Introduction

This book is the result of  some 24 interviews, conducted between September  and December, 1983,  in Canada,   England, France  and Germany.  At that time I  had just  completed some  twenty years   of work   on  Dwight   Eisenhower,   during which  period  I examined something over two million documents.  In my next book I  wanted to work from  an entirely different  kind of source  material. I  have always been  impressed by  the work  of the  American  military  writer S. L. A. Marshall,   especially by  his use  of  post-combat  interviews   to   determine what  actually   happened  on   the battlefield.

My thought was, Why not do a post-combat interview forty years after the  event? Even taking into account all the tricks that memory plays, I felt that for  many of the participants, D-Day was the great day of their lives, stamped forever  in their memories. I  knew that was  the case with  Eisenhower, who went  on to two full terms as  President, but who  always looked back  on D-Day as  his greatest day, and could remember the most surprising details. I also wanted to come  down from the  dizzying heights  of the  Supreme Commander  and the  President to the company level, where the action is. Further, I wanted a company that was unusual and that played a crucial role, Pegasus Bridge was an obvious choice.

So I set out. My recorded interviews with John Howard took twenty hours,  spread over a period of some weeks. I  got almost ten hours of tape from  Jim Wallwork. My shortest interview was two hours.

Listening to the  old veterans was  fascinating. D-Day had  indeed burned itself indelibly into  their minds,  and they  very much  enjoyed having  an interested audience for their stories.

My  major problem,  it turned  out, was  the sequence  and timing  of events:  I sometimes got six, eight, or  ten individual descriptions of the  same incident. When the veterans differed it was only in small detail, but they often disagreed on when the specific incident took place, whether before this one or after  that one. By comparing all the transcripts later, by using such documentary  material as exists, and by constant re-checking with my sources, I worked out a  sequence of events and incidents that  is, I think, as close  to accurate as one can  get forty years later.

The key time, on  which everything else hinges,  is the moment the  first glider crashed. I  use 0016,  D-Day, as  that moment.  That was  the time at which John Howard's watch, and the watch of one of the privates, both stopped -  presumably as a result of the crash.

When I began  writing the book  I quickly realised  that the more  these men and women spoke for  themselves, the better.  I found myself  using more and  longer quotations than I had  ever used before. Gradually,  I realised that what  I was doing was putting their stories into a single narrative, rather than writing  my own book. Because this is, truly, a book written by the veterans themselves, I'm glad to say that the royalties are going to the Royal Greenjackets  Consolidated Charitable Fund (the Oxfordshire  and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry  became the 1st Battalion  of the  Royal Greenjackets  in the  late 1950s)  and the Airborne Forces Security Fund).

The informants (listed in the order the interviews were done)

Jim Wallwork, John  Howard, Wally Parr,  Dennis Fox, Richard  Todd, Nigel Poett, Nigel Taylor, M. Thornton, Oliver Boland, C. Hooper, E. Tappenden, Henry Hickman and Billy Gray (a joint interview),  David Wood, John Vaughan, R. Ambrose,  Jack Bailey, Joy  Howard, Irene  Parr, R.  Smith, H.  Sweeney, E.  O'Donnell, Therese Gondree, and Hans von Luck.

Prologue

SPRING, 1944

The  spring  of 1944  was  a unique  time  in European  history,  unique because virtually every European was anticipating a momentous event. That event was  the Allied invasion, and  everyone knew that  it would decide  whether the continent lived under Nazi domination.

By May of  that year the  war had reached  its decisive phase,  a phase in which invasion was inevitable. The British had been planning to return to Europe since they were kicked off in 1940. The  Russians had been demanding the opening of  a second front since the June of  1941, insisting that the Germans could  never be beaten without one. And  the Americans had been  in agreement with the  Russians since  their  entry  into  the  war.  Generals  George  Marshall  and  Dwight D. Elsenhower had argued forcefully for a second front in 1942 and 1943.

Despite the  commitment by  the three  great allies,  and despite intense public pressure, another strategy was followed. In November, 1942, the Allies landed in French North Africa,  a long way  from any major  German forces (not  to mention from any German cities).  In July of the  following year they landed  in Sicily, and two months later in southern  Italy. These operations ran into heavy  German opposition, but they did not put a significant strain on enemy manpower. Nor did they seriously weaken Germany's capacity  to make war: indeed, German  factories were producing tanks and guns at record  rates by the spring of 1944. And  their guns and tanks were  the best in the  world - as well  they might be, given  the Nazis' ability to draw on the  expertise and resources of all Europe.  In short, the  Allied operations  in the  Mediterranean during  1942 and  1943 were   more important for their political than their military results. They left Hitler with few problems either of production or of manpower.

But Hitler did have one major worry in the Spring of 1944, and that was a single point at which his fighting forces were vulnerable. He was well protected on the north, where his troops occupied Norway  and Denmark. To the south, the  immense barrier of the Alps stood between Germany and the Allied forces, who in any case were still  south of  Rome. Hitler  was not  even excessively  worried about his eastern flank: his armies were 600 miles east of Warsaw, and within 300 miles of Moscow. He had lost the Ukraine in 1943, much his biggest loss to date, but  for compensation he had held on in the Balkans and was still besieging Leningrad. On all fronts except one he had a deep buffer between himself and his enemies. That one exception was to the west.

The Allied forces building up in the United Kingdom, now 2,500,000 strong,  were the greatest threat to Cologne and Germany's industrial heartland. Not only were they  much  closer than  the  Red Army,  they  were operating  from  a virtually impregnable base and had far greater mobility than either the German or  Russian armies. But of course there was the English Channel between Hitler's Europe  and the armies gathering in the United Kingdom. Hitler knew, from intensive study of the plans for operation Sea Lion, a German invasion of Britain in 1940, just how difficult a cross-Channel attack would be.

Hitler did what  he could to  make it even  more difficult. Just  as the British started thinking  about returning  to the  Continent even  as they  were leaving Dunkirk, so did Hitler begin thinking then of how to repulse an invasion.  First the ports were fortified,  protected by big guns  on the cliffs, by  machine-gun emplacements,  by  trenches,  by  mine fields  and  barbed  wire,  by underwater obstacles, by every device known to German engineers. The Canadians learned  how effective  these  were at  Dieppe  in August,  1942,  when they  were  met by  a veritable wall of steel hurtling down on them from every direction. In 1943, the Germans began extending  the fortifications up  and down the  coast; in January, 1944,  with Rommel's  arrival to  take command  of Army  Group B,   construction reached an almost frenzied pace. The  Germans knew that the second front  had to come that  spring, and  that throwing  the invaders  back was  their single best chance to win the war.

Hitler had therefore  turned a staggering  amount of labour  and material, taken from all over Europe,  to the construction of  the Atlantic Wall. All  along the French and  Belgian coasts,  but especially  between Ostend  and Cherbourg,  the Germans had built or were building machine-gun pillboxes, trenches,  observation posts,  artillery  emplacements,   fortresses,  mine  f......