“Their missions were so dangerous that they earned an Air Medal for each, the equivalent of a Bronze Star.”

By Scott McGaugh

WHEN WARS begin, those who volunteer or who are drafted enter a universe that is unfathomable. A universe filled with weaponry far more deadly than what their fathers or grandfathers may have endured in the previous war. A universe of chaos, uncertainty, and fear. Balanced by devotion to duty and a wellspring of courage.

World War Two was no different. 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. They were bound by a love of flying, even though some were still in high school. 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.

A man who had developed a fear of flying but had risen through the ranks to become chief of the U.S. Army Air Corps. 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. Missions that would require no shortage of guts.

Arnold 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. An onslaught against a dug-in enemy would require frontal assaults, as well as attacks from the enemy’s rear (called “vertical envelopment”). Such operations would require pathfinders, paratroopers, troop carrier air crews, and defenseless gliders.

The glider missions seemed particularly suicidal. 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. Once on the ground, the crew would find themselves in the thick of the action.

With a glide ratio of 9:1 and a fully loaded weight of more than three tons, the gliders handled like flying bricks. 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. Almost always immediately surrounded.

Gliders were covered only with reinforced fabric stretched across a hollow metal tube frame and a honeycombed plywood floor comprising 5,000 pieces. At 48 feet in length and with a wingspan of 84 feet, they were comparable in size to a B-25 bomber. 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.

Chaos defined both stateside training and the development of the glider. Recruitment shortages prompted lower eligibility requirements which in turn produced a glut of eager, would-be aviators, including fighter-pilot school washouts. Similarly, training regimens underwent several modifications as students waited for combat gliders to come off the assembly lines.

The race to invent the combat glider was even more confused. When one prospective manufacturer in the bidding process was asked for his company’s name, he replied, “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

Less than a dozen, largely unqualified, glider manufacturers wove a network of widespread subcontactors. Steinway & Sons, the piano manufacturer, built tail assemblies; H.J. Heinz Pickle Company, the makers of ketchup, supplied wings. Ironically, even a casket maker fabricated metal fittings.

Quality control was more wish than reality. One company attempted to build gliders in a circus tent in Florida before a storm destroyed it. Inspectors discovered a 95 percent glue failure rate at one facility. Another company built its glider prototype in a former dry-cleaning shop, its wings protruding out two windows.

Shoddy gliders often made training as disordered as it was deadly. Wings might fall off, sometimes in mid-air.  In one case, they collapsed on the ground when an instructor leaned against them. Tow ropes often broke and sometimes wrapped around a glider’s tail in mid-flight, cutting it off. Ultimately, more glider pilots would be killed in the line of duty (training and accidents) than in combat during World War II.

Somehow, these volunteers became part of the “tip of the spear” in Europe’s major invasions, sometimes only weeks apart. Following a disastrous mission in the sea off Sicily, their missions were part of every major Allied operation of the last two years of the war: Normandy, Operation Dragoon in southern France only two months later, Operation Market Garden six weeks later in Holland, resupply missions to U.S. forces besieged at Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge the day after Christmas, and then Operation Varsity, the Allied airborne drop into the Germany itself only three months later.

In each, a fond wish for surprise dissolved into wistful fantasy.

Following the pathfinders and paratroopers, the enemy was waiting and seemingly locked onto the glider pilots’ route and altitude. In the glider pilots’ last mission of the war, the “Tail End Charlie” squadron of 12 gliders approaching their landing zone suffered three crew killed and 11 taken prisoner. Only one glider pilot returned to base.

One shivers when reading many of their after-action reports, journals, and letters.

Glider pilot Zane Graves wrote the following account:

“Big day! Flak heavy, strings of red beads, orange golf balls. I’m scared! Released in wrong territory, dark, can hardly see, still shooting at us. Little field. Watch those trees, pull up, Doc! Not a bit of the nose left, only part of center of fuselage. First out, feet through floor. Doc pinned against something, pulled him out. Sgt. Davis next, two bad cuts behind knee. Slim Smith went out through the side. Rogers and Rappey dumped out rear… Gliders crashing all around, horrible sounds. Look out, there’s one on top of us. No, went over and hit trees on other side of field. Where is that sulfa powder? Can’t find any. Give Davis a hypo. Finally bandaged up…Expect to be shot any minute. Adam Bone and Ben Winks [glider pilots] lying down the road, dead. Gunfire getting closer. Let’s get out of here. Where are we?”

Glider pilots not only fought the enemy, they endured the uncertainty of life as combat test pilots. Photo intelligence taken at midday in advance of Normandy failed to reveal the lethal height of hedgerows. Spacing waves of inbound gliders only 10 minutes apart in southern France created horrific chaos over the landing zones.

After surviving horrors in the air, they were orphans on the ground. Their senior commanding officers remained back at their base. They might be assigned to guard prisoners after reaching a nearby command post, but their overall orders were to get back to their bases in France or England any way they could, sometimes hitchhiking rides in jeeps to bases in the rear or securing a seat on a boat headed for England.

These intrepid (and largely unsung) heroes were so inspiring that I devoted nearly three years to research and write Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin. I remain fascinated by the notion that young men would fly a glider covered only with reinforced fabric with no motors, no parachutes, and no second chances on one-way missions into enemy territory.

For many, it was only later in life that they began sharing their experiences in interviews, stowed-away journals, and in recorded oral histories. The archives of the Silent Wings Museum in Lubbock, Texas, and the museum foundation’s National World War Two Glider Pilots Committee—compiled across years of research—are indispensable to preserving the glider pilots’ legacy.

Although decades had passed, their accounts of combat still reveal the pain they had endured during the war and later had kept hidden when they rejoined their families. Many read like a thriller novel. I had to remind myself they were written by young men, far from home, whose survival was uncertain.

“Our right wing hits the wing of another glider and is gone—sounds perhaps like an implosion of a giant wooden match box,” wrote glider pilot Richard Fort. “Then the outer third of the left wing is gone and the nose plows up dirt, buckles, then breaks. Dust, dirt, grapes, vines, debris all pile in through the broken lower half of the cockpit as we grind to a stop. I’m still gripping the stick,”

Some memories remain gripping.

“For a split second, the two intermingled gliders seem to hang in the air and then broke apart,” recalled glider co-pilot Robert Dopita. “A jeep, its driver still sitting rigid at the wheel and his passenger slumped beside him, tore out of the front of one of the gliders and tumbled to the ground. Bodies spilled out from the wreckage like toy soldiers out of a great box, turning over and over, arms and legs outspread as they fell. The two gliders crashed a short distance apart, and one of them burst into a brilliant white flame from the phosphorous shells it had been carrying,”

Glider pilots’ missions were so dangerous that they earned an Air Medal for each, the equivalent of a Bronze Star (bomber pilots required five missions for one; fighter pilots, 10).

Equally remarkable, their legacy was forged in only 10 months, beginning with Normandy on June 6, 1944, and concluding with Operation Varsity across the Rhine River on March 24, 1945.

Normandy became a snapshot of their contribution in the context of airborne warfare. Despite a glider pilot casualty rate of 16 per cent (forty per cent among paratroopers), casualties on Utah Beach, which had airborne support were one percent, while on Omaha Beach, without airborne support, the casualty rate was seven per cent.

By the time Germany surrendered, an estimated 4,000 glider pilots had forged an outsized contribution to Allied victory in a sea of three million American troops in Europe.

They had volunteered as strangers and had become brethren, united against the enemy and intent on coming home. A legacy of flying “low-performance trailers that had to be towed to a point almost directly over the landing area, and once over the designated spot, the real piloting skills necessary to reach the ground quickly in one piece took over, if one wanted to survive,” as historian Charles Day phrased it.

Others had a different perspective, including General William Westmoreland.

“Never before in history had any nation produced Aviators whose duty it was to deliberately crash land, and then go on to fight as combat infantrymen. They were no ordinary fighters. Their battlefields were behind enemy lines. Every landing was a genuine do-or-die situation for the glider pilots. It was their awesome responsibility to repeatedly risk their lives by landing heavily laden aircraft containing combat Soldiers and equipment in unfamiliar fields deep within enemy-held territory, often in total darkness. They were the only aviators during World War II who had no motors, no parachutes and no second chances.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Scott McGaugh is the author of Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin, the New York Times bestseller Surgeon in Blue, and Honor Before Glory (now in film development). Brotherhood is his 11^th nonfiction book. He also served as the founding marketing director of the USS Midway Museum (2004-2020), one of the 10 most popular museums of any type in the United States and has returned to the museum’s board of directors. For more information, please visit www.scottmcgaugh.com.