Pegasus Bridge

by Stephen Ambrose

  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 talk
ing 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 Scandinav
ia, 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.