Obviously, many soldiers rather enjoyed this situation: they would have been more than content to stick out the war lounging around barracks, doing the odd parade or field march, otherwise finding ways of making it look as if they were busy. But there were thousands who were not content, young men who had joined up because they really did want to be soldiers, really did want to fight for King and Country, really did seek some action and excitement. In the spring of 1942, their opportunity came: Britain had decided to create an airborne army under the command of Major-General F. A. M. ‘Boy’ Browning. This would be the 1st Airborne Division, and volunteers were being called for.
Browning had already become a legendary figure in the army. Noted especially for his tough discipline, he looked like a movie star, dressed with flair, and was married to the novelist Daphne du Maurier. It was she who in 1942 suggested a red beret for airborne troops, with Bellerophon astride winged Pegasus as the airborne shoulder patch and symbol, pale blue on a maroon background.
Wally Parr was one of the thousands who responded to the call to wear the red beret. He had joined the army in February, 1939, at the age of 16 (he was one of more than a dozen in D Company, Ox and Bucks, who lied about their age to enlist). Posted to an infantry regiment, he had spent three years ‘never doing a damn thing that really mattered. Putting up barbed wire, taking it down the next day, moving it. . . .Never fired a rifle, never did a thing’. So he volunteered for airborne, passed the physical, and was accepted into the Ox and Bucks, just then forming up as an air landing unit, and assigned to D Company. After three days in his new outfit, he asked for an interview with the commander, Major John Howard.
‘Ah, yes, Parr’, Howard said as Parr was marched into his office. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I want to get out’. Parr stated. Howard stared at him. ‘But you just got in.’ ‘Yes, sir’, Parr responded, ‘and I spent the lasty three days weeding around the barracks block. That’s not what I came for. I want to transfer from here to the paras. I want the real thing, what I volunteered for, not these stupid gliders, of which we don’t have any anyway.’
‘Now you take it easy’, Howard replied. ‘Just wait.’ And he dismissed Parr without another word. Leaving the office, Parr thought to himself, ‘I’d better be careful with this fellow’.
In truth, Parr as yet had no idea just how tough his new company commander was. Howard was born December 8, 1912, eldest of nine children in a working-class London family. From the time John was two years old until he was six, his father. Jack Howard, was off in France, fighting the Great War. When Jack returned he got a job with Courage brewery, making barrels. John’s mother, Ethel, a dynamic woman, managed to keep them in clean clothes and adequately fed. John recalls, ‘I spent the best part of my childhood, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen, pushing prams, helping out with the shopping, and doing all that sort of thing’.
John’s one great pleasure in life was the Boy Scouts. The Scouts got him out of London for weekend camps, and in the summer he would get a fortnight’s camp somewhere in the country. His chums in Camden Town did not approve: they made fun of his short pants ‘and generally made my life Hell’. Not even his younger brothers would stick with the Scouts. But John did. He loved the out-door life, the sports and the competition.
John’s other great passion was school. He was good at his studies, especially maths, and won a scholarship to secondary school. But the financial situation at home was such that he had to go to work, so he passed up the scholarship and instead, at age fourteen, took a full-time job as a clerk with a firm of stockbrokers. He also took evening classes five nights a week in English, maths, accounting, economics, typing, shorthand, anything that he thought would be useful in his work. But in the summer of 1931, when he returned to London from Scout camp, he discovered that his firm had been hammered on the stock exchange and he was out of a job.