MAJOR GENERAL RICHARD Gale’s 6th Airborne Division had a full plate of D-Day objectives. Originally, the plan for inserting the 6th Airborne Division into Normandy—Operation Tonga—involved only Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade and Brigadier The Honourable Hugh Kindersley’s 6th Air-Landing Brigade—the latter’s role being the securing of the two Orne bridges and the area around Ranville. However, once the extent of the anti-glider defenses in the area became known, it was decided that a major night landing by glider was too dangerous, and so their tasks were assigned to the 5th Parachute Brigade.
Still, it was felt that delivering a small party of raiders by glider to seize the Orne bridges was preferable to the possibility of having hundreds of parachutists scattered about the countryside. Therefore, the decision was made to utilize glider-borne troops to take the bridges. Major John Howard was charged with leading this force and D Company, along with two platoons of B Company of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (commonly called the “Ox and Bucks”) that were attached to the brigade.1
Hill’s 3rd Parachute Brigade—made up of Lieutenant Colonel George Bradbrooke’s 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Alastair Pearson’s 8th Parachute Battalion, and Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway’s 9th Parachute Battalion—was given the greatest number of missions that had to be accomplished if the British, French, and Canadian seaborne forces were to enjoy a successful landing at Gold, Juno, and Sword Beaches.2 In addition, the division’s other brigade—the 5th, commanded by Brigadier Nigel Poett—had the daunting task of seizing and holding two bridges over the Orne River and Canal west of Ranville that were the only bridges in the area that the Germans could use to attack the amphibious invasion force. Once their missions had been accomplished, the majority of the 5th Parachute Brigade would be with drawn and held in reserve to respond to any emergencies that might arise.
Additionally, Lieutenant Colonel Peter J. Luard’s 13th Parachute Battalion would secure Ranville while the 591st Parachute Squadron would clear two landing strips at LZ “N,” between Ranville and Le Mesnil, for the first glider landing.3
Although dwarfed by the number of aircraft the Americans would be using, the British lift was still considerable: a total of 266 aircraft, mostly Albemarles and Dakota C-47s, were detailed to carry 4,512 paratroopers.*4
While Howard’s planned seizure of the Orne bridges was daring in the extreme, it was not nearly as complex and fraught with danger as Otway’s mission. The 9th Para’s objective was to neutralize, through the use of both a parachute drop and a glider landing, the Merville battery east of Ouistreham, which was thought to have four casemates of heavy artillery that could pummel the left flank of the British seaborne invasion force.
While this action was taking place, Pearson’s 8th Para was to be dropped at Drop Zone “K,” some three miles south of Ranville, from which the Royal Engineers of No. 2 Troop, 3rd Parachute Squadron, would proceed to demolish a road bridge and a railway bridge at Bures and another highway bridge at Troarn, thereby shutting off German access to the invasion area.
Although the objectives might seem to be more than one brigade could reasonably be expected to accomplish, Hill said afterwards, “Looking back on my brigade’s task for D-Day, I think I would have accepted it was well nigh impossible when two thousand young men with an average age of twenty-two, who, with the exception of three officers, had never seen a shot fired in anger before, were asked at the dead of night, in a foreign field, to put out of action an enemy battery and destroy five bridges interspersed with deep irrigation ditches and German wire. These tasks covered a span of seven miles.”
Hill continued, “Thereafter, as near first light as possible, the brigade was required to capture and hold the [Le Mesnil] ridge, which was the dominating feature overlooking the Orne Valley, where the main divisional objective was the capture intact of the bridges over the river Orne and canal so that a bridgehead for a future breakout for 21 Army Group could be established. When regarded in retrospect and the cold light of day, that was a formidable task in all circumstances. The extraordinary thing was that no one of us doubted our ability to carry it out. During our months of training, we had built up faith in each other and faith in ourselves.”5
THE CANADIANS’ D-DAY orders and objectives were:
“… to land one hour in advance of the rest of the [3rd] Brigade in order to secure the dropping zone and capture the enemy headquarters known to be located on the DZ. Thereafter they are to destroy road bridges over the River Dives and its tributaries at Varaville, then neutralize the strong points on the cross roads. In addition the Canadians are to protect the left (southern) flank of the 9th Battalion during that battalion’s attack on the Merville Battery, and then seize and hold a position astride the Le Mesnil cross roads, a vital strategic position at the centre of the ridge.”
Based on these broad objectives, Colonel Bradbrooke issued the following specific tasks to his company commanders:
C Company (Major Murray Macleod) was to secure DZ “V,” while the pathfinders for Otway’s troops set up the homing and navigational equipment, then head to Varaville to destroy an enemy headquarters and a radio station there, and blow a bridge over the Divette stream east of the town. C Company would then move southwest to the battalion’s rendezvous point at Le Mesnil.
A Company (Major D. J. Wilkins) would drop at “V,” protect the left flank of 9th Para during their attack on the Merville Battery, then cover the 9th’s advance to Le Plein. Afterwards, they would then move to the Le Mesnil crossroads.
B Company (Major C. E. Fuller) was to destroy a bridge over the River Dives at Robehomme within two hours of landing and deny the area to the enemy until ordered to withdraw to Le Mesnil.6
THE SMALL TOWN of Merville (1940 population: 470), located just south of the coastal city of Franceville-Plage, had as its neighbor on its southern fringe an unwelcome German battery consisting of four concrete bunkers housing artillery pieces that pointed northwest toward Ouistreham and the mouth of the Orne River.
Since Rommel’s visit to the battery site on 6 March 1944, aerial photos revealed a frenzy of activity there, with it appearing obvious that the Germans’ construction arm, Organization Todt, was in the midst of installing four reinforced concrete, earth-covered casemates. The first, and largest, was identified by the British as “Type H611,” while the other three were smaller “Type 669” models. SHAEF intelligence officers knew that the Type H611 was almost always used to house 155mm field guns with a range of ten and a half miles; Sword Beach, at Ouistreham, was only slightly less than four miles from this battery. It was therefore understandable that SHAEF believed that these powerful guns were emplaced in the Merville casemates. No one at SHAEF was actually certain of the caliber of the guns, because none of the aerial photographs showed them in any great detail. But unless the guns—whatever their caliber—were knocked out, they would pose a grave danger to 3rd British Infantry Division troops coming ashore at Sword, and possibly even farther west at Gold and Juno Beaches.
Aerial photos also revealed that encircling the battery were a 20mm anti-aircraft gun, bunkers, fighting trenches, and a partially completed anti-tank ditch. The position was surrounded by a cattle fence enclosing a minefield of an approximate average depth of 100 yards, the inner border of which consisted of a Dannert* wire fence fifteen feet thick and five feet high. In places this inner fence was doubled, and within it the battery position itself was intersected by cross wire. Everyone at SHAEF was convinced that the Germans would not have poured so much concrete and so heavily defended the battery if what it housed was insignificant, and so it was added to the list of primary objectives—such as Sainte-Mère-Église, Pointe-du-Hoc, the La Fière bridge, and the two bridges over the Orne—that needed to be taken as soon as possible on D-Day. Since it was believed that the casemates of the battery were immune to aerial assault, SHAEF realized that they could only be neutralized through a ground attack by a large number of troops.7
OTWAY’S BATTALION, WHICH obviously had the roughest assignment (he called it a “stinker”), spent many months training for their role. The Merville battery consisted of four earth-covered, concrete bunkers that were virtually bomb-proof. They held what were thought to be heavy artillery pieces within range of Sword Beach, and were ringed by barbed wire, minefields, and machine-gun emplacements.
The more Otway studied the aerial photos, he more he was convinced that no planes or ships could knock out the installation. He came to agree with his superiors’ assessments that the only way to destroy it was by hand, on the ground. Somehow, Otway’s men would have to breach these defenses and get close enough to the bunkers to assault them through their firing ports, steel doors, or ventilation shafts—all within a very short period of time. The battery would have to be neutralized by 0530 hours and then a signal needed to be given, or else the Royal Navy would assume the raid had failed and would begin bombarding the site to keep the gunners’ heads down.
At best the mission seemed suicidal, and, even though the twenty-nine-year-old battalion commander presented a bluff, hearty confidence to his men, Otway secretly doubted that any attacking force could accomplish such a mission.
But they had to try, so a full-scale replica of the Merville battery, developed from aerial photos, was constructed near Newbury in Berkshire.8 “If we were going to go and do this job, which was obviously very difficult, we had to have a replica in this country and every man would have to know what to do,” said Otway. “The battery was sited to fire along the length of Sword Beach, across which the British 3rd Infantry Division was going to land. Everybody emphasized to me personally what would happen if we failed—that is, the men killed on the beach.”9
The British government spent tens of thousands of pounds to buy the field for the false battery and construct the full-scale model, and Otway’s 750 men spent weeks rehearsing and refining their timing and movements at the replica, often using live ammunition. Since the raid would have to take place in the dark, Otway had his men constantly practiced the assault in the dead of night.
Otway soon realized that having his men land either by parachute or glider outside of the battery’s defenses and then fight their way in would probably not work, so he devised a plan that would have sixty men in three Horsa gliders crash-land as close as possible to the concrete case-mates; additional men would drop immediately by parachute inside the defenses on top of the battery. Outlining his plan to A Company, Otway asked for volunteers—the entire company stepped forward. Moved by this show of courage and selflessness, Otway and Major Allen J. M. Parry, the company commander, had the solemn task of selecting sixty single men for almost certain death.10
AS OTWAY WAS running 9th Para through its paces, Major John Howard and his men were rehearsing for their coup de main action: simultaneously take both the Bénouville and Ranville bridges over the Orne. For months Howard had put the men of D Company through a grilling as they constantly practiced perfecting the techniques of seizing a bridge. Understandably, the troops became bored with the repetition, especially since, with the exception of Howard, they had no idea what their role in the invasion would be.
To end boredom and add a new level of realism, Howard asked Brigadier Poett if he could find a place in England that replicated the target in France—a place where two bridges close together crossed both a river and a canal. George Chatterton, commanding the Glider Pilot Regiment, said that such a place was found “near Hinton, Buckland and Bampton Aston which almost completely corresponded” to the Orne bridges area. The troops were moved there in early May to continue their training.11
On a daily basis the men of each Canadian company were brought into a briefing tent and shown a highly detailed scale model of their objectives, and were also allowed to study enlarged aerial photos of the drop zone and surrounding countryside. So precise were the photos that Colin Brebner, the battalion’s medical officer, remarked, “It was amazing to see [in the photos] cows in the fields, the power line which was at the far end of the DZ, and people on the roads. All other ranks were completely briefed, and those fighting men who had specific objectives were taken into the briefing rooms by their officers to repeatedly go over the details of where they should rendezvous and what to do if they appeared lost on landing.”12
Of course, viewing well-lit models and photographs taken in daytime is one thing, but being able to pick out landmarks in the dead of night, with an enemy no doubt firing at you—especially if you are not dropped in the correct location—is quite another. All the Canadian and Allied paratroopers could only hope and pray that the pilots could deliver the pathfinders to the right places.
AS D-DAY CREPT ever closer, final preparations were made, and everything that could be done to aid the paratroops, glider troops, and their air-crews was being done. Staff Sergeant Roy Howard of the Glider Pilot Regiment, who would have the responsibility for bringing in one of the three gliders destined to land at the Orne Canal Bridge, was astounded at the amount of detailed information that he and the other pilots were being given about the upcoming operation. He was especially impressed by “a most marvelous sand table, a perfect model of what was on the ground in Normandy—even down to the last tree and ditch. The chap who’d made it had put some wires above the [model] and slid a camera down those wires, filming all the way, and therefore had simulated what a glider pilot would see on his approach. It was incredibly clever and impressed us all very much. So we were very confident.”13
RAF Flight Lieutenant Alec Blythe, who would be piloting a load of Royal Engineers from Down Ampney to Normandy, also recalled the movies made of the scale model. “Accurate models of the Normandy coast and hinterland were constructed. From these models cine films were made of the tracks to each of the dropping zones. So we were prepared with a mental picture of what we could expect to see as we flew in.”14 The idea of filming the models to present a glider-pilot’s perspective of the LZs was the brainchild of Squadron Leader Lawrence Wright, of 38 Group.15