Shropshire Magazine

Godfrey Yardley explains the replica project to pupils and staff of Burton Borough School.

Shirley Tart salutes some of the bravest volunteers to take to the skies

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark nor even eagle flew –

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 

John Magee’s poem High Flight perfectly captures the relationship between a man and his airborne machine. From microlights to bi-planes, jaunty jets to the mighty Red Arrows, single seaters to helicopters.

Or memories of a Horsa glider, with cramped crew and daring pilot, dropped behind enemy lines in the early years of the Second World War.

Sometimes all survived. Often, they did not.

Valiant hearts who did make it back from jungle and desert, trench and blooded woodland, are dying off. To comrades who shared that one life-or-death moment, their memories are golden.

At assault glider pilots’ gatherings, the hard thing now is how fewer they are since last year, how stark the empty chairs. I was privileged to be invited to the West Midlands Assault Glider Association lunch this year, starting at RAF Shawbury to see the progress of the Horsa glider being recreated there in a project led by Major Ray Conningham and which every Tuesday sees former Para Godfrey Yardley from Lilleshall putting on his apron for a shift on the Horsa. The gliders, used before helicopters, carried troops into enemy territory and were towed behind Halifaxes, Dakotas and Stirlings.

Operations in some of history’s notorious locations included Pegasus Bridge in June 1944 during the Normandy Landings, which for many did indeed prove a bridge too far. The same went for the troop-carrying gliders used in other major airborne assaults such as the ill-fated Arnhem operation.

The Shawbury project is a tribute to the present and future as well as to the past, fashioned as it is by a team ranging from veterans to apprenticed youngsters.

It has been nearly 70 years since other young lads with eyes ablaze and little fear in their hearts climbed into the cockpit of a Horsa and dropped into hostile and dangerous places. They sometimes didn’t survive the landings – up to 60 per cent of them did not survive the war.

The Rev Preb Chris Thorpe with his father’s Horsa pilot equipment.

Those who did became The Few of their days. The special memorial service this September for the West Midland group was led by their chaplain, the Reverend Prebendary Chris Thorpe, vicar at St Andrew’s Church in Shifnal. Chris’s father was a Horsa glider pilot and Chris’s memoris of being taken to Normandy as a teenager are crystal clear. He honours these men and their almost reckless bravery in the Horsa glider, those massive, engineless, wood-and-canvas machines.

Veterans of World War II are now disappearing; those who remain remember with awesome clarity the part they played, the close shaves they survived, the friends they made, and all too soon lost.

Michael Watson from Oswestry is 82 and is one of those men. He can talk about dates, planes and personnel with never a note nor a reminder in sight. Michael doesn’t even have an old picture, in or out of uniform. He says: “There weren’t cameras about and film wasn’t easily available. I had a picture once but lost it.”

A snap of him in uniform would have been nice but, you know, Sgt Michael Watson doesn’t need one. Old soldiers, airmen and sailors who have seen war in both gore of death and glory of survival, will never forget.

Mary and Edward Montague with his Sam Browne belt, and (right) Edward in uniform.

Edward Montague of Church Stretton began a 24-year military career as a teenage soldier and ended it as an RAF Squadron Leader. In between times, he was Cadet of the Year, was awarded the coveted Sam Browne belt, and became an army captain. Before that, Ted Montagu was also a Horsa pilot.

The operations and the gliders themselves were so risky that the young men towed into danger had to volunteer; none was ordered to serve.

Ted volunteered for the Army when he was 17 and joined the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. But the Horsa awaited him.

He says: “After Arnhem, the Glider Pilot Regiment had been decimated so they sent round a team telling soldiers what they did, how they did it and where they went. They also got extra rations and extra pay, five shillings a day more than the three shillings we got. They asked if we wanted to volunteer.”

The young soldier did just that. He was 18 years old.

Awesome

And so began a round of training, from Edinburgh to Shobdon in Herefordshire to Fairford to Brize Norton. They first learned to fly Tiger Moths, then Hotspur gliders, before taking to the skies in the awesome Horsa. Being towed by a plane which broke down or where the tow snapped was not unusual.

One night saw Ted landing his bereft machine on dark and bumpy ground, a few scary yards from what they discovered was the imposing house of famous designer William Morris!

Horsa gliders landing in 1944.

Like others, his service is littered with varied hair-raising experiences, survival often a cliff-edge job. Like nearly getting to the Far East and to certain death – the Hiroshima bomb exploded just before they were due to leave. In the Middle East, Ted’s leg was smashed, putting him in hospital for a couple of years. In all, over a 24-year period Squadron Leader Montague lived and served in 40 different places. Now, for him and wife Mary, peaceful Church Stretton with its hills and vales is a million miles away from wartime bumpy landings.

Godfrey Yardley is an ex Para, 14654596 of the 10th Worcesters, 2nd Oxford and Bucks, who had joined Edgmond Home Guard at 17. He went on to survive the Rhine crossings and write his memoirs, A Village Lad Goes to War.

But that wasn’t the fate of many thousands who left their villages, towns and cities to stand against the enemies of freedom and justice. Some are recorded only on war memorials in our land for which they fought and died.

Godfrey could so easily have been a statistic because 60 per cent of Horsa pilots and men never made it.

One day in a German wood, Godfrey could have been one of them. Hundreds of Horsas and their planes left England – he was in glider number 2. Over the Rhine, there was a heavy barricade of fire, a bullet went through the man in front and flashed between Godfrey and the soldier sitting shoulder to shoulder with him.

Many had died before the glider hit the ground, others died on impact, some died from their injuries, only seven could run for it. Godfrey Yardley survived both bullet and landing. Operation Varsity was entering the history books.

“We agreed to try to link with the nearest Allied unit, the 1st Ulster Rifles, a thousand-yard run. We could hear the enemy sweeping the wood and ran like bats out of hell. Fortunately the Royal Ulster Rifles had taken the bridge and an Irish voice shouting ‘Halt, who goes there’ was a welcome sound,” says Godfrey.

Wartime service also saw him helping sell the Germans a dummy. In 1943 floating dummy tank landing craft were designed to fool reconnaissance aircraft in the weeks before the real D-Day landings. Boats were moved to invasion ports on the south coast and dummies moored in the south-east, suggesting a strike on north-eastern France.

Remember this: The soldier, above all others, prays for peace for he must bear the scars and deepest wounds of war. To soldiers, add sailors, airmen and -women and all who still go forward in faith for their land and their people.

And don’t forget the Horsa pilots.

Horsas were used on such operations as the Arnhem operation and the crossing of the Rhine.