Wright knew that the six gliders held 170 officers and men of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry commanded by 32-year-old Major John Howard. Our task was to deliver six gliders to the vicinity of the bridges spanning the River Orne and the canal running parallel to it.” “Although we had completed about a dozen operations previously-dropping supplies, weapons and ammunition, and sometimes agents, to the Resistance Movement, mainly in France-we knew this flight to be something special and that the price of failure would be very high. Every so often we felt the drag of the glider as it bumped around in our slipstreams, each time pulling us a little way off course. Although we could not see them, we knew we were accompanied by five other Halifax bombers, each towing a Horsa. We were flying over the English Channel towards France at about 7,000 feet.
In one of the bombers, navigator Walter Russell Wright recalled, “It was well towards midnight on 5th June. The six bombers and gliders had taken off from their field at RAF Tarrant Rushton at 10:45 PM on June 5, and now were homing in on their objective in France. And each was towing a Horsa glider filled with up to 28 superbly trained soldiers. Only six British Halifax bombers were involved in this phase of Operation Overlord: three from 644 Squadron and three from 298 Squadron. Late on the night of June 5, 1944, while American paratroopers were on their way to drop behind Utah Beach, another, smaller air armada carrying 170 British airborne troops was also dashing headlong into battle like an aerial cavalry charge towards the far eastern flank of the Normandy invasion site.