Book Review: "Pegasus Bridge" by Stephen E. Ambrose

Noted American historian Stephen E. Ambrose shines a light on one of the least-discussed but most important parts of the D-Day operation in a short, but important work detailing the heroic exploits of the small detachment of British glider-borne troops who were the first Allied soldiers to touch the soil of occupied France on D-Day - 6 June, 1944 - and had one of the more difficult tasks: the capture and subsequent defence of a vital bridge across the Orne River, behind the seaborne invasion zones, codenamed Pegasus.

Interestingly for someone whose previous works – Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers and Wild Blue, to name only a handful – have focused almost exclusively on the United Stated involvement in the Second World War, Pegasus Bridge barely mentions anyone other than the volunteers, former light infantry from the famous Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire regiment along with twenty sappers and glider pilots, twenty of them, from the Glider Pilot Regiment.

‘Deadstick’ was the codename for the operation that called for the glider pilots to land their fragile Horsa gliders almost right against the bridge, making the distance to be travelled by the attacking infantry much shorter than it might otherwise have been – they crash-landed as close as forty-seven yards from their target. It was a daring plan, the likes of which had never been attempted before, and one that caught the German garrison completely by surprise.

Capturing Pegasus Bridge meant stopping German armour from using it as a pathway to push into the eastern flank of the Allied landings at Sword Beach. It was as important a part of D-Day as, say, the landings at Utah Beach, and fraught with danger, due to the vagaries of glider-borne landings, the unfamiliar French countryside at night and being relatively lightly armoured infantrymen right in the middle of enemy territory, basically surrounded by incredible amounts of firepower.

Ambrose opens his book at the beginning of the raid, and goes back to detail the formation of the taskforce led by Major John Howard, their training, the important role played by the pilots, Howard’s mission briefing from his superiors and, here and there, information about the German soldiers and French civilians around the Bridge, who were entangled in Operation Deadstick.

Pegasus Bridge is a fascinating story about a little-known part of D-Day, which reads like a great adventure fiction. You sometimes have to stop and remind yourself that the events contained within actually happened. The book is a fitting memorial to those who died in the capture and subsequent defence of the bridge. The first man to die on Pegasus Bridge was also the first man to die on D-Day. Yes, the Ox and Bucks were the vanguard of the mighty Allied invasion effort.

The capture of the bridge across the Caen Canal undoubtedly made the Allied landings much more successful. With Howard’s men holding until mid-morning on D-Day, withstanding counter-attack after counter-attack from German Panzer divisions. Who knows what might’ve happened if Major Howard’s force had not been able to hold the bridge. It’s very possible that the D-Day landings would now be talked about not as an overall success but as a disastrous failure.

Pegasus Bridge was indeed that important and Ambrose’s book is brilliant.