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    The Greatest Generation
    The Greatest Generation
    The Greatest Generation
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    The Greatest Generation

    By Albert Jack

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    The Greatest Generation is the first hand account of an English soldier who began his army career with the Long Range Desert Group in 1940, raided with David's Sterling's Special Air Service, volunteered for the 1st Airborne Division and took part in their first ever jump. 

    He then transferred to the 6th Airborne in 1943 and with them he dropped at Pegasus Bridge, battled the Bulge, jumped the Rhine and fought through northern Germany to meet the Russians on the Baltic Coast where they celebrated together with vodka. 
     

    Albert arrested Joseph Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, escorted Prince Olaf of Norway during peacekeeping duties and finally confronted Jewish nationalists in Palestine.  

    Now, for the first time, his personal account is available and provides a fascinating insight into the minds of the men of the Parachute Brigade who carried out such dangerous war-time operations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAlbert Jack Publishing
    Release dateApr 22, 2021
    ISBN9781386702856
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      Book preview

      The Greatest Generation - Albert Jack

      Dedication Page

      This book is dedicated to every one of the Greatest Generation to whom we all still owe so much. Thank you for our freedom.

      ‘The loss of a single life at war is a frightening and horrible thing. But to believe that nothing at all is worth fighting for is even more horrible.’ -  Bert Childs - 1993

      Introduction

      Operation Overlord, otherwise known as the D-Day Landings, was huge scale invasion of Northern France in 1944 by Allied Forces in order to rid that country, followed by the rest of Nazi occupied Europe, of totalitarian domination. Having taken the decision to counter invade, and to confront Hitler’s army on the ground, it was agreed that a combined force of parachute & glider troopers from the British 6th Airborne Division would lead the invasion of Normandy by landing at key inland locations, well behind the Nazi front line. Their initial objective had two important elements.

      The first would be for the parachute soldiers to set up a defensive perimeter, or bridge-head, which would prevent the enemy, waiting in reserve a little deeper into the French countryside, from reinforcing their own fortification at the Normandy beaches and subsequently mounting a counter attack on the exposed allied landing forces. In effect, the parachute regiment would be dropping behind the first line of German defence in order to isolate them. And this was critical. If the 6th Airborne soldiers failed to stop German Colonel Hans A. Von Luck and his 125th Panzer Grenadier Regiment, who were in a position just a few miles east of where the paras would be landing, from counter attacking then the entire operation would probably fail.

      The second main objective was to secure vital river crossing points that would enable the much larger seaborne invasion force to push past the paratroopers and establish stronger, safer defensive positions away from the exposed beaches. The Allied plan was to enable a massive seaborne invasion force to attack the isolated German defences on the beaches and quickly push past to link up with the established British Airborne Division further inland. Other objectives for the airborne units were to attack and destroy the heavy German gun batteries that also threatened to inflict massive damage to the troops landing on the beaches. One of these was the feared Merville Battery. This central part of the invasion plan was code-named ‘Operation Deadstick.’

      Prior to Overlord, preparation and repeated rehearsal had been going on all over Britain with men and women rehearsing and revising their roles. As new ideas were developed new units were created to carry out specific operations and one of these had been the 6th Airborne Division, formed on May 18th 1943 and under the command of General Richard Gale, otherwise known as ‘Windy.’ In a basic but effective piece subterfuge, the division was called the 6th Airborne simply to confuse enemy intelligence officers into believing Britain already had five others, when in fact there was only one other, the 1st Airborne, commanded by Major General F.A.M Browning. Within a year the new 6th Airborne would become one of the most acclaimed British infantry divisions of all time.

      Operation Overlord was initially scheduled to commence on the 4th June 1944 but bad weather delayed the campaign by a single day. German commanders however, expecting the imminent allied attack, calculated the weather forecast for some days ahead to be too poor for the British and Americans to attempt any assault. Some of them even gave themselves a few days off and returned to their families. Their assumptions would be wrong because late in the evening of the 5th June 1944 a squadron of Dakota aircraft, filled with paratroopers and with six Horsa gliders on tow behind them, took off from RAF Tarrant Rushton in the south of England. Ahead of them were the pathfinders of 22nd Independent Parachute Company who had been detailed to mark the drop zones with beacons for the pilots to locate.

      Once on the ground individual units set about their prearranged tasks, some of which had very tight time limits with grave consequences should the para’s fail to achieve their own given objectives. For example the Merville Gun Battery, which had an awesome capacity and protected the beaches code-named Gold, Juno & Sword, was to be silenced by the men of the 9th Parachute Battalion. So critical was this part of the operation that if they failed to do so the British Navy cruiser HMS Arethusa would open fire on the position at 05:00 wiping out any paratroopers in the area. And they were all aware of that.

      The four 75mm guns themselves were protected by a 10ft concrete shield and were thought to be capable of sinking any ship or landing-craft heading for the beaches they overlooked. The RAF had tried and failed several times to knock out the guns and so the job was now given to the men on the ground. Other elements of the eight-thousand strong 6th Airborne were to link up with Major John Howard of the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry whose men of D-Company, on board the gliders, were expected to attack and seize three important bridges across the River Orne and the Caen Canal. They were to defend them until the more heavily armed paras arrived.

      Whilst the men of 9 Para were tackling the Merville guns and 3 Para were destroying four vital bridges on the Dives, 5 Para were busy attacking, mine-clearing and preparing a landing zone for the glider-borne troops who were following. Later in the night over two-hundred more gliders arrived in the area in what was a vital part of the overall operation. They all landed in zones secured by the men of the 6th Airborne Division. Simply put, without the British 6th Airborne, and the men and women of its rank and file, the D-Day landings could not have been attempted, let alone successful, and Britain today would be a very different place to live in.

      In September 1939 Albert Childs was a twenty-one year-old engineer working for the British Rail in London. He had recently married Kate Cooling and was settling into a happy family life, with their one-year-old daughter. At the same time events across Europe were taking a sinister turn, which led to a declaration of war, by Britain, on the German nation. Warned by the tales of world-war-one, relayed to him by his father and uncles, Albert decided the thought of being drafted into the armed forces and then ‘stuck in a trench somewhere in Europe,’ didn’t appeal to him at all. So, after thinking long and hard about his options, he took the brave step of volunteering for the British Army in the hope of securing a better deal for himself than the conscripted soldier would later on.

      In the October of that year he packed his bags and, with a heavy heart, said his goodbyes, reported for duty at Plymouth’s Millbay Barracks and began his military training. Shortly afterwards Albert was posted to the Royal Military Police and received training in all aspects of military law. Being awarded the coveted red-cap would mean a better war than that of the regular foot soldiers and volunteering had already proven to be a wise decision. He saw his first action after a posting to North Africa, where Italian & German forces had been building up and Albert became involved in the activities of the Long Range Desert Group, who used parachute soldiers for the first time.

      Until 1940 Britain had adopted a defensive policy but in June of that year Winston Churchill announced a new approach that included striking directly at the enemy. On 22June 1940, in a memo to the war office, Churchill wrote, ‘We ought to have a Corps of at least 5000 parachute troopers. I hear something is being done already to form such a Corps but only, I believe, on a very small scale. Advantage must be taken of the summer to train these forces who none-the-less can play their part meanwhile as shock troops in home defence. Pray let me have a note from the War Office on this subject.’

      It had been the early successes of the Long Range Desert Group, and a five-hundred man Commando Battalion who also had a parachute wing, that persuaded Churchill to instruct Major General Browning to form the 1st Airborne Parachute Brigade Division. Once again Albert was towards the front of the volunteers and found himself selected for the brand new airborne division, which was to later become part of the 6th Airborne Division.

      The 1st Airborne’s Provost Company (Military Police) was to be located at Bulford Army Camp on the edge of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, southern England. It is a bleak and wind-swept place that served as home to the Royal Artillery during the First World War and where Lord Kitchener himself had visited his troops. By the 1940’s it had hardly changed at all and became the location for all the early parachute regiment recruitment and instruction. Training at Bulford was designed to be a very tough test of strength and character and recruits were required to fight opponents, in a no rules and no holds barred contest, for a period of at least two minutes. These contests resembled nothing more than a pub brawl or a street fight, only without anyone stepping in to break them up. However, Albert had grown up in a rough London area as the son of a semi-professional bare knuckle boxer who

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