Dad battled his way through The Longest Day
... even though childhood TB left him with one leg shorter than the other
DROPPED by plane into occupied Normandy before the D-Day landings in June 1944, my father Arthur had no idea of the terrible ordeal ahead. A member of the 12th (Yorkshire) Parachute Battalion, he and his comrades were part of Operation Tonga, tasked with capturing two important bridges over the Caen Canal and River Orne to aid the planned Allied advance from the beachhead, destroying several others to thwart the Germans, and securing several villages.
Unfortunately, men ended up scattered all over the drop zone due, my father later told me, to inexperienced pilots caught in bad weather and poor navigation.
Some were shot as they landed or drowned in ditches, others were bayoneted by German troops. One of my father’s best friends was caught in a tree and hung there until he was shot.
The surviving Paras gathered together using a clicker device known as a ‘cricket’ to locate each other — as famously depicted in the film The Longest Day. One click would be answered by two clicks from other Paras nearby.
Although depleted as a fighting force by about 40 per cent, they were soon in action, taking the village of Le Bas de Ranville despite heavy German resistance.
From there, my father took part in a key event of the war, the Battle of Breville, to capture a strategic village the Germans fought hard to defend. Every officer or sergeant major in the battle was killed or wounded. Of the 500 British servicemen who saw action, only 55 survived.
‘The battlefield is a lonely place,’ my father, who was promoted to sergeant on the field, told me years later. ‘There’s only two things men call for — their mother or God.’ Perhaps he was more resilient than most thanks to a difficult start in life.
Born in Bermondsey, South London, the eldest of four brothers, he contracted TB in his right knee when he was just three years old. He spent the next threeand-a-half years in Sevenoaks Hip Hospital confined to bed — wheeled outside during daylight, winter and summer.
His parents visited once a month, but were separated from him by a glass screen.
When he was finally discharged, my father had one leg two inches shorter than the other. He wore a leg iron and used crutches during the day, and slept in a splint at night until he was 15. At 17, he joined the Territorial Army Royal Engineers and later applied to be a paratrooper — he thought the red beret would attract the ladies!
After the war, my father met and married Lilian, my mother, now 96, and they had my sisters Christine and Gillian, then me. Father ran a newsagent with his brothers in Carshalton, Surrey, and they would always open on Christmas Day so regulars could stop by for a festive drink.
He spoke little of his wartime heroics, but Gillian and I went back to Normandy in 2010 with him on the 65th anniversary of the PParachutedhtdiintot occupied id France: Arthur Cooper end of the war. Two years ago my father was made a Chevalier (Knight) in the French Legion of Honour, for his role in the liberation of France.
It was the proudest moment of his life and confirmed what his family — including his seven grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren — had always known: Arthur Cooper was a true hero.
Arthur thomAs LAcAssAne cooper, born october 6, 1921, died July 31, 2018, aged 96.