The "G" is for Guts, the story of WW II Glider Pilots

 

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 – 439^th 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 4^th 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 88^th 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 26^th 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 104^th 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 51^st Wing’s 60^th 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 878^th 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 38^th Training Division and then with the 439^th 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 91^st 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 47^th 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 91^st 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 91^st 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 48^th TCS of the 313^th 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, 439^th 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 91^st 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 72^nd 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 439^th 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 91^st 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 439^th 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 439^th 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 439^th 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 440^th 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 439^th 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 316^th 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 50^th 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 91^st 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 91^st 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. 82^nd and 101^st Airborne Divisions, the British 1^st and 6^th 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 439^th 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 82^nd 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 439^th 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 17^th.

    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 91^st 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 8^th 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 82^nd 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 91^st 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 91^st 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 2^nd 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 91^st 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 304^th 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 77^th Troop Carrier Squadron, 435^th 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 442^nd 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