Finally Howard, wearing a pistol and carrying a Sten gun, climbed into his own glider, closed the door and sat down next to Brotheridge. He nodded to Wallwork. Wallwork told the Halifax pilot that everything was go. At 22.56 hours, June 5, they took off, the other gliders following at one-minute intervals.
At Vimont, east of Caen, Colonel von Luck had just come in from an exercise, and after a bite to eat sat down to do paperwork. In Ranville, Major Schmidt enjoyed his wine and his companion. At the canal bridge, Private Bonck thought with relief that there was only an hour to go and he was finished for the night. In the bunker. Private Romer groaned in his sleep, aware that he would have to get up soon to go on duty.
Sergeant Hickman drove eastwards over the bridge, identifying himself to Bonck. He was setting off for the coast to pick up the four young soldiers. As he passed the Gondree cafe, he regretted that the curfew was in force. He had stopped in at the place the other day and rather liked it.
At the cafe, the Gondrees went to bed. In Oxford, Joy Howard did the same. In London's East End, Irene Parr stayed up. She could hear planes gathering, and it sounded bigger than anything she had ever heard before.
CHAPTER FIVE
D-Day: 0016 to 0026 hours
Wallwork struggled with his great wooden bird, swooping silently alongside the canal, below the horizon, unseen and unheard. He was trying to control the exact instant at which the Horsa lost her contest with gravity. Wally Parr glanced out the open door and, 'God Almighty, the trees were doing ninety miles an hour. I just closed my eyes and went up in my guts.' Wallwork could see the bridge looming ahead of him, the ground rushing up, trees to his left, a soft, marshy pond to his right. He could see the barbed wire straight ahead. He was going too fast, and was in danger of ploughing up against the road embankment. He was going to have to use the chute, a prospect he dreaded: 'We didn't fancy those things at all. We knew they were highly dangerous, nothing but gadgets really, never tested.' But if he were to stop in time, he would have to use it.
At the same time he was worried about the chute stopping him too quickly and leaving him short of his objective. He wanted to get as far up the LZ as possible, into the barbed wire if he could, 'not because Howard wanted me to, not because I was particularly brave or awfully skilled, but because I didn't want to be rear-rammed by no. 2 or no. 3 coming in behind me.'
As the wheels touched ground, Wallwork yelled at Ains-worth, 'Stream!' Ainsworth pushed the button, the chute billowed out, 'and by golly it lifted the tail and shoved the nose wheel down'. The whole glider then bounced back up into the air, all three wheels now torn off. 'But the chute drew us back, knocked the speed down tremendously, so in two seconds or less I told Ainsworth, "Jettison", so Ainsworth pressed the tit and away went the parachutes and we were only going along possibly at 60 mph.'
The Horsa hit ground again, this time on its skids, which threw up hundreds of friction sparks from the rocks; Howard and the other passengers thought these were tracer bullets,, that they had been seen and were being fired upon. Suddenly, Howard recalls, 'there was the most hellish din imaginable, the most God Almighty crash'. The nose had buried itself in the barbed wire and crumbled.
The crash sent Wallwork and Ainsworth flying forward. They were still strapped in but their seats had broken loose and they went right out the cockpit and onto the ground. They were thus the first Allied troops to touch French soil on D -Day. Both, however, were unconscious.
Inside the glider the troops, the sappers, and the company commander were also unconscious. Howard had broken through his seat belt and was thrown against the roof beams, which jammed his helmet down over his ears and knocked him out. Private Denis Edwards thought he was dead.
Save for an occasional low moan, there was complete silence. Private Romer, pacing on the bridge, heard the crash, but assumed it was a piece of wing or tail from a crippled British bomber, a not-unusual occurrence. He went on pacing.
D Company had achieved complete surprise. Wallwork and Ainsworth had taken no. 1 platoon and set it down where it was supposed to be. Their magnificent performance was praised by Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory, commanding the Allied air forces on D-Day, as the greatest feat of flying of World War II.
But with all the men knocked out, no. 1 platoon was in danger. Romer was turning at the west end of the bridge, beginning to pace towards the east. If he noticed the glider sitting there, not fifty yards from the east end of the bridge, and if he gave the alarm, and if the men in the machine-gun pillbox woke quickly enough, Howard and his men would be wiped out inside the Horsa.
To the men in the glider, it seemed afterwards that they must have been out for minutes. Each man was struggling to regain consciousness, dimly aware that he had a job to do and that his life was threatened. It seemed to each of them a desperate, time-consuming process to clear the mind and get moving. Minutes, at least, they all recall - three minutes some say, even five minutes according to others.
In fact, they came to within eight or ten seconds. This was the critical moment, the pay-off for all those hours, weeks, months, years of training. Their physical fitness paid off first - they shook their collective heads, got rid of the cobwebs, and were alert, eager to go. Few heavyweight boxers could have recovered from such a blow so quickly.
Then their endless training paid off, as they automatically unbuckled, cut their way through the smashed door, or hopped out the back. Once again it seemed to Parr, Bailey, Gray and the others that chaos reigned, that everyone was getting in everyone else's way as they tried to get out. In fact, the exit was smooth and swift.
Howard thought he was injured or blind until he pushed his helmet up; then he realised that he could see and that he was all right. Feeling a wave of relief, he watched with pride as No. 1 platoon went through its exit drill. Howard scrambled out of the debris and saw the bridge looming over him, the barbed wire crushed at his feet. He was exhilarated. God bless those pilots.
Not a word was spoken. Brotheridge got Bailey and told him, whispering in his ear, 'Get your chaps moving'. Bailey and two others had the task of destroying the machine-gun pillbox. They moved off. Then Brotheridge gathered the remainder of his platoon and began running for the bridge.
At that moment, glider no. 2 came down, exactly one minute behind no. 1. Pilot Oliver Boland could see Wallwork's Horsa ahead of him, 'and I didn't want to run up his arse', so Boland used his chute and hit his spoilers hard, forcing his Horsa onto the ground. He had to swerve, to avoid hitting Wallwork and as he did so he broke the back of the glider. He stopped right on the edge of the pond, a bit shaken but conscious. He called over his shoulder to his passengers, 'We're here, piss off and do what you're paid to do'.
The platoon commander, David Wood, was thrown out of the glider by the impact along with his bucket of grenades and his Sten, bayonet fixed. (The bayonets had been sharpened back at Tarrant Rushton, an overly dramatic gesture on John Howard's part, many of the men thought.) His platoon gathered around him, exactly as it was supposed to do, and he went forward to where Howard was waiting, just by the perimeter wire.