A few hours before the Canadians aboard the Prince Henry climbed into that landing craft, 181 men in six Horsa gliders took off from RAF Tarrant Rushton in Dorset to take two bridges over the River Orne and hold them until reinforcements arrived. Their job was to prevent the Germans using the bridges to attack troops landing on Sword Beach. At lunchtime, Lord Lovat and his commandos arrived at the Bénouville Bridge, much to the relief of the 7th Parachute Battalion’s commanding officer, Major Pine-Coffin. That was his real name, and an amusing one back in Blighty: simple pine coffins are what soldiers get buried in. It wasn’t quite so funny in Normandy, where a lot of pine coffins would be needed by the end of the day. Lord Lovat, Chief of Clan Fraser, apologized to Pine-Coffin for missing the rendezvous time: “Sorry, I’m a few minutes late,” he said, after a bloody firefight to take Sword Beach.
Lovat had asked his personal piper, Bill Millin, to pipe his men ashore. Private Millin pointed out that this would be in breach of War Office regulations. “That’s the English War Office, Bill,” said Lovat. “We’re Scotsmen.” And so Millin strolled up and down the sand amid the gunfire playing “Hieland Laddie” and “The Road to the Isles” and other highland favorites. The Germans are not big bagpipe fans and I doubt it added to their enjoyment of the day.
There was a fair bit of slightly dotty élan around in those early hours. As I mentioned during On the Town, I knew a chap who was in the second wave of gliders from England, and nipped out just before they took off to buy up the local newsagent’s entire stack of papers — D-Day special editions, full of news of the early success of the landings. He flew them into France with him, and distributed them to his comrades from the first wave so they could read of their exploits.
But for every bit of dash and brio there were a thousand things that were just the wretched, awful muck of war. Many of those landing craft failed to land: They hit stuff that just happened to be there under the water, in the way, and ground to a halt, and the soldiers got out waist-deep in the sea, and struggled with their packs — and, in the case of those men on the Prince Henry, with lumpy old English bicycles — through the gunfire to the beach to begin liberating a continent while already waterlogged and chilled to the bone.
The building on the other side of the Bénouville Bridge was a café and the home of Georges Gondrée and his family. Thérèse Gondrée had spent her childhood in Alsace and thus understood German. So she eavesdropped on her occupiers, and discovered that in the machine-gun pillbox was hidden the trigger for the explosives the Germans intended to detonate in the event of an Allied invasion. She notified the French Resistance, and thanks to her, after landing in the early hours of June 6th, Major Howard knew exactly where to go and what to keep an eye on.
Shortly after dawn there was a knock on Georges Gondrée’s door. He answered it to find two paratroopers who wanted to know if there were any Germans in the house. The men came in, and Thérèse embraced them so fulsomely that her face wound up covered in camouflage black, which she proudly wore for days afterward. Georges went out to the garden and dug up ninety-eight bottles of champagne he’d buried before the Germans arrived four years earlier. And so the Gondrée home became the first place in France to be liberated from German occupation. There are always disputes about these things, of course: some say the first liberated building was L’Etrille et les Goélands (the Crab and the Gulls), subsequently renamed — in honour of the men who took it that morning — the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada house. But no matter: the stylish pop of champagne corks at the Café Gondrée was the bells tolling for the Führer‘s thousand-year Reich.
Arlette Gondrée was a four-year old girl that day, and she has grown old with the teen-and-twenty soldiers who liberated her home and her town. But she is now the proprietress of the family café, and she has been there every June to greet those who return each year in dwindling numbers […] The Bénouville Bridge was known to Allied planners as the Pegasus Bridge, after the winged horse on the shoulder badge of British paratroopers. But since 1944 it has been called the Pegasus Bridge in France, too. And in the eight decades since June 6th no D-Day veteran has ever had to pay for his drink at the Café Gondrée.
Mark Steyn, “June 6th, 1944”, SteynOnline, 2024-06-06.
June 6, 2025
QotD: D-Day landing on Sword Beach
Comments Off on QotD: D-Day landing on Sword Beach
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
