Pegasus Bridge and Horsa Bridge, 5–6 June 1944

The battle, stage by stage

1. 6 June 1944, about 00:07–00:20

   Six gliders in the dark

   Six Horsa gliders towed by Halifax bombers leave RAF Tarrant Rushton late on 5 June carrying about 181 men under Maj. John Howard: D Company of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, reinforced by two platoons of B Company and sappers of 249 Field Company, Royal Engineers. Cast off near Cabourg at about 6,000 feet, they glide to two bridges about 400–600 meters apart: the canal bridge at Bénouville and the river Orne bridge toward Ranville. The markers beside the canal record glider 91 (Staff Sgts. Wallwork and Ainsworth, with Howard and Lt. Den Brotheridge's platoon) landing at 00:16, glider 92 (Lt. David Wood) at 00:17 and glider 93 (Lt. R. A. 'Sandy' Smith, with Capt. John Vaughan, RAMC) at 00:18, the lead glider within a few dozen meters of the bridge defenses. L/Cpl. Fred Greenhalgh is thrown from glider 93 into a pond and drowns. At the Orne, Lt. Dennis Fox's glider 96 lands about 170 yards from the bridge at about 00:20 and Lt. 'Tod' Sweeney's glider 95 several hundred yards short; glider 94, with Lt. Tony Hooper's platoon and Howard's second-in-command, Capt. Brian Priday, is towed off course and lands beside a bridge over the Dives east of Varaville, roughly 7–8 miles away. The bridges are held by about 50 men (French Ministry of Armed Forces) of the 716th Infantry Division; accounts of their alertness vary.

2. 00:16–about 00:30

   Ham and Jam

   Brotheridge leads No. 25 Platoon straight across the canal bridge while grenades are pushed into the pillbox; he is shot in the neck as he reaches the west bank by Café Gondrée and dies soon afterward, remembered as the first Allied soldier killed by enemy fire on D-Day (IWM). Smith's No. 14 Platoon follows him across and fights through the trenches on the west bank, Smith himself wounded; Wood's No. 24 Platoon clears the east-bank trenches until Wood is badly wounded. Organized resistance ends within about 10–15 minutes (accounts vary). At the Orne, a sentry fires an MG 34 burst at Fox's men; a 2-inch mortar bomb from Sgt. Thornton silences it, the guards run and the bridge is taken with almost no other shooting. Sweeney's glider lands about a minute after Fox's but some 700 yards short; his platoon comes up across the ditches, soaked, a few minutes later. The sappers find demolition wiring but no charges in the chambers. At about 00:26 word reaches Howard that the Orne bridge is intact; he leaves Sweeney to hold it and calls Fox's platoon back to the canal bridge, and his wireless operator, Cpl. Tappenden, begins sending the success signal 'Ham and Jam'. Near the Dives, Priday's party skirmishes at the bridge, Hooper is briefly captured, and the group sets off across the flooded valley; it reaches the battalion only after D-Day.

3. 00:30–about 02:00

   The tank at the T-junction

   Howard sets a perimeter on the west bank, expecting a counterattack from Bénouville. By Carl Shilleto's account Fox's No. 17 Platoon, called over from the Orne bridge, waits forward near the T-junction where the bridge road meets the Caen–Ouistreham road about 350 yards west of the bridge; Smith's No. 14 Platoon holds trenches across the road; No. 25 Platoon holds the Café Gondrée grounds; Wood's No. 24 Platoon and the sappers are in reserve on the east bank, and Sweeney holds the Orne bridge. From about 00:50 the 5th Parachute Brigade drops on DZ N north of Ranville, badly scattered; Brig. Nigel Poett reaches the bridges at about 00:52 with a single soldier. At about 01:30 German armor comes down toward the junction. With the company's only serviceable PIAT, Sgt. Charles 'Wagger' Thornton hits the lead vehicle at roughly 30–50 yards; its ammunition explodes for between half an hour and an hour (accounts vary) and the second vehicle pulls back. What these vehicles were is disputed: Ambrose calls them Panzer IVs; Shilleto's text calls them tanks, while a photo caption in his book identifies a Hotchkiss self-propelled 7.5 cm Pak 40; other accounts describe half-tracks, and Neil Barber identifies the wreck from an air photograph as an armored half-track. Patrols approaching the Orne bridge are fired on; a German officer's vehicle (a staff car in Ambrose, an open half-track in Shilleto) is shot up and its officer, Maj. Hans Schmidt, captured.

4. 01:40–about 03:30

   7th Parachute Battalion crosses

   Lt. Col. Geoffrey Pine-Coffin, unable to wait for his scattered battalion to gather, leads the first of the 7th Parachute Battalion to the bridges; Shilleto has him crossing at about 01:40, other accounts give the first arrivals at about 02:40 or 03:00. At roughly one-third strength and short of mortars, wirelesses and machine guns, about 200 men push out to hold the west bank: B Company (Maj. Roger Neale) into Le Port and the woods to the north, A Company (Maj. Nigel Taylor) into the southern and western edge of Bénouville, and C Company (Maj. R. Bartlett) south along the canal toward the château, where an outpost of one officer and nine men is set up in the grounds. Howard draws his platoons back into a tighter perimeter at the bridges as the reserve. At about 03:00 the 8th Company of Panzergrenadier Regiment 192 (21st Panzer Division) bumps into the paratroopers south of the village, while patrols of the 716th Infantry Division probe toward Le Port. The 7th Para's war diary at 03:25, as Shilleto quotes it, already counts 19 killed, 42 wounded and about 170 men who never reached the rendezvous.

5. Dawn to about 11:00

   Holding the west bank

   With daylight the Germans attack in earnest, chiefly against A Company in southern Bénouville, which is cut off and loses all its officers killed or wounded but holds. South of the village Lt. Hans Höller's section of 75 mm Pak 40s is blocked short of the bridge; armor that forms up near the château, its commanders picked off on foot by C Company's outpost, swings away toward the coast once the seaborne landing is heard after 07:25 (7 Para's battalion history). Snipers in the Le Port church tower are silenced when Cpl. Tommy Killeen puts a PIAT round through it. At the bridge, Pvt. Wally Parr fires a captured anti-tank gun at the château roof, where Höller is in fact observing, until Howard stops him because the building is a maternity home. At about 09:00–10:00 two German patrol boats come up the canal from Ouistreham; the leader fires its 20 mm gun at the bridge, Cpl. Charles Godbold's PIAT hits its wheelhouse, it runs into the bank and the crew surrender, and the second turns back. At about 10:00 a single German aircraft — a Focke-Wulf 190 by most accounts — hits the bridge with a bomb that fails to explode. Capt. Vaughan's aid post works at Café Gondrée, whose owners, the Gondrée family, are among the first French civilians liberated; Louis Picot, a civilian, is mortally wounded.

6. About 12:30–13:30

   Lovat and the piper

   Brig. Lord Lovat's 1st Special Service Brigade, landed on Sword Beach that morning, fights its way inland through Saint-Aubin-d'Arquenay and comes down through Le Port to the bridges, the leading troops of No. 6 Commando with Lovat and his piper, Bill Millin, playing. Times differ: Shilleto gives 12:30, the Ox and Bucks' regimental history and the French Ministry of Armed Forces about 13:00, D-Day Overlord after 13:30; by Millin's own account they were about two and a half minutes behind schedule, and Lovat reportedly apologized to Howard for being late. The commandos cross under sniper fire — several are hit on the bridge — and press on over the Orne toward Le Plein and Amfréville to hold the high ground east of the river. The coup de main had cost the glider force two killed (Brotheridge and Greenhalgh) and about 14 wounded by D-Day Overlord's count; the 7th Parachute Battalion's stele in Bénouville records more than 60 killed and wounded in holding the village. The French commandos of No. 4 Commando cross at about 16:00, and the 2nd Royal Warwicks of the 3rd Infantry Division reach Bénouville at about 18:00, relieving the paratroopers that night.