High life | 24 May 2018

Pegasus Bridge, Normandy

  We’re taking morning coffee at the Café Gondrée, which skirts the

They operate in total darkness, in choking fumes. No man can take more than four days of tank fighting

bridge. It still belongs to Arlette Gondrée, whose family owned it on D-Day. She was a girl at the time and she now stands, old but erect and schoolteacher-like, looking us over as we have breakfast and try to imagine those brave Brits who took and held the bridge so long ago. Our Führer-teacher James Holland called it the greatest piece of flying ever. The gliders managed to land in the dark less than 50 yards from the bridge on a grassy strip not much wider than a tennis court and three courts long. (The very same pilots had messed up in Sicily one year before, but this time they got it more than right.) What every Allied commander feared was the ten armoured divisions of the Panzergruppe West, commanded by General Geyr von Schweppenburg, with its 170,000 men and 1,500 tanks. Schweppenburg was a commander who knew that by keeping his army inland he could mount a massive counterattack and wipe out the Allies. The taking of the bridge by Major John Howard and his 6th Airborne commandos was imperative. It was the sole passage from east to west and would allow the invading forces to join them a few hours later. We move to Gold and Sword beaches, assigned to the Brits as revenge for the Dunkirk and Dieppe humiliation of four years earlier. I look over Lord Lovat’s bust, a ramrod-straight man I saw once at his son’s wedding where I was an usher. We arrive at a small farm where a young boy told Company Sergeant Major Hollis that some Germans with a Panzerfaust were hiding behind a hedge 50 metres away.