Putney-born military hero General Sir Richard “Windy” Gale has been honoured by Wandsworth as a native-born son who was both a World War One hero but also a key player in making the D-Day invasion such a success.
Born in Putney’s Oakhill Road, Richard “Windy” Gale spent utmost of the first ten years of his life in Australia (his mother’s home country) but returned to the UK and studied hard for a planned career in the army. He initially failed the physical requirements to join the army but trained himself hard and in 1915 was accepted to military college.
He fought as part of the 164th Machine Gun Company of the 55th West Lancashire Division on the Western Front and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery in 1918 after going out under heavy fire to help retrieve the unit’s guns after German artillery had fired on them.
He stayed in the army and was known for reading voraciously and trying new ideas, particularly with aviation, In 1940 Winston Churchill, after seeing the use of paratroopers in the Battle of Crete, set up a unit of 5,000 paratroopers and Gale was picked to lead it.
D-Day landings
At dawn on D-Day Gale was crouched in a glider being towed across the English Channel, He was now head of Britain’s 6th Airborne Division, which despite its name was only the second of its type, and was promoted to Colonel before D-Day for getting his troops ready and able.
“Our great moment had arrived. All our training; all our endeavours; all our beliefs were at last to be put to the test,” he later wrote.
“We had tried to think of every contingency. We, the whole team, had studied, laboured, pondered and deduced. We knew what we could do and what we wanted. We knew just how far the bow would stretch.”
It was a bad landing, but back then gliders were, in the words of former pilots, controlled crash devices. A bad landing left Gale without a jeep so he walked, then found a horse, and headed into Ranville to organise the troops. The town, the first in France to be liberated, has a statue to him in front of the town hall.
Counterattack
After holding the Allied flank at Pegasus Bridge and then leading the counterattack he was awarded a DSO for his leadership in the campaign. After his unit suffering heavy casualties, Gale returned to the UK and began working on breaking into the heart of Germany itself – Operation Varsity, the biggest airborne attack the world have ever seen that secured the Rhine bridges needed to invade Germany.
On June, 1952 – eight years to the day after landing in Normandy – Gale was promoted to General and appointed head of the British Army of the Rhine. After over 40 years in the military he retired in 1957, but was recalled a year later to replace Field Marshal Montgomery as NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander, Europe – a post he held for another two years.
He finally retired, although remained Queen Elizabeth’s aide-de-camp for many years. He remained a South Londoner, dying in 1982 in Richmond just after his 86th birthday.
“General Richard Gale was critical to the successful D-Day landings, training and organising the 6th Airborne Division and pioneering a never before attempted full air deployment into enemy territory,” said Wandsworth’s Mayor Sana Jafri.
