14 minute read
LAURIE WEEDEN
from Dialogue 2018
THE ACCIDENTAL HERO
5 June 1944, 22.45 hours, RAF Blakehill Farm, Wiltshire
A green Very light shoots up into the still-darkening dusk sky. The operation is on. Six Airspeed Horsa gliders, towed by Dakotas, rise up into the night. Crossing out over the Channel at Littlehampton and leaving the bright white RAF beacon light behind them, they extinguish their navigation lights and head for France. This is Operation Tonga and the start of D-Day.
Hitler was getting rather troublesome and they didn't have much trouble getting 'people to sign up'.
October 2018: I am sitting in Laurie and Ann Weeden’s kitchen. It is here that Laurie sat for artist Martin Yeoman, as part of Last of the Tide – a collection of 12 portraits of D-Day Veterans, commissioned by HRH The Prince of Wales in 2015. The portrait is light and ethereal, but it perhaps fails to quite capture Laurie’s twinkle, still very much in evidence.
Laurie was born four years shy of the end of WW1, “within the sound of the bells of Wandsworth Jail”. His father worked as a bank official at Schroders, but longed for the countryside – inspired by camping trips to Leith Hill with friends before WW1. “On Easter Saturday, 1913, they took one of the last horse-drawn buses out of London to the Coldharbour area for conversion to a caravan.” The family subsequently moved to Great Bookham and Laurie started at the Royal Grammar School, Guildford on 16 September 1931, despite “exorbitant fees of four guineas a term”. He remembers ‘Smiler White’, Scout master and a “brilliant maths teacher” and AJB Green, of whom they “walked in fear”. He was, Laurie says, “a highly effective Headmaster” and the “place was very well-run”, if somewhat “spartan” compared with today. “All the classrooms were cold, particularly the Big School Room, which just had pipe-stoves, and the loos were appallingly bad, basic in the extreme.” Articled to a chartered accountant, aged just 16, he started work in the West End in 1938. Despite not being “much enamoured” of the OTC at school, he also joined the Territorial Army (TA) at the behest of his father, a one-time corporal cook in the London Rifle Brigade during WW1. The Territorial Unit was 318 Battalion Royal Engineers (searchlights), headquartered in Guildford and Laurie, not yet 17, was designated “Boy Weeden”. As he explained, “Hitler was getting rather troublesome, they didn’t have much trouble getting people to sign up”.
Having served a month’s compulsory training in the summer of 1939, on the outbreak of WW2 that September, Laurie was called up for full-time service with the rank of Sapper. He was transferred to a Territorial Searchlight Battalion which had been raised from the staff of Bentalls Department Store in Kingston, and for whom the first operational area was the defence of Portsmouth. Searchlights were used extensively in defense against nighttime bomber raids during the Second World War. Controlled by sound locators, searchlights could track bombers, indicating targets to anti-aircraft guns and night fighters. The searchlight equipment was from the Great War however and clearly “inadequate”. “We had difficulty in picking up a Tiger Moth at 80mph, so we weren’t much good at picking up a Dornier at 250mph”. ´
In 1941, notice came round the Army for volunteers for Royal Air Force air crew. The medical, amongst other things, involved blowing a column of mercury up a tube and holding it for one minute, which he passed with “momentous effort”. He also managed to pass the hearing test despite “rather poor hearing”, having received the test words – ‘Cardington’ and ‘tomatoes’ from a preceding soldier. On the suggestion that this might be considered cheating, Laurie is clear: “unashamedly”, he chuckles.
It was “rough and tough”, a “cross between the Guards Depot at Caterham and Siddi-bel-Abbès – renowned training camp of the French Foreign Legion.”
Following the cancellation of transfers from the Army to the RAF – a fact they learned in the Daily Mirror – Laurie volunteered for the Glider Pilots (later the Army Air Corps). He was sent for eight weeks of ‘eliminator testing’ at the Glider Pilot depot at Tilshead. It was “rough and tough”, a “cross between the Guards Depot at Caterham and Siddi-bel-Abbès – renowned training camp of the French Foreign Legion”.
80 hours of training on Tiger moths at the flying school at Booker followed (the airfield where they subsequently made the 1965 film, Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines) and, after an unprecedented two Chief Flying Instructor Tests, Laurie – “to his astonishment” – was sent solo.
Laurie received his wings and was made Sergeant in December 1942, having completed Glider Training School at Shobdon on the Welsh Border. Along with about ten other recently qualified pilots, the achievement was appropriately celebrated at a tavern in Leicester Square. He awoke next day “with a hangover that had to be experienced to be believed”. I imagine Laurie cut a fine figure that Christmas. Mike Peter’s book Glider Pilots in Sicily, portrays Laurie as not only as “a purveyor of doubtful jokes, but also as a ladykiller”. Laurie and Mike are still in touch and, Laurie tells me, when Mike teases him in this vein, his reply is always the same, “chance would have been a lovely thing.”
In 1943, Laurie headed for Tunisia on the Cunard Liner The Samaria, via Algiers. He believes his Squadron was earmarked for the Sicily operation, but they never made it. The rumour was that the army had “lost them, which was... fortuitous... bearing in mind the horlicks of the Sicily landings”. In September his Unit joined the 1st Airborne Division for the seaborne invasion of Italy, landing at Taranto in the troopship Princess Beatrix (requisitioned from the old Hook of Holland to Harwich route). The Italian Navy, having surrendered, was “steaming off to Malta” and they were “greeted on the steps of the quay by the local Italian Mayor”. It was, he says wryly, “the right sort of invasion”. Initially they “had nothing for the glider pilots to do with no aircraft there, but they had no stevedores”, so Laurie and his fellow soldiers were consigned to unloading ships. He remembers, with more laughter, “a shell dropping out from a landing net nose first onto the quayside”.
In March 1944, Laurie was posted to an operational squadron at RAF Blakehill Farm. On his first trip he was “detailed to fly an American glider up to Ayr in Scotland. It was a typical April day with great showers on the way”. In thick cloud and seriously out of position with the tug aircraft, he decided to release and emergency land on a Welsh hillside. He was “so lucky that day (I have a guardian angel), because if the cloud had occurred over Liverpool Bay – this was March 1944 – a forced landing in the Irish Sea would have been pretty cold, and I’m not sure we had ‘Mae Wests’ on board” (WW2 nickname for life jackets).
Two months later, in May 1944, six crews at Blakehill were detailed for an “unspecified operation which involved a moonlight landing without flare path”. They thought that it was going to be supplying the French resistance who were much in the news at the time, but early in June they were briefed for the operation – “the big show, the night before D-day.”
D-Day: 6 June 1944, 00.45 hours
Reaching France in the early hours of 6 June, the six Horsa gliders pass over flashes, bangs and the rising smoke of the bombing of the Merville battery. Some way ahead, a line of red tracer shoots up in front of the glider nose, missing Laurie’s glider and the tug plane towing them. As they clear the cloud and dust from Merville, down on his left, Laurie spots a flare path, laid out by the preceding Paras. The morse code flash is ‘N’ rather than ‘K’, but the homing beacon is indicting to the tug pilot that they have now arrived over the chosen landing zone and Laurie has to make a decision. He releases from the tug. For the rest of the flight they are on their own. Airpower only. No engine. No radio contact. The Horsa glider has a wingspan of 88 feet (27m). It is 67 feet (20m) long, made almost entirely of wood and - fully loaded with two pilots, four RASC (Service Corps) drivers, a Brigade Ordinance Warrant Officer, an ambulance jeep, trailer and the medical supplies and blood plasma they are carrying - weighs seven tonnes. Laurie puts on full flap (reputedly the size of barn doors) and the Horsa comes almost straight down, like a lift. But the Pathfinder Paras have crossed the ‘T’ of the flare path at the wrong end. Laurie is now attempting to land downwind with a 27-knot wind on his tail. They hit the ground at speed, dinging in the nosewheel of the tricycle undercarriage, and now they are tearing across a French field, in the dark, towards a line of trees. Laurie slams on the brakes and they come to a stop about 20 yards from the treeline. With the exception of a light ack-ack gun away on the other side of the landing zone it is an “unopposed landing” into German-occupied France. They now have to get the tail of the glider off. In common with many other gliders that night, difficulty is experienced in detaching the tail assemblies, but the tail is high because of the dinged-in front wheel, so the six soldiers improvise. They connect their toggle ropes together, hoist it over the tail and tug. Finally, they get it free and the jeep drives out into the night. It is soon after commandeered by a Royal Engineer Officer. The medical supplies are jettisoned in favour of explosives which are then used to blow the bridge over the River Dives at Troarn, helping to secure the eastern flank for the Allied Forces landing. ´
Laurie’s job, at this point, was effectively complete. He was to report to the rendez-vous at Touffreville and serve as infantry if required. In common with thousands of British soldiers landing in France that night, they did not, at this point, know where they were, due to the misplaced homing beacon. He and his co-pilot joined the Paras and advanced into enemy territory in open order formation. Laurie remembers a friendly stray white horse accompanying them as they advanced in the dark and, later, an offer of beer from a café-owner as they arrived in the village of Herouvillette. It is an offer they were forced to refuse, “having other rather important business to attend to”. As the column of troops moved through the village a shout went up in German accompanied by a rattle of machine-gun fire. The troops scattered, taking cover wherever possible, but the column was split in two and all the officers were in the front. Laurie, aged just 22, was the senior NCO in the rear end of the column. He had a map and by now knew where they were, so he led the 30 soldiers from the village and up onto a hill to rejoin the front half of the original column of troops. His was, as Laurie pointedly notes “a rather short command”.
As dawn broke, Laurie and the recently reunited column of troops made their way through the woods of Bois de Bures. Soon after, the beach landings at Normandy began. It was, Laurie says, “very noisy” and “rather nerve-wracking” particularly when the rocket ships commenced firing. Breaking cover, they finally arrived in Touffreville – their original designated meeting point – where they met up with the rest of their flight. Colonel Pearson, the distinguished Colonel of 8th Parachute Regiment (quadruple DSO) decided the glider pilots were “no longer required” so, with no clear route back to the coast because of the fighting, they lay down “under a large apple tree and went to sleep”. Nine of the original 12 glider pilots made their way to Brigade HQ at Les Mesnil later that day. One of the three who did not make it, a sergeant, whose glider had badly overshot, was assisted by the local villagers to evade capture by the Germans. He left a note with one of its members for his parents in case he should not make it, which sadly he did not. After the war, the Frenchman delivered that note and subsequently married the Sergeant’s sister.
The nine pilots slept in a ditch on 6 June, in a “rather disturbed night, because the Canadian Paras were fighting nearby”. On their way to the coast, they were called upon to assist a stray glider pilot to release the tail from his own glider, and then detailed to escort 130 prisoners back to divisional HQ. Laurie remembers that when the interpreter told the prisoners that if they tried to escape they would be shot, “they all started to laugh”; as forcibly drafted soldiers from occupied territories, being taken prisoner was exactly what they wanted.
Crossing the bridge at Ranville, which had then been taken by the Allies, the pilots finally reached Ouistreham, at the end of ‘Sword Beach’ – one of the five key sectors for the Normandy landings. The mood was victorious, and they drank beer in a café, before loading on to a Buffalo (amphibious tank) to take them on to a landing ship tank and then home to England. They were back on base just three days after they left. “And that was D-Day. Incredible really, we were walking about the place as though we owned it and just a day later, the Germans were getting their act together and it would have been a totally different story.”
WW2 was, for Laurie, “a 12-day war: three days in Normandy, and nine days in Arnhem”. 32 Horsa gliders from Blakehill Farm flew in the first lift to Arnhem and all of them arrived at the designated landing zone, at Wolfheze about eight miles from “the bridge too far”. Eight days later, just half of the 65 who had set out to Arnhem with Laurie returned. It is a tale that requires more time... So day nine of Arnhem, having swum across the Rhine and stepped out on to the south bank of the river, turned out to be the last day of Laurie’s war. Although he went on to train on US gliders in preparation for service in the Far East, the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to a close in August 1945, following VE Day in Europe on 8 May earlier that year.
Laurie was demobilized in 1946. He and his two brothers had survived WW2, exactly as the three sons of his grandmother had survived WW1. He returned to accountancy and married his boss’s secretary. After her untimely death from breast cancer in 1969, Laurie married Ann, to whom he has now been married for 46 years. She tells me that “tolerance” and a “sense of humour” is their secret.
Laurie’s ‘active service’ may have been brief, but it was vital – in all senses of the word. The Allied invasion of Northern France in 1944 is generally considered to have been a turning point in the war, giving the Allies the foothold in mainland Europe that they needed. The troops and supplies that Laurie and his fellow glider pilots flew into German-occupied territory, on 5/6 June 1944, blew the bridges along the invasion’s eastern border, preventing the German armour and troops from moving in to attack the British and Allied troops landing by sea and air.
The work of the glider pilots was daring and dangerous; at Arnhem nearly 20% of the Glider Pilot Regiment were fatalities, so it seems doubly odd that Laurie had no great flying aspiration. Like many who survived, Laurie does not see his story as one of ‘daring-do’. He does not see himself as a ‘hero’. “We volunteered for something which seemed to be dangerous, and at Arnhem we were not to be disappointed. I just wanted to do something useful...”
To all those who were ‘useful’, including our own accidental and most treasured of RGS heroes, we owe an unpayable debt of gratitude. ■
