To the men in the glider, it seemed afterward 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 that it was a desperate and 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 to ten seconds. This was the critical moment, the payoff 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-up 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 dead or blind, until he pushed his helmet up and realized that he could see and that he was all right. He felt a wave of relief, and watched with pride as #1 platoon went through its exit drill. Howard hopped out and saw the bridge looming over him, the barbed wire crushed at his feet. There was no firing. He felt exhilarated. “God bless those pilots,” he thought.
Not a word was spoken aloud. 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, whispered, “Come on, lads,” and began running for the bridge.
• • •
At that moment, glider #2 came down, exactly one minute behind #1. Oliver Boland was the pilot. He 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’s glider; as he did so he broke the back off #2 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. He had a bucket of grenades with him, and his Sten, bayonet fixed (the bayonets had been sharpened back at Tarrent Rushton, an overly dramatic gesture on John Howard’s part, many of his chaps 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, “Number three task.” That meant clear the trenches on the northeast side, across 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, #3 glider landed.
Like #1, #3 bounced, streamed its chute, and came back down on its skids with a resounding crash. Dr. 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 nearly half an hour before he came to consciousness.
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 analyzes the event forty years later, “is where the training comes in.” He staggered to his feet, grabbed a Sten gun, and started moving toward the bridge. Half a dozen of his chaps were still trapped inside the crashed glider; one of them drowned in the pond, the only casualty of the landing. It was 0018.
• • •
Back in the Bénouville whorehouse, Private Bonck had just unlaced his boots. On the bridge, Private Romer had just passed his fellow sentry at the midpoint and was approaching the eastern end. Brotheridge and his platoon came rushing up the embankment. As the shot aimed at Howard broke the silence, Romer saw twenty-two British airborne troops, appearing so far as he was concerned literally out of nowhere, in their camouflaged battle smocks, their faces grotesquely blacked, giving the most eerie sensation of a blending of savagery and civilization, the civilization half of it 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, an eighteen-year-old schoolboy who scarcely knew how to fire his rifle.
Romer turned and ran, back toward 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 defense 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 café.
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, 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. He told his driver to stop. He knew immediately that it was a Sten—he says today that the Sten and the Bren both had distinctive rates of fire, easily recognizable, and, he adds, both distinctly inferior to their German counterparts. Grabbing his Schmeisser, Hickman motioned to two of his privates to get on the right 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 the slit trenches on both sides of the bridge into full alert. The privates, all conscripted foreigners, began edging away, but the NCOs, all Germans, opened fire with their MG 34s 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. Just behind him, also running, came Billy Gray, his Bren gun at his hip. Billy also fired at the sentry with the Verey pistol, then began firing toward 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 machine gun.
Gray was standing at the end of the bridge, at the northwest corner. Brotheridge was lying in the middle of the bridge, at the west end. Other men in the section were running onto 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 of all saliva and my tongue was stuck.”
His attempts to yell only made the sticking worse. Parr’s frustration was a terrible thing to behold—Parr without his voice was an impossible thing t
o imagine. His face was a fiery red, even through the burned cork, from the choking and from his anger. With a great effort of will Parr broke his tongue loose and shouted in his great Cockney voice, “COME OUT AND FIGHT, YOU SQUARE-HEADED BASTARDS,” with a very long drawn-out A and the last syllable pronounced “turds.” Pleased with himself, Parr started yelling “Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam,” as he ran the rest of the way over, then turned left to go after the bunkers that were his task.
• • •
The moon emerged from behind the clouds. As it did, Sergeant Hickman had crept to within fifty meters of the bridge. He saw #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 in full pack, they frighten the daylights out of you. And at nighttime 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. Hickman put another clip into his Schmeisser and started spraying the bridge, as Billy popped into the barn on his right. As soon as he got inside, Billy rested his Bren gun on the wall and took a pee.
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.” Hickman decided to get out of there. Motioning to his four privates, he got back in the staff car and sped toward Caen, going the long way around to get to his headquarters, which were only a few kilometers 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 that airborne troops had landed, 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. As Smith got to the other side, he saw a German in the act of throwing a stick grenade at him. As the German turned to leap over the low courtyard wall that ran around the front of the café, 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 Gondrée 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 Gondrée’s head, swung the Sten toward him, and let go a burst. He pointed the Sten too high, so he shattered the window and sent bullets tearing into the wooden beams, but did not hit Gondrée, who beat a hasty retreat, then took his wife and daughters down into the basement.
• • •
When Private Bonck heard the first shots, he pulled on his pants, laced up his boots, buttoned his shirt, grabbed his rifle, and dashed out of the whorehouse onto the street. His comrade was already there; together they ran down to the T-junction. After one look at the fire fight going on, they turned and ran back through Bénouville on the road to Caen. When they were out of breath they stopped, talked over the situation, fired off all their ammunition, and then ran back to Bénouville, 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 orient himself during his short drop, and after a soft landing he undid his harness, gathered himself together, looked around, and realized 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 cornfield and could not see it. Nor could he see any of his chaps. He had set out to find some of his soldiers, especially his wireless operator, when he heard Brotheridge’s Sten go off. That fixed his rendezvous point exactly in his mind and he began walking toward it, as fast as a man could move at night through a cornfield. 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 1st Airborne Division. The colonel of the battalion, Jeffery Pine Coffin, was in the same group of Stirling bombers as Todd—the paras were on their way to reinforce the coup de main party at the bridge.
Todd was supposed to fly in Stirling #36, but as his group 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 #1. “I sort of feebly protested at that,” Todd says, “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 three hundred meters from the river bridge. According to Fox, the real leader in the platoon was Sergeant Thornton. “He was a remarkable man,” Fox says of Wagger Thornton. “In barracks 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. There was a burst of fire from an MG 34. Everyone hit the ground. “Then,” Fox relates, “dear old Thornton, as quick as ever, 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 ‘Easy, Easy, Easy.’ ”
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.
A
t 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 with an oath, “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. Turning to Sweeney, the pilot said, “I’m sorry, I’ve landed about four hundred yards short.” Actually, he was more like seven hundred meters short.
The exit was smooth. Sweeney gathered his platoon and set off at a trot. Just that quick he fell into a drainage ditch and was soaked. He got out and started doubling forward. When he and his men reached the bridge, they charged right across, shouting “Fox, Fox, Fox” at the top of their lungs. Because there was no opposition, Sweeney half suspected that either Priday’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 go up under our feet, blown up in our face.” He left one section at the west bank, crossing with the other two sections. The men were “thumping along beside me, and Fox was there, his men shouting back ‘Easy, Easy, Easy.’
“And so we came to a halt, rather disappointed, because we were all worked up to kill the enemy, bayonet the enemy, be blown up or something, and then there on the other side of the bridge was nothing more than the unmistakable figure of Dennis Fox.”
Sweeney had often seen Fox standing just like that on countless occasions during the practice runs back at Exeter. At those times, Fox’s great concern, like that of all the platoon leaders, had always been the umpires and how they would score 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. Sandy Smith remembers that “the poor buggers in the bunkers didn’t have much of a chance and we were not taking any prisoners or messing around, we just threw phosphorous grenades down and high-explosive grenades into the dugouts there and anything that moved we shot.”
The Men of World War II Page 128