The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
THE PARATROOPER
Fred Glover, 93 Private, A Company of the 9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment
D-DAY. MY FIRST OPERATION as a private. Over the loudspeaker we were asked to report to the dining area, then the commanding officer jumped up and said he needed 30 volunteers for a special operation involving gliders on the Normandy coast.
The idea was to get three Horsa gliders – each containing 30 men – over a German gun battery. About 500 men [on foot] were supposed to attack the battery from the outside while those of us in the gliders would crash-land inside and create mayhem. The object of the exercise was to stop the guns firing on to Sword Beach [the code name given to one of five main landing areas along the Normandy coast].
It sounded wonderful – but we were warned it was only for unmarried people, which made you think a bit…
At the time I was 18 and unmarried. I’d signed up when I was 17 (like many, I’d lied about my age) and joined the Royal East Kent Regiment, but as soon as the chance arose I put my name down to become a paratrooper – I wanted to be in the thick of it. I received orders to report to training at Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire but had a difficult time of it there. I was immature and it took everything I had to get through the initial training. At one stage I was put in a boxing ring with a guy who had a bit of a reputation in the East End for being a tough nut. He floored me in the third round but the instructor said, ‘You stood up, that’s the main thing.’
When I first signed up, my mother asked me to let her know when I was going to be deployed because she would make me some sandwiches. I only thought later that she might well have gone and cried her eyes out.
On the day I took off at about 2am from RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire – we had to get to our target at least 30 minutes before the seaborne attack started. I remember a brief attempt at singing Roll Out the Barrel but that quickly faded away. I thought about how I would react for the first time under fire, and looked at the Fairbairn-sykes fighting knife [issued to special troops] strapped to my leg and wondered if it would really come to that. I had to reconcile myself to the fact I might kill somebody.
It went nothing like the plan. One glider was overloaded and landed back in England. The second had its tail shot away over the coast and had to land two miles from the battery. Our glider was the only one to make it over the battery as planned. As we were coming down the anti-aircraft guns started up. I got hit badly in the calf and upper leg.
We crashed into a copse where a large German infantry company was preparing to attack and engaged in a firefight straight away. Most of us had hardly seen any action but training came into it: disperse and return fire. In a situation like that you’re fighting for your life. A few of our men had Sten [sub-machine] guns, which put up a tremendous rate of fire and helped drive the Germans away.
Eventually the people from the glider that had its tail shot away caught up with us. I couldn’t do anything because of my injuries so while they advanced I was left guarding two wounded Germans: one had been hit in the legs and another had a nasty wound in the stomach. They were the first Germans I had seen and I felt sympathy for them. They would have killed me, I would have killed them, but we had come through it. We tried to talk and I gave one of the chaps some morphine.
The plan was to wait until our troops came up from Sword Beach, but a German patrol of around a dozen men searching a nearby building got to us first. I quickly took apart my Sten gun and scattered it but I forgot to remove my knife – any troops caught carrying specialist fighting knives by the enemy were ordered to be shot.
They took the knife out, looked at it, and also found my Gammon bomb [the nickname for a British grenade]. It wasn’t looking good, but then the younger German I was guarding called out to them and said something I couldn’t understand. Instead of killing me they shook my hand. I feel absolutely certain he saved my life.
I was taken to a German field hospital and when we were shelled out by the Royal Navy the Germans took me to another field hospital, where I was operated on. After a couple of weeks we were taken to a hospital in Paris, where I managed to make contact with the French Resistance and escape. It was August 1944. I was driven down to the coast and airlifted back to Britain, where I was taken to a US hospital in Blandford, Dorset.
My family had no idea whether I was alive or dead. When I saw my mother again it was elation, I suppose. We were very close. It wasn’t until I got back to my battalion that I discovered how many had died: more than half of the 600 to 700 men in my unit who were deployed to France had lost their lives.
Every year, I go along with a group of paratroopers to visit the Ranville War Cemetery near Normandy to remember them. We have a saying in the regiment that we are just veterans – the real heroes are laid to rest under our feet.
Life after the war Left the armed forces: 1947 (retired as sergeant) / Lives in: Brighton / Family: married in 1948, two children, three grandchildren, one great-grandchild / Career: mechanical engineer
‘I looked at the fighting knife strapped to my leg and wondered if it would really come to that… I might kill somebody’