In Glider No. 1, Howard’s men started to loosen up a bit, some of them even singing Cockney tunes as a way to pass the time during their journey. But the singing only masked their nervousness about what they might face on landing. The men had been shown the most recent aerial photos, and they had seen newly dug holes in the Normandy countryside for anti-glider stakes, nicknamed ‘Rommel asparagus’ by Allied troopers. Many of those holes appeared near the bridge landing sites. Each man had plenty to think about as the gliders neared the French coast.

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The tow planes and gliders crossed over the town of Cabourg, at which point the glider pilots cut themselves loose from the bombers. Once free of the tow planes, the gliders were in free flight at 6,000 feet, and each plane went into a steep dive to get through the flak belt being thrown up by the German anti-aircraft guns targeting the bombers that droned onward.

The steep dive brought painful pressure to the ears, and to relieve it each man blew hard while holding his nose. Many of the paratroopers fought queasiness as the powerless aircraft swooped downward in the darkness. In the cockpits, co-pilots began monitoring stopwatches as pilots checked their compasses to make the exacting runs on the downwind and upwind legs of the flight. They would have to work to stretch the glide out far enough to reach the bridges 10 miles away.

In Glider No. 1, pilot Jim Wallwork held the aircraft steady while John Ainsworth called out, ‘5-4-3-2-1-bingo, right turn.’ The glider turned to starboard and onto the course of the crosswind leg. Wallwork strained to see what lay ahead of them in the light from a half-moon.

‘Halfway down the crosswind leg, I could see it,’ Wallwork later recalled. ‘I could see the river and the canal like strips of silver and I could see the bridges. So then, to hell with the course, I didn’t complete the crosswind leg. I bowled down and landed rather quickly.’

Wallwork glided in at 95 mph. He was a little fast, having hoped to come in at 85. He deployed his arrester parachute for a few seconds, then released it and crashed into the corner of a small triangular field next to the Caen Canal Bridge. The nose wheel came off, the cockpit collapsed and Wallwork and Ainsworth were thrown through the cockpit. The rest of the men were tossed about as well, with Howard smashing his head on a beam, which jammed his helmet down over his eyes. For a brief moment Howard thought he had suddenly been blinded, but he quickly recovered his wits and found his platoon commander, Lieutenant Den Brotheridge.

Kneeling next to Brotheridge, Howard heard him give his section leader a simple, four-word order: ‘Get your chaps moving.’ Nothing more was necessary. Each man knew just what to do. In minutes, men of No. 1 platoon were racing across the bridge, firing as they ran and tossing grenades into bunkers. A flare went off, fired by a German sentry.

One minute after Glider No. 1 landed, Glider No. 2 was down. ‘I dropped to the ground with an almighty crash,’ said pilot Oliver Boland, ‘and we crashed along and managed to stop.’

Directly behind No. 2 came No. 3, which initially touched down behind Glider No. 2 but then shot into the air and sailed over No. 2, crash-landing between it and Glider No. 1. Number 3 broke in half upon the second impact and hurled Private Fred Diggs into a pond, pinning him there until he drowned. Had the glider not become airborne after its first impact, it would have crashed into the rear of glider No. 2, and two-thirds of Howard’s force might have been wiped out upon landing.

Now the attackers’ intense training paid off. The men from the second and third gliders moved quickly to accomplish their assigned tasks, and within five minutes the bridge over the Caen Canal was in British hands. Engineers checked the span for explosives and found that not only were the wires not hooked to the hellbox but the explosives themselves were not fixed in the holders attached to the bridge supports. Instead, they had been stored in a shed situated just off the far side of the bridge. Gale’s assessment of a bored and lethargic bridge defense force had been more than accurate.

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