Raiders (31 page)

Shortly after 0900, lying in their slit trenches and gun nests, exhausted by a night of fighting, the troops at the crossings witnessed a peculiar but awe-inspiring sight.
Marching in step down the middle of the road between the bridges were three lofty figures in red berets and immaculate battledress.
As the sniper rounds whistled through the air, not one of them flinched or broke stride.
Closer inspection revealed the new arrivals to be none other than General ‘Windy’ Gale, Commander of 6th Airborne Division, flanked by Brigadier Hugh Kindersley, commander of 6th Air Landing Brigade, and Brigadier Nigel Poett, Commander of 5 Para Brigade.
‘For sheer bravado it was one of the most memorable sights I’ve ever seen,’ wrote Todd.

Taking a chance among the flying rounds, Howard strode out to meet the three senior officers and saluted them.
Half hoping for a verbal slap on the back for his men’s efforts, the Major was disheartened when General Gale scowled at him, pointed to an
antitank gun lying in the grass and told him to have it stowed away.
The men strode on to visit Pine-Coffin in 7th Battalion’s HQ at the end of the canal bridge.
‘The General found Pine-Coffin and his men in fine form, in spite of the hammering they were getting,’ Poett recalled.
‘He was left in no doubt that Pine-Coffin would hold his position.’

In the middle of the morning, a German bomber was spotted diving steeply towards the canal bridge.
The troops scrambled for cover, pressing down their ‘battle-bowlers’, braced for the explosion.
A 1,000-lb bomb, dropped with perfect precision, hurtled towards the bridge, crashed into the side with a metallic clatter and then splashed harmlessly into the water.
Had it detonated, the bridge would have been torn to shreds and dozens of men killed and wounded.

In spite of mounting casualties and no sign of reinforcements, or of their heavy weapons and wireless sets, 7 Para continued to hold the Germans at bay throughout the morning in the wooded Le Port area around the church and in the lanes and fields in Bénouville.
It was twelve hours after the Ox and Bucks troops had seized the bridges that Colonel von Luck at last received his orders from Berlin to launch a concerted counterattack.
But when the tanks of his 125th Panzer Regiment rolled northwards out of Caen, their location was reported almost immediately by Allied aircraft.
Von Luck, a veteran of all Germany’s major campaigns, knew what was coming.
Minutes later the bombs began to rain down from aircraft and naval guns offshore, inflicting significant damage on men and machines.

But Colonel von Luck’s regiment was one of a dozen units within the 21st Panzer Division operating in the area, some of which continued to press the bridge positions backed up by artillery.
Howard was not the only commander wondering how much longer the overstretched, outnumbered, outgunned and exhausted force could hold out.
General Gale had been certain that Pine-Coffin’s men would hold firm, but that had been three or four hours earlier.
The Paras’ casualties had risen to almost sixty, roughly a third of the depleted force that had managed to reach the bridges.
Howard had lost two killed and fourteen wounded from his assault party and he was short of a whole twenty-eight-strong platoon and his 2iC.
(It transpired later that their glider had come down eight miles away alongside the wrong river.) The Germans, growing ever more organised, were tightening their grip on the defensive perimeter.
Howard was looking at his watch for the umpteenth time that day – it was one o’clock – when a curious sound, cutting through the rattle and boom of the guns, made him look up.
One by one his men and the Paras did the same.

‘After all the earlier din of battle it suddenly became very quiet,’ Private Denis Edwards of 25 Platoon, whose section had been sent up to reinforce the Paras around the church, recalled in his postwar account.
‘Even the Germans had stopped shouting to each other, when suddenly, in the uncanny stillness of that spring day, I heard a sound that will live with me for the rest of my days .
.
.
One of the lads shouted
“It’s them – it’s the Commando!”
and we all let out a cheer as the noise grew louder
and we recognised it as the high-pitched and uneven wailing of bagpipes!
Shouting and cheering .
.
.
and abandoning all caution, we were up on our feet and leapt over the wall into the churchyard again, yelling things like “
Now you Jerry bastards, you’ve got a real fight on your hands.
”’

A long line of green berets, stretching as far as the eye could see, ran along the canal towpath back towards the coast.
The relief, in the impressive form of the 1st Special Service Brigade, had indeed arrived – and they were bringing with them some desperately needed heavy weapons, including a tank.
Accompanied by his piper Bill Millin hammering out ‘Blue Bonnets over the Border’, the lanky figure of Lord Lovat was at the head of his men, cutting a somewhat eccentric figure in his heavy Aran wool white jersey.
If the British were delighted by the arrival of the powerful Commando force, the Germans were less pleased.
As Lovat’s men turned onto the bridge, every sniper in the area lined up one of the hundreds of new targets.
The men of D Coy, dug into trenches and foxholes at either end, watched appalled as every few seconds a heavily laden Commando, exhausted from his fighting march from Sword Beach, slumped to the ground, felled by a high-velocity bullet.
But still Lovat and his men kept marching.
No one flinched, no one dived for cover.
Onward they strode, cheered by Howard’s men and the Paras.
Lovat wrote later that he had run across the bridge but Howard remembered him walking calmly, unfazed by the bullets whistling and ricocheting around him.

Howard and his men would stay in position until midnight,
but for them the hard fighting that day was over.
Almost exactly twenty-four hours after the first glider slammed into the turf and battle commenced, D Coy Ox and Bucks handed over to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, packed up their equipment and prepared to rejoin the remainder of their battalion in the town of Ranville.
With the snipers now silenced, Howard’s men marched away into the darkness in silence.
Most of the men couldn’t resist turning round for one last look at the crossing, which from that day onwards has been known as ‘Pegasus Bridge’, after the winged-horse emblem of the British airborne forces: named in their honour, and in that of the other brave young men who came from the sky to liberate it.