From the overloaded Horsa gliders soundlessly approaching their pinpoint landing zone at 0007 on D-Day, Ambrose switches to the preceding two years of training and planning, boredom and break-outs: Howard's fanatical emphasis on physical fitness and mental alertness the endless nighttime simulations, the practice with German weapons the intelligence, unprecedented in detail and currency (the scale model of the site was changed daily, on the basis of French-underground and aerial-reconnaissance reports) the sense, to a man, 'that D-Day would be the greatest day of their lives.' Howard's company succeeds in taking the bridges intact, thanks partly to luck and German weaknesses (a carousing officer, feeble non-German conscript troops). from whom (along with other British and German survivors) he later got much of this story. For Ambrose, maximum-biographer of Eisenhower, this brief chronicle of a single engagement in a busman's holiday for fair: leading a veterans' battlefield tour in 1981, Ambrose was approached at Pegasus Bridge-one of the pair of crossings, over the Caen Canal and Ouse River, that Company D captured and held on D-Day-by none other than Major Howard. The recent, deglorifying accounts of D-Day and after (John Keegan, Max Hastings) left untouched the repute of the British Sixth Airborne Division-one unit of which, the gliderborne troops of Major John Howard's D Company, made the first, crucial Normandy landing.

Pegasus bridge stephen e ambrose