Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the
following Glider and Power Pilots for their input in the writing of this
book:
Leon B. Spencer
Milton Dank
Albert S. Burton
Morris “Moe” Gans
Bill Greenlee
Charley Scott
Earl Ivie
Wayne Palm
Ronald Calendine
Fred Francher
Jack Usner
Bill Taylor
Johnny Shields
Carey M. Lee
Robert W. Rausch
Del Summers
F/O LaRue
Haskel Hazelwood
Tom Berry
Norm (Boot) Wilmeth
Howard P. Trimpe
Jack W. Riley
Rolla W. Brooks
Maurice H. Daubin
Oscar L. Morrow
Elbert Dean Jella
_____________________
Charles E. Skidmore Jr.
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
Acknowledgement: .……………………………………………………………………….. 1
Table of Contents: …………………………………………………………………………2
FOREWORD: ……………………………………………………………………………….3
Chapter 1: The G is for Guts: ……………………………………………………………….5
Chapter 2: The Uncertain Role of
the Glider Pilot: …………………………………………15
Chapter 3: Training for Combat: …………………………………………………………...28
Chapter 4: We Go Overseas: ……………………………………………………………….37
Chapter 5: D-Day in Normandy: …………………………………………………………...56
Chapter 6: On the Continent: …………………………………………………………........ 64
Chapter 7: The End of the War: …………………………………………………………….90
Flight Officer Charles E. Skidmore Jr. -
91st Troop Carrier Squadron – 439th Troop Carrier Group
FOREWORD
“The G is for guts,” one glider pilot answered
during World War II when ask the significance of the “G”
in
the center of the Silver Wings he wore on his chest to donate that he flew
gliders. Nearly half a
century
later the same questions are still being asked of the dwindling number of young
men who were
among
the 7,350 Glider and Power pilots who flew the ungainly canvas and plywood
“Flying Coffins” in
some
of the bloodiest battles of the war.
Why American gliders in WW II? It is said they came upon the scene as a
result of the German successes on the Island of Crete, and later in the
blitzkrieg of Belgium that opened the doors for Hitler’s sweep across France
that defeated the French and drove the British back across the English
Channel. Helicopters had not been
developed as assault personnel carriers and huge supply- dropping parachutes
were yet to come. Gliders were the only way that huge numbers of
men with equipment could be deposited in a small area, such as at the end of a
bridge, just beyond a beach, or at a key railway or highway junction.
In a nation which hardly knew what a glider
was, where was it to find pilots to fly them?
The answer is that they came from
the thousands of aviation cadets who were eliminated from the powered aircraft
training program for flying deficiencies; from those who wanted passionately to
fly but who could not pass the rigorous aviation cadet physical examination;
from those with pilots licenses but who would have to hide the fact that they
were over the age limit for flying training and were using “doctored” certificates
to enlist; and from those who simply were intrigued by the thrill of flying.
The goal set by the military for enlisting in
the program was attained in a matter of weeks in early 1942, a rather
remarkable feat and testimony to the patriotism of those days when it is
recalled that many Americans) probably including my family) grouped glider
flying in the same category with Japan’s Kamikaze suicide pilots.
Certainly not all young American males
wanted to fly gliders. One glider pilot told later of spreading panic
among a contingent of draftees with whom he was taking his physical, when just
for laughs he started a rumor that all men drafted that day were to become
glider infantrymen. And for those Army
infantry inductees who were eventually assigned to the gliders (the so-called
“glider riders”) on a non-voluntary basis, I had only the greatest
compassion. It was only with the advent
of D-Day in Normandy that they received pay comparable to that of
paratroopers. What were American glider
pilots like? Ask those who knew them
and they’ll probably tell you that they were, for the most part, about as wild
and crazy bunch of guts that you could imagine. But to that group of devil-may-care GP’s, as
they were called, the training and war that followed for them wasn’t all
misery, death and destruction. There
were many times when life was a barrel of fun.
They flew, they drilled, they qualified to fire the “45” pistol, rifle
and sub-machine gun, they toasted life with a drink, they chased woman, and
they lived mostly for the day. But they
also wrote home, sometimes attended church, and in the end fought bravely for
their country.
This book is not a military history of
gliders in World War II. It is a tale,
much of it humorous but some of it sad, of the men who flew the CG-4A Glider –
the guys with the G on their silver wings.
The author was one of those guys.
The G is for Guts
Chapter 1
“Do you have a private pilot’s license?” “If so, why not become a glider pilot in
Uncle Sam’s Army Air Corps?”
“Why not?”
I asked myself as I figured the change in my pocket – all that was left
a few days after I had drawn my month’s pay.
A short time later, pilot’s license in
hand, I was in front of the first sergeant’s desk, eager to sign up.
The time was June 1942. America had a few months earlier been
plunged into World War II by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Victory would depend upon retaliating on
many fronts and someone high up in the military hierarchy had decided that one
method would be that silent messenger of death, the glider.
Training the projected 5,500 glider pilots
meant starting practically from scratch.
Mike Murphy of Findlay, Ohio, one of the nation’s most famed pre-war
stunt pilots, established a three-phase program: (1)
“Dead stick,” 30 hours in which the student flew to a pre-designated
altitude, shut off the engine of the small plane (usually a 65-horse power
craft such as a Piper Cub). And landed with a dead engine, a la glider. (2)
“Basic training,” 30 hours in which the student was pulled (towed) in a
small glider at the end of a 300-foot rope by a powered aircraft to a certain
altitude from where he cut himself free and landed. (3) “Advanced training,” 30 hours in which the
student flew the large CG-4A Glider usually behind a C-47 Aircraft, sometimes
alone and at other times in double-yow with another glider. Upon completion of advanced, the student
graduated, pinned on his glider wings with the “G” emblazoned in the center,
and was given the strictly wartime (WW II) rank of Flight officer – a rank
equivalent to that of a warrant officer, that is, somewhere in that fuzzy area
between the highest enlisted rank (in those days a master sergeant) and the
lowest commissioned rank, second lieutenant.
The shoulder insignia, blue and gold, was much like a lieutenant’s bar
except with round corners. The cap
insignia was that of a warrant officer, the “ruptured duck.”
Following graduation from advanced
training, all glider pilots went to Bowman Field at Louisville, Kentucky, to a
reserve pool and after that to several fields in North Carolina where they
received combat training prior to going overseas – mostly to the European Theater
of Operations.
But enough of the formalities – let’s get
on with the tales of glider pilots including those of one Charles E. (Chuck)
Skidmore Jr., of Columbus , Kansas.
Assigned to the “dead stick” school at Pittsburg, Kansas, the first of
many frightening experiences I was to undergo happened soon after I began
training. One night my instructor and I
climbed to 3,000 feet above an auxiliary field for my first night dead stick
landing. The grass-covered strip lay in
a large area which years before had undergone strip coal mining. The torn-up land appeared menacing even in
the light of the moon. I knew without
being told that the churned up terrain would be very hostile in the event of an
error in landing judgment.
I heard the words, “Cut the engine.” I did, and the propeller on the Piper Cub
slowed, wind milled a bit, and finally stopped dead with one end standing
straight up in front of my eyes.
“You know,” said my instructor, “If anyone
had told me three months ago that I’d be up here at night with a dead prop
staring me in the face because I ordered it, I would have told him he was out
of his mind.” I tended to agree with
him, especially since I was born and grew up in a small town of Columbus only
16 miles away and knew the area well.
Our landing strip was probably not more
than 800 feet long and our only landing aids were a single kerosene pot burning
at either end of the strip. Naturally,
we had only one try for a landing and there was little margin for error. I still don’t know how we judged our
distance from the ground by that one pot at the approach end of the field. I do recall, however, that I made a good
down-wind leg on my way to landing, turned left on my base leg at about 250
feet and touched earth midway between the pots. After being congratulated by my instructor,
who seemed to be as relived to be back on solid earth as I was, I hopped out of
the tiny aircraft, twisted the prop until the engine took hold, taking on a
dark night from that un-lit grass field was nearly as thrilling as the landing.
Authorities of the flying school kept a
supply of 90 octane aviation gasoline at the auxiliary field in case some of
the airplanes, with their tiny gasoline tanks, happened to need a refill to get
back home. One of our guys who had the
use of a local girl friend’s car decided to slip out to the field one dark to augment
her gas supply which is typically limited due to wartime rationing. What he didn’t know was that the high octane
gas was too much for her old crate and he mostly succeeded in shortening the
life that was left in her 1934 vintage Ford.
Like the glider he flew, they glided to a stop on a country road a few
nights later and had to walk back to town.
Following my Pittsburg training, I went to
Stutgart Field in Central Arkansas, undoubtedly one of the worst assignments
possible in the U.S. While I was there
for a month for no apparent reason except to wait around, I lived in a
half-finished base in a sea of mud. The
base had been built on a former rice paddy, no logical place.
The only place we had to drink from was a
pipe in a partially completed hangar.
We used outside two-hole toilets.
Our first sergeant was seated in the place after one particularly hard
rain, when midway through his constitutional the shack fell unceremoniously
into the muck below. It required a
considerable period of yelling until a passer-by located him. He had to be chopped out through the roof
and his language while the rescue was taking place was suitably that of what
was expected from a World War II first sergeant.
For some mysterious and unexplained reason
I was sent from Stutgart to Lubbock Field, Texas. I remember my brief time there for two
reasons: Reason No. 1 was our reception
to the air field. We arrived at
midnight and were told to disrobe and prepare for the well-known “short arm”
inspection for venereal disease. I did
a lot of grouching but I passed. Reason
No. 2 had to do with my promotion from the rank of private. I had understood for some weeks that I was
to receive an automatic promotion to staff sergeant after I had completed four
months in the service as a glider student.
As it occurred I was in a barracks with others with less service than
I. Well, it happened that we had a
barracks chief, a private first class, who loved to enter our barracks at 5
a.m. each morning and roust us out of bed at the top of his voice. The day I was to receive my staff stripes we
planned a surprise for our antagonist.
When he yelled that day I sat up in my bunk with staff stripes pinned to
my undershirt and told him to knock off the noise. After he recovered from the shock somewhat,
someone told him the circumstances and that I really was a new staff
sergeant. Probably fortunately for me –
sense he was permanent party and staff stripes on students meant nothing to him
– he proved to be a decent guy under the circumstances and laughed off the
trick.
From Lubbock I went to another contract
school at Vanita, Oklahoma, for my first glider flying. I received it in a contraption fashioned
from small airplanes such as Piper Cubs, Aeronics and Taylorcraft. Engines had been removed from these
airplanes and the glider pilot sat in front where the engine had once been
positioned, thus retaining reasonable aeronautical stability. The engines had weighed approximately 150
pounds so that the pilot who weighed more or less than this compensated by
adjusting the wing tabs. Those who
failed to make the proper adjustment sometimes zoomed into the air prematurely
behind the tow plane or had difficulty in getting off the ground at all. I always thought that tow plane pilots were
either foolhardy or needed the money awfully bad. They had a dangerous life pulling
inexperienced glider pilots who on a few occasions nearly drug tow plane and
glider back onto the ground.
Adding to the confusion were the 300-foot
long hemp ropes which were used to pull the gliders. In reality, the so-called training “gliders”
didn’t do much gliding at all. They
were meant only to be pulled to a certain spot where their pilots were to cut
loose and practice gliding to the ground.
This was to simulate later combat landings. To get back to the hemp ropes, they
frequently broke during the tug off the ground or when glider pilots failed to
keep the proper distance behind the tow plane and slack was taken up too
fast. This situation was alleviated
somewhat with the introduction of nylon ropes sometime during 1942, but let’s
return to Vanita, Oklahoma, and the hemp ropes.
Rope breaking at Vanita was nearly a daily
occurrence. This was seldom cause for
real alarm, however, because there were large flat fields in all distances and
landing on one of them was little or no problem. There was just one small matter: when the
direction of the wind dictated taking off to the north it also meant that the
tug plane and glider climbed for altitude over the adjoining Oklahoma State
Insane Asylum. Incidentally, I always
thought it was a logical thing to put the glider training school next door to
the asylum.
One fine day as I sat awaiting my time to
fly, I watched a friend taking off. The
flight was short lived, however, because the hemp rope snapped shortly after
the glider cleared the ground. At that
height there was nothing the glider pilot could do except put the glider back
on the ground straight ahead. He landed
uneventfully in the spacious yard in front of the asylum. My friend alighted from his small craft and
was walking around to determine any possible damage. About that time an elderly patient arose
from a nearby bench and walked to the scene of the landing.
After observing the converted aircraft, now
a glider, the old gent finally ascertained that the craft had nothing
resembling and engine.
“Where’s your engine?” the fellow asked,
obviously puzzled. “We fly without
one,” my friend replied. After puzzling
over this for a few seconds the old gentleman waved am arm in a beckoning
fashion toward the asylum and said, “Come on in, brother.” His meaning was obvious.
The civilian school contactor at Vinita had
several honest-to-goodness, German built gliders and each of us got a crack at
flying them. The only problem was that
we were there during the winter and had to wear those WW II padded flying
suits. Entrance to the glider was
gained by first lifting the top canopy and then settling one’s self into the
seat, but this was almost impossible in the bulky suits. The school commander proved to be
resourceful: he appointed some of his
ground personnel as “stuffers.” The
glider pilot slid down into the seat as far as he could, after which the
stuffer put his hands on the pilot’s shoulders, and “stuffed” him down onto the
seat as best he could. I don’t recall
that we even bothered strapping on our parachutes. We could never have gotten free to jump
anyway.
One day at Vanita the wind arose
unexpectedly to about 30 miles or more per mile while several of us were in the
air. The tow plane pilots realized this
and pulled us back over the home field.
We cut off and pointed our noses practically straight down towards our
landing spots. Some said later they
literally “backed down to a landing.”
It was true that some pilots came down at such a slow speed that ground
support personnel ran out, grabbed onto the wing struts, and actually pulled
the motor less craft down to the ground.
I completed my small (basic) glider
training at Vanita in early 1943 and was sent for my advanced training at South
Plains Army Flying School near Lubbock, Texas.
Here I was introduced to the CG-4A Glider. “CG meant combat glider and I always
imagined that the “4A” meant they tried four times before they got one to
fly. Actually the 4 meant that it was
the fourth major version. The CG-4A was
a cavernous thing looking much like a big box kite. It was made of plywood, gas pipe and
canvas. It measured 48 feet long with a
wingspread of 83 feet. Advanced
training was very important because it was not only a prerequisite for earning
one’s wings and flight officer rating but was also the glider I would be flying
into combat carrying either or both men and weapons.
My time in advanced training was actually
rather routine. I seemed to absorb the
training with relative ease and there is little I recall of my days there. This is not to say, however, that some of my
friends didn’t have some bad moments.
One in particular had a hair-raising experience getting checked out on
the procedure for “snatching” gliders off the ground.
Snatching gliders was a maneuver wherein
the glider tow rope was stretched between fork-topped poles about 14 feet off
the ground. The tow planes, almost
always the C-17, would swoop down and “snatch” the rope with a hook which was
attached to the tail of the airplane.
The plane literally “snatched” the glider off the ground after
engagement and a short roll along the ground.
The contraption inside the C-47 which
accomplished the snatch was unbelievably primitive by today’s standards. It was a large steel drum upon which was
wound 300 feet of cable and then 300 feet of rope. Following the snatch, a crew member was
charged with playing out the cable and rope and then braking it to a gradual
stop.
It was a hot and sunny day in Texas. Six advanced glider pilots were on hand for
further training in the snatch procedure.
Among them was Albert S. Burton, now of Dallas Center, Iowa. The men were sitting in the shade of the
glider wing as awaited word over a ground radio that their C-47 tow plane
flight was underway. They were outside
the glider because the heat inside the canvas glider would have been nearly
unbearable.
Several of the glider pilots dropped off to
sleep in the heat; the rest were in varying degrees of drowsiness. As they loafed blissfully they little knew
that the ground radio set was inoperative.
Barton was resting on his side casually observing the nylon loop which
was in place on the poles just ahead of the glider. Suddenly he was shocked into reality by the
sound of an approaching C-47 which was obviously diving downward in preparation
for snatching the glider off the ground.
Barton leaped to his feet. Luckily he was on the side of the glider
where the single door was located.
Followed closely by another glider pilot, Morris “Moe” Gans, of San
Diego, California, he dashed into the glider and had just plopped himself into
the seat when he saw the shadow of the C-47 zip by overhead and heard the roar
of the Pratt and Whitney engines un full power as the pilot started his climb
after successfully engaging the rope.
Fortunately there was a delay of a second or so as the reel in the
aircraft rapidly un-wound. In that
second, Barton got control of the wheel of the glider and yelled, “Here we go.”
Then the brake on the reel slowed to a stop
and the glider swooshed from zero to 85 miles an hour in a matter of
seconds. To Barton’s horror he quickly
ascertained that it took all the strength of both his hands to hold the nose of
the glide down. What was it? Answer:
The trim tab had been left in the landing position by the pilot who last
flew it. Al yelled for assistance but
Moe was in poor position to offer it.
Apparently he had just seized the back of the copilot’s seat at the time
the glider accelerated off the ground.
When Al cried out, Moe was in a horizontal; position three feet above
the floor, barely managing to hold onto the seat. Luckily, acceleration dropped as the craft’s
speed rose from 85 to 115 miles an hour.
This allowed Moe to pull himself into the second seat from where he
reached the trim tab overhead and neutralized it.
Moe was possible a life saver for all
concerned in both glider and tow plane because as the speed passed 100 mile an
hour maker Barton had found himself no longer able to hold down the nose of the
glider. Much more of a rise could have
caused the tow plane to go into a threatening disastrous dive. Perhaps the tow pilot would have released
the tow rope before such a tragic turn of events occurred, but who knows. Things happen very fast during some
emergencies, and tragedies do happen.
What if Barton had missed his hold on the back of the seat? What if?
What if? There were so many ifs, but it was safe to
say that a couple of plucky glider pilots had almost certainly saved the day
that time in Texas.
Some guys just couldn’t seem to remember
when they were in gliders and when they were in airplanes. Bill Greenlee of Jackson, Florida, recalls
one unfortunate incident which occurred while he was undergoing primary
training at Leanoke, Arkansas – and this was the first time I knew there was a
school there. I doubt that anyone knows
how many of these schools operated across the nation, but there must have been
an amazing number of them. Bill and his
classmates were flying Cubs off a dried up rice field in that duck hunting
sector of the Razorback State.
One obviously forgetful young fellow walked
into the path of a spinning propeller.
He was knocked to the ground where he bled profusely but remained
conscious. His immediate concern was
that he had been blinded because he could see nothing. A buddy came to the rescue and cradled the
injured man’s head in his arms. A
second glider pilot, noting that the victim’s hair was in his eyes, brushed it
back in place. Although stunned and in
pain the injured man was greatly relieved that he could see. It was one of those occasions for: I’ve got bad news and good news for you;
you’ve been partially scalped but you are not blind.
Remember the old song, “And the Pig Got Up
and Slowly Walked Away,” which relates the tale of the drunk that even a pig
wouldn’t associate with? In this case
it was a glider pilot who attempted to fly a Cub Airplane while drunk. He ended a short flight by crash landing in
a pig pen. He managed to get out of the
wreckage whereupon landing in the pig pen.
He climbed out of the wreckage whereupon he fell in a drunken stupor
amid the pigs. The owner of the farm
had fortunately witnessed the landing such assist was and came to the rescue
just as his pigs were beginning to nuzzle up to the downed glider pilot. This landing must have been one of the most
ignominious ever recorded in the history of flight and was cause for the
fellow’s elimination from the glider program.
Another tale that Bill Greenlee remembers
from his student days in Arkansas involved a bit of buzzing the ground. Now most glider pilots were probably at
least once in their career guilty of some buzzing. Some were caught, some were not. It seems that his pilot, while flying alone
and at a low altitude, sighted a large bull in a farmer’s pasture. Perhaps he had one time in his life been chased
by a bull and wanted revenge. Or maybe
he simply recalled that bulls don’t like to be chased. In any event, he set about to have a little
sport at Mr. Bull’s expense. Climbing
to a little higher altitude he dipped his nose and made a bee line for the big
one. Up and down from a couple of
hundred feet altitude to the deck he chased the unhappy bull from one end to
the other of a large field.
Unbeknown to our flying friend, however,
the little drama did not go unnoticed.
Not only did the bull’s owner witness the pilot’s caper, he even had the
presence of mind to record the plane’s identifying tail number. The bull happened to be a prize winner type
which made the farmer especially unhappy.
The result was that the glider pilot was dropped from the program.
It has always seemed to me that some glider
pilots succeeded in completing the program and receiving their glider wings
despite the fact they were lousy pilots, while others with more talent were
less fortunate and were eliminated from training. One guy in the poor category is the subject
of another story by Bill Greenlee as he recalls his days for me at the contract
base in Arkansas
This pilot was one of a member of a group
doing touch and go practice landings in Piper Cubs one dark night. The fellow was taking off along the grass
strip when he lost control of the rudders and did a ground loop. Undismayed, our lucky friend raced across
the strip from left to right, shot up the incline of a rice levee, and was
virtually “launched” into the air.
Those on the ground could observe the wing tip lights bobbing up and
down as the little craft struggled and finally became airborne at minimum
speed. The glider flying in sequence
behind him knew who was at the controls and later in the evening, after they
had returned to their quarters, questioned the former about his take off from
the levee, The guilty one refused to
admit that he had taken off from the side of the field and had to be escorted
to the spot the next day and shown the wheel marks in the levee before he would
admit to the ground loop and hazardous take off. But to illustrate how lucky some glider
pilots were, Greenlee remembers that the guy later nosed over another Cub in a
mud hole, destroying the propeller, and still graduated from the flying school
and went on for further training in basic gliders. He was from Texas but he surely had the luck
of the Irish.
Greenlee’s final tale from his Arkansas
schooling involved playing “Chicken” in a Piper Cub. Two Glider Pilots were flying in the small
airplane when they decided upon a bit of death defying game. Both took their hands off the controls. The Cub was evidently trimmed for slow
descent because it slowly dropped toward the ground. Neither pilot would give in nor the Cub
landed by itself on a small field with neither Cub nor pilots suffering
injury. Talk about luck. They really had it that day.
I completed my student training on the
CG-4A Glider at South Plains, Texas, in April 1943, and was appointed to the
rank of flight officer before a small group of friend and relatives, and
awarded my glider wings. I was ready to
go to war. Instead I went to Bowman
Field at Louisville, Kentucky.
About the only thing I remember about our
graduation was that as we left the theater there was a large group of enlisted
men awaiting us. In accordance with
established military tradition, a first salute from a newly graduated officer
was worth a quick dollar.
Chapter 2
The Uncertain Role of the Glider Pilot
By the time I arrived at Bowman Field in
May 1943 the role of the American glider pilot was definitely uncertain. Newly rated glider pilots were arriving at
Bowman steadily and the reserve pool there was growing at an alarming
rate. It was apparent that the Army Air
Force could not make up its mind as to the exact future of its glider pilots.
The story making the rounds at the time was
that General Dwight Eisenhower was trying to decide as to whether glider pilots
would be committed to a combat status once they were on the ground or would be
returned to their off bases for additional flights.
As days passed at Bowman it became obvious
that an immediate decision was not forthcoming. So what was the Army to do with
approximately 2,000 (at the time) virile young men who were sitting around with
little to do and too much time on their hands for their own good.
Something had to be done because Bowman
Field was right in the outskirts of Louisville and there were just too many
ways for glider pilots to get into trouble.
Those shiny new glider wings and officers’ bars adoring those brand new
officers’ uniforms were simply more than the local girls could bear. The classier bars downtown were nightly
crowded with glider pilots. Fights,
especially with “tank jockeys” from Fort Knox, were common. The rate of venereal disease climbed. And too many homesick young men settled for
quickie marriages to southern belles.
The situation at Bowman actually reached
the boiling point by summer of 1943 when the commander formed a twenty-first
squadron called “X” Squadron. It was
made up of those awaiting trial, discharge, or suffering from a venereal
disease. It was decision time for the
Army so someone in the hierarchy decided that the solution was to work the hell
out of its glider pilots and at the same time give them a good dose of ground
training – just in case they had to take care of themselves in combat later if
they happened to land in a hostile situation.
Later on many were thankful for the training and it saved many lives.
That summer of 1943 at Bowman we underwent
infantry-type training that at times more nearly resembled that of the
paratroopers. We suffered calisthenics
morning and night , took countless hikes up to 35 miles long, qualified on the
rifle and “45” revolver, pitched hand grenades, and learned to disassemble
various guns. We did little
walking. It was run, run, run!
Most of us had little trouble qualifying on
the rifle, at least with the lowest rating of “marksman,” and there was a
generous sprinkling of “sharpshooter” and “expert” among us. The Army’s venerable “45” was, however,
another story. Most of us agreed that
if we ever got close enough to the enemy to use the thing we’d be better off if
we threw it at him.
Two events concerning the rifle and the
revolver that stand out in my mind – the Infiltration Course at Fort Knox and
the Pistol Range at Bowman.
One bright and sunny day in July, 1943, I
was one of a party trucked some 40 miles to Fort Knox to qualify on the
Infiltration Course. We had heard
stories (always told as the “gospel truth”) of the guy who, when startled by a
snake, stood up while on the course and was ripped apart by machine gun bullets
which were deliberately fired over crawling men to impress them with the
advisability of staying low in combat.
As thousands of American ground troops will
tell you, an Infiltration Course such as the one at Fort Knox was no laughing
matter. The idea was for a bunch of men
in a line were to crawl a couple hundred yards or so along the ground, avoiding
holes, rocks, timbers and other obstacles, and arrive at the other end wiser
and unscathed. But it wasn’t as simple
as that. While crawling with a rifle
cradled in your arms underneath your body, 30 caliber machine guns mounted at
the rear of the course were spitting a hideous stream of bullets over your
head. I’m sure they were aimed well
above our bodies, but the average person on the ground didn’t know for sure at
the time just how close they were coming.
And then there were those characters on the
catwalks above us at the rear who delighted in throwing strings of firecrackers
down on those of us below. Others at
the rear were screaming over bill horns to “not bunch up.” In my case I separated myself from a guy who
was crowding me, but I unfortunately rolled up against a bunch of logs which
covered a small charge of explosives.
Some happy soul at the rear seized upon my move to detonate the charge
which gave a good jar but didn’t actually inflict any damage on me, other than
nearly scaring the wits out of me.
Upon our arrival at the far end of the
course, which sloped downward, we were confronted a few yards ahead by dummy
soldiers which popped up from the ground.
The idea was for us to fire at the enemy. I don’t know if I hit any but I do recall
that I was able to pull my trigger. As
to whether or not the guy at the rear was firing real live ammunition I still
don’t, but I did notice that the trees down the hill below the course were all
reduced to shreds. Glider pilots on the
course that day must have been a well-disciplined group because the briefer
after the infiltration, a tough looking Army major, said we were the best
looking bunch he had seen that week.
The part of our “45” program that remains
with me concerns a strapping six-foot-plus captain who had charge of that phase
of our training. After a suitable
checking out period and much warning as to how we could kill someone if we
didn’t handle the piece properly, he took us out to the range. After positioning himself on a high bit of
ground at the rear of the firing line, he uttered those familiar words: “Ready on the left, ready on the right, ready
on the firing line, fire at will.”
Unhappily for him, one Glider Pilot in the center of the line and seen
someone in the movies draw his gun back over his shoulder before each
shot. By the time the captain had run
down the slope and made his way to where he could tackle his offender, the
fellow had drawn three beads on the captain’s chest. “This man will not fore in my range for records,”
the captain screamed, along with a string of profanity. It was undoubtedly hair raising for the
captain, but the rest of us thought it was hilarious and showed it with gales
of laughter.
Each of the squadrons of Glider Pilots at
Bowman had a so-called tactical officer who was in overall charge of
training. My squadron’s just happened
to be the meanest s. o .b. that anyone could imagine. We were there to prepare for combat and he
evidently meant to toughen us up. We
just didn’t like the way he went about it.
He used to love to sit in the back of a truck just ahead of hot and exhausted
Glider Pilots marching in full field pack with rifle – drink in front of them
from his canteen. Once he did this
after having ordered one group of marchers to empty their canteens. One story had it that when he received his
overseas orders late in the war, he came into his living quarters to discover
that his services ties had been cut off at the halfway mark – an old pre - World
War II fair warning that “someone was about to do you in.” I seem to have forgotten his name but many
glider pilots who were stationed at Bowman during 1943 remember him well.
At least one glider pilot had no fear of
this officer. One day after he had been
AWOL for 24 hours, he returned to his bunk to find a note to report to said
officer’s desk. He did – with chewing
gum in his mouth which he was chewing rapidly and noisily. He managed a half-way salute in the front of
the desk. After observing the glider
pilot for half a minute or so, the officer screamed out, “Spit out that
gum.” Which the fellow did – right in
the middle of the desk. I’m almost
sorry to report that it was the offender’s last act in the military as a glider
pilot. He was cashiered out of the
service within a week for “conduct unbecoming to an officer.” among other
offense.
I think I can say that life for the average
glider pilot at Bowman in 1943 was an unbelievable mixture of miserable ground
training, dangerous flying, and really great after-hours fun in the city of
Louisville.
Sad to say, all was not fun and games at
Bowman. All too many glider pilots were
either injured or killed there on the small planes we flew. One summer day about 30 of us were flying
solo and returning from a practice assault on the city of Warsaw, Indiana. Flight Officers Roth and Sutherland, who
bunked on either side of me, collided at 900 feet while we were all strung out
and making a turn into the sun. One
tried to parachute but there wasn’t sufficient altitude by the time he got out
for the parachute to open. The other
was unable to jump at all and spun into the ground with the craft. A friend of mine Leon Spencer, and I,
neither knowing whether Roth and Sutherland had actually been killed, decided
separately to land at the scene of the accidents, something that was strictly
forbidden by Army Air Force regulation.
As it turned out, we’d have been better off
if we had obeyed the regulation. As we
individually swept low over the scene, Spence evidently took a look and then
decided to push the throttle forward and regain altitude. Instead, he pushed the trim tab forward and
flew into the ground, barely missing a farm boy sitting atop a fence next to a
barn. I made another turn around the
field and landed in a nearby pasture.
In my troubled state of mind I couldn’t even find the foot brake and
ended up nearly going through a fence myself.
Shortly after that, a third glider pilot landed at the scene – ground
looping his tiny aircraft and narrowly averting another accident.
Once we had determined that Roth and
Sutherland were both dead, the two of us turned our attention to Spencer. We quickly discovered that the engine was on
his legs, his leg was obviously broken, and he was bleeding rather profusely
from a gash on the leg. We were about
to try to move the small engine off Spencer’s legs, when my friend noted that
an inquisitive farmer was looking over our shoulders with a lighted cigar in
his mouth, a very stupid thing to do with gasoline pouring freely from the engine. The farmer paid no attention to our request
to leave the scene with his cigar, that is, until my friend hauled out his “45”
service revolver to emphasize the point.
I rode to the Bowman Hospital with the
injured pilot, my buddy spencer, and asked an administrative type at the
hospital to call me wife and ask her to come to the hospital to be with
Spencer’s wife. When my wife arrived
some time later by cab and saw me in the waiting room she was more than surprised. It seems that a guard at the door had told
her that “if your husband was in that airplane, he’s dead.” It wasn’t the only time that I was either to
be injured or worse in an accident during my time in the glider program, but I
imagine most other glider pilots can say the same thing.
As an aftermath, the commander at Bowman
Field informed both of us would-be rescuers that he intended to courts-martial
the both of us for landing at the scene of an accident. We were spared when our formation leader of
the day, a captain, said that he would be ask to be tried with us unless the
charges were dropped. I was forever
grateful to the captain for his friendly gestures, although today I don’t even
recall his name.
A sequel to the story was that several
years after the war I was back in the service on recruiting duty at Louisville
and had occasion to visit a farm home to give a recruiting pitch to a young
gentleman. As I entered the farmyard I
had that de ja vu sensation that I had been there before. As it turned out, I had. I mentioned my sensation to the family,
related the crashes, and was told by his mother that my service prospect was
the same kid who had been sitting on the fence and had narrowly missed being
another casualty that tragic day. I
wanted to ask them if they knew who it was that stole my prized leather jacket
and revolver from my aircraft that day while I was helping my injured friend,
but decided that discretion was still the better part of valor, especially
sense I was intent on filling my recruiting quota for that month.
Part of our flying training at Bowman Field
in 1943 involved landing the small aircraft as slowly as possible to prepare us
for landing gliders similarly slow in combat.
This came about primarily because of a badly bungled maneuver carried
out at Alliance, Nebraska, in late 1942.
At that time it was believed that glides should be landed in combat at a
high rate of speed to avoid ground fire.
What planners had failed to realize, however, was that fast landing
gliders don’t stop quickly once they land, especially if loaded heavily in
combat.
A large number of C-47-towed CH-4A Gliders
approached the base at Alliance at speeds of more than 100 miles an hour. Most of the glider pilots waited until they
were nearly upon the end of the runway and then forced their gliders down at
speeds up to 120 miles an hour. Most
overshot the entire runway and ended up in the dirt at the far end. It was apparent what would have happened had
the pilots tried such high speed landings in rough terrain or even smooth
pasture land. Thus involved the
decision at Bowman to start learning to land aircraft at slow speeds when
simulating glider landings.
A friend of mine and his instructor were
flying off Bowman Field one afternoon in a Piper Cub. They
were under 200 feet on the final (base) leg of the landing pattern when his
instructor informed him that he would demonstrate how to slow the Cub down to
35 miles an hour flying speed – a hair above stalling speed – and land super
slow. “Not with me in here.” My friend
countered, where upon he shoved the stick forward and picked up speed to where
he felt comfortable.
Descending at such low speeds caused many a
landing accident at Bowman in the summer of 1943. A mountaineer friend of mine from West
Virginia names Robertson who customarily fly either barefooted or in his
stocking feet was trying to slow his plane down to the point where it would
“mush” onto the ground and roll a minimum distance, in accordance with the
policy of the time. At about 20 feet
altitude the craft “stalled” and pancaked onto the ground. The landing gear crumpled and the
undercarriage was damaged considerably.
The colonel who was commanding the glider program at the time happened
to be standing on the flight line observing the slow landings and witnessed the
incident.
After a sprint to the scene the colonel
found my friend sitting calmly in the wreckage making out the record of his
flight. The West Virginian took off his
sun glasses, looked up and inquired with a straight face, “Is that the way you
want them landed, sir?”
Because it was common in three months due
to crash landings, the colonel had evidently had enough. After that we were told to slow our landing
as much as possible but to use some discretion which meant maintaining a safe
flying speed at all times.
Speaking of slow flying reminds me of a
letter which a glider pilot friend of mine received from his mother. “I’m sure glad you fly low and slow,” she
wrote. That really summed up the
inherent dangers of flying gliders in combat, I thought later. Without the fighter pilot strength we
possessed over Normandy and later over Holland there would surely have been
immensely grater loss of gliders than there was.
To further improve our flying proficiency,
the tactical professionals came up with various projects such as flying
cross-country in formation off Bowman Field to “attack” installations such as
civilian Stout Field at Indianapolis and others. That day we swopped down on the grassy area
on the edge of Stout in our Piper Cubs and Aeroncas, alighted in combat attire
with rifles and other combat ordnance, and proceeded to take the control
tower. Not content with capturing the
building, one eager beaver glider pilot uncorked a canister of smoke on the
main floor. Those of us on the second
and third floor, with no warning to don our gas mask, got a lung full before we
could get outside. We all departed
hastily for our aircraft fearing that bleary-eyed civilians might decide on their
own to engage us in some hand-to-hand combat in reprisal.
On another of our forays we were flying in
trail near Sheppards-ville, Kentucky, at a very low altitude. I mean really low – like rolling our wheels
along the highway, or clipping corn socks in the fields. The glider pilot with whom I was flying
copilot flew low over one field, failed to see a power line, and severed it
neatly – well not quite that good. The
truth was, one end of the wire wrapped around our landing gear. Looking back, I observed the wire trailing
us along the ground. I advised him to
land, which he did successfully amid the cornstalks, and adjacent to a country
road.
Remembering on this occasion that it was a
court-martial offense to leave the scene of an accident until properly relived,
we sat down alongside the road to await developments. A farmer soon appeared and asked our home
base. We told him “Bowman Field” and he
advised us that he would call the proper authorities at the field. We later learned that he was more interested
in his damaged corn than in our welfare.
He advised authorities, alright, including legal authorities who later
were called upon to pay for damage incurred.
To return to the scene, after a bit a lad
appeared along the road on a bicycle and sat down to talk. By the time it was noon and my friend and I
were growing hungry, so we inquired as to whether or not the las would consent
to ride into a nearby town and bring us back a couple of hamburgers. Upon searching our flying suits we
discovered a total of 50 cents. (It
must have been near the end of the month and anyway we didn’t make much money
in those days.) Fifty cents would buy
two hamburgers and a soft drink back then.
Our newly-found friend agreed and departed on his mission, but by 3 p.m.
had not returned. We finally sadly
reached the conclusion that he had taken our money and flown the coop. I never trusted small boys on a bicycle
after that. I remembered the words of
my father back in my youth in Kansas: “I
never knew an honest farmer.”
As I mentioned earlier, life at Bowman
Field after hours was a ball. The first
two or three weeks of each month were great but then we usually ran out of
money because we were paid only once a month.
I recall one month especially when a pair of glider pilots in my
barracks came around occasionally asking for contributions of pocket change for
the “Good Buddy Club.” We gave what we
could and didn’t question their integrity.
About 7 p.m. on the last Saturday of the month, when most of us were
staying in for lack of finance, the two donned their best uniforms, got out
their jar of money, went to the barracks door, faced their generous friends,
and announced: “So long, good
buddies.” With that they departed for
town with our money.
Another thing I recall from Bowman was the
constant bickering between the single and married men each night after
work. The married men argued that they
were entitled to the showers first because they had to get to town to see their
wives. On the other hand, the single
guys maintained that they should shower first so they could get to town to find
someone to marry. Two other groups were
the “open window guys” and the “closed window guys.” This went on at night as to whether the
windows in the barracks were to be up or down on cool nights. As General MacArthur once said, “I wouldn’t
give a damn for a soldier who didn’t complain.” He would have liked glider pilots.
One of my good drinking buddy’s was
scheduled for an early morning cross-country flight and arrived back in the barracks
from a weekend pass, about an hour before flight time. A couple of his buddies practically carried
him to the rear seat of a Piper Cub and strapped him in. One friend took the front seat, completed a
cross-country flight of several hours, returned to Bowman and landed without
incident. After the taxing had been
completed and the engine shut off, the guy in the rear seat aroused
sufficiently to inquire, “When do we take off?”
Jackie Coogan, the child movie star of the
twenties, was a World War II glider pilot, believe it or not. Assigned to the Bowman Field glider pilot
pool, like many of us in 1943, he enjoyed spending as much off-duty time as
possible in downtown Louisville. In his case, his favorite spot was the famed
Brown Hotel at 4th and Main streets. Jackie was known for his drinking ability
and had a special love for Brown’s four bars.
The only hitch was that Brown management thought he still had some of
the money he earned as a star, or perhaps they thought his wife Betty Grable
would pay. In reality, his mother and
stepfather had spent it all.
Within a matter of weeks after his arrival,
Coogan owed $1,500.00 a lot of money in those days. When the Brown manager pressed him for the
money, Jackie came up with what proved to be a brilliant idea: If he enticed enough glider pilots to come to
the hotel that weekend so that the Brown bars would take in $1,500.00 more than
the usual net for a weekend, would the management write off the bill? The manager agreed, whereupon Jackie put
signs in all the glider pilot barracks announcing a “Jackie Coogan Party for
ALL at the Bowman Hotel Saturday Night.”
The only thing that he didn’t put on the signs was that he did not
intend to pay for a cent of the cost of the party. The scheme worked and he squirmed out of a
tight financial bind.
Incidentally, Jackie Coogan wasn’t the
Hollywood sissy that some glider pilots presumed him to even if he was by that
time fat and almost totally bald at age 24.
It was said that Coogan was in the habit of going to his hotel room
telephone on nights before he was cut off and saying, “This is Coogan. Send up such and such a number of bottles of
Scotch and mix.” One evening a friend
of mine was present in Coogan’s room, heard the conversation, waited until he
thought Coogan was out of hearing range in the bathroom, and then picked up the
phone. “Hello desk,” he said in a rather
inebriated tone, “this is Coogan. Send
up a locomotive.” Unfortunately for my
friend, who was a good sized man himself, Coogan heard the flippant
conversation, rushed back into the room, picked up my friend by the scruff of
the neck and seat of his pants and deposited him in the hallway. I was never privileged to be present, but
there were time that Coogan would hold court in one end of the barracks and
relate tales of Hollywood and its glamorous stars. He would say little concerning wife Betty
Grable except for one occasion when he intimated that she didn’t go much for
normal bedtime relations with him because she took such great pride in her
gorgeous form. Coogan turned out to be
a good glider pilot-soldier and participated in the glider invasion in Burma
carried out in conjunction with the British to ambush a large force of
Japanese.
There were many stories and some jokes of
wild and hell-bent-for leather glider pilots in Louisville. One occasion a hard drinking fellow who was
supposed to have tried to glide from one room window in the Seelbach Hotel
across the alley to the window in another building, holding a large piece of
cardboard. When a buddy came to visit
him in the hospital the next day, the would-be flier inquired of his visitor,
“Why didn’t stop me?” “Stop you,”
retorted his friend, “I had $5.00 on your nose.”
One time at 2 a.m. as I wobbled through the
gate at Bowman, a guard said to me, “Sir, I just don’t understand how you
glider pilots can come in at these unearthly hours and then fall out at 6 a.m.
and take those long hikes.” I suppose
only another glider pilot could give the answer. Glider pilots were “something else.”
One favorite glider pilot pastime in
addition to drinking and women was gambling.
I saw a lot of small fortunes made and lost but no instance was stranger
that what happened to my friend Charley Scott, formerly a truck driver out of
Baltimore. Charley completed his basic
glider training at Twenty Nine Palms, California, and with his classmates
boarded the train for the trip to Bowman Field in Louisville. After two days and nights of drinking and
gambling, Charley was awakened from a deep sleep (stupor) on a bench in the
train’s men’s room by a porter who informed him he had reached his destination.
Charley arose, straightened his tie, donned
his blouse for the departure at the station, and only then noticed that his
blouse seemed to fit rather tightly. He
stuck his hand inside his shirt, then inside his under shirt, and there
discovered to his absolute amazement the presence of $1,600.00 in
greenbacks. He obviously had won a lot
of money (a real bonanza in those pre-inflation days) but couldn’t even
remember doing it. It is said that
expert gamblers don’t drink when they are playing for serious stakes, but
Charley apparently disproved that old saying – at least on one occasion. The gambling went on unabated on the ship
going overseas, continued while we were overseas, and never ceased until the
day we were discharged at the end of the war.
Another funny incident at Bowman involved a
glider pilot and his small dog.
Although it was forbidden by regulation, the fellow managed to keep the
pooch in and around our barracks.
Another glider pilot who was never particularly popular with most of us
insisted on giving beer to the dog who seemed to like the taste of it but
invariably gave the dog a large drink of the brew and then took off for
town. Then something wonderful
happened. The dog staggered from his owner’s
to the other’s bed, leaped up on it, and not only threw up the beer but also
urinated on the bed. Some sort of GI
justice, the rest of us thought.
This didn’t happen in Louisville but it was
rather typical of some of the things that glider pilots did during World War
II. Dressed in his blues, glider wings
and all, this glider pilot commandeered an unoccupied railway locomotive in the
yards at Mohave, California, a small town 3,000 feet up in the desert, and
drove it some 100 miles down from the mountains into the outskirts of Los
Angeles. He braked it to an uneventful
stop, alighted unnoticed, and proceeded by cab to the city for a weekend of
fun. His explanation: why hitchhike or pay bus fare when it was so
easy to take a train? He literally
“took” a train and lived to tell about it.
Say “Louisville” to a World War II glider
pilot and among the memories he will dredge up will be those of the legion of
girls of that fair Southern city. Among
those I recall from my own experiences was one pretty damsel whom I squired to
the races at Churchill Downs, home of the famed Kentucky Derby. Believe it or not, one of the horses running
that day in an early race was named “Glider Pilot.”
Sensing a premonition for a winning bet, I
gave my date $5.00 with instructions to go bet it on Glider Pilot to win. Sure enough, the horse came in first by a
comfortable margin, Elated, I waited for her return, knowing that my earnings
would be substantial because the odds were high.
“I didn’t bet your money on Glider Pilot,”
she sighed demurely. “What do you mean you
didn’t bet it on Glider Pilot,” I cried in dismay.” I bet it on ‘First Sergeant’, she came
back. At the time I settled down and
wrote off the incident as more bad luck.
Later on, after we parted, never to meet again, I became convinced that
she had collected and pocketed my winnings.
Even at that, I know I came off a lot more fortunate than many other
glider pilots who were fleeced one way or another while in Louisville.
It was safe to say that glider pilots at
Bowman were, in general, dissatisfied with their status in the military with
the rank of “Flight Officer.” We were,
yet were not, officers in the true sense of the words. With a rank just below that of a second
Lieutenant, one way remarked, “What’s lower than a second lieutenant?”
According to one story of the time, General
Dwight Eisenhower created the rank himself when he decided that only persons
with an officer rank would fly aircraft for the Army. Why he didn’t just commission glider pilots
upon graduation no one will ever know.
Possible it was because the qualifications for entering the program were
not equal to those of the aviation cadet program. The flight officer rank was indicated by a
bar of blue with gold outer-rim and rounded rather than square corners.
Once they had become flight officers, many
glider pilots immediately began altering their insignia to make it appear to be
that of a second lieutenant. This was
done by taking a second lieutenant gold bar and painting it with blue
fingernail polish. Many glider pilots
did not like the “ruptured duck” hat insignia worn by warrant and flight
officers rather than the commissioned officer’s insignia. So many simply and illegally wore this
commissioned officer’s eagle-like insignia on their 50-mission crush hats. From time to time the commander at Bowman
Field issued edicts that flight officers were not to alter their bars or wear
the improper hat insignia. Many glider
pilots were personally chewed out by commissioned officers who regarded the
practice as an infringement on their privileged hats.
Flight Officer Earl Ivie (the), later of
the 88th Troop Carrier Squadron, recalls a time he was serving in an
additional duty as his squadron’s transportation officer. Wearing his altered bar and commissioned
officer’s hat insignia, he picked up a full colonel to transport him across
base. It was obvious by his glanced
that the colonel did not approve of Ivie’s rank alternations but he apparently
didn’t have the guts to mention it until he had reached his destination. After he had alighted from the vehicle and
had stood by for the customary dismissal salute he remarked rather curtly,
“Mister (as one addressed warrant and flight officers in pre-World War II days
and occasionally during World War II) I suggest that you remove those insignias
after you return to your office.
General Eisenhower doesn’t like it.”
Poor Ike, he sure got blamed for the enforcement of a lot of unpopular
rules.
Chapter 3
Training for Combat
The fall of 1943 found the glider pilots at
Bowman Field in Louisville moving out by increments for combat training at
several Army installations along the North-South Carolina border. It was bad enough leaving fun-loving
Louisville, but if we had known what lay in store for us in the Tar-heel state
we certainly wouldn’t have gone happily.
In my case I was assigned to Camp MacCall,
North Carolina in October 1943 and should have been wary of what awaited me
because I now recall my dad’s warning about staying away from that particular
state. He used to tell me stories
during my youth of his days in tank training for World War I at Raleigh and
Charlotte. “Son,” he said, “it’s the
only place on God’s green acres where you can stand knee deep on mud with the
sand blowing in your face.”
For some reason which I can’t recall, I
made the train trip to the East alone.
The train stopped at a siding near the camp where a sign on a post said,
“Officers call such and such a number for transportation. Enlisted men walk.” I called the number and was advised that a
jeep and driver would be there shortly.
After I waited impatiently for two hours in the Carolina sun, jeep and
driver arrived. The driver, a
freckled-faced kid with a New York accent, explained that he had just driven a
military policeman and (major) chaplain from Fayetteville to MacCall. It seems that the chaplain was just being
brought back from an Absence without Leave (AWOL) from MacCall. I didn’t expect much from the place after
that introduction so I suppose I was never really surprised about what I
eventually encountered there. The
military policeman drove away after dropping me off at the squadron
headquarters with this bit of philosophy:
“Camp MacCall should have been named “GuadalMacCall.”
The very day I arrived at MacCall there
also arrived a railroad freezer car full of pork. During my month there, we never had a bite
of beef – just pork. Our captain supply
officer who was Jewish merely ignored the situation by always saying, “Please
pass the whale neat.”
One night for supper we had macaroni and
dry bread. No butter; just dry
bread. I was to recall this meal later
when I was stationed in France. Our
mess sergeant was directed to draw our supply of bread from a centralized point
at LeMans, which they did. The first
night our inventive cook made bread pudding.
While eating it I soon pulled a horsehair from my mouth, then another,
and then more. Our cooks had brought
back the bread in gunny sacks which apparently had earlier been used to carry
something containing horse hair. Until
you’ve eaten bread pudding garnished with horse hair, you’ve never really
lived!
The only other place that had food as bad
as MacCall’s was Lockbourne Field at Columbus, Ohio, where I was stationed
briefly in late 1942. There it was
common to be served practically raw bacon and chicken with pin feathers still
attached. Each evening an enterprising
little man in a vendor’s truck arrived outside the service club with a load of
sandwiches. We never knew where he got
the then-rationed neat. We didn’t ask. We just stood in line half a block long to
buy his sandwiches. We suspected it was
horse meat but were afraid to ask. We
ate it. It was better than raw
bacon. Oh yes. The knives, forks and
spoons at the mess hall were all rusted.
I’ll never forget that mess-hall at Lockbourne. How could I?
Camp MacCall and the nearby village of
Hamlet proved to be the end of the world, or so thought the average glider
pilot there. It was no place to bring a
wife and the Army knew it, so glider pilots were expressly told to not bring
them there. But many wives including
mine soon arrived on the scene. Finding
lodging was a real task as was finding a decent meal in Hamlet. For instance, cafes would serve a glass of
milk only to pregnant women. My wife
lied convincingly enough to get served.
Glider Pilot wages including flight pay
were relatively high but it was still difficult to stretch them from payday to
payday while living in an expensive private or hotel room. It was commonplace to steal canned C rations
from the base, especially late in the month.
I recall heating cans of the stuff on top of an old fashioned steam
radiator in our rented room. It seems
bad now but I recall it rather fondly.
I was still practically a newlywed and little things like canned GI food
didn’t bother me at all.
For a time at Hamlet we sub-rented the room
of a school teacher who had gone back to her home at Christmas time for a
couple of weeks. After she returned we
tried a small motel where the ancient bed fell to the floor on evening, finally we located a room over a tavern. One glider pilot’s wife who lived in an
adjoining room usually awoke my wife each morning at 9 a.m. when the bartender
arrived for work below. With her usual
hangover she would lower a market basket on a rope from her second story window
and by banging the basket on the rear bar window attracting the gent’s
attention. He would take her money from
the basket, tie in a six-pack of beer, and send it on its way upstairs. All this was not without considerable
noise. My wife retaliated one evening
when we arrived late from the club. She
took my combat boots, which I had removed, held them by the laces and drug them
all the way upstairs, striking each step along the way. It was war from then on. One night her lieutenant husband brought
three paratroopers home for a game of porker.
By 2 a.m. the game changed to a brawl which brought the military
police. Later I heard that the four
resumed their game in the paddy wagon and by the time they reached Camp MacCall
they were once more on friendly terms.
The disgusted military police ended up by turning them loose with an
admonition to get the hell back to town and not cause and further trouble.
New Year’s Eve in North Carolina meant the
usual party at the Officer’s Club.
During the course of the evening my squadron commander, a handsome
dashing major known for his womanizing, asked my young wife for a dance. The dance had barely started when she was
back with the news that the major had French kissed her instead of the friendly
New Year’s Eve kiss she had expected.
What was her reaction? Of course
she slapped him. How did I react? “Oh no, not the major,” I lamented. I was to hear that statement thrown back at
me many times by several friends who overheard me at the table. They never let me forget it.
World War II glider pilots with one hundred
percent fond memories of time spent in North Carolina must be few in number. Among those few would surely ne a dozen or
so who were transferred in from Bowman to Maxton-Laurinburg in December
1943. They found Uncle Scrooge right
there in the Tar-heel State. Their
orders read that they were to report to that desolate place on Christmas
Day. The lads took it upon themselves
to report in on the 26th instead, giving many of them an opportunity
to spend Christmas at home. So was
Uncle sympathetic and understanding?
You’d better believe he wasn’t.
All involved were directed to sign a Violation of the 104th
Article of War – failure to report on time – and were docked a day’s pay.
Mrs. Gracie Ivie, whom I met with her
husband at a National World War II Glider Pilot Association long after the war,
was one of those loving wives who defied the Army and followed their husbands
to North Carolina. Unless you were
there, you don’t know the trials and tribulations those wives endured in the
tiny towns near MacCall, Maxton-Laurinburg and Pope Fields.
Many of the home owners in the area offered
rooms in their ancient structures (many of them relics of the Civil War) to
glider pilot couples. The natives were
friendly but they weren’t above charging outrageous rent. Gracie recalls that there wasn’t much for
her to do except to sit around and await her husband’s return, if and when he
got off in the evening in those days of seven-days-a-week duty.
One thing which Gracie and some of the
other wives did to occupy their empty hours was attempting to catch bats which
occasionally flew down the chimneys of the two-story homes. This was usually dome by swinging a broom at
the creatures until the latter were either struck or fell to the floor from
utter exhaustion. After catching the
bats one way or another, Gracie gingerly deposited then in the stool and
flushed them into eternity.
Two glider pilot wives succeeded in finding
rooms over a theater in Hamlet. The
husband of one rushed in one evening after dark and pounded on his own door. “You okay.” He breathlessly asked his
spouse. “Sure,” she replied, “what in
the heck is wrong?” She let him
in.
The problem was that FBI agents had come to
town and were after several prostitutes who had followed the trail of glider
pilots from Louisville to North Carolina.
The ladies of the evening had evidently decided that any place where
hundreds of unaccompanied young glider pilots were stationed far out in the
piney woods and away from the bright lights would surely be fertile ground for
plying their talents. Obviously the two
married glider pilots were worried be mistaken for the prostitutes which had
been seen around the theater.
The Army lost no time in getting on with
the combat training phase once the Glider Pilots arrived in large numbers. Because Fort Bragg was already established
as a training facility for airborne troops it made sense to build the glider
bases near there. Of course the army
didn’t take into consideration the fact that the area was mostly covered by towering
trees which would be most unfriendly to a glider that accidently broke off its
C-47 tow plane. Other than on the
landing fields at the bases, simulated combat assault landing were to be made
in cotton fields, notwithstanding the fact that approaches to these fields were
usually over these towering pines. Lord
protect the unwary glider pilot who undershot the field. There was no place to go put into the tops
of these trees, many times with tragic results.
Camp MacCall was undoubtedly the most
ill-equipped installation anyone could imagine for receiving such a large
number of troops, and the other Army field’s around Bragg weren’t much
better. MacCall was a hastily built
collection of tarpaper-covered shacks along a runway hacked out among the
pines. Our barracks had no running
water and were heated by coal-burning, pot-bellied stoves, one at either end of
the one-story barracks. We all shared a
community latrine and shower.
Most of our flying training in North
Carolina consisted of coming in for landing over obstacles which were shaved
off pine trees implanted into the ground.
We were to drop in over the 60-foot tall trees and come to a stop within
600 feet. In the daytime we made
assault landing with large numbers of gliders into the cotton fields. There were invariably gliders crashing into
other gliders. Night landing were
murder. There was one smudge pot at
either end of the field. The idea was
for the first gliders to land at the far end of the field with the others
landing shorter and shorter, filling the field from the far to the near end in
that order. But try that sometime at
night with only a kerosene pot at either end to guide you. God only knows the number of crash landing
and injuries which were experience on those Carolina fields in 1943-44.
Glider pilots had empathy for the Army Airborne glider troopers we
carried. After all, we were riding in
the same crates. Stating in 1942,
several thousand young American makes had been drafted into the Army and had
the further misfortune of being involuntarily assigned as glider
infantrymen. At first this was without
additional pay, but by D-Day (June 1944) they were receiving extra pay the same
as the paratroopers. These glider
troopers received one, two, or three at the most, orientation flights in our
gliders in North Carolina prior to being shipped to England for the Normandy
Invasion.
Glider pilots were forever thinking up
sadistic jokes to pull on these poor unsuspecting souls. I was a part of one of these deals. A very tall friend of mine with whom I was
flying that day jumped up, grabbed on to the end of the glider wing, and swung
back and forth under the Carolina sun as the airborne troops awaited their
first glider flight.
The glider troopers stood it as long as
they could and then one of them inquired of me, “What’s he doing that
for?” “Well,” I said with a straight
face, “If the wing doesn’t crack, we’ll fly it.”
One of the stories making the rounds in
England after D-Day concerned paratroopers who had been in the guardhouse when
it was time for the Invasion of Normandy.
Reportedly, those serving minor sentences were released but denied the
privilege of jumping into combat.
Instead, they had to ride the gliders.
And that was punishment for anyone!
Glider pilots didn’t’ have the corner on
the comedy market. When I was stationed
in North Carolina, I heard about a C-47 pilot who was making his landing approach
behind one of our CG-4A gliders. When
he noted a female voice coming from the control tower radio he got on his mike
and said, “CG-4A coming in with no engine.”
The WAC, not realizing she had a glider approaching rather than an
aircraft, got very excited for a few moments before being told by a fellow that
she had been had.
Most flying at the Carolina bases was of
the double-tow variety. One glider was
attached to the C-47 with a short nylon rope while the other had a much longer
line. The idea was for the glider with
the shirt line to fly behind and to the left of the C-47 tow plane while the
glider pilot flew in the left seat it was easier for the one on the long line
to see and keep track of the short tow glider which was ahead and lower to the
left.
Earl Ivie, while receiving his combat
training at Maxton-Laurinburg, took off one day on the short tow line. Soon afterwards and at a low altitude, the
rope broke. Fortunately there was a
corn field in view which he believed he could reach. And there weren’t too many good fields
around, as he recalls it. He landed
fairly roughly among the rows of corn.
He alighted from the glider without delay to assess the possible damage
and to congratulate himself on being alive and unhurt. It was only then that he saw the other
glider on the ground right behind him.
Ivie’s rope had somehow become entangled around his right wheel and the
wing of the other glider. Unable to
disengage his glider, the other pilot had literally flown in formation with
Ivie and had also landed successfully, still attached to Ivie’s glider.
Speaking of glider ropes, Wayne Palm of the
51st Wing’s 60th Troop Carrier Group in Sicily, was given
an assignment to fly a glider load of tow ropes from one field to another. His glider was full of ropes. When he reached the other field he cut his
glider loosed to land when for some reason it became unstable and the nose rose
to a near-stall attitude. Palm trimmed
the glider wing down as far as possible and managed to keep it flying at a
dangerously slow speed of 60 miles an hour – okay for an empty glider but not a
loaded one. He landed in a sweat,
probably the only glider pilot who was nearly done in by a tow rope(s) not even
hooked to a glider.
Glider pilots who underwent harrowing
experiences sometimes shared them with glider riders from the Army
Airborne. Ronald Calendine, who was a
radio operator with the 878th Airborne Engineers at Memberry,
England, tells of one strange training incident in which he participated.
Ron was aboard a CG-4A Glider as it was set
to take off as part of a training maneuver in Central England. As the C-47 tow plane took up the slack in
the rope, and Ron was probably wishing he was back home in Stockport, Ohio, he
felt the glider suddenly and completing stop while the C-47 continued
forwarded. There was nothing to be
heard except the sound of the C-47s on all sides and in front. At that instant the glider pilot at the
controls threw up both hands in front of his face. With a loud swooshing sound, the rope from
the C-47 sailed backwards and struck the Plexiglas windshield of the glider in
which Ron was seated. Luckily the large
metal hook fastened into the tail of the C-47 stayed in place when the rope
broke and no one was the worse for the incident. It developed that the left glider wheel had
dropped into a drainage hole at the side of the runway, instantly stopping the
then slow-rolling glider. The nylon
rope stretched to its limit and then snapped.
Ron was unscathed but the event did a little to increase his confidence
in the frail craft which had become so much a part of his life.
The rope snapping under great tension
reminded me of the story that I heard of an airborne picnic back in the
states. Two companies decided to each
get on one end of 300 feet of nylon rope to decide which was the stronger. As I recall it, there were about one hundred
men on either side. The contest had
pretty well reached an impasse with neither side able to beat the other when
the rope snapped with a sound resembling the sound of an artillery piece going
off. The first several men on either
side closest to the point of “explosion” were severely hurt broken hands and
other lacerations.
Now a retired science teacher living in
Newark, Ohio, Ron also remembers a time in England when he was in a glider on
double-tow. To this day he doesn’t know
why, but he says the C-47 pilot released both gliders within sight of the home
field. Ron’s pilot evidently speculated
that he could not stretch his glide to the runway and chose a small field ahead
for an emergency landing site. It was
then that the glider pilot made good use of his stateside training in
side-slipping the ungainly CG-4A.
Nearing the ground he released the glider from the slipping maneuver,
leveled off, and applies wing spoilers and landed uneventfully. The other glider pilot chose instead to
stretch his glider in an attempt to reach the grassy end of the home airfield. He didn’t make it and smashed up his
glider. Luckily the occupants escaped
unhurt. That experience demonstrated
the difference between a glider pilot with good judgement and on without it. Ron had the good luck to be aboard the
former.
Not all the harrowing, mind boggling
flights experienced aboard gliders were limited to glider pilots
themselves. At least one was shared by
a wife. When the commander of a
training field where Al Barton was stationed decreed that wives could be taken
up on an orientation flight the idea didn’t set well with Al’s wife Vicky. She didn’t care too much for flying,
especially in a glider.
After considerable coaxing and much talk
about how safe glider flying was, Mrs. Barton consented to a 10-minute
flight. At 2 p.m., Al and Vicky were
airborne in CG-4A Glider No. 91A. Al
released the glider at 2,500 feet. At
that point Vicky seemed to relax as the glider slowed and they drifted quietly
toward the landing field. Then the
bumps started as they glided through a building cumulus cloud. She became obviously alarmed as the field
below got smaller and smaller.
After a bit, the altimeter read 8,000. With a quiver in her voice she asked, “How
do we get down?” “No problem,” Al
answered with as much bravado as he could muster, because the bumps were
definitely worsening. Al tried the
spoilers and for a minute the craft lost a little altitude. Then a sudden took the craft back to 8,000
and quickly to 10,000.
At this point it was the panic button for
even Al. “We’ve got to get out of
here,” he shouted, “even if we have to land somewhere other than the home
field. Just then, however, the glider
was tossed free of the storm cloud and started descending, much to the relief
of both Bartons. They made it back home
as the thunderstorm clouds rolled on to the west. As he competed his trip report, Al noticed
that it was exactly two hours since the flight began. He hadn’t broken the Army regulation which
limited orientation flights to two hours, but he had defiantly strained
relations with wife Vicky.
Chapter 4
We Go Overseas
Having completed
my combat glider training in North Carolina, first with the 38th
Training Division and then with the 439th Troop Carrier Group to
which I was assigned for overseas duty, I was ready for shipment to England in
February 1944. The aircrews ferried our
C-47s via Brazil and North Africa but the poor glider pilots went by ship. So where did we go first” We went by slow train via Atlanta to Baer
Field at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Why was
Baer Field in the geographical center of the nation our staging area for the
European Theater? I don’t know. You tell me.
My memory of Fort Wayne was that it was a
very Friendly city. The installation
commander, however, was not at all friendly.
Having had previous experience with glider pilots, he was ready for us. No overseas-bound troops were to go off
base. But I guess he didn’t really
know glider pilots. Many of our wives
again made the trip on their own, this time to Fort Wayne, and we were
determined to go off base to rejoin them.
One resourceful glider pilot located enough wood and nails to fashion a
sturdy V-shaped folding ladder which each evening allowed us to literally “go
over the fence.” One glider pilot swore
to several of us that one night there were so many waiting to go over that it
was done by rank, lieutenant colonels on down to us lowly flight officers.
After ten joys days at Fort. Wayne (for me
anyway) we got started on our way to England.
We went by train to Camp Miles Standish near Boston where we remained
for another ten days. My memory of this
place was that many of us endured the diarrhea brought on by some lousy Army
chow. There were long lines at the
community latrine and some of the guys didn’t make it in time.
Finally we boarded the USS George
Washington for what proved to be a ten-day trip to limey land. Some seven thousand of us Americans were
aboard the ship which was built in Germany in1908. From WWI until WWII it was used to transport
bananas from Central America to the United States. It may have been okay for bananas but it
wasn’t much as a living quarters for ten days.
We went in convoy. This meant that a group of ships were
bunched up fairly close together and were surrounded by destroyers. All ships made a directional change of a
coup of degree each seven minutes so that all were less vulnerable to German
submarines. All went well for me for
the first three days other than complete boredom, then there was an unpleasant
happening involving booze. And the
strange part was that it didn’t involve any drinking on my part. I really wasn’t a heavy drinker but I did
manage to buy two fifths of rum in Boston which I was carrying in my personal
baggage aboard the transport. I made
the mistake of telling a friend that I had it.
After three days at sea, two of my heavy
drinking friends informed me that I would either sell them the rum for $15.00 a
bottle or they’d take it away from me.
Naturally I sold out. When the
two were discovered in a drunken stupor by two Navy law enforcers my “friends”
implicated me. I underwent some heavy
grilling by the ship commander himself.
I told him the truth; that I really had no alternative. He dismissed me with a stern warning to
never do it again. I wondered if he
thought I might have some more of the stuff stashed away somewhere. I didn't.
Not all glider pilots going to England had
the comparative luxury of an American ship.
Those who went via British ships never forgot the unappetizing food they
were served en route, especially the cabbage and kidney stew. I didn’t experience much British food myself
at any time overseas but it must have been poor by American standards and I do
remember that English troopers I encountered at any time during the war
invariable seemed happy to share our GI food.
Some guys were just lucky. One bunch of glider pilots left Camp Kilmer,
New Jersey, from New York harbor bound for England aboard the “Tomorrow.” A
3,000 ton British ship. They spent the
first miserable night inside the harbor, and then before they could clear the
harbor the next morning the ship was stuck and lightly damaged by an American
Liberty Ship. The guys were returned to
Kilmer for a week and then went to England in five days aboard none other than
the luxurious Queen Mary.
We were at mid-ocean aboard the George
Washington when the Queen Mary was observed going the other direction to the
United States. She was only a couple of
miles off or left, clearly in view. The
George Washington was heavy with seven thousand souls aboard and most of rushed
to the one side to view the Queen Mary.
The shipped rolled to an alarming amount, whereupon a voice shouted out
over the loudspeaker, “half of you men and women get back on the other
side.” I sometime wondered afterwards
how our government would have explained to the folks back home had out ship
rolled over and gone down. It was
certainly a case of curiosity nearly killing the cat.
We crossed the Atlantic with relative ease
but the same couldn’t be said for our enlisted men. We slept on cots stacked three high, but our
GIs were five levels below the waterline, down in the very bowels of the huge
ship. We were above the waterline and
would have had a chance to take to the lifeboats had we been struck by a
torpedo. Our men below would have had
little chance. I spent one half-hour
stint as duty officer below and there was never a longer half hour in my life.
After completing a rather uneventful
crossing, we landed in Liverpool, England, in early 1944. When land came into sight below the usual
fog we could make out the docks fronting blocks and blocks of bombed out
buildings. The German bombers had really
done a job on them in the early days of the war and none had been rebuilt. As we neared our docking area we could pick
out the sounds of a British military band playing lustily. The newness of seeing a city and the band at
least partially distracted our attention from the reality of the badly damaged
city.
We boarded one of the tiny train coaches
for which England and all of Europe are famed and after a ride through the
Midlands arrived at Balderdon Airdrome near the city of Newark and not far from
Nottingham of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forrest fame.
We had a hard time becoming accustomed to
the rain and cold fogs which plagued the area much of the time. While life wasn’t comfortable in the drafty
Neisen huts which housed us, it wasn’t completely unbearable and we made the
most of it with wood and coal-burning stoves.
After all, we had endured them in North Carolina. As it developed, the date had yet to arrive
for the Invasion of France and we had time on our hands until the big date,
June 6, 1944.
The temperature never rose above 75 degrees
and there was never a day we couldn’t jog a quarter of a mile to the mess hall
in a winter issue pair of pants and shirt.
And always that rain, rain, and more rain. When it wasn’t raining it was the fog. Every morning we awoke to the sight and
smell of kerosene pots burning along the runways as support personnel sought to
clear them enough so that aircraft and gliders could land and take off.
An unusual sound we heard often in the
early morning or late afternoon hours had us all baffled for a time. Something was taking off the runway but we
couldn’t figure it out. We finally
learned that it was an early version of a British jet fighter. The nights weren’t always quite either. About a week after we arrived we were lying
around the hut one evening when we startled by a new sound to us – the wailing
horns of a British air raid alarm.
Naturally we all dashed outside and there it was almost directly
overhead – a single German bomber.
British searchlights had locked onto the aircraft at 1.500 feet
altitude. Then all hell broke loose as
the antiaircraft guns which surrounded our field went after the intruder. From where we stood the arching tracers from
all around us resembled an umbrella.
Then there was a direct hit and a huge ball of fire as the bomber
exploded and the pieces fell toward the earth.
On another occasion the British didn’t fare so well. Two German fighter aircraft sneaked into the
formation of lumbering old Lancaster bombers which had entered their landing
pattern and shot six of them down.
While we awaited D-Day, some glider pilots
had added duty jobs such as in administration, engineering and transportation,
etc., but many of us spent much of our time censoring enlisted men’s mail. Some glider pilots seemed to get a kick out
of it but, personally, I disliked the task.
Many of the letters were addressed, “Dear Mom and Pop and the
Censor.”
Some glider pilots became acquainted with
English people in the small towns around the base and spent some happy hours
visiting in their homes. Not a few
romances blossomed between Yanks and British girls and there were some
marriages. There were public dances and
Yanks learned to “do the hokey pokey” and other English dances. Many a truckload of guys from the base
returning from various excursions were heard belting out the old British
military ballad, “Roll me over in the clover, roll me over, lay me down and do
it again.” The name given to the
British version of the American WAC was “ATS,” standing for “Army Territorial
Service.” Some Americans preferred to
think the ATS stood for “any time, sergeant.”
Where the English ever got such a name for their women in the service
was difficult to understand. Some of
them were good lookers but actually it was hard to tell under those heavy
uniforms they wore. It was no wonder
their male soldiers resented us Yanks with our salaries that were five time
what they made. To them we were “over-paid,
over sexed, and over here.”
Sometime after our arrival at Balderdon all
officers were summoned to the orderly room by the commander. There we noticed a huge number of American
and British-made bicycles. About half
heavy tubular-steel American bikes and the remainder were flimsy looking
British models with hand rather than departure (foot) style American brakes. The commissioned officers, including the
ground-pounding types, quickly seized the American bikes, leaving the British
ones for us lower ranked, flight officer glider pilots. Little did the former know the mistake they
were making.
That night an open post was declared for
dark and we all set sail up and down hill on the three-mile trip to the pubs
(bars) of Newark. Those on the British
bikes (Primarily glider pilots) left the others on American bikes far
behind. In fact, we were firmly
ensconced on most of the available bar stools when our weary friends
arrived. This was important because of
the beer and harder drinks that were always limited.
As one might expect, those with the heavy
American bikes came around the next day and made all sort of efforts to
separate us glider pilots from our lightweight bikes, ranging from offers of
money to veiled threats. Their pleadings
fell on deaf ears. The only thing was,
we almost had to take our bikes to bed with us for the remainder of our stay at
Newark, or face possible theft of our prized possessions. While in town we used locks and chains to
secure them.
Speaking of pubs, one tipsy glider pilot
rode his bike into a bar one evening, lifted a front wheel onto the bar and
declared, “Give me a Scotch and give my bike a drink of water.” Needless to say, he got the old heave-ho.
I had
many friendly conversations with elderly British gentlemen in bars during my
time in Merry Old England. Probably
because I had a journalism degree prior to joining the service, I was always
delighted to hear the King’s English spoken properly by these fellows. One seldom heard incorrect use of verbs such
as “I seen it” and “I done it,” as one hears frequently from many
Americans. But one evening I innocently
struck up a conversation with an old Englishman who evidently had enough of
Americans taking over his pub. He went
out of his way to point out to me that almost everything “British” excelled its
American counterpart. I finally had my
day, however, when I told him that I was amazed at how many cities in England
were names after cities in America. I
delivered that pinch line just as he was taking a swig of beer and to say that
he sputtered in his beer would be to put it mildly.
That Word: mildly” reminds me of British:
“mild” beer. My first taste of British
beer was unfortunately the mild type and it tasted to me as if it were regular
beer mixed with water. I soon learned
to ask for: half and half beer. This
was a mixture of mild and strong beer and was quite good, or least I thought
so.
Half and half beer reminds me of a corny
story an American told me while we were in England. It seems that an inebriated Englishman was
passing a British pub after hours.
Being in need of further drink (or so he thought) he tossed a stone up
against the second story where he knew the pub owner and his wife were
sleeping.
The pub owner came to his bedroom
window. Recognizing his visitor, he
yelled down, “What do you want, Harry?”
“I want me a half and half.” came up the
reply.
Whereupon the pub owner retreated to the
side of his bed and returned to the window with a partly filled personal
pot. Sloshing the contents to the
street below he cried out. : There’s
your half and half, Harry. Half mine
and half the little woman’s.”
When we first occupied our barracks in
England to train and await D-Day, we were directed by our commander to dig
foxholes alongside our building. (This
seemed like busy work at the time until we were reminded that lone German
bombers still occasionally made it across the English Channel and on to our
area in an attempt to bomb airfields.)
It did seem, however, that one glider pilot, my friend Charley Scott,
was getting his hole deeper than the rest of us. The truth was that it was so deep that he
had to put steps in it to get up and down the hole. He finally quit after the commander came by
to inspect our efforts. When he came
upon Scott’s foxhole he was heard to say, “If you dig that hole any deeper I’ll
charge you with desertion.”
Americans who served overseas during World
War II remember the tasteless malt tablets found in K rations which were
encased in regular old Cracker Jack boxes.
One time in England a little bloke approached me as I left the
gate. “Any gum, chum?” he asked me as
all English kids did in those days. I
didn’t have any at the time but I did have some of the malt balls. I offered him some.
“No thanks, Yank.” He said wistfully. He wasn’t that hungry.
One of those ration boxes did give comfort
but it literally saved his rear end. As
he was running across an open field a partially-spent German rifle bullet
struck him from the rear and penetrated halfway through the ration box.
A truly terrifying thing happened to
several of my friends who were playing porker in a Neisen hut.
They were seated on a cot which they had
shoved up against the door at the rear end when a fellow from another squadron
entered the scene. Known as a practical
joker, this time he gained the attention of the players and then proceeded to
pull the pin of a grenade and “accidentally” drop it on the floor beside the
cot. In reality it was one he had
previously emptied but my friends didn’t know that. In the matter of seconds which they believed
they had before detonation they did their best to leave the building through
the far door. When they finally
discovered they had been tricked they gave the joker a pummeling. Evidently he didn’t learn a thing because I
heard several weeks later that he had blown off part of his right hand while
still monkeying around with a grenade.
While we’re on the subject of scares, I was
sitting in an Officers’ Red Cross lounge in London a few weeks before the
invasion talking to a Red Cross lady who had just arrived, when we all heard
the cut off sound of a buzz bomb overhead.
Most of us “veterans” knew by that time that if you heard the thing cut
off that this meant it would glide for some time before striking earth. But the Red Cross lass didn’t know
that. When we looked around for her she
was on her hands and knees under a flimsy card table. No one laughed at her. We all remembered our first time
hearing the buzz bomb sound.
After a time in England several of us
learned that a U.S. Navy Air Station near us had ice cream, an unheard
commodity at an Army installation. On
our first afternoon off (a rarity) we actually walked three miles each way for
a dish of the delightful stuff. One
thing was for sure: The Navy never stood short when it came to good chow.
Shortly after our arrival in England a
couple of our guys went into town for a haircut. I should say they went after a
“butchering.” An English barber had
administered them the British version of a haircut – whitewalls above the ears. The barber might as well have put a bowl
over their heads. They looked terrible
by American standards. So, I refused to
get my hair cut. After a month or so of
this my good buddies told me I’d either get a haircut or they’d give me one. I wrote home and my dad managed to find a
secondhand pair pf barber scissors which he mailed tome. Fred Fancher, a glider pilot from Arkansas
who claimed he had cut a few heads of hair in his time, volunteered to be the
glider pilots’ barber from that time forward.
He finally learned to do an acceptable job, taking his pay in candy bars
and cigarettes.
Glider pilots had their share of life’s
most embarrassing moments. Two glider
pilots from the 91st Troop Carrier Squadron had theirs during a
blackout at Newark, England.
Many private homes in England bordered
immediately on sidewalks. Some, in
fact, had a step down from the walk into the front room. During heavy rains it wasn’t uncommon for
rainwater to run from the sidewalk into the front room.
Well, it seems that my first friend English
friend was relieving himself on the side of a building after an evening of
drinking beer. In reality he was aiming
precisely on the door of a home and the stream was flowing into the front room.
The English home owner, a particularly
strong looking individual, flung open the door, uttered some strong words, and
went for his umbrella which was standing in a corner. Needless to say, the Yank took off faster
than a glider being snatched from the ground.
He made a successful getaway and later had to sneak back for his bicycle
which was nearby and luckily had gone unnoticed by the offended Englishman.
My second friend was similarly full of the
brew another night but managed to come upon a water closet – the British name
for a toilet. He could see very little
inside the blacked-out room but located the toilet door which he opened and let
fly. Unfortunately there was an
Englishman seated on the stool. As he
felt the warm stream he screamed in utter dismay, “I say, waggle it a bit, I’m
getting it all.”
Another most embarrassing moment happened
to two other glider pilots from another outfit that I heard about. I never learned their names, so let’s call
them John Smith and Bill Brown. John
was taking a shower when friend Bill threw a bucket of cold water on him. The shivering Smith ran from the shower,
grabbed a mop and chased his antagonist into the street. It was fairly well along toward evening but
not dark enough so that a passing formation of WACs could not see the pair
running naked past their ranks. Hoots
of derisive laughter trailed after the two beat a hasty retreat into their barracks.
A glider pilot named Jack (I forgot his
last name and it’s just as well I did) was telling me at a national Glider Pilots
convention in recent years of an experience he had with a British water closet
at Nottingham de Dance, that British city’s most elegant dance spot.
A friend of Jack’s in their unit, the 47th
Troop Carrier Squadron, decided to get Jack crocked on the latter’s
twenty-eight birthday. Jack did just
that and passed out late in the evening.
At 3 a.m. he came to, seated in the emporium’s water closet. After trying all the outer doors to the
building and finding them locked, Jack first downed some more beer to get right
with the world and then went to the front door. He was finally able, by beating on the door
and telling at the top of his voice, to attract the attention of a policeman
(Bobbie) who luckily came by on foot patrol.
At 5:30 a.m., a most unhappy manager came down and freed our friend from
his imprisonment inside the famed establishment.
The incident reminded me of a story of a
similar situation which I heard of and went something like this: Voice over the
phone: “Hey Smitty, come down and open your tavern for me.”
Tavern owner: “You’re crazy. It’s against the law to sell drinks at this
hour and even if it weren’t I wouldn’t come down there at this time to let you
in my place.”
Voice:
“Who said I wanted in? I want
out.”
Americans in England were told by their
British acquaintances that trees in England could be cut only with the permission
of the local government. Most of us
Yanks didn’t put much stock in the story.
As it developed, two glider pilots learned to believe – the hard way.
Jack Usner and Bill Taylor were stationed
at Saltby when the weather became particularly cold. The night the blast struck there was no coal
or wood to be had. After several hours
of this, the pair went outside their barracks, felled a three-inch in diameter
tree, and fed it to their pot-bellied stove.
The next day the law arrived, investigated the incident, and the end
result was that the U.S. Army paid $200.00 for the tree.
Many years later, Usner was among those
present at Fort Benning, Georgia, home of the American Airborne, when the
Airborne Walk was dedicated in April 1986.
In a subsequent issue of “Silent Wings,” the national news publication
published in the interest of World War II glider pilots, there appeared a photo
taken at the ceremony and in it was the face of Jack Usner. The caption underneath the photo listed Jack
as “unidentified,” which promoted Tabor to write the publication that Jack was
afraid to identify himself for fear of having to repay the American government.
Glider pilot Johnny Shields decided that
the thing to do that would make life more interesting for the American troops
in England was to promote a boxing match.
Shields, by then a captain but a one-time tennis player of some note,
was serving in an additional role as his outfit’s special services officer. Learning that famed professional boxers Joe Louis
and Billy Conn (the fellow who almost defeated Louis in a pre-WW II fight) were
touring the European Theater and staging exhibition matches, Shields arranged
for a match at his airfield.
Some eight thousand Americans, including a
number of glider pilots and Troop Carrier support personal, turned out one nice
Sunday afternoon at Ramsbury.
Unfortunately, only Conn showed up for the match heralded match. Conn hated to disappoint the crowd and
finally enticed a glider pilot named Harry Kirby, a former amateur boxer of
some ability at the University of San Francisco, to get into the ring with
him. By fight time, the Irishman Conn
and Kirby were both well-oiled with British beer.
The fight went along pretty well with Conn
making no attempt to lord it over his opponent Kirby. Then early in the third round, Kirby threw
caution to the wind and undoubtedly impressed with himself at being in the same
ring with a world class boxer, nailed Conn with a solid right to the jaw. Conn immediately tied up Kirby in the center
of the ring and whispered menacingly in his ear, “Don’t do that again, friend.” A word to the wise was sufficient and the
pair went on to complete the three rounds of good exhibition boxing to the
delight of the crowd.
For some strange reason, some high ranking
Americas seemed bent on having their glider pilots fly the 28-passenger,
British-built Horsa Glider despite the fact that 99 percent of us preferred the
smaller 13-passenger CG-4A. The Horsa
was a completely different version of a combat glider from ours. Whereas the CG-4A was built of gas pipe,
canvas and plywood, and sat practically on the ground on two squatty wheels,
the Horsa was a huge thing built of plywood and sitting high above a tricycle
landing fear which had a bad habit of sheering off if it landed on a rough
field. We also disliked it because a
loaded Horsa was almost too much for our C-47 to pull off the ground and once
airborne the controls responded slowly.
Attached to the tow plane by a rope that had a “Y” at the end of it and
attached to the glider at two spots on either side of the cockpit, it flew
along from side to side a lot like a toy glider on the end of a string pulled
along by a small boy. Lots of us would
do anything we could to avoid flying the Horsa and I heard of one squadron
where the Glider Pilots refused to fly the big contraption.
One American who did not fear flying the
Horsa was Tom Berry of our 91st Troop Carrier Squadron. He seemed to take delight in it. So it was natural that our squadron
operations officer picked him to fly one of the monsters off a small field in
Southern England following a maneuver.
As it developed, Tom almost volunteered for one too many flights in the
big bird. Shortly after takeoff the
rope broke. From a couple of hundred
feet, all Tom could do was continue straight ahead and hope for a field large
enough to sit her down. The only
obstacle in his landing path was an innocent appearing bush. The thing that Tom didn’t know was that the
“bush” was actually a large tree trunk cut off low to the ground and covered
with large weeds. As fate and his glide
would have it the large center skid of the glider struck the top of the stump,
causing the lumbering craft to balloon back into the air and then fall back to
earth on one wing. Uninjured except for
his pride, Tom sat at the controls thanking his lucky stars that he was still
in one piece.
The dust from the crash landing had hardly
settled when a nattily dressed English farmer appeared on the scene to inquire
as to Tom’s good health. Once satisfied
that the American was not hurt, the very proper old gent remarked, “I’m
delighted that you are safely down, lad, but I regret to inform you that you
are a bit early for a spot of tea.”
Being invited to tea wasn’t the only
pleasant ending to an emergency landing for Berry. One fine day he was given an assignment to
ferry one of our CG-4A gliders from one field to another shortly before we
moved to the continent following D-Day.
The route lay near London and before he took off he causally remarked to
a glider mechanic standing nearby that he, Berry, intended to cut his glider
free when he was over London. Because
Berry and all of us made it to the big town every chance we had while in England,
and later back from France on rest and recuperation (R&R) leaves, it wasn’t
hard to believe that he would like mothering better than to have a release in
that vicinity.
So, wouldn’t you know it, as tow plane and
glider passed over the edge of the city the entire hooking mechanism fell free
from the C-47. Probably smiling to
himself, Berry released the dangling rope and hook from his glider and looked
about for a landing spot. He glided
smoothly to an easy landing on a grassy meadow within sight of homes in the
outskirts. It was several days before
the 91st TCS could make the proper arrangements with the British authorities
and to prepare for sending a C-47 crew to snatch Berry from the field. In the meantime young Tom had several nice
days on the city downing some of the good British suds.
Eventually a crew arrived, set up the poles
and rope for snatching the glider out of the field, Tom was back in the air and
on his way to his previous destination.
And, because, the rope fell free from the tow plane and not from his
glider, he didn’t even have to do any explaining.
Life wasn’t always exciting for Americans
in England, especially for those who stayed in the barracks and didn’t frequent
the bars. About the only diversion was
listening to the Armed Forces Radio and an occasional trip on a bicycle to a
movie downtown. There were no hamburger
joints and no ice cream parlors. The
only food available off base was the storied fish ‘n chips wrapped in pages of
the local newspaper. The custom among
the locals was to add a generous shake of salt and splash of vinegar over the
top. Unless you were careful, the
vinegar soaked through the newspaper and your fries ended up on the
sidewalk. I don’t what the British
would have done without potatoes from Ireland.
The only treat at the movies was a visit to the lobby at intermission
time (all British movies had a break midway) where you could obtain a serving
of toast and baked beans. Can you
believe that?
One evening down town along about dusk I
was sitting on a bench in a park when I struck up a conversation with a very
old British gentleman on the subject of eating. He told me that the British would have
starved during the blitz of 1939-40 except for spam from America and Irish
potatoes. And the funny part was that
while I was talking to him I excuse myself and walked over to a bombed out
building to relieve myself of some beer when I noticed a large sack resting
next to the building. For no reason at
all, I peered into it and discovered that it was full of Irish potatoes. How they got there or why, I’ll never
know. I plucked several of them from
the sack and returned to the old gentleman.
Then for half an hour or so he and I peeled potatoes with his pocket
knife ate them raw, and talked of the war and England past and present. This story has always stuck with me and I’d
like to think it did likewise with the old fellow. I’m sure he retold the incident many times
during the remainder of his life of the time during the blackout when he sat
and ate raw potatoes with that nice young Yank from Kansas.
I would recall this story a year or so
later when I disembarked from overseas at Camp Kilmer on the Hudson River. We had been told that steak and French fried
potatoes would be our first meal when we reached the States and we were really
anticipating it. I got the meal okay
but only after standing in line behind a group of German prisoners. They didn’t get steak but they got whatever
they wanted while I waited. You might
say I was highly ticked off but could do nothing about it but growl. That “homecoming” nearly wiped out the joy I
had experienced a few minutes earlier while still on the ship in the river when
Red Cross ladies came aboard to hand out quarts of milk. I hadn’t had a drink of milk in two years
and I drank my bottle in two long gulps.
The foregoing tales of glider pilots in
England for several months preceding the Normandy Invasion depict our lighter
moments. This doesn’t mean, however,
that we weren’t seriously preparing for the big day, D-Day. There were assault type landings in the
small fields of England which were much like those on the continent. On other occasions we flew in small to large
formations to simulate the big ones to come on D-Day. And, we did a lot of snatching the gliders
out of the small fields to return them to their home fields for final
conditioning for the big day that we all knew was coming soon.
As a participant in one particular large
armada over Central England I was flying copilot for a friend Pat Doran. During the flight the glider seemed to be
flying erratically to the point where Pat reached up and pulled the release,
setting us free over the large city of Petersboro on the Great Northern Highway
running from London to Scotland. We
located a small open field and Pat sat the glider down roughly but safely,
skidding to a stop just short of the crowded highway. A British Bobbie was on the scene in short
order, He approached us with notebook in hand and inquired as to Pat’s
rank. When Pat gave it as “Flight
Officer.” It was apparent that the police official confused the American rank
with the British rank of “Flying Officer,” the rank of a squadron commander –
probably roughly the equivalent our colonel.
The Bobbie froze at attention and even after given “at ease” by Pat,
with tongue in check, continued to treat us with obviously great respect. We were taken to the city in a police van
and continued to receive the same respect from city and police officials until
an American vehicle arrived to take us back to our home field. Pat really enjoyed the attention and several
times implored me not to tell any of our British friends that we were something
less than a second lieutenant.
One cool customer I heard about years after
the war was a Flight Officer Kent who flew for the 48th TCS of the
313th TGC in Europe. Kent
was flying copilot for another Glider Pilot named Kilmer in a formation of
C-47s and CG-4A Gliders over England when their tow plane suddenly over-ran the
C-47 ahead and the pilot extended a high degree of flaps to reduce speed. Kilmer couldn’t take similar action and his
alternative was to drop underneath his tow. The C-47 pilot evidently saw the glider in
under and slightly ahead of him and cut the glider free. Kent landed his glider uneventfully and upon
arriving back at his home field reported the incident routinely.
For some reason known only to himself, when
the C-47 pilot was called in for questioning he denied cutting off the glider
in the manner which Kilmer described.
Kent, who was a camera bug, was sitting in on the discussion and heard
the C-47 pilot’s denial. “Well,” said
Kent, “we’ll see about that.” It seems
that Kent had his camera in his hands at the time of the happening in the air
and had snapped a picture of the C-47 when the glider was immediately
underneath.
The photo was developed and showed the
underside of the C-47 from below. The
squadron intelligence officer, upon seeing the picture and studying it for
several moments, asked Kent, “How could you take that photo when you must have
known you were in danger of being killed?
“Oh,” Kent answered, “Kilmer was doing the flying and I didn’t have
anything else to do, so I shot the photo.
It wasn’t altogether uncommon for glider
pilots to release their gliders during practice formations over England. Some found themselves in such terrific down
drafts that they felt they were endangering lives in their gliders, or perhaps
those in other gliders or even the tow plane.
But a few were so purely accidental as one experienced by Horace Sanders
and Jimmy Siefert of the 91 TCS, 439th TCG.
The two had been dispatched to Greenham Commons
Depot where disassembled gliders arriving from the U.S. were reassembled. They were waiting in the flight line ready
room on a Sunday afternoon when a local squadron operations officer burst into
the room with the news that a glider was hooked up on the runway and ready to
roll.
As the pair neared the glider they saw that
it wasn’t ready to roll; it was rolling.
They caught up with the slowly moving glider, jumped in, and Seifert was
able to get into the pilots seat in time before disaster struck right there on
the taxiing strip. The glider took to
the air with both pilots seated but with their seat belts unfastened. Sanders, with belt still unfastened, took
over the controls after they had reached a safe altitude to allow Seifert to
get himself seated properly and fasten his belt.
Seifert having gotten himself strapped into
his pilot’s seat, Sanders was in the process of getting the belt around his
midriff when the glider hit a downdraft which flung him forward and upward. His left arm struck the Plexiglas windshield
and then came back sharply against the tow release. It could have been part of his clothing that
caught the release. Anyway, the result
was the same: The glider released from the tow plane.
The fields below were of the usual small
variety, but Seifert was able to locate one of sufficient length to land the
glider successfully. It was later
snatched out and flown to its destination at Balderton, Airdrome, home of the
91st TCG.
Another somewhat similar incident happened
to me in England. One day shortly
before the June invasion a couple of other glider pilots and myself were
sitting around the barracks with little to do when our squadron commander came
looking for glider pilots who were qualified at snatching gliders. Although I had never been checked out even
one time on the rather frightening type of takeoff, I acted on a whim of the
moment and volunteered. We were then
flown to an area near the south on a practice assault maneuver.
I took my seat alone in the glider,
strapped myself in, looked at the looped rope on the sticks just a few feet
ahead of the glider’s nose, and awaited the arrival of the diving C-47. What I didn’t know then was that the pilot
flying the C-47 was being checked out for the first time on the procedure from
the other end of the rope. I heard the
roar of the engine, saw the C-47 swoop low over my head, and saw him miss
contact.
I awaited the second overhead pass and the
sweat poured down my face in a steady stream.
A second pass also failed and I continued to sweat. A third pass missed me and I sweated even
more profusely. The fourth time was a
charm and the hook engaged my rope. With
a swooshing sound I arose into the air.
All I had been told previously was to be sure and keep the stick forward
enough so that I wouldn’t rise too fast and stall myself out and perhaps the
tow plane too.
Despite my lack of experience, I made it
off the ground with no trouble, but I had no sooner positioned my glider properly
behind and a little above the C-47 when, for some reason unknown to me at the
time, cable and rope fell free from the tow and there I was with it hanging
from the front end of my glider. I
didn’t act soon enough to release the rope and it wound around my wheels. I began my decent into a small field which I
had picked pit from an altitude of about 300 feet. I dropped lower, trailing the rope and
cable, but my good luck ran out just as my tow rope did. It evidently caught in the fork of a tree
and stalled me out at about 75 feet above the ground. I don’t know if it was training, presence of
mind, or fright that did it, but I kept the stick back in my lap and the glider
came down like an elevator. Had I
dumped the stick I probably would have hit the ground nose first.
The glider hit with considerable force and
the wings dropped to the ground. I sat
disconsolately amid the wreckage only a short time when who should appear with
a ghastly white face but my squadron commander. Evidently he was watching the takeoffs on
the ground very near to where I crash landed.
Seeing that I was not injured, he had little more to say except to tell
me to go get into another glider, which I did.
The next snatch was successful on the initial pass and I had completed
my first and last glider snatch pickup.
I learned later that a crew member aboard
the C-47 who was operating the cable drum failed to do his job properly and
allowed the cable and rope to roll completely off the drum. I could only surmise that it was his first
time at the glider snatch procedure. It
was a case of the blind leading the blind.
Carey M. Lee, now of Farmersville, Texas,
but in England a member of the 72nd TCS had as a copilot on a
training mission another glider pilot who was with the squadron on temporary
duty. Maintenance men placed sand bags
on the floor of the glider as ballast because high winds and rough weather were
predicted for the flight. Shortly after
takeoff the sand bags broke loose and slid to the rear of the glider. The unusual weight at the rear caused the
nose of the glider to point upward at a dangerous stall-threatening angle and,
despite their best efforts, the glider was apparently going to stall out with
undoubtedly life-threatening results.
Then, as if in answer to their prayers, the bags slid off the plywood
floor onto the canvas-covered nose section, broke through the flimsy canvas,
and plunged earthward. Fearing that the
damage tail section might rip more, Lee waited a bit until he had sufficient
altitude and cut the glider free from the tow plane. He landed without further incident and
walked to the hangar to report the happening.
Only then did he learn that the people there were well aware of his sand
bags. He had literally “bombed” the top
of the building with the bags.
Lee never saw his copilot before or after
the flight, that is, not until many years later in the 1980s when he was doing
volunteer work at the Silent wings Glider Museum in Terrell, Texas. A gentleman from Maryville, Ohio, while
visiting the museum, introduced himself as former glider pilot Robert W.
Rausch. During the course of the
ensuing conversation the visiting glider pilot found occasion to relate the
time he was copilot on a glider in England with another fellow, whose name he
never knew when several sand bags tore loose and “bombed” a hangar. After comparing memories for several minutes
the two former glider pilots determined without a doubt that they were the pair
that participated in the life-threatening incident so many years ago.
The falling sand bags story reminds me
somewhat of another case of a falling object, this one at Lockbourne Army Air
Base. It seems that it was a warm
autumn day and a plain ordinary cat had crawled atop a CG-4A canvas-covered
wing to catch the warming sun rays.
Without even an “excuse me” to Mr. Cat, a ground crew towed the huge
glider out into the runway to participate in a training maneuver. Since the tug moved the glider slowly, the
ride apparently didn’t particularly bother the cat who probably continued his
snooze. In due time the glider was
attached to the C-47 and then took to the air, with Mr. Cat no doubt by that
time clinging to the fabric for dear life.
Airplane and glider climbed to 900 feet
where they joined a formation of other gliders to carry out the maneuver. In due time the formation made a turn and
then came over the base. By that time
Mr. Cat had enough flying time and decided it was time to bail out since he was
right over his point of departure and home.
He took to the air and plunged earthward. When he was a couple of hundred feet from
the ground he let out a loud wail which was heard by an airman standing near a
runway. The airman looked up in time to
see the cat complete his decent and hit on a piece of grass-covered earth
nearby. As the airman looked on, the
cat rolled over several, arose rather unsteadily, and walked away, apparently
without serious injury. I had in my
youth seen several cats fall from tress without injury and had in fact heard
that slow motion movies had shown that a cat has the ability to land tail-first
and then flip himself over for a safe landing from rather high altitudes. The story must be true, but it does seem
rather remarkable from 900 feet.
On
June 1, 1944, the advanced party of the 101st Airborne Division arrived at our
field near Taunton, in the south of England, where we had gone in preparation
for the Normandy Invasion. When the
airborne arrived in combat attire we knew that the fun and games were over and
it was time to go to the mainland of Europe.
Chapter 5
D-Day in Normandy
June 1, 1944. The time was nearing to invade Hitler’s
Fortress in France. We could feel the
tension in the air. June 3 arrived and
we were herded into a block of barracks behind barbed wire. Military police stood armed guard around the
wire perimeter to make sure we didn’t out, and no one got in. Uncle Sam wasn’t about to let any of his
invasion party troops wander off downtown and give away any secrets. Of course, Axis Sally knew the significance
of our new compound and told us so a night later during her usual evening
program. “Why do you young Americans
want to invade France and get killed?
Don’t you know while you are 1-A over here, the 4-Fs back home are
making out 1-A with your wives and girlfriends?” We hated her but she played Bing Crosby
records and we listened to her for laughs.
None of us knew our exact landing spot on
the coast. Only “Ike” knew that and he
didn’t disclose it until sealed orders were hand carried to our commanders and
flight planners 24 hours in advance of the invasion.
The briefings for the aerial invasion of
Utah Beach, our particular destination, were serious matters but not without a
little pressure-relieving levity upon occasion. Our 439th Troop Carrier chaplain,
Father Whalen, had undoubtedly heard about all the profanity known to mankind
because he was a prison chaplain at Joliet, Illinois, prior to volunteering for
the service. So he probably wasn’t
overly shocked at one of the briefings to hear profanity that included the
Lord’s name. Upon looking around at his
listeners, the briefer stopped to apologize to the good Father. “Don’t worry about what I think,” Father replied. “Worry about what the Lord thinks.”
One of the briefers was our own 91st
Captain Merryman. As I listened to him
I recalled that he was a former school teacher but was quite a roughneck when
he wanted to be. I remembered the time
in North Carolina when he took a carbine to the shower to see if its charge
would penetrate the wall of wood and galvanized steel. It did.
It went clear through, across half the barracks, and lodged into a 4 by
4 inch thick support beam. I hoped the
American armament would be that good on the beach.
The conclusion of Captain Merryman’s briefing
went something like this: “Glider pilots
will release in turn when the pilot of the C-47 leading your formation starts a
gradual turn to return to the beach. If
any C-47 pilot cuts his glider off at any time during the invasion flight
without sufficient reason, and there shouldn’t be any, he’d better keep on
going because if he comes back here I’LL be waiting for him.” … And I’LL add
here that I never heard of a tow pilot needlessly cutting his glider off during
any of the major airborne operations in the European Theater.
There seemed to be nothing the Gooneybird
(C-47) was incapable of doing. For
instance, the proper procedure was for the glider to leave the runway first and
then the C-47, but on D-Day I saw several of the old work horses use the entire
runway, hit the dirt beyond the hard surface, and then literally drag gliders
into the air. It was fortunate that
airfields were, and still are, designed with a safety run-over at either end,
because I saw and heard of many, many instances of overloaded gliders barely
making it off the ground.
One of our C-47 crews included a radio
operator affectionately called “Tiny” who weighed over 300 pounds. He was so large that he could actually
un-trim (unbalance) his aircraft by walking from his radio compartment up front
to the rear of the plane. He sometimes
couldn’t wait until he returned from a flight and was once caught cooking meat
and potatoes on a small burner aboard the plane. On another occasion he ate a gallon of
peaches on a one-hour trip. While we
were at Chateaudun he went to town wearing his crew wings, which he had a
perfect right to do. However, a couple
of military policemen, seeing the wings on his chest, couldn’t believe anyone
that large could be on flying duty. After
careful consultation the two apprehended Tiny for questioning and took him back
to our base. It required the captain of
his crew to secure his release.
The military police incident finally upset
the apple cart for the sergeant. The
captain informed him that he had to lose weight. He never did and on the night before our
departure for D-Day the officer swore he intended to tie Tiny to his radio desk
so that he would not upset the trim during the critical flight to the
coast. Our final briefing for the
invasion was a sober one. Not a smile
was seen as the briefing officer gave out the details of the flight to the
coast and how the glider pilots were to start cutting themselves free when the
lead plane started circling back toward the ocean off France.
The sobriety was defiantly broken when one
glider pilot asked innocently enough, “Sir, what do we do after we land our
gliders?” There was a brief period of
silence after which the briefing officer (anon-flying officer with thick
glasses) admitted, “I don’t know. I
guess we really never thought about that.”
After the laughter had subsided a glider pilot sitting near me gave the
only logical answer, “Run like hell.”
The real answer, as best I can recall it, was that we were to first take
care of ourselves as best we could and then band together for a hike back to
the beach some three miles from where we were to land near St. Mere Eglise.
D-Day finally arrived, breakfast was at 4
a.m., featuring (honest to goodness) two fried eggs and a huge piece pf
chocolate cake. I suspect that the cook
believed he was cooking a last meal for us unfortunately suicidal glider pilots
and that he believed also that what glider pilots wanted most as a final meal
was fried eggs and cake. Where he got
the fresh eggs I’ll never know. We
hadn’t had any in the previous four months we’d been in England, “The condemned ate a hearty meal,” I
thought.
Del Summers and I flipped to see who would
fly pilot and who would be copilot. He
won. When we arrived at our
combat-ready glider, we walked gingerly between two rolls of glider infantrymen
already seated and strapped onto benches on either side. We took the parachutes out of necessity, not
to use in an emergency, but because the pilots’ seats were built low to
accommodate the seat-type parachutes by the manufacturer. Without the seat pack, short guys like me
couldn’t have seen over the instrument panel to fly the thing.
Once we were seated, a burly lieutenant
stuck his head in between Summers and me and announced, “There’s no use of you
two fastening those Parachutes. We’d
never let you use them anyway.” I
thought he put it plainly enough, so I didn’t even bother to drape the straps
over my shoulders. You don’t argue with
burly airborne officers.
One C-47 pilot in our squadron was quite a
comic. It happened he was the copilot
on the Goonerbird that pulled me into France that day. All we had for communication between
airplane and glider was a telephone wire strung along the tow rope. As we flew along the east side of the
Normandy Peninsula en-route to our turn
in toward the Utah Beach landing area I noticed splashes of water appearing in
the ocean below us.
“Anderson,” I inquired over the telephone,
“what is making all those splashes?”
“Those are F-51 Fighters dropping their tip
tanks.”
“Anderson,” I replied, “you’re a damned
liar. There aren’t that many tip tanks
in the whole Army Air Force.”
The splashes were German antiaircraft
shells falling in the water.
Two good glider pilot buddies in my
squadron were Johnny Bennett of Springfield, Illinois, and Charley Balfour on
Indianapolis, the latter now deceased.
Those two were as close as friends can be but were forever arguing about
one thing or another.
One great debate among us glider pilots
concerned whether or not glider pilots and their pilots would ever be committed
to combat in Europe. Charley said yes
and Johnny said no – right up to D-Day.
They asked to make the trip to Normandy together and flipped a coin to
see which would fly as pilot and which as copilot. Bennett won the toss.
Along with the string of hundreds of
gliders they crossed the English Channel, flew inland over Utah Beach, and then
Bennett released their glider silently for a few seconds and then Balfour broke
the silence with these words: “Johnny,
they’ll never us glider in combat.”
For several more seconds there was
hilarious laughter between the pair despite the hail of bullets coming up from
the Germans below. The airborne troops
sitting at their rear must have thought the two were slightly nutty. Luckily all reached the ground unscathed.
Seconds after Summers and I cut ourselves
free from our tow plane at 900 feet we opted to follow another glider onto a
field which looked smooth and very inviting.
We had dropped to about 500 feet when we saw the glider ahead of us
catch a burst of fire near the rear of the passenger compartment. “Turn
left,” I shouted at Summers. Following
my shout he started a turn left and at that time a stream of machine gun fire
ripped through the right wing uncomfortable near me. “Pop the tail ‘chute” he yelled at me. I did and we then noticed that the field
lying in front of us was completely covered by water. We learned later that the Germans had opened
the sea wall and flooded a number of the fields including ours. Summers plopped our glider with a huge
splash into three-foot deep water.
Not content to await our turn in getting
out of the glider via the rear door behind all those airborne troops, Summers
and I shed our flak jackets, punched aside the canvas on the side of the glider
at the front end, and tumbled out into the water. As we waded waist-deep toward a patch of dry
land we noted that at least one glider pilot hadn’t the presence of mind to
take his heavy metal jacket off.
Evidently he had stepped from his glider still with his flak jacket on
into some sort of hole which was higher than his height. As I watched, the other pilot dive under
water, came up empty handed, took a deep breath and dived once more, and the
third time came up with his half-drowned companion.
Following our landing and departure from
our glider we discovered the source of the ground fire which nearly got
me. It turned out to be a bunker
containing about a dozen conscripted Polish troops with one German in
charge. After the glider infantrymen
from several gliders including ours directed a hail of rifle fire at the bunker
the resistance ceased. Then there was a
silence from the bunker and then a single shot. Next there were shouts of laughter and the
Poles emerged with their hands held high in surrender. They weren’t about to fight the Americans so
they simply shot their kraut sergeant-in-charge.
I heard a story a couple of hours later from a glider pilot
in our landing area that romance can blossom even in the heat of the greatest
of battles. The glider took refuge in a
farm house which had looked safe. There
he discovered an American paratrooper who had jumped shortly after midnight but
who had the “misfortune” of crashing through a thatched roof, breaking his
leg. The French lady of the house had
simply rolled out of bed and assisted him onto her sack. The story teller said that when he left the
injured American the latter seemed quite content to let the rest of the world,
including the war, go right on by.
By nightfall several of my friends and I
were looking for somewhere to dig in.
We came upon several Americans who were busily digging holes in the
middle of a small field. So, figuring
that misery loves company, we started sinking our trenching tools at the edge
of the field. Then the conversation
went something like this:
“Hey, you guys can’t dig in here.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re starting a temporary
American cemetery here.”
One glider pilot with me didn’t seem to
believe them and walked over to a canvas-covered something-or-other which could
have been anything. He snapped back the
canvass cover and there were a number of bodies. The one nearest his hand was an officer –
with a bright set of glider wings on his left breast. With a sickening feeling in the pits of our
stomachs we all turned and departed to dig elsewhere.
Following a day of confusion where there
were no battle lines and the war was usually small engagements between small
groups of Americans and Germans, I joined up with a group of mostly glider
pilots and began the hike back of approximately three miles to Utah beach. Having drunk all my canteen water, I was
thirsty by the time we arrived at the beach.
I sighted a Lister bag of water which was being guarded (no kidding,
it’s the truth) by a lieutenant colonel.
He gave me half a canteen of water and I was glad to have it.
Once we were at the beach, glider pilots
were given the job of herding German prisoners onto LCIs (Landing Craft
Infantry) ships for the start of their trip back to prison camps in
England. From the LCIs they were to be
transferred to larger ships for the short trip across the English Channel.
My personal experience with helping get the
prisoners aboard an LCI had a strange beginning. After an American major turned over a group
of prisoners to several of us he asked for our rifles. He overruled our protest by telling us that
that rifles were there, they were needed, and there no logical reason for us to
carry them back to England, the land of plenty. Also, because we were officers we still had
our “45” revolver. It made sense so we
gave him our rifles. It developed,
however, that once we arrived at our home base in England our supply officer
couldn’t see the wisdom of the whole thing and said he intended to initiate
action to make us pay for them. Luckily
for us our commander vetoed the idea.
Roy Samples and I were successful in
getting our group of Germans aboard first the LCI (Landing
Craft
Infantry) and then a larger LST (Landing Ship Tank) with minimum difficulty, to
make the return
trip
across the English Channel. The ship was crammed with 1,200 German
prisoners on the main tank
deck. As we made it off the beach, it didn’t mean we
were out of danger.
Among the 1200 were several Officers who were
pretty well subdued, except for one Nazi storm
trooper. This lieutenant insisted that every German
prisoner passing by him give the Nazi salute.
One
glider
pilot finally tried of this and told a German corporal to tell the lieutenant
without the preliminary
Nazi
salute that if he, the Nazi, saluted one more time, he, the glider pilot,
intended to emphasize his
point with a bayonet on the end of his
rifle. That was the end of the saluting.
Then things ceased to be routine. The LST was anchored close to an American
oil tanker which subsequently attracted the attention of a German “E” (torpedo
carrying) boat. The swiftly moving “E”
swept in from the sea and fired one torpedo into the tanker which exploded and
sank almost immediately. One man with a
dog who were atop the mast as lookouts were only survivors. Our LST crew fished them out of the water.
The “E” Boat’s luck ran out almost
simultaneously with the sinking of the tanker.
A British air-to-ground attack aircraft swooped down with machines guns
ablaze and then fired a rocket which destroyed the German attacker. It was like watching an old newsreel from
the deck of our LST.
One of our prisoners was an overaged major
who had been stationed in Normandy to recuperate from wounds received on the
Russian front. When we passed out K
Rations for a midnight meal the major refused to eat. We asked and English-speaking corporal what
the major’s complaint was and were informed that an officer was uses to the tasty
meat and dairy products of Normandy and didn’t cotton to the prospect of eating
our canned food. We let the major know
that it was K Rations or nothing. He
ate them with apparent disgust.
The corporal proved to be handy to us as an
interpreter for the trip to England. He
told us he was the son of a German father and British mother. At the outbreak of the war in 1939, when he
was still a youngster, the family was visiting in Germany and had to stay
following the declaration of war. He
was subsequently drafted into the German Army.
He hoped to convince British authorities of his story once he was
imprisoned in England.
A couple of more incidents on the LST are
worth recounting. The commander of the
“E” Boat was hauled from the water suffering from a leg wound. I helped carry him to the medical room below
deck where an American medic made ready to work on the wound. When the medic indicated that he wanted to
cut apart the officer’s prized sealskin pants. The latter raised all kinds of
hell. He obviously prized his pants
above his well-being. “If he wants them
that badly let him keep them.” The medic said.
So three of us pulled the pants off over the gaping wound. It must have been terribly painful but the
guy never uttered a sound.
Another German caught his ring on a nail
while descending the ship’s ladder. The
ring tore into his flesh so badly that the same medic had to take a surgical
saw and remove the ring. He did this
without benefit of pain killer which the German for some reason refused. I speculated later that the fellow may have
been full of war secrets and perhaps was afraid he’d tell some of them while
under the influence of the pain killer.
Glider pilots and prisoners made it back to
England safely. We were glad to be
there. I suspected most of the Germans
were too. I thanked God that I had
survived my first glider combat mission against the enemy, a lot of others
weren’t so lucky.
Chapter 6
On The Continent
Once American
troops had driven the Germans from the Cherbourg Peninsula, Then routed them at
St. Lo, the general retreat of Hitler’s legions to the east began. At that point the transfer of U.S. military
units from England to France began. In
the case of the 439th Troop Carrier Group it meant moving to
Alencon, northwest of Paris.
Life for most glider pilots in France was
lonely, routine and downright boring much of the time. Most lived in eight-man tents. Some had useful additional duties as
mentioned earlier while others spent part of their time censoring mail. A lucky few with above-average piloting
ability flew occasionally as C-47 copilots on supply and other non-combat
support missions.
Glider pilots usually referred to aircraft
pilots as “power pilots,” meaning they flew powered aircraft rather than
gliders. While we got along reasonably
well together most of the time, that wasn’t always the case. There were a few battles, usually brought on
by too many drinks at the Officers’ Club.
After our group moved to France we took over the former German Officers’
Club ay Alencon. We kept the same
French bartenders and waitresses and even finished off beer which the Germans
had left behind when the fled the area.
After one unsavory incident at the club one
night which concluded with the participants finishing up in the street outside,
the mayor of the city suggested that it would be nice if the club moved to an
abandoned chateau several miles from town.
The roughhouse didn’t cease and it became great fun for glider pilots,
who always outnumbered power pilots at the club, to toss the latter from a low
bridge into a stream of water which meandered by the club. These dunking’s became frequent enough that
the Group’s safety officer kept some of his enlisted men on duty nights at the
club. The officer who took his job very
seriously, boasted on several occasions that he had never lost a power pilot to
drowning.
One of the glider pilots who went to France
with the 439th was one of these rarities – a person who won his
wings and bars while not yet 19 years old.
In other words, a kid. But this
lad was more than that. He was a
virgin. But France changed that when a
friend took him along to one of the village brothels. He not only enjoyed his introduction to “manhood”
but reveled in it. In fact, he returned
ao many times in such a short time that the madam of the house: called him the
French equivalent of the “Rabbit.”
Later on, after weeks of frequent visits, she declared a dividend and
let him have one on the house.
Making ourselves understood was a problem
for most of us when we went out into the local French community. Personally, I remembered enough words from
my high school French class, to do a little shopping and engage in an
occasional conversation for one reason or another, but I recall one incident
involving one of the glider pilots names LaRue where a little knowledge proved
to be a dangerous thing.
LaRue, who professed to be an expert in
parlez vooing the French, thought his big black mustache gave him an “in” with
the natives. He was really proud of his
handle type. Once, while in the shop
for a haircut, he threw caution aside and decided to have his prized upper lip
decoration professionally trimmed. He
went into great detail, in French, or so he thought to be French, to instruct
the barber as to just how he wanted it trimmed. But the barber evidently didn’t quite
“compree” LaRue’s version of the French language. He made short work of the prized
mustache. He cut it all off… period. To say that Larue was distraught was to put
it mildly. Large tears streamed down
his face. He returned to the base, grew
another one, and never again bragged of his ability to speak French – at least
not to any of us who knew about the visit to the local barber shop.
A story I heard long after the war at a
glider pilot mini-convention concerned two glider pilots who ferried a glider
from Spanhoe, England, to Amiensm France.
For some unknown reason the two attempted a downwind landing at
excessive speed. They hardly slowed
after scarcely touching down on the strip.
The then leapfrogged three fences and a levee, dug furrows through a
plowed field, snapped off a wing on an electric light pole and then ground
looped to a stop. They had cut off all
the electricity in the area, but things for them would have been a lot worse
had they continued any further. If they
had, they would have gone over a bank of earth and into a quarry where the jeep
they were carrying undoubtedly would have crushed them. Some guys were just lucky, but weren’t most
glider pilots at one time or another.
Without a lot of luck most of us wouldn’t have come back.
To progress to more mundane things, I think
our chow improved after we moved to France.
We even had some fresh vegetables from the local market. When the 439th moved from Alencon
to Chateaudun we discovered that the Germans who abandoned the field ahead of
us had left a large patch of good ole Irish potatoes. So, each morning a detail from the kitchen
police dug up some honest-to-goodness spuds.
“Real potatoes” were certainly a welcomed change from the dehydrated
ones we had been enduring until that time.
And, the enlisted men on the digging detail never seemed to complain.
Our cooks probably did about as well as
they could in France with what they received from the States. Let’s face it: the dehydrated food products of those days
were a far cry from todays. I do recall
one unsavory incident now, but only because of something that transpired ay one
of our squadron reunions long after the war.
One fellow, who was attending his first reunion, seemed a bit put out
because none of us remembered him as one of our squadron cooks. I was discussing this with one of my glider
pilot buddies who had a plausible explanation.
“I’m not quite sure, but he strikes a chord with me. He just might be the guy who cooked the
turkey dressing the night before Christmas when we were in France and then left
it out all night.” Only then did I
recall the “poisoning of the troops” and the day afterwards that most of us
spent going back and forth from our outside toilet at the edge of camp.
Still another toilet-going episode I
remember from those days in France involved the military police. The squadron doctor got o
It in his mind
that it was being caused by us not washing our eating utensils carefully
enough. So who should appear besides
the dish washing GI can one day but a Military Policeman with a gun strapped to
his hip. The meaning was certain: you both washed and rinsed your mess kit and
aluminum knife, fork and spoon to the satisfaction of the MP, or you went no
further. It took me back to the days of
childhood when my mother threatened me with all sorts of penalties if I didn’t
take my turn at washing the dishes, but this was the first time I had ever had
anyone put a gun on me to make me do the job and do it right.
While we were stationed at Chateaudun we
were evidently on a line between the nearest German troops to the East and a
pocket of their forces which was still holding out against the Allies in the
Brest area tour northwest. Each evening
around dusk a lone plane would zip over our tents on his was to dropping
whatever it was (probably medicine and intelligence reports) to the sealed off
Krauts. If we had nothing else to do,
we’d sit outside our tents and watch for the aircraft which we dubbed “Bed
check Charley.” One evening an American
fighter plane was seen loafing around in and out of the clouds above us,
obviously awaiting the arrival of Charley.
But Charley must have gotten the word somehow because he never showed up
that evening nor did he ever again. Too
bad. We missed him.
Another happening at Chateaudun involved an
instrument of war, but it was a bomb, not an airplane. And it was an old bomb at that. One pleasant afternoon a farmer was busily
plowing a field not more than a quarter of a mile from our tents when he dug a
little too deep and detonated what was later estimated to be a thousand pound
bomb. It had been dropped earlier in
the war by either the British or the Americans. Nothing was found of the farmer, but dirt
and stones fell on our tanks like rain for several seconds. At the time I was walking to our eight-holer
outside toilet and I was sure the world had come to an end.
The 440th TCG had the good
fortune of being headquartered and housed in a regular French Army
fortress-like installation at Orleans, a large city near Chateaudun, home of
the 439th TCG. I once went
there on TDY and finding myself unable to drop off to sleep, was sitting
outside on a bench. I happened to be
looking at the high wall which surrounded the buildings when I noticed a man
scoot through a hole in the wall. It
proved to be a barefooted American clad only in his briefs. In the moonlight I watched as he ran for a
barracks. It was evident that he had
sold the clothes off his back to some Frenchman. I heard while there that white bed sheets
brought $10.00 on the black market. It
seems that the buyers were using them to make men’s shirts and other articles
of clothing.
While in France we were eligible for
seven-day rest and recuperation (the familiar R&R) trips by air to
London. Sometime after D-Day and our
move over the channel, I made the R&R with three other glider pilots. On our first night on the town we tried
valiantly to drink up all the Scotch whiskey we could find. When the familiar “time please, gentlemen”
from the bartender signaled the end of the drinking time, we arose, donned our
blouses (the term for an officer’s dress jacket at that time) and began wending
our way (staggering would have been a better word for it) back to our
hotel. While taking a short cut through
a park, one of my companions had an urge to toss his cookies. Of course this brought gales of laughter
from the other three of us. However
when the next morning arrived and it was time for me to put on my blouse and go
out for lunch, I discovered much to my chagrin that he had been wearing my
blouse the night before, not his own.
He had inadvertently switched with me when we left the bar. Somehow the event of the night before didn’t
seem so funny in the light of developments.
Harry Kirby, the fellow mentioned earlier
as the former boxer who sparred with Billy Conn in England, was one of the many
glider pilots who served in added jobs once he went overseas. Kirby, of American Indian descent, loved
shop work and sometimes put his skill to good use for his squadron. On one occasion, however, he reportedly
turned his talents to making a moonshiner-type “still” from some copper objects
which the Germans had abandoned in their hasty retreat from the allies.
Harry and his friends were said to have
raided the kitchen for any food or scraps of food which aroma of a still and
detected its presence in an old building near the mess, but no one tipped off
the commander or any of his staff.
Harry did, however, have a problem in locating sufficient sugar and
often turned to brown sugar which was good for coloring his product anyway.
Once the booze had fermented for the length
of time deemed appropriate, Harry tested it by burning a little in a
spoon. If it burned brightly enough he
knew it was ready for consumption.
Haskel Hazelwood, a glider pilot known to
many for his gambling ability, was in Kirby’s outfit. He was also known for his drinking
ability. Once Kirby and a couple of
others tried to get Haskel drunk on the stuff but the story goes that Haskel
downed a large portion of the moonshine and managed to stay on his feet. In fact, he even mixed his drinking with his
gambling, something most good gamblers don’t normally do, and yet came out the
big winner one evening, hauling his winnings in large French bills in a wheelbarrow.
Several glider pilots from my squadron were
sent on TDY to Italy in August 1944 for the Invasion of Southern France. Except for an unfortunate few glider pilots,
none from my squadron, the invasion there was rather routine and uneventful.
One fellow did tell me of getting lost from
his buddies after the landing and going without much to eat for three
days. Then one morning he heard the
friendly sound of any approaching C-47.
A great sigh of relief from him and several others with him as they
envisioned some American chow descending in parapacks from the sky. Sure enough, down came the packs. A lot of hungry guys dashed to the packs,
tore them open feverishly, and then discovered to their dismay, bundles of
Stars and Stripes newspapers.
“Americans Now in Southern France,” said a giant headline across the top
of page one. “Fantastic,” said on
glider pilot, “but I’d still rather have some food.” Incidentally, one pack was full of mattress
covers meant for burying the dead.
Since these weren’t needed, they were traded to the French civilians for
eggs or whatever food the latter could come up with.
One glider pilot had a second “landing”
after his original one in southern France.
He had commandeered a bicycle and was riding it hell bent for election
down a cobblestone street in a village when he failed to see a public clothes
washing cement pool in the middle of an intersection. He hit the low retaining wall and flew right
over the handle bars and into the midst of several women who were busily
engaged in washing clothes. Luckily for
him, they broke his fall and he wasn’t hurt.
He beat a hasty retreat and many of these ladies have probably related
this tale of “that crazy American” to their children and grandchildren. C’est la guerre!
Several glider pilots from my squadron
returned from the trip to Italy in their stocking feet. As they were preparing to board the C-47 for
the return trip and Old Italian gentleman accosted them with a small wagon load
of potent wine. So, they naturally
traded their footwear for the wine. It
proved to be really powerful stuff and a lot of us got drunker than skunks on
it.
Speaking of Italy reminds me of a story I
heard at a national glider convention long after WW II. Anyway, it went like this: This guy was a glider pilot with the 316th
TCG and he must have been a real slick operator. While in Sicily, a friend of his was trying
to become intimate with a Sicilian lass who insisted upon marriage before
sex. Evidently this joker got one of
his bright ideas, dressed up like a priest, and “married” the girl to his
friend. The latter lived with the girl
a number of weeks before his unit departed for England and the Invasion. No doubt, the girl he left behind never
heard again from her American “husband.”
This
same slickster who married his friend had been in North Africa before moving to
Sicily on that ill-fated invasion in which the American Navy mistakenly shot
down a number of C-47s and gliders. One
day in Africa he decided to “inspect” one of the local cat houses
(brothels). So, how did he do it? He dressed up as an American medical officer
and inspected the place just for laughs.
I guess it was just for laughs but who knows, maybe he tested some of
the products. If he did, I’m sure it
was for free.
Another time this resourceful clown came up
to a fiend of his named George and said, “George, have a drink of this Rhine wince.”
“No thanks,” said his friend, “you’d best
drink the stuff your-self.”
“That’s okay,” said the slicky boy, “I
traded two of your sheets for a five=gallon jerry can full of the stuff.”
Actually, I was told the names of the main
players in the foregoing tales of North Africa and Sicily but I didn’t have the
guts to use them here. Maybe it is the
stories may not be true, or maybe I’m afraid they might look me up. At my age I don’t go in much for defending
myself.
Bill Greenlee went overseas in May 1943 to
Africa with the 50th TCS, 314 TCG and he has many memories of that
place, some of which equal the tales of Arkansas described earlier herein. He recalls a friend who flew a CG-4A out of
Casablanca with the elevators hooked up backwards. Fortunately he was an alert pilot who
discovered during takeoff that of he pushed the stick forward instead of pulling
back, the glider would leave the ground.
One must admit that it was surely strange and unnerving to fly by
operating the controls backwards including landing by pushing forward on the
stick at the final moment of touchdown.
Another glider pilot that Greenlee knew in
Africa broke off tow in a desert region and lived with a riving band of Arabs
for a month before finding his way back to civilization. All he suffered was bruises from learning to
ride a camel and great dislike for the rest pf his life for mutton.
One of his hard-drinking friends (and how
many glider pilots fit that category) got drunk in Tunis and came to his senses
stoking a French train. There was no
stopping until the end of the line many miles distance. This nut also returned to camp via camel.
I can’t imagine what they were, but
Greenlee says he knows of many other experiences even more startling and all
concerning glider pilots. All I can say
is that living in Northern Florida now must be rather tame by comparison.
My tales of life on the continent wouldn’t
be complete without a few more lines about Father Whalen, and the way he
was. He went with us from the States to
England and on to France and was both priest and friend to those who needed
him He was human, however, and was even
heard to remark at one time, :Sometimes I wonder if you guys really need me the
way you act on occasions.” But I’m sure
this was only a brief relapse. He had
an important role to play in our lives and he played it well. He died young not too many years after WW II
and his death must have been a tragic loss to whomever he was serving at the
time.
While we were at Alencon, France, he
conducted Mass in an old tumbled down barn.
During one of his masses, a young two-striper seated on a log down front
fell asleep during the sermon. Father
Whalen stopped his sermon, strode to the man’s side, and without a word thumped
him with a cocked index finger right between the eyes. Then he admonished the roughly startled
airman thusly: “Now don’t you ever go to
sleep again in the middle of one of my sermons.” As if he had to.
The barn incident made me think of my
“introduction” to the fine priest. I
was entering a squadron barracks of the 91st TCS for the first time
in North Carolina and was there just in time to see him horsing around with a
strapping young officer at the head of the stairs leading to a second
story. As I watched in horror the
latter came tumbling head over heels to the bottom of the stairs. He wasn’t hurt seriously and the pair
apparently treated the matter as a huge joke.
When I related the incident to one of the old hands of the squadron later
that day he wasn’t surprised. He
informed me that Father Whalen, who still looked the part, was a captain of the
Notre Dame boxing team his senior year.
While we were en-route to England I stood
with him one day watching an exhibition boxing match between two heavyweights
and he remarked causally tome that “he could whip either one of them.” I
Didn’t doubt
it. He was around 30 when I knew him
and must have been over six-feet tall and weighed around a very solid 200
pounds. His hair was prematurely gray
which may have been the result of his years before the war as the prison
chaplain, as I mentioned earlier.
While we were overseas for nearly two years
we never had a Protestant or Jewish chaplain, except that for 24 hours before
D-Day we were visited by a neighboring Protestant chaplain who conducted one
ceremony. Father Whalen conducted Protestant and Jewish
services weekly from a goverment0issued booklet and those who attended seemed
perfectly satisfies. Perhaps they were
hesitant to complain!
Father Whalen asked several times for
permission to ride on one of the C-47s in combat situations but he group
commander refused him. It was rumored
that the commander had an officer assigned to the task of making sure that the
brave priest didn’t get aboard an aircraft.
On the occasion of one of the invasions of the continent he met our
squadron commander at the latter’s airplane and presented him I with a Saint
Christopher medal, the patron saint of the traveler. “Woody.” He said, “This medal was blessed by
the Pope and I want it back.” It was
Father Whalen’s way of wishing the commander Godspeed.
There was one thing for sure: Father Whalen could be just as tough as his
fellow officers as he could on the enlisted men. Milton Dank, formerly of our 91st
TCS but now Doctor Dank of Wyncote, Pennsylvania, recalls one story in
particular about the good padre. Dank,
who received his doctorate in theoretical physics after the war and worked for
many years in the aerospace industry and is the author of “The Glider Gang,” a
story of gliders and their pilots in WW II, participated in the Invasion of
Southern France in August 1944. The
armada of gliders had taken off from Italy for the invasion and their pilots
returned to Italy afterwards.
Dank and a number of other glider pilots
were granted leave time to spend several days in Rome before they were to be
flown back to their home bases in England.
They alighted from a train in the Holy city and had covered only a short
distance when they met none other than Father Whalen.
“Were on our way to the Wild West Saloon,”
explained Dank.
“Oh no you’re not,” shot back Father
Whalen. You’re going with me to the
Sistine Chapel to visit the Pope.” And,
as Dank still remembered over 40 years later, the former Notre Dame boxing
captain emphasized his point by leaning his sold 200 pounds on the 135 pound
Dank frame.
Dank and friends eventually made it to the
saloon but not before they met the Pope, received his blessing and a religious medal,
and heard him address an audience in five different languages.
Glider warfare having declared a success on
the beaches of Normandy and on a smaller scale in Southern France, it was
inventible that we would be used again.
Following the breakthrough at St. Lo, American armored columns took
Paris without a fight and the chase was on as German divisions beat a hasty
retreat toward the Rhine River and home.
With two-thousand glide pilots and their
gliders poised for action from England and France it was up to the American
command to find something for us. It
has since been said that no less than eighteen separate airborne missions were
planned during July and August, mostly in Support of Patton’s men and tanks. They were all scrubbed because by the time
the gliders and paratroopers would have reached their drop zones, Patton would
have been on down the road. I know
personally that was briefed for several of these.
I recall one planned mission in particular
when we were confined to the base and were sure that: this is it.” This time we were more fortunate than on
D-Day when we were restricted to the barracks and mess hall. We could go to the officer’s club. That evening I happened to notice four nurses
at a table. Three of them were nice
enough looking to stir the normal male reaction; one was just plain big. I looked back a little later and noted that
the three were paired off with handsome young pilots while the ugly duckling
sat alone at a table nursing a drink.
“How sad,” I reflected, but I had not reckoned with human nature and the
words of the country and western song which goes something like, “Homely girls
get better looking at closing time.”
Shortly before the doors were to close, I looked at the lady’s table
and, lo and behold, three young males were vying for her attention. Evidently it was an old story for her and
she had the patience to hang in there until booze, the timeless male urge, and
the base restriction made even her attractive enough that three guys wanted to
escort her home.
Each time our Group was alerted for one of
these hoped-for missions, military police were dispatched to the nearby
villages to run all our guys out of the bistros (taverns) and back to the
airfield. This routing included the local
brothels once we moved to France. One
of our more amorous glider pilots who was known for the number of trips he made
to the ladies of the night, happened to be in one of the “houses” at an alert
time. Upon hearing the sounds of the
Military Police on the first floor, he quickly put on his uniform, ran to the
second story window with his boots in his hands, and leaped to the ground
below, twisting one ankle badly. He
hobbled to a jeep which he had driven to the village and hidden on a side street
and made his way back to the base. He
gave the doctor a story about having hurt the ankle playing softball, which the
doctor may or not have believed, knowing the fellow and his feats personally,
administered a small bottle of aspirins, and sent him on his way to his
glider. Luckily for the latter, her
flew his missions successfully, landed expertly with his sprained ankle on one
of the rudder pedals, limped his way through several days of combat, and made
his way back to his hone airfield safely.
Speaking of landing a glider with a bad ankle
reminds me of a story of the glider pilot who was asked if getting a glider
down didn’t worry him. “We don’t have
to worry about getting down,” he replied.
“Gravity takes care of that. All
we worry about is where and when. Every
glider
I knew one glider pilot who managed to have
someone else take his eye test that allowed him to get into the program… He was
so notoriously poorly sighted that other glider pilots tried to land as far
away from him as possible of they were scheduled to land in the same area. One mission he is said to have landed atop a
line of hedge trees which he mistakenly believed to be a path through a
pasture.
In mud-August 1944, General Eisenhower
decided to form the First Allied Airborne Army to be composed of the U.S. 82nd
and 101st Airborne Divisions, the British 1st and 6th
Airborne Divisions and elements of French and Polish Brigades. Late that month, most Troop Carrier Wings
moved their C-47 Airplanes and crews plus glider pilots and supporting troops
to Balderton Airdrome and other bases near Newark in the Midlands.
Airborne and Troop Carrier outfits received
orders in late August to assemble at a location in England to hear speeches by
Eisenhower and General Breton, who was to head the new Army. It was a unusually sunny day in England and
the weather was just right for marching with all of us attired in our best
dress uniforms.
The two American Airborne Division marched
first into a large pasture to the music of the 83nd Band. Down the road they came, marching in perfect
time, not a man out of step, to the music of “The Stars and Stripes:
Forever.” The marching was perfection –
a thing of beauty to behold to my outfit, the 439th Troop Carrier
Group, and other similar groups. We
watched all this from fields along the road when the Airborne marched by.
Then it was the Air Force’s time to
march. Did we march down the road? No, we marched across a plowed field to the
assembly point. Heads bobbed all along
our ranks and marching in time was nearly impossible – even if the
seldom-marched Air Force troops could have marched in time. We practiced so rarely!
And what was the music by the 82nd
Band to which we of the Air Force marched?
The sing was – and this is true – “Lookie,Lookie, Here comes
Cookie.” There was many a snicker and
some outright laughing from the Army troops.
General Breton addressed us first,
describing the formation of the New Army which was eventually to make the
airborne invasion of Holland and September 17, 1944. Eisenhower, with his typical boyish grin,
said little other than to wish us good luck and chide us of the Air Force for
not wearing our ribbons. He then walked
along the ranks asking from time to time, “Anyone here from Kansas” and then
stopping for a bit of conversation. I
hoped he’d come near so that I could say I was from Kansas but no such luck.
The higher ups reached their decision: we were to drop into Holland and hold three
bridges, the last being across the Rhine River near Arnheim. Montgomery had convinced Eisenhower (as I
learned from history books after the war) that once across the Rhine, the
British could sweep across upper Germany into Berlin, shortening the war by
possible six months. Little did we know
what lay before us – the tragedy at Arnheim.
The role of my 439th Group was
to fly from our old base near Newark in the Midlands for four hours, across
some 90 miles of Dutch farm country and land near the village of Grave near Nijmegen. September 16 was a lovely day in England,
the day we received our briefing for our mission on the 17th.
I rode in a jeep to my glider to await
being pulled by a small tracked vehicle to my take off spot on the runway. I wasn’t long in noting that the glider,
with a capacity of approximately four-thousand pounds of cargo, was loaded to
the gills with a canvas-covered jeep trailer.
I asked the loadmaster what was in the trailer and he told me it was
land mines. He added “don’t worry” because
it took a sizable vehicle, presumably a truck or tank to detonate the
mine. Small consolation, I mused.
I had waited outside the glider for some
time when it occurred to me that I was alone, whereas on the earlier mission to
Normandy I was one of two pilots aboard.
“Where’s the other glider pilot?” I
inquired.
“You’re the only one on this glider,” The
loadmaster replied. Then with a
straight face he added, “The colonel said he didn’t want to waste two pilots on
this one.”
As fate would have it, there was to be
another person in the glider copilot seat.
Not another pilot but another person.
It came about in this manner: A
warrant officer of Polish descent who worked in our group headquarters had
evidently decided ahead of time that he had enough pencil pushing and had an
insatiable desire to see combat. When
it was apparent that my glider was getting close to being pulled into position
for hook-up, the officer, in full combat dress, appeared from nowhere carrying
a Thompson submachine gun and boarded my glider. I thought afterwards that I was rather
relived that he was slight in build because he had to crawl over the mines to
reach the copilot’s seat.
The decision of the ground-pounder officer
to board my glider as mu “copilot” was not the only strange thing that happened
to me as I sat in my glider awaiting the trip to Holland.
Tom Berry and Norm (Boot) Wilmeth, also of
the 91st and friends of mine, got it in their heads to play a
gruesome joke on me. As I sat nervously
in my glider with 800 pounds of high explosives and awaiting my departure, what
should appear in front of my windshield not Santa Claus and his reindeer, but
Tom Berry holding a human Skelton head, snapping its jaws, and yelling at the
top of his voice, “Skidmore, his brother is waiting for you in Holland. He can’t miss you; you’re fat.”
The skull was that of a German killed in
Africa. An American had found it and
somehow it ended up in England. How
Wilmeth got it I’ve never learned.
Probably in a crap game. But
there was Berry, held aloft by Wilmeth, and waving the head before my startled
eyes. On the forehead was painted a
black swastika. I forgot what I screamed
at both of them. Probably a string of
four-lettered words. Berry was still
laughing about the whole incident when we met for the first time in some 40
years at a national WW II Glider Pilot Convention in St Louis.
Wilmeth, who was also at St. Los, told me
he started his flight to Holland with the skull beside him. On the way, however, he had a paratrooper
discussed the possibility of what might happen if they were unfortunate enough
to be captures in Holland with the skull still in their possession. They solved their dilemma by having the
trooper throw the skull out the rear door of the glider into the North Sea.
Wilmeth told me another story in St.
Louis. While he had a glider
infantryman were shooting the breeze beside Wilmeth’s glider prior to take off,
Boots mentioned something about “I’ll take care of you in the air if you’ll
take care of me on the ground.”
Boots landed his glider in great haste,
naturally. Seconds later he was
crouched beside his glider trying to decide which way to go and what do next
when he was literally tackled from behind.
The paratrooper had taken Wilmeth at his word and was doing what he had
promised to do – protecting Boots. It
took some talking before Boots convinced the trooper that he, Boots, had
undergone considerable ground combat training as part of the glider program and
was at least reasonably capable of taking care of himself there in Holland.
Getting back to my own flight to Holland,
after four hours of flying over the North Sea we could see the Dutch
shoreline. The tempo changed there when
a tow plane ahead of us went down on the coast after being hit by fire from an
old barge which was tethered in an inlet.
In an instant, an American stack aircraft swept downward off my right
side and fired first a burst of machine gun fire with traces into the barge and
then a cannon shot which hit dead center.
As we passed overhead I could see debris all over the inlet as the barge
began to sink. Frankly I was terrified
but my stowaway seemed to relish the action.
He had his face glued to the air vent on his side and was taking in the
whole thing, laughing and yelling all the time we were over the boat. Maybe he felt that he, being Polish, had a
personal score to settle with the Germans and he was getting a sneak preview of
what he hoped would come later.
We completed the 90 miles across the Dutch
Hillsides without further incident. We
had been briefed that the 8th Air Force had bombed everything in our
90-mile path and their bombers must have done a good job of it. They did miss one converted windmill on a
hill just short of where we were to land.
Machine gun fire from the top of the mill shot down a C-47 ahead of
me. It was like watching a movie to see
the C-47 going into a steep dive and suddenly explode on the ground ahead of
us. It was sickening to see Americans
dying before your very eyes. “I figured
my time was about up,” but when it was time for my glider to pass the windmill
he must have had to stop to reload because we passed over safely.
As we arrived over the drop zone I could
see some of the paratroopers still not yet on the ground or barely there. This was a surprise to me because I had
understood that they were to have the fields secured before the gliders
arrived. I released my glider as
briefed at 900 feet and as I began my descent I observed considerable ground
fire coming up at me and the other gliders around me. I decided to dive my glider with the idea of
subsequently slowing the speed once I was free of my antagonist on the
ground. Evidently one of the glider
infantrymen at the rear of my glider sensed that I was exceeding the usual rate
of decent because I soon became aware that one of them had crawled over the
land mines and was pounding on my steel helmet and shouting, “Slow this s.o.b.
down.”
Not knowing quite how to fly the glider and
defend myself at the same time, I was doing my best but with mixed
results. He shoved me forward and the
glider dropped an alarming angle.
Fortunately, my “co-pilot” came to the
rescue by pushing his Thompson into the trooper’s ribs and uttering, “If you
don’t get off his back right now, I’m gonna slow you down permanently.”
Since the trooper had left his weapon at
the rear pf the glider, and probably because he sense that discretion was the
better part of valor from where he was, he beat a hasty retreat over the mines
to the rear and that was the last I ever saw of him. I landed my glider successfully although
giant beets in the field pretty well tore up the underside of the fragile
craft.
My landing stirred up a large amount of
dust from which I emerged after scrambling over my load of mines. For a time after I exited I was entranced at
the sight of more paratroopers from the 82nd drifting out of the sky
and plopping onto the ground. Then the
sound of an incoming mortar brought me back to reality with a rush. I dived for a nearby shallow ditch. A young paratrooper had the same idea, only
from the opposite direction. As we hit
the dirt we clanged helmets. We raised
our eyes simultaneously and instantly recognized each other.
“What the hell are you doing here,
Potter?” I asked with disbelief.
“That’s d good question, and if you find
the answer let me know,” he replied with equal disbelief.
Right there and then I discovered that you
seldom get so far from home that you don’t meet someone you know.
For a few minutes we crouched and chatted
about the good old days back home in Kansas.
I ran into him a couple of days later at the base of a windmill. He was white as a sheet, caused no doubt by
the fact that a German sniper had a little while earlier pinged a rifle bullet
into a tree just inches from a K-Ration he was eating. I never saw him again but I heard after I
got back home that he made it through the war okay. And that was something an unfortunately
large number of American paratroopers didn’t do.
My Polish-descent stowaway “copilot” turned
out to be hell on wheels in combat. I
heard eventually that he remained for several weeks with the airborne in the
Nijmegen-Arnheim area and made a good amount of himself in combat. After he returned to our Group he asked for
and received a transfer to an Officers Candidate School conducted by the Army
in France.
I had a scare of my own later in the day we
arrived. I was in a fox hole at a road
intersection hoping to join up with some other glider pilots but after half an
hour I gave up and decided to walk to a large farm house which I could see atop
a nearby hill. A few minutes later
another glider pilot came in looking very shook up. He told of seeing an American get a direct
hit from a mortar shell while standing in the very hole from which I had
emerged earlier. War sometimes was a
matter of luck.
Several glider pilots from my Group got
together near Nijmegen and took refuge near a railhead. That afternoon a trainload of German Army
replacements arrived, only to find themselves in the hands of American Airborne
troops. Most of the Germans were in
their fifties and sixties and weren’t even in uniform. They wore yellow swastika arm bands which
under international rules of war served as a “uniform.” This was to distinguish them from spies and
thus provide safety from execution. One
old gentleman who appeared to be 65 or more was accompanied by his 14-year old
grandson, also with the arm band.
Obviously the manpower pool in the homeland had hit bottom.
A friend of mine observed the American
paratroopers searching their prisoners.
Some of the Yanks had wrist watches from wrist to elbow on both arms. Tiring of the searching, the Americans had
their prisoners file by one at a time and empty their pockets including their
money. Several glider pilots stepped up
to the line and took some of the paper money and pocketed it. It was only after they made their way to
Brussels, Belgium, for the return trip to England did they discover that it was
real rather than worthless paper money.
Some bought things for their folks back home; others spent it for a good
time in the city. Needless to say, all
wished they had taken more of the loot.
For the invasion of Holland we were issued
usual K-rations. We each carried three
of the cracker jacks boxed rations with the understanding we would be supplied
with rations by aerial drop. Bad
weather which plagued the invasion and aftermath prevented the drops until days
later. Some never received the food in
a week or so on the ground and had to forage for food, including raw vegetables
from the field. The Dutch were good
about sharing their limited food. I
tried some of their ersatz coffee, reportedly made of acorns, but it was pretty
difficult to stomach.
An acquaintance told me later that he
discovered some beans in an abandoned house and spent some time cooking
them. The smoke must have attracted a
German mortar squad because an incoming round hit the wall and knocked the bean
pot to the floor. My friend was not
injured and after things settled down he was hungry enough to gather the beans
up from the floor and eat them.
A B-17 outfit from the Eighth Air Force
took on the job of supplying us with food and ammunition. I saw three of the giant Fortresses come
across under 250 feet altitude from where crewmen kicked parapacks out of the
side door on to the ground. I heard
later that one squadron lost four of the big bombers to ground fire on what the
commander had thought was to be a milk run.
He reportedly was so incensed that he threw his fifty-mission crush hat
down on the runway back in England and stomped on it.
When American aircraft finally were able to
penetrate the bad weather in the week following the invasion some of the packs
fell to the British rather than to the Americans. I was in a field where retrieved parachutes
were being piled onto an Old Dutch wagon when word came to the lieutenant in
charge that the British had our rations.
Another young officer volunteered to go make arrangement to bring back
the rations, but he returned with word that the British thought they were the
intended recipients. They just flat
didn’t want to surrender those Yankee vittles – good compared to some of the
garbage they were accustomed to eating.
For a time it looked like a recurrence of the Revolutionary War as old
friends argued over parapacks of rations.
It finally took an American Lieutenant Colonel packing a big “45” on his
hip to recover the rations. A footnote
to this particular story was that this was the first time I ever knew that the
U.S. had a policy of salvaging combat parachutes. I know one small chest pack they didn’t
get. I carried it back 150miles to Brussels
and then back to Taunton, England. Part
of it was used to decorate the officer’s club at the “Welcome Back” party and
the remainder was used back home on December 7, 1947, to make an outfit for
Joseph Skidmore, our first-born offspring.
Speaking of the British and their food, it
was never too wise to be around then at 10 in the morning or 2 or 4 o’clock in
the afternoon. Why? Because no matter where they were, including
gun positions right out in the middle of a field. They would start up a fire to
brew a pot of tea. Germans or not,
“Tommy” had to have his tea.
Some glider pilots, probably fearing the
worst as they saw gliders ahead of them ground looping and flipping over on the
sandy fields, landed okay through pilot skill or plain old good luck. One of these was “Rhodie” Rhodehamel of the
91st TCS. As he was about to
touch down in a large and inviting field he noticed two wire fences immediately
ahead in his intended oath. “Lift up
your feet lads,” he shouted to the glider troopers seated in two rows behind
him. The fences proved to be old and
rusty and gave way to the glider’s underside.
Rhodie and company slid to a perfect and safe landing.
Many glider pilots have interesting answers
to the time-worn question: “What did you
do in the war, daddy?” Tom Berry of St
Louis who was with the 91st is one with thrilling stories to
recount. Tom flew into Nijmegen,
Holland, on the first day of the invasion, September 17, 1944. After landing his combat troops he, like the
other glider pilots with him, was mostly on his own to find his way 150 miles
Brussels where all the glider pilots were to catch a ride to England.
Tom was in the vicinity of Veghel in the
Netherlands working his way in the right direction when he heard what was to
prove to be German tanks firing their infamous 88 millimeter cannons at
vehicles of the Canadian 2nd Armored Division, the outfit which was
supposed to have broken the back of the German Army in the North where we were
and open the way to Berlin.
Berry was attempting to find shelter in a
brick home on one of the streets in the village when an American Lieutenant
colonel and a private first class drove up in a jeep pulling a cannon. At that very moment a German tank drove into
the square down the street and started firing down still another street.
The American officer and GI leaped from
their Jeep and began extending legs of the gun in preparation for firing at the
tank. Sighting Berry, the Lieutenant
Colonel shouted, “Give me the blue shells.”
Tom learned later, the officer was asking for armor piercing shells. Unfortunately the blue ones were on the
bottom of the pile in the rear of the vehicle.
After tossing aside several shells, Berry located a blue shell and
handed it to the private who rammed it into the breech, fired and missed the
tank the first time. By that time the
German in the tank and spotted the Jeep and were swinging the turret if the
huge tank around in the direction of the three Americans. Berry handed two more shells to the private
who was successful both times in hitting the tank and setting it afire. The tank crewman were able to get out of
their burning tank but their good fortune was short-lived. At that juncture, according to Berry,
American heads popped up from behind everything in sight along the street. The tankers went down in a hail of bullets.
Sometime after I arrived in Holland I
teamed up with two others from my 91st TCS, the aforementioned
Charley Balfour and Tom Bennett. On one
occasion we had taken shelter in a large house atop a hill which had once been
the local headquarters of the Germans in that vicinity. One side of the house had a glassed-in porch,
and you could see several hundred feet down a hillside into the outskirts of
the town of Groesbeck. We heard shots
coming from the streets below as we stood at the huge glass window and could
see rifle fire exchanges between Americans and Germans.
Watching the action in the streets below us
was not unlike sitting in a theater back home and watching a war newsreel. We were entranced by it all until a bullet
shattered the glass right above our heads and embedded into the wall behind
us. I don’t know who coined the
expression “going ass over teakettle” but that’s exactly what the trio of us
did.
The Airborne had imprisoned approximately
one-hundred Germans in a large garage behind this same house. One of them was grievously wounded,
obviously near death. Several of us
were attempting to sleep in the house but were having little luck with
messengers coming and going all night.
Half a dozen wounded Americans had also been brought to the house, one
of them a glider pilot whom I didn’t know.
He had a rather bad knee wound but kept up a stream of conversation long
after dark. I had dropped off to sleep
sometime after 2 a.m. and then along about 4 a.m. we were all awakened by a
loud commotion coming from the garage.
Another glider pilot and I went to the
garage to investigate. Upon discovering
that the German had died we had several of the other prisoners carry him
outside to await burial after daybreak.
At Dawn I arose from the floor, went outside and found the dead man
propped up against the base of a tree, eye wide open, and with a cigarette in
his mouth. Despite the severity of the
battle being waged on all sides some paratrooper still had a macabre sense of
humor. We had him buried next to the
tree.
The second night In Holland, Bennett,
Balfour and I came upon a pole of canvas bags which had been used to drop
supplies. Upon deciding that the thick
padded bags were just the thing to sleep in that night, we selected a spot in
an apple orchard and being completely exhausted went to sleep easily despite
the sounds of battle all around us.
At the crack of dawn I awoke to the sounds
of German tanks clanking by our spot not thirty yards away. Evidently my two buddies had awakened before
I did and each was crouched behind a skinny apple tree not more than four
inches in diameter. It was a serious
matter but we all laughed later at the thought of the two of them attempting to
hide behind those two little trees.
“Any old port in a storm,” Bennett remarked.
Another war story which I heard in Holland
went like this: A lieutenant glider
pilot was walking along a road when he met an American airborne private who had
a captured German in hand. The trooper
saluted:
Paratrooper: “Sir, I have a German prisoner. What shall I do with him?”
Glider Pilot: “Shoot the bastard.”
Paratrooper: “Yes sir. Thank you sir.”
With that, the trooper took a couple of
steps backwards, threw a shell into the chamber of his rifle and prepared to
take action as commanded. Luckily for
the German, the glider pilot regained his shattered composure in time to
rescind his “order” and save the life of the horrified prisoner.
I also heard that paratroopers had a
superstition against landing in C-47s from which they jumped. It was okay to take off in them but landing
in them was bad luck. I think there may
have been some truth in the story because of the following incident in which I
was involved:
One day in North Carolina before we went
overseas I rode along on a practice paradrop.
The warning light came on and the stick of paratroopers stood up and
prepared to jump as a closely knit group in the usual line.
Before the line of men could jump, one
young kid half way back in the line popped his emergency chest pack onto the
floor of the C-47. It was evident that
he didn’t know what to do, so I stood up, detached his main ‘chute from the
overhead static line and pulled him free from the line of men. After the others jumped I could see that he
was badly shaken up.
“What’s the matter?” I inquired.
“I’m scared.”
“Why?”
“Because I never landed in an
airplane before.
I had heard of people who were afraid to
get into an airplane, but never anyone who was afraid to get out of one on the
ground.
One glider pilot in my group was recognized
as quite a dresser. He kept his “pink”
pants with a razor edge crease and his blouse (green dress jacket) was always
neatly pressed. His buddies didn’t
really believe him, however, when he announced that he was taking his dress
uniform complete with the shirt and necktie to Holland.
But sure enough when he took off for
Holland he had his dress outfit hanging on the back of his seat at the controls
of the glider. So, when I arrived in
Brussels, after having hitch-hiked my way 150 miles back from the front, who
was the first person I saw? Right. There he was in his dress uniform, complete
with 50-mission crush hat and his mustache neatly trimmed. He was ready to operate in the land of
beautiful women! He had somehow kept it
intact through his time in combat and after the arduous trip to the capital
city of Belgium was his usual fashion plate self. Someone said he was quite the ladies’ man in
the big city for several evenings and I had no reason to doubt it.
While the American glider pilots were
engaged near Nijmegen and the surrounding area our British counterparts were
surrounded on the far side of the Upper Rhine River at Arnheim. Their heroics heve been documented in books
and movies, but I feel pleased to add some of my stories which I personally
heard from several of their lads who attended our National WW II Glider Pilot
Association Convention at St. Louis in 1986 where they were special guest.
One of those at St. Louis was Desmond Page
of Kent, England. After eight days at
Arnheim, said Page, It was apparent that the British would have to evacuate the
bridge city. Realizing that it would be
safer to cross the river at night he “Liberated” a woman’s short fur coast
which he found in an abandoned home.
With the Germans at his heels he donned his camouflage coveralls over
the coast and, with a couple of other Englishmen, pushed an assault boat off
the shore and paddled for the far side.
The luck of the British ran out when the
boat capsized on the middle of the river.
Because he was a powerful swimmer he was able to make it to shore,
loaded down as he was with a lot of clothing and a British 303 rifle. He now thinks the fur coat trapped air and
acted rather like a float. He took the coat
back to England and gave it to his mother with instructions to get it cleaned
and keep it. Even then he had
intentions of someday returning it to its owner, especially when the cleaner
informed his mom that it was worth 17 British pounds, a considerable amount of
money in those days.
Twenty-one years later he returned to the
Arnheim-Nijmegen area for an airborne reunion and visit to the former battle
ground. After considerable searching he
found the house where he liberated the coat and discovered that the same family
still lived there. He and his wife
returned the coat personally to its owner and had a delightful visit wither and
her family.
Arnheim wasn’t to be the last fearful
escapade in Page’s military career as a paratrooper in WW II. On the crossing of the Rhine River into
Germany in March 1945 he was briefed to land his giant 30-man Horsa glider at
Northern Road Bridge near Wessel, Germany.
He made the customary steep glide in the huge lumbering Horsa and when
nearing the ground pulled the attester gear designed to pull the glider out of
its steep descent and permit a slow roll and stop. All was not destined to go well for Page,
however. When he pulled on the arrester
at approximately fifty feet altitude the entire tail fell off. Fortunately the big wings of the Horsa had
enough life left to allow the glider to slam to the ground at a slow enough
speed so that none aboard was injured.
To return to myself at Nijmegen, I somehow
became separated from Bennett and Balfour after a few days and decided to make
my way alone to Brussels. By that time,
General Dempsey’s Canadian Armored Division’s vehicles were clogging the roads
into the area as I walked the other way along a road leading back to
Belgium. Suddenly I heard the rough
engine of a German aircraft. I looked
up in time to see a fighter-type aircraft cross the road at a right angle at no
more than 300 feet.
I guessed that the pilot, whom I could see
clearly in the cockpit, would probably bank his plane around and strafe the
column along which I was walking. With
that in mind, I lost little time in seeking shelter in a nearby house. Upon entering, I saw what I thought was a
door to the basement – cellar, as we used to call them in Kansas. But getting into the place proved to be
something else. I discovered that a
Dutchman of some considerable strength was on the other side of the door and
had no intentions of letting a soldier into a cellar full of civilians. While I was trying without success to open
the door the German did in fact return and raked the column right in front of
the house. And until you have been
strafed you don’t know the real meaning of “thrilling.” After I emerged from the house I met an
American paratrooper who told me that some GI on the ground shot down the plane
with a submachine gun. Maybe it was
true but I found it a little hard to believe.
I can’t close out this account of glider
pilots in Holland without relating the tale of at least one glider pilot who
made it there only through sheer determination. On September 17, invasion day, First
Lieutenant Lee Ryser of the 304th Troop Carrier Squadron took off
with his unit, but ten minutes later his tow rope broke and he landed
successfully in a green English pasture.
He and the airborne troops with him unloaded the jeep and drove it back
to their departure base.
On the following day Ryser became part of a
follow-on mission and once more took off for Holland. This time the weather closed in over the
mainland of Europe and the C-47s turned back for England with their
gliders. The third day he was one of a
number of glider pilots who were sent to a British base where they were once
more to try for the trip to Holland.
Fate evidently decreed that Ryser was not to take part in an aerial
mission to Holland and the mission was scrubbed. He finally made the trip by ship with an
airborne division’s communications people.
A little sidebar story here is that Ryser
was a close friend of his unit’s doctor and while awaiting the original mission
the two were discussing the squadron’s policy which permitted the doctor to
award a couple of shots of good scotch whiskey to glider pilots returning from
combat missions for their de-briefings.
The pair decided that it would be nice for Ryser to take along a bottle
of the booze and distribute some among his friends after they had landed safely
in the Low Country. Several of his
close friends knew of the arrangement.
Although he did get to Holland he never managed to hook up with any of
these friends for a “reunion drink.”
But it wasn’t wasted, he noted years later when telling this personal
account.
Following the strafing incident I caught a
ride in an empty British truck which was returning for more Bailey bridge
parts. It was obvious to me from the
time I caught my ride as to why the Canadians armor had not relived the
airborne within 48 hours in the Nijmegen area.
There was only one road from Eindhoven to Nijmegen for incoming combat
vehicles and returning support trucks, ambulances, and others. The traffic snarls were frequent. When large vehicles met it meant that one
had to get off the road into a sandy field and this frequently meant miring
down in the muck.
We finally reached Eindhoven in time to see
a number of Canadian tanks and trucks burning in the street in the center of
the city. Enough German attack aircraft
had gotten through to create havoc and further halt Dempsey’s advance. Several times I saw burned out tanks with
graves right alongside the remains. As
we were departing the city a British major in the center of the traffic island
halted my driver. The major deiced that
the truck was needed locally, so that was the end of my ride. I walked several miles and then thumbed a
ride all the way to Brussels in another truck.
The truck driver seemed familiar with
Brussels and dropped me off in front of the world-famed Metropole Hotel, The Germans had been gone such a short time that
I could still smell that familiar odor in the air that meant the Germans had been
there. Most of us thought it was the
jack boots they wore, others the food that they ate. Odor, smoder, was the way I felt. All O wanted was a bed.
Being on the front one day and then almost
as if by magic bedded down 48 hours later in the Metropole was unreal
tome. Upon arising in the morning I
felt one of the first things I required was a shave. I had shared a room with another glider
pilot I had never met before. When I
mentioned my need for a shave he went to the bathroom and returned with a
German straightedge razor. Amazingly
enough I had found a former barber who gave me neat shave. We’ll you know what they say: there’s nothing like a clean shave to make
you feel like anew man. The dream of a
good time in the big city was quickly shattered, however, when a notice was
posted in the lobby that returning glider pilots were to report to the
municipal airport for the return to England.
I boarded a Canadian-owned C-47 for the
flight back across the English Channel, a trip which I anticipated would be
uneventful but which proved to be otherwise.
Midway across the channel the pilot allowed one of the gasoline tanks to
run dry. There we were with a coughing
engine. Fortunately he got the engine
running with little trouble, but not before he shook up a bunch of American
glider pilots who considered themselves lucky to be alive and who didn’t want
to die an inglorious death in the English Channel.
My hitch-hiking days weren’t over even
after I had reached England. The
Canadian airfield was 50 miles from my own base, so there I was out on the
highway again, with thumb raised, and without a dime of British money in my
pocket. I finally caught a ride in an
American truck which was headed to my area and the driver, an American private
first class, even bought me a sack of time-honored fish and chips on the
way.
By the time my squadron had reassembled its
glider pilots and was ready for a second trip to Holland the battle there was
at a stalemate. It was back to
censoring mail and awaiting further developments as the winter of 1944 set in.
A limited number of glider pilots were
called upon with only hours of notice to help relive American troops trapped at
Bastogne in December 1944 during the tragic Battle of the Bulge. Once the Germans’ desperate attack was
repulsed it was back to still more waiting for the spring offensive which was
to bring an end to World War II.
Chapter 7
The End of the War
I attended my first National World War II
Glider Pilots Association annual convention at St Louis in 1986 where I met
several old acquaintances for the first time since the war. Among them was squadron buddy Tom Berry who
was busy helping host the convention but found time to tell me several humorous
tales of the crossing of the Rhine River in the spring of 1945.
Tom landed in a plowed field amid a barrage
of sniper fire coming from nearby houses.
Unable to run for shelter, he fell on his stomach and began fashioning a
mound of dirt in front of his face as a dog would have done.
Hearing some shouts in German, Berry peered
over his mound just as three Germans ran from a house with their hands in the
air. But all Tom could do was to motion
them back into the house. After this
happened three times, an American nearby shouted, “Hey, Berry, let them come
out. They want to give up.”
Eventually Berry found refuge in a small
village. But as in the story I related
earlier about him in Holland, the relative safety didn’t last long. Soon, mortar shells were striking the roofs
of homes and pieces of tile were coming down like rain into the streets. Tom flattened himself against a door of a
home where he was soon joined in the same position by another American. “Sonofabitch.” Berry exclaimed, “Sure is
rough here.” “You said that right,”
answered the other fellow as he darted away for better protection. It was only then that Berry saw the Chaplin’s
bars on the other’s collar.
Glider pilots making the Rhine crossing
carried a yellow triangular piece of cloth with which they were to mark their
gliders once they were on the ground. A
friend of Tom’s later told him a hilarious tale involving the yellow cloth
markers. The friend landed his craft
and immediately found himself and his companions pinned down by Germans firing
from an adjacent forest. But each burst
of sniper fire was followed by gales of laughter from some other Americans who
were crouched at the tail of his glider.
After a couple of times of this he discovered the cause of the
laughter: every time the Germans fired
and missed, an American, who had tied the yellow cloth to the end of his rifle
barrel, would raise it high in the air and wave a “Maggie’s drawer,” the
time-honored practice on Army rifle firing ranges since the Civil War days
which signified that the person firing the gun missed the target completely.
Henry J. Jocz, who made the Rhone crossing,
saw two resourceful German pilots flying Messerschmitt fighter aircraft. Jocz was on the outer fringe of a swarm of
gliders crossing over the river when je happened to look to his right. There, flying in formation with him, were
two German pilots doing a clever job of hiding from escorting fighter
pilots. The Germans completed their undetected
with an assist from the formation of American and CG-4A Gliders.
This
wasn’t the only strange and ironic sight which Jocz saw on this mission. After he was safely on the ground he and
some airborne troops saw a German fighter aircraft shot down and Australian
Typhoon Aircraft. Afterwards they
happened to run onto some American ground troops who had the Australian pilot
in custody and mistakenly believed him to a German pilot because he had blonde
hair and a light complexion. His
strange Aussie dialect added to the confusion.
He finally convinced his American captors that he was an Australian, not
a German.
Glider Pilot Jack Usner was another fellow
who almost became a victim of circumstances.
He was flying copilot on a C-47 near the end of hostilities when an
engine went sour and the pilot chose to land on the autobahn, German’s number
one highway. The crew chief got the
engine going again and the crew took off and landed successfully later at
Munich. Only then did pilot and crew
learn that as they flew very low toward the city they had practically buzzed
one of the last remaining pockets of German troops. Evidently the Germans, although still armed
and intact as a military entity, thought more of their lives than their
country. Usner says they probably said
to themselves, “What the hell. The war’s
over anyway.” Or they may have thought
that the lumbering C-47 was acting as a decoy to draw fire so that American
artillery could get a fix on their position.
Usner had another odd experience while
flying a CG-4A Glider back in the states in the hot, light Texas air while in
training there. He turned onto his
landing approach from his base leg at about 200 feet altitude, but sensing that
he was too high he dumped his flaps midway through the final turn. In the light air the huge glider dropped to
the ground much like a helicopter. The
craft was smashed but Usner escaped unhurt.
Strange happenings in glider flying weren’t
confines to overseas areas, says Elbert Dean Jella who later served overseas
with the 77th Troop Carrier Squadron, 435th Troop Carrier
Group. While stationed at Sedalia,
Missouri, he was one of a group of glider pilots flown aboard a C-46 aerial
transport from Sedalia to the West coast to pick up and ferry back a bunch of
small L-5 Liaison Aircraft. While flying
up the coast bound for Tacoma, Washington, the C-46 conked out. The aircraft pilots decided to ride the
plane down but told the glider pilots to bale out.
Jella drifted in his parachute and finally
hung up 150 feet off the ground in a giant Redwood tree. He remained there for 36 hours, enable to
get down. Uncle Sam came to his rescue
by paying a private contractor to get Jella down from his perch. It cost a lot of money at the time, he says
now, but certainly worth the price to him then. Talk about being caught high and dry!
For years following World War II, Glider
Pilot Al Barton of Iowa had often related a combat story in which he praised
the courage of the C-47 crew which pulled him into a sticky situation. As aircraft and glider neared the drop zone
the flak became so intense that it looked like black clouds all around
them. Suddenly the C-47’s left engine
began streaming black smoke and several seconds later the right engine did
likewise. It was no longer airplane and
glider; it was in effect two gliders.
The ground fire switched to the glider but was luckily ineffective. Then they were at the projected landing spot
and Barton cut his glider free from the tow and began his descent, uttering
words of praise to himself for the C-47 pilot’s bravery in not cutting him free
earlier.
Barton and his airborne infantrymen
immediately lost sight of their tow pane and made a relatively routine
landing. The peaceful situation didn’t
last long, however, as the Germans began firing their old reliable “88”
artillery piece into the glider landing area.
As Barton and a few others were about to make their ways to hoped-for
safety in an adjoining bunch of trees, a number of German soldiers met them
with guns raised. The war was about
over for Barton, or so he thought. His
enthusiasm for life in a German prisoner-of –war camp was at low ebb as a
German lifted his wrist watch. But
almost as quickly as it had happened to him. The tide of war changed as a
larger bunch of Americans burst upon the scene and took the Germans under
guard. Barton got his watch back in
record time along with that of the German who had taken his.
But Barton’s story doesn’t end here. At a reunion of his outfit in 1986 he met
his C-47 tow pilot who had crash-landed his aircraft successfully but had spent
the remainder of the war as a prisoner.
In the middle of Al’s profusion of thanks for “that last ten seconds,”
the fellow interrupted Al to say: “With
all our flak suits fairly jumping from the stream of lead coming up, the flight
engineer couldn’t make it to our glider release handle.”
Howard P. Trimpe was another of those
unlucky airplane pilots who were diverted into flying gliders in 1944. Someone evidently thought it would be a fine
idea to take the surplus of power pilots and turn them into glider pilots.
Trimpe had won his wings and second
lieutenant bars in mid-1944 and by late that year was checked out on the
C-47. The war by that time was going
favorably for the Allies and he thought he had it made. Then with little warning he was yanked up
from his position as an aircraft instructor at Bakersfield, California, and
sent to South Plains Army Flying School at Lubbock, Texas, where he received
three weeks of glider pilot training.
Although he had his brand new uniform and bars of a commissioned officer
for three months he was a student again and denied the privilege of going into
the Officers’ Club. The final irony was
that military police “escorted” him and several other transformed pilots to the
train at the conclusion of their glider training and headed them toward their
debarkation point for overseas at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey. He went to England – you guess it – on a
slow boat.
The new glider pilot, not by his own
choice, unhappily eventually joined the 442nd Troop Carrier Group
near Paris. Wearing both glider and
power pilot wings, he made the crossing of the Rhine River with the airborne,
flying copilot on a lumbering CG-4A Glider.
Adding insult to injury, he stayed in Germany two years in the Army of
Occupation.
But the Army Air Force wasn’t done with
Trimpe yet. He was recalled as a pilot
during the Korean War to fly the C-47.
He left the service at the end of the fracas only to be recalled again
during the Cuban unpleasantly in the early 1960s. He once more reverted to civilian life but
was recalled again for the Vietnam conflict.
By that time he was a captain.
He eventually went to work as a civilian Air Reserve technician at Scott
Air Force Base, Illinois, flying weekends as a reserve pilot instructor. He stayed with the Air Force, as it came to
be called in 1950, until 1972 when he received a partial retirement through the
reserve as a Lieutenant colonel.
Despite the uncertainties he endured in the
service, Trimpe still has a warm feeling toward glider pilots and the Air Force
in general. Although authorities at
south Plains told him he was going to the European Theater for one invasion and
would then return to the States to his C-47 piloting job. He concedes that his
training as a glider pilot was through and that he was treated respectfully by
his glider instructors. He must
still like the glider pilot’s because he showed up at their national convention
in St. Louis in 1986 and, according to himself, “Had more fun than anybody.”
Jack W. Riley was one of a fairly large
number of glider pilots who never made it overseas through no fault of their
own. He was selected to become an
instructor for glider pilots taking simulated combat training in North Carolina
in 1943. He was fairly well satisfied
with his role as an instructor until newly commissioned airplane pilots began
arriving for cross training as fighter pilots in 1944.
He says he just couldn’t take it from a
bunch of hot shots who thought they knew more than he did. He tells of one who arrived there fresh (and
that’s the word for the guy) from his post-cadet training as a fighter
pilot. Riley took this fellow up in an
L-5 Aircraft for his dead-stick training which preceded his actual glider
flying. The young man just wouldn’t
listen to the pre-flight briefing because he was obviously convinced that he
knew it all.
Riley piloted the small Liaison aircraft to
1,500 feet over a spot just short of the landing strip. There he put the plane in a steep side-slip
and held it there all the way down until it seemed he would fly the thing right
into the ground. At the last second he
released the craft from the slip and landed it on a dime. The kid was so scared he could scarcely
speak. The next day Riley asked for
reassignment from instructing and spent the remainder of his WW II service as
an operations officer at Maxton-Laurinburg Field, North Carolina.
Rolla W. Brooks was another instructor who
found that raining glider pilots could be a harrowing experience at times. Brooks was with a transition unit at George
Field, Lawrenceville, Illinois, and training pilots in how to fly tow planes in
the glider program. He was also there to
train aircraft pilots who were being reassigned in 1945 as replacements glider
pilots for overseas units. At 3.a.m.,
he was showing one of these trainees how to land a glider at night with only
flare pots as landing aids on the ground.
The pair released their glider from the tow plane over the field but the
student power pilot made his downwind leg too long in his landing pattern and
came down short of the landing strip.
He landed in an ice-covered swampy area and, according to Brooks, the
sound of breaking ice was unbelievable.
Mud and ice came through the sides of the glider and when the two freed
themselves from the wreckage they were covered with the stuff. The ambulance arrived in quick order and the
driver said later he expected to find only dead bodies. Instead he found two people who looked like
creatures from outer space.
Brooks did not, however, escape the
accident harm free. While they were
awaiting the ambulance he was standing under the glider wing congratulating
himself on being alive when tragedy struck, as he stood waiting he had one hand
on an aileron hinge. Then some clown on
the other side of the glider decided for no reason at all to grab the other
aileron and give it one hell of a shaking.
The result was that Brooks nearly lost a finger. Ironic to say the least.
Not all the poor flying was done by glider
pilots. We had some C-47 pilots who
were a threat to themselves and their crews.
At our base at Chateaudun, France, there was a highway which ran right
alongside the base and parallel to a runway.
Early one morning one of our “Gooney bird” pilots was returning from a
supply run. He approached for his
landing but was all lined up to sit down on the highway instead of the
runway. The co-pilot, who happened to
be a glider pilot, warned him in time for the latter to pull up and go
around. Another time this same pilot
buzzed a lake in France, didn’t pull up in time, and dragged his tail through
the water, returning to his base with a huge bunch of moss dangling from his
tail.
Maurice H. Daubin was a glider pilot with
an unusual habit of taking maps and navigation equipment along on glider
flights. Some of his friends used to
ask him where in the hell he thought he was going that the airplane ahead
wasn’t going. Nerveless he enjoyed
knowing the direction he was going, especially when he was flying copilot and
had the time and opportunity to work with the equipment.
So, as fate would have it, Daubin and
another glider pilot were sent from South Plains, Texas, to Minneapolis,
Minnesota, to pick up a newly-built glider.
On the return trip, the C-47 and glider landed at Omaha, Nebraska, where
they were to remain overnight and take off the following morning on the return
trip to Texas. Daubin knew that his
compass hadn’t been swung right and was inaccurate, so after a time he
determined that the C-47 pilot was about fifty miles off course to the
left. Daubin figured to himself that if
he veered his glider to the left it would pull the C-47 tail left which in turn
cause the tow plane to fly to the right.
After he had done this several times the tow plane pilot got on the
telephone line strung to the glider.
While answering the C-47 pilot’s questions
as to “what the hell are you doing to me with that glider of yours?” Daubin decided that the tow pilot didn’t know
he was off course. The pilot finally
admitted to Daubin that he had left his window partly open as they were taking
off from Omaha and that his maps had blown out. The two pilots reached a happy
decision: The aircraft pilot agreed to
let the glider pilot, Daubin, do the navigating. Not only that but the C-47 piloted, through
a series of directional moves, plus relaying the readings to Daubin, was able
to correct his compass. After that,
Daubin gave directions from time to time, and tow plane and glider reached
Wichita successfully. Said Daubin, “No
one kidding me after that about my navigating ability.”
Many of the funny stories told by glider
pilots involve the small airplanes they flew both before and after they were
graduated as full-fledged glider pilots.
Oscar L. (bob) Morrow was taking dead stick training at Monticello,
Minnesota. After he had cut off his
engine and landed dead stick at an auxiliary field all by himself he discovered
that there was no one on duty there to restart his plane with the usual
propeller twist.
After waiting a considerable length of time
to no avail for someone to show up and give him a twist, he opted to do it
himself. He set the little airplane’s
brakes, hopped out, and twisted the prop.
But before he could regain his seat in the craft’s controls he heard the
plane’s brakes pop off and the thing started taxing across the grassy meadow on
its own.
Morrow dashed after the Piper Cub, caught
it by its horizontal stabilizer on the tail, and halted further forward
movement. Due to the low power of the
Cub this was no big deal. However, each
time he spun the prop and ran to get into the seat of the tiny aircraft it
literally ran off. Now that he looks
back at the tiny aircraft he says it reminds him of an old Laurel and Hardy
Comedy. He finally overcame his problem
by starting the engine, grabbing the tail as the Piper rolled by, and then
moving forward to the side door while at the same time pressing his body
against the side of the plane enough so that movement was stopped. In this manner he regained his seat and took
off for the home field.
General Matthew B. Ridgeway, former
Airborne Division commander, when dedicating the CG-4A at the Air Force Museum
at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in 1975 told a story on the
aforementioned Mike Murphy of the glider program. Murphy, probably the nation’s top stunt
pilot, in pre-WW II days, took the general for a glider ride in 1943. Murphy had obviously planned a fast landing
which would allow him to roll right up to the flight line in typical “hot dog”
Murphy style. The glider was rolling
along at about 30 miles an hour when Mike applied the brakes, found he had
none, and realized that he and the general were headed for a parked B-17 bomber. “Bail out,” Murphy yelled at the general,
whereupon both officers leaped from the door of the glider. The general slid along the cement taxiway
but suffered only scratches on his knees.
With the end of hostilities in Europe in
May 1945 it was time to break up our temporary installations over there, shut
down the Officers’ Club, and go home.
Our particular Officers Club, Officer-in-charge thought the only fair
thing to do was to divide what booze remained equally among the departing
members. We each received a bottle of
scotch, two bottles of wine, and a bottle of champagne.
While I was crossing the Atlantic, again by
slow boat, a friend of mine remarked that he preferred champagne to scotch.
When I arrived home I stashed the scotch
with my in-laws while my wife and I lived in a nearby apartment and searched
for permanent quarters. My
father-in-law assured me that it was safe with him because he didn’t like
scotch. A month or so later we were
planning a party and I inquired about my scotch.
“It’s gone,” said my father-in-law.
“What do you mean it’s gone? You said you didn’t like scotch.” I said plaintively.
“Well, son,” he explained, “I just kept
practicing until I learned to like it.”
I guess that’s the way it was with flying
gliders during World War II. You kept
trying it and if you lived long enough you learned to like it. You didn’t ask why. You flew the durned thing.
Fighter pilots depended on speed and
deception. We had neither and it was a
blessing for our families back home that they knew little of this. The previously-mentioned mother who wrote
her glider pilot son said that she was glad that “he flew low and slow”
probably suggested a possible title for this book.
When the movie “The Longest Day” came out a
number of years after World War II, my then 12-year old son Mike attended it
with several of his schoolmates.
Rushing into our home breathlessly afterwards he asked, “Dad, do you
know about the movie, “The Longest Day?”
“Son,” I said with a smile, “your dad was
in the original cast.”
-End-
Statement of Military
Service World War II
Charles E. Skidmore Jr
July 11, 1941 – Appointment to U.S. Army
Air Corps – Aviation Cadet
November 3, 1941 – Honorable Discharge –
Aviation Cadet
December 30, 1941 – Appointment to U.S.
Army Air Corps – Bombardier Cadet
April 23, 1942 – Honorable Discharge –
Bombardier Cadet
April 30, 1942 – Appointment to U.S. Army
Air Corps – Air Cadet - Glider Pilot Training
April 30, 1943 – Appointment – Flight
Officer – Glider Pilot - U.S. Army Air Corps
July 3, 1946 – Honorable Discharge – U.S.
Army Air Corps – Flight Officer
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