Raiders (28 page)

The planners for Operation DEADSTICK were lucky to have a first-class source of intelligence in Bénouville.
The Gondrées owned a café situated right next to the canal bridge; every day for four years, the proud French family had served the troops of the local German garrison.
When they picked up significant news of German activities, the information was quickly passed along the Resistance’s chain of communication and transmitted to England.
Their German customers never suspected for a moment that Thérèse and Georges Gondrée, a friendly and apparently guileless couple, were in fact members of the Resistance.
Thérèse came from the Alsace region on the border with Germany and spoke the language of the occupying forces almost fluently.
Georges had worked for over a decade as a clerk in Lloyds Bank in Paris and spoke perfect English.
Thérèse listened to the troops in the café and passed on any noteworthy news to Georges to translate.
He then forwarded the information to the leader of the local Resistance – a Madame Vion, who ran the local maternity hospital a few hundred yards along the canal.
Madame Vion then passed it on to the radio operator in Caen, who tapped out the coded message for the intelligence people back in England.
Thérèse and Georges often plied their German customers with the local hooch Calvados, an apple brandy, in order to loosen their tongues.
The speed with which information was relayed back to the UK was illustrated in the final days leading up to D-Day.
On the Friday, Thérèse discovered that the detonator for the demolition charges on the canal bridge had been placed in the machine-gun bunker at the eastern end.
By Sunday, Howard was reading the memo in his briefing hut in north Dorset.

The wider intelligence network had provided a comprehensive breakdown of German defences and troop numbers in the area.
The bridges were defended by men from a fifty-strong garrison made up of conscripts from occupied countries, mostly from Eastern Europe, but commanded by German NCOs and officers.
They were armed with light machine guns, four light anti-aircraft guns and one anti-aircraft machine gun.
The bulk of the defences were centred on the left or eastern end of the canal bridge where there was an anti-tank gun in a reinforced concrete bunker surrounded by a series of sandbagged trenches.
Gun pits sat at the other corners of the bridge.
The river bridge, a quarter of a mile away to the west, was guarded by gun pits, but was nothing like as heavily defended as the canal crossing.

Major Hans Schmidt, the commander of the local garrison, was under orders to place explosive charges on the bridges ready to be blown in the event of an attack.
But, fearing that the French Resistance would either defuse them, or detonate them as part of their strategy of sabotaging transport links to disrupt German movements, he decided to keep the charges in a nearby bunker and put them in place when they received news of the invasion.

Howard’s orders from Brigadier Nigel Poett, commander 5th Parachute Brigade, included the lines: ‘The capture of the bridges will be a
coup de main
operation depending largely on surprise, speed and dash for success.
Provided the bulk of your force lands
safely, you should have little difficulty in overcoming the known opposition on the bridges.
Your difficulties will arise in holding off an enemy counterattack on the bridges, until you are relieved.’

Thanks to the intelligence from the Resistance and the photographs from the RAF’s aerial reconnaissance unit, Howard knew every detail of the local defences – except for one.
So as not to undermine the morale of his men, a key piece of information was deliberately withheld from him by his masters at the Planning HQ on Salisbury Plain.
Stationed in Caen, five miles down the road, was the 125th Panzer Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division, commanded by Colonel Hans von Luck.
The regiment was a very well-equipped, elite unit, trained in the art of counterattacking.
Von Luck was one of the most experienced and capable tank commanders in the German Army, hardened by years of heavy fighting in Poland, France, North Africa and the Eastern front.
He was an old-school Prussian who enjoyed a clean fight and had developed an admiration and liking for his British foes in the North Africa campaign.
Von Luck and the 2,000 men of 125th Panzer Regiment were the ‘difficulties’ to which Brigadier Poett was referring in his orders.
The ‘relief’ would be provided by the men of 7th Battalion, 5th Parachute Brigade, 6th Airborne Division.
Whether there would be any forces left for them to relieve was another matter.

The first challenge was to get the assault party safely onto French soil.
The men were to be flown over the Channel in Horsa gliders towed by Halifax bombers that would release them close to the Normandy coast.
From that moment on, the lives
of the twenty-eight men crammed into each of the wooden aircraft lay in the hands of the pilots, who had been specially handpicked and trained for the assignment.
All twelve were highly skilled airmen who had been put through intense training programmes for the D-Day landings.
Glider pilots were a precious asset in the Normandy landings and orders stated that, in a break with normal practice, they were not to be risked in the battle on the ground and that they were to be returned to England at the earliest practicable time for the next mission.

Glider operations had many advantages over parachuting.
They could deliver a large body of men to a single spot ready to go straight into action.
They were able to carry heavy items of equipment.
They approached the landing zone in silence and, with a high descent rate, the pilots could put them down in a very tight landing area.
Unlike paratroopers, glider infantry needed virtually no additional training.
But there were also many shortcomings and hazards to glider-borne operations.
Gliders need flat terrain on which to land and, at 80 mph, even the smoothest landings were violent, painful experiences that often ended in death and injury.
The Sicily landings of 1943 highlighted a number of problems.
More than 250 men had been drowned after the gliders were released too early by their towing aircraft.

Gliders were also very vulnerable to interception by enemy fighters while being towed, as well as to anti-aircraft and small-arms fire during the final approach.
Several gliders were shot down in Sicily by Allied gunners who mistook them for the
Luftwaffe.
As a result of those blue-on-blue incidents, to aid identification all Allied aircraft involved in the Normandy invasion were painted with black and white stripes on their wings and fuselage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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