Harry Read
Salvationist who parachuted into Normandy in the early hours of D-day and did so again 75 years later
HARRY READ, who has died aged 97, was a Salvation Army commissioner who, as a 20-year-old wireless operator with the Royal Signals, parachuted into Normandy in the early hours of D-day.
In 2019, 75 years later, with fellow D-day veteran John Hutton, 94, he took part in a commemorative tandem jump to honour comrades they had lost when they first made the descent under heavy enemy fire.
Read volunteered for the Parachute Brigade early in 1943 and, when his wireless training was completed in May, joined the 6th Airborne Division. Its first mission was Operation Tonga on June 6 1944, D-day, when it was responsible for securing the left flank of the Allied invasion of Normandy.
Read recalled being told to expect a high casualty rate. As paratroopers jumping into France they had only a 50 per cent chance of reaching the ground without being killed or wounded.
“We young fellows, who thought we were immortal, suddenly had to change our tune,” he recalled.
“In that first hour of D-day, as our Dakota aircraft took us towards the French coast, on the word of command we stood in line and prepared to jump. As we did so we flew into the most magnificent fireworks display imaginable, except of course they were not fireworks but shells and tracer bullets.
“Keeping our feet in a wildly bucking aircraft was no easy exercise but the red warning light was on, then came the green light, and we shuffled unsteadily down the plane to the exit where, in turn, and aided by a burly dispatcher, we leapt out into the night air to whatever awaited us.”
Weighed down by a battery the size of a toolbox strapped to his right leg, at 0500 hours Read parachuted down amid mortar fire while an aircraft went down in flames ahead of him. To improve chances of survival, the drop took place as close to the ground as possible: “30 seconds later I was on the ground.”
He landed in an area which had been deliberately flooded. Many of his unit drowned on landing and Read and a comrade spent 16 hours struggling out of the swamp before finding refuge with a French farming family. A priest helped to reunite them with the rest of their section so they could continue their advance to the River Seine.
Seventy-five years later Read took off from Duxford, Cambridgeshire, in a Cessna and flew over to France, where he and John Hutton were the first two out of the aircraft, followed by a 5,000 sq ft Union flag. They landed in fields at Sannerville. Their jump had been in danger of being cancelled when a Dakota aircraft originally lined up for the mission proved unavailable. When the Cessna was found it was a race against time to get into French airspace in time in order to get clearance from the authorities to land.
“I couldn’t believe the drop was going to be postponed because I had this assurance that it was God behind why I was doing it,” Read said. “I would have been examining my theology if it hadn’t happened.”
“I feel good,” he told reporters after his landing. “This was a very different kind of landing to when I arrived in 1944. The people waiting for me then didn’t really want me to be there. They were going to shoot me. So this was definitely worth the wait.”
He did not think he would do another jump.
Harry Read was born on May 17 1924 and grew up in Grangetown, North Yorkshire. His family were Salvationists, his father serving as a Corps Sergeant Major. As a child Harry joined the Army’s Singing Company and YP (young people’s) Band, but most of his friends were Methodists and in 1940 he joined the Methodist Church.
When he volunteered for military service aged 18 in 1942, his father, who had been twice wounded in the First World War, refused to sign the necessary documents, reasoning that with one son a commissioned officer in the Royal Artillery, and with a daughter in the WAAF, the family had done its bit. He could not prevent Harry from joining up, but in deference to his father, instead of joining the infantry Harry joined the Royal Signals.
Of the fewer than 100 men who made up the group which parachuted with him on D-day, Read was one of only 25 to come back. A parachuting injury prevented further jumps and he was returned to an ordinary signals unit.
At the end of the war in Europe, Read applied to train for the Methodist ministry. However, the Royal Signals transferred him to Orkney where, in Stromness, there was no Methodist church, so instead he attended a small Salvation Army Mission Church Corps in Kirkwall.
In 1946 he was posted to Edinburgh, where he attended Salvation Army Saturday-evening meetings. Though he had been accepted to train for the Methodist ministry, he realised that God was calling him to service in the Salvation Army and became a soldier in the Army’s Edinburgh Gorgie Corps.
After demobilisation in June 1947 he entered the Salvation Army’s training college, and over the next few decades served as press officer and director of information services at its international headquarters; territorial leader in East Australia; chief secretary at the Salvation Army in Canada; and Commissioner and Territorial Commander of the UK.
In 2018, in preparation for his jump the following year, Read took to the skies at the Old Sarum Airfield in Salisbury and jumped from 10,000 feet, alongside two granddaughters and a great-grandson. He used the event, and the Normandy jump, to raise funds for the Salvation Army’s anti-trafficking and modern slavery campaign.
Read was supported for more than 50 years by his wife Win, née Humphries, whom he had met at the Salvation Army training college and with whom he had a son and a daughter. After her death in 2007 he published a book based on his experiences of bereavement. He continued to publish prayers and poems on Facebook.
In 2016 he was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur for the role he had played in France’s liberation from the Nazis.