Raiders

by Ross Kemp

  The assault party was split into two groups of three platoons, one to assault the canal bridge, the other to seize the river bridge. The six Horsas would carry a platoon each. The first group, which was scheduled to land shortly after midnight, was to capture the canal bridge. To do that, a handful of troops in the lead glider had to sprint from the aircraft to take out the machine-gun bunker that stood on the eastern bank of the canal, no more than 100 yards from where they had landed. The rest of the platoon, meanwhile, were to storm over the bridge and secure its western end, which led into Bénouville village. The two other platoons in the group would clear the other enemy positions.

  The three platoons of the second group, landing a short distance away, would carry out a carbon-copy manoeuvre at the river bridge. D Coy would then settle into defensive positions and wait to be relieved by paratroopers landing a few miles to the east. Codewords and recognition signals were issued: if the canal bridge was successfully captured, it was ‘Ham’; for the river bridge ‘Jam’. On being told this, the men could be heard wandering through camp shouting ‘Ham and Jam!’ If all went to plan, Howard’s lightly armed men would have to wait no more than an hour for airborne reinforcements to arrive. In turn, the paratroopers would be relieved in the late morning by a large force of Commandos arriving by sea. How the Germans reacted in the hours immediately following D Coy’s assault would be the key factor. ‘Surprise, speed and dash’ were the words used by Poett to describe how Howard’s men were to take their objectives. They might equally have been included in the orders issued to the German units tasked with the counterattack.

  The morning after the scheduled day of departure, Howard’s prayers for fine weather were answered – at least in part. It was still blustery and the Channel was still running heavy, but the gales had subsided and clearer weather was forecast overnight. Howard waited anxiously for news. That afternoon, the dispatch rider returned and Howard was handed another brown envelope, once again containing the codeword Cromwell. The camp was filled with a nervous excitement that mounted as the day wore on. The most momentous challenge in the lives of the 180 soldiers and pilots of Operation DEADSTICK drew ever closer – a challenge deeply connected to the lives and fortunes of hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen who would follow them into the action in the days and weeks that followed. And it was upon the skill and courage of those servicemen that the fate of the Free World and Occupied Europe depended.

  After a well-attended church service, a meal with all fat removed was served to the men that evening to reduce the risk of airsickness. (Howard and many of his men had vomited on every training flight in the Horsas. The motion of the glider was different to a powered flight and it induced nausea in most passengers.) The rest of the evening was spent checking equipment, weapons and provisions. The men put on their battledress, blackened their faces and, as the light began to fade, they lined up on parade for the final time at the camp. ‘Everyone was grossly overloaded – and some of the smaller chaps were visibly sagging at the knees under their heavy loads,’ Howard recalled in his diaries. He addressed his men for the last time and was almost overcome by the emotion of the occasion. In his own words: ‘I am an emotional man beneath the surface, a fact that would have surprised many who knew me then, and I found addressing the men as they went into battle very moving. I found my voice breaking several times as I wished them all the best.’

  When the men boarded the trucks for the short journey up the hill to RAF Tarrant Rushton airfield, some of them were so heavy with kit they had to be lifted and shoved into the back. RAF personnel from the admin buildings came out to wave them off, instinctively aware that a special mission was about to be launched. The gliders had their numbers, from 91 to 95, chalked onto the fuselage and white ‘D-Day stripes’ painted on their sides and wings. The first three, containing Howard’s group, were destined for the canal bridge; the second, led by his 2iC Brian Priday, for the river bridge. A little further in front were the six Halifax bombers, the paint of their new stripes adding some freshness to their war-weary frames.

  Pilots and soldiers greeted each other warmly, bantering amongst themselves over mugs of hot tea and cigarettes. Ever the perfectionist, Howard walked amongst his men, checking that they had blacked out properly. Those who hadn’t were dispatched to supplement their battle paint with the grime from the exhaust of the trucks.

  At 2240 the men synchronised their watches. The men squeezed aboard the gliders through the side door, took their places on the floor of the wooden aircraft and snapped on their harnesses. Howard, the last to board, and with a ‘terrible lump’ in his throat, went to each glider and shouted some final words of encouragement. From each one he was met with shouts of ‘Ham and Jam!’ One by one, a minute apart, the six Halifaxes roared down the runway, their gliders on tow, and climbed into a dark sky of broken cloud to 6,000 feet. The largest invasion in history was underway.

  The six gliders rolled and bounced in the wind as the Halifaxes pulled them over the Sussex seaside town of Worthing and out to the Channel. All along the coast below them, the largest invading force ever assembled lay waiting to go into action. The twenty-eight men in the back of each glider sat on the floor leaning against the wooden sides of the fuselage, the whites of their eyes gleaming in their blacked-out faces. The atmosphere was thick with smoke and song as the young troopers pulled nervously on cigarettes and belted out a medley of music hall favourites.

  The lead glider was piloted by Staff Sergeants Jim Wallwork and John Ainsworth and carried Howard and Number 25 platoon led by Lieutenant Den Brotheridge. They were to be the first troops into the fray, tasked with the vital role of seizing the canal bridge. As soon as the Normandy coast appeared on the distant horizon, Wallwork shouted his order to prepare for cast-off. The men fell silent and waited for the lurch as the two aircraft decoupled and the glider dived below the clouds before levelling out. It had just gone midnight. They had reached the point of no return. Dead or alive, wounded or intact, the men of D Coy, Ox and Bucks were three minutes from their long-awaited encounter with destiny.

  When Brotheridge dragged open the side door a few minutes later, the chill night air swept through the cramped compartment. Fields and hedgerows rushed beneath. The only sound was the stream of the air as the unpowered glider floated towards earth. There was a reason why the troops who flew in them called the gliders ‘silent coffins’. The pilots took their bearings from the glistening waterways of the canal and the river, to their right, which cut through the landscape from the coast. Straight ahead of them, six or seven miles distant, balls of orange flame and towers of smoke rose up through the searchlight beams and tracer around Caen as Allied bombers laid aerial siege to the medieval city. Wallwork turned the glider sharp right on Ainsworth’s order and then once again to set up the final approach.

  The two bridges were now clearly visible through the Perspex windscreen, but this was not the time to celebrate the navigational skills that had brought them to their target so skilfully. Everyone on board knew what was coming next and they braced themselves. The men linked arms and raised their feet over their heads ready for impact. There was no such thing as a smooth landing in a glider and many legs had been broken in the past. Wallwork battled the controls and adjusted the wing flaps as the glider, wobbling from side to side, went into a steep descent towards the little triangular field by the canal. Wallwork pulled up the nose and the world outside raced by at 100 mph when the seven-ton, sixty-seven-foot-long aircraft made impact with the uneven ground. The glider bounced twice before sliding along the field in an ear-splitting, wood-splintering crash. The nose of the aircraft was sticking into the barbed-wire fence, fifty yards from the bridge, exactly where Howard had jokingly asked Wallwork to place it back at Tarrant Rushton.

  The force of the crash-landing had thrown the two pilots through the windscreen and left the men in the back momentarily stunned. Howard’s harness had snapped and he smashed his head on the roof. When he came round, he thought h
e had been blinded until he realised that his helmet had been pressed down over his eyes. Glider One had broken up on impact, dust and debris filled the air, and the only sound was that of groaning men injured in the crash.

  Moments later, as Howard and 25 Platoon staggered out of the wooden wreckage, Glider Two, piloted by Staff Sergeants Boland and Hobbs, made a near-perfect landing close by. Glider Three, with Staff Sergeants Barkway and Boyle in the cockpit, came in between the first two, but theirs was not a happy landing. The Horsa broke up as it slid into the marshy end of the field and into a pond, which had gone undetected during the planning. Barkway and Boyle were catapulted out of the disintegrating cockpit and into the water. Semi-concussed, they hauled themselves out past the heavily laden body of Lance Corporal Greenhalgh who lay dead in the water. (It is thought that he may have drowned while unconscious.) Such was the force of the impact that Lieutenant Sandy Smith, the leader of 14 Platoon, was also hurled through what remained of the cockpit. The German sentries on the other side of the bridge heard the crash of the gliders but they had grown so accustomed to the Allied bombing raids over the years that they assumed the noise was falling debris or a stricken bomber.

  Meanwhile Lieutenant Brotheridge, hobbling from the heavy landing, took off towards the bridge with his men in close attendance. Gunfire erupted as they charged down the bridge firing Sten and Bren guns from the hip. Brotheridge was the first to reach the far end and had just thrown a grenade into a gun pit when he was cut down by a burst of Spandau machine-gun fire that sliced through his neck. He slumped backwards to the ground, the first combat casualty of the Normandy invasion. Tracer streaked back and forth and the air was filled with the rattle of machine-gun fire, the thud of grenades and the cries of men. Brotheridge’s platoon wasted no time in dispatching the gun crew as their leader lay slowly bleeding to death. On hearing the news, Howard’s first thoughts were for the young Lieutenant’s wife who was eight months pregnant.

  As the three platoons of Group One cleared trenches and gun positions, Howard set up his command post at the end of the bridge near the landing zone along with his wireless operator Lance Corporal Ted Tappenden. The glider pilots, meanwhile, staggered through the dark, stunned into semi-consciousness during the landings. Staff Sergeant Barkway, one of the pilots in Glider Three, which had crashed heavily, was almost immediately felled by machine-gun fire that almost ripped off his arm. (It was later amputated.) But Boyle, and the other glider pilots who had escaped serious injury, braved the enemy fire to lug weapons, ammunition and equipment from the aircraft to Howard’s command post next to the bridge. Wallwork, covered in blood from a gash to the head, freed his copilot Ainsworth who was trapped under the nose of their Horsa and, ignoring his orders to keep clear of the fighting, worked tirelessly to bring up supplies for the troops.

  The three gliders of the second group, a few minutes behind the others, were also experiencing mixed fortunes as they attempted to land in the field alongside the River Orne. Only Glider Six, carrying Lieutenant Fox’s 17 Platoon, managed to come down in the designated landing zone. Glider Five, with Lieutenant ‘Tod’ Sweeney’s 23 Platoon, came down three fields away, almost half a mile short of the bridge. What had happened to Glider Four, carrying 2iC Priday and Lieutenant Hooper’s 22 Platoon, no one knew. They were nowhere to be seen and Tappenden was unable to raise them over the wireless. Howard began to fear the worst.

  Sweeney’s men set off as fast as the terrain and their loads allowed, crashing through hedges and sprinting across the fields towards the bridge, all the time fearing they might have arrived too late to take the German defenders by surprise. They could hear the crack and boom of battle in the distance and saw the tracer licking through the darkness. When they arrived at the river bridge, panting and sweating under their heavy loads, they were surprised to find Lieutenant Fox’s men already in position. There was mild disappointment among all the men that they had taken the bridge without a fight. Two mortar bombs had been sufficient to send the crew of the machine-gun post sprinting for safety. The W/T set at Howard’s command post soon crackled into life. The word ‘Jam’ confirmed the capture of the river bridge.

  Back at the canal, Lieutenant Wood and his men had cleared out the trenches and positions assigned to them on the ‘home bank’ and were on their way back to report to Howard when they were raked by machine-gun fire. Three bullets tore into Wood’s left leg, shattering his thigh bone. His Sergeant and one other also collapsed under the heavy fire. Wood tried to stand up but couldn’t. It would be many hours before he could be evacuated to a divisional aid post, and in the meantime all his men could do was splint his leg with a rifle and give him and the two others an injection of morphine.

  Within fewer than five minutes of landing, Howard had only one infantry officer left standing, Lieutenant Smith whose platoon had been badly mauled during Glider Three’s violent landing. In addition to Greenhalgh’s death, two others had been badly injured, including his Sergeant. Smith had twisted his knee in the crash and he was limping as he led his men across the bridge to reinforce Brotheridge’s platoon. On reaching the other side, a German soldier stood up from behind a wall by the Café Gondrée and threw a stick grenade at him. Smith cut the German down with his Sten, but the grenade exploded and tore the flesh on his wrist down to the bone. Not until he and his men had cleared out all the German positions did he allow himself to be treated.

  Captain John Vaughan of the Royal Army Medical Corps, the one qualified doctor in the assault party, had been knocked out when Glider Three had broken up on landing, and he was wandering around in a stupor when Howard spotted him. An unmistakable sight with his large drooping moustache, Vaughan was plastered in foul-smelling mud, having been thrown into the pond on impact. After giving him a swig of whisky from his hip-flask, Howard pointed him in the direction of the casualty command post that had been set up near the river bridge. The first casualty he attended to was Lieutenant Wood, whose thigh had been shattered by machine-gun fire – the first injury in what was to prove a very busy night for the dazed doctor.

  The five-man Royal Engineer parties attached to each platoon leapt beneath both bridges to cut wires and remove explosives. They were astounded to discover that no charges had been fixed to the structures. So long as Howard’s assault force could hold their positions for an hour or so, there was no chance now of the Germans blowing the bridges. Cries of ‘Ham’ and ‘Jam’ echoed back and forth across the waterways as the three platoons finished mopping up the slit trenches and machine-gun nests. Within ten minutes of the lead glider careering into the landing zone, Howard had achieved his primary objective of seizing both bridges intact. The months of hard training had paid off. It was a brilliantly executed coup de main operation but, as the men took up position in the slit trenches and gun pits, every one of them knew that the real battle was about to begin.

  It was ten minutes to one, a little over half an hour after the Ox and Bucks assault party had gone into action, when the men craned their heads skywards. What started as a distant humming soon turned into a loud drone as scores of aircraft filled the darkened skies. The moon cast its light through the broken cloud, revealing a sight, described by all who saw it, as one of the most magical and uplifting of their lives. Hundreds and hundreds of paratroopers were floating towards earth, the silk canopies of their chutes billowing above their heads. They were falling into landing zones lit up by ground flares in farmland a mile or two beyond Bénouville. To their disgust, they could also see streaks of German tracer rising up to greet the men of the 5th Parachute Brigade in blatant violation of the Geneva Convention.

  Howard immediately reached for his pea whistle and blew the ‘Victory-V’ signal – the letter V in Morse code – and continued to repeat it at regular intervals through the night. The shrill blasts carried for miles through the night air over the flat landscape. Some of his men grumbled that Howard was only rousing the Germans and giving away their position, but after the battle many of the paratrooper
s who had fallen far and wide of the landing zone commented that it was the sound of the whistle that had guided them to the bridges. Howard ordered Tappenden to send the message to Brigadier Poett, commanding the 5th Parachute Brigade, that the bridges had been captured. ‘Ham!’ and ‘Jam!’ . . . ‘Ham!’ and ‘Jam!’ . . . ‘Ham!’ and ‘Jam!’, the Corporal repeated over and over. But no matter how often he said it or how loudly, there was no reply.

  The drop of the main body of the 5th Brigade was nothing like as accurate as had been hoped. Poor visibility and strong winds were partly to blame, and some of the ground flares, guiding the men down, were laid too far to the east. The net result was that a great number of the men landed in difficult country far from their forming-up points. There was a good deal of confusion as different units became tangled up with each other. Much of the equipment, including the heavy weapons, could not be recovered until daylight. Without mortars and medium machine guns, the already mighty task of keeping the counterattacking Germans at bay was going to be even more of a challenge.

  Minutes after the gliders had landed, Brigadier Poett and his HQ unit were dropped a mile to the east of Bénouville, amongst a group of pathfinders from the 22nd Independent Parachute Company, whose job it was to set up the ground flares at the drop zones. Disorientated at first, the sound of gunfire helped guide him through the crop fields to the canal bridge around which Howard had established the bulk of his defences. With no prior warning of his arrival, Howard was a little taken aback when he saw the tall figure of his Brigadier striding over the bridge towards his command post shortly before one o’clock. Tappenden was still monotonously repeating ‘Ham and Jam!’ into the wireless when he arrived, and Poett explained that their own sets had been lost during the drop.

  Howard’s delight at the sight of the paratroopers’ floating to earth gave way to an anxiety that mounted with every minute that they failed to arrive. The original schedule envisaged the Brigade’s 7th Parachute Battalion reaching the bridges roughly one hour after Howard, but as they were now scattered all over the countryside, that seemed highly unlikely.