Dan Snow's History Hit - Pegasus Bridge: The First Assault of D-Day

Episode Date: June 6, 2024

Just after midnight on the 6th of June, 1944, 181 British glider-borne infantry crashed to earth in the Normandy countryside. They clambered out of their gliders and rushed towards their objectives; t...wo German-held bridges near the D-Day landing zones. This was the opening salvo of D-Day, and their mission was vital - if they failed, their comrades would be trapped on the beaches, unable to move off the sand and vulnerable to counterattack.To mark the 80th anniversary of this assault, Dan is joined by Neil Barber. Neil has been interviewing veterans of the British 6th Airborne Division in Normandy for almost 30 years. He is the author of ‘Pegasus Bridge - The Capture, Defence and Relief of the Caen Canal and River Orne Bridges on D-Day’. Remembered in the words of the people who were there, Dan and Neil retrace this vital chapter of the D-Day story.This episode uses AI-generated voices for the excerpts of veteran testimony.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at ds.hh@historyhit.com.You can take part in our listener survey here.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 In the very opening moments of June 6th, 1944, just hours before the D-Day landings themselves, British airborne infantry pulled off one of the most daring assaults of the Second World War. 181 men landed in gliders under cover of darkness and swiftly captured two key bridges behind enemy lines in Normandy. Their mission, well, it was absolutely vital. If they failed, thousands of their airborne comrades would be cut off from the main invasion force and that invasion itself would be vulnerable to German counter-attack. Now today, June the 6th, right now is the 18th anniversary of D-Day, Operation Overlord. This is the largest amphibious invasion in human history. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and French resistors risked their lives on the land, on the sea and in the air
Starting point is 00:01:00 to penetrate fortress Europe, to break the Atlantic wall, to begin the liberation of Northwest Europe from the Nazi grip. Over the last week on Dan Snow's History, we've been releasing episodes about all that, from what it was like huddling behind obstacles and seawalls on the beaches to being in the gun turrets of battleships and the cockpits of aircraft. from what it was like huddling behind obstacles and seawalls on the beaches, to being in the gun turrets of battleships and the cockpits of aircraft. And we've also heard the extraordinary story of the deception operations that drew German attention away from Normandy with things as wild as inflatable tanks and fake armies. Now, to mark the day of the invasion itself,
Starting point is 00:01:40 I thought we'd go to the story of the first Allied boots to hit French soil on that day, just after midnight, June the 6th. The Pegasus Bridge assault. It's rightly lauded for the daring demonstrated by the pilots, the infantrymen, but I think also for the meticulous planning, the ingenious problem solving that really typified the D-Day landings, typified Operation Overlord. Here to tell us about it, I'm joined by historian Neil Barber. Neil is the guy talked to about this. He's been studying the British Airborne in Normandy for 30 years. He's spoken to dozens of veterans. He's published several books on the topic, including Pegasus Bridge, the capture, defence and relief of the Corn Canal and River-on-Bridges on D-Day. Today, Neil and I are going to take you through this
Starting point is 00:02:31 essential part of the D-Day story from start to finish. Enjoy. Right, let's quickly set the scene. By June 1944, Allied preparations for the D-Day landing had been underway for a long time. The plan was just staggering. It was vast. So on day one, 7,000 ships and boats and landing craft were going to transport about 130,000 men
Starting point is 00:03:03 from several countries, the United States, Britain, Canada, other nations, to the coast of Normandy and then land on that coast. They would be protected, they'd be helped by thousands of bombers and fighter bomber aircraft. The hope was that they would demolish German shore positions, they would intercept Luftwaffe attacks, they would break up German armoured counterattacks. Now, all of this required years of preparation. Some of it paperwork and planning, others actual kinetic operations on the ground and on the sea and in the air.
Starting point is 00:03:33 Heavy bombers blasted German infrastructure, transport infrastructure, German troop concentrations. And those bomber forces would take enormous risks. They did so. Too many of those aircraft and their crews were lost at sea sailors braved submarines u-boats e-boats fast patrol vessels as they fought to wrest control of the channel from the germans as they fought also to keep the shipping lanes open to keep the supplies and the men flowing into brit from the Americas. They also had to ensure that German battleships were bottled up
Starting point is 00:04:09 and would not move to interdict the invasion force. It was a Herculean effort on all fronts. Now, this invasion differed in so many ways, scale and many other ways, from the countless other invasions launched from one side of the Channel to the other over the course of our history. This would see men not just delivered from the decks of ships onto the enemy shore,
Starting point is 00:04:28 but from aircraft as well. The Allies had embraced one of the great military innovations of the Second World War, the airborne soldier. Pioneered, it's fair to say, by the Germans in their rapid advance across Europe, the Allies had quickly developed their own airborne forces. If used correctly, these airborne troops offered huge tactical advantages. Basically, you can circumvent defence on the ground by capturing vital positions from above with swift surprise assaults. Just like the ancient Greek myth of Pegasus the flying horse, ridden by Bellerophon, who'd slayed the mighty Chimera by attacking from above.
Starting point is 00:05:08 This was the ingredient the Allies needed to be sure that D-Day would work. They wanted to ease the passage of the invasion force across the beach by dropping troops behind German defences. They would sow chaos and confusion and fear. The British, for their part, launched Operation Tonga. This would see thousands of British and Canadian paratroopers from the 6th Airborne Division. They would jump out of aircraft, laden with rifles and ammunition and explosives, in the dead of night to land in German-occupied France and cause as much disruption as possible among the German defenders. Distract them, as possible, among the German defenders. Distract them, destroy them, decoy them, and hopefully capture as many key locations, railroads, gun batteries, bridges, as they could.
Starting point is 00:05:54 And two of the most important targets that the Airborne had that day were key bridges across the Caen Canal and the parallel River Orne, the big waterway that runs north-south from the city of Caen all the way to the Channel. Those bridges were given the code names Pegasus and Horsa. Now let's hear from Neil Barber. Neil, why were those bridges on the absolute eastward extremity of the D-Day landing zones? Why were they so important? They were so important because the most vulnerable part of what was going to be the proposed invasion area were the two flanks so you had the 101st and the 82nd being dropped at the western end of the proposed bridgehead and the six airborne at the
Starting point is 00:06:36 eastern end so all of the um the german armor was positioned to the west of paris and southeast of calais because that's where they believed the invasion would take place. And so, in effect, the 6th Airborne Division was acting as a buffer to prevent this armour coming straight into the flank of the proposed landing areas. The bridges were so important because there were two waterways running from Weestrom down to Conn, the Conn Canal and the River Ulm. And they were the only crossing points between the coast and Conn.
Starting point is 00:07:12 So they were going to be vital for reinforcement, ammunition, getting the wounded out, supplies, all that kind of thing. So basically you can stop the Germans using the bridges and you can use them yourself? Absolutely. Obviously the Germans wanted them because that was their only route into the flank. Yeah, if they wanted to strike deep into the entrails of the Allied landings, they had to use those bridges. You mentioned the airborne troops, the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne, the Americans over there in the West, the British
Starting point is 00:07:39 Airborne dropping to the east. For this operation, attacking these two bridges, why didn't they just send men out the back of aeroplanes with round parachutes like they did in so many other landings? What's different about this airborne landing? Well, with regards to the bridges, as they found out later, with parachute drops, they were obviously spread over a certain distance and it took time to get together and organise before heading to whatever objective they were assigned. Whereas using the gliders, they knew they could get very close to the bridges and be upon them before, hopefully before the Germans could react. So that's why they specifically used gliders for the capture of the bridges rather than the paras.
Starting point is 00:08:16 A meticulous plan was devised. First into the fray would be the 181 men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, known as the Ox and Bucks, and some Royal Engineers, all under the command of Major John Howard. They would land in gliders in the dead of night, right next to those bridges. They would seize the bridges themselves from the Germans, disarming any explosive device that had been placed on them. Then they would hold onto those bridges against all comers. They'd be
Starting point is 00:08:45 reinforced by paratroopers from the 7th Parachute Battalion, and then together they would dig in, hold out, and wait until the backup from the beaches hopefully arrived. Tell me about the gliders themselves. How many men can they fit, and how many of them were going to be used in this operation? About 28 men per glider they could take. And there were around about 180, 181 men that would be spread amongst the six gliders. Three for Pegasus Bridge or the Concanal Bridge, as it was initially known, and three for the River Orne Bridge, which was about 500 metres further along the road. The Hauser was a huge, huge aircraft, almost as big as its tug aircraft,
Starting point is 00:09:26 the Halifax, wingspan of 88 feet. They're very robust, really. They were brilliantly designed. They had all kind of sort of circular reinforced beams all the way through the glider itself. So they could take a lot of punishment. And the pilots always said any landing that you could walk away from was a good one. So you've got these six-horser gliders. What are the defences like on the ground? The actual defences, say Pegasus Bridge, there was a 50mm gun in placement right beside the bridge.
Starting point is 00:10:02 Lots of barbed wire, trenches mainly on the eastern side, running up both sides of the bridge itself. The defences were only really about 25 men and actually on the night there was two guards really that were pacing up and down on the bridge opposite one another, that kind of thing. There was some asleep in the bunkers underneath in the trenches and also there was a pillbox as they called it. It wasn't really a pillbox, but they didn't know it at the time, where there was other Germans in there sleeping.
Starting point is 00:10:30 The Allies had built up a pretty clear picture of the situation on the ground, and that's thanks to reconnaissance. Thanks to repeated flights by reconnaissance aircraft, the expert photoanalysis of their films when they landed back in the UK, but also intercepted German communications. And of course, another vital resource were the French citizens on the ground. They were willing to risk their lives by smuggling information back to Allied headquarters. John Howard also relied on those same patriotic French citizens during the fight that was to come.
Starting point is 00:11:03 Tell me about the town itself, because some of these people have become famous. There's a cafe right next to the bridge, isn't there? What's going on there? Yes, that was the Cafe Gondre, which was run by Georges Gondre and his wife Therese. They had two daughters at the time, Georgette and Arlette. And Georges had had the link,
Starting point is 00:11:21 the actual main resistance person in the area was a lady called Leah Vion. And she ran the Beneville Maternity Home, which is in a huge chateau further along the canal. That job, because she had that sort of responsibility, she could get about in an ambulance so she could gather evidence. And she was always hiding shot down airmen or French resistance people, this kind of thing. And Therese, who was actually born in Alsace, could speak fluent German. So she could understand exactly what the Germans were saying and she didn't let on. And the most valuable piece of information that she found out was that the mechanism to blow the bridge was actually in the pillbox.
Starting point is 00:12:09 So that went back down the line, obviously ended up in John Howard's hands. After months of gruelling, night-time training and meticulous planning, the date had arrived. At eight o'clock on the 5th of June, the men of the 7th Parachute Battalion gathered for a final service, given by their beloved Padre, Captain George Parry. Among the young men gathered around him was Richard Todd, as in Richard Todd OBE, the Academy Award-nominated actor. After the war, he would famously star in the epic war film, The Dam Busters,
Starting point is 00:12:43 and he even played John Howard himself in The Longest Day, which told the story of the D-Day landings. But on the evening of the 5th of June 1944, Richard Todd was a lieutenant in the 7th Parachute Battalion, about to go into action for the first time. He later recalled the Padre's final service, saying, Parry was a wiry Welshman, with a nature as fiery as his red hair, and a heart and courage to match. as his red hair, and a heart and courage to match. Drawing up in a semicircle, six hundred ten men faced inwards towards the Padre, who stood on an ammunition box. A more unlikely or piratical congregation could not be imagined, every man a bristle with weapons, his face and hands besmirched with black cream, his helmet on the ground before him, his rifle or Sten gun laid across it.
Starting point is 00:13:29 Onward, Christian soldiers went well. Abide with me was rather more ragged. It was not easy to sing that in such a setting and at such a moment. And so in the closing hours of June the 5th, 181 men of the Orenbucks and some Royal Engineers climbed into six Horsa gliders, laden with gear and wedged in between crates of ammunition and engineers' stores. They'd be the first Allied soldiers to land on D-Day. And despite their
Starting point is 00:13:58 meticulous preparation, I think their nerves would have been pretty stretched. They take off on the evening of the 5th of June. They're towed across the Channel, aren't they, by British bombers? That's right, yeah. They took off from Tarrant, Rushton, and to disguise their approach, they got the Halifaxers to carry. Once they dropped or let the turrets go, the Halifaxers went on to Bonn Conn. Somebody might pick it up on the radar and think that's suspicious
Starting point is 00:14:23 if they didn't do that kind of thing. So we've got these six horse gliders. They're each carrying just under 30 men. They're going to land, what, as close as possible to those bridges? It's when you actually see the small area that they had, you cannot believe that they got that close to the bridge. Obviously, it was vital. The nearer the bridge they got, the less time the Germans had to react. Later on in July, they took some Russian envoys there, military ones, and they thought it was a put-up job. They didn't believe that they could fly and get that close to the bridges in the dark with no aids at all.
Starting point is 00:15:00 So in the dark, no aids, no engine. These gliders come into land. You could almost touch the bridge from where they land. And the men pile out the back. How quickly were they able to seize their objective? Within 10 minutes, something like that. I mean, there was the two guards. At first, they thought it was a downed bomber.
Starting point is 00:15:20 And then they sort of hid behind the pillbox itself, was looking over the top and that's when they saw these figures coming towards them one fired a shot one fired a flare another german the nco came out of the pillbox and was shot another german ran across the bridge roma and sat with these two guards they ran off to the north up the canal bank and that's when the oxen bucks started attacking the pillbox itself and denaseridge and a few of his men ran across the other side of the bridge. So there was very little actual resistance, initial resistance. You're listening to our D-Day to Berlin series. More coming up.
Starting point is 00:16:26 I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, To be continued... We're rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. If you were to look up the expression Kuduma Assault, you'd see Pegasus Bridge, probably, given as the definitive example of it. It was just textbook. It was swift. It was decisive. It was hugely successful.
Starting point is 00:17:01 The Ox and Bucks landed just yards away from their objectives. An astonishing bit of flying, and I suppose more importantly, landing. They then stormed the bridges, taking the Germans completely by surprise. Major Howard then sent the message, Ham and Jam back to Allied headquarters, letting them know that the bridges had been captured. In the town of Benuville, on the western end of Pegasus Bridge, the men of the Oxenbucks took up defensive positions. Because the problem was the initial shock factor of their assault, it didn't last. The Germans gathered themselves and began sending out patrols to assess the situation.
Starting point is 00:17:35 Remember, this was all taking place in the dead of night. Neither side had a real precise handle of what they were up against. At the western end of the bridge, there's this T-junction. It's still there today. This crossroads, really, that was absolutely vital. Whoever controlled it would determine who got to approach and cross the bridge. By this point, a sort of stalemate had come into effect, and this was a no-man's land, with both sides sweeping the crossroads with their fire, but neither side in control of it completely. Not long after the capture of the bridge, the British in Benneville heard the low rumble of a German vehicle column
Starting point is 00:18:10 approaching. This spelt trouble. Now technically they're not tanks, but any kind of vehicle with armour on can be pretty intimidating for infantry, and the men of the Ox and Bucks knew that they were about to face an opponent with some heavy kit. In an audacious move that's really now become part of airborne forces law, Sergeant Charles Wagger Thornton and Private Alf Whitbread decided they were going to do something about this. They dropped into a trench beside the road that led up to the crossroads and they sort of stalked the lead vehicle. They were waiting for an opportunity. They just let it pass them and they let it move a little bit more towards the bridge. Then Thornton popped up from the trench and fired a PIAT round into it.
Starting point is 00:18:49 The PIAT was a portable anti-tank weapon. It looks a bit like what we might call a bazooka, but in fact it was just a primitive shoulder-mounted steel tube with a really powerful spring mechanism inside it that catapulted an explosive round at a target. It was a direct hit. The vehicle must have been rammed full of ammunition because it went up with an almighty explosion
Starting point is 00:19:10 that kept crackling away for a while afterwards. And the timing couldn't have been better. The wreckage blocked the vehicles behind it and the Germans turntail and fled back the way they'd come, thinking perhaps it was best to try again a bit later on. For a short while, there was relative calm in Benneville. Reinforcements from the 7th Parachute Battalion began to arrive through the early hours of the morning, and the extra rifle strength, those extra bodies, were very, very welcome indeed. From now on, the job was to hold the
Starting point is 00:19:38 breaches at all costs until they were relieved from the beaches. It was later on where the Germans really started putting pressure on them that it became difficult for everyone. Just before dawn, the Germans started to probe and find out exactly what was going on in Beneville. There was some pretty fierce fighting. Is there any stories in your research that particularly strike you? Yes, certainly. I mean, A Company in Beneville don't get enough publicity, really,
Starting point is 00:20:06 for what they achieve. There was only about 50 men they started out with and they were literally cut off the whole day. The first attack on them was an infantry attack, which they managed to repel. But then a self-propelled gun unit turned up further down the road and eventually started opening up on the houses that they'd taken occupation of. There's famous stories about a German tank which,
Starting point is 00:20:31 or it could be an SP gun, it's always a bit debatable about what vehicle they were, but it was an armoured vehicle that got very close. Nigel Taylor had made his headquarters in a zigzag trench which the Germans had built to avoid being strafed by the RAF and he had a telegraph pole there and this SP gun was firing and it was the shells are hitting the road coming up and one hit this telegraph pole and sent a splinter right across the back of his legs which actually knocked Nigel Taylor out of the battle in effect but that tank came further down the road and one of the 7th Battalion, a chap called McGee, literally went out into the middle of the road
Starting point is 00:21:10 and fired at this vehicle coming down the road and it actually shut its observation slip. So men were able then to get out and destroy it with gammon bombs. Here's Lieutenant Todd again, who later recounted his experience of McGee's bravery in a newspaper article, recalling... shouting encouragement. We knew that he was lying by the window of a house, one leg shattered, when his second-in-command, Jim Webber, himself shot through his chest, got through to us to report. Things might have been worse for A Company but for the action of one man, nineteen-year-old Private McGee. Fed up with being shot at by a tank as he ducked down in his foxhole, he leapt up and
Starting point is 00:22:07 charged down the street firing his Sten gun from the hip. The tank crew closed up the shutters and were temporarily blinded, whereupon McGee threw a plastic gammon bomb from a few yards and crippled the vehicle, which slewed across the road blocking any further tank movement. the vehicle, which slewed across the road, blocking any further tank movement. McGee was awarded the DCM posthumously. He was killed a few hours later. For the rest of the morning, there was close quarters fighting. Intense bursts across the town as the two sides tried to get the upper hand. Beneville was, actually it still is, a very picturesque, a lovely Norman countryside town, but that means there's narrow streets, there's high walled gardens, the houses are very thickly built,
Starting point is 00:22:50 and it's surrounded by fields and orchards. And that's rather idyllic now, but it meant that it was a very difficult, in fact a horrific place to fight back in 1944. The narrow passageways, plenty of opportunities for ambush, for unexpected confrontations. There were lethal, almost hand-to-hand scuffles. Here's Lieutenant Hunter of 3 Platoon. Private Pembury, who was beside me, was badly wounded with a shattered leg. He lay on the roadway which ran alongside the wall of the farm. I took out his two large field dressings and bandaged him up as best I could. I also gave him a shot of morphine. While I was doing this, I put my Sten gun down.
Starting point is 00:23:31 Suddenly, the door in the wall was flung open. I looked up and was confronted by a German no more than a yard away with his Schmeisser submachine gun pointing right at me. I was a press away from Oblivion. He hesitated long enough to enable one of my men to send him to oblivion. Machine gun fire, but it's brightly lit tracer rounds crisscrossed the gardens and alleyways.
Starting point is 00:23:54 The remnants of A Company took cover behind anything they could. There's accounts of them tossing back German stick grenades that tumbled into their laps. I gradually got pushed back out of these houses as the afternoon went on, and literally they were in a ditch, which was faced by a high wall, and you had Germans literally throwing grenades over the wall,
Starting point is 00:24:14 this kind of thing, and they were throwing them back. I suppose the death of the Padre is always very emotive, because he was helping the wounded in one of the regiment lay posts on the lower road and the Germans managed to penetrate down that lower road and they obviously got to this regiment lay post and we don't know what happened for sure, but the Padre was killed. It was a real tragedy.
Starting point is 00:24:41 George Parry, his name was. Everybody loved him in the 7th Battalion apparently and he was a very slight, diminutive man, very well liked. But all that fighting was very sporadic, right through the day, ferocious at times. I mean, Parry's a people that don't surrender easily. To the north of Beneville, at Lepore, Philip Crofts and five platoon were holed up in a house as German soldiers tried to beat down the door with their rifle butts. A chap in our section called Scotty, brave sod, he didn't seem to know fear. The Germans were passing by on the pavements down below, and old Scotty was putting a little piece of mirror outside the window, and when they came,
Starting point is 00:25:20 he was just firing at them. It went on like this. There was a lot of sniping there, an awful lot of sniping. Pinned down from all angles, the Brits held fast and did their best to see the job through. Here's Lieutenant Todd again. B Company repelled repeated attacks, one of their worst problems being the large number of snipers making movement difficult as they picked off men from cottage windows, rooftops, and especially from the church tower. We had to be careful about any sort of movement around there. You realised you were taking a chance, but you had to go about your business, otherwise you'd have sat cowering
Starting point is 00:25:57 in your trench for the whole of the day. In a way just as remarkable as the tenacity of the airborne troops were the steel nerfs, the bravery of some of the town's residents. There was a real firefight at one point, a heated firefight, when some German snipers had based themselves in the church tower, and Corporal Tommy Killeen from the anti-tank platoon fired at it. He scored a direct hit with a PIAT round on that church tower. As they ran across the road then to clear the church, he was shocked to see
Starting point is 00:26:25 the mayor of the town run out of a building, and despite the chaos and battle going on, gesticulated wildly and shouted, please don't hurt my church. Cleen and the men did have to enter the building, but he said that he was quick to take me out of respect. Private Dennis Edwards of the Ox and Bucks, who was fighting nearby, tells a wild story about a lady who crossed the street, casually as you like, amidst German and British machine gun fire. I've always thought that's such a bizarre scene. You've got highly trained soldiers on both sides, some of whom have jumped out of a plane for a living,
Starting point is 00:26:56 and all of them are prepared for this battle, this close quarters battle. They've got small arms fire, some heavier weapons, they've got grenades blowing up, and they're all hunkered down. They're all seeking cover wherever they can. And then they spot this woman just walking down the street, casual as you like. Perhaps this was an ultimate act of defiance, or maybe disdain for those men who were trashing her town. Either way, she decided that she would not be deterred. The streets were hers, and she would walk down them. The French people were wandering around quite openly and with an air of complete unconcern,
Starting point is 00:27:33 as if the war was something between the British and Germans and was nothing to do with them. One grey-haired old lady suddenly stepped out into the street, only a few yards from where we were positioned, and with a machine gun, which at the time was firing, and a German machine gun was firing back, the old gun was firing back the old lady walked slowly up the street with an air of total unconcern. A few yards further on and as she came to a gap between two houses she decided to cross the road and walk directly into our line of fire. Momentarily we were forced to stop firing but very quickly had to recommence as we realized that behind the cover of the woman crossing the street, the Germans were also doing some changing around. And where we had previously had them pinned down, they had now smartly crossed the street and into the houses on our side. Later, we wondered whether
Starting point is 00:28:13 we had seen an old lady or a German dressed up to fool us. We had earlier been warned to expect such trickery. Tell me about when they're finally relieved, the famous story of their relief and the musical accompaniment. The Ox and Bucks and the 7th Battalion that were in Lepore, which was the northern end of Benneville in the church area, they'd heard the pipes in the distance, so they knew they were coming. And the fighting there, again, had been pretty intense. It had all been very close in and around the cemetery. But they were running low on ammunition by that time, so it was getting a bit touch and go.
Starting point is 00:28:45 So they were very pleased to hear these pipes coming. The bagpipes were being played by Piper Billy Millen of the 1st Special Service Brigade. Millen was the personal piper of the outfits, eccentric commander Lord Lovett, both of whom have become shrouded in myth thanks to their escapades on D-Day. To the best of our knowledge,
Starting point is 00:29:04 Millen was the only man to storm the beaches of Normandy wearing a kilt and playing the pipes. After landing on Sword Beach at 8.40am, the commandos had immediately moved as quickly as they could cross-country towards the bridges, skirting minefields, dealing with sniper fire, and occasionally any nests of resistance that they met head-on. As they approached the bridges, Lovett had turned to Millen and told him to start playing. Here's Private Edwards again. After all the earlier din of battle, it suddenly became very quiet. Even the Germans had stopped shouting to each other when suddenly, in the uncanny stillness of that spring day, I heard a sound that will live with
Starting point is 00:29:39 me for the rest of my days. From somewhere to the north, well beyond the churchyard and probably beyond the village, I heard a sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. A sound like the wild wailing of banshees. For us, excessively tired young soldiers, out of ammunition and in an impossible position, the sense of relief and exhilaration can only be guessed at. exhilaration can only be guessed at. To know that the seaborne forces were ashore and moving inland was also a cause for enormous relief and satisfaction. Those wild wailing bagpipes were like the sound of heaven. The raucous noise came to me more sweetly than any music that I had ever heard. And so with the shriek of the bagpipes raising the spirits of the British defenders, And so with the shriek of the bagpipes raising the spirits of the British defenders, Millen and the commandos entered Laporte to the north of Pegasus Bridge. The arrival of those commandos and seaborne engineers,
Starting point is 00:30:34 well, that marked the key turning point of the battle. And it was never the commandos' job to relieve that area. They had a job on the Breville Ridge. But nevertheless, their presence there certainly put the Germans off from a more concerted effort. Along with the seaborne engineers, a lot of seaborne engineers are overlooked and they got there very, very early. And all the Germans could see were these troops arriving. I mean, the seaborne engineers were there in effect to put up a Bailey Bridge if Pegasus Bridge had been destroyed. But their sheer presence there was, as it turned out, crucial. How many British troops were wounded and killed
Starting point is 00:31:09 in carrying out this essential part of the D-Day story? Well, that would be difficult to say, but certainly a company lost an enormous amount of men, really. There was only about 50 of the company that managed to get into the southern end of Benneville. And by the end of the day, there was about 10 that weren't wounded or dead. So they took the bulk of the casualties in that area on the day. And did the seizure of these bridges,
Starting point is 00:31:35 did it have the effect that the Allies were hoping for? Was it as important as they thought? Absolutely. It was absolutely vital to get supplies across because they'd arranged to have a resupply drop later on that night. But apart from that, all their supplies would have to come through Salt Beach. So that route was absolutely crucial. Absolutely crucial. Well, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast on this big anniversary and telling us all about it.
Starting point is 00:32:02 Tell us what your book is called. and telling us all about it. Tell us what your book is called. It's just called Pegasus Bridge, the Capture, Defence and Relief, the Corn Canal and River Horn Bridges on D-Day. It's a snappy title. Pegasus Bridge, though, people won't forget that.
Starting point is 00:32:16 Thank you very much for coming on. Oh, it's a pleasure. Thanks for asking me. I hope you enjoyed this episode of our D-Day series on Pegasus Bridge. Make sure you hit follow in your podcast app to get the next episode, which comes out next week. We'll be looking at the events around D-Day on the Eastern Front with the great Jonathan Dimbleby.
Starting point is 00:32:34 So you do not want to miss that. you

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