The recent, deglorifying accounts of D-Day and after (John Keegan,
Max Hastings) left untouched the repute of the British Sixth
Airborne Division - one unit of which, the gliderborne troops of
Major John Howard's D Company, made the first, crucial Normandy
landing. For Ambrose, maximum-biographer of Eisenhower, this brief
chronicle of a single engagement in a busman's holiday for fair:
leading a veterans' battlefield tour in 1981, Ambrose was
approached at Pegasus Bridge - one of the pair of crossings, over
the Caen Canal and Ouse River, that Company D captured and held on
D-Day - by none other than Major Howard . . . from whom (along with
other British and German survivors) he later got much of this
story. It's foremost a story of preparation. From the overloaded
Horsa gliders soundlessly approaching their pinpoint landing zone
at 0007 on D-Day, Ambrose switches to the preceding two years of
training and planning, boredom and break-outs: Howard's fanatical
emphasis on physical fitness and mental alertness; the endless
nighttime simulations, the practice with German weapons; the
intelligence, unprecedented in detail and currency (the scale model
of the site was changed daily, on the basis of French-underground
and aerial-reconnaissance reports); the sense, to a man, "that
D-Day would be the greatest day of their lives." Howard's company
succeeds in taking the bridges intact, thanks partly to luck and
German weaknesses (a carousing officer, feeble non-German conscript
troops). A single corporal, with the company's one functioning
anti-tank weapon, holds the bridges until paratroop reinforcements
arrive - in effect securing the invasion's entire eastern flank -
while Hitler's insistence on giving every order delays a German
counterattack until midday. But Howard loses his officers, by
having them lead their platoons from the front. After D-Day, we
learn, D Company reverted to being an ordinary infantry company, a
waste Ambrose decries, and the British never mounted another such
coup de main - "not for the bridge at Arnhem, nor the one at
Nijmegen." Howard, a reckless driver, was seriously injured in a
motor accident and crippled trying to get back into trim. Others of
the men became friendly, even intimate, with their German
counterparts (one of them now a British citizen). Ambrose is little
given to dramatizing, and he apologizes for superlatives: recounted
close-in, with soldierly affability and snap, the facts don't need
embellishment. (Kirkus Reviews)
In the early hours of 6th June 1944, a small detachment of British
airborne troops stormed the German defence forces and paved the way
for the Allied invasion of Europe. Pegasus Bridge was the first
engagement of D-Day, the turning point of World War Il. This
gripping account of it brings to life a daring mission so crucial
that, had it been unsuccessful, the entire Normandy invasion might
have failed. The author of this book traces each step of the
preparations over many months to the minute-by-minute excitement of
the hand-to-hand confrontations on the bridge, a story of heroism
and cowardice, kindness and brutality.
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