The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  There was the bridge itself, with its superstructure and water tower at the east end the dominant features of the flat landscape. There was a machine-gun pillbox just north of the bridge, on the east side, and an antitank gun emplacement across the road from it. These fortifications were surrounded by barbed wire. At Wallwork’s last conference with Howard, Howard had told him that he wanted the nose of the Horsa to break through the barbed wire. Wallwork thought to himself that there was not a chance in hell that he could land that big, heavy, cumbersome, badly overloaded, powerless Horsa with such precision, at midnight, over a bumpy and untested landing strip he could barely see. But out loud he assured Howard he would do his best. What he and Ainsworth thought, however, was that such a sudden stop would result in “a broken leg or so, maybe two each.” And they agreed among themselves that if they got out of this caper with only broken legs, they would be lucky.

  Along with the constant concern about his location, and with the intense effort to penetrate the darkness and clouds, Wallwork had other worries. He would be doing between 90 and 100 mph when he hit the ground. If he ran into a tree or an antiglider pole, he would be dead, his passengers too injured or stunned to carry out their task. And the parachute worried him too. It was in the back of the glider, held in place by Corporal Bailey. Wallwork had agreed to add the parachute at the last minute, because his Horsa was so overloaded and Howard refused to remove one more round of ammunition. The idea was that the arrester parachute would provide a safer, quicker stop. What Wallwork feared that it would do was throw him into a nose dive.

  The control mechanism for the chute was over Ainsworth’s head. At the proper moment, he would press an electric switch and the trapdoor would fall open, the chute billow out. When Ainsworth pressed another switch, the chute would fall away from the glider. Wallwork understood the theory; he just hoped he would not have to use the chute in fact.

  At 0014 Wallwork called over his shoulder to Howard to get ready. Howard and the men linked arms and brought their knees up. Most everyone thought the obvious thoughts—“No turning back now,” or “Here we go,” or “This is it.” Howard recalled, “I could see ole Jim holding that bloody great machine and driving it in at the last minute, the look on his face was one that one could never forget. I could see those damn great footballs of sweat across his forehead and all over his face.”

  • • •

  Gliders #2 and #3 were directly behind Wallwork, at their one-minute intervals. The other group of Horsas was, however, now split up. Priday’s #4 glider had gone up the River Dives rather than the Orne River. Seeing a bridge over the Dives at about the right distance inland, the pilot of #4 glider was preparing to land. The other two Horsas, on the correct course, headed up the Orne River. They had a straight-in run. They would “prang,” a gliderman’s term for touchdown, pointed south, along the west bank of the river, in a rectangular field nearly one thousand meters long.

  • • •

  Brigadier Poett finally got his hatch open (in another of those Albemarles one of Poett’s officers fell out while opening his hatch and was lost in the Channel). Standing over the hole in the floor of the bomber, a foot on each side, Poett could not see anything. He flew right over the Merville Battery, another critical target for the paras that night. Another minute and it was 0016 hours. The pilot flipped on the green light, and Poett brought his feet together and fell through the hatch into the night.

  • • •

  On the canal bridge, Private Romer and the other sentry were putting in another night of routine pacing back and forth across the bridge. The bombing activity at Caen was old stuff to them, not their responsibility and not worth a glance. The men in the machine-gun pillbox dozed, as usual, as did the troops standing to in the slit trenches. The antitank gun was unmanned.

  In Ranville, Major Schmidt opened another bottle of wine. In Bénouville, Private Bonck had finished his wine and had gone into the bedroom with his little French whore. He unbuckled his belt and began to unbutton his trousers as the whore slipped out of her dress. On the road from Ouistreham, Sergeant Hickman and his group in the staff car sped south, toward Bénouville and the bridge. At the café, the Gondrées slept.

  • • •

  Wallwork was down to two hundred feet, his airspeed slightly below 100 mph. At 0015 he was halfway down the final run. About two kilometers from his target, the clouds cleared the moon. Wallwork could see the river and the canal—they looked like strips of silver to him. Then the bridge loomed before him, exactly where he expected it. “Well,” he thought to himself, “I gotcha now.”

  CHAPTER 2

  D-Day

  Minus Two Years

  Spring 1942 was a bad time for the Allies. In North Africa, the British were taking a pounding. In Russia, the Germans had launched a gigantic offensive aimed at Stalingrad. In the Far East, the Japanese had overrun the American, British, and Dutch colonial possessions and were threatening Australia. In France, and throughout Western and Eastern Europe, Hitler was triumphant. The only bright spot was that the previous December 7, America had entered the war. But to date that event had produced only a few more ships, and no troops, no planes, hardly even an increased flow of lend-lease supplies.

  Throughout the British Army, nevertheless, boredom reigned. The so-called phony war was from September of 1939 to May of 1940, but for thousands of young men who had enlisted during that period, the time from spring 1941 to the beginning of 1944 was almost as bad. There was no threat of invasion. The only British army doing any fighting at all was in the Mediterranean; almost everywhere else, duties and training were routine—and routinely dull. Discipline had fallen off, in part because of the boredom, in part because the War Office had concluded that martinet discipline in a democracy was inappropriate, and because it was thought it dampened the fighting spirit of the men in the ranks.

  Many soldiers, obviously, rather enjoyed this situation and would have been more than content to stick out the war lounging around barracks, doing the odd parade or field march, otherwise finding ways of making it look as if they were busy. But there were thousands who were not content, young men who had joined up because they really did want to be soldiers, really did want to fight for King and Country, really did seek some action and excitement. In the spring of 1942, their opportunity came when a call went out for volunteers for the airborne forces.

  Britain had made a decision to create an airborne army. The 1st Airborne Division was being formed up. Major General F. A. M. “Boy” Browning would command it. Already a legendary figure in the Army, noted especially for his tough discipline, Browning looked like a movie star and dressed with flair. In 1932 he had married the novelist Daphne du Maurier, who in 1942 suggested a red beret for airborne troops, with Bellerophon astride winged Pegasus as the airborne shoulder patch and symbol.

  • • •

  Wally Parr was one of the thousands who responded to the call to wear the red beret. He had joined the Army in February 1939, at the age of sixteen (he was one of more than a dozen in D Company, Ox and Bucks, who lied about his age to enlist). He had been posted to an infantry regiment and had spent three years “never doing a damn thing that really mattered. Putting up barbed wire, taking it down the next day, moving it. . . . Never fired a rifle, never did a thing.” So he volunteered for airborne, passed the physical, and was accepted into the Ox and Bucks, just then forming up as an air landing unit, and was assigned to D Company. After three days in his new outfit, he asked for an interview with the commander, Major John Howard.

  “Ah, yes, Parr,” Howard said as Parr walked into his office. “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to get out,” Parr stated.

  Howard stared at him. “But you just got in.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Parr responded, “and I spent the last three days weeding around the barracks block. That’s not what I came for. I want to transfer from here to the paras. I want the real thing, what I volunteered for, not these stupid gliders, of whi
ch we don’t have any anyway.”

  “You take it easy,” Howard replied. “Wait.” And he dismissed Parr without another word.

  Leaving the office, Parr thought, “I’d better be careful with this fellow.”

  • • •

  In truth, Parr as yet had no idea just how tough his new company commander was. Howard had come out of a background that was as working class as any of the Cockneys in his company. Born December 8, 1912, he was the eldest of nine children. From the time John was two years old until he was six, his father, Jack Howard, was off in France, fighting the Great War. When Jack returned, he got a job with Courage’s brewery, making barrels. The family lived in the West End of London, where John’s mother, Ethel, a dynamic woman, managed to keep them in clean clothes and adequately fed. John recalls, “I spent the best part of my childhood, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, pushing prams, helping out with the shopping, and doing all that sort of thing.”

  John’s one great pleasure in life was the Boy Scouts. The Scouts got him out of London for weekend camps, and in the summer he would get a fortnight’s camp somewhere in the country. His chums on the streets of London did not approve; they made fun of his short pants “and generally made my life hell.” Not even his younger brothers would stick with the Scouts. But John did. He loved the outdoor life, the sports, and the competition.

  John’s other great passion was school. He was good at his studies, especially mathematics, and won a scholarship to secondary school. But the economic situation was such that he had to go to work, so he passed up the scholarship and instead, at age fourteen, took a full-time job as a clerk with a broker’s firm. He also took evening classes, five nights a week, in English, math, accounting, economics, typing, shorthand, anything that he thought would be beneficial to his work. But in the summer of 1931, when he returned to London from Scout camp, he discovered that his firm had been hammered on the stock exchange and he was out of a job.

  By this time the younger Howard children were growing, taking up more space, and the house was bursting. John offered to move out, to find a flat and a job of his own. His mother would not hear of his breaking up the family. So he decided to run off and enlist in the Army.

  He went into the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. The older soldiers, Howard found, were “very rough and tough. . . . I freely admit I cried my eyes out for the first couple of nights when I was in the barracks room with these toughs and wondered if I’d survive.”

  In fact, he began to stand out. In recruit training, at Shrewsbury, he was outstanding in sports—crosscountry running, swimming, boxing, all things he had done in the Scouts. To his great benefit the British Army of 1932, like most peacetime regular armies everywhere, was fanatic about sports competition between platoons, companies, battalions. When John joined his battalion, at Colchester, the commanding officer immediately made him the company clerk, a cushy job that left him with plenty of free time to excel in sports. Then he was sent to an education course, to learn to teach, and when he returned he was put to teaching physical education to recruits, and to competing for his company in various events.

  That was all right, but John’s ambitions reached higher. He decided to try for a commission, based on his sports record, his education qualifications—all those night courses—and his high scores on army exams. But getting a commission from the ranks of the peacetime Army was well-nigh impossible, and he was turned down. He did get a promotion to corporal.

  • • •

  And he met Joy Bromley. It was on a blind date. He had been dragged along because his buddy had two girls to look after. Joy was supposed to be his buddy’s date, but John took one look at her and lost his heart forever. Joy was only sixteen (she lied and told John she was eighteen), slim but with a handsome figure, pert in her face, lively in her carriage, quick to laugh, full of conversation. She had come reluctantly on the date—her people were in the retail trade, respectable middle class; she had already been dating a boy from Cambridge; and as she told her friend, “I’m not allowed to go out with soldiers.”

  “Well, it’s only for coffee,” her friend persisted, “and I’ve made a promise.” So Joy went, and over the coffee she and John talked, the words, the laughs, the stories bubbling out. At the train station, John kissed her good night.

  That was in 1936, and a courtship ensued. At first it was secretive, Joy fearing her mother’s disapproval. They met under a large copper beech tree at the foot of the garden at Joy’s house. John did not much care for this sneaking around, however, and he decided to proceed on a direct line. He announced to Joy that he was going to see her mother. “Well, I nearly died,” Joy recalled. “I thought Mother wouldn’t see him,” and if she did, then “she would flail me for making such an acquaintance.” But Mother—and John—came through splendidly, Mother liking John immediately and telling Joy, “You’ve got a real man there.” In April 1938, they were engaged, promising Joy’s mother they would wait until Joy was older before marrying.

  • • •

  In 1938, John’s enlistment came to an end. In June, he joined the Oxford City Police force. After a tough and extended training course, in which he came in second out of two hundred, he began walking the streets of Oxford at night. He found it “quite an experience. You are on your own, you know, anything can happen.”

  • • •

  He stayed with the police until after the war began. On October 28, 1939, he and Joy were married. On December 2, he reported for duty as a full corporal with the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. Within two weeks he was a sergeant. One month later he was company sergeant major. In April, he became regimental sergeant major. So he jumped from corporal to regimental sergeant major in five months, something of a record even in wartime. And in May, his brigadier offered him a chance at a commission.

  He hesitated. Being regimental sergeant major meant being the top man, responsible only to the commanding officer, the real backbone of the regiment. Why give that up to be a subaltern? Further, as Howard explained to his wife, he did not have a very high opinion of the incoming second lieutenants and did not think he wanted to be a part of them. Joy brushed all his objections aside and told him that he absolutely must try for the commission. Her reaction ended his hesitancy, and he went off to OCTU—Officer Cadet Training Unit—in June 1940.

  Upon graduation, he requested the Ox and Bucks, because he liked the association with Oxford and he liked light infantry. Within a fortnight he feared he had made a terrible mistake. The Ox and Bucks were “a good county regiment” with a full share of battle honors, at Bunker Hill, in the Peninsula, at the Battle of New Orleans, Waterloo, and in the Great War. Half the regiment had just come back from India. All the officers came from the upper classes. It was in the nature of things for them to be snobbish, especially to a working-class product who had been a cop and had come up from the ranks. In brief, the officers cut Howard. They meant it to be sharp and cruel, and it was, and it hurt.

  After two weeks of the silent treatment, Howard phoned Joy, then living with her family in Shropshire. “You’d better plan to move here,” he declared. “Because it’s just horrible and I need some encouragement or I am not going to stick it. I don’t have to put up with this.” Joy promised him she would move quickly.

  The following morning, on the parade ground, Howard was putting four squads through a drill. He already had his men sharp enough to do some complicated maneuvers. When he dismissed the squads, he turned to see his colonel standing behind him. In a quiet voice, the colonel asked, “Why don’t you bring your wife here, Howard?” Within a week, Joy had found a flat in Oxford and John had been accepted by his fellow officers.

  Soon he was a captain with his own company, which he trained for the next year. At the beginning of 1942, he learned that a decision had been taken to go airborne with the Ox and Bucks, and that his battalion would be gliderborne troops. No one was forced to go airborne; every officer and trooper was given a choice. About 40 percent declined
the opportunity to wear the red beret. Another 10 percent were weeded out in the physical exam. It was meant to be an elite regiment.

  The sergeant major came to the Ox and Bucks specially posted from the outside. Wally Parr makes the man’s overpowering personality vivid in a short anecdote. “That first day,” says Parr, “he called the whole bleeding regiment together on parade. And he looked at us, and we looked at him, and we both knew who was boss.”

  Howard himself had to give up his company and his captaincy to go airborne, but he did not hesitate. He reverted to lieutenant and platoon leader in order to become an airborne officer. In three weeks, his colonel promoted him and gave him command of D Company. Shortly after that, in May of 1942, he was promoted to major.

  • • •

  D Company as noted, came half from the original Ox and Bucks, half from volunteers drawn from every branch of the Army. The men came from all over the United Kingdom, and from every class and occupation. What they had in common was that they were young, fit, eager to be trained, ready for excitement, the kind of troops every company commander wishes he could have.

  Howard’s platoon leaders also came from different backgrounds. Two were Cambridge students when they volunteered, one was a graduate of the University of Bristol, but the oldest lieutenant, at age twenty-six, was Den Brotheridge, who, like Howard, had come up from the ranks. Indeed, Howard had originally recommended Den, then a corporal, for OCTU. His fellow platoon leaders were a bit uneasy about Den when he first joined up; as one of them explained, “He wasn’t one of us, you know.” Den played soccer rather than rugby and cricket. But, the officer immediately added, “You couldn’t help but like him.” Den was a first-class athlete, good enough that it was freely predicted he would become a professional soccer player after the war.

  Captain Brian Priday was Howard’s second-in-command. Six feet tall, a quiet, steady type, Priday was ideal for the job. He and Howard hit it off, helped by the fact that Priday’s father had also been on the Oxford police force. Priday himself had been in the automobile trade. He was in his mid-twenties. Lieutenants Tod Sweeney and Tony Hooper were in their early twenties; Lieutenant David Wood was all of nineteen years old, fresh out of OCTU. “My gracious,” Howard thought to himself when Wood reported, “he is going to be a bit too young for the toughies in my company.” But, Howard added, “David was so keen and bubbling with enthusiasm I thought, Well, we’ve got to make something of him. So I gave him a young soldier platoon with mature NCOs and it worked out fine.”