Heinrich (now Henry) Heinz Hickman, a sergeant in the German 6th (Independent) Parachute Regiment, was at that moment riding in an open staff car, coming from Ouistreham on the coast towards Benouville. Hickman, twenty-four years old, was a combat veteran of Sicily and Italy. His regiment had come to Normandy a fortnight before; at 2300 hours on June 5 his company commander had ordered Hickman to pick up four young privates at observation posts outside Ouistreham and bring them back to headquarters, near Breville on the east side of the river.
Hickman, himself a paratrooper, also had heard low-flying planes. He came to the same conclusion as von Luck, that they were dropping supplies to the Resistance, and for the same reason – he could not imagine that the Allies would make a paratrooper drop with only half-dozen sticks. He drove on towards the bridge over the Caen Canal.
Over the Channel, at 0000 hours, two groups of three Halifax bombers flew at 7,000 feet towards Caen. With all the other air activity going on, neither German searchlights nor AA gunners noticed that each Halifax was tugging a Horsa glider.
Inside the lead glider. Private Wally Parr of D Company, the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (Ox and Bucks), a part of the Air Landing Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division of the British army, was leading the twenty-eight men in singing. With his powerful voice and strong Cockney accent, Parr was booming out ‘Abey, Abey, My Boy’. Billy Gray, sitting down the row from Parr, was barely singing, because all that he could think about was the ‘Jimmy Riddle’ he had to do. At the back of the glider. Corporal Jack Bailey sang even as he worried about the parachute he was responsible for securing.
The pilot, twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Jim Wall-work, of the Glider Pilot Regiment, anticipated casting off any second now that he had seen the surf breaking over the Norman coast. Beside him his co-pilot, Staff Sergeant John Ainsworth, was concentrating intensely on his stop watch. Sitting behind Ainsworth, the commander of D Company, Major John Howard, a thirty-one-year-old former sergeant major and an ex-cop, laughed with everyone else when the song ended and Parr called out, ‘Has the Major laid his kit yet?’ Howard suffered from air sickness and had vomited on every training flight. This flight, however, was an exception. Like his men, he had not been in combat before, but the prospect seemed to calm him more than it shook him.
As Parr started up ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, Howard touched the tiny red shoe in his battlejacket pocket, one of his two-year-old son Terry’s infant shoes that he had brought along for good luck. He thought of Joy, his wife, and of Terry and their baby daughter. Penny. They were back in Oxford, living near a factory, and he hoped there were no bombing raids that night. Beside Howard sat Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, whose wife was pregnant and due to deliver any day (five other men in the company had pregnant wives back in England). Howard had talked Brotheridge into joining the Ox and Bucks, and had selected his platoon for the no. 1 glider because he thought Brotheridge and his platoon about the best in his company. Another reason was that they were mostly Londoners like himself. Howard loved the Cockney quick wit and cheerfulness.
One minute behind Wallwork’s glider was no. 2, carrying Lieutenant David Wood’s platoon. Another minute behind that Horsa was no. 3 glider, with Lieutenant R. A. A. ‘Sandy’ Smith’s platoon. The three gliders in this group were going to cross the coast near Cabourg, well east of the mouth of the Orne River.
Parallel to that group, to the west and a few minutes behind, Captain Brian Friday sat with Lieutenant Tony Hooper’s platoon, followed by the gliders carrying the platoons of Lieutenants H. J. Tod’ Sweeney and Dennis Fox. This second group was headed towards the mouth of the Orne River. In Fox’s platoon. Sergeant M. C. ‘Wagger’ Thornton was singing ‘Cow Cow Boogie’ and – like almost everyone else on all the gliders-chain-smoking Player’s cigarettes.
In no. 2 glider, with the first group, the pilot. Staff Sergeant Oliver Boland, who had just turned twenty-three a fortnight before, found crossing the Channel an ‘enormously emotional’ experience, setting off as he was ‘as the spearhead of the most colossal army ever assembled. I found it difficult to believe because I felt so insignificant.’