code name: Operation Deadstick – very appropriate, since in aviation, a “deadstick” landing is one that is made without engine power. Deadstick would require some extraordinary feats of military daring. For starters, there were the targets themselves. The village of Bénouville stands on the west side of the canal. The road crossed the canal on a steel drawbridge, built in 1934. Technically it was a “Scherzer rolling lift bascule bridge,” with a massive counterweight above the roadway. It would be immortalized as “Pegasus Bridge,” after the flying horse emblem of the British Airborne forces. Defending the bridges were elements of the 736th Regiment of the German 716th Infantry Division. This was a “static” (non-mobile) unit made up largely of Polish, French, and Russian prisoners, old men, and boys. But the position was strongly fortified, with barbed wire, a concrete machine-gun pillbox, and a 50 mm anti-tank gun. In reserve near Caen was the powerful 125th Panzerg renad ier Reg i ment of the 21st Panzer Division, one of Rommel’s favorite units from his days commanding the “Afrika Korps.” Of the 156,000 British, American, Canadian, and Free French who would set foot in Normandy on D-Day, the men of D Company would be among the very first, landing just 16 minutes after midnight. They were reinforced by a detachment of Royal Engineers, tasked with disarming any demolition charges attached to the bridges. Although the bridges had been wired and prepared for destruction, after the battle the explosives were found neatly stacked and securely locked in a nearby hut. Everything depended on surprise. The gliders would have to land as close as possible to the objective, and the German defenders would have to be neutralized before they could get organized and react. German doctrine called for immediate counterattack against airborne troops, because they were most vulnerable in the minutes after landing. The Fight for the Bridge and the Luckiest Shot Piloted by Staff Sgt. Jim Wallwork (1919-2013), the f irst glider, with Howard aboard, landed fast and hard, ripping off its wheels in a shower of sparks and burying its nose in the German barbed wire only a few yards
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from the bridge, “not because Howard wanted me to, not because I was particularly brave or awfully skilled, but because I didn’t want to be rearrammed by Number Two or Number Three coming in behind me,” Wallwork told Steven Ambrose in an interview for Ambrose’s Pegasus Bridge. A German sentry pacing on the bridge assumed a shot-down Allied aircraft had crashed. Before he realized his mistake, the second and third gliders crashed down. The British quickly recovered from the shock of landing and swarmed onto the road. Leading the charge across the bridge, Lt. Herbert Denham Botheridge, 29, was shot, becoming the first Allied soldier killed in action on D-Day. The fourth and fifth gliders landed a short distance to the north and quickly secured the nearby river bridge. The sixth glider mistakenly picked out a bridge over another river, and landed 20 km (12.4 miles) to the east. Within 10 minutes the canal bridge was secured. The pillbox was taken out with a shower of grenades, and some of the Germans were still asleep when Howard’s men broke into their bunkers. Despite confusion caused by scattered paratroopers and the absence of German commanders (Rommel was driving back to Germany for his wife’s birthday, and many generals were attending a war game in Rennes 100 miles [160 km] to the southwest), the counterattack against Deadstick was not long in coming. About 0130, two Panzer IV tanks rumbled into Bénouville. M.C. “Wagger” Thornton was waiting for them with the company’s only working heavy weapon, a Projector Infantry Anti-Tank or PIAT. Hastily improvised in 1942 and rushed into production, the PIAT was one of the worst weapons of World War II – fragile, inaccurate, difficult to load, and with a kick like a mule. Thornton himself later described it as “a load of rubbish.” A strongly compressed spring drove the firing pin into a cartridge in the tail of a 2.5-pound (1.1 kg) hollow-charge grenade. When it worked, the projectile might fly as far as 100 yards. Thornton would only get one shot; he waited patiently until the tank was about 50 yards away (some observers say as little as 30) and fired. Miraculously, a direct hit penetrated the lead tank and ignited its ammunition, causing a spectacular series of explosions that caused the second tank and the trailing German infantry to retreat in disorder.
Horsa gliders near the Caen Canal bridge at Bénouville, June 8, 1944, part of the 6th Airborne Division’s coup de main force that carried men of “D” and “B” Companies, 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, who captured the bridges over the Orne River and Caen Canal in the early hours of D-Day. In the foreground is glider No. 93, which carried Lt. David Wood’s platoon, and behind it, glider No. 91, which carried the force commander, Maj. John Howard, and Lt. Den Brotheridge’s platoon.