Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork, DFM, worked as a salesman for the first ten years after the war. In 1956 he emigrated to British Columbia, where today he runs a small livestock farm on the edge of the mountains east of Vancouver. From his porch, and from his picture window, Jim has a grand view of a valley dropping away before him. The kind of view a glider pilot gets on his last approach to the LZ.
Corporal Wally Parr wanted to stay in the army, but with a wife and children decided he had to get out. He returned to Catford, where one of his sons is in his window-cleaning business with him. Another son is a promising musician.
To my knowledge, there are no intact Horsa gliders flying today. Zanuck got the blueprints and built one for The Longest Day, but was told by the Air Ministry that the design was inherently bad and the craft not air-worthy. Therefore Zanuck could not fly it across the Channel, as he had hoped to do, but had to dismantle the thing, bring it over by ship, and put it together again in France.
The model of the bridge and surrounding area, the one that Howard and his men studied so intently in Tarrant Rushton, is today in the Airborne Forces Museum at Aldershot.
Benouville has a few new houses, some development, but basically it is as it was on June 6, 1944. So is Ranville, where Den Brotheridge is buried, under a tree in the churchyard.
The Gondree cafe remains, changed only by the portraits on the wall of John Howard, Jim Wallwork, Nigel Taylor, and the others who came to liberate France and the Gondrees.
Madame Gondree presides over her tiny cafe in a grand fashion. To see her on a June 6, surrounded by her many friends from D Company and from the 7th Battalion, chatting away gaily, remembering the great day however many years ago, is to see a happy woman. Before he died in the late 1960s, her husband Georges made many close British friends, Howard especially. Jack Bailey went duck hunting with Gondree each year.
When asked to describe life during the occupation, Madame Gondree lets loose a torrent of words, paragraphs or incidents separated by heartfelt cries of’Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!’ She still hates the Germans and will not allow them into her cafe today. When Zanuck was shooting The Longest Day, he wanted to have half -dressed German soldiers come leaping out of the windows of the cafe as D Company charged across the bridge. Madame screamed, insisting to Zanuck that she had never, never had Germans sleeping in her house, and that he absolutely must take that scene out of the script. Unlike Howard, Madame got her way. The scene was dropped.
When Howard goes to the cafe today, he sometimes brings Hans von Luck with him. Howard has told Madame that von Luck might look suspiciously like a German, but that he is in fact a Swede.
The canal has been widened by some four or five feet. The chateau stands intact. The machine-gun pillbox that Jack Bailey knocked out and John Howard used as a CP is still there, forming the foundation of the house lived in by the man who operates the swing-bridge. The bunkers are all filled in. But the anti-tank gun and its emplacement, where Wally Parr had so much fun, remains. Three stone markers are placed on the sites where the three gliders crashed.
The river bridge is a new one, built since the war. The canal bridge, Pegasus Bridge, is still there.
EPILOGUE
The significance of Pegasus Bridge
Pegasus Bridge today plays only a minor role in the Norman economy. It is lightly used, and for local purposes exclusively, because all the long-distance or heavy commercial traffic uses the new autoroute that runs from Le Havre to Caen to Bayeux. But on June 6, the bridge recalls its former glory, the day on which it was the most important bridge in Normandy. The tourists and the veterans come in increasing numbers each year to visit the museum and the Gondree cafe, the bridge, the markers designating the landing sites of the gliders. They are keenly interested in the operation, and want to know how the British did it.