Headlines are seductive. I was sucked into a story about the D-Day landings the other day.
D-Day has always fascinated me, ever since as a six year old I listened to the thunder of 11,500 aircraft fly overhead to France that summer night in June 1944.
The story I watched on video was not new to me but I didn’t know much about it, and intriguingly, it told me that the Allied invasion was won hours before the troops arrived on the beaches of Normandy. This was new to me.
Operation Coup de Main was performed by 181 men silently dropped from six gliders by the bridges over the Caen Canal and the Orne river, now called Pegasus and Horsa in honour of those brave men. It took them ten minutes to overcome the German defenders, and to capture the bridges, and for Major John Howard to send the agreed message, Ham and Jam to headquarters.
The surprize capture of these bridges by John Howard and his men who he had trained for eighteen months to do this, making them perform the operation until they knew it by heart and could do it with their eyes shut, meant that the German Panzer divisions and other forces couldn’t get to the invasion beaches to stop the Allies landing.
General Rommel had said the only way to repel the Allies would be on the beaches, General Von Rundstet and Hitler were sure they should be fought further back. Neither of these possibilities were available to the Germans once these bridges were blocked to them.
Famously, as they waited anxiously to be reinforced, while all the while keeping attacking Germans at bay, the dashing 15th Lord Lovat commanding his regiment, with his piper playing as they marched the five miles from the landing beach, arrived at one pm, an hour later than the time he’d promised Major Howard, and apologized.
Another delicious detail of this daring operation which sealed the fate of Germany, was the part played by the innkeeper by the bridge.
When France had been occupied four years before, he had dug a hole in his garden, and buried his finest champagne. Now as the troops were gathered on the bridge after driving off the enemy, he hurried into the garden in the dark night and dug up his champagne. He grasped the first one, dusted off the dirt, and walked over to the soldiers to celebrate with them.
As the night wore on, he and his wife nursed a dying officer and tended to the rest of the wounded on the wooden floor of their cafe. Every year until they died they served the returning relatives on 6th June for free, and when their daughter, who was four years old during the battles, took over the cafe, she too continued to welcome and refresh the families who came each year.
Major Howard’s feat made me think of other men who had single handedly influenced the course of history, and two others sprang to my mind. There was Major Chris Keeble, who was handed command of his regiment when the CO, Colonel H. Jones, was killed during the Falklands Islands battle at Goose Green.
The remaining men of Major Keeble’s command were on their last legs after fighting for forty hours non-stop, 80 men dying and wounded, almost out of ammunition, and hemmed in by burning gorse.
At this moment Major Keeble, a devout Catholic, went behind some burning bushes, and knelt to pray for guidance. When he returned, having decided to try psychology, instead of arms, he sent two Argentine prisoners into Stanley to tell the Argentine commander to surrender or an attack with artillery would be made on them. The Argentine colonel took the bait and did surrender with some thousands, to Major Keeble’s 400 spent men, and the war was ended.
This saved the lives of the Falkland Islanders locked up in the village hall and of everyone else fighting on both sides. One man tilted the balance.
As did another man who won a battle in 2003 without firing a shot. Lt Colonel Christopher Hughes was leading his men in the Iraqi city of Najaf, and when they reached the mosque, the holiest in Iraq, the Iraqis thought they were going to arrest the imam and destroy the mosque. An ugly crowd gathered, and a very tense situation developed for the 130 Americans surrounded by hundreds of furious Iraqis.
Col Hughes remained calm, ordered his men to “take a knee “, point their weapons to the ground, and smile. (that must have been hard to do)
In the silence and surprise which fell, the crowd drifted away, and calm spread in the city.
Unknown numbers of lives and an international incident had been averted by the quick thinking and courage of one man.
I find these stories so inspiring, a reminder of the amazing human spirit. And these are just the stories we know about. There must be countless other stories of the nobility of men and women who have risen to the moment, with courage and intelligence like the Nepali headmaster who saved all the children in his school when the floods came pounding down the valley a few weeks ago.
Yet as I think about these heroic moments, I also remember that there’s another sort of courage and nobility… to carry on uncomplainingly through hardship and boredom, day after day. Like the Y Service listeners who supplied the messages for Bletchley Park for decoding. They were young men and women barely out of their teens sitting night after night, day after day, for eight hour shifts and longer, with earphones clamped to their heads in freezing conditions, for four or five years, taking down amid hisses and crackling morse code messages about enemy army moves. Footsoldiers ( “the poor bloody infantry, or PBI”) slogging away for weeks in the snow, rain and mud of the freezing winter in the Hurtgen Forest, struggling across swamps and rivers, or trudging through the rubble of ruined cities, dodging sniper bullets and displaying dogged determination were also unsung heroes.
“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow’.”says writer Mary Anne Radmacher.
So courage is also endurance, perhaps the only sort that is called for today.
Now that those times of crisis are so far away, I sometimes wonder if the youngsters of today, many adorned with tattoos and nose rings, and all the other embellishments of a different world, would have the same spirit of selfless duty that those people back then displayed so constantly, and for so long when their country was in danger. Or am I under-estimatng the power and the glory of the human spirit to rise to challenge and danger, or to tedium and exhaustion? Maybe I am and I so hope so…
Food for Threadbare Gourmets
Cauliflower cheese for a light supper last night,with some crusty rolls and the unsalted butter I love. Just a cheesy white sauce, poured over the cooked flowerlet of the cauliflower,either steamed or boiled. I usually add some carrots to cook with the cauliflower to save on saucepans.
When the cheese sauce is ready, and the cauliflower cooked, I throw several tablespoons of slivered almonds into a dry frying pan and toast them until slightly coloured. Sprinkled over the top of the cauliflower cheese before lightly grilling the top, makes all the difference -some crunch and savoury taste.
Food for Thought
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Dalai Lama
ThesoundofwaterNZ 