The 505th PIR had been pulled out of Italy that November, sailed to Northern Ireland and had been training for OVERLORD ever since. Alexander, now decorated with a British Distinguished Service Cross as well as a Silver Star for actions in Italy, was made executive officer – deputy commander – of the 505th, but would be dropping into Normandy as a fighting man, just like the rest of the US Airborne Forces. Also jumping was the divisional commander, Major-General Matthew Ridgway. ‘I want to be there on the ground right from the start,’ he told Alexander.2 ‘And I want you to pick a plane for me where I’ll have the best chance of landing on the drop zone.’ It was understandable that Ridgway had chosen the 505th – they were the only regiment in the two airborne divisions to have combat jump experience. For the general, Alexander selected a C-47 taking men from the 505th’s Headquarters Company, while he opted to go with an experienced jump master and a plane that would be on the right side of the flying formation; he intended to stand by the door and watch for the beacons on the ground marked out by the pathfinders, sent in thirty minutes ahead and specially trained to set up configurations of giant letters in lights and to operate Eureka homing beacons.
Now, on the evening of Monday, 5 June, Alexander was preparing to jump into France. Orders were that every paratrooper was to jump – not one of them was to be brought back to England. It didn’t matter how well trained or experienced one might be; at this stage each paratrooper, from private to general, was placing his life in the hands of the aircrew delivering them to their intended drop zone – DZ – and trusting in Lady Luck.
At least it seemed likely they would be flying over the Cotentin with the benefit of tactical surprise. ‘There has been no intelligence during the last week,’ concluded the Joint Intelligence Committee on Saturday, 3 June, ‘to suggest that the enemy has accurately assessed the area in which our main assault is to be made.’3 That was a huge relief, but there had been potentially catastrophic intelligence breaches on the 5th, first when an Associated Press report announced that the invasion was under way and then when a fighter pilot from the Eighth looked down on the huge invasion fleet and shared his amazement over his radio. Furthermore, the latest intelligence picture about German strength in Normandy was sobering; unquestionably, the month’s postponement from early May had cost the Allies. Some 59 German divisions were in the West, including 10 panzer and panzer-grenadier, with a possible further 13 divisions arriving within two months. These were of varying sizes; infantry divisions by this stage of the war were only around 12,000 men full strength, while the panzer divisions were more like 20,000. Immediately facing the invasion, the Joint Intelligence Committee predicted, were 7 divisions, which might well rise to 10 by the end of D-Day. By D plus 2, that figure could well be 16 or 17 and by D plus 8 as many as 24. The moment the first Allied troops landed, the race would begin to see which side could build up sufficient strength and weight of arms first. That was what it boiled down to: which side could build up weight of arms quickest in the Normandy coastal bridgehead. Shipping vast armies methodically across the sea was one thing; shipping them very quickly was quite another.
The first troops in, though, had no need of shipping. They would be airborne forces, dropped with the specific task of securing the all-important flanks and so enabling the Allies to isolate the battle zone immediately to their front. Their role could not have been more important and it was quite absurd that Leigh-Mallory should have even considered cancelling them, no matter the risk; that he had implored first Bradley then Eisenhower to do so demonstrated his lack of understanding about how OVERLORD was planned and expected to work. Those flanks had to be protected if the seaborne landings were going to have a realistic hope of success. At the western end of the invasion front, that meant severing the vital arteries that led to Cherbourg and protecting the Utah landings, and in the east, destroying the crucial bridges over the River Dives and securing intact those crossing the Orne and Caen Canal.
Ever since 10 May 1940, when the Germans had dropped glider-borne troops on to the Belgian fort of Eben Emael and paratroopers had captured key bridges, both Britain and America had become rather dazzled by the potential of airborne troops.4 They had, however, absorbed all the benefits but filtered out – or not properly analysed – the many drawbacks of such operations. For example, in May 1940, when the Germans had launched their assault in the West using large numbers of airborne troops, some 353 aircraft had been destroyed, most of them transports; it was the worst single day of losses in the air for the Luftwaffe in the war to date. The airborne operation at Dombås in Norway in April 1940 had been a spectacular failure, as was their airborne drop on The Hague the following month; they captured only two of three bridges over the Albert Canal in Belgium; and on Crete secured only one of three objectives and over half their number were slaughtered. Where they had proved more successful was that those who survived their jump fought superbly on the ground.
Churchill had been among the first to insist the British Army create an airborne arm of 5,000 men. One or two brigades, however, had soon ballooned. In October 1941 the War Office decided to create the 1st Airborne Division, followed by a second division in the spring of 1943. The SAS also grew quickly in 1943, as did a British-funded Independent Polish Brigade. A similar story was unfolding in the United States: a paratroop test platoon formed in June 1940 evolved into the 501st Parachute Infantry Unit. A parachute school was established at Fort Benning and then in March 1942 the 82nd Airborne Division was activated, swiftly followed by the 101st in August the same year. Two more divisions were then created: the 11th and 17th in May 1943. Glider troops were added, requiring yet more special equipment and further training, and absorbing yet more assets.
There had been no shortage of applicants, and from the outset paratroopers, especially, had been perceived as elite, and very much special forces. They were expected to train harder and be physically fitter than most other units, and, crucially, they were all volunteers and were consequently more motivated. The large majority of conscripted troops – and both armies were around 75 per cent conscripts – did not want to fight in the war, would never have entered the military were it not for the global conflict now raging, and simply hoped to keep their heads down and get through it. Most also wanted to be led and told what to do. In theory, the Americans still had capital punishment for desertion, though there was no appetite for enacting it, while the British had abolished it altogether. Unlike the Germans, Allied servicemen were not going to be shot for desertion. It was why maintaining morale was so important: there was nothing, really, to stop them throwing down their weapons and walking away. The best troops were those that could think on their feet and, crucially, use their initiative. This was linked to motivation, and the combination of motivation, a desire to be the best, and physical fitness made the airborne troops stand out.
Not quite the same thought had been devoted to how these excellent troops might be delivered to the battlefield, or in what format and conditions. The British had no specifically designed troop-carrying aircraft, nor did they attempt to create one. Instead, bombers were refitted with hatches built into their bellies. Bombers, however, were designed to carry bombs, not troops. Wing spars, a lack of seats and badly positioned jump hatches all mitigated against using them for dropping paratroopers. Instead, Britain turned to the United States, which was using slightly adapted Douglas DC3s. These aircraft would be the means of dropping most Allied paratroopers, American and British. The US military classified them as C-47s while the British called them Dakotas, but they had not been given self-sealing fuel tanks, something that massively reduced the chances of fire spreading or an aircraft blowing up and had become standard on most other combat aircraft; nor had they been given defensive guns or armour plating. By June 1944, none of the 1,176 transport aircraft earmarked for the American airborne drop had been updated. Each one remained as vulnerable as ever, and their aircrew knew it. Rumours circulated that they were considered expendable and that high casualties
were assured. It did nothing for the already fragile morale amongst the transport wings.
Training was intense for the transport crews once they reached Britain – collectively, they logged some 30,000 hours in the lead-up to D-Day. Allocations were made early on, so the divisions could train together with the troops they would be carrying, but with the exception of Exercise EAGLE, the last big joint training exercise in May, the 101st Airborne, for example, carried out no further drops after 18 April. Although the brief history of airborne operations clearly showed the drop was the most problematic part, for the next seven weeks General Maxwell Taylor felt his men were better served carrying out further training on the ground.
In fact, previous Allied airborne operations had demonstrated the difficulties of such missions with vivid clarity. Drops in north-west Africa had been an utter fiasco, and not much better on Sicily, where fewer than one in six American paratroopers had landed close to the drop zone and some as far away as 65 miles. A subsequent airlift had been badly shot up by the Allies’ own naval guns. British glider troops had also been spread to the winds over Sicily, where just four out of 144 had landed in the correct DZ. Sixty-nine had landed in the sea.
Over North Africa and again over Sicily, the troops that landed had fought brilliantly. The problems had all lain with the airlift – the delivery to the battlefield. Since Sicily, both the Americans and British had given much further thought to this issue. General Ridgway had delivered a report in autumn 1943 in which he outlined his own views. ‘Airborne troops,’ he had written, ‘are weapons of opportunity.’ In this he was correct, but he then went on to insist it was no use using such troops piecemeal; instead they should be sent into the fray en masse – that is, in divisions. Again, he had a point, but still he was focusing more on what airborne troops might achieve once on the ground rather than how they might get there in the first place. The more paratroopers dropped, the more transports needed, but the number, status and quality of those had not improved very much since the fiascos in the Mediterranean.
This was the problem in a nutshell: while American airborne troops were among the best in the US Army, they were being delivered to the battle zone by the least well trained aircrew. Few in the USAAF aspired to become pilots or navigators on transport aircraft, so it was those of lower ability and charisma who tended to be posted to them. The conundrum had, if anything, been made worse when, late the previous year, General George Marshall, the US chief of staff of the army, and General Hap Arnold had together encouraged a greater use of airborne troops for OVERLORD and so had made available considerably more transport aircraft. Now ready and waiting in England were three wings and fourteen transport groups – some 1,176 in all. It was a mighty fleet, except it had been achieved only by hurrying pilots and, especially, navigators through their training. As Sicily had shown, the combination of inadequate training and unexpected winds was not conducive to successful airborne operations. Now, even if the meteorologists got lucky and the small ridge of high pressure did come into play, there were still going to be some strong gusts – stronger than they had been for the invasion of Sicily the previous July.
At least, though, the new American plan, enforced by the sudden arrival of Germany’s 91. Division and Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6 into the area, was a better one, in which the two US divisions – the 82nd and 101st Airborne – would be more obviously mutually supporting. It could, however, have possibly been even better, because the final plan had settled for two regiments of the 101st to protect the four exits from Utah Beach and just one – of three battalions – to be dropped further south towards Carentan. For the planned link-up between the invasion troops at Utah and those at Omaha Beach, the town of Carentan, with its bridges and locks over the canal and the River Douve, was a key target. This was the area in which Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6, unquestionably the best-trained and -led enemy infantry in Normandy, were based. With two regiments of the 82nd now scheduled to be dropped around Sainte-Mère-Église – around 2,600 men – there would be potentially twelve paratroop battalions in an area that, until the switch of plans, had been allocated to just six.
While the new plan was unquestionably a more sensible one, regardless of German reinforcements, it seemed the planners had become so fixated with the protection of Utah that they had taken their eye off Carentan. The gap between Omaha and Utah, within which were the significant waterways of Carentan, was around 20 miles, by some margin the biggest gap between the five invasion beaches – a gap into which a wedge of enemy troops might well be driven and at a time when expanding and linking the bridgehead as quickly as possible was vital. There was no other possible landing beach in between, but dropping a second regiment of the 101st towards Carentan might have been a more judicious option. Certainly they could have been spared from Utah with the configuration as planned.
The British plan was no less demanding. Although using just one division rather than two, they were to blow up bridges across the Dives at four separate places, destroy a potentially dangerous coastal battery at Merville, and also secure intact vital bridges across the Caen Canal and River Orne. It was asking a lot, but at least with a smaller airlift the transport crew were not being suddenly and dramatically increased in size and so had more time to train.
The operation to capture the two bridges intact had been given to the 2nd Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, who, despite their heritage as a local regiment from the provincial shires of England, had been absorbed into the 6th Airlanding Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division along with the 12th Devons and 1st Royal Ulster Rifles. Major-General Richard ‘Windy’ Gale, the division commander, gave his senior brigade commander, Brigadier James Hill, the task of drawing up the initial plan. Still only thirty-two at the time, the tall, lean-faced Hill quickly proposed the bridges over the Caen Canal and River Orne be captured by glider troops, reasoning that the Germans would be bound to have prepared them for demolition and that the only way to take them intact, before the enemy destroyed them, was if they could arrive like a bolt from the blue. They would have one chance to capture them in the brief moment of indecision by the enemy and that, Hill reckoned, could be achieved only by glider-borne troops arriving accurately and en masse, rather than paratroopers, who by their very nature would land over a wider area. Gale agreed completely and allocated two lots of three gliders for each bridge. These would spearhead the entire invasion and, because speed and surprise would be so important, would have to arrive silently and ahead of the rest of the airborne drop.
Each Horsa glider could carry twenty-eight men, of whom twenty-three would be airborne infantry and five engineers; this meant just one company and two extra platoons from 6th Airlanding Brigade would be needed to spearhead the invasion and the assault on the bridges. D Company, the Ox and Bucks, had particularly impressed during a key training exercise at the end of March and so had been given this job, along with two platoons from B Company. Everyone, from the company commander Major John Howard, to the ordinary rank and file, were keenly aware that this was both a considerable honour and also a hugely important but high-risk task.
One of those getting ready for the glider assault that night was Denis Edwards, a month short of his twentieth birthday and attached to 25 Platoon, D Company, scheduled to be the first glider to touch down at the swing bridge across the Caen Canal, now code-named ‘PEGASUS’. Edwards had been brought up by very well-to-do and eccentric parents. His father had had a business building airfields, but had lost much of his money during the Crash and so, from once employing a chauffeur and servants, the family had become much reduced in circumstance. It hadn’t bothered Edwards much; he was a phlegmatic soul who tended to take life’s obstacles in his stride, and by the age of sixteen he was working in stables near his home in Kent. After leaving school he began a milk round for the Co-op Dairy and, although a member of his local Home Guard, only after a horse had bolted and injured itself on his watch had he joined the army; he had been too mortified to
face his employers at the dairy.
Having been posted to the 70th (Young Soldiers) Battalion of the Ox and Bucks, he responded to a notice for volunteers for the 2nd Battalion, who were being retrained as glider-borne troops. He was accepted into D Company under Major Howard, a former Oxford City policeman, who, like Mark Alexander, had worked his way up the ranks from being a private. ‘In D Company we had the hardest of taskmasters,’ wrote Edwards.5 ‘His company had to be the best at everything, be it sport, marches, field exercises or physical endurance training.’ Training had been rigorous, including exercises and tests in which troops were expected to think on their feet and use their initiative. ‘Apart from flying training,’ noted Edwards, ‘we were continuously undergoing every other type of training for the skills that we should need when, eventually, we had to face a real enemy.’6 That included numerous training assaults on bridges, so that by the time they were posted from Bulford Camp to a mysterious airfield location in southern England on 4 June, Edwards felt confident in their skills and abilities.
They were now at Tarrant Rushton Airfield near Blandford in Dorset, although Edwards never learned the name. Howard had been briefed on the invasion in early May, but now the rest of his men were finally let in on the secret. The plan, as drawn up by Howard, was studied in minute detail, with each glider platoon and each seven-man section considering and analyzing their given tasks. Detailed photographs were pored over and all key features memorized. A large-scale model had also been built, with every building, tree and bush accurately recorded. Everything had to run like clockwork.
The night of the 4th, Edwards struggled to sleep. He and his mates all thought they were being sent on a suicide mission: 180 men were going to crash-land into enemy territory without any heavy weapons, capture two bridges and then, crucially, hold on to them until reinforcements arrived, first from the airborne drop and then Commandos, who, they were told, would arrive by sea some 5 miles away and work their way towards them. Edwards thought the prospect of being able to hold the bridges, even if they took them intact, was little more than a pipe-dream. ‘I smoked a great many cigarettes on the night after the first briefing,’ he wrote, ‘just about the longest night I can ever remember.’7
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