By then, paratroopers were rushing onto the bridge. The Poles, hopelessly outnumbered, refused to accept the umpire’s decision that the bridge had been destroyed. When told in no uncertain terms that they must lay down their arms they merely said, ‘No speak English’ and went on scrapping. There were several little fist-fights which everyone but the harassed umpires seemed to enjoy. Several of the combatants finished in the drink.
The umpires declared that Sweeney’s platoon had been put out of action by fire from Brotheridge’s platoon. Sweeney had not recognised Brotheridge’s men as they crept silently towards the bridge. Howard learned a lesson from the experience.
MUSH was a well-conceived and well-conducted rehearsal. The exercise revealed problems, such as mutual recognition in the dark, but it also convinced Howard, and his many superiors who watched, that if the Horsas pranged on the right spot, the coup de main would work.
The sine qua non, of course, was getting the Horsas down in the right place. To that end, Jim Wallwork and the Glider Pilots Regiment were working day and night, literally, on operation Deadstick. In April, 1944, Wallwork and his fellow pilots had done a demonstration for Gale, operation Skylark, landing their Horsas on a small triangle from 6,000 feet. When all the gliders were safely down, the GPR commanding officer, Colonel George Chatteron, stepped out of the bushes. He had General Gale with him. Chatteron was boasting, ‘Well, Windy, there you see it, I told you my GPR boys can do this kind of thing any day.’ Wallwork overheard the remark and thought, ‘I wish we could, but that is a bit of asking.’
To make sure they could. Gale put them on operation Deadstick. Sixteen pilots of the GPR, two for each of the six gliders going in on D-Day plus four reserves, were posted to Tarrant Rushton in Dorset, an RAF airfield where there were two Halifax squadrons and a squadron of Horsas. The men of the GPR were treated as very special people indeed. They had their own Nissen hut, excellent food, and a captain delegated to them – they were all staff sergeants – to see to it that their every want was catered for. As Oliver Boland recalled it, ‘we were the most pampered group of people in the British army at the time’.
The pilots were introduced to their tug crews, which was an innovation: previously the glider pilots had not known their tug pilots. The tug crews lived near the GPR boys at Tarrant Rushton, and they got to know each other. The glider pilots had the same crew on each training flight, and this would be the crew that tugged them on D-Day.
The training flights for operation Deadstick were hellishly difficult. Colonel Chatteron had the pilots landing beside a small L-shaped wood, a quarter of a mile long down the long end, and a few yards along the angle. The pilots landed with three gliders (carrying cement blocks for a load) going up the L and three on the blind side. In daylight, on a straight-in run, it was a snap. But then Chatteron started having them release at 7,000 feet and fly by times and courses, using a stopwatch, making two or three full turns before coming in over the wood. That was not too bad, either, because – as Wallwork explains -‘in broad daylight you can always cheat a little’. Next Chatteron put coloured glass in their flying goggles to turn day into night, and warned his pilots, ‘It is silly of you to cheat on this because you’ve got to do it right when the time comes’. Wallwork would nevertheless whip the goggles off if he thought he was overshooting, ‘but we began to play it fairly square, realising that whatever we were going to do it was going to be something important’.
By early May they were flying by moonlight, casting on at 6 000 feet, 7 miles from the wood. They flew regardless of weather. They twisted and turned around the sky, all by stopwatch. They did forty-three training flights in Deadstick altogether, more than half of them at night. They got ready.
CHAPTER FOUR
D-Day minus one month to D-Day