Captain Geoffrey Forde
Unit : No.2 Forward Observation Unit
Captain Geoffrey Forde was an officer serving with the Royal Artillery when, in 1944, he volunteered to serve in the Airborne Forces. He completed parachute course 82, and was posted to No 2. Forward Observation Unit. After the war he wrote the following article about his part in the Rhine Crossing operation.
CROSSING THE RHINE - OPERATION VARSITY AND WHY I MISSED THE R.V.
It is a long operation getting 50 gliders off a runway. Some left about 5.15 a.m. We did not take-off till 7.30 a.m. and during that time we did exactly what we had intended to do. We stowed our kit away - checked our weapons - drew haversack rations and tea in a thermos for the journey and for 24 hours after landing - checked over wireless batteries - checked each other, and then sat down on the glider wheels and had a chat and a smoke. A NAAFI van came round and we drank hot sweet tea and had nearly another breakfast. Five of us - a glider pilot Captain, a Gunner Lieut (myself), an R.A.F. Sergeant (co-pilot), a Driver/Operator 'Bob Mortimer and Gunner Craven, who was my Technical assistant; aged about 25, 20, 19, 18 and 18 respectively. I was within 2 weeks of being 21. Nobody seemed windy - personally I was looking forward to it and hoping we would get down alright - after that I was not worried.
At 7.20 we climbed in and closed and bolted the doors. I sat just behind the pilots. Mortimer and Craven were in the tail and I could only see them by looking back over two motor-bikes, a jeep and a trailer. A tractor pulled the Glider out onto the runway and we were hooked up to a Stirling Bomber by a nylon tow-rope. The Stirling revved its engines to take up the slack. The pilot gave the thumbs-up sign. I looked at my watch - 7.30 precisely - we moved slowly off. We accelerated violently. The tow-rope stretched, then tightened - I was pressed back into my seat - we crashed and banged and bounced over the runway, making an appalling noise - the speed indicators and wind noises rose - a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach told me we were inevitably airborne - and the earth dropped away as we banked quietly to Port and increased height.
One rather interesting thing happened to me in the period between getting up and going into breakfast. A tall fair, rather quiet looking War Reporter had asked me if I would bring in his typewriter in my jeep and deposit it at Bde H.Q. as he had no room for it. He was going in by parachute. I accepted the type-writer, and after taking off I fixed it firmly in the jeep against the shock of landing. Well over two years later I saw a film "The True Glory" ["Theirs is the Glory"] of the 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem, and there was my quiet-looking War Reporter telling all England that when they met an Airborne Type to "bring him a drink". He was there at Arnhem and I hope sometime I shall have the chance to buy him a drink.
They were very brave men at Arnhem and he was with them. His name was Alan Wood.
We stooged around over Cambridgeshire for half-an-hour or so, and watched the sun come up. Then we set a course for Dover and, with two gliders on one side and one on the other we set off - a mighty column - droning down England at a steady 120 m.p.h. We talked, ate buns and drank tea, watched the countryside and thought about the immediate future.
It was a reasonably calm trip and I managed to keep down my breakfast, bacon and all, though Mortimer and Craven had a harder job in the tail. We crossed the Thames Estuary and I saw the "Flak-Forts" that had been set up there against German planes. Then we were over Kent, looking lovely in the early spring. It was a glorious day, and I sat for a while reciting Shakespeare to myself - the country looked so wonderful.
Exactly over Dover we wheeled left and were over the Channel, and at the same time the pilot pointed out little glints of wings in the sky - our Fighter Escort. We were a bare ten minutes over the Channel, but there, slap in the middle of it, with two small cargo ships moving towards it, was a glider. Its tow-rope had broken and down it had come.
Next moment we were over the Pas de Calais and looking down on France. Almost on the Cliffs was an immense area over which the bomb craters were, quite literally, overlapping. To say that it had been "plastered" was putting it very mildly - it was all shell-holes and no undamaged ground. The pilot passed me back the map showing our course, and I found it absurdly easy to map-read from the air in daylight - when you knew your position to start with. We ate more buns and chocolate and boiled sweets, smoked cigarettes and admired the view. Occasionally we passed through the slip-stream of our towing plane to find smoother going, but otherwise one was rather bored. We went over our jobs on landing for the ninth time.
Suddenly the pilot shouted, and pointed to port. For a moment I thought he had seen German Fighters, but it was to point out to me that the glider on that side had broken his tow-rope. I expected he would drop away, but the slip-stream of the whole air armada kept him up for several miles before he banked away towards Brussels. I thought of lunch at the Officer's club, with a Peche Melba into which one poured a little wine to give it extra flavor and for a moment I wished I was in that glider, or that the same thing would happen to us.
Suddenly the crisis came nearer. We crossed the Maas and I went Aft to warn the others it was nearly time. When I struggled back I saw, in front, the Rhine. There it was, a fine, wide, calm river, set in pleasantly rolling countryside. I watched it pass under us. Not a shot was fired.
Something made me look ahead, and I saw an appalling sight - we were going straight into Hades. Barring our way, and rising to easily 300 feet, was a solid mass of black smoke, stabbed repeatedly by vivid red flashes and hideous yellow streaks - but above all dark threatening, and thick. My stomach contracted at the sight, and my fingers buckling my safety belt became all thumbs. Suddenly two planes flashed by below us, two mighty Stirlings, slow, heavy bombers, but this time coming out of the smoke with their noses down and going like bats out of hell. Their obvious desire to get back to safety acted on me like a tonic. I laughed, and was myself again.
Quite deliberately the pilot pulled back the handle to release us from the plane. The noise of our passage grew less. His knuckles stood out white as he put her nose down and the sun dimmed out as we sailed down into the cloud.
It grew quite dark inside the glider and the noise of our passage increased again as we dived. Suddenly I heard what sounded like a nice wood fire crackling away below us before I realized it was rifle fire. * It sounded quite different from the air. Chips flew up out of the floor of the glider. A piece of pencil - shaped metal rattled against the roof and I knew somehow that it was hot. The noise increased - it was light, dark, light again and then almost black. The Perspex windscreen had a jagged hole in it and the pilot sagged, holding his right hand, then a frightening glare and a fearful crack behind me, coupled with a numbing blow that left me snagging forward on my safety belt.
I was hit, badly I feared. I looked to my right and saw that the co-pilot was now slumped in his seat and the pilot reaching out his left hand for the controls. We were in a very steep dive and he pulled back the stick. It came back easily - too easily. I looked to my left and saw, suspended above me by our angle of descent, the two motor-bikes with the jeep and trailer behind. Petrol was spurting from the motor-bikes. A terror of fire seized me. "Oh God", I prayed, "finish it quick, kill me off quickly and do not let it hurt too much!" I looked into the cockpit once more. The stick was right back, but it made no difference. The air-speed indicator read 160 m.p.h. and was still going up. For a fraction of time it was broad daylight - then blackness.
Sunlight - the sky - the wing of the glider pointing straight up like a Church Steeple to the sky - my leg is numb - my left wrist hurts - tracer bullets are whipping over me! Where is my helmet - its gone? I turned my head. On my left were pine trees, on my right the fragments of the glider. About half of one wing and part of the tail was recognizable, but the fuselage, jeep and trailer and cockpit seemed to have vanished, though somehow I knew they were there.
Crouched down in a tiny gulley was 'Bob' Mortimer, with his Sten at the ready, looking keen and eager. [1] I must have said something because he looked towards me and then crawled forward and dragged me, as I lay on my back, into the gulley. More tracer appeared to criss-cross over my head. I tell myself it is not as near as it looks, but this does not comfort me and I am frightened. Mortimer asks me where my helmet is, finds it and sticks it sideways on my head. The thick webbing chin-strap has torn like tissue paper. So has the 4-inch safety belt which should have held me in the glider, now being riddled by machine-guns. I have gone out through the side of the glider and about ten feet from it so it is hardly surprising that my chest and back ache a bit.
Just beyond Mortimer, the pilot and co-pilot are both alive and doing first aid on each other. Mortimer tells me that he and Craven are unwounded and that I have been "out" for ten minutes or so, but they are pinned down by fire. I look round. My right leg is O.K., but my left leg is numb, my right arm is numb and bloody and my head, chest and back and left arm all ache. I have had it. I tell Mortimer and Craven to go and find the rendezvous. I ask him where the aerials (with the codes in them) are. He does not know. [2] Suddenly he sees movement and I wonder if it is friend or foe.
WOUNDED - AND A PRISONER OF WAR.
They are Jerries - I tell him [Craven] and Mortimer to clear out, but it is too late - we both remember that if the Jerries capture Airborne [or] Commandos with their fighting knives on them the Jerries sometime use these knives to cut their throats! Mortimer snatches my knife - and his own - and throws them into some bracken. I hear running footsteps and shouts - then see five or six middle-aged men in uniforms of the German Home Guard. * They have rifles and fixed bayonets. They rush at us and one of them thrusts his bayonet at me. They all seem enormous from where I am lying. For a sickening moment I believe he is going to stick me through the stomach, but he checks his blow and just pricks me through the clothing with the point. They searched us and then tell Mortimer and Craven to march off as they are unhurt. Mortimer says, "Like hell I will" and squats down beside me, rips open my First Field Dressing and starts patching me up. They let him go ahead.
My leg is numb and I am worried about it. Mortimer takes off my right boot and cuts off my battledress trousers at the knee. He tells me it is not serious and quickly slaps my Field Dressing on it. Then he takes off my equipment. A German takes my watch, field-glasses, compass and pistol. Then Mortimer cuts away most of the right side of my battledress top, together with my shirt and vest. They are sodden with blood and it hurts. He takes his own dressing and puts it on the front my arm and shoulder. Somewhere he gets another and puts it round the back. A shell dressing also goes on at the back. I feel very queer and I must have cried out, because he takes out my morphia phial and shoots it into my left hand. He then tells me I am alright. I wish I was as sure.
Weakness or morphia take effect very quickly and much is vague. Somehow a stretcher appears - of course, we had one in the glider. The Jerries seem quite decent blokes. They help to lift me onto the stretcher. One of them grins at me encouragingly. Mortimer and Craven lift the stretcher and one of the Jerries walks behind with a rifle and shows us where to go. I am thirsty - terribly thirsty. Craven is hot and bothered looking - the stretcher with me on it must be heavy.
[1] & * See account by Gnr. R.W. 'Bob' Mortimer.
[2] 'Bob' Mortimer. "I had the frequency codes hidden in my pack, destroyed later".
END.
After a few weeks in a German POW Camp hospital, Captain Forde was released by advancing Allied Forces. After the War he became a successful businessman in civil engineering and lived in the Knutsford area. He met up with Bob Mortimer on the 50th Anniversary Commemorations of Operation Varsity in Germany.
My thanks to Bob Hilton for this account.