June 4 was to be the day, or rather the evening, to go. D Company was primed for it, aching to get going. Everyone got into battle dress in the afternoon, checked weapons and equipment and prepared to go to the gliders, but soon after midday word came down that the mission was off. Cancellation had been half -expected, what with the high winds and heavy rains sweeping the countryside, but it was still a major disappointment. John Howard wrote in his diary, ‘The weather’s broken – what cruel luck. I’m more downhearted than I dare show. Wind and rain, how long will it last? The longer it goes on, the more prepared the Huns will be, the greater the chance of obstacles on the LZ. Please God it’ll clear up tomorrow.’
Parr and his gang went to the movies and saw Stormy Weather with Lena Home and Fats Waller. The officers gathered in David Wood’s room and polished off two bottles of whisky. Twice Den Brotheridge fell into a depressed mood, and Wood could hear him reciting a poem that began, ‘If I should die .. .’ But his spirits soon recovered.
The following morning, June 5, the officers and men checked and rechecked their weapons. At noon, Howard told them that it was on, that they should rest, eat, and then dress for battle. The meal was fatless, to cut down on air sickness. Not much of it was eaten. Wally Parr says ‘I think everybody had gone off of grub for the first time possibly in years’.
Towards evening the men got into trucks to drive to their gliders. They were a fearsome sight. They each had a rifle, a Sten gun, or a Bren gun, six to nine grenades, four Bren gun magazines. Some had mortars, one in each platoon had a wireless set strapped to his chest. They had all used black cork or burnt coke to blacken their faces. (One of the two black men in the company looked at Parr when Parr handed him some cork and said, ‘I don’t think I’ll bother’.) All of them, officers and men, were so fully loaded that if they had fallen over it might have been impossible to get up without help. (Each infantryman weighed 250 pounds, instead of the allotted 210.) Parr called out that the sight of them alone would be enough to scare the Germans out of their wits.
As the trucks drove towards the gliders. Billy Gray can remember ‘the WAAFs and the NAAFI girls along the runway, crying their eyes out’. On the trucks, the men were given their code words. The recognition signal was V, to be answered by ‘for Victory’. Code word for the successful capture of the canal bridge was Ham, for the river bridge Jam. Jack meant the canal bridge had been captured but destroyed, Lard the same for the river bridge. Ham and Jam. D Company liked the sound of it, and as the men got out of their trucks they began shaking hands and saying, ‘Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam’.
Howard called them together. ‘It was an amazing sight’, he remembers. ‘The smaller chaps were visibly sagging at the knees under the amount of kit they had to carry.’ He tried to give an inspiring talk, but as he confesses, ‘I am a sentimental man at heart, for which reason I don’t think I am a good soldier. I found offering my thanks to these chaps – a devil of a job. My voice just wasn’t my own.’
Howard gave up the attempt at inspiration and told the men to load up. The officers shepherded them aboard, although not before every man, except Billy Gray, took a last-minute pee. Wally Parr chalked ‘Lady Irene’ on the side of Wallwork’s glider. As the officers fussed over the men outside, those inside their gliders began settling in. One private bolted out of his glider and ran off into the night. Later, at his court-martial, the private explained that he had had an unshakeable premonition of his own death in a glider crash.
The officers got in last. Before climbing aboard, Brotheridge went back to Smith’s glider, shook Smith’s hand, and said, ‘See you on the bridge, Sandy’.