WHILE THE AMERICAN air armada was roaring across the black sky, on the Allies’ left—or eastern—flank, the planes carrying the British and Canadian troops were also dashing headlong into battle like an aerial cavalry charge.
For the ten thousandth time, Major John Howard, commanding D Company, 2nd Battalion, Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, ran over his unit’s role in Operation Tonga: land in the first of three Horsa gliders as close as possible to the bascule bridge over the Orne Canal, rush the guards, capture the bridge, and hold it against enemy counterattacks until Lord Lovat’s force, the 6th Commandos, landing by sea at Ouistreham, could reach him.
Three additional gliders carrying the other half of D Company, the Ox and Bucks, under Howard’s second-in-command Captain Brian Priday, would simultaneously be landing 400 yards to the east at the so-called Ranville Bridge over the Orne River and attempting to grab it, also. At this bridge, a Horsa containing Priday and Lieutenant Tony Hooper’s No. 22 Platoon was scheduled to land first, followed seconds later by Lieutenant Tod Sweeney’s* No. 23 Platoon, and then Lieutenant Dennis Fox’s No. 17 Platoon. Once the two spans were seized, Howard’s men were to send out the coded success signal: “Ham and Jam.”
UNLIKE THE PARATROOPS who would be coming in at just a few hundred feet, the first three gliders that were carrying the Orne Canal bridge assault force would detach from their tow planes at 6,000 feet and make a 180o circle to approach the landing zones from the south. The other three gliders, assigned to the Ranville Bridge, would make a north-south landing.
Lieutenant Tod Sweeney recalled, “As we crossed the coast of France I was leaning in at the door of the [glider] cockpit when the pilot shouted, ‘There you are!’ and in the spotty moonlight I could just see the thin stream of the silver river—and then the two bridges!”
It came time to remove the glider’s door. Sweeney said, “As we went down, my batman got hold of my belt and I got hold of the door and tugged. We’d never done this before in the air because it was a rather dangerous operation. So it took quite a bit of effort to pull the door back and open up. As that happened the glider leaned over, so I found myself looking down on the fields of Normandy at cows munching grass!”1
In Sweeney’s number five glider, pilot Stanley Pearson was doing his best to bring it in on target—the Ranville Bridge. “Strange how quiet it all was,” recalled Pearson, “yet the Germans guarding the area must by now have been on the alert. We had glided down to 1,000 feet when the four men in the back started to open the Horsa doors. But they must have slid the doors all the way up, and the glider took a rush of air in the port side door and out the starboard side door, causing the Horsa to swing badly. Speed was still too high. We were now down to 200 feet and opted for the field immediately ahead.”
Glider number four, with Sergeants Lawrence and Shorter at the helm and carrying Captain Priday, was far off course. The pilots of the tug had somehow missed the Orne and were heading for the Dives, farther to the east. With no one aware of the error, the glider began its descent on the wrong bridge over the wrong waterway.2
AS HIS C-47 crossed into French airspace, pilot Sergeant Alec Blythe noticed he was catching a bit of light flak, but not enough to require taking evasive action. His stick of Royal Engineers were standing inside the plane, hooked up, waiting for the green light. Blythe then saw that the DZ where he was supposed to drop his paratroopers was glistening in the moonlight and obviously flooded. He made a quick decision to drop the men away from the water. “I was intent on making as steady a run as possible,” he said, when suddenly his aircraft was thrown into a bank of nearly 45 degrees.
“In a flash of light from the ground, I saw a Stirling bomber passing in front of us. Clearly we had been caught in his slipstream which threw us off course.” Fighting to bring his plane level and back on course, Blythe barely managed to regain control. “The paratroops in the back no doubt were hurled about and were probably cursing me for taking violent evasive action. I never saw them again to explain the reason for their discomfort…. I would like to think that my engineers were accurately dropped, especially as the two bridges assigned to them were blown up.”3
MAJOR JOHN HOWARD looked down to see what he had hoped to see: the Orne Canal bridge dead ahead. The anxiety level in the descending number one glider was almost thick enough to slice with a bayonet, but, as Howard put it, “our enthusiasm to get the job done overcame fear. The landing drill was to link arms with the man on either side of you, then butcher’s grip your fingers, lift your feet, and pray that your number wasn’t up.”4
After taking off from their field at Tarrant Rushton at 2245 hours on 5 June, Major John Howard’s group of six gliders, loaded with 180 British paras, gathered into formation and headed south. Piloting the lead glider was Manchester-born Staff Sergeant James H. Wallwork, a veteran of the glider assault at Sicily. He recalled, “It was as smooth a flight as any. The troops, encouraged by Howard, sang and, thank goodness, none were airsick, as the design of the Horsa seemed to generate air currents from the back straight to the cockpit, where it seemed to linger.”
Wallwork and his co-pilot, Johnnie Ainsworth, were speeding toward the coast of France attached to a long rope that connected their Horsa glider, named “Lady Irene,” to the tail of a Halifax bomber. Six miles from the coast, at 6,000 feet altitude, Wallwork pulled the lever that cut the glider loose and aimed toward their objective: the cantilevered bridge over the Orne Canal.
“Thanks to our tug crew,” said Wallwork, “we were dead on time and dead on target, and saw the French coast in plenty of time to get set. Five, four, three, two, one, Cheers! Cast off! Up with the nose to reduce speed whilst turning on to Course One. That was when the singing stopped and the silent flight started. And that was when six Horsas tip-toed quietly into two little fields in Normandy, releasing 180 fighting men in full battle order to give the German garrison the surprise of their lives and a lesson in taking a bridge.”
For three minutes the six gliders swooped down silently on their un-suspecting targets. Wallwork’s glider and the two behind it would land at the canal bridge; the other three would come down 400 yards away at the Orne River Bridge. Wallwork said, “We could see the twin waterways of the river and canal like silver in the moonlight—which was a little better than half, and more than we had hoped for—and the bridges now showed clearly. It was tempting to fly the rest by the proverbial seat-of-pants, but we resisted and flew the courses and times meticulously. The last leg brought us directly in line with the canal and, behold, the bridge! We were a little high, so half flap and steady in at 90 m.p.h.”
“Hold tight!” Wallwork shouted to his passengers, as the ground got closer. The platoon linked arms, raised their feet off the deck, and waited for impact. Wallwork noted later, and probably somewhat more light-heartedly than he likely felt at the time, “Full flap and touchdown. We streamed the chute, jettisoned it after two seconds, and Ainsworth and I in the nose were now ploughing the field, headed for the embankment. We removed a couple of fences and arrived as required at, or rather in, the embankment. Although we made an awful noise, we seemed not to have bothered the German sentries, who thought perhaps that part of a shot-down bomber had landed.”5
The glider made contact and began sliding at a high rate of speed toward the bridge structure, scraping brush aside and chopping down small trees with a noise the men feared surely must have been heard in Paris. Finally, the shattered craft stopped with a jolt.6
Wallwork noted, “I had taken a header through the Perspex nose and was bleeding from a head cut. It had congealed quickly in my right eye socket, and I thought all night I had only one good eye left. With a black eyepatch, would I look like Errol Flynn? Johnnie was stunned and pinned under the collapsed cockpit, but the troops had traveled fairly well and got on with it. Exactly one minute later, No. 2 arrived and joined in, followed by No. 3, justifying all those ‘Deadstick’ training flights…. There was only one casualty on landing. The Bren gunner in [one of the other gliders] was thrown out and drowned in the pond—the pond in our field about which everyone seems to have avoided asking daft questions in briefing, perhaps so as not to make us all more nervous than we already were.”