Dine, Jim:Jim Dine: Recent Work
- Paperback 1988, ISBN: 9780938608059
Simon & Schuster. Very Good. 5.25 x 0.52 x 9.25 inches. Paperback. 1988. 208 pages. <br>In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a smal l detachment of British airborne troop… More...
Simon & Schuster. Very Good. 5.25 x 0.52 x 9.25 inches. Paperback. 1988. 208 pages. <br>In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a smal l detachment of British airborne troops stormed the German defens e forces and paved the way for the Allied invasion of Europe. Peg asus Bridge was the first engagement of D-Day, the turning point of World War II. This gripping account of it by acclaimed author Stephen Ambrose brings to life a daring mission so crucial that, had it been unsuccessful, the entire Normandy invasion might hav e failed. Ambrose traces each step of the preparations over many months to the minute-by-minute excitement of the hand-to-hand con frontations on the bridge. This is a story of heroism and cowardi ce, kindness and brutality-the stuff of all great adventures. Ed itorial Reviews Review Los Angeles Herald Examiner All the vivid ness of a movie, and all the intelligence -- in every sense -- of fine military history. Drew Middleton The New York Times Book R eview An illuminating account of an operation as strategically im portant as any fought on D-Day. James Pitts New Orleans Times A little gem. One that will be drawn from by historians of the futu re. Noland Norgaard The Denver Post The best war story this revi ewer has ever read. From the Back Cover In the early morning hou rs of June 6, 1944, a small detachment of British airborne troops stormed the German defense forces and paved the way for the Alli ed invasion of Europe. Pegasus Bridge was the first engagement of D-Day, the turning point of World War II. This gripping account of it by acclaimed author Stephen Ambrose brings to life a daring mission so crucial that, had it been unsuccessful, the entire No rmandy invasion might have failed. About the Author Stephen E. A mbrose was a renowned historian and acclaimed author of more than thirty books. Among his New York Times bestsellers are Nothing L ike It in the World, Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, D-Day - June 6, 1944, and Undaunted Courage. Dr. Ambrose was a retired Bo yd Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and a co ntributing editor for the Quarterly Journal of Military History. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. D-Day: 0000 to 0015 Hours It was a steel-girder bridge, painted gray, w ith a large water tower and superstructure. At 0000 hours, June 5 /6, 1944, the scudding clouds parted sufficiently to allow the ne arly full moon to shine and reveal the bridge, standing starkly v isible above the shimmering water of the Caen Canal. On the brid ge, Private Vern Bonck, a twenty-two-year-old Pole conscripted in to the German Army, clicked his heels sharply as he saluted Priva te Helmut Romer, an eighteen-year-old Berliner. Romer had reporte d to relieve Bonck. As Bonck went off duty, he met with his fello w sentry, another Pole. They decided they were not sleepy and agr eed to go to the local brothel, in the village of Benouville, for a bit of fun. They strolled west along the bridge road, then tur ned south (left) at the T-junction, and were on the road into Ben ouville. By 0005 they were at the brothel. Regular customers, wit hin two minutes they were knocking back cheap red wine with two F rench whores. Beside the bridge, on the west bank, south of the road, Georges and Theresa Gondree and their two daughters slept i n their small cafe. They were in separate rooms, not by choice bu t as a way to use every room and thus to keep the Germans from bi lleting soldiers with them. It was the 1,450th night of the Germa n occupation of Benouville. So far as the Germans knew, the Gond rees were simple Norman peasants, people of no consequence who ga ve them no trouble. Indeed, Georges sold beer, coffee, food, and a concoction made by Madame of rotting melons and half-fermented sugar to the grateful German troops stationed at the bridge. Ther e were about fifty of them, the NCOs and officers all German, the enlisted men mostly conscripts from Eastern Europe. But the Gon drees were not as simple as they pretended to be. Madame came fro m Alsace and spoke German, a fact she successfully hid from the g arrison. Georges, before acquiring the cafe, had been for twelve years a clerk in Lloyd's Bank in Paris and understood English. Th e Gondrees hated the Germans for what they had done to France, ha ted the life they led under the occupation, feared for the future of their daughters, and were consequently active in trying to br ing German rule to an end. In their case, the most valuable thing they could do for the Allies was to provide information on condi tions at the bridge. Theresa got information by listening to the chitter-chatter of the NCOs in the cafe; she passed along to Geor ges, who passed it to Mme. Vion, director of the maternity hospit al, who passed it along to the Resistance in Caen on her trips to the city for medical supplies. From Caen, it was passed on to En gland via Lysander airplanes, small craft that could land in fiel ds and get out in a hurry. Only a few days ago, on June 2, Georg es had sent through this process a tidbit Theresa had overheard - - that the button that would set off the explosives to blow the b ridge was located in the machine-gun pillbox across the road from the antitank gun. He hoped that information had got through, if only because he would hate to see his bridge destroyed. The man who would give that order, the commander of the garrison at the b ridge, was Major Hans Schmidt. Schmidt had an understrength compa ny of the 736th Grenadier Regiment of the 716th Infantry Division . At 0000 hours, June 5/6, he was in Ranville, a village two kilo meters east of the Orne River. The river ran parallel to the cana l, about four hundred meters to the east, and was also crossed by a bridge (fixed, and guarded by sentries but without emplacement s or a garrison). Although the Germans expected the long-anticipa ted invasion at any time, and although Schmidt had been told that the two bridges were the most critical points in Normandy, becau se they provided the only crossings of the Orne waterways along t he Norman coast road, Schmidt did not have his garrison at full a lert, nor was he in Ranville on business. Except for the two sent ries on each bridge, his troops were either sleeping in their bun kers, or dozing in their slit trenches or in the machine-gun pill box, or off whoring in Benouville. Schmidt himself was with his girl friend in Ranville, enjoying the magnificent food and drink of Normandy. He thought of himself as a fanatic Nazi, this Schmid t, who was determined to do his duty for his Fuhrer. But he seldo m let duty interfere with pleasure, and he had no worries that ev ening. His routine concern was the possibility of French partisan s blowing his bridges, but that hardly seemed likely except in co njunction with an airborne operation, and the high winds and stor my weather of the past two days precluded a parachute drop. He ha d orders to blow the bridges himself if capture seemed imminent. He had prepared the bridges for demolition, but had not put the e xplosives into their chambers, for fear of accident or the partis ans. Since his bridges were almost five miles inland, he figured he would have plenty of warning before any Allied units reached h im, even paratroopers, because the paras were notorious for takin g a long time to form up and get organized after their drops scat tered them all over the DZ. Schmidt treated himself to some more wine, and another pinch. At Vimont, east of Caen, Colonel Hans A . von Luck, commanding the 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division, was working on personnel reports at his he adquarters. The contrast between Schmidt and von Luck extended fa r beyond their activities at midnight. Schmidt was an officer gon e soft from years of cushy occupation duty; von Luck was an offic er hardened by combat. Von Luck had been in Poland in 1939, had c ommanded the leading reconnaissance battalion for Rommel at Dunki rk in 1940, had been in the van at Moscow in 1941 (in December, h e actually led his battalion into the outskirts of Moscow, the de epest penetration of the campaign) and with Rommel throughout the North African campaign of 1942-43. There was an equally sharp c ontrast between the units von Luck and Schmidt commanded. The 716 th Infantry was a second-rate, poorly equipped, immobile division made up of a hodgepodge of Polish, Russian, French, and other co nscripted troops, while the 21st Panzer was Rommel's favorite div ision. Von Luck's regiment, the 125th, was one of the best equipp ed in the German Army. The 21st Panzer Division had been destroye d in Tunisia in April and May 1943, but Rommel had got most of th e officer corps out of the trap, and around that nucleus rebuilt the division. It had all-new equipment, including Tiger tanks, se lf-propelled vehicles (SPVs) of all types, and an outstanding wir eless communications network. The men were volunteers, young Germ ans deliberately raised by the Nazis for the challenge they were about to face, tough, well trained, eager to come to grips with t he enemy. There was a tremendous amount of air activity that nig ht, with British and American bombers crossing the Channel to bom b Caen. As usual, Schmidt paid no attention to it. Neither did vo n Luck, consciously, but he was so accustomed to the sights and s ounds of combat that at about 0010 hours he noticed something non e of his clerks did. There were a half-dozen or so planes flying unusually low, at five hundred feet or less. That could only mean they were dropping something by parachute. Probably supplies for the Resistance, von Luck thought, and he ordered a search of the area, hoping to capture some local resisters while they were gat hering in the supplies. Heinrich (now Henry) Heinz Hickman, a se rgeant in the German 6th (Independent) Parachute Regiment, was at that moment riding in an open staff car, coming from Ouistreham, on the coast, toward Benouville. Hickman, twenty-four years old, was a combat veteran of Sicily and Italy. His regiment had come to Normandy a fortnight ago; at 2300 hours on June 5 his company commander had ordered Hickman to pick up four young privates at o bservation posts outside Ouistreham and bring them back to headqu arters, near Breville, on the east side of the river. Hickman, h imself a paratrooper, also heard low-flying planes. He came to th e same conclusion as von Luck, that they were dropping supplies t o the Resistance, and for the same reason -- he could not imagine that the Allies would make a paratrooper drop with only a half-d ozen airplanes involved. He drove on toward the bridge over the C aen Canal. Over the Channel, at 0000 hours, two groups of three Halifax bombers flew at seven thousand feet toward Caen. With all the other air activity going on, neither German searchlights nor AA gunners noticed that each Halifax was tugging a Horsa glider. Inside the lead glider, Private Wally Parr of D Company, the 2d Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry (Ox and Bucks), a part of the Air Landing Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division of the British Army, was leading the twenty-eight men in singing. Wi th his powerful voice and strong Cockney accent, Parr was booming out Abby, Abby, My Boy. Corporal Billy Gray, sitting down the ro w from Parr, was barely singing, because all that he could think about was the pee he had to take. At the back end of the glider, Corporal Jack Bailey sang, but he also worried about the parachut e he was responsible for securing. The pilot, twenty-four-year-o ld Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork, of the Glider Pilot Regiment, ant icipated casting off any second now, because he could see the sur f breaking over the Norman coast. Beside him his copilot, Staff S ergeant John Ainsworth, was concentrating intensely on his stopwa tch. Sitting behind Ainsworth, the commander of D Company, Major John Howard, a thirty-one-year-old former regimental sergeant maj or and an ex-cop, laughed with everyone else when the song ended and Parr called out, Has the major laid his kitt yet? Howard suff ered from airsickness and had vomited on every training flight. O n this flight, however, he had not been sick. Like his men, he ha d not been in combat before, but the prospect seemed to calm him more than it shook him. As Parr started up It's a Long, Long Way to Tipperary, Howard touched the tiny red shoe in his battle-jac ket pocket, one of his two-year-old son Terry's infant shoes that he had brought along for good luck. He thought of Joy, his wife, and Terry and their baby daughter, Penny. They were back in Oxfo rd, living near a factory, and he hoped there were no bombing rai ds that night. Beside Howard sat Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, whos e wife was pregnant and due to deliver any day (five other men in the company had pregnant wives back in England). Howard had talk ed Brotheridge into joining the Ox and Bucks, and had selected hi s platoon for the #1 glider because he thought Brotheridge and hi s platoon the best in his company. One minute behind Wallwork's glider was #2, carrying Lieutenant David Wood's platoon. Another minute behind that Horsa was #3 glider, with Lieutenant R. Sandy Smith's platoon. The three gliders in this group were going to cr oss the coast near Cabourg, well east of the mouth of the Orne Ri ver. Parallel to that group, to the west and a few minutes behin d, Captain Brian Priday sat with Lieutenant Tony Hooper's platoon , followed by the gliders carrying the platoons of Lieutenants H. J. Tod Sweeney and Dennis Fox. This second group was headed towa rd the mouth of the Orne River. In Fox's platoon, Sergeant M. C. Wagger Thornton was singing Cow Cow Boogie and -- like almost eve ryone else on all the gliders -- chain-smoking Players cigarettes . In #2 glider, with the first group, the pilot, Staff Sergeant Oliver Boland, who had just turned twenty-three years old a fortn ight past, found crossing the Channel an enormously emotional exp erience, setting off as he was as the spearhead of the most colos sal army ever assembled. I found it difficult to believe because I felt so insignificant. At 0007, Wallwork cast off his lead gli der as he crossed the coast. At that instant, the invasion had be gun. There were 156,000 men prepared to go into France that day, by air and by sea, British, Canadian, and American, organized in to some twelve thousand companies. D Company led the way. It was not only the spearhead of the mighty host, it was also the only c ompany attacking as a completely independent unit. Howard would h ave no one to report to, or take orders from, until he had comple ted his principal task. When Wallwork cast off, D Company was on its own. With cast-off, there was a sudden jerk, then dead, Simon & Schuster, 1988, 3, Pace Gallery Pubns, 1982-12-01. Paperback. Good. in x in x in. Ex-library book, usual markings. Clean copy, sound binding., Pace Gallery Pubns, 1982-12-01, 2.5<
