MAJOR JOHN HOWARD looked through a small round window of his Horsa glider. The Channel below was dotted with boats, their arrowhead wakes all pointed toward the white, gently arcing shore of Nazi-occupied France. The gray seas were rough and choppy. Howard’s thoughts turned to the seaborne soldiers in the first wave, packed into hundreds of landing craft. What a terrible crossing. They must be puking their guts up, what with the fear, the nerves, and the high seas.
Poor devils.
Better to go to war this way—an hour’s flight, a good old sing-along, and then smack bang into the enemy’s lap. A fast, clean entry into battle, with little time to dwell on dark thoughts, to be afraid, unlike with those poor buggers far below.1
Pilot Jim Wallwork heard the calm voice of a Halifax pilot in his headset.
“Weather’s good. The clouds are at six hundred feet, a couple of minutes before we cast off. And we all wish you the best of luck.”
It was past midnight.2 D-Day had arrived.
Wallwork looked out of the cockpit and saw surf breaking on beaches.
“Two minutes from cast-off!” Wallwork shouted to Howard and his men.
The Halifax pilot gave last details of wind speed and height.
“Prepare for cast-off!” yelled Wallwork.
The glider was past the coast now, the Merville Gun Battery below. Howard called for silence and his men stopped singing and tightened their safety belts, waiting for the familiar jerk as the glider was released.3
Wallwork reached for the control that would unleash his “flying coffin,” as some men called the Horsa glider, from the Halifax bomber.
They were on time and on target.4
“Cast off!” said Wallwork.5
There was a distinct twang as the towrope was released.
Howard felt the Horsa jerk slightly and then the Halifax bomber disappeared, headed back to England,6 and with it went the reassuring sound of its engines. “The silence was uncanny,” recalled Howard, “and all we could hear was the air swishing past the sides of the glider; it was a sound that none of us would ever forget.” Howard thought of his wife and his two young children, fast asleep back in Oxfordshire, and then felt for a lump in his breast pocket—a small red leather shoe, the first his son Terry had ever worn.
CAPTAIN FRANK LILLYMAN stared at a patchwork of Norman fields framed by hedgerows and speckled with old stone farm buildings, all bathed in bright moonlight.7 Crouch was following a narrow road Lillyman could see below, heading for the 101st Airborne’s northernmost drop zone, “A,” between the town of Sainte-Mère-Église and the village of Saint-Martin-de-Varreville.
Lillyman checked his kit. His folding-stock M1 carbine was handy for spraying Germans up close, and his M2 switchblade in his chest pocket could be useful if he dropped into an apple tree and had to cut himself free of his harness. He then crouched down on one knee, looking out the open door, trying to identify landmarks he’d examined so many times so carefully in aerial reconnaissance photos.
A red light flashed on.
Four minutes to go.
The pathfinders glanced at one another. Tension showed in their taut features, some painfully aware of what a staff sergeant had told them in a last briefing back in England when asked about their chances of getting out alive. Not good, not good at all. Hopefully the Germans lay sleeping soundly below.
Lillyman stood and ordered his men to their feet. To shed weight, many had dispensed with their reserve chutes, leaving them stuffed under their seats.
“Snap up!” called Lillyman.
They attached their cords to a cable that ran above their heads along the length of the cabin, then quickly checked each other’s packs and equipment. Lillyman stepped down the row of men, making sure each had snapped his line to the cable. There was no kettledrum roll of anti-aircraft fire. No searchlight. They’d not been spotted. Thick fog now shrouded the landscape below as Lillyman waited the last few seconds for the light to turn green. He was the very tip of the Allied airborne spearhead, the first man who would jump from the first US plane over Normandy on D-Day.8 It was an honor, a great privilege, to be number one, entrusted with arguably the most important task of any officer who belonged to the American first wave—those who would encounter a startled and trigger-happy enemy first.9
When the newspapers and radios blare out the news, remember that your pappy led the way.
Those were the words he’d written to his three-year-old daughter a couple of weeks earlier, after learning of his mission.
In the cockpit with Crouch and Pedone was a radio operator who announced that they were close to the hamlet of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville.10 Dark fields rushed past below. Crouch pulled back on the throttle, slowing the plane, cutting prop blast.
A green light flashed a few seconds later.
“Let’s go!” shouted Lillyman, and he stepped out into the prop blast, followed by seventeen other Americans.
Crouch noted the time as he dived low, heading back toward the English Channel.
It was 12:15 A.M., June 6, 1944. The most important day of the twentieth century.
The first Americans had arrived in France.11
IT WAS TIME TO OPEN the doors on Major John Howard’s Horsa glider. “This could be a fairly perilous task,” remembered Howard. “Den Brotheridge released his safety belt and, as I gripped his left hand in a double wrist-grip, and his platoon stretcher bearer held onto his straps and equipment, he leaned forward and heaved the door upwards. The other man and I then yanked him backward and he sank back into his seat with a sigh of relief and refastened his safety belt. Suddenly, we were all aware of the sweet, damp night air over the Normandy countryside as it filled the glider and we all breathed in, for the first time, the smell of France.”12
Pegasus Bridge was just a couple of miles away.
In training, Wallwork had asked Howard where he wanted him to place the glider.
“Ideally, Jim,” Howard had answered, “right through the wire defenses of the bridge.”
“Right-ho, sir!” Wallwork had replied.
He never expected Wallwork to take the request seriously. It would require a tremendous feat of flying, especially in a flimsy glider.
Beside Wallwork was his co-pilot, John Ainsworth, holding a stopwatch.
Wallwork checked the compass on the control panel.
Ainsworth monitored the glider’s airspeed.
The seconds ticked by on the stopwatch.
Almost time to make the critical turn toward the target.
Below, on Pegasus Bridge, Private Helmut Romer, a thin-faced eighteen-year-old with blond hair, walked across the structure’s planking. Tracer fire lit up the sky over Caen, several miles away. The city was being bombed, as it had been on many nights in recent weeks. A gun crew was asleep in a nearby bunker. Some of Romer’s comrades were at a late-night bar in Bénouville, no doubt drinking cheap plonk with stolid, milk-fed Norman farm girls.
Seven thousand feet above Romer, Wallwork could now see nothing but cloud from his large Perspex window. He was flying blind, relying on Ainsworth, whose eyes were glued to his stopwatch.
Wallwork glanced at the indicators just in front of his left knee.
Airspeed: 160 miles per hour.
Ainsworth stared at his stopwatch.
Three minutes and thirty-nine seconds . . . forty seconds . . . forty-one . . . forty-two.
“Now!” said Ainsworth.
Wallwork put the glider into a full turn.
Still full cloud cover. Nothing but gray through the large cockpit window.
Where were the damn bridges? The large area of woods shown on the maps?
“I can’t see the Bois de Bavent,” said Wallwork, referring to the forest indicated on his maps.
“For God’s sake, Jim, it’s the biggest place in Normandy,” replied Ainsworth. “Pay attention.”13
“It’s not there.”
“Well, we’re on course anyway.”
Ainsworth looked at his stopwatch and again began to count down.
“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Bingo! Turn to starboard onto course.”
Wallwork again turned the glider, this time to the north, making for the eastern bank of the Caen Canal, as planned. In his mind, he could picture the bridge, the defenses . . .
The altimeter near his left knee showed he was losing height fast.
Still just gray skies. Cloud cover. But behind him, over his shoulder, were red flashes from bomb explosions near Caen. Searchlights stabbed the black sky above the city.
They’d be lucky to survive in one piece. At best, a broken leg or two. That was what Wallwork and Ainsworth had agreed.
The glider’s speed was slowing, but Wallwork knew he would still be touching down at ninety miles per hour on rough ground, and if he hit a defensive obstacle or a tree . . . The cockpit was as flimsy as a paper bag in rain, all Perspex window and wooden struts. Wallwork could deploy a parachute to slow the glider on landing, but using it could send the craft’s nose into the ground, killing him instantly.
At last, Wallwork was below the clouds, and at once he could see flooded fields, thick hedgerows, small villages. In the bright moonlight, the Orne River and the Caen Canal sparkled like “strips of silver.” There they were—the bridges.
Wallwork saw all the key landmarks, all the places that had been etched into his memory from months of practice, that had been mocked up in the models he had examined endlessly.
To hell with the course.
He knew the distance to the target and how high he was. He’d fly by instinct and experience from now on, “by guess and by God.”
He headed down toward the bridge.
Throughout the glider, there was no more singing—the men heard only the sound of the cold wind rushing against the glider’s wings.
“Hold tight!” yelled Ainsworth.
Howard prayed, Please God, please God . . . 14
“Link arms!” cried Wallwork.15
AN UNLIT BLACK cigar between his lips, Captain Frank Lillyman drifted down at sixteen feet per second from 450 feet, trying to spot a clearing as the earth rushed up to meet him. He pulled on his forward risers and a few seconds later touched down in a small field near Saint-Germain-de-Varreville.16 He freed himself of his parachute and looked around. He thought he could see something moving in the shadows cast in the moonlight by tall poplar trees. Germans? He loaded a clip into his tommy gun. There were shapes moving. Friend or foe? He used his “cricket,” a small metal signaling clacker.
Click, clack . . .
Click, clack . . .
He was about to open fire when one of the shapes made a sound: a loud moo. The shapes were cows, and he laughed to himself and felt a little less nervous.
Click, clack . . .
Click, clack . . .
Some men replied with their crickets, and within a few minutes Lillyman had connected with seven of his stick. He’d ordered them not to open fire unless absolutely necessary, as it would attract the enemy, and now they silently examined maps and scouted the immediate vicinity in pairs. Lillyman realized he was more than a mile north of where he should be, but there was no time to get to the planned position for setting up lights. They had less than thirty minutes before the main body of troops would arrive, so Lillyman decided to use the nearest suitable fields.
The silence was broken by the rattle of machine gun fire, and Lillyman took cover as Germans, hidden in a hedgerow, fired several more bursts. He sent two men to “convince these Krauts of the errors of their ways,” he recalled, and then he “heard a grenade go off with a ‘whumf,’” and everything was “lovely and quiet.”17 But then Lillyman apparently learned that two more Germans, riding bicycles, were heading his way, no doubt alerted by the machine gun fire.
A couple of pathfinders acted fast, it would later be claimed, stretching a “length of piano wire” across a road, “at neck level to a standing man, and secured tautly to a pair of large trees. Soon the pair of Germans came along on their bicycles, and they flipped over backward [as] the piano wire caught their necks. Nearly decapitated, the two died instantly.”18
Lillyman could make out a church less than a hundred yards away, at the center of the village of Saint-Germain-de-Varreville, and before long he and his men had gathered in its graveyard. The church steeple would be an excellent spot for a Eureka radar set.
A priest came to the heavy wooden door at the main entrance. He looked afraid. One of Lillyman’s men, a young lieutenant, could speak French.
“Bonsoir, padre,” he said. “You’ve just been liberated.”19
The lieutenant explained what they were doing, and a Eureka set was placed in the steeple, as were three others along a hedgerow near the church. Lights forming the tail of a T were laid out two hundred yards east of the church, in a field beside a narrow lane. Then two men climbed a tree and put another Eureka set in the branches to help guide the planes scheduled to drop hundreds of Screaming Eagles on Drop Zone A, one of six landing areas for American airborne troops.20 Lillyman’s men turned on the first Eureka set at 12:30 A.M., just fifteen minutes after arriving on the ground.21
All they could do now was wait. But then Lillyman discovered from a scout that there was a large farmhouse, seemingly occupied by Germans, close to a 22-millimeter anti-aircraft gun position that could wreak considerable havoc. “Two others and myself went to the house where we met a Frenchman smoking a pipe,” remembered Lillyman. “He was standing in the doorway. He jerked his thumb toward the stairs and said, ‘Boche.’ We caught one German, in a nice pair of white pajamas, in bed. We disposed of him and expropriated the bottle of champagne beside the bed.”22
WITHIN MOMENTS of Captain Lillyman’s arrival in France, Major John Howard and the men in his Horsa glider lifted their knees and held hands, locking fingers together in a “butcher’s grip.” In his last seconds in the air, Howard wondered “what the strength of the enemy would be . . . I was worried about a machine gun wiping us all out before we could have a chance to fight back.” The glider was carrying explosives. Would they detonate if they crashed badly? How fast were they going? More than one hundred miles per hour?
Howard looked at Jim Wallwork, a few feet away, the back of his neck sweaty from tension.23
Wallwork knew he was approaching too fast. “There was a feeling,” he recalled, “of the land rushing up and I landed probably at about ninety-five instead of at eighty-five.”
Wallwork called out, “Stream.”
His co-pilot, John Ainsworth, flicked a switch.
The parachute brake opened. The glider’s nose went down, but not too much, and the parachute worked, slowing them abruptly.
One second.
Two.24
“Jettison.”
Ainsworth pressed another switch and the parachute fell away.25
It seemed for a moment as if the glider might come to a halt with little damage. But then the wheels fell off and the undercarriage skidded along the stony ground, sparks showering everywhere. “There followed a sound like a giant canvas sheet being viciously ripped apart,” recalled Howard, “then a mighty crash like a clap of thunder and my body seemed to be moving in several directions at once.” The glider slid to a halt. Inside, men and equipment were jumbled up in a tangle of limbs and kit.
God help me, thought Howard, we must all be dead.26
“For a frightful second,” he recalled, “I really believed that I might have been blinded, and then just as quickly realized that my helmet had rammed down over my eyes as I hit the roof or the side of the glider.”27 He could see “a misty blue and greyish haze,” then, from “somewhere out in endless space there zoomed towards me a long tracer-like stream of multi-colored lights, like a host of shooting stars” zipping toward him at great speed. A moment later, he knew he was not a target, not being shot at yet: “I was simply concussed and seeing stars!”
He pulled up his helmet and looked at his watch. It had stopped, the minute hand frozen at 12:16.28 A few men stirred, emerging from shock. In a few moments, others were fully alert, snapping into action, their training kicking in as they instinctively freed themselves of canvas straps and reached in the darkness for ammunition, Sten guns, and grenades. In training, Howard had drummed into them that every second counted if they were to retain the element of surprise. It was their deadliest weapon. Every moment wasted now could cost a life.
The glider’s smashed exit door was blocked by ripped canvas and splintered wooden struts. Howard and others quickly broke through with the butts of their rifles and climbed out. Wallwork had, in Howard’s words, done “a fantastic job in bringing the slithering, bouncing and crippled glider to a halt with its nose buried into the canal bank and within seventy-five yards of the bridge.”29
Lieutenant Den Brotheridge emerged from the wreckage.
“Gun out!” he ordered.30
A man carrying a Bren gun climbed out.
Howard noticed that Brotheridge was limping.
“You all right, Den?” he asked.
Yes, he was fine.
“Get cracking with your first section.”31
Brotheridge moved quickly toward the bridge. Howard followed, glancing back at the stricken glider. Its nose had been smashed in on impact, pushed back almost to the wings. Had the pilots survived? It seemed unlikely, given the wreckage. “I had been very lucky,” recalled Howard, “but I thought that those who were forward of me must have been badly smashed up or killed.”32
In fact, Wallwork had been thrown through the glider’s Perspex windscreen and now lay flat on his stomach a few yards away, stunned and badly bruised. He was in shock but able to move all his limbs, and he called to Ainsworth, still trapped under the collapsed cockpit.
“Can you crawl?”
“No,” answered Ainsworth.
Forcing himself up, Wallwork tried to lift the nose of the glider so he could free his co-pilot.
Could Ainsworth get out of the wreckage, he asked, if the weight was taken off him?
“I’ll try.”33
Wallwork felt as if he were lifting the “whole bloody glider,” but the adrenaline coursing through him gave him extra strength and Ainsworth was able to crawl free of the wreckage.
Meanwhile, John Howard crouched down. Thirty men were gathered near him, ready to rush the drawbridge, its iron superstructure towering above them in the moonlight, before the Germans could blow it up. There were trenches nearby and a pillbox, but no sign of Germans. For a few seconds, they all stared at their objective, then Howard stood up.
“Charge!”
A private carrying a Bren gun spotted a German to his right and opened up, hitting the man, then kept firing as he ran toward the bridge. He saw a blockhouse and threw a grenade inside, then pressed his trigger again, emptying his magazine, spraying bullets inside.34
Germans began shooting from trenches to his right.
Howard’s men returned fire, calling out the code words for their platoons to avoid hitting one another.
“Dog, dog, dog!”
“Sapper, sapper, sapper!”35
Howard heard a crash as a glider landed, followed by another. Both gliders skidded to a halt less than fifty yards away, narrowly missing a pond.
On the west side of the bridge, Georges Gondrée, a café owner, was sleeping soundly beside his wife in his bedroom in the small brick building that served as both his home and his business. His wife had been awoken by the sound of the gliders crashing and she tried to stir her husband to action.
“Get up. Don’t you hear what’s happening? Open the window.”
A sleepy Gondrée didn’t understand.
“Get up. Listen. It sounds like wood breaking.”36
Gondrée climbed out of bed and went to the window. The bridge lay only yards from his café, and he could see a German soldier nearby in the moonlight. “His features were working,” recalled Gondrée, “his eyes wide with fear. For a moment he did not speak, and I then saw that he was literally struck dumb by terror. At last he stammered out one word, ‘Parachutists!’”37
Private Helmut Romer may have been the soldier Gondrée spotted. He was certainly among the first Germans to confront the Allied invasion.38 “As far as I was concerned,” Romer recalled, “I was on a fairly boring bridge in the middle of rural France and was just very glad to be there and not on the Russian front.” He had been on watch for two hours, waiting, impatiently, to be relieved. “One minute it was a duty like any other. The next there was this swishing noise, followed by a bang and we thought it was part of an Allied plane that had been shot down. But the sound kept getting nearer to us, accompanied by a huge shadow and we froze. Then some soldiers, their faces smeared all in black, started coming towards us and in the half-moonlight we saw they were British. In a split second, we realised what the story was.”
Romer was terrified.
He fired a flare that flooded the bridge with bright white light.
“Achtung!” he screamed.
Bullets cut through the air, and Romer and two other Germans ran for their lives, throwing themselves into the nearest cover, an elderberry bush.
A German sergeant emerged from a pillbox on the eastern side of the bridge.
“What’s wrong?”39
The sergeant was quickly shot and killed.
Around a hundred yards west of Pegasus Bridge, another German sergeant, Heinz Hickman, was leading four of his men from the German 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment toward the bridge, having heard the clatter of Sten and Bren guns. He had “no great respect whatever for the American soldier,” but the British were a different case altogether.40 As he neared, he saw figures moving across the canal—Howard’s troops.
“Come on, come on,” Hickman urged his men. “Don’t start firing before I fire, wait for me.”
Hickman was soon blasting away at Howard’s lead platoon—and quickly running out of ammunition. “I’m not a coward,” he later stated, “but at that moment I got frightened. If you see a Para platoon in full cry, they frighten the daylights out of you—the way they charge, the way they fire, the way they ran across the bridge . . . Then I gave the order to pull back. What [could] I do with four men who had never been in action?”41
Lieutenant Brotheridge ran ahead of his platoon.
“Come on 25!” shouted Brotheridge. “Come on 25!”42
Other men followed, moving west across the bridge. Twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Richard Smith had injured his knee upon landing, and now he hobbled toward the Café Gondrée, leading Number 3 platoon. A German threw a stick grenade at Smith and it exploded, a piece of shrapnel hitting Smith in the wrist. The German ran for cover and was climbing a wall when Smith’s weapon answered. “I gave him quite a lot of rounds, firing from the hip—it was very close range.”
A corporal approached Smith.
“Are you all right, sir?”
Smith looked at his wrist. Skin and muscle had been ripped off, exposing bone. Christ! No more cricket, thought the lieutenant, who had been a keen sportsman at Cambridge University.
Smith heard a sound from the café and saw Georges Gondrée peering from a window. “I wasn’t messing around, having just had this bloody German, and I just put my Sten gun up and fired.” A bullet just missed Gondrée’s head, hitting the stone ceiling of his bedroom and ricocheting down into his bed.43
Across the canal, Jim Wallwork had meanwhile pulled Ainsworth into a ditch, out of the line of fire. Blood seeped from a wound to Wallwork’s head, so much that he wondered if he’d lost an eye. Yet his overriding emotion was of satisfaction, “glad to have done the job and delivered the boys.” It had been some job indeed. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, head of the Allied air forces on D-Day, would later describe Wallwork’s landing as “one of the greatest feats of flying of the second world war.”44
Major Howard ordered his men to clear trenches and dugouts nearest the downed gliders. Corporal Wally Parr and another man had a running start, fifteen yards ahead of the others. Parr’s mouth was dry, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. He thought he was going to choke, so he took a deep breath, then let out a piercing scream. He didn’t know why—he just screamed. Two years of training for this moment, five years of war, of Hitler’s bombs killing so many innocents in the East End of London, where he’d grown up. Time to get even.
“Come out and fight, you squirrelly little bastards.”
Parr reached a blockhouse on the eastern side of the drawbridge, opened the door, and made ready with a hand grenade. Another man covered him with a Bren gun as he pulled the grenade’s pin, threw it inside, and shut the door. A few seconds later, there was a loud explosion.
“Get in!” he shouted to the soldier with the Bren, who promptly opened the door and sprayed the inside with bullets. Then it was on to the next strongpoint, where Parr again pulled out a phosphorus grenade and threw it inside. He ran back toward Howard, near the bridge.
“You cleared those?” asked Howard.
“Yes, cleared, sir.”
“Run, run, run. Get across that bridge!”
Parr and another soldier began to sprint across.
“Ham and jam!” shouted Parr.
“You know you’re not supposed to shout ham and jam,” the soldier told Parr.
Parr was so excited, he’d used the code name to be employed only once the bridges had been secured, not before. They were the only words he could find, and saying something—anything—in English had meant he’d been recognized and therefore not shot by mistake. When he reached the other side of the bridge, he saw a Belgian belonging to Howard’s unit gesturing with his left thumb at a window in the Café Gondrée, about to throw a smoke grenade through it.
Parr grabbed the Belgian’s arm.
“What the hell are you going to do with that thing?”
“I’m going to smoke the bastards out.”
“We’re going to need that café tomorrow, for more reasons than one.”
Parr moved closer to the café. “There was a dead German. He had no equipment, no uniform, just trousers and what appeared to be a jumper, or possibly a shirt. He was lying in the middle of the road. A big stout chap. I checked him. He was dead.” He couldn’t see any sign of Lieutenant Brotheridge, his platoon leader.
“Where’s Denny Brotheridge?” he shouted. “Where’s Brotheridge?”
The plan was for Parr to meet up with Brotheridge thirty yards beyond the café, in a ditch. As he made his way there, he passed another body lying in the road. “It was Lieutenant Brotheridge. I knelt down beside him. I put my rifle down, put my hand behind his head and lifted him up. He was conscious and he said something.”45
Parr leaned closer.
“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t hear you.”
Brotheridge started to speak again but then closed his eyes, exhaled, and slumped back to the ground.
Parr looked at his hand, which had been supporting the lieutenant’s head. It was covered in blood.
My God.
All the years of training had come down to this.
What a waste.
One of Parr’s comrades ran over.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“It’s Denny,” said Parr. “He’s had it.”
“Christ almighty.”
Brotheridge died not long after, becoming the first Allied soldier killed in combat on D-Day. A medical officer later found him “lying near a low stone wall . . . He was looking at the stars, bewilderment on his face and a bullet hole in the middle of his neck below his chin.”46
Parr turned back to the Café Gondrée and tried to find a sergeant to tell him he was now platoon leader. Then he sprinted back across the bridge toward Major Howard, who had taken up position near the bridge on the eastern side.
“Where you going, Parr?” asked Howard.
“Sir, I’m afraid Mr. Brotheridge has been killed.”
Howard looked at Parr and then stared across the bridge.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry, he’s dead.”
Shaken by the news of his good friend’s death, it was several seconds before Howard was able to issue further orders. “Top of my mind,” recalled Howard, “was the fact that I knew Margaret, his wife, was expecting a baby almost any time.”47 She would in fact give birth to a girl seventeen days later.
At twenty-five minutes past midnight, Howard learnt that there were no explosives under Pegasus Bridge. Then still more good news: The bridge over the Orne had also been captured. So long as both could be held, the British would control the flow of troops and armor to the eastern flank of the Allied bridgehead. Howard peered through the gun smoke across Pegasus Bridge. The shooting had died down. His men were in control. The attack had lasted just ten minutes.
He turned to his radioman.
“Send it out,” said Howard. “Ham and Jam. Ham and Jam. Keep it up until you get acknowledgment.”48
It was the first message of success on D-Day.
Ham and jam . . . Ham and jam.
FIFTY MILES AWAY, at Drop Zone A, beside the old stone church in Saint-Germain-de-Varreville, Captain Frank Lillyman waited anxiously for the sound of engines.49 Never had time passed so slowly—these were by far the “longest minutes” of his life. At 12:40 A.M., he finally heard it—the steady drone of hundreds of planes to the north—and ordered his men to turn on the drop zone’s lights. “Those lights never looked so bright in training,” he recalled, “but that night they looked like searchlights. One light went out, and we had to rig an emergency connection. We were silhouetted against it for a few minutes.”50
Meanwhile, among the swarm of fast-approaching C-47s carrying the US Army’s 101st Airborne, a BBC reporter observed the callow young men, grim-faced, “burdened like pack-horses so that they could hardly stand unaided . . . So young they looked, on the edge of the unknown. And somehow so sad. Most sat with eyes closed as the seconds ticked by. They seemed to be asleep, but I could see lips moving wordlessly.”51
The first aircraft flew over the T that Lillyman’s men had placed on the ground. It was three minutes before one o’clock. The main body of American airborne troops had arrived.52