At 1300, the first commandos (Peter Masters’s outfit) arrived, followed shortly thereafter by Lord Lovat and bagpiper Bill Millin, who was playing away. It was quite a sight. “Lovat strode along,” Howard said, “as if he were on exercise back in Scotland.” There was a Churchill tank with the commandos. “Everybody threw their rifles down,” Sgt. Wagger Thornton of the Ox and Bucks recalled, “and kissed and hugged each other, and I saw men with tears rolling down their cheeks. I did honestly. Oh, dear, celebrations I shall never forget.”⁷

Lovat met Howard at the east end of the bridge. “John,” Lovat said as they shook hands, “today history is being made.” Howard briefed him on the situation. Lovat’s objective was Varaville; Howard told him to be careful crossing Pegasus Bridge, as it was still under heavy sniper fire. Lovat nevertheless marched his men across rather than have them dash over as individuals, an act of bravado that cost the commandos a dozen casualties. The doctor who treated them noted that most were shot through their berets and killed instantly; commandos coming later started putting on their helmets to dash across the bridge. More British tanks came in from the coast, some crossing the bridge, others moving into Benouville to help in the defense. The linkup was now solid.⁸

At 1400, Luck finally received permission to attack the bridge. But as he set out with his tanks and self-propelled vehicles, Allied aircraft spotted the movement and called in naval fire. “All hell broke lose,” Luck remembered. “The heavy naval guns plastered us without pause. We lost radio contact and the men of the reconnaissance battalion were forced to take cover.” Luck ordered the commander of the lead battalion to break off the attack and dig in near Escoville.⁹

Lt. Werner Kortenhaus was in the battalion. “We failed,” he said, “because of heavy resistance from the British navy. We lost thirteen tanks out of seventeen.”¹⁰ Like the other regiment of 21st Panzer west of the Orne, the 125th abandoned its counterattack and went on the defensive. Howard’s Ox and Bucks, with help from the paratroopers and then from the commandos, had held Pegasus Bridge.

EAST OF THE BRIDGE, in the area between the ridge and the Orne waterways, British airborne troops were engaged in scattered firefights. Peter Masters recalled riding his bicycle to Ranville and beyond and seeing “people welcoming us, gliders and parachutists, but we never knew exactly how far we were in possession of the road, how far it was reasonably safe to cycle on. At times there was fire from the woods and instinctively one cycled faster to regain cover and dip into a less exposed stretch.”

Masters was headed toward Varaville. By this time, around 1400, “a number of the commandos were riding German bicycles, army issue, heavy black things, much better than ours; their rightful owners had abandoned them galore by the side of the road. Some of our chaps were mounted on colorful civilian bikes, ladies’ bikes, anything would do to get to Varaville.

“At last we approached the village. Canadian parachutists [from the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion of the 6th Airborne Division] told us they were still fighting for the place.”¹¹

The Canadians had started their attack on Varaville during the night, at about 0330. An anonymous British captain (who had landed at 0200 in the River Dives) reported that when he joined the fight just before dawn “Complete chaos seemed to reign in the village. Against a background of Brens, Spandaus and grenades could be heard the shouts of British and Canadians, Germans and Russians. There was obviously a battle in progress.”¹² The Russians in Wehrmacht uniforms had been told that if they retreated their German NCOs would shoot them and that if they surrendered the Allies would shoot them as traitors, so they put up a stiff resistance until late afternoon.

By 1900 the Canadians had taken the village. They thought that with the job accomplished, they would be evacuated back to England. “They gave us all their cigarettes,” Masters remembered. “Sweet Caporal cigarettes from Canada, which we appreciated greatly, on the premise they didn’t need them as they would be going home soon.”

“Give ’em hell, boys,” the Canadians called out to the commandos. “Give ’em hell.”

A sergeant with Masters informed the Canadians that they were indulging themselves in a fantasy. He pointed out, “If a general has you under his command, do you suppose he’s going to let you go in the middle of a battle?” The Canadian paratroopers spent three months in Normandy before being withdrawn.

On D-Day afternoon, having reached Varaville, the commandos dug in and awaited counterattacks.¹³

BRIG. JOHN DURNFORD-SLATER was the planning officer for the commandos. In the late afternoon he joined Shimi Lovat on the ridge south of Varaville. Lovat’s men were beating off occasional counterattacks. “Shimi was magnificent,” Durnford-Slater reported. “Every time a mortar bomb burst I jumped a couple of feet while he stood rock still. I felt thoroughly ashamed.

“A runner came rushing up from No. 4 Commando. ‘We’re being heavily counterattacked, sir,’ he said to Lord Lovat.

“ ‘Tell 4 Commando to look after their own counterattacks, and don’t worry me until things get serious,’ Shimi said. We then resumed our conversation.”

Durnford-Slater and Maj. Charlie Head picked up a Bren gun and offered to man a post for the night. “We were anxious to prove ourselves.”

“No, thank you,” Lovat replied.

A bit downcast, Durnford-Slater and Head went down the road, back toward the Orne. On the way, Durnford-Slater saw a huge German soldier standing by a ditch.

“Shoot him if he moves an inch!” Durnford-Slater shouted to Head. The German’s hands flew up.

“Kaput,” the German said with a grin on his face. He was supposed to be acting as a sniper but he was delighted to be taken prisoner.

Durnford-Slater had his batman hold a pistol on the prisoner while conducting an interrogation. The prisoner was wearing a fine lumber jacket.

“You ought to have that,” Head said to Durnford-Slater. Head told the batman to strip the jacket from the German. The batman unthinkingly handed his pistol to the prisoner. Durnford-Slater recalled, “The situation was ludicrous: a German prisoner with a loaded revolver, faced by an unarmed British brigadier, a major, and a private soldier. Fortunately this particular prisoner had no guts at all. He surrendered his jacket. Then he handed back the gun.”¹⁴

AS THE SUN began to go down over the Channel, Maj. Nigel Taylor settled himself into a chair outside the Gondrée café at Pegasus Bridge. He had been wounded in the leg. After a medic dressed the wound, “Georges Gondrée brought me a glass of champagne, which was very welcome indeed after that sort of day, I can tell you. And then, just as it was getting dark, there was a tremendous flight of aircraft, British aircraft, that came in and they did a glider drop and a supply drop on our side of the canal. It was a marvelous sight, it really was. Hundreds of gliders, hundreds of the damned things, and of course they were also dropping supplies on chutes out of their bomb doors. All this stuff coming down, and then it seemed only a very few minutes afterward, there were all these chaps in jeeps, towing antitank guns and God knows what, coming down the road and over this bridge.”¹⁵

As the reinforcements marched over the bridge to join the paratroopers and glider troops east of the Orne, Wally Parr and other enlisted men in Howard’s company called out, “Where the hell you been?” and “War’s over” and “A bit late for parade, chaps” and other such nonsense.¹⁶

There were 308 Horsa gliders in the flight, bringing in two glider battalions of 1,000 men each, accompanied by thirty-four of the larger Hamlicar gliders bringing in jeeps, artillery, and supplies. The landing zones had been cleared by paratroopers, on both sides of the Orne waterways.

Capt. Huw Wheldon, later a famous BBC broadcaster and producer, was in a Horsa. When his platoon landed, “all our weapons were at the ready. There were gliders all around, some upended and grotesque, some in the act of landing. They seemed huge.”

Where Wheldon came down, there was no firing. “The next thing I noticed, and shall never forget, was the sight of the troops, ever sensitive to unexpected opportunity, standing on the quiet grass in the twilight and relieving themselves with the absent-minded look that men assume on these occasions. First things first.

“That done, off we went. The entire company had landed, 120 strong, in five gliders; not a single man was hurt or missing.” Engineers and signalers, artillerymen and weapons, supply and transport and repair services, medical units and even chaplains came down all around. “All in all,” Wheldon commented, “it seemed, even at the time, an extraordinary and even breathtaking piece of organisation.”¹⁷

Not everything worked. After sunset, forty DC-3s from 233 Squadron of the RAF crossed the Channel carrying 116 tons of food, ammunition, explosives, spare radios, medical stores, and petrol to drop by parachute to the 6th Airborne Division. The crossing was uneventful, but when the Dakotas passed over the naval vessels off the mouth of the Orne River, the ships opened fire on the low- and slow-flying aircraft. Two were forced to turn back with severe damage and one ditched in the Channel; five more were missing and the rest scattered. Only twenty-five tons of supplies were recovered.

The Royal Navy’s trigger-happy gunners had failed to recognize the Dakotas; they blamed the aircraft for failing to identify themselves soon enough, adding the excuse that a lone enemy night fighter had attacked them not long before.¹⁸

CAPT. JOHN TILLETT of the Air Landing Brigade had spent the bulk of D-Day at the airfield at Tarrant Rushton in England, waiting for word that the landing zones in Normandy had been cleared. Tillett had charge of some homing pigeons that were to be used to bring back news should the radios fail. A squadron leader in the RAF had trained the pigeons “and he was so proud of them. They were all in baskets. Unfortunately, during the waiting period, some of the chaps fell for this temptation and killed, roasted, and ate the pigeons.”

Finally at 1830 the bombers towing the gliders began to take off, with some 900 Spitfires providing cover. As the fleet approached the French coast, Tillett recalled, “The sky was full of aircraft for miles in all directions and they were all ours. There was the mass of shipping off the beaches, thousands of ships of every shape and size.” At 2130 his glider pilot cast off and the Horsa began to spiral down to land.

“We hit the ground with a splintering crash and our glider came to a shuddering halt. Other gliders were landing around us, some hitting one another, they were landing from all different directions.

“We leapt out of the glider and took our position all around for defense. To my astonishment, there in front of me was a German in a trench, a real live German. We had been training for three years to fight Germans but I wasn’t prepared for this. We got ready to shoot him but then looking at him I could see that he was absolutely terrified and there was no question of him shooting us. He couldn’t move. We made him prisoner.”

Tillett and his platoon set off at a trot for the ridge. “Just as we got to it we could hear tank noises and two tanks came up and to my horror I saw the leading tank had a swastika painted on its side so we turned tail and disappeared over this cornfield in ‘Jesse Owens’ speed, looking for some sort of hole to get into as this tank swung its turret toward us.

“So within two minutes of landing we had a.) taken a prisoner, b.) advanced boldly, and c.) pulled full flight.”

The tanks turned out to be British. The lead tank had knocked out a German tank earlier in the day and chalked a swastika on its side. Tillett got his men back on the ridge and dug in for the night.¹⁹

One major in the Air Landing Brigade had noticed a paperboy selling the afternoon London Evening Standard outside his airfield before taking off. The headline was “SKYMEN LAND IN EUROPE.” The major bought the entire stock, loaded them into his glider, and distributed them in Normandy that night, so that at least some of the paratroopers were able to read about themselves in a London paper the same day they had been dropped.²⁰