Major John Howard & the Capture of Pegasus Bridge

The Quiz Question

Which British officer led the glider-borne coup de main that seized Pegasus Bridge in the first hours of D-Day, 6 June 1944?

A. Major John Howard
B. Lieutenant Colonel John Frost
C. Brigadier Lord Lovat
D. Major Digby Tatham-Warter

The answer is A. Major John Howard. Here is the full story.

Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, six wooden gliders slipped silently through the Norman darkness and changed the course of the greatest seaborne invasion in history — before a single Allied soldier had set foot on any beach.

Six Gliders, Six Minutes, and the Start of D-Day

At 00:16 on 6 June 1944, the first Allied soldier set foot on French soil. He did not arrive by parachute or landing craft. He stepped off a Horsa glider in a field beside the Caen Canal, Normandy.

Within six minutes of that landing, British troops had seized the bridge over the canal — later immortalised as Pegasus Bridge — in what many historians regard as the most precisely executed airborne operation of the entire war.

The mission was codenamed Operation Deadstick. Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower is widely credited with calling it one of the finest examples of military execution he had ever witnessed — and the men who pulled it off were not elite commandos or specially trained saboteurs. They were infantry soldiers from Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, led by a 31-year-old major from London's East End.

This is the story of Major John Howard, D Company, and the six Horsa gliders that secured D-Day's eastern flank before the guns of Sword Beach had fired a single round.

Why Pegasus Bridge Mattered: The Strategic Picture

The bridge carried the D514 road over the Caen Canal at Bénouville — one of only two crossing points between the Allied landing beaches and the open countryside stretching east toward the River Orne. German armour using this route could strike the flank of Sword Beach within hours of the landings, potentially unravelling the entire British 3rd Infantry Division assault before it had consolidated ashore.

Four hundred metres to the east lay the Ranville Bridge over the River Orne itself — later nicknamed Horsa Bridge. Both crossings had to be seized simultaneously. Losing either one left the other dangerously exposed.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's defensive doctrine was built around rapid armoured counter-attacks delivered in the first hours of any invasion, before the Allies could mass sufficient strength ashore. These two bridges were central to that plan.

But the equation worked both ways. Destroying the bridges to deny them to the Germans would have isolated the 6th Airborne Division east of the Orne with no reliable resupply or reinforcement route. They had to be taken intact. That demand for precision is what made Operation Deadstick so extraordinary — and so dangerous.

The Man Behind the Mission: Major John Howard

John Howard was born in Bow, east London, in 1912. His family was working-class and money was scarce; he left school at 14 and spent his early years as a shop assistant. The Army gave him direction, discipline, and eventually a career.

He enlisted in the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry as a private in the 1930s, rose steadily through the ranks, and earned a commission — a rare achievement for a man of his background in the rigid class structure of the pre-war British Army. By 1944 he commanded D Company, 2nd Battalion, Ox and Bucks Light Infantry, attached to the 6th Airlanding Brigade, 6th Airborne Division.

Howard's training regime was famously — some said brutally — demanding. He ran his 180 men through gruelling night exercises and timed assault drills until the movements were instinctive. A few fellow officers questioned his methods. None of his men questioned the results.

What set Howard apart was not merely his toughness. He knew every soldier in D Company personally — their families, their anxieties, their individual strengths. That combination of high standards and genuine care forged a unit whose cohesion under fire would prove decisive.

Planning and Training for Operation Deadstick

The operation was developed under Brigadier Nigel Poett of 5th Parachute Brigade and rehearsed over several months at RAF Tarrant Rushton in Dorset, the designated launching airfield. Every detail was planned to the second.

Howard's men practised the assault on full-scale mock-ups of the bridges, targeting a window of under two minutes from glider touchdown to the moment the first section reached the bridge deck. The glider pilots of the Glider Pilot Regiment — particularly Staff Sergeant Jim Wallwork, who would fly the lead aircraft — trained obsessively on night landings aimed at putting their Horsas within 50 metres of the objective.

Intelligence about the bridges came through multiple channels. Among the most remarkable sources was Georges Gondrée, a French café owner whose establishment stood immediately beside the canal bridge. His wife Thérèse quietly gathered information from German officers billeted nearby, passing it on to Allied intelligence networks.

The six Horsa gliders were divided into two flights of three: one flight targeting the canal bridge at Bénouville, one targeting the river bridge at Ranville. The landing zones were tiny — small flooded fields identifiable from the air only under precise conditions. There was no margin for error.

The Night of 5–6 June 1944: The Assault in Detail

At approximately 00:07, the six Horsas cast off from their Halifax tugs at 6,000 feet over the Normandy coast. They entered a silent, engineless glide toward two bridges in pitch darkness, their pilots navigating by moonlight, stopwatch, and exceptional skill.

Staff Sergeant Wallwork's glider — carrying Howard and the lead platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Den Brotheridge — struck the ground at 00:16 and skidded at high speed across the field, its nose crumpling through the perimeter wire fence and coming to rest just 47 metres from the canal bridge. Howard was briefly knocked unconscious on impact.

Brotheridge's platoon was onto the bridge within seconds, running hard. Den Brotheridge himself was shot and fatally wounded as he crossed — becoming, by most historical accounts, the first Allied soldier killed in action on D-Day proper. But his platoon's momentum was unstoppable. The guards were overwhelmed in under a minute.

Within six minutes of the first glider landing, both ends of the canal bridge were in British hands. The river bridge fell almost simultaneously: the platoon assigned to it found it so lightly guarded that it was secured before the Germans could mount any coherent defence.

Howard flashed the success signal — a 'V' pattern in Morse on his torch — and transmitted the codeword 'Ham and Jam' over the radio, confirming both bridges taken intact. The message moved up the Allied chain of command within minutes, triggering the broader airborne drop that followed.

Holding On: The Tense Hours Before Relief

Capturing the bridges was only the first part of the mission. Holding them was the test. Howard's 180 men dug in on both banks with Bren guns, PIAT anti-tank weapons, and whatever ammunition they had carried aboard the gliders. Resupply was hours away. German counter-attacks were not.

At around 01:30, two German armoured vehicles approached the canal bridge. Corporal Billy Gray and Private Emile Corteil engaged the lead tank with a PIAT, destroying it — and causing the second vehicle to withdraw. It was a tipping-point moment. A successful German armoured push at that stage could have reversed everything Howard's men had achieved.

The promised relief came in the form of Lord Lovat's 1st Special Service Brigade, which had landed on Sword Beach and was moving inland at speed. Leading them was their piper, Bill Millin, playing his bagpipes as the commandos marched through a still-contested landscape — in defiance of Army regulations that Lovat cheerfully dismissed.

Lord Lovat reached Pegasus Bridge at approximately 13:30 on 6 June, reportedly offering Howard a light-hearted apology for being 'two and a half minutes late.' His commandos crossed immediately, reinforcing the airborne perimeter east of the Orne and securing the corridor for the days ahead.

Howard's company suffered 2 killed and 14 wounded in the assault and its defence. Given what they had achieved — two intact bridges, an eastern flank stabilised, and the German counter-attack timetable thrown into disarray — the casualty count was, in the grimly arithmetical logic of warfare, extraordinarily light.

The Horsa Glider: The Unsung Weapon of D-Day

The Airspeed Horsa was a British military glider constructed largely of wood, capable of carrying 25 to 30 fully equipped troops or a light vehicle. Towed by a Halifax or Stirling bomber to the release point, it then glided silently to its landing zone with no engine and no powered second approach.

Flying a loaded Horsa to a precise night landing zone demanded extraordinary skill and nerve. A miscalculation of a few degrees on the approach meant overshooting by hundreds of metres — which in this case meant landing in the Caen Canal or missing the landing zone entirely. There was no going around for another attempt.

Wallwork's landing — within 47 metres of the bridge in total darkness — earned him the Distinguished Flying Medal. He was knocked unconscious in the impact and had to be pulled from the wreckage by his own troops, but his piloting had put D Company exactly where it needed to be.

The Horsa's hinged nose section could be swung aside after landing to unload troops rapidly — a design detail that proved critical in getting Howard's men onto the bridge in seconds rather than minutes. All six Horsas used in Operation Deadstick landed within acceptable range of their targets, a collective feat of precision flying that has rarely been matched since.

Aftermath: What the Capture of Pegasus Bridge Achieved

By holding both bridges, Howard's men sealed the eastern flank of the entire D-Day operation. No German armour was able to use the Bénouville crossing to attack Sword Beach during the critical opening hours of 6 June — the window in which such a counter-attack might have inflicted catastrophic damage on the British landing.

The intact bridges gave the 6th Airborne Division — including the 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades who had dropped east of the Orne during the same night — a coherent defensive perimeter that held for weeks against determined German pressure. They also provided the logistical artery through which Allied reinforcements and supplies flowed into the eastern Normandy bridgehead throughout June and July.

Georges Gondrée, whose café stood feet from the canal bridge, became a celebrated figure in the liberation story. He had reportedly buried 98 bottles of champagne before the German occupation and opened them all when Howard's men arrived — making the Gondrée Café the first house in France to be liberated on D-Day. His family has run it ever since.

The local population gave the bridge its enduring name: Pegasus Bridge, honouring the winged horse emblem worn by every soldier of the British 6th Airborne Division. It is a name that has never been displaced.

Legacy: Pegasus Bridge and Major John Howard Today

The original bridge was replaced in 1994, but it was not lost. It was carefully preserved and now forms the centrepiece of the Mémorial Pegasus at Ranville, Normandy, which opened in June 2000. It is one of the most moving D-Day sites in all of Normandy — and among the most historically significant.

Major John Howard was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his leadership of Operation Deadstick. In July 1944 he was seriously injured in a road accident in Normandy and did not return to active service. His full story reached a global audience through Stephen Ambrose's celebrated 1985 book Pegasus Bridge, based partly on Howard's own detailed recollections — one of the finest works of popular military history produced in the twentieth century.

Howard died in 1999, long enough to see his men properly celebrated, and to know that the mission they had carried out in six extraordinary minutes just after midnight on 6 June 1944 was understood for exactly what it was: one of the most brilliant small-unit operations in the history of modern warfare.

Every 6 June, veterans' families, history enthusiasts, and thousands of visitors gather at the Gondrée Café and Pegasus Bridge to mark what happened there. The bridge is gone; the story is not.

If the story of Major John Howard and Operation Deadstick moved you, share it with someone who loves military history — and tell us in the comments: have you ever visited Pegasus Bridge? We'd love to hear about your experience.