by Ross Kemp
The reason for Bénouville’s importance lay right beneath the feet of its inhabitants in the form of two small bridges running consecutively over the Caen Ship Canal and the River Orne. The waterways are almost exactly parallel to one another, separated by 400 yards of flat farmland. Whoever controlled the bridges on 6 June 1944 controlled the course of the battle on the left-hand – eastern flank – of the invasion. If the Allies could somehow capture the bridges before the dawn landings began, and hold them until major reinforcements arrived, they would close off the only feasible route for a German counterattack against the British Army landings at Sword Beach. It was from this direction that German 711th Infantry Division and the tanks of the formidable 21st Panzer Division would race to engage the British as they waded ashore and attempted to break out. In short, whoever held the bridges held the key to D-Day.
It was decided that the most effective way of seizing the bridges was by a glider-borne coup de main operation, under the cover of darkness, a few hours before the main assault forces came ashore. The task would not just represent a mighty responsibility but also a mighty challenge. The 6th Airborne Division, commanded by Major General Richard ‘Windy’ Gale, was tasked with securing the left or eastern flank of the Allied invasion. Gale asked Brigadier Hugh Kindersley, the CO of the division’s glider infantry brigade, to recommend the best group of men to carry out the assignment. Without a second thought, Kindersley put forward ‘D’ Company, 2nd (Airborne) Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, known to all as the ‘Ox and Bucks’.
It would have come as a major surprise to his first commanding officer in the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry that the gap-toothed private by the name of John Howard would one day play a leading role in the largest invasion in the history of warfare. Howard was plagued by homesickness as a young recruit, but he persevered. He had served for six years when, in 1938, he applied for an officer’s commission only to be turned down in spite of having all the necessary qualities and qualifications. Snobbery may well have been a factor. Howard was from a working-class background. His father was a barrel-maker at Courage Brewery in London and barely brought home enough money to feed and clothe his nine children.
After joining the police, Howard rejoined his regiment when war broke out and rose rapidly through the ranks. This time, there was to be no social prejudice to hold him back. Within five months he was Regimental Sergeant Major and was offered a commission and joined the Ox and Bucks. By mid-1942, he had been promoted to Major and took command of a Company that he soon turned into one of the finest in the British Army.
After impressing the staff officers during a three-day exercise to find the best unit for the D-Day assignment, Howard’s D Company (D Coy) was chosen to spearhead the British assault. The planners considered that two platoons were needed to seize each bridge but, in case of heavy casualties or the loss of a glider, D Coy’s four platoons were reinforced with two extra ones. Howard chose two from B Company, commanded by Lieutenants Dennis Fox and ‘Sandy’ Smith. Most of the 170 men that made up the coup de main party were from London or its suburbs. Howard was invited to play a significant role in planning the specifics of the assault. The two landing zones he chose for the six troop-carrying Horsa gliders were situated in fields between the Caen Canal and the River Orne, so that if the Germans blew one of the bridges, the force would not be stranded on the far bank.
The final three-week training course, which began in late April at Ilfracombe in Devon, was extremely tough even by Howard’s exacting standards. Howard was a great sports enthusiast and he set out to create a culture of fierce competition among his men. His training methods were imaginative and resourceful. He switched between day and night exercises in order to simulate the reality his men would experience on the battlefield. He took the company to bombed-out areas of Southampton to accustom them to a street-fighting environment in a war zone. Only Howard knew why the men were being pushed to the very limits of their endurance, but slowly they began to suspect that they had been assigned some form of special mission. Others might have been pushed to the brink of mutiny by Howard’s punishing regime, but his men not only respected him, they genuinely liked him. For a start, he would never ask them to perform an assignment he wouldn’t carry out himself. He was strict but down-to-earth, ‘one of the boys’ at heart who had risen through the ranks and never forgot his humble background. Far from being aloof and removed, Howard would often sit down with the other ranks and polish his boots with them.
When the training was over, the entire battalion was told to march the 130 miles back to their camp at Bulford on Salisbury Plain, carrying eighty pounds of weapons and equipment. D Coy completed it in just four days, two of them in torrential rain and two under a scorching sun. It was this Herculean effort that convinced the higher authorities once and for all that Howard’s men were the right ones to carry out one of the most momentous tasks in the history of the British armed forces. Under Howard’s training regime, D Coy of the Ox and Bucks, a harmless-sounding unit, had become elite Special Forces in everything but name. Howard was nothing if not meticulously thorough. He thought deeply about every scenario that might unfold on the night and trained all his men in each of the tasks they were assigned so that they were interchangeable.
At the end of May, the extended group of D Coy was split up from the rest of the battalion and driven from Bulford to a camp in the village of Tarrant Rushton in north Dorset, five miles from the picturesque market town of Blandford Forum. As the men climbed down from the trucks and saw the canvas community, the barbed-wire fencing and the guards patrolling the perimeter, they realised that this was no ordinary transit camp. When they were informed that they were not to leave the camp under any circumstances, speculation was rife as to the nature of the special mission they had been assigned. Training was light so as to minimise the risk of injuries. The weather was hot for the first few days and the men spent much of the time sunbathing or playing football and other sports. In the evening, they played cards, gambled, watched films in the tented cinema or went to the NAAFI to supplement their meals. The food, by all accounts, was dreadful, even by the low standards of army catering.
On the morning of 27 May, Howard summoned six platoon commanders to his Nissen hut, the only solid structure in camp, which served as the briefing room. Maps, aerial photographs and Top Secret files lay in neat piles and a twelve-by-twelve-foot scale model of Bénouville, exact in its detail down to the last bush and ditch, sat on a table in the centre of the room. It was now that Howard revealed D Coy’s mission and objective. Slowly and methodically, Howard talked his junior officers through every phase of what had been code-named Operation DEADSTICK. The room soon became thick with cigarette smoke as the men, poring over the model and the RAF’s recce photographs, ran through every step and possible eventuality. It was almost midnight when the meeting broke up.
Straight after breakfast the following day, the group filed back in and another entire day was spent going over the procedure. That evening, Howard addressed the entire extended company and finally put an end to the mounting speculation. He told them everything except the name of the place where they were going. Over the following week, platoon by platoon, the men were summoned to the hut and talked through the operation, until every last detail was drummed into them. ‘They stood round the model, at first struck dumb by its complexity, fascinated and impressed by its detail, and before long they all seemed to know every inch of the area on which they would be working,’ Howard wrote in the private papers that were published almost sixty years after the event.
The following day, the twelve pilots of the six Horsa gliders were brought over and introduced to D Coy. ‘A damn good crowd,’ Howard called them and, helped by some inter-service banter, they quickly struck a close bond with the men who would carry them into battle. Only one jarring note was struck: the pilots were horrified by the combined weight of men and equipment that their unpowered, plywood aircraft were expected to car
ry. There would be thirty fully laden men in each Horsa, plus extra equipment and ammunition, which made them about three-quarters of a ton overweight. There was no choice but to jettison valuable provisions and equipment. For Howard, the hardest part of all was telling two men from each glider that they’d have to stay behind.
The invasion of Normandy was scheduled to take place on Monday 5 June. Each day in the week leading up to it, fresh aerial reconnaissance photographs and intelligence were fed into the planning of the operation. On 29 May, Howard was alarmed to learn that poles designed to stop aircraft landing were being constructed in the very fields that he had designated as their landing zones. Known as ‘Rommel’s asparagus’, after the German General who had ordered their construction along the Normandy coast, the poles were laid out at intervals and would tear off the wings of all but the smallest aircraft. Howard was told that the white dots in the photographs were just the holes that had been dug, not the poles themselves. But he was only partly reassured. He harboured two fears that would nag him until the moment the gliders were scheduled to land. Firstly, with the holes now dug, it was obvious that the poles could be installed at any time. Secondly, did their appearance suggest that the Germans had got wind of the operational plans and were busy reinforcing their defences in anticipation of their arrival?
Four days before they were scheduled to be flown in, the men were reminded of the dangers that awaited them in France when they were each issued with a small survival kit to help them escape through enemy territory. They were given a small amount of French francs and a number of items to sew into their battledress, including silk maps of France, a file, a hacksaw blade, fishing hooks, a trouser button with a compass embedded in it and Benzedrine tablets or ‘Bennies’, a stimulant to help the exhausted stay alert, which were especially popular with bomber pilots.
Major General ‘Windy’ Gale, commander of the 6th Airborne Division, came down to Tarrant Rushton to address the troops, delivering the memorable lines: ‘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.’ By Friday night, with forty-eight hours to go, the weather turned for the worst as the hot spell gave way to strong winds and a heavy grey sky. On Sunday morning, a dispatch rider roared up to the camp on his motorcycle and handed Howard a brown envelope. Inside, there was just one word: ‘Cromwell’ – the code-name confirming that D-Day was on the following morning.
Howard’s first course of action was to get the entire company to sit down and write a letter to their loved ones. Most of the men found this task far harder than anything they were asked to do out in the field. Writing the letter put the challenge that lay ahead into sharp focus. Each man asked himself the same question: Is this the last contact I will have with home? Even Howard admitted, years later, that he could barely write to his wife Joy for all the tears welling up. Most of the older soldiers had children and it was especially hard for the eight men in the company whose wives were pregnant.
The weather deteriorated as the day went on and by late afternoon gales were lashing the Channel. Howard was not surprised to be informed that the invasion had been postponed – but he was worried. The longer they waited, the more time the Germans had to strengthen their defences at the landing sites. As wind and rain lashed against the canvas, making sleep almost impossible, Howard prayed all night for a rapid improvement in the weather.
The planners for Operation DEADSTICK were lucky to have a first-class source of intelligence in Bénouville. The Gondrées owned a café situated right next to the canal bridge; every day for four years, the proud French family had served the troops of the local German garrison. When they picked up significant news of German activities, the information was quickly passed along the Resistance’s chain of communication and transmitted to England. Their German customers never suspected for a moment that Thérèse and Georges Gondrée, a friendly and apparently guileless couple, were in fact members of the Resistance. Thérèse came from the Alsace region on the border with Germany and spoke the language of the occupying forces almost fluently. Georges had worked for over a decade as a clerk in Lloyds Bank in Paris and spoke perfect English. Thérèse listened to the troops in the café and passed on any noteworthy news to Georges to translate. He then forwarded the information to the leader of the local Resistance – a Madame Vion, who ran the local maternity hospital a few hundred yards along the canal. Madame Vion then passed it on to the radio operator in Caen, who tapped out the coded message for the intelligence people back in England. Thérèse and Georges often plied their German customers with the local hooch Calvados, an apple brandy, in order to loosen their tongues. The speed with which information was relayed back to the UK was illustrated in the final days leading up to D-Day. On the Friday, Thérèse discovered that the detonator for the demolition charges on the canal bridge had been placed in the machine-gun bunker at the eastern end. By Sunday, Howard was reading the memo in his briefing hut in north Dorset.
The wider intelligence network had provided a comprehensive breakdown of German defences and troop numbers in the area. The bridges were defended by men from a fifty-strong garrison made up of conscripts from occupied countries, mostly from Eastern Europe, but commanded by German NCOs and officers. They were armed with light machine guns, four light anti-aircraft guns and one anti-aircraft machine gun. The bulk of the defences were centred on the left or eastern end of the canal bridge where there was an anti-tank gun in a reinforced concrete bunker surrounded by a series of sandbagged trenches. Gun pits sat at the other corners of the bridge. The river bridge, a quarter of a mile away to the west, was guarded by gun pits, but was nothing like as heavily defended as the canal crossing.
Major Hans Schmidt, the commander of the local garrison, was under orders to place explosive charges on the bridges ready to be blown in the event of an attack. But, fearing that the French Resistance would either defuse them, or detonate them as part of their strategy of sabotaging transport links to disrupt German movements, he decided to keep the charges in a nearby bunker and put them in place when they received news of the invasion.
Howard’s orders from Brigadier Nigel Poett, commander 5th Parachute Brigade, included the lines: ‘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 counterattack on the bridges, until you are relieved.’
Thanks to the intelligence from the Resistance and the photographs from the RAF’s aerial reconnaissance unit, Howard knew every detail of the local defences – except for one. So as not to undermine the morale of his men, a key piece of information was deliberately withheld from him by his masters at the Planning HQ on Salisbury Plain. Stationed in Caen, five miles down the road, was the 125th Panzer Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division, commanded by Colonel Hans von Luck. The regiment was a very well-equipped, elite unit, trained in the art of counterattacking. Von Luck was one of the most experienced and capable tank commanders in the German Army, hardened by years of heavy fighting in Poland, France, North Africa and the Eastern front. He was an old-school Prussian who enjoyed a clean fight and had developed an admiration and liking for his British foes in the North Africa campaign. Von Luck and the 2,000 men of 125th Panzer Regiment were the ‘difficulties’ to which Brigadier Poett was referring in his orders. The ‘relief’ would be provided by the men of 7th Battalion, 5th Parachute Brigade, 6th Airborne Division. Whether there would be any forces left for them to relieve was another matter.
The first challenge was to get the assault party safely onto French soil. The men were to be flown over the Channel in Horsa gliders towed by Halifax bombers that would release them close to the Normandy coast. From that moment on, the lives of the twenty-eight men crammed into each of the wooden aircraft lay in the hands of the pilots, who had been specially handpicked and
trained for the assignment. All twelve were highly skilled airmen who had been put through intense training programmes for the D-Day landings. Glider pilots were a precious asset in the Normandy landings and orders stated that, in a break with normal practice, they were not to be risked in the battle on the ground and that they were to be returned to England at the earliest practicable time for the next mission.
Glider operations had many advantages over parachuting. They could deliver a large body of men to a single spot ready to go straight into action. They were able to carry heavy items of equipment. They approached the landing zone in silence and, with a high descent rate, the pilots could put them down in a very tight landing area. Unlike paratroopers, glider infantry needed virtually no additional training. But there were also many shortcomings and hazards to glider-borne operations. Gliders need flat terrain on which to land and, at 80 mph, even the smoothest landings were violent, painful experiences that often ended in death and injury. The Sicily landings of 1943 highlighted a number of problems. More than 250 men had been drowned after the gliders were released too early by their towing aircraft.
Gliders were also very vulnerable to interception by enemy fighters while being towed, as well as to anti-aircraft and small-arms fire during the final approach. Several gliders were shot down in Sicily by Allied gunners who mistook them for the Luftwaffe. As a result of those blue-on-blue incidents, to aid identification all Allied aircraft involved in the Normandy invasion were painted with black and white stripes on their wings and fuselage.