The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Howard thought it a bit unfair of the French to take out all their frustrations on one single element of the whole 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 to establish romantic attachments with young boys. There were only young German boys around, no French. 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 haircutting.

  • • •

  On September 5, after ninety-one days of continuous combat, D Company was withdrawn from the lines. It traveled by truck to Arromanches, was driven out to Mulberry Harbor, climbed up scrambling decks, and set sail for Portsmouth. Then by train 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 of the original coup de main party still with them. All the sergeants and most of the corporals were gone. All told, D Company had fallen from its D-Day strength of 181 down to 40.

  * * *

  1. At the beach, Oliver Boland was interviewed by a newspaper reporter. He gave a brief account of what happened at the canal bridge. The following day, The Times carried an article on the coup de main, giving D Company its first publicity. There would be a great deal to follow.

  CHAPTER 10

  D-Day

  Plus Three Months to D-Day Plus Fifty Years

  After one night at Bulford, the company went on leave. Howard drove up to Oxford, for a joyful reunion and a glorious rest. On the morning of September 17, he relates, “I 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 I silently wished old Jim good luck.”

  Howard did not know it, but Sergeant Thornton was also up there, with a group of paratroopers. When Thornton was evacuated from Normandy, he had a quick recovery from his wound. Then, rather than wait for D Company to return, he had transferred to the 1st Airborne Division, gone through his jump training, and was going in with Colonel John Frost’s 2d Battalion. Thornton fought beside Frost at Arnhem Bridge for four days, and was captured with him. When I suggested to him that he probably was the only man to have been at both famous bridges, he modestly and typically denied it, saying there must have been others.

  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. Speculation on what Howard’s company, flown in by Wallwork, Ainsworth, Boland, and the other pilots, might have accomplished at Arnhem and Nijmegen makes for one of the more tantalizing “what ifs” of World War II. If the bridge at Nijmegen had been captured by a coup de main, the American paratroopers would not have had to fight a desperate battle to take 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. He set out to rebuild D Company. Reinforcements brought it up to full strength; 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 Monday, November 13, Howard decided to spend the night with Joy, as Oxford was on the route to Birmingham. He brought two Oxford residents with him, Corporal Stock and his new second-in-command, Captain Osborne. Although Stock was his driver, Howard insisted on taking the wheel, because Stock did not drive fast enough to suit him.

  About half-past five, just as it was getting dusk, on a narrow, twisting road, they met a Yank convoy of six-ton trucks. 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 leapfrogging up, and it was all over so quickly.”

  They had a head-on crash. Howard was thrown clear, but both legs, his right hip, and his left knee were smashed up. Stock and Osborne escaped with lesser injuries.

  Howard was taken to a hospital in Tidworth, where he was on the critical list for three weeks. Joy made the long journey daily to visit. In December, using his connections with the Oxford police, Howard got himself moved to a hospital in Oxford. He remained there until March 1945.

  • • •

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

  • • •

  When Howard came out of the hospital, he was using crutches. By the time his convalescent leave was over, so was the war in Europe. But when he reported for duty, he learned that the Ox and Bucks was 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 running program on a track near his home. On the second day of trying to run laps, his right hip went out of joint, his right 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 deadened the nerves running down the leg. Howard went back into the 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 on the National Savings Committee, then with the Ministry of Food. In 1946, he had an audience with the King in Buckingham Palace. On June 6, 1954, the tenth anniversary of D-Day, he received a Croix de Guerre avec Palme from the French government, which had already renamed the canal bridge, calling it Pegasus Bridge. Later the road that crosses the bridge was named Esplanade Major John Howard.

  Howard served as a consultant for Darryl Zanuck in the making of the film The Longest Day. Howard, played by Richard Todd, 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. Zanuck, not Howard, 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.

  In 1974, Howard retired. He and Joy live in a small but comfortable home in the tiny village of Burcot, about six miles from Oxford. Terry and Penny live close enough for the grandchildren to pay regular visits. As old-age pensioners, 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 cane to get around, and then moves only with great pain, but all his enormous energy flows out again when he sees his bridge, and greets Mme. Gondrée, and starts talking to those of his men who 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 fall of 1944 fighting General Leclerc’s French armored division. In mid-December, he was involved in the fighting at the southern end of the Battle of the Bulge. He 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 defense of Berlin. In late April, by then encircled, von Luck was ordered to break a way through the Russian lines, then hold it open so that the 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, our homeland.”

  The men fought until they were out of ammunition. Von Luck told them, “O.K., now it’s finished, everybody is 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, self-made coffee importer.

  Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Swedish military academy has brought von Luck and Howard together to give talks on 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 good friends. “So much for war,” Howard comments.

  • • •

  Sergeant Heinz 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 duly granted, and he immigrated to England, got a job, married a British girl, and settled down. One day in the early 1960s one of his friends at work told him that there was a 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 stood opposite at twenty minutes after midnight on June 6, 1944, in front of the café, in the classic stance of legs wide apart, machine gun at the hip, blazing away.

  Hickman did not recognize Gray, of course, 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. “That’s the bridge over the Orne Canal.” He and Gray got talking. Later they exchanged visits. A friendship developed. Over the years it grew closer and deeper, until today it can only be described as intimate. 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. (When I interviewed him, he was starring in The Business of Murder at the Mayfair.) Major Dennis Fox, MBO, 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 Tod is the Director General of the Battersea Dog’s 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; retired today, Sandy lives in Chedworth and runs specialty tours to India. Colonel David Wood, MBE, soldiered on until retirement. He organized staff college visits to Pegasus, where Howard and Taylor would give lectures on what happened. Today David lives in retirement in a country home in Devon.

  Staff Sergeant Oliver Boland, DFM, lives in retirement near Stratford-on-Avon. Jack Bailey stayed in the Army, where he became a regimental sergeant major. Today, Jack is head clerk in a London business firm and lives in Catford, near Wally Parr. Dr. John Vaughan is in practice in Devon.

  Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork, DFM, worked as a salesman for the first ten years after the war. In 1956, he immigrated to British Columbia, where today he runs a small livestock farm on the edge of the mountains to the 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, he decided he had to get out. He returned to Catford, where he lives today with Irene. One of his sons is in business with him—he runs a window-cleaning business—and another is a promising musician. He is as irrepressible today as he was forty years ago.

  Wagger Thornton lives with his wife in quiet retirement in the south of London. His children are university graduates with advanced degrees and already successful professional careers. They have, in short, taken full advantage of the freedom he helped to preserve when he fired his Piat at 0100 June 6, 1944. (He still curses the weapon as “a load of rubbish.”)

  • • •

  To my knowledge, there are no intact, still flying Horsa gliders in existence. Zanuck got the blueprints for the Horsa and built one for The Longest Day. The Air Ministry judged that the design was inherently bad, that the craft was not airworthy, and that therefore Zanuck could not have a permit to fly it across the Channel, as he had hoped to do. Zanuck 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 Tarrent Rushton, is today in the Airborne Forces Museum at Aldershot.

  • • •

  Bénouville has a few new houses, some development, but basically it stands as it stood on June 6, 1944. So does Ranville, where Den Brotheridge is buried, under a tree, in the British military cemetery.

  The Gondrée café remains, changed only by the portraits hanging on the wall—portraits of John Howard and Jim Wallwork and Nigel Taylor and the others who came to liberate France and the Gondrées.

  Over the next forty years, Mme. Gondrée presided over her tiny café 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, was to see a happy woman. Before he died in the late seventies, her husband, Georges, made many close British friends, Howard especially. Jack Bailey went duck hunting with Gondrée each year.

  When I interviewed Madame, I asked her to describe life during the occupation. She let loose a torrent of words, paragraphs or incidents separated by hearfelt cries of “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!” She spat out her hatred of Germans. They had taken all the young men. They took all the best food and drink. They smelled bad. They shot people. Everyone had to work for them. There were arrests for no reason. Because there was a reason to arrest them, the Gondrées lived in dread. The worst was having to serve them food and beer.

  Madame, in short, still hated the Germans and would not allow them into her café. When Zanuck was shooting The Longest Day, he wanted to have half-dressed German soldiers come leaping out of the windows of the café as D Company charged across the bridge. Madame screamed, she yelled, she ran around waving her arms, crying “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!,” and 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 had her way with Zanuck. The scene was dropped.

  When Howard went to the café in the seventies and early eighties, he sometimes brought Hans von Luck with him. Howard told Madame that von Luck might look suspiciously like a German, but that he was in fact a Swede. In addition to Germans, Madame was also death on the Communists, especially French Communists.

  She had daughters and grandchildren and many friends. In shor
t, a full and rich life.

  Just prior to the fortieth anniversary celebration, Madame fell ill. She had been so pestered by reporters and television crews in the weeks preceding the ceremonies that she had put a sign on the door of her café, “No reporters, no interviews.” She took to her bed.

  But she rallied for the ceremonies, and on the anniversary went to the services in the Ranville cemetery, leaning on John Howard’s arm, using a cane in her other hand, but holding her head proudly high. She was presented to Prince Charles, who had an animated conversation with her in French. She introduced her daughters, Georgette and Arlette. Then Prince Charles turned to John Howard, exclaiming, “Oh, I know all about you.” Howard brought forward some of his pilots, including Wallwork, Boland, and Geoff Barkway of #3 glider. Prince Charles knew all about them, too—they discussed the Horsa glider.

  For Madame, who was being called the “Mother of the 6th Airborne Division” by the British Press, the excitement proved to be too much. When the ceremonies were finished, she returned to her café, and her bed.

  At midnight, Howard and twenty survivors from D Company met on the bridge—among others, Jack Bailey was there, and Wally Parr, Paddy O’Donnell, Jim Wallwork, David Wood, Oliver Boland, Sandy Smith, John Vaughan, Tod Sweeney, and Wagger Thornton. At past reunions, Madame had brought out champagne at 0016 hours on June 6, but she was unable to make it in 1984. Georgette and Arlette Gondrée, along with Howard’s daughter Penny, took her place. The corks popped at exactly 0016. The party lasted until past 0300.

  The next morning, the Gondrée girls and Howard wanted to rush Madame to the hospital, but she refused to go until after Howard and the rest of the British airborne veterans had left Normandy. One hour after John Howard drove off to catch the ferry, on June 8, she consented to enter the hospital. She died there on July 2, 1984.