Who knows what might’ve happened if Major Howard’sįorce had not been able to hold the bridge. Mid-morning on D-Day, withstanding counter-attack after counter-attack from Made the Allied landings much more successful. The capture of the bridge across the Caen Canal undoubtedly Yes, the Ox and Bucks were the vanguard of the The first man to die on Pegasus Bridge was also theįirst man to die on D-Day. The book is a fitting memorial to those who died in the capture and subsequentĭefence of the bridge. To stop and remind yourself that the events contained within actually happened. Part of D-Day, which reads like a great adventure fiction. Pegasus Bridge is a fascinating story about a little-known Soldiers and French civilians around the Bridge, who were entangled in Their training, the important role played by the pilots, Howard’s missionīriefing from his superiors and, here and there, information about the German Goes back to detail the formation of the taskforce led by Major John Howard, Infantrymen right in the middle of enemy territory, basically surrounded byĪmbrose opens his book at the beginning of the raid, and Unfamiliar French countryside at night and being relatively lightly armoured It was as important a part of D-Day as, say, the landings at Utahīeach, and fraught with danger, due to the vagaries of glider-borne landings, the

Using it as a pathway to push into the eastern flank of the Allied landings at It was a daring plan, the likes of which had neverīeen attempted before, and one that caught the German garrison completely byĬapturing Pegasus Bridge meant stopping German armour from Shorter than it might otherwise have been – they crash-landed as close as forty-seven

The bridge, making the distance to be travelled by the attacking infantry much ‘Deadstick’ was the codename for the operation that calledįor the glider pilots to land their fragile Horsa gliders almost right against Twenty of them, from the Glider Pilot Regiment. Other than the volunteers, former light infantry from the famous OxfordshireĪnd Buckinghamshire regiment along with twenty sappers and glider pilots, Interestingly for someone whose previous works – Citizen Soldiers,īand of Brothers and Wild Blue, to name only a handful – have focused almostĮxclusively on the United Stated involvement in the Second World War, Pegasus Bridge barely mentions anyone 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.

Pegasus bridge by stephen e ambrose