Allan Orpin, Jeep driver who braved hair-raising D-Day glider landings and Rhine crossing – obituary
Allan Orpin, who has died aged 98, was believed to be the last survivor of those who served with 6th Airborne Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment (6th AARR) in the glider-borne landings in Normandy and in the forced crossing of the Rhine.
On March 24 1945, Operation Varsity was launched with the aim of establishing a bridgehead across the Rhine for the main allied advance into Germany. Orpin, a Jeep driver with HQ Squadron, enplaned at RAF Tarrant Rushton, Dorset, and landed by Horsa glider near Wesel.
Orpin said afterwards that his abiding impression was that of total chaos. Eight Locust tanks had flown in Hamilcar cargo-carrying gliders; several of these had smashed on landing. In the trees, hanging from the branches, were American paratroopers who had been shot. Many of their comrades had been killed on landing: the static line had failed to open their parachutes, and their torn tunics showed that they had made desperate attempts to pull the ripcords of their reserve ’chutes.
The preliminary bombardment had obscured the battlefield with dense smoke and glider pilots found it difficult to identify their zones. There was also intense anti-aircraft fire. In daylight, gliders made easy targets and many were shot down at a height of a few hundred feet. Orpin found the landing zones littered with burning gliders.
Troops disembarking from gliders found themselves under attack and sometimes overwhelmed from pockets of fierce resistance. There were heavy casualties and Orpin helped to collect the dog tags from many of the fallen. To the end of his life, he was deeply affected by what he had seen.
Allan Gordon Orpin, the youngest of four children, was born in Walthamstow on January 17 1926. One Sunday in September 1939, immediately after the declaration of war, the air-raid siren sounded. Young Allan was a choirboy in church at the time. The whole congregation panicked and rushed down to shelter in the crypt. It was a false alarm.
He left school at 13 and began working 12-hour days as a signwriter. At home during the Blitz he heard the whistle of bombs falling, and everyone in the family put their heads under the kitchen table.
One day, when an incendiary bomb fell by their front gate, his mother ran out and extinguished the flames by throwing sand on it. An ARP Warden appeared with a stirrup pump and sprayed the device with water, which set it alight once more. Allan’s mother, furious, shouted: “I put the fire out. You’ve started it again. Push off and find your own bloody bomb!”
Orpin did not want to be a “Bevin Boy” and work in the coal mines, and he enlisted in the Army at the Romford recruiting office. In October 1943 he was just under 18 when he was sent to No 1 Infantry Training Centre at Warley Barracks, Brentwood, Essex, to begin his basic training.
He had been “trade tested” and demonstrated an aptitude for mechanics, so he was posted to the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC) Training Centre at Bovington in Dorset, where he trained as a Jeep driver and mechanic. Having responded to a request for volunteers for airborne forces, he was posted to HQ Squadron 6th AARR at Larkhill, Wiltshire. He received an extra half-crown pay a day.
The basic role of the regiment was to crew and fight their light tanks after accompanying them by glider into battle. It was made up of volunteers from across the Army, mostly from the RAC, the Royal Tank Regiment and cavalry regiments. They were never granted their own cap badge, but retained the insignia of the regiment from which they had been drawn. As airborne soldiers, however, they all wore the maroon beret, airborne titles and Pegasus flashes.
On the evening of D-Day, June 6 1944, Orpin, a member of Jeep Troop, 6th AARR, took off from RAF Brize Norton and landed by Horsa glider near Ranville in Normandy. The undercarriage of the glider collapsed and the glider itself finished up half way into a hedge. He and his comrades unloaded the Jeeps and trailers and dug slit trenches. They then reverted to an infantry role: their immediate task was to be ready to repel a counter-attack.
Recce patrols were ordered to obtain information about the enemy’s strength and dispositions, in difficult country with high banks, thick hedges and narrow lanes. The Germans were well sited, and covered with a protective screen of machine gun and anti-tank guns which was hard to penetrate. In early September, 6th Airborne Division was withdrawn from Normandy and 6th AARR accompanied them to England for rest, retraining and reorganisation.
In mid-December, the Germans achieved complete surprise with an offensive in great strength through the densely forested region of the Ardennes between Belgium and Luxembourg, the so-called Battle of the Bulge. All Christmas leave was cancelled. On Christmas Eve, Orpin drove his Jeep to Tilbury in Essex.
He broke regulations by visiting his mother at Walthamstow on the way. His absence was not missed, though, and at midnight the Jeep was loaded on to the deck of the LST (Landing Ship, Tank). Orpin spent the night in the vehicle, preferring that to sharing a bunk below deck.
At dawn, near the mouth of the Thames, the vessel ran into heavy fog and spent the next three days at anchor off Sheerness. To dispel the boredom, someone bet the colonel a bottle of whisky that he could not swim around the ship in the bitterly cold weather. The colonel dived into the water and won the bet.
Two days later the ship docked at Ostend. Orpin’s squadron spent the night in a convent before pushing on to Villers-sur-Lesse in the Ardennes and subsequently to Sevenum in Holland. The regiment deployed in Cromwell tanks on the River Meuse. There was patrolling in heavy snow and freezing fog, low-level infiltration by the Germans and the constant danger of booby traps, but the real enemy, he said afterwards, was the weather.
After Operation Varsity, during which he was a member of Jeep Troop, Orpin drove the second-in-command of HQ Squadron from the Rhine to Wismar on the Baltic, where 6th AARR linked up with the Russians at the end of the campaign. On the way they came up against fanatical resistance from members of the Hitler Youth armed with Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons.
After the war, Orpin served in Palestine with 6th Airborne Division and was severely injured in Tel Aviv when he was hit in the chest by a rock thrown by a protester. In February 1946, the Regiment was disbanded and members of 6th AARR awaiting demobilisation were transferred to the 3rd Hussars.
As his demobilisation date drew near, he responded to a call for ex-servicemen in Palestine to join the Metropolitan Police. Having been accepted subject to passing the medical test, he returned to England. But to his dismay, he was failed. His health, after the earlier chest wound, rapidly deteriorated. One of his lungs collapsed and he was admitted to a civilian hospital in London as an emergency case.
After several months recuperating in a sanatorium in Bournemouth, in July 1947 he received a medical discharge from the Army, but he did not receive a full disability pension until a considerable time after the war.
Orpin worked as a trainee toolmaker before transferring to a time-management job. He subsequently worked on various engineering contracts overseas, which took him to Kuwait then to the Taikoo dockyard in Hong Kong, followed by projects in Zambia, Libya and Egypt. Aged 80, in 2006, he finally retired.
In 2014, after many years without any contact with fellow veterans, he attended the 70th-anniversary commemorations in Normandy and was thrilled to meet up with Bill Gladden, a veteran of 6th AARR. They had not met before, but had both landed on the same landing zone on D-Day. Gladden died in April, aged 100.
On June 18 2016, at a service of remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum, Orpin was presented with the insignia of the Légion d’honneur by the French Honorary Consul.
In retirement he divided his time between East Sussex and Egypt. In Cairo, he became something of a VIP with the British and German embassies, regularly invited to attend commemorative events in the city as well as at Alexandria and El Alamein. A talented artist, poet and wood carver, Orpin was commissioned to paint a mural in the expatriates’ club. He was also a keen fisherman and wrote articles for local papers in Cairo.
Allan Orpin married, in 1950, Patricia Bealin, who had been a Wren during the war. She predeceased him and he is survived by their son and daughter.
Allan Orpin, born January 17 1926, died June 1 2024