I'm John Matthew with Sir Max Hastings.

The new book is Sword Beach.

This is one of the two beaches that the British Army took upon themselves on June 6, 1944. The left shoulder of the British advance is held by the sixth parachute division, six para commanded, and the commanders are everything here. Their understanding, their morale,

their choices of deputies and subordinates all the way down, shape the nature of the morale that

lands out of jumping out of airplanes all over the place. And we need to introduce Major General

Richard Gale. What do we need to know about him,

Max? He was definitely a good guy that some of the other British Airborne commanders weren't

all geniuses, but everybody liked Richard Gale. He was incredibly gung-ho type. He landed in the first wave of gliders into Normandy himself.

And he landed with Chester Wilma, a great Australian war correspondent who vividly described

what it was like landing with Richard Gale. And Gail was one of those completely imperturbable

senior officers, who he was as good as the American, his American counterparts, Ridgeway and Gavin and so on.

And that's saying quite something.

The airborne did get a lot of the best in the Second World War, and certainly on D-Day, I think they had the best. And Gail did a brilliant

job of pulling together, this unbelievably chaotic landing. And the real job of the commander

in that sort of situation, when everybody can see that it's a mess and half the guys were

gone missing and the Germans have started to bring in heavy fire and all the rest of it, the great function of your divisional commander is just to keep everybody calm. And that's what Richard Gale did brilliantly. He put on this great mask of calm and confidence and he made lots of terrible jokes. And when

they captured a horse, Richard Gale insisted that they hang on to the horse because he felt

that it was going to be quite fun to ride around the perimeter. Well, actually, he had no real

intention of riding the horse with a lucky because he got killed by German mortifier pretty quickly.

But of course, if you see that your commander is worrying about when he's going to get an opportunity to ride his horse around the perimeter,

although it can be ridiculous, it can also make you laugh and calm you down when you're pretty scared.

And how could you not be scared that half the people who landed in Normandy, they'd never

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