INTERVIEW Jumping into the past

STEPPING OUT Henry Moroney, poised to jump from a World War II C-47 aircraft during the 68th anniversary of Operation Market Garden.  ?Pic: Michael de Boer

Jumping into the past


Interview
Ciara Moynihan

When it comes to hobbies, many have a passion for what could be termed ‘anorak’ pursuits. For some, joy is to be found in the spotting of a steam train, the discovery of a rare Victorian brooch, the mere mention of a Penny Black stamp. These hobbies are rarely associated with even the slightest whiff of danger. However, one man’s obsession with history has developed into a passion that has seen him risk life and limb. Repeatedly, and completely voluntarily.
Like many young boys, Henry Moroney was interested in soldiers and war. While many grow out of guns and tanks, Henry did not.
His interest developed over time, gradually narrowing to one particular era: World War II. Not content with reading books and watching documentaries, the Castlebar resident regularly travels to France, Holland and Belgium. Yes, he visits iconic sites of military engagement during that war-torn time – Arromanches, Arnhem and Bastogne to name a few. But unlike most who visit the history-laden villages and towns, fields and beaches, he gets a bird’s eye view.
Henry re-enacts Allied paratrooper drops, jumping from C-47 planes that were used in the war, in full military kit, using replica parachutes, over actual World War II drop zones, along with groups of around 24 others per plane.    
Most recently, the 42-year-old father of three jumped north of Eindhoven in Holland, for the 68th commemoration of Operation Market Garden (September 17-27, 1944), the second largest airborne operation ever launched in history. A doomed offensive, it is familiar to many today through Richard Attenborough’s film ‘A Bridge Too Far’. The event was attended by history buffs, locals, and – most importantly – many war veterans and their families. 
While this event included three drops in the countryside – at drop zones at Eerde, Heeswijk Castle and Best – Henry has also jumped in Arnhem. The plan that time was to land on the famous bridge. However, things did not go quite according to plan. “I ended up in someone’s garden! The area is all built up now compared to how it was in the war. There used to be just fields, but now there’s a housing estate.”

Dangerous pursuit
As it turns out – and contrary to what many might assume – jumping at the lower heights that paratroopers jump at is much more dangerous than higher sky dives. Henry jumps at around 1,200 feet.
“With military chutes it’s not about how high you jump, it’s about how low,” he explains. “The skill is to do with the fact that the jump is so quick. Sky divers wouldn’t jump below 4,000 or 5,000 feet; they have to be under canopy by 2,000 feet. If you talked to a sky diver about what we do, they’d never do it. The more height you have, the more time you have, if something goes wrong, to sort it out.”
Military chutes use static lines – a fixed cord attached at one end to the aircraft and at the other end to the top of the pilot chute inside the jumper’s backpack. The parachutist’s fall from the aircraft causes the static line to become taut, then it pulls the chute free of the backpack.
But what happens if the chute doesn’t open? “You get towed behind the plane and they have to cut you loose. If you’re still conscious.” Apparently, if you’re being towed, you can be knocked out by slamming into the side of the plane. If that happens, you’re either dragged manually back into the plane, or, if that’s not possible, the plane has to fly as low as it can with you dangling behind, and then cut you loose and let you fall to the ground.
If, however, you are still conscious and are cut loose, you have to deploy an emergency chute that’s carried in a chest pack, which should bring you safely to earth. Comforting… While Henry’s never been injured himself, he casually says “I know people who’ve broken their arms, legs and backs and stuff.”
So why do it? Henry explains that he once asked a World War II veteran how it felt to jump out of a plane. The veteran said “I didn’t like it!” – but then added: “You’ll never understand ’til you’re standing in the door of a plane and you look out and you see the ground, and you think ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And then you make the decision to do it – to step out.”
For Henry, the veteran’s description of a jump stayed in his head. Then, during a trip to Holland 2008, he walked past some parachutists who were involved in drop re-enactment. “Next thing I heard all these Irish accents. So I went over to them, and got talking to one big tall guy with a Dublin accent.” The Dublin man explained that they were in the FCA and that they had done a course in Holland – a course that anyone could do. Henry, who is also in the FCA, immediately signed up and got his Military Wing after doing the week-long course.
Once you’re qualified, you can jump in Clonbullogue in Offaly, and that’s where Henry goes to practice.

Stories of bravery
While Operation Market Garden was ultimately unsuccessful, the bravery of the Allied troops involved has become the stuff of legend – but what is perhaps less well known is the involvement of Irish fighters in the struggle to capture Arnhem Bridge.
“There were a lot of Irish guys there too,” said Henry. “There was one veteran I was very friendly with, his name was [Lance Corporal] Arthur Hendy and he was from Cricklewood in London. His best mate was Daniel Neville from Listowel in Kerry. He [Neville] was killed.
“The troops were trying to get the wounded out of the basement of a building. Neville stayed behind, himself and another guy, when the German tanks were coming across. They had two machine guns, and they were trying to take on the tanks while the others got the wounded out. The tanks fired into the building and it collapsed. When Hendy and the other soldiers returned to get them, they couldn’t find them. There was nothing they could do. And no one will ever know what this guy from Listowel did, you know?”
Many stories about Irish soldiers’ bravery and sacrifice have been lost due to our own island’s difficult history with Britain. More often than was right, the Irish who fought against Hitler and Mussolini with the Allied Forces were shunned in Ireland after the war. Many found it impossible to get work, were ostracised from their communities and were forced to live in Britain.
“There were loads of Irish guys in the British army who fought there and were killed there. If you go the wartime graveyards you’ll find loads. There’s two or three I usually visit. Many survived too.
“I met one guy one time from Mohill in Leitrim. He wasn’t a paratrooper, he was one of the air guys who dropped them in. He was a radio operator on a C-47. He was in his 80s when I met him. He was telling me how he used to drop in the paratroopers, and after that he’d go back to drop in supplies. He also told me about how he’d take part in thousand-bomber raids over Germany – but he said ‘There was never a thousand bombers, they didn’t have them! They used to send transport planes … I remember flying over Hamburg and Düsseldorf, chucking bombs out the doors of planes’.”
Co Mayo has its fair share of veterans too. Chris Dowd from just outside Shrule in south Mayo, was one of the early members of the SAS. “He was one of these guys who drove jeeps in the Italian desert; they attacked Italian and German convoys,” Henry explains. “He was killed in Italy. The Germans were about to break through and they were called to reinforce some of the soldiers … they were getting in the back of a truck and a mortar bomb came in and landed in the middle of them all and killed them all.”
Henry remembers talking to another veteran, who was from Ballina and who served at Tobruk in North Africa. He spoke to Henry about how they would wash in the sea because they had very little water. Often as they were bathing, the Germans would come in an air raid, and they’d be forced to hide under shelves of rocks until the planes passed.
Another veteran Henry met, was drafted into the French army, fought at Dunkirk, escaped to Brittany, robbed a boat, made it to England, was recruited into the Special Operation Executive (which were dropped in to blow up trains and bridges and set up networks), was wounded, met an Irish nurse from Mayo, married her, and now looks after the nuns’ garden in Swinford.

Bonds with the past
For Henry, so much of his interest in World War II is bound up in the extraordinary stories behind the veterans – stories of untold bravery and, often, survival against the odds. And a huge part of attending World War II commemorations, he says, is getting to meet veterans from the Allied forces, and seeing them rediscover their past in new ways.
He spoke fondly of Jack Womer from Dundalk, Maryland. “Did you ever hear of a film called ‘The Dirty Dozen’? Well they were a group called the Filthy Thirteen, and Jack Womer was a member of that team,” Henry says.
The Filthy Thirteen was the name given to the Demolition Section of the Headquarters Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, of the US Army. They were famous for their fierce bravery – and appearance: They shaved their heads into mohawks and wore war paint, Native American style. The unit was ordered to destroy a bridge over the Douve River during the Normandy Invasion of Europe in June 1944, a mission that cost the lives of most of these men. Jack Womer was one of the few survivors.
Womer also jumped in Holland, and he attended the 68th commemoration of Operation Market Garden with his daughter last September. “He hadn’t been back in the area since 1944 … We met him at a place called Son,” Henry remembers.
Womer was keen to try to find one particular place here he and his fellow soldiers had stayed. “Whatever house they’d got into, there was nuns in it, and the nuns made him pancakes and they washed his clothes for him. Jack had been telling his daughter for years about the nuns and the pancakes. He was fixated on it. And they found it, they found the house [La Sonnerie, now a hotel, but used as a convent during WWII]. It’s just down from a bridge that he was involved in trying to take as part of Operation Market Garden. There’s a new bridge there now. The Germans blew it up before they could take it.
“Finding that convent was so important to Jack, and it was incredibly special that he got to see it again.”

Special connection
One moment in Henry’s military-parachuting career stands out for him more than any other. “I got to jump into Normandy at night. I remember being on a plane in the dark and the doors open and everything is pitch black.
“Then we flew over Sainte-Mère-Église [a village that played a significant part in the World War II Normandy landings] and I could see all the lights in the square and all the people looking up as the plane was banking, and then we flew off out into darkness again over the fields, and we jumped out.
“It was a full moon. I was able to turn around as I was coming down, and I could see the plane flying into the full moon, and all the parachutists falling out – pop, pop, pop, pop, pop – behind it. I remember seeing this and thinking, ‘How many people have got to experience this since the war?’
“I landed in a French field, and a French farmer came out with his wife and kids, and he had Calvados [local apple brandy]. He handed out glasses of Calvados to me and the others who had landed in his field … The locals really look after you. If you jump into their area, they put on a little ceremony afterwards, and they give you wine and tea, and some food … it’s very special to meet the locals that way.”

Mayo Memorial Peace Park
Unsurprisingly perhaps, Henry was also involved in establishing the Mayo Peace Park, Garden of Remembrance, in Castlebar – along with Michael Feeney and several others. The park commemorates the men and women of Mayo killed in the world wars of the last century with the Allied and Commonwealth Forces, a forgotten generation, many members of which were written out of local history until recently. The park also remembers the Mayo-born Irish Army soldiers who served and died on UN operations.
“It’s become a focal point between the Mayo community and the British and continental communities. We can say, we have this shared history,” Henry says, with pride.
For those who have lived through war – those who fought, and those who have been touched by its ravages – it is vital that their sacrifices, hardships, bereavements and stories are remembered, and thanks to Henry Moroney and others like him, many more stories that might never have been heard will continue to live on.

Mass in Castlebar Church at 12 noon on Remembrance Sunday, November 11, will be dedicated to all the men and women who were killed in war and in UN service. Henry jumps in remembrance of all veterans with Pathfinder Ireland (www.pathfinderireland.com).