JUST after midnight on June 6, 1944, six platoons of British troops, sitting silently in their gliders, swooped low over the Normandy countryside and braced themselves for the roughest landing of their lives.

They were the first Allied soldiers to land on French soil that night, launching the crucial opening attack of the D-Day invasion.

Under the command of Major John Howard, a force of 180 landed in large Horsa gliders, known as flying coffins, at precisely 16 minutes past midnight in an operation to suprise the Germans.

Dropping out of the sky in their flimsy gliders, the men from the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry secured the Allies their first D-Day success with the daring capture of Pegasus Bridge.

In the first glider to land that night was Denis Edwards, now 79 and living in Lancing, West Sussex.

As a 19-year-old sniper private, he was terrified waiting at the airfield for take-off.

He said: "I was frightened to death. We all were."

Two German Panzer tank divisions had recently arrived in the area south of Caen, about five miles from where the troops were targeted to land.

Mr Edwards said: "We thought we were literally on a suicide mission."

The military objective was to secure two bridges -over the Caen Canal and the River Orne -and to hold off enemy counter-attacks until relieved.

Once the gliders were in the air, all fears disappeared.

"I think I just accepted that you have a time to be born, a time to live and a time to die," he said. "When our friends got killed around us, we just had to accept it and that was it.

"On the way over, we were sat in the gliders all singing our heads off. We were singing as loud as we could until we reached the French coast, when we had to keep quiet."

Towed by Halifax bombers, the group of six gliders, each carrying 30 men, made their way across the Channel.

When they reached the French coast, "all the searchlights and flack started going up", remembers Mr Edwards. "They were firing into the night sky and it looked like a big firework display all along the French coast.

"As we approached the coast, our six gliders were cast off. We were at about 5,000ft and we went into the most horrendous dive I have ever done in a Horsa.

"We dived straight down; we had to get down quickly to get out of the range of the anti-aircraft guns. The idea was to trick the Germans into thinking they had gunned us down."

The highly skilled pilots in five of the six gliders landed exactly where they were supposed to be, while one was some distance adrift, having been cast off from the bomber in the wrong place.

Mr Edwards said: "We landed within about 75 yards of the canal bridge that we were after, which was named Pegasus Bridge by the French later."

But touchdown itself was far from smooth. Hitting the ground at about 100mph, the front of Mr Edwards's glider "stove in", throwing the two pilots out of the cockpit.

"The rest of us were all knocked out for a second or two."

There were about 30 German troops guarding the bridge over the canal and they were taken completely by surprise.

"They fired a few shots and fled in terror when we crossed the bridge, shouting our heads off and firing our weapons," he said.

In only 15 minutes, with the loss of only two men, the code signal "Ham and Jam" was sent out to say both the bridges had been captured, along with the neighbouring Gondree Cafe -the first part of occupied France liberated on D-Day.

The initial landing operation was "a piece of cake" compared with what the troops had to deal with for the rest of the day.

Mr Edwards said: "From dawn onwards, we had Germans shooting at us and firing shells and mortars at us right throughout D-Day.

"We were losing people all over the place and we were in big trouble."

The 7th Battalion of the 5th Parachute Brigade eventually arrived to take up defensive positions in an outer ring, Mr Edwards said.

"The Commandos arrived just in the nick of time; we were virtually out of ammo."