British Pegasus Bridge AAR -SPOILERS-

[Dan Weaver]

Fear and the Horsa's rough ride had gotten everybody a little nauseous, but Wilham had it worst of all. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and gripped his rifle again. This wasn't the sort of operation I relished - into the middle of nowhere, against uncertain opposition, in blackest night, with the entire war riding on your shoulders. I resumed my disrupted prayers.

We landed two minutes later. I thought we had crashed. I leapt to my feet and followed Lieutenant Brotheridge through the rear hatch into the blackness, and the next thing I knew I was looking down over my Sten into what was left of the head of a German soldier. It was a bloody slaughter. We landed maybe twenty yards from them and the blighters never knew what happened. At that range a Sten gun will mow down entire sections.

From there on it was a minute of hiding in the trees near the canal and gulping in air, and then it was onwards and upwards again. The Lieutenant got hit by a machine-gun going up onto the road. Sergeant Myers waved us on. We couldn't stop for casualties. The rest of the company was giving us fire support from the treeline, which was really all that kept us alive, you know. Otherwise we would have been slaughtered. Bullets whistled around us. Marrins was shot and fell into the water. The bridge seemed like it would never end, then the Sergeant shouted and I followed the noise and fell right into a foxhole. Thankfully, it was empty. I don't know what I would have done if there had been dead men in it. Wilham leapt in next to me and fired his rifle off somewhere in the distance. There was a scream. I fired my Bren gun in the same direction and got nothing. We were working on sound. Fire back at what's firing at you.

All of a sudden there was the most horrid noise you'd ever heard - THOOM, THOOM, THOOM. Dirt flew up all around. I lost my nerve and ducked down into the foxhole, which was deep and well-constructed. Biggest stroke of luck I've ever had. Wilham kept firing off into the distance. The big gun put more shells on our position. It went on like that forever. Men were screaming all around us. I don't remember if I screamed. It was the longest two minutes of my life. The Germans were pouring everything they had into the tiny beachhead we'd formed. Machine-guns and rifles cracked at us, punctuated by the deadly hum of that awful gun. Afterwards we found out that the Germans had had a rapid-fire AA gun trained right onto our positions. Our mates in the treeline saved us again. They started shooting up the gun crew and I guess eventually they killed enough of them to stop them firing. At the time, all I knew was that the shells stopped, Sergeant Myers ordered us forwards, and we went. There was a big building a few yards away that we'd planned as the strong point of our bridge defense, so we ran for that. We could hear the rest of the company following. They seemed very far away.

Inside the cafe we took a look at our situation. We'd taken eight casualties crossing the bridge. There wasn't much time for regret, since we still had to seize the town of Benouville. Panting and gasping, we ran across the open fields towards the little rural houses. As we took up positions at windows and doors, we heard tank tracks. I'll take back that bit about the AA gun being the world's most awful noise. Machine-gun fire was there to greet us. The Germans were making a stand.

When I read about Stalingrad, I shudder. The Germans and the Russians fought street-to-street, house-to-house for five months. We fought for ten minutes and it was the worst thing I've ever done. The Jerries had a platoon of engineers and two Panzer tanks, and for God, love, or money we could not find a damned man with a PIAT. The engineers had moved up, so we had their satchel charges, but otherwise it was just us with our small arms against those monsters. Good men died needlessly because we didn't have any anti-tank weaponry. Major Howard chose to be safe and guard both avenues of approach to the bridges, figuring we were just as likely to be attacked from the east as the west. It turned out that nobody came from the east, and so the PIATs we had there were out of position. It was a bollocks, and there's no two ways about it.

For a while the Huns were really beating on us. The engineers and the few machine-guns they had left kept our heads down and the tanks shelled the houses where we were hiding. Somehow, though, we held on. Enough of us kept our heads up to keep returning fire, and I guess we killed a lot of them where they stood. Sections led local counterattacks from house to house, wiping out the machine guns and straggling infantry. Jerry's attack seemed to break down and lose cohesion. One of their tanks tried to come around behind our positions and cut the town off from the cafe. I lost sight of him and started to get seriously scared, then I heard an enormous blast followed by the most beautiful fusillade I'd ever heard, a wonderful chorus of Lee-Enfields and Stens and Brens barking out into the night sky. It was the reinforcements we'd been promised, an entire company of paras. I guess the engineers we'd brought with us had knocked one of the Panzer's treads off with a satchel charge and forced the crew to bail out. They didn't last very long after that. The Germans went to pieces. They rolled their other tank right up next to our house, as if we weren't even there. There wasn't an anti-tank weapon among the ten of us inside that house, but we started firing everything we had at it anyway. By the greatest stroke of luck I've ever seen, one of us pitched a grenade right into the track and wrecked the whole thing. The crew leapt out. We shot them down in cold blood.

The paras moved up to reinforce us, and we started to realize that it was all over except the mopping-up. We were ordered forwards one last time to clean up some German engineers hiding behind a house. Of course, they had a flamethrower team with them, and they torched the house we'd chosen for cover but good. Cox was burnt terribly; he died several minutes later. We ran, leaving Cox behind. The sections assaulting with us wiped out the bastards, and then the Germans started to surrender, and it was really over. I was alive, though panicked, and they were dead. When we began to round up the German POWs we began to realize the carnage we'd created. Only nine of them were left unwounded. Most of the soldiers we faced weren't even real infantrymen, they were just some kind of ad-hoc slapped-together police unit with combat skills to match. We suffered fifty-one casualties. Twenty-four of them were dead, including Lieutenant Brotheridge and two of my section-mates, Cox and Feeley. I still think about them daily.

We had won, though. I found out later that the bridge at Benouville had been nicknamed 'Pegasus Bridge' in our honor. That's a nice feeling for a man, when he can point to something in the war and say, I was there. We did that.

(Interviewer's note: Pvt. Brian Gormey, D Coy, 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, was evacuated to England two weeks later after losing his right foot and most of his lower leg to a mortar shell. He died in 1982.)

[Guest Scott Clinton]

n/t

[This message has been edited by Scott Clinton (edited 06-25-2000).]