Pegasus Bridge_ June 6, 1944 Part 6

By 0400, the platoon commanders had put their men into German bunks, then found beds in a chateau for themselves. After two hours of sleep they were on the road by 0630. When it came to the road junction and the left turn towards Escoville, there was Corporal Porter sitting on the side of the road with his Bren gun. He looked at Sweeney and said, 'Where did you get to, sir?' Sweeney apologised but explained that he really had to get back and report.

D Company moved on towards Escoville when they suddenly came under very heavy fire. They took some casualties before setting out cross-country, and finally got to the farm Howard had picked as his company headquarters. He put his three platoons into position and they immediately came under mortar, SPV, tank, sniper and artillery fire. They were being attacked by the 2nd Panzer Grenadiers of von Luck's 125th Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division. 'And these people', Sweeney is frank to say, 'were a different kettle of fish to the people we had been fighting at the bridges'. Casualties were heavy, but D Company held its position.

About 1100 hours, Howard started to make another round of his platoons. Sweeney's was the first stop. Howard began studying the enemy with his German binoculars, 'then there was a zip and I was knocked out'. He had a hole right through his helmet, and there was enough blood to convince the men that he was mortally wounded.[3] --- [3] Howard's helmet, complete with bullet-holes front and back, is now in the museum at Pegasus Bridge. He still bears the scar.

When that word went around in Sweeney's platoon, the men's reaction was to start organising patrols to find and kill the sniper who had shot their Major. In relating this incident, Tappenden commented: 'Every man in the company admired Major Howard more than almost anyone alive. He was a man who knew that if he couldn't do it, you couldn't do it, and you weren't asked to do it. We wors.h.i.+pped him and we wanted revenge'. Fortunately, Howard regained consciousness within a half hour - he had only been creased - and told the men to hold their positions.

By mid-afternoon, the Germans had pushed forward their attack, to the point that there were German tanks between Hooper's platoon and the other two. Orders came down from battalion to withdraw to Herouvillette. The retreat was carried out in fairly good order, considering the pressure and considering that Howard had lost nearly half his fighting strength in half a day.

Parr and Bailey covered the retreat. When they pulled back behind a chateau, Parr gasped out to the Padre standing there with the wounded, 'Let's get going. They are right behind us.' The Padre replied that he was going to stay with the wounded, be taken prisoner with them, so that he could be with them in their POW camp. Bailey and Parr organised some of the men, found some improvised stretchers, and carried the wounded back to Herouvillette. 'It wasn't far'. Parr says, 'only three-quarters of a mile'.

When they got there, the rest of the men were lined up in the ditch all facing the direction from which the Germans would be attacking. 'And the sergeant major, almost with tears in his eyes, was striding up and down and saying in a great booming voice, "Well done, lads. Well done. Wait till the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds come at us this time. We'll mow 'em down. I'm proud of you. Well done." ' It was a scene more reminiscent of World War I than World War II.

When the Germans did come, D Company mowed them down as if it was the Battle ofMons all over again. But that only highlighted the transformation that had taken place in D Company's role. On June 6 it had been at the cutting edge of tactical innovation and technological possibilities. On June 7 it was fighting with the same tactics ordinary infantry companies used throughout the First World War.

Howard set up headquarters in Herouvillette, and the company stayed there for four days. They were always under attack by mortar and artillery fire, sometimes having to fight off tanks and infantry. By the end of four days, they were down to less than fifty fighting men.

The company moved twice more, then settled down into defensive positions it was to hold for almost two months. 'The only thing we could do was to send out fighting patrols every night to bring back prisoners', Howard says. On one patrol he took with Wally Parr, they found themselves in the area where the Battle of Breville had just been fought. In the moonlight they could see the scattered corpses of men who had been killed by an artillery concentration. Howard and Parr found one group of six men, sitting in a circle in their half -completed slit-trench, playing cards. They were still sitting up, holding their cards, and they had no bullet or shrapnel wounds. But they were all dead, killed by concussion.

During this period, Howard says, 'the biggest problem I had was keeping up the morale of the troops because we had always got the impression that we would soon be withdrawn from Normandy to come back and refit in the UK for another airborne operation'. After all, the glider pilots had been withdrawn and were already in England.

Another morale problem came from the constant sh.e.l.ling. 'Chaps began to go bomb -happy', Howard says.

At first many of us tended to regard it as a form of cowardice and we were highly critical. I remember that I tended to take a very tough and almost unfeeling line about it. But after a time, when we began to see some of our best and most courageous comrades going under, we soon changed our minds. We could see that it was a real sickness. Men would hide away and go berserk during bombardments, and they became petrified during attacks. They could not be used for patrols, or even sentry duty, and the only answer was to hand them over to the Medical Officer, who, once he was satisfied it was a genuine case, had the man evacuated as a casualty. It was pathetic to see good men go down.

Howard himself almost went under. By D-Day plus four, he had gone for five days with almost no sleep, and his losses in Escoville and Herouvillette were heartrending. 'I felt terribly depressed and pessimistic', Howard admits, 'feeling quite sure that the Allied bridgehead was going to collapse on our vulnerable left flank. However, once the CO and the MO persuaded me what was wrong, with quiet threats of evacuation, I luckily shook myself out of it. It was an awful experience.'

Howard learned a lesson from the experience. He got regular, if short, periods of sleep for himself, and he saw to it that the platoon leaders arranged regular rest periods for everyone in turn, especially after attack or sh.e.l.l fire. Another manifestation of the pressure was some self-inflicted wounds, shots through the leg or foot 'usually said to have occurred when cleaning weapons. They were very difficult to prove.' Howard found that keeping up morale when casualties are heavy is always difficult and he did what he could. 'Good discipline and esprit de corps goes a long way towards overcoming it, but I found keeping the men well occupied was as good a cure as any. Active aggressive patrolling, sniping parties, marches behind the line and above all keep everyone in the picture. Glean all you can from HQ by way of information about how the battle is going and have regular meetings with the men to pa.s.s it on.'

Howard went to HQ not only to find out what was going on, but to do all those little things a good company commander does. He made certain there were plenty of cigarettes, for example, with an extra supply after a battle or a sh.e.l.ling. He also ensured the prompt arrival and distribution of the mail ('Essential for maintaining good morale'), sending runners back to HQ for the mail if he thought he could save a few minutes. Getting fresh bread was another morale-booster, though the first s.h.i.+pment did not arrive until about D plus 25. 'I was astounded over how much we longed for it.'

Cleaning weapons became almost an obsession. First thing in the morning, after the dawn stand to and breakfast, everything came out - rifles, machine-guns, Piats, mortars, grenades, ammunition - and everything was cleaned, oiled and inspected. Many of the men had a Schmeisser by this time.

During this period, Howard says, 'one thing I could never get used to were the smells of battle. Worst of these was dead and putrefying bodies. The men, friend and foe, were buried, but there was dead livestock everywhere just rotting away. In the middle of summer it was h.e.l.l. At one chateau a stable full of wonderful racehorses was caught in a burning building. The appalling smell from that place spread over a very wide area, and it was sickening. We eventually dealt with it by loads of lime, but you can imagine the flies that pyre attracted.'

But the biggest morale problem of all was a nagging question in every man's mind: 'Why are we being wasted like this? Surely there must be other bridges between here and Berlin that will have to be captured intact.'

It is indeed a mystery why the War Office squandered D Company, a unique group in the British army. Huge sums had been spent on its training, and its combination of training, skills, and hand-picked officers was unsurpa.s.sed.

Despite all this, the War Office sacrificed D Company to the German guns. Sweeney was wounded, Friday was wounded, Hooper was wounded - by August none of D Company's original officers were left, save Howard himself. All the sergeants and the sergeant-major were gone. Thornton had a leg wound and had been evacuated; so had Parr.

On D plus 11, Howard was wounded again, receiving shrapnel in his back. His driver took him back to an aid post where a surgeon removed it, and when he finished, the doctor told Howard to lie there for a while. Mortar rounds started coming in, and everybody ran for cover. Howard looked around. He was alone in the farmhouse operating-room. He jumped off the table, put on his s.h.i.+rt and battle smock, and went outside. Finding his driver taking shelter under the jeep, he told him, 'Let's get back to the company. It's quieter there than it is here.'

Howard's return to the front lines was followed by some confusion as to his whereabouts. All the doc.u.mentation at the aid post showed that he had been evacuated to England, and as a result his mail was diverted to hospital there. The daily letters he had been getting from Joy suddenly stopped coming. This was the period when Vis and V2s were raining down on England and he was tortured with thoughts other death and the loss of his children. That experience, Howard says, 'nearly sent me round the bend'.

It was worse for Joy. She got a telegram from the War Office which was supposed to read, 'Your husband has suffered a mortar wound and is in hospital'. In fact it read, 'Your husband has suffered a mortal wound and is in hospital'. A frantic Joy was told that he was in such-and-such hospital. She called there and was told he never arrived. No one knew where he was. For two weeks before the matter was worked out, and they started receiving letters from each other again, John and Joy suffered terribly.

Sergeant Hickman was fighting across from D Company once again. He gives a description of what it was like from the German point of view: There was man-to-man fighting, fighting in the rubble along the streets. You didn't know who was running in front of you and who was running behind you, you couldn't recognise anything and everybody ran. In the daytime we took position, and night we moved either to the left, to the right, back. I had a map case in my belt. The map made no difference to me because I didn't know where I was. So you were moved two kilometres to the left, two kilometres to the right, three kilometres forwards, or back again. Every day you counted your men, one section had two men left, another three. I was a platoon commander with five men to command.

On September 2, while trying to swim the Orne River, Hickman was wounded, captured, interrogated, and sent on to a POW camp in England.

Von Luck was also having a bad time. Every two or three days he would launch armoured attacks, but every time his tanks moved, observers in balloons would spot him, radio to the big s.h.i.+ps offsh.o.r.e and the planes overhead, and down would come naval gunfire and strafing Spitfires.

On July 18, there was the biggest bombardment von Luck ever experienced, from bombers, naval wars.h.i.+ps, and artillery. This was part of operation Goodwood, designed to break through the German lines, capture Caen, and drive on towards Paris. As the barrage moved past him, von Luck set out for the front on his motorcycle. He arrived at a battery of smoking 88mm guns pointing skyward, commanded by a Luftwaffe major. Off to his right, less than a kilometre away, von Luck could see twenty-five British tanks moving forward. He pointed them out to the battery commander and said, 'Major, depress your guns and kill those tanks'. The major refused. He said he was a Luftwaffe officer, and his target was bombers, not tanks. Von Luck repeated his order. Same response.

Von Luck pulled his pistol, pointed it between the major's eyes at a six-inch range, and said, 'Major, in one minute you are either a dead man or you will have won a medal'. The major depressed his guns, started shooting, and within minutes had crippled twenty-five British tanks. Shortly thereafter, Monty called off operation Goodwood.

In late August, 21st Panzer Division was pulled out of the Normandy battle. Von Luck and his men were sent over to the Rhone Valley to meet the threat of the invading forces in southern France.

At the end of August the British broke through and had the Germans on the run. D Company was part of the pursuit. It reached a village near the Seine, where Howard established his headquarters in a school and received the schoolmaster. The Frenchman said he wanted to show some appreciation for being liberated. 'But I've got nothing of any value that I can give you', he confessed to Howard. 'The Germans took everything of value before they left, in prams and G.o.d knows what, but the one thing I can give you is my daughter.'

And bringing out his eighteen-year-old daughter, he offered her to Howard. 'It was so pathetic', Howard remembers. He declined, but he also thinks the schoolmaster pa.s.sed his daughter on down to the other ranks - and that they accepted the gift.

The following day, on the Seine itself, Howard came into a village 'where we saw all these girls with all their hair cut off and tied to a lamp post. It was a gruesome sight, really.' He wondered if that kind of humiliation was being handed out to the prost.i.tutes back in Benouville, who had been as eager to please the British troops as they had the Germans. Or to the young mothers in the maternity hospital. Whose babies could those be, anyway, with all able -bodied Frenchmen off in slave labour or POW camps?

Howard thought it unfair of the French to take out all their frustrations on a single segment of 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 establish romantic attachments with young boys, and there were only young German boys around. 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 hair cutting.

On September 5, after three months of continuous combat, D Company was withdrawn from the lines. It travelled by truck to Arromanches, was driven out to Mulberry Harbour, climbed up scramble nets aboard s.h.i.+ps, and set sail for Portsmouth. Then by truck 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 still with them. All the sergeants and most of the corporals were gone. D Company had fallen from its D-Day strength of 181 to 40.

CHAPTER TEN.

D-Day plus three months to D-Day plus forty years

After one night at Bulford, the company went on leave. Howard drove up to Oxford for a reunion with his family and a glorious rest. On the morning of September 17, he relates, T 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 he silently wished him good luck.

Howard did not know it, but Sergeant Thornton was also up there, with a stick of paratroopers. When Thornton was evacuated from Normandy, he had a quick recovery from his wound. Then, rather than wait for the Ox and Bucks to return, he had transferred to the 1st Airborne Division, gone through his jump training, and was going in with Colonel John Frost's 2nd Battalion. Thornton fought beside Frost at Arnhem bridge for four days, and was captured with him.

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. If they had been there to take the bridge at Nijmegen, the American paratroopers would not have had to fight a desperate battle for 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 and set out to rebuild D Company, brought up to full strength by reinforcements. 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 Friday, November 13, Howard decided to spend the night with Joy, as Oxford was on the route to Birmingham. He brought with him two Oxford residents. Corporal Stock and his new second-in-command. Captain Osborne, together with his batman. Although Stock was his driver, Howard insisted on taking the wheel, because, although a good driver, Stock did not drive fast enough.

At about 5:30, just as dusk was falling, they met a Yank convoy of six-ton trucks on a narrow, twisting road. 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 leap-frogging up, and it was all over so quickly.'

They had a head-on crash. Howard was jammed behind the steering-wheel, and both legs, his right hip, and his left knee were smashed up. Osborne suffered similar injuries, but the other two escaped with cuts and bruises.

Howard was taken to hospital in Tidworth, where he was on the critical list for nearly six weeks. Joy made many long journeys to visit him. In December, using his connections with the Oxford police, Howard got himself moved to the Wingfield hospital in Oxford. He remained there until March, 1945.

D Company went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge, then led the way on the Rhine crossing and partic.i.p.ated in the drive to the Baltic. Most of the glider pilots were at Arnhem, then flew again in the Rhine crossing.

When Howard came out of hospital, he was using crutches. By the time his convalescent leave was nearly over, so was the war in Europe. But when he reported for duty, he learned that the Ox and Bucks were 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 training programme on a track near his home. On the second day of trying to run laps, his right hip seized up and the 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 stopped the nerves running down the leg. Howard went back into 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 with the National Savings Committee, then with the Ministry of Food, and finally with the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1946 he had an audience with the King at Buckingham Palace. On June 6, 1954, the tenth anniversary of D-Day, he received a Croix de Guerre avec Paime from the French government, which had already renamed the bridge. From that day onward, its name has been 'Pegasus Bridge'. Later the road between the bridge and the LZ was named 'Esplanade Major John Howard'.

Howard served as a consultant for Darryl Zanuck in the making of the film, The Longest Day. Played by Richard Todd, he 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, and it was he, not Howard, who 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 ca.n.a.l. Zanuck also romanticised the arrival of Lovat and his Commandos, quite falsely depicting their bagpipes playing as they crossed Pegasus Bridge.

Howard retired in 1974, and he and Joy live in a small but comfortable home in the tiny village of Burcot, about eight miles from Oxford. Terry and Penny live close enough for the grandchildren to pay regular visits. 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 walking-stick to get around, and then only moves with great pain, but all his enormous energy flows out again when he sees his bridge, and greets Madame Gondree, and starts talking to those of his men who have 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 autumn of 1944 fighting General Le Clerc's French armoured division. In mid-December he was involved in the fighting at the southern end of the Battle of the Bulge, and was surprised at how much the Americans had improved since February, 1943, when he had fought them at Ka.s.serine Pa.s.s. In the spring of 1945, 21st Panzer went to the Eastern front, to join in the defence of Berlin. In late April, by then encircled, von Luck was ordered to break through the Russian lines, then hold it open so that 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, your homeland.'

The men fought until they were out of ammunition, and von Luck told them, 'Now it's finished, you are 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 coffee importer.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, the Swedish royal military academy has brought von Luck and Howard together to give talks on Normandy battles and leaders.h.i.+p. 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 very good friends. 'So much for war', Howard comments.

Sergeant Hickman spent the remainder of the war in England as a POW. He liked the country so much that when he was s.h.i.+pped home, he applied for a visa. It was granted, and he emigrated to England, changing his name to Henry, and got a job, married a British woman, and settled down. One day in the early 1960s one of his friends at work told him that there was a British 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 faced at 0020 hours on June 6, 1944, in front of the cafe, with his machine-gun blazing away.

Hickman did not recognise Gray, 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. He and Gray got talking. Later they exchanged visits, and a friends.h.i.+p developed. Over the years it grew closer and deeper, and today they are intimates. 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. Major Dennis Fox, MBE, 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 he is the Director-General of the Battersea Dogs' Home near Old Windsor, and the head of the Ox and Bucks regimental veterans' a.s.sociation.

Major R. A. A. Smith, MC, became a director of both Sh.e.l.l and BP in India; he is now retired but runs tours to India. Colonel David Wood, MBE, soldiered on until retirement. He organised staff college visits to Pegasus, where Howard and Taylor would give lectures on what happened. Today David lives in retirement in Devon.

Staff Sergeant Oliver Boland, Croix de Guerre, lives in retirement near Stratford-upon-Avon. Jack Bailey stayed in the army, where he became a regimental sergeant major. Today he is head clerk in a London firm and lives in Catford, near Wally Parr. Dr John Vaughan has a medical practice in Devon.

Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork, DFM, worked as a salesman for the first ten years after the war. In 1956 he emigrated to British Columbia, where today he runs a small livestock farm on the edge of the mountains 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 decided he had to get out. He returned to Catford, where one of his sons is in his window-cleaning business with him. Another son is a promising musician.

To my knowledge, there are no intact Horsa gliders flying today. Zanuck got the blueprints and built one for The Longest Day, but was told by the Air Ministry that the design was inherently bad and the craft not air-worthy. Therefore Zanuck could not fly it across the Channel, as he had hoped to do, but had to dismantle the thing, bring it over by s.h.i.+p, 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 Tarrant Rushton, is today in the Airborne Forces Museum at Aldershot.

Benouville has a few new houses, some development, but basically it is as it was on June 6, 1944. So is Ranville, where Den Brotheridge is buried, under a tree in the churchyard.

The Gondree cafe remains, changed only by the portraits on the wall of John Howard, Jim Wallwork, Nigel Taylor, and the others who came to liberate France and the Gondrees.

Madame Gondree presides over her tiny cafe in a grand fas.h.i.+on. 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, is to see a happy woman. Before he died in the late 1960s, her husband Georges made many close British friends, Howard especially. Jack Bailey went duck hunting with Gondree each year.

When asked to describe life during the occupation, Madame Gondree lets loose a torrent of words, paragraphs or incidents separated by heartfelt cries of'Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!' She still hates the Germans and will not allow them into her cafe today. When Zanuck was shooting The Longest Day, he wanted to have half -dressed German soldiers come leaping out of the windows of the cafe as D Company charged across the bridge. Madame screamed, 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 got her way. The scene was dropped.

When Howard goes to the cafe today, he sometimes brings Hans von Luck with him. Howard has told Madame that von Luck might look suspiciously like a German, but that he is in fact a Swede.

The ca.n.a.l has been widened by some four or five feet. The chateau stands intact. The machine-gun pillbox that Jack Bailey knocked out and John Howard used as a CP is still there, forming the foundation of the house lived in by the man who operates the swing-bridge. The bunkers are all filled in. But the anti-tank gun and its emplacement, where Wally Parr had so much fun, remains. Three stone markers are placed on the sites where the three gliders crashed.

The river bridge is a new one, built since the war. The ca.n.a.l bridge, Pegasus Bridge, is still there.

EPILOGUE.The significance of Pegasus Bridge Pegasus Bridge today plays only a minor role in the Norman economy. It is lightly used, and for local purposes exclusively, because all the long-distance or heavy commercial traffic uses the new autoroute that runs from Le Havre to Caen to Bayeux. But on June 6, the bridge recalls its former glory, the day on which it was the most important bridge in Normandy. The tourists and the veterans come in increasing numbers each year to visit the museum and the Gondree cafe, the bridge, the markers designating the landing sites of the gliders. They are keenly interested in the operation, and want to know how the British did it.

There was no single key to the success of Howard's coup de main, or to the success of the 5th Para Brigade in providing relief just when it was most needed. Success in this case truly had many parents. John Howard stands out, of course, but without Jim Wallwork, Howard might well have come to earth miles from the bridge, or even on the wrong river. And so it goes, down the line. Gale's contribution was absolutely critical, but then so was Poett's. Without the information George Gondree fed the British, and without the air reconnaissance photographs, D Company might well have failed. If Nigel Taylor had not got his company into Benouville in time, or fought so magnificently once there, all would have been for nought. So too for Sergeant Thornton, without whose Piat all would have been in vain. If Jack Bailey had not knocked out the pillbox, Howard could hardly have taken, much less held, the bridge.

There were, in short, many heroes, each making a key contribution to the final success. If any one of these men - and in fact many others - had failed, the mission as a whole would have failed. Rather than single out individuals for praise, therefore, it is more appropriate to attempt an a.n.a.lysis of the factors in the British success.

TRAINING: It would be hard to find any company in the entire history of warfare that was better trained for a single operation than D company was on D-Day. Major Howard had laid the base in 1942 and 1943 by getting his men into the fittest physical condition possible, teaching them all the skills of combat infantry, forcing them to become accustomed to fighting at night, drilling into them patterns of quick response and immediate reactions. Then in the spring of 1944, he put them through the drill of capturing the bridges innumerable times. When they went into the operation, the men of D Company were far better trained for the battle that ensued than their opponents were. And their esprit de corps was as good as that to be found anywhere in the British army.

PLANNING AND INTELLIGENCE: The quality of British planning, like the intelligence on which it was based, was outstanding. Possibly no company commander in any invading force has ever known so much about his opposition as John Howard knew. On the basis of this intelligence. General Gale came up with a plan that was both highly professional and brilliant. Poett added his own touches to his part of the plan, as did Howard. It could not have been better conceived.

EXECUTION: The execution of the operation was somewhat less than perfect. Because of a navigation error, one-sixth of Howard's fighting strength never got into the battle. Howard's emphasis on having his platoon commanders lead from the front cost him dearly - in retrospect it certainly seems a mistake to have Lieutenants Brotheridge and Smith lead their platoons over the bridge, or to have Lieutenant Wood lead his platoon in clearing out the trenches. The paratroop drop was much too scattered, causing a delay in the arrival of reinforcements at critical moments. Coordination between ground and air for strafing and bombing support was sadly lacking. Radio communications were poor.

The things that went right were, obviously, of more significance. First and foremost, the achievement of the glider pilots was crucial, unprecedented, and magnificent. Second, the way in which D Company recovered from the shock of the landing and went about its drill exactly as planned was outstanding. Third, the night-fighting and street-fighting ability of D Company proved far superior to that of the enemy. Fourth, although the paras may have been understrength when they arrived, and a bit late at that, they did get there in time and did outfight the Germans, even though the Germans heavily outnumbered and outgunned them. Fifth, although Howard lost a majority of his officers and NCOs early on, he had the company so well trained that corporals and privates were able to undertake critical missions on their own intiative.

SURPRISE: Without surprise, obviously, there could have been no success. Any kind of a warning, even just two or three minutes before 0016, would have been sufficient for the Germans. Had Major Schmidt's garrison been alert when D Company landed, every man in the three gliders could have been killed by machine-gun fire before any got out. Surprise was complete, both with regard to method and target.

LUCK: Give me generals who are lucky said Napoleon, and so says every commander since. Howard and the British had more than their share of good luck. The best, probably, was the bomb that did not explode when it hit the bridge. (One is tempted to think that this was not just luck; it is at least possible that the bomb had been deliberately sabotaged by a French slave labourer in a German munitions factory.) It certainly was good luck that Thornton's Piat bomb set off the explosions inside the tank near the T junction. And it was wonderfully lucky that Hitler did not release the 21st Panzer Division to attack until after noon on D-Day.

METHOD: In his May 2 orders to Howard, Poett had said that the capture of the bridges would depend on 'surprise, speed, and dash for success'. In the event, Howard and D Company showed all three characteristics in carrying out their a.s.signment. What did it all mean? Because the operation was a success, we can never know its full significance; only if it had failed would we know the real value of Pegasus Bridge. As it is, any a.s.sessment of the operation's worth is speculative. But then speculation is the secret vice of every history buff, and in any case is unavoidable when pa.s.sing judgements.

Suppose, then, that Major Schmidt had managed to blow the bridges. In that event, even if Howard's men held both sides of both waterways, the easy movement that the British enjoyed over the bridges would have been impossible. Howard could not have brought Fox's platoon over from the river to Benouville, and Thornton would not have been by the T junction with his Piat. The most likely outcome, in that case, would have been a failure to hold the ground in the Benouville-Le Port area, with the resulting isolation of the 6th Airborne east of the Orne. Had German tanks come down to the bridge from Benouville, the enemy surely would have repulsed the invaders. In that case, with the bridges in German hands, the 6th Airborne would have been isolated, in a position comparable to that of the 1st Airborne later in the war in Arnhem.

The loss of a single division, even a full-strength, elite division like the 6th Airborne, could by itself hardly have been decisive in a battle that raged over a sixty-mile front and involved hundreds of thousands of men. But 6th Airborne's mission, like the division itself, was special. Elsenhower and Montgomery counted on General Gale to hold back the Germans on the left, making him the man most responsible for preventing the ultimate catastrophe of panzer formations loose on the beaches, rolling them up one by one. Gale was able to hold off the German armour, thanks in critical part to the possession of Pegasus Bridge.

Denying the use of the bridges to the Germans was important in shaping the ensuing campaign. As. .h.i.tler began bringing armoured divisions from the Pas de Calais to Normandy, he found it impossible to launch a single, well-coordinated blow. There were two major reasons. First, Allied air hara.s.sment and the activities of the French Resistance slowed the movement to the battlefield. Second, the only area available to the Germans to form up for such a blow was the area between the Dives and the Ornc. The natural line of attack would have been over Pegasus Bridge, down to Ouistreham, then straight west along the beaches. But because the 6th Airborne controlled Pegasus Bridge, such divisions as the 2nd Panzer, the 1st SS Panzer, and the famous Panzer Lehr, had been forced to go around bombed-out Caen, then enter the battle to the west of that city. As a consequence, they went into battle piecemeal and against the front, not the flank, of the main British forces. In the seven-week battle that followed, the Germans attacked again and again, using up the cream and much of the bulk of their armoured units in the process.

At a minimum, then, failure at Pegasus Bridge would have made D-Day much more costly to the Allies, and especially to the 6th Airborne Division. At a maximum, failure at Pegasus Bridge might have meant failure for the invasion as a whole.

There was one other matter of significance about Pegasus Bridge that needs to be mentioned. Dwight Eisenhower used to say that no totalitarian dictators.h.i.+p could ever match the fighting fury of an aroused democracy. That was certainly true in this case. The Germans provided their men with better weapons than the British had available; they also put more men into the battle. But with the exception of a handful of fanatic n.a.z.is, none of those wearing German uniforms in and around Pegasus Bridge (no matter what country they came from) wanted to be there. In the case of D Company and the 5th Para Brigade, every man who was there was a volunteer who wanted desperately to be there. In addition, the Germans were badly hampered by the mistrust that prevailed among their high command. Jealousy and suspicion are common in all high commands in war, of course, but nowhere else did they go so far as in n.a.z.i Germany. The direct consequence for Pegasus Bridge was the holding back of 21st Panzer until after Hitler had woken, a disastrous delay.

By contrast, the British high command trusted General Gale and allowed him wide leeway in meeting his objectives. Gale trusted Poett and Kindersley. Poett trusted Pine Coffin; they all trusted John Howard; Howard trusted his subalterns. In every instance, superiors left details of operations to the man on the spot.

The common soldiers of the Third Reich were almost incapable of acting on their own. Deprived of their officers and NCOs, they tended to fade away into the night. Whereas British soldiers - men like Jack Bailey and Wally Parr and Billy Gray and Wagger Thornton - were eager to seize the initiative, quick to exploit an opportunity, ready to act on their own if need be.

It is, therefore, possible to claim that the British won the Battle of Pegasus Bridge primarily because the army they sent into the fray was better than the enemy army, and it was better precisely because it represented a democratic rather than a totalitarian society. Ultimately, then, the victory was one for freedom, won by an army of the free.

Acknowledgements

I wish I could think of an adequate way to express my thanks to every person I interviewed for their hospitality and helpfulness. Without exception, I was welcomed into homes, always offered a meal and/or a drink, frequently invited to spend the night. In the process of doing two dozen interviews in England, I got to see a great deal of the country, which was fun, and to see a great deal of the British people, which was fascinating. I stayed with old-age pensioners, with successful businessmen, with solicitors, on grand country estates, in East End flats, in fas.h.i.+onable West End town houses. D Company, I came to realise, came from every part of British society, with each part making its own contribution to the organisation as a whole. But what impressed me most was the tangible evidence of what good use these men and women had made of the freedom they helped to preserve for themselves and for us on June 6,1944.