At 00:16 on 6 June 1944, a wooden glider carrying twenty-eight men hit the ground at over ninety miles an hour, tore through barbed wire, and stopped about fifty yards from a bridge over the Caen Canal. It had been cast off from a bomber at 7,000 feet nine minutes earlier, in darkness, with no engine, no radar, no lights and no second attempt.

Two more gliders arrived behind it, at one-minute intervals, and did the same thing.

Those were the first Allied aircraft of D-Day to reach their objective, and the men who came out of them fired the first shots of the invasion. Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory later called the flying the greatest feat of the Second World War, which from an officer not given to overstatement about glider pilots is quite something.

Why the bridges mattered more than the beach

Look at a map of the eastern flank of the Normandy landings and the problem becomes obvious. Between Sword Beach and the open country to the east lie two parallel waterways, the Caen Canal and the River Orne, and in 1944 there were two road bridges across them at Bénouville.

Those bridges were the only eastward exit for British forces landing at Sword. They were also the route by which German armour, and specifically the 21st Panzer Division, could come the other way and drive into the beachhead. Intelligence said both were heavily defended and wired for demolition.

Blow them and the British 6th Airborne Division, dropping east of the Orne, would be cut off with two waterways at its back. Leave them standing in German hands and the invasion beaches had a road leading straight to them. The bridges had to be taken intact, in the dark, before the Germans could react. There is no way to do that with a parachute drop, because parachutists land scattered and take an hour to assemble. It had to be a glider.

The aircraft that made it possible

The Airspeed Horsa was made largely of wood, carried around thirty men, and had no engine. It was towed to altitude behind a bomber, released, and then flown down as a very large, very heavy glider by two pilots of the Glider Pilot Regiment who would fight as infantry once they had landed.

What made it right for this job is that a glider arrives silently, arrives all at once, and arrives where it is aimed. What made the job nearly impossible is everything else. There is no going around for another attempt. There is no engine to correct with. The pilots had to descend several thousand feet in darkness onto a specific field, in formation, using a stopwatch, a compass and an airspeed indicator, and stop before hitting the water.

Nine minutes in the dark

Six Horsas lifted off from RAF Tarrant Rushton in Dorset at 22:56 on 5 June, towed by Halifax bombers. Three were tasked with the canal bridge and three with the river bridge. Each carried a platoon of infantry plus five Royal Engineers, whose entire job was to find the demolition charges and cut the wires before anybody could fire them.

The Halifaxes crossed the Normandy coast at 00:07 at 7,000 feet and released. Nine minutes later, Wallwork's glider went through the barbed wire perimeter of the canal bridge defences and came to rest close enough that the men aboard could see the bridge through the shattered nose. Gliders two and three followed a minute apart.

Glider two broke in half and stopped at the edge of a pond. Lance-Corporal Fred Greenhalgh was knocked unconscious in the crash, thrown clear into the water, and drowned. He was the first man killed in the operation, and by most accounts the first Allied fatality of D-Day.

Ten minutes of fighting

The German garrison knew an invasion was coming but not when or where, and only two sentries were on duty. One ran off shouting a warning; the other fired a flare, and was shot. Lieutenant Den Brotheridge led his platoon across the bridge, threw a grenade that silenced a machine gun position, and was hit as he did it. He died of his wounds, and is generally recorded as the first Allied soldier killed by enemy fire on D-Day.

While the infantry cleared the trenches and the pillbox, the Royal Engineers went under the bridge looking for explosives and cutting fuse wires wherever they found them. Both bridges were in British hands within minutes of the first glider stopping. Neither was ever demolished.

Holding them was the longer job. The 7th Parachute Battalion arrived to reinforce, German counter-attacks came in with tanks and a gunboat on the canal, and relief eventually arrived with Lord Lovat's commandos coming up from Sword Beach. Fourteen German tanks were destroyed in the fighting in the area that day, and a gunboat was sunk on the canal.

What the pilots got, and what they said about it

Eight of the twelve glider pilots were awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. Howard received the Distinguished Service Order, presented in the field by Montgomery. Brotheridge was posthumously mentioned in dispatches.

Wallwork himself, who died in 2013, was characteristically unimpressed by the fuss about being first.

One thing almost everybody gets wrong

The assault is very widely called Operation Deadstick. It was not. Deadstick was the name of the intensive glider training exercise that prepared the crews for the mission, and the assault itself was part of Operation Tonga, the wider British airborne landing in Normandy. The name has stuck to the wrong thing for eighty years, which is a small and forgivable error and worth correcting anyway.

The Caen Canal bridge was renamed Pegasus Bridge after the winged horse emblem of British airborne forces. The bridge over the Orne became Horsa Bridge, after the aircraft. The original span now sits at the Memorial Pegasus museum a short walk away, and the café beside it, the Gondrée, claims to be the first house in France liberated on D-Day.

Six aircraft. No engines. One pass. It remains, arguably, the most precise piece of flying anybody has ever been asked to do.

Sources: Imperial War Museum; Pegasus Archive; Airborne Assault Museum (ParaData); Memorial Pegasus; contemporary accounts of the 6th Airborne Division.