Similarly, training regimens underwent several modifications as students waited for combat gliders to come off the assembly lines. Recruitment shortages prompted lower eligibility requirements which in turn produced a glut of eager, would-be aviators, including fighter-pilot school washouts. Through experience, their pilots, all of whom were volunteers, concocted sardonic nicknames: Flying Coffins, Purple Heart Boxes, Flying Box Kites, Flak Bait, and Winged Hearse.Ĭhaos defined both stateside training and the development of the glider. At 48 feet in length and with a wingspan of 84 feet, they were comparable in size to a B-25 bomber. Gliders were covered only with reinforced fabric stretched across a hollow metal tube frame and a honeycombed plywood floor comprising 5,000 pieces. Descending at 950 feet per minute at 100 miles per hour, glider pilots would have little time to find a field, line up, skid to a stop, and unload any combination of glider infantry, small artillery, vehicles, ammunition, communications or medical personnel. With a glide ratio of 9:1 and a fully loaded weight of more than three tons, the gliders handled like flying bricks. Once on the ground, the crew would find themselves in the thick of the action. ![]() Pilots would be towed by modified C-47 aircraft within range of enemy small arms fire for miles past the frontline into the enemy’s rear, release at perhaps 600 feet, descend, and slide to a stop as quickly as possible. The glider missions seemed particularly suicidal. More than 13,000 were manufactured in three years. The CG-4 Waco was the United States’ main troop/cargo glider of the war. Such operations would require pathfinders, paratroopers, troop carrier air crews, and defenseless gliders. An onslaught against a dug-in enemy would require frontal assaults, as well as attacks from the enemy’s rear (called “vertical envelopment”). Missions that would require no shortage of guts.Īrnold was in a hurry, even though the invasion of Normandy and the campaign to liberate Western Europe would not take place for more than two years. General Henry “Hap” Arnold had an idea: Ahead of major invasions, fly gliders into enemy territory on one-way missions with no motors, no parachutes and no second chances. Few, if any, knew that they would place their fates in the hands of a man who had graduated 66 th in a class of 111 at West Point.Ī man who had developed a fear of flying but had risen through the ranks to become chief of the U.S. They were bound by a love of flying, even though some were still in high school. Following the attack at Pearl Harbor, young men from across America volunteered for the opportunity to fly an aircraft into battle that had not yet been invented. Balanced by devotion to duty and a wellspring of courage. A universe of chaos, uncertainty, and fear. A universe filled with weaponry far more deadly than what their fathers or grandfathers may have endured in the previous war. WHEN WARS begin, those who volunteer or who are drafted enter a universe that is unfathomable. ![]() (Image source: WikiCommons) “Their missions were so dangerous that they earned an Air Medal for each, the equivalent of a Bronze Star.” American glider-borne infantry disembark during Operation Varsity, 1945.
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