Military History | Mémorial Pegasus — Five Years on Waste Ground Beside the Canal

The bridge over the Caen canal at Bénouville was a Scherzer rolling-lift bascule built in the mid-1930s, and sources still disagree over whether that means 1934 or 1935. On the night of 5–6 June 1944 it was one of two objectives of Operation Deadstick. Six Horsa gliders carrying D Company of the 2nd Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, under Major John Howard, with sappers of 249 Field Company, came down beside the canal and the Orne after midnight; published accounts of how close the leading glider stopped differ by a factor of three. Both bridges were taken in about ten minutes. On 26 June the canal bridge was renamed Pegasus Bridge, after the winged horse worn by British airborne forces.

The span outlasted the war by fifty years. It carried traffic until a larger bascule, built by Spie Batignolles for the Calvados highways department, replaced it in 1994. What usually gets left out is what happened next: the original was lifted out and left on waste ground beside the canal, where it sat for about five years. In 1999 it was bought from the French authorities for a symbolic one franc, and on 4 June 2000 it stood in the park of a new museum at Ranville when the Prince of Wales opened it.

The Comité du Débarquement runs the Mémorial Pegasus, which also holds a Horsa replica, a section of Bailey bridge, and a set of Bill Millin's pipes — the campaign set he used later, not the one he carried on 6 June. A separate private association is contesting the ownership of some of the collections in the French courts.

The museum closed in September 2026 for building work and has said it will not reopen before 2027, with no date confirmed. The 1994 bridge still carries the D514 over the canal, about two hundred metres west.

📸 Cover: the original Bénouville bridge re-erected in the park of the Mémorial Pegasus, photograph by Iain Cameron, 7 July 2014, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.