Gavin Mortimer explains what our relations who invaded Normandy in Operation Overlord went through – and the vital records for researchers
The sky above Normandy in northern France was full of men floating to earth in the minutes after midnight on Tuesday 6 June 1944.
The first to jump were 120 US Pathfinders under the command of Captain Frank Lillyman. They had sung songs on the flight across the Channel from their base in England to keep up their spirits. They left the aircraft with “wonderful” morale, recalled Lillyman, parachuting to earth without incident. They then went about their business with swift and silent precision, marking a series of drop zones with fluorescent panels and radar beacons for the imminent arrival of a huge airborne landing over an area of the Cherbourg Peninsula measuring 50 square miles.
Fifty miles east of the US Pathfinders, 60 British Pathfinders from the 22nd Independent Parachute Company were undertaking a similar task on the eastern extremity of the invasion zone. They had half an hour to erect three drop zones using their lights and transponding ground radar before 4,255 soldiers from the British 6th Airborne Division started jumping over Merville, Ranville, Troarn and Trouville.
DECOY DUMMIES
Back on the western sector of the invasion zone, six men from the British Special Air Service (SAS) parachuted into the black Normandy night along with 200 dummy parachutists nicknamed ‘Ruperts’. Constructed out of sandbags, the Ruperts were a third the size of an average man but in the dark, and from the ground, they resembled a soldier as they fell to earth, and were intended to distract the Germans from the main drop zones.
A larger contingent of British special forces came to earth in Normandy at 12.30am in six Horsa gliders. The objective of Major John Howard and 180 men of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was to seize two small bridges over the River Orne (Ranville Bridge) and Caen Canal (Bénouville Bridge). These were to be held in order to prevent German tanks reaching the beaches as the seaborne invasion was in progress. One of the first men out of the gliders was Lieutenant Den Brotheridge, commander of 25 Platoon. He raced across the 100 feet of open ground to Bénouville Bridge with a yell of “Come on 25!” Moments later he was shot dead. Brotheridge was the first Allied fatality of D-Day but many more soldiers, sailors and airmen would be dead by the end of the
