“It seemed as though every seaport in England had belched its contents into the[English] Channel,” he later wrote.
Air Commodore – later air vice marshal – Frank Bladin in Darwin before leaving Australia to prepare for D-Day.Bladin family
“Great battleships slid along like great grey swans,their two and three-fingered turrets turned beachwards,belching hot metal on to those French seaside resorts.
“In peace,in this month of June,these villages would be filled with trippers,but today they were ablaze,sending columns of smoke high into the air.
“Some of our troop ships were already on their way back to England,others nudged beachwards,where the sea was scarred with the wakes of relays of landing craft fussing between ship and shore.”
For Bladin,a celebrated Australian pilot and officer who became air vice marshal of the RAAF,D-Day was the culmination of months of secret planning and dangerous exercises in the skies of Britain and over Europe.
Bladin’s Halifax bomber prepares to tow the first of a wave of gliders from a British airfield to Normandy on D-Day.Bladin family
He was in charge of planning and training air crews to fly hundreds of gliders and thousands of parachute troops into the crucial D-Day battles.
The glider and airborne assaults are regularly overlooked in the accounts of D-Day,but they were critical to the success of the massive and bloody storming of Normandy.
As Britain,the US and their allies sailed the greatest seaborne armada in history from England to France to set about turning the tide of World War II against Nazi Germany,waves of aircraft filled the skies above,many of them towing gliders filled with assault troops and heavy weaponry.
Bladin,at the time an RAAF air commodore,was brought from Australia in late 1943 to become senior air staff officer of 38 Group,Royal Air Force.
Gliders lie scattered on the fields of France after landing on D-Day.Badin family
It was a job like no other:to prepare to invade Normandy by clouds of gliders and US and British parachutists.
The gliders were not the sleek sports craft that dance the thermals today. They were big wooden contraptions,each capable of carrying 28 fighting men from the army,plus weapons.
They were towed by powerful warplanes,their pilots and navigators transferred from Bomber Command,many of whom were Australians,New Zealanders and Canadians flying alongside their British colleagues.
The pilots,accustomed to using navigational aids on their high-level bombing raids across Germany,had to be retrained to use land maps at night,to take off towing heavily laden gliders and to deliver them over enemy territory at low levels.
The bombing of Darwin in 1942.RAAF
Bladin,born in the little Gippsland town of Korumburra in 1898,had been flying since joining the in 1923.
During his extraordinary career,he won great acclaim for essentially rebuilding Australia’s north-west area defences after the.
He was the first Australian decorated by the United States in the Pacific war. He was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry after leading a bombing raid by US B-17 Flying Fortresses on Celebes in the Dutch East Indies – now Sulawesi,in Indonesia – and surviving an attack by nine Japanese fighters while returning to base.
But gliders and airborne troops were new to him when he was given the task in November 1943 of figuring out how to train and land thousands of parachutists and hundreds of gliders of the 6th British Airborne Division alongside two US airborne divisions in Normandy for D-Day – less than six months away.
A B-17 Flying Fortress.AP
“We trained the hard way,” Bladin said in a speech in 1945. “Accurate navigation – ‘bang on’ is the air force slang – was our motto.”
Crews were trained in all weather over enemy territory,often dropping French resistance fighters and equipment by parachute.
“As crews became fit for work,they went on these sorties,weaving and threading their course through the holes in the enemy flak defences on the coast,deep into enemy territory,over lakes,forests and mountains,to the correct spot in the dark,and home again through the same defences,watching for night fighters,noting the flak bursts,watching for fighter flares,” he said.
“A few such trips as these are as realistic an aid to planning as any I know,and certainly an antidote to sleepiness.”
US soldiers approach shore during the D-Day operations.US Coast Guard
Secrecy meant even the pilots and crews could not know where the D-Day landings would occur. A film was made of a model of the proposed landing sites so glider pilots could practise their final run,even if they did not know where it was.
The result was that the first group of gliders to land on Normandy by the light of a half moon – only minutes after midnight on D-Day – hit their targets so “bang on” that one craft slid through a fence surrounding the German defence. Most of the flying machines were wrecked.
They disgorged their fighting men so fast that a canal crossing known as Pegasus Bridge,critical to protecting Allied troops during the coming beach landing,was captured before the German defenders had time to react.
Bladin was kept abreast of the nighttime landing from his group’s operations headquarters in London.
But his approach was always to lead from the front:soon after learning of the success of the first wave,he rushed to the Tarrant Rushton airfield in Dorset,near Bournemouth.
He boarded the lead Halifax bomber shackled to a tank-carrying glider weighing seven tonnes and took off for France at the head of the second wave of 145 gliders.
“Our take-off was in the afternoon. It was fine and the sun shone,” Bladin wrote in an unpublished memoir treasured by his family.
“As our British aircraft swept away from our eight airfields,the air space to the west of us[was] filled with the American aircraft carrying the US airborne divisions.
“It was like watching hordes of flying ants swarming out of the ground on a hot,sultry Australian afternoon in the bush.
“Below us every village was filled with upturned faces clearly showing up in the westering sun,clearly conveying the same message as[Horatio] Nelson’s signal,but possibly adding a prayer:“God go with you.”
Nelson,the vice-admiral of the Royal Navy,ordered a famous message to be flagged before the battle of Trafalgar in 1805 against the fleets of France and Spain:“England Expects That Every Man Will Do His Duty”.
“Slowly,the lumbering air armada reached the English coast,each of the three snake-like columns over its own allotted starting point,” Bladin wrote.
A World War II Spitfire.Gaynor Sipolis/Brisbane Airport Corporation
“Here we were enveloped by hordes of British fighter aircraft – Spitfires – which were to escort us.
“There were some 20 squadrons of them,for at the final conference in London,[British prime minister Winston] Churchill had been upset when told that our losses could be up to 20-25 per cent. Perhaps this over-supply of escort fighters was to make sure our losses did not reach that figure.
“In fact,I saw only one German aircraft,and it was in a vertical position,in flames.”
As he looked down on the ship-crammed English Channel,Bladin found himself reminded of the speech by Shakespeare’s Henry V on the eve of St Crispin’s Day.
Before the Battle of Agincourt,which fell on Saint Crispin’s Day in 1415,Henry V urged his men – vastly outnumbered by the French – to imagine the glory and immortality that would accompany victory. It introduced the term “we few,we happy few,we band of brothers”.
“As we crossed the beach,we could recognise our target areas – the landing zones began to show up,” Bladin wrote.
The medal awarded to Bladin by ground crew at Tarrant Rushton.Bladin family
“No longer spectators,we became participants. We were holding a steady course,nearing the point where we would cast off our gliders. In the lead aircraft we were attracting the attention of an anti-aircraft gun mounted on a German barge in the Caen Canal below us.
“The lead aircraft is usually a bit safer than the one further back,and so it proved,for one of the following aircraft went down. Just at that moment,a Spitfire hurtled down past our nose,and the anti-aircraft gun ceased firing and toppled into the canal.”
The gliders were released at 6000 feet,their passengers readying for ground battle,and Bladin and the surviving tug-planes returned to England,skimming the waves.
The ground crew at Tarrant Rushton had a hand-sawn medal waiting for him,inscribed,“For Tuggery,Bushman Bladin,6-6-44”.
From this,he learned he was known among the crews he had trained as “Bushman” or “Bushranger” for his “stand and deliver” attitude.
Two days later,he was mentioned in dispatches for leading the gliders into Normandy. A day later,he returned to France to plan further incursions into enemy territory.
He was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in the King’s Birthday Honours in June 1950.
There was much more to the storied military career of the air vice-marshal born in Korumburra,but his memoirs suggest nothing topped D-Day.
He retired from service to a property near Yass in NSW,and later moved to Melbourne,where he died on February 2,1978.
One of his grandsons,Peter Crock,has travelled from Melbourne to Normandy to represent the extended Bladin family at this week’s D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations.
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