Eighty years ago this month a young bloke from south London called Wally Parr was floating through the night in a flimsy wooden glider a few thousand feet over the Channel. He wasn’t alone. Jammed alongside him in one of six such craft were his mates from the British army’s 6th Airborne Division. On the night before the D-day landings, they were heading behind enemy lines to capture a bridge from the Germans. Some wouldn’t see the dawn.
If the 181 men on these gliders were afraid, adrenaline and delusion may have helped still their nerves. “The thing that keeps most men going in battle,” reflects one, “is despite seeing people die left right and centre, they always get this idea that it’s not going to be them.” These were words of the late Pte Parr, who died in 2005, recorded during an interview after the second world war. Here, those words are brought to life by being lip-synced in a sweetly characterful performance by Samuel Lawrence, a young actor dressed in 1940s civvies.
