Pegasus Bridge

by Stephen Ambrose

  Back in Oxford, Joy Howard slept. She had had a routine day, taking care of Terry and Penny, getting them into bed at 7 p.m., doing her housework, then spending a couple of hours by the radio, smocking Penny's little dresses.

  On his last furlough, John had hidden his service dress uniform in a spare room closet. He had then taken Terry's shoe, kissed the children, started to leave, and returned to kiss them once more. As he left, he told Joy that when she heard that the invasion had started, she could stop worrying, because his job would be finished. Joy had discovered the missing shoe and found the uniform. She knew that the invasion must be imminent, because leaving the uniform behind meant that John did not expect to be dining in the officers' mess for the foreseeable future.

  But that had been weeks ago, and nothing had happened since. For two years there had been talk of an invasion, but nothing happened. On June 5,1944, Joy had no special feelings - she just went to bed. She did hear air traffic, but because most of the bombers based in the Midlands were headed south, rather than east, she was on the fringes of the great air armada and paid little attention to the accustomed noise. She slept.

  Down in the southeastern end of London, almost in Kent, Irene Parr did hear and see the huge air fleet headed towards Normandy and she immediately surmised that the invasion had begun, partly because of the numbers, partly because Wally -in a gross breach of security - had told her that D Company was going to lead the way, and he guessed it would be in the first week of June, when the moon was right. She did not know, of course, exactly where he was, but she was sure he was in great danger, and prayed for him. She would have been pleased, had she known, that Wally's last thoughts, before leaving England, were of her. Just before boarding Wallwork's Horsa, Wally had taken a piece of chalk and christened the glider the 'Lady Irene'.

  Wallwork had crossed the coast well to the east of the mouth of the Orne River. Although he was the pilot of the no. 1 glider, and nos. 2 and 3 were directly behind him, he was not leading the group to the LZ - the Landing Zone. Rather, each pilot was on his own, as the pilots could not see the other gliders in any case. Boland remembers the feeling 'of being on your own up there, dead quiet, floating over the coast of France, and knowing that there's no turning back'.

  Wallwork could not see the bridges, not even the river and canal. He was flying by Ainsworth's stop-watch, watching his compass, his airspeed indicator, his altimeter. Three minutes and forty-two seconds into the run, Ainsworth said, 'Now!', and Wallwork threw the descending glider into a full right turn.

  He looked out the window for a landmark. He could see nothing. 'I can't see the Bois de Bavent', he whispered to Ainsworth, not wanting to upset his passengers. Ainsworth snapped back, 'For God's sake, Jim, it's the biggest place in Normandy. Pay attention.'

  'It's not there', Jim whispered fiercely. 'Well, we are on course anyway', Ainsworth replied. Then he started counting: '5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Bingo. Right one turn to starboard onto course'. Wallwork heaved over the wooden steering wheel and executed another turn. He was now headed north, along the east bank of the canal, descending rapidly. Using the extra large 'barn door' wing flaps, he had brought the glider from 7,000 to about 500 feet, and reduced her airspeed from 160 mph to about 110 mph.

  Below and behind him, Caen was ablaze with tracers, searchlights, and fires started by the bombers. Ahead of him, he could see nothing. He hoped that Ainsworth was right and they were on target.

  That target was a small, triangular field, about 500 metres long, with the base on the south, the tip near the south-east end of the canal bridge. Wallwork could not see it, but he had studied photographs and a detailed model of the area so long and so hard that he had a vivid mental picture of what he was headed towards.

  There was the bridge itself, with its superstructure and water tower at the east end the dominant feature of the flat landscape. There was a machine-gun pillbox just north of the bridge, on the east side, and an anti-tank gun emplacement across the road from it. These fortifications were surrounded by barbed wire. At Wallwork's last briefing with Howard, Howard had told him that he wanted the nose of the Horsa to break through the barbed wire, which otherwise would need to be destroyed with bangalore torpedoes. Wallwork thought to himself that there was not a chance in hell that he could land that heavy, cumbersome, badly overloaded, powerless Horsa with such precision 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 amongst 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 anti-glider 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. Wallwork feared that it would 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, following normal landing drill. Everyone knew the floor of the glider would disintegrate on landing. 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. Friday's no. 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 no. 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 touch-down, pointed south, along the west bank of the river, in a rectangular field nearly 1,000 metres 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 up 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; so did the troops standing-to in the slit trenches. The anti-tank gun was unmanned.

  In Ranville, Major Schmidt opened another bottle of wine. In Benouville, Private Bonck had finished his wine and had gone into the bedroom with his prostitute. He unbuckled his belt and began to unbutton his trousers as the woman slipped out of her dress. On the road from Ouistreham, Sergeant Hickman and his group in the staff car sped south, towards Benouville and the bridge. At the cafe, the Gondrees slept.

  Wallwork was down to 200 feet, his airspeed slig
htly below 100 mph. At 0015 he was halfway down the final run. About two kilometres 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, 'Igotchanow.'

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 and British colonial possessions and were threatening Australia. In France, and throughout Western and Eastern Europe, Hitler was triumphant. The only bright spot was that 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 ofLend-Lease supplies.

  Throughout much of the British army, nevertheless, boredom reigned. The official phoney 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. As a result, discipline had fallen off. But discipline had suffered anyway, partly because the War Office had feared to impose it too strictly in a democracy, and partly because it was thought to dampen the fighting spirit of the men in the ranks.

  Obviously, many soldiers rather enjoyed this situation: they 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: Britain had decided to create an airborne army under the command of Major-General F. A. M. 'Boy' Browning. This would be the 1st Airborne Division, and volunteers were being called for.

  Browning had already become a legendary figure in the army. Noted especially for his tough discipline, he looked like a movie star, dressed with flair, and was married to the novelist Daphne du Maurier. It was she who in 1942 suggested a red beret for airborne troops, with Bellerophon astride winged Pegasus as the airborne shoulder patch and symbol, pale blue on a maroon background.

  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 16 (he was one of more than a dozen in D Company, Ox and Bucks, who lied about their age to enlist). Posted to an infantry regiment, he 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 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 was marched 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.' 'Yes, sir', Parr responded, 'and I spent the lasty 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 which we don't have any anyway.'

  'Now you take it easy', Howard replied. 'Just wait.' And he dismissed Parr without another word. Leaving the office, Parr thought to himself, '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 was born December 8, 1912, eldest of nine children in a working-class London family. 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 brewery, making barrels. 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 in Camden Town 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 out-door life, the sports and the competition.

  John's other great passion was school. He was good at his studies, especially maths, and won a scholarship to secondary school. But the financial situation at home 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 firm of stockbrokers. He also took evening classes five nights a week in English, maths, accounting, economics, typing, shorthand, anything that he thought would be useful in 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, however, 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 excelled in sports - cross-country 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 fanatical about sports competition between platoons, companies, battalions. When John joined his battalion, at Colchester, the company commander immediately made him the company clerk, a cushy job that left him with plenty of free time for sports. Then he was sent on an education course, to learn to teach, and when he returned he was put to teaching physical education and school subjects to recruits, and to competing both for his company and battalion 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 educational qualifications - all those night courses - and his high scores on army exams. But getting a commission from the ranks in the peacetime army was almost impossible, and he was turned down. He did get a promotion to corporal, and transferred to teach in the school at the Regimental Depot at Shrewsbury.

  And he met Joy Bromley. It was a blind date, John being dragged along simply 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 seventeen), slim but with a handsome figure, pert in her face, lively in her carriage, quick to laugh, full of conversation. She had come on the date reluctantly - her people were in the retail trade in Church Stretton near Shrewsbury, 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 pro
ceed 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 Mrs Bromley and John got along splendidly; she told Joy, 'You've got a real man there'. In April, 1937, 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, extended training course at the Police College in Birmingham, in which he came in second of 200, 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.'

  It was here, on the streets of Oxford at midnight, with the young undergraduates staggering their way home, the occasional thief, the odd robbery, the accidents, the pub staying open after closing hour, that John Howard first came into his own. He had already demonstrated that he was reliable, exceedingly fit, a natural leader in games, a marvellous athlete himself, in short one of those you would look to for command of an infantry platoon, perhaps even a company, in time of war. But these qualities he shared with thousands of other young men. However admirable, they were hardly unique. What was unique was Howard's love of night. Not because it gave him an opportunity to indulge in some petty graft, or bash in a few heads - far from it. He loved the night because while walking his beat he had to be constantly alert.

  He was a man of the most extraordinary energy, so much energy that he could not burn it off even with daily ten-mile runs and twenty miles of walking the beat. What could burn it off was the mental effort required at every corner, past every tree, literally with every step. Expecting only the unexpected, he was always on his own, with no one to turn to for reinforcements or advice. To be so intense, for such a long period of time, through the dark hours, brought Howard to a full use of all his gifts and powers. He was a creature of the night; he loved the challenge of darkness.