at the southern end  of the  Battle of  the Bulge,  and was  surprised at  how much the Americans  had  improved  since  February, 1943,  when  he  had  fought them  at Kasserine Pass. In the spring of 1945, 21st Panzer went to the Eastern front, to join in the defence  of Berlin. In late  April, by then encircled,  von Luck was ordered to break through the Russian lines, then hold it open so that Ninth Army could get out and surrender to the Americans. Before attacking the Russians, von Luck called what was left of his regiment together, and gave a small talk.

'We are here now', he began, 'and I think that it is more or less the end of the world. Please  forget about  the Thousand  Year Reich.  Please forget  all about that. You will ask. Why  then are we going to  fight again? I tell you,  there's only one reason you  are fighting, it is  for your families, your  grounds, your homeland. Always think  about what will  happen when the  Russians overcome your wives, your little daughters, your village, your homeland.'

The men fought until they were out  of ammunition, and von Luck told them,  'Now it's finished, you are free to go  wherever you want'. Von Luck himself went  to report to the  commander of the  Ninth Army, and  was captured by  the Russians. They sent him to a POW camp in the Caucasus, where he spent five years as a coal miner. In 1951 he moved to  Hamburg, where he became a highly  successful coffee importer.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the  Swedish royal military academy has  brought von Luck and Howard together to give talks on Normandy battles and leadership.  They hit it off  from the first,  and have grown  to like each  other more with  each annual appearance. Today they could only be described as very good friends.  'So much for war', Howard comments.

Sergeant Hickman spent the  remainder of the war  in England as a  POW. He liked the country so much that when he was shipped home, he applied for a visa. It was granted, and he emigrated to England, changing his name to Henry, and got a job, married a British woman, and settled down. One day in the early 1960s one of his friends at work  told him that  there was a  British parachute reunion  going on that night, and as an old  paratrooper himself he might want to  attend. Hickman did. There he saw Billy Gray, the same man he had faced at 0020 hours on June 6, 1944, in front of the cafe, with his machine-gun blazing away.

Hickman did  not recognise  Gray, but  during the  evening Gray  pulled out some photographs of Pegasus Bridge and started  to explain the coup de main.  Hickman looked at the photos.  'I know that bridge',  he said. He and  Gray got talking. Later they exchanged visits, and a friendship developed. Over the years it  grew closer and deeper, and today they are intimates. They kid each other about  what lousy marksmen they were in their youth. 'So much for war.'

General Sir  Nigel Poett,  KCB, DSO,  had a  distinguished military  career. Now retired, he lives near Salisbury. Major Nigel Taylor, MC, is a solicitor  living near Malvern.  Richard Todd  continues to  pursue his  highly successful  acting career. Major Dennis Fox,  MBE, soldiered on for  ten years after the  war, then became an executive with ITV. Colonel H. J. Sweeney, MC, also stayed in the army until he was fifty-five; today he is the Director-General of the Battersea Dogs' Home near Old  Windsor, and the  head of the  Ox and Bucks  regimental veterans' association.

Major R. A. A. Smith, MC, became a director of both Shell and BP in India; he is now retired but runs tours to India. Colonel David Wood, MBE, soldiered on until retirement.  He organised  staff college  visits to  Pegasus, where  Howard  and Taylor would give lectures on what happened. Today David lives in retirement  in Devon.

Staff  Sergeant  Oliver  Boland,  Croix  de  Guerre,  lives  in  retirement near Stratford-upon-Avon.  Jack  Bailey  stayed  in  the  army,  where  he  became  a regimental sergeant major. Today he is head clerk in a London firm and lives  in Catford, near Wally Parr. Dr John Vaughan has a medical practice in Devon.

Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork, DFM, worked  as a salesman for the first  ten years after the war. In 1956 he emigrated  to British Columbia, where today he runs  a small livestock farm on  the edge of the  mountains east of Vancouver.  From his porch, and from his  picture window, Jim has  a grand view of  a valley dropping away before him. The kind  of view a glider pilot  gets on his last approach  to the LZ.

Corporal Wally Parr  wanted to stay  in the army,  but with a  wife and children decided he had to get out. He returned  to Catford, where one of his sons is  in his window-cleaning business with him. Another son is a promising musician.

To my knowledge, there are no intact Horsa gliders flying today. Zanuck got  the blueprints and built one for The Longest  Day, but was told by the Air  Ministry that  the design  was inherently  bad and  the craft  not air-worthy.  Therefore Zanuck could not fly it  across the Channel, as he  had hoped to do, but  had to dismantle the thing, bring it over by ship, and put it together again in France.

The model of the  bridge and surrounding area,  the one that Howard  and his men studied so intently in Tarrant Rushton,  is today in the Airborne Forces  Museum at Aldershot.

Benouville has a few new houses, some development, but basically it is as it was on June 6, 1944. So is Ranville,  where Den Brotheridge is buried, under a  tree in the churchyard.

The Gondree  cafe remains,  changed only  by the  portraits on  the wall of John Howard, Jim Wallwork, Nigel Taylor, and  the others who came to liberate  France and the Gondrees.

Madame Gondree presides over her tiny cafe  in a grand fashion. To see her  on a June  6,  surrounded  by her  many  friends  from D  Company  and  from the  7th Battalion, chatting  away gaily,  remembering the  great day  however many years ago, is to  see a happy  woman. Before he  died in the  late 1960s, her  husband Georges made  many close  British friends,  Howard especially.  Jack Bailey went duck hunting with Gondree each year.

When asked to describe life during  the occupation, Madame Gondree lets loose  a torrent of words,  paragraphs or incidents  separated by heartfelt  cries of'Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!' She  still hates the Germans  and will not allow  them into her cafe today. When  Zanuck was shooting  The Longest Day,  he wanted to  have half -dressed  German soldiers  come leaping  out of  the windows  of the  cafe as  D Company charged across the bridge. Madame screamed, insisting to Zanuck that she had never, never had Germans sleeping in her house, and that he absolutely  must take that scene out of the script. Unlike Howard, Madame got her way. The  scene was dropped.

When Howard goes to the cafe today, he sometimes brings Hans von Luck with  him. Howard has told Madame that von Luck might look suspiciously like a German,  but that he is in fact a Swede.

The canal has been widened by some four or five feet. The chateau stands intact. The machine-gun pillbox that Jack Bailey  knocked out and John Howard used  as a CP is still there, forming the foundation  of the house lived in by the  man who operates the swing-bridge. The bunkers are all filled in. But the anti-tank  gun and its  emplacement, where  Wally Parr  had so  much fun,  remains. Three stone markers are placed on the sites where the three gliders crashed.

The river bridge is  a new one, built  since the war. The  canal bridge, Pegasus Bridge, is still there.

EPILOGUE

The significance of Pegasus Bridge

Pegasus  Bridge today  plays only  a minor  role in  the Norman  economy. It  is lightly used, and for local purposes exclusively, because all the  long-distance or heavy commercial traffic  uses the new autoroute  that runs from Le  Havre to Caen to Bayeux. But on June 6,  the bridge recalls its former glory, the  day on which  it  was the  most  important bridge  in  Normandy. The  tourists  and the veterans  come in  increasing numbers  each year  to visit  the museum  and  the Gondree  cafe, the  bridge, the  markers designating  the landing  sites of  the gliders. They are keenly interested in  the operation, and want to know  how the British did it.

There was  no single  key to  the success  of Howard's  coup de  main, or to the success  of the  5th Para  Brigade in  providing relief  just when  it was  most needed. Success in this case truly had many parents. John Howard stands out,  of course, but without  Jim Wallwork, Howard  might well have  come to earth  miles from the bridge,  or even on  the wrong river.  And so it  goes, down the  line. Gale's contribution was  absolutely critical, but  then so was  Poett's. Without the  information  George   Gondree  fed  the   British,  and  without   the  air reconnaissance photographs, D  Company might well  have failed. If  Nigel Taylor had not got his company into Benouville in time, or fought so magnificently once there, all would  have been for  nought. So too  for Sergeant Thornton,  without whose Piat all would have been in  vain. If Jack Bailey had not knocked  out the pillbox, Howard could hardly have taken, much less held, the bridge.

There were, in short, many heroes,  each making a key contribution to  the final success. If any one  of these men -  and in fact many  others - had failed,  the mission as a  whole would have  failed. Rather than  single out individuals  for praise, therefore, it is more appropriate to attempt an analysis of the  factors in the British success.

TRAINING: It would be hard to find any company in the entire history of  warfare that was  better trained  for a  single operation  than D  company was on D-Day. Major Howard had  laid the base  in 1942 and  1943 by getting  his men into  the fittest physical  condition possible,  teaching them  all the  skills of  combat infantry, forcing them to become accustomed to fighting at night, drilling  into them patterns of quick response and  immediate reactions. Then in the spring  of 1944, he put them through the drill of capturing the bridges innumerable  times. When they went into the operation, the men of D Company were far better  trained for the battle that ensued than their opponents were. And their esprit de  corps was as good as that to be found anywhere in the British army.

PLANNING  AND  INTELLIGENCE:   The  quality  of   British  planning,  like   the intelligence  on  which  it  was based,  was  outstanding.  Possibly  no company commander in any invading force has  ever known so much about his  opposition as John Howard knew. On the basis of this intelligence. General Gale came up with a plan  that was  both highly  professional and  brilliant. Poett  added his   own touches to his part of  the plan, as did Howard.  It could not have been  better conceived.

EXECUTION:  The  execution of  the  operation was  somewhat  less than  perfect. Because of a navigation error, one-sixth of Howard's fighting strength never got into the battle.  Howard's emphasis on  having his platoon  commanders lead from the front cost him dearly - in  retrospect it certainly seems a mistake to  have Lieutenants Brotheridge  and Smith  lead their  platoons over  the bridge, or to have  Lieutenant  Wood  lead  his platoon  in  clearing  out  the trenches.  The paratroop  drop  was much  too  scattered, causing  a  delay in  the  arrival of reinforcements  at critical  moments. Coordination  between ground  and air  for strafing and bombing support was sadly lacking. Radio communications were poor.

The things  that went  right were,  obviously, of  more significance.  First and foremost, the achievement of the  glider pilots was crucial, unprecedented,  and magnificent. Second, the way in which D Company recovered from the shock of  the landing and went about its drill exactly as planned was outstanding. Third,  the night-fighting and street-fighting ability of  D Company proved far superior  to that of the enemy. Fourth, although  the paras may have been understrength  when they  arrived, and  a bit  late at  that, they  did get  there in  time and  did outfight the Germans, even though the Germans heavily outnumbered and  outgunned them. Fifth, although Howard lost a majority of his officers and NCOs early  on, he had  the company  so well  trained that  corporals and  privates were able to undertake critical missions on their own intiative.

SURPRISE: Without  surprise, obviously,  there could  have been  no success. Any kind of a warning, even just two  or three minutes before 0016, would have  been sufficient  for the  Germans. Had  Major Schmidt's  garrison been  alert when  D Company  landed,  every man  in  the three  gliders  could have  been  killed by machine-gun fire before any got out. Surprise was complete, both with regard  to method and target.

LUCK: Give me generals who are lucky said Napoleon, and so says every  commander since. Howard and the British had more than their share of good luck. The  best, probably, was  the bomb  that did  not explode  when it  hit the bridge. (One is tempted to think that this was not  just luck; it is at least possible  that the bomb had  been deliberately  sabotaged by  a French  slave labourer  in a German munitions factory.) It certainly was good luck that Thornton's Piat bomb set off the explosions inside the tank near the T junction. And it was wonderfully lucky that Hitler did not release the 21st Panzer Division to attack until after  noon on D-Day.

METHOD: In his May 2  orders to Howard, Poett had  said that the capture of  the bridges would depend on 'surprise, speed,  and dash for success'. In the  event, Howard and  D Company  showed all  three characteristics  in carrying  out their assignment. What did it  all mean? Because the  operation was a success,  we can never know its full significance; only if  it had failed would we know the  real value of Pegasus Bridge.  As it is, any  assessment of the operation's  worth is speculative. But then speculation is the secret vice of every history buff,  and in any case is unavoidable when passing judgements.

Suppose, then,  that Major  Schmidt had  managed to  blow the  bridges. In  that event, even if Howard's men held both sides of both waterways, the easy movement that the  British enjoyed  over the  bridges would  have been impossible. Howard could not  have brought  Fox's platoon  over from  the river  to Benouville, and Thornton would not have  been by the T  junction with his Piat.  The most likely outcome, in  that case,  would have  been a  failure to  hold the  ground in the Benouville-Le Port area, with the  resulting isolation of the 6th  Airborne east of the Orne. Had German tanks come down to the bridge from Benouville, the enemy surely would  have repulsed  the invaders.  In that  case, with  the bridges  in German  hands,  the  6th  Airborne  would  have  been  isolated,  in  a position comparable to that of the 1st Airborne later in the war in Arnhem.

The loss of a single division, even a full-strength, elite division like the 6th Airborne, could by itself hardly have been decisive in a battle that raged  over a sixty-mile front and involved hundreds of thousands of men. But 6th Airborne's mission,  like  the  division itself,  was  special.  Elsenhower and  Montgomery counted on General Gale to hold back the Germans on the left, making him the man most responsible for  preventing the ultimate  catastrophe of panzer  formations loose on the beaches, rolling them up one by one. Gale was able to hold off  the German armour, thanks in critical part to the possession of Pegasus Bridge.

Denying the  use of  the bridges  to the  Germans was  important in  shaping the ensuing campaign. As  Hitler began bringing  armoured divisions from  the Pas de Calais to Normandy, he found it impossible to launch a single,  well-coordinated blow.  There  were two  major  reasons. First,  Allied  air harassment  and  the activities of  the French  Resistance slowed  the movement  to the  battlefield. Second, the only area available  to the Germans to form  up for such a blow  was the area between the Dives and the  Ornc. The natural line of attack would  have been  over Pegasus  Bridge, down  to Ouistreham,  then straight  west along  the beaches. But because the 6th Airborne controlled Pegasus Bridge, such  divisions as the  2nd Panzer,  the 1st  SS Panzer,  and the  famous Panzer  Lehr, had been forced to go around bombed-out Caen, then  enter the battle to the west of  that city. As a consequence, they went  into battle piecemeal and against the  front, not  the  flank, of  the  main British  forces.  In the  seven-week  battle that followed, the Germans attacked again and  again, using up the cream and  much of the bulk of their armoured units in the process.

At a minimum, then,  failure at Pegasus Bridge  would have made D-Day  much more costly to the Allies, and especially to the 6th Airborne Division. At a maximum, failure at Pegasus Bridge might have meant failure for the invasion as a whole.

There was one other matter of significance about Pegasus Bridge that needs to be mentioned. Dwight Eisenhower used to say that no totalitarian dictatorship could ever match the fighting fury of an aroused democracy. That was certainly true in this case. The Germans provided their  men with better weapons than the  British had available; they also put more men into the battle. But with the exception of a handful of fanatic Nazis, none of those wearing German uniforms in and  around Pegasus Bridge (no matter  what country they came  from) wanted to be  there. In the case of D Company  and the 5th Para Brigade,  every man who was there  was a volunteer who  wanted desperately  to be  there. In  addition, the  Germans were badly hampered by the mistrust that prevailed among their high command. Jealousy and suspicion are  common in all  high commands in  war, of course,  but nowhere else did they go so far as  in Nazi Germany. The direct consequence for  Pegasus Bridge was  the holding  back of  21st Panzer  until after  Hitler had  woken, a disastrous delay.

By contrast, the British high command trusted General Gale and allowed him  wide leeway  in meeting  his objectives.  Gale trusted  Poett and  Kindersley.  Poett trusted  Pine  Coffin;  they  all  trusted  John  Howard;  Howard  trusted   his subalterns. In every instance, superiors  left details of operations to  the man on the spot.

The common soldiers of the Third Reich were almost incapable of acting on  their own. Deprived  of their  officers and  NCOs, they  tended to  fade away into the night. Whereas British soldiers - men like Jack Bailey and Wally Parr and  Billy Gray and Wagger Thornton - were eager to seize the initiative, quick to  exploit an opportunity, ready to act on their own if need be.

It is, therefore, possible to claim  that the British won the Battle  of Pegasus Bridge primarily because the  army they sent into  the fray was better  than the enemy army,  and it  was better  precisely because  it represented  a democratic rather than a  totalitarian society. Ultimately,  then, the victory  was one for freedom, won by an army of the free.

Acknowledgements

I wish I could think of an adequate way to express my thanks  to every    person I    interviewed    for     their   hospitality     and  helpfulness.    Without exception,  I   was  welcomed   into homes,  always  offered  a  meal  and/or  a drink,  frequently  invited  to  spend the  night. In  the process  of doing two dozen interviews in England, I got  to see a  great deal of  the country,  which was  fun,  and  to  see   a  great  deal  of   the  British  people,  which  was fascinating. I  stayed  with  old-age pensioners,   with successful businessmen, with solicitors, on grand country  estates, in  East End flats,   in fashionable West End  town houses.  D Company, I  came to realise, came from  every part  of British  society,   with  each  part   making  its  own   contribution  to   the organisation as  a whole. But what impressed me  most was the tangible  evidence of what good use these  men and  women had made  of the freedom  they helped  to preserve for themselves and for us on June 6,1944.

Their friendliness towards me, an unknown  Yank prying into their past, I  shall never  forget. It  has been  a great  privilege and  pleasure to  have had   the opportunity to meet these men and women and to listen to their stories.

Adam Sisman, my editor, provided enthusiasm, energy, and exceptional efficiency, all of which was gratefully and profitably received.

I would  also like  to thank  the University  of New  Orleans and  the Board  of Supervisors of  the LSU  System. In  the autumn  of 1983  the Board granted me a sabbatical leave, which made  it possible for my  wife and me to  live in London and travel on the Continent, and  in Canada, doing the interviews. Without  that sabbatical,  there would  be no  book. My  gratitude to  the University  of  New Orleans and the Board is deep and permanent.