Transcript
Speaker: Hi, everyone. This is AJ Woodham's host of the War Books Podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war -related topics. Today, I am really excited to have on the show Scott McGaugh for his new book, Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin, The Glider Pilots of World War II.
Speaker: Scott is a veteran journalist and the published author of several books, including Midway Magic, which became the basis for the History Channel show, Heroeship, the USS Midway. Scott has also served as the founding marketing director of the USS Midway Museum in San Diego. Scott, how are you doing today?
Speaker: doing very well. I'm in San Diego. How bad can it be? It's gorgeous here. And thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit about this slice of the Greatest Generation. Yeah, absolutely. And to be honest, Scott, I thought that everything that could be written about World War II had been written until I came across your book, which was really enjoyable. So the glider pilots of World War II
Speaker: I'll be honest, I didn't even know there were gliders in World War II. So this is such a fascinating topic for me. I guess kind of first off, why did you write this book?
Speaker: Well, I guess I've settled kind of on a description, AG, a little bit about many of the books I write. I'm fascinated by battlefield heroes who I want to have over for dinner, who I just want to get to know better and become friends with. And that's kind of become the unifying theme of the different
Speaker: stories that I have found whose legacies I think need to be preserved and certainly glider pilots is one of them. Actually, I was like you. I had never heard of the word glider in the same sentence as World War II. But in a previous book, Honor Before Glory, about a Japanese -American unit rescue mission, there was a brief mention of one portion of that unit was not available because they had been flown into France on gliders.
Speaker: And I literally wrote down the word glider and kept working on that book and got it published and so on and came back to the word glider. And lo and behold, I discovered this legacy that's just extraordinary. And to your point, largely unrecognized and even unknown. And hopefully you and I can help correct that today. Yeah, absolutely. Do you find that most people don't don't know about the gliders? I mean, certainly if you didn't. No one does except a very small group.
Speaker: And I don't oversimplify it, but by and large, it's family members of the glider pilots who are aware of grandpa or a great grandpa, if you will, sometimes. And many of them are very passionate about what grandpa or dad did in the war and how he contributed to the war. Some of them are extraordinarily dedicated. Thank God for preserving their legacies, their personal records, their letters, their diaries and so on. But I think
Speaker: For most people, certainly as civilians and even World War II fans and academics in some respects, it is largely unknown. Yeah. Well, let's just talk about gliders real quick. What was the purpose of the glider in World War II? What was the tactical advantage? Which countries were using gliders?
Speaker: Basically, by the time we got ready to invade the European theater of operation, obviously, the Germans had been dug in for several years, so it was going to be amphibious landings by and large, a whole notion of paratroopers being flown in 5, 10, 15 miles behind the front lines in a strategy called vertical envelopment, attacked from the beach and attacked from the rear.
Speaker: get troops to the rear behind the front lines, prevent reinforcements from coming forward, seizing key access routes, roads, causeways, that sort of thing, and really attack the enemy, the Germans, from both sides.
Speaker: Well, paratroopers generally were only going to carry about a day or two worth of supplies. So how were you going to supply them? Fundamentally, it was by parachute and equally important even more so were by gliders. So gliders, to a certain extent, were the reinforcements, the suppliers of the paratrooper's aspect of these invasions at Normandy and crossing the Rhine River and southern France.
Speaker: and so on. So the glider pilots delivered medical personnel, communications personnel, glider infantry, fuel weapons, ordnance, all those things were critical to any given, say, D -Day at Normandy. So vertical envelopment made possible in large part by the glider pilots together with the paratroopers.
Speaker: And so not just America using gliders, it was Britain you write about. Were other countries using gliders? Yes. Britain had a glider program in advance of the states. America was late to the party, which we can get into a little bit later. But yes, they had developed Britain a glider called the Horsa, larger than what the American glider had, made of plywood. The American glider was made of reinforced fabric.
Speaker: over a tubular steel frame. Germany had gliders, had a very robust glider training program throughout the 30s but discovered despite one successful raid early in the war before we got involved.
Speaker: following a situation in Crete was such a disaster that Hitler basically turned away from glider warfare because of the losses on one particular day. So it didn't remain a key element of the German model of warfare while it grew relatively quickly from scratch for the states and for Britain.
Speaker: Well, I suppose the reason that a glider is used is because a lot of these supplies, you can't parachute the supplies in, correct? Yeah, exactly. These gliders weighed about 3 ,700 pounds and carried almost the same amount of weight in terms of cargo.
Speaker: or 13 infantry men, glider infantry. So yes, they were able to, I think, land in some respects more reliably, although that was an issue, both by parachute, pair drops, as well as gliders, weather and the fog of war, some of the variables that would take place that we can get into a little bit.
Speaker: But fundamentally, the idea was to get them down on the landing zone, which was usually very, very close to the drop zones of the paratroopers to get them rearmed, resupplied to carry the fight to the enemy from the rear. Right. And well, you know, with a title like Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin, one immediately assumes that it's not the safest assignment that you can have.
Speaker: Real quick, could you very helpfully include photographs in your book of what a glider looks like? Could you just describe for the audience a typical World War II glider? How big was it? You just did a little bit, but what did it look like? What was it made from? The wingspan was about 88 feet. The length was about 48 feet, basically the size of a B -25 bomber. These were good size aircraft. They weren't small little
Speaker: hobby gliders by any stretch. They were large enough again to carry almost two tons of supplies or payload, 13 men in the back. They were made of fabric. They were squarish in general shape, made of this reinforced fabric around a hollow steel tube frame. It had a reinforced plywood floor of 5 ,000 pieces that was designed in a honeycomb way to
Speaker: to be able to carry a small jeep or withstand the weight of a trailer or the ordinance and so on. What made them remarkable to me, one aspect, is once they released, these brave men flew them down generally in broad circles, tighter, tighter, tighter, like around a drain until they finally got to where they were headed for in a given field. And once they landed, they skidded to a stop generally in farm fields and pastures
Speaker: The front cockpit literally opened upwards. It was hinged. And the cockpit was all plexiglass. These guys were exposed on three sides.
Speaker: through plexiglass to enemy fire. But once they landed, they were then able to lift the cockpit by hinges upwards and unload the cargo out the front of the aircraft. Now, if they were carrying infantry, there was a couple of doors on the sides and they could go out the side. But basically, it was a long rectangular aircraft made of reinforced fabric that would largely, generally slide to a stop in the middle of the enemy territory.
Speaker: without ever having seen a glider function. I can kind of imagine what some of the dangers of an aircraft like this are, but what are some of the things that make this a really dangerous operation? Well, I think the large part is just the fact that they had very little time and almost no evasive capability. Once they were released over the landing zone,
Speaker: They had one job and that was almost to go straight down, if you will, figuratively speaking, to get on the ground. A lot of times I had not seen before until I did some of the research, but when I went to some of these battlefields landing zones to do some research and actually saw the size of
Speaker: the shrapnel that I saw on the battlefield. And imagine what this would have been like to be, you know, ripping. Is that shrapnel that you're holding up right now? Yeah, that's a piece the size of my palm, my hand. When it breaks, it literally is knife. You could cut. You could shave with this just naturally or designed to break. Think about this going at 3000 feet a second through a tent and you're sitting there on a plywood bench hoping to get down and get out alive.
Speaker: Glider pilots wrote about the sound of popcorn popping the enemy small arms fire ripping through these fuselages. So it was an extremely dangerous almost largely defenseless both for the passengers and the glider pilots. Their job was again to get on the ground immediately surrounded. You know they almost never landed.
Speaker: in a pasture that wasn't in enemy territory, at least very nearby. And their job was to unload and take the fight, do what they could accordingly. So it really, when you think about it, and these were all volunteers, AJ. These were young men who volunteered for a mission, a role in the war. And what I think is just amazing to me, they volunteered for an aircraft that had not yet been invented at the time of Pearl Harbor.
Speaker: Literally these aircraft, the specs, the design, their capabilities, how to fly them and so on, literally was being invented as they were being trained for an unknown aircraft. And yet by the end of the war, they had really forged a remarkable legacy in European theater of operations.
Speaker: Yeah. Well, let's talk about some of the pilots, which this is the heart of the story. Yes. First, you know, how many pilots, how many glider pilots were there throughout the whole war? And then what were the types of people who became glider pilots? About at one point, they had 10 ,000 pilots in the training pipeline that ended up being more than what actually saw combat.
Speaker: Personnel records are kind of hard to sort from my research, but as best as I can determine, between three and perhaps 4 ,000 glider pilots saw duty in Europe. About 13 ,000 gliders were manufactured. Most of those were used in training in Europe as well as in Europe. So this was a very small slice, relatively small slice of the American presence, you know, two million
Speaker: men were in Europe at the time of when peace finally came. We're talking about 4 ,000 roughly glider pilots who actually participated were part of that force. So their legacy in only five or six missions and only about 10 months of the war is really remarkable and outsized in many ways for the number of men, the number of volunteers, and how they contributed to some of the major operations in Europe.
Speaker: So what were, was there a typical background for a glider pilot? Were they, you know, talk about the types of people who became glider pilots? Yes. They had a mixed reputation in some ways. If there was one thing that united all of them and everything that I researched for several years is a love of flying. So many of these young men
Speaker: loved flying in high school. Some of them had built their own gliders to be towed behind 1935 Ford cars, that sort of thing. Many of them had wanted to be fighter pilots or bomber pilots. And either those schools, those training pipelines were already filled or maybe they couldn't meet the eyesight qualifications or something along those lines. And when this program came along about a year after the war started, it gave them an opportunity
Speaker: to serve their country in the air, which is almost what all of them wanted to do. Some of them had a reputation for being rapscallions. Sometimes they were men who were just not happy in the duty station they had, and this was an opportunity to get out of Puerto Rico and do something fun and daring and scratch their itch for a love of flying.
Speaker: Well, we can get into this here in a minute, but it was a unique element of this part of the war that these men, once they landed and reported to their glider officer in combat, their primary mission after that was to hitchhike back to base, get back to their base in France or England any way they could. And sometimes they those guys might some guys might take a few extra days, a little sightseeing on their way back to England or whatever.
Speaker: And that did give glider pilots in some quarters a little bit of a mixed reputation from that rapscallions was a word that I heard at one point or read at one point. But, you know, thinking about it for a moment, here's an excerpt, a training officer of glider pilots in the States. He later wrote, there was an increased V .D. rate.
Speaker: ill -advised marriages, poor money management, too many hot checks, and run -ins with civil authorities. And this was in the States. I thought Glider pilots only needed to see lightning, hear thunder, and have two natural teeth. But in reality, they were some of the finest officers I ever served with.
Speaker: that pretty well in a graphic way sums it up in terms of these guys, some of them being quite characters, but they were all dedicated, they were all volunteers for these impossible missions. And that's the most important thing. Yeah, absolutely. And the different people that you profile in the book, you really get a real sense, I think, that, I mean, one, as you just said, some very colorful people,
Speaker: But to be in a plane that's got no engine, and you basically are, if you wanna call it this crash landing every time that you fly it, there's gotta be a lot of heroism there, a lot of selflessness. Talk about some of the,
Speaker: some of the people that you chronicle, maybe just give us a couple of them. Tell us their stories and their backgrounds and what led them to become glider pilots. It's interesting you asked that. There's some common themes.
Speaker: that really I think spread across many of them as much as individual. Many of the young men who volunteered, they weren't yet in the military in 1941, 1942, or they were about to be drafted.
Speaker: and decided to volunteer, and then learned of this brand new program that they were inventing in the States at that time. So a lot of these guys, a year earlier they were in high school, or they were clearing brush at a logging camp in a job that their father had gotten for them, or they were walking behind mules,
Speaker: in Georgia, plowing cotton fields through the clay. Seemed like a lot of them came from Texas for some reason, more often than not. Most of them didn't really have a direction in life, I would think, from what I read. Of course, the war changed everything at that point. So these were young men just simply looking to make a difference. And they had that love of flying, and that took them in a particular direction. Some of them were married.
Speaker: A number of them were married with wives and children back home. But, you know, I'm sure you've seen this phrase many times when it comes to World War II. You know, I've got a job to do. I'm just doing my job. You know, my life will resume once this thing is over was kind of a common thing. And to go a little bit beyond your question, what really struck me about them is the amount of trust, training and teamwork they had in each other.
Speaker: that when you fight in the war, in all my research, oftentimes you're not fighting ideology. You're fighting to survive, to achieve an objective, to take care of your buddy next to you, and you're trusting the buddy next to you to take care of you. Those are the kinds of things that really struck me in reading their chronicles and their life histories and so on. There were, in some ways, average Americans doing extraordinary things in a time that
Speaker: and in a way that you and I can't begin to imagine. The history is so, of course, Pearl Harbor is attacked in December of 1941. The first action that the glider pilots see is the invasion of Sicily, which is about a year later, I think. Two years later, 1943. Yeah.
Speaker: the buildup for the glider pilot program, how were they manufactured the gliders? How did this idea even get into the minds of the US Air Force leadership? Yes, you're referring to General Hap Arnold.
Speaker: Yes, you had five heart attacks I learned from your book. Yes, yeah, he was not a well man. He died not too many years after World War Two. Here in California, he had had heart trouble. It was his idea his concept. I'm sure others contributed to it. Again, this whole notion of vertical development and how are we going to
Speaker: breach Europe at that point a year or two later. It was a very rushed program. He ordered the design in early 1942. Simplistically, it took about a year to settle on a final design and then quickly recruit manufacturers. None of them had ever built a glider because a glider never had existed before.
Speaker: The quality of the manufacturing as a result was horrific in the early days. Holy unqualified manufacturers and subcontractors were building parts. Literally wings fell off in flight. One time an instructor was leaning against the wing on the ground talking to his students and it fell off. I can't imagine what kind of confidence that instilled or destroyed amongst these students.
Speaker: some of the subcontractors, Steinway Pianos, Heinz Ketchup Company, a casket manufacturer. I can imagine what that must have, I hope the students didn't know that, that a casket manufacturer was making some of the key couplings from that standpoint.
Speaker: So these guys were literally, they were inventing the training program as they went. They were training for an aircraft that didn't exist. So how do you train for that? Well, they had to use sailplanes in the beginning until some of these gliders finally came off the assembly lines. Well, sailplanes are all designed to do one thing, stay up in the air. And they were being trained to do just the opposite, get on the ground as quickly as possible.
Speaker: It seems like a bass -ackwards way to train for war, and yet that's all they had available. So on one hand, they're struggling to build reliable aircraft that would do the job. At the same time, they were changing the training program and the entrance requirements because at one point they were too strict and they weren't getting enough volunteers. Then they became too loose and they had too many volunteers and no gliders. So it was really, I don't want to call it a haphazard, but
Speaker: They were test pilots in some ways, tactically and operationally and training wise, literally being revised and updated from one mission to the next, beginning with their training in 1942, leading up to the first use of American gliders in Sicily in July of 43. And so what is the training in America? How does the training take place?
Speaker: Well, the training began really got at sea legs, the mixed metaphors. Once gliders were available to be used and the C -47s were available, some enough C -47s were available, there were temporary training facilities all over the country from Minnesota to the California desert, ultimately consolidated to a large extent in Lubbock, Texas.
Speaker: which today that city is very proud of its legacy and its contribution with a glider, the only glider pilot, glider museum in the country. They get a lot of credit for this book even existing. So they were training everything, everything from how to fly a glider, how to tow, how to be towed by a glider. There's a lot of technique involved. It's not just getting in and sitting there by any stretch. They're actually flying the gliders behind these aircraft. They're being towed
Speaker: by a one -inch nylon rope, about a football field behind the C -47. The C -47 pilots, they had to be trained. No one had towed gliders before. These C -47s were basically commercial DC -3s modified. So everyone was learning on the job, literally from one mission, from one training session to the next.
Speaker: how to build them, how to equip them, how to get up off the ground from a takeoff standpoint, release, how to deal with the weather, getting it down onto the ground, hopefully without tearing them up too much.
Speaker: There was an idea that these would be large could largely be reusable in combat It turned out that wasn't the case and obviously most of the training in the States They were landing back on runways for reuse and so on but perhaps the thing AJ that strikes me the most was these guys were training in very very unsafe aircraft prototypes That were being rushed through production as best they could
Speaker: The contractors that the government hired were just extraordinary when looking back. One outfit that got a contract to build these gliders built a prototype in a dry cleaning shop in Florida that didn't work well. It didn't end well. Another one tried to build them under a circus tent until a hurricane came along and blew them all away. There was really only one
Speaker: a primary manufacturer that really was able to deliver quality gliders within budget. And that was Ford Motor Company, not too surprising. They know how to build on assembly lines and they converted a station wagon plant into a glider plant and ultimately produced more of these gliders than any other contractor. But it was a crazy time in the States trying to invent a new concept of aviation while the war raged.
Speaker: Well, let's talk about when, let's talk about that first invasion into Sicily. Talk about, I guess first it should be noted too. I don't know why, but in my mind, when I first started reading the book, when I thought about a glider, you know, gliders going to action, I thought maybe like three or four that are getting towed in, but it should be noted there's hundreds of these gliders that are being towed in. Talk about Sicily, talk about how these gliders
Speaker: how this invasion went, and there were some complications. Talk about some of the complications for that first time. This was the maiden flight, the maiden use of gliders in July of 1943.
Speaker: Everything that could go wrong went wrong. It was primarily a British invasion from the standpoint of the aerial side. And yet the Brits did not have enough gliders and tow pilots. They didn't have enough time to train. So relatively the last minute was only a few months before the invasion.
Speaker: volunteer American glider pilots arrived with a C -47 cruise. They did not have any combat experience. There was so little time they weren't able to rehearse properly. At the last minute Field Marshal General at that time, Montgomery changed it to a night mission. So literally this relatively small group of pilots to support the invasion at Sicily had to fly through the night, through a storm across the Mediterranean from Africa to Sicily.
Speaker: over the Allied fleet that had miscommunications and became firing on its own gliders as they passed overhead. It was a disaster by every stretch of the imagination. Far too many of them were released too far from shore with the enemy fire up ahead, guaranteeing them they would not make it to shore. They landed in the water.
Speaker: By the next morning, something like half a dozen gliders of the original group were able to make land. All the others were in the ocean. 600 men were lost by sunrise, half by drowning. It was a disaster by every standard to the point that General Eisenhower questioned whether large scale airborne operations were even feasible. Just too many variables, two minutes resources involved.
Speaker: But fortunately, in a sense, that's 1943, Normandy was 10 months away, 11 months away, and they had some obvious time to learn their lessons, conduct the post -mortems figuratively and literally. And the next real mission became Normandy, which was a significant success. One of the things I found that was very interesting was the tension between the gliders and the airplanes that were towing them.
Speaker: because the airplanes that were towing them were the ones that could kind of call the shots. And I think they were like, well, we're going to let these gliders go early because we got to turn around and the glider pilots had no choice because of course they don't have an engine. And there's a part in your story where the tow aircraft decides that they're just going to start dropping the gliders and the gliders don't even make it to their landing zone. They have to crash land in the ocean.
Speaker: Yes, that was heartbreaking to research that and see the reality of that. And the glider pilots had the option to release as well. And they did in subsequent missions when necessary and when circumstances dictated. But yes, I think the key point you're making and certainly I discovered in the book is these glider pilots
Speaker: put their lives and those of their passengers in the hands of these tow pilots and who were equally as green as the glider pilots were early in the war. Some of the glider pilots from the Sicily invasion harbored grudges against the C -47 pilots for years after the war that, my word, they chickened out and released us way too early when they saw enemy fire for the first time in their lives.
Speaker: It might be some merit to that. Who am I to judge by any stretch of the imagination? So, yes, again, getting back to trust training and teamwork. The other thing I think, AJ, that has struck me about this kind of a story is these are all strangers to a large extent. Yes, the glider pilots trained together and that sort of thing, but they weren't best friends with the C -47 pilots assigned to their glider on a given mission.
Speaker: In some cases, Sicily was one. The glider pilots didn't know who their co -pilot was going to be until they walked up to the glider half an hour before departure, before takeoff. So a lot of times people don't realize how much of war is fought between and among strangers in many ways beyond the guys that you trained with, of course, and from that perspective. And that certainly was evident in the Sicily mission.
Speaker: What were some of the lessons learned after this initial, it wasn't a failed mission, but after this very complicated mission? Command and control immediately comes to mind. Communication, because these guys were not flying in a vacuum by any stretch, not just the enemy, but flying over allied Normandy, flying over the invading allied fleets, making sure that
Speaker: approach corridors, allied fire was suspended if they knew the gliders were coming through along with the paratroopers. Many of the lessons though, every mission had, it seems to me, came away with different lessons because this was being invented to a large extent from one mission to the next. So I think from a Sicily standpoint,
Speaker: There would be a little bit more, but night missions were generally considered too dangerous, too many variables.
Speaker: it became clear that more training and ideally at least one full -scale rehearsal before the mission would be critical, especially the larger ones that were to follow. I think the takeaways from Sicily were simply that there are so many variables involved. It's so complex. There are so many resources and so many different units involved that more preparation, more training, more command, more communication and control is far,
Speaker: was greatly a higher, needed to be a higher priority than that first one demonstrated. And in some of the research that you did in some of the interviews from the pilots that you discuss, how did they feel about this program after this very kind of botched mission? Were they like,
Speaker: We're not doing this again because this is suicide. Was there a lot of pushback? What was the feelings of some of these pilots after Sicily? That's an interesting question. I didn't see much at all after the Sicily disaster that, oh my God, what the hell are we doing here? I don't want to do this. That was still at a time when they were still really ramping up training and recruiting and that sort of thing back home.
Speaker: And also remember, a lot of this detail isn't necessarily in the next day's newspaper back in the States. Some of the reports were, I remember now, some of the articles in Stars and Stripes and so on, following the Sicily mission for quite a while, bore very little resemblance to what really took place. The media was very much controlled. There weren't embedded reporters
Speaker: like we have today and that sort of thing, other than stars and stripes, and they were of a different breed than reporters today. So I don't know that there was a whole lot of pushback or, oh my God, what have we gotten into in real time? Because I'm not sure the glider pilots were that up to speed on what had happened real time.
Speaker: Well, let's talk about in 1944, let's talk about the invasion of Normandy because this is where the glider pilots, you know, there's some adjustments that are made after Sicily. There's more training that takes place. We talk about the gliders in Normandy and what their role was.
Speaker: Yeah, this was the first real mission, real mission, if you will, from a glider standpoint. And their mission was what I was talking about a little bit earlier. Get six to eight miles inland, get to your landing zone, get down and fundamentally resupply the paratroopers and join in combat as necessary. But their primary mission was to deliver. The challenges
Speaker: a little bit different this time because now we're talking about hundreds of gliders coming in from England. That's a long flight across the English Channel. The choreography was always a challenge starting with Normandy. Oftentimes they would have the flights of gliders too close together and by the time they got over the landing zone they were on top of one another.
Speaker: And that created a lot of chaos in Normandy and in subsequent missions. When the first 50 C -47s were slowed down a little bit, here comes the next 50 right behind them. Well, what do they do? They generally will slow down and go a bit higher. So you start stacking up. And one of the things that really struck me, AJ, is, okay, all this training, we're gonna release you at 600 feet or thereabouts. Many, many glider pilots later wrote about
Speaker: being released at 2 ,000 feet or even higher. Now you're up in the air for several minutes under enemy fire after flying across enemy territory. And of course, they want to get down as quickly as possible. So their role was to support the troops coming ashore.
Speaker: where they, I think it was 101st, if I recall correctly, where the glider pilots provided support. The troops coming ashore had a far, excuse me, less casualty rate than those troops coming ashore that did not have airborne support. So it proved to be effective.
Speaker: But both paratroopers and gliders, a big lesson there was you don't get down in your landing zone that they have on the books when you first start. Many of them were spread out far more than what the generals and the fighting troops officers would have preferred or needed. That would be a challenge frequently throughout the rest of the war. But it was a success. Obviously Normandy succeeded and the glider pilots played a key role in that.
Speaker: Yeah, and also too, so a lot of the gliders, so on D -Day, obviously the paratroopers are, they're dropping in. The gliders aren't, are there a lot of gliders on D -Day? It was my impression that a lot of them came after D -Day.
Speaker: There were six waves of gliders. I think we've got two waves of 50 at sunrise or even a little bit before sunrise. Another two waves later in the evening and two more the next day. So this was a two -day mission of 500 gliders, 1 ,000 glider pilots dwarfed what had taken place at Sicily. So this was the first major use of gliders over a two -day period.
Speaker: And so in what ways did the Glider program, how is it successful now? How had things improved and what were the contributions that these pilots made? They demonstrated that it was now feasible to deliver troops and supplies relatively reliably.
Speaker: not a ground zero, but certainly for the paratroopers and the advancing troops. They were able to land within their landing zone or close to it. And a lot of people don't realize when you talk about a landing zone, it's actually a group of maybe
Speaker: 200 fields all in a one or two mile radius kind of a thing. You have to pick a spot to get down, but your assigned area would be considered the landing zone. So it demonstrated the viability of supply from the rear or in the rear at the time of invasion, not as quickly and as it's concentratedly, if there's such a word, as war planners would have liked.
Speaker: They learned other lessons. The field intelligence for the airborne was generally considered very poor after the fact. The photographs that were taken, the recon photographs were taken at midday in advance of the invasion. Midday means that you didn't show the shadows of the hedgerows that everyone thought were hedges.
Speaker: turned out to be much bigger, 50 -foot trees, making getting down inside a small farm field even more difficult. Some of the communications in terms of some glider pilots felt that they were misled as to the risk of what they were about to embark upon in hopes of building up their morale. Many of them said after the fact, just tell us what's going to happen and we'll deal with it.
Speaker: some of the recon intelligence was considered very, very faulty or inadequate. And that would be something that would have to be addressed in future missions. Yeah. And you include also too, some journal entries from some of these pilots who felt that it was very chaotic. And you talk about how like, you know, the commanders don't, the pilots felt like the commanders didn't understand the on the ground situation and that, you know, five minutes on the ground could teach them more than, you know, a year's worth of training.
Speaker: Well, what were some of these feelings that the pilot did? Yeah. That's a great question. It was a real, not a mixed bag, but
Speaker: This was their first, for almost all these men, this was their first time. This was their first mission for a tactic that had never been flown before. So everything was foreign. How difficult it was that you're not going to be released at 600 feet where you'd been training for two years. You're going to be released at 2 ,000 feet. And you had not been shot at with this shrapnel shredding your co -pilot and that sort of thing as you're trying to get down.
Speaker: suddenly learning that you've got to watch out for the other gliders to make sure there aren't mid -air collisions because three gliders are heading for the same small farm field. Obviously, once they got on the ground, they had not experienced live fire from the enemy surrounding them or having to deal with wounded glider infantry
Speaker: once they were on the ground. Many of the passages that you read in the book talk about what it was like after they landed in terms of finding a ditch alongside the farm field and dragging your buddy to it. The fact that these aircraft were flammable. You had to be careful about getting away quickly because the right kind of phosphorus rounds, these aircraft would burn up and potentially explode.
Speaker: about what their cargo was, what their payload was. All these things happened real time that really I'm not sure you could possibly train for between the Texas prairie and Normandy's farm fields. What was the casualty rate for these pilots? Not as bad as I would have thought at Normandy. The casualty rate was about 16%.
Speaker: As you may know, these numbers statistics can be wildly variable when you read the records, you know what a troop carrier might narrative after a mission, I might say, could be significantly different than what the statistics are a couple years later, but but fundamentally.
Speaker: Glider pilots suffered about a 16 % casualty by comparison, paratroopers closer to 40 % in what they endured side by side in a way kind of thing. So I think there are two points to be made. Given what the role of the gliders and their mission was, I'm surprised they didn't have a higher casualty rate because they were so exposed literally and figuratively
Speaker: And the other thing is, you know, we talked about the flying coffin, which in many ways you could make that argument. These aircraft actually were remarkably sturdy for something that had just been invented 18 months earlier. It was minimal test flights, if you will. They came in hot and heavy.
Speaker: and they were able to get them down. Yes, there was damage, and sometimes they couldn't open the cockpit to get everybody or everything out, as they would hope they could do from a training standpoint. But these were remarkably sturdy aircraft, even though they couldn't be used a second time, and were able to deliver the pilots, the infantry, and the supplies reliably once they got through the horrors up in the sky.
Speaker: Well, and were some of the casualties, was it mostly getting shot down or was it mostly just the dangers of trying to land these things? That's a great question. Honestly, I don't know. It'd be both. I would guess from everything that I've written,
Speaker: I'm not sure. There are so many reports of glider pilots being shot and killed on the ground. Once they got free or literally they slide up in their glider up to face -to -face to a German machine gun nest and they never got out of there. I guess it's hard to know if you're shot in the air or if you crash land or something. Yeah. And yet there were many who were also shot down. The C -47s were shot down.
Speaker: reports of gliders being hit and crashing, but I honestly don't know the split. I'd almost guess half and half just from everything I've read, but that's off the top of my head. Would you say that the gliders, would you say that this was a successful
Speaker: mission for them with Normandy? Yeah, absolutely. There were still things to be learned. They couldn't deliver quite as precisely on the ground as at a spot in the ground, as they would like. A few things work out that way in war, but it absolutely validated the use of airborne paratroopers and certainly gliders. And they played in both and certainly gliders played an increasing role
Speaker: a little bit later in Southern France and in Market Garden and throughout the war. Yeah. We'll talk about the rest of the glider pilot involvement in Europe. What are some of the bigger battles around? Sure.
Speaker: Basically, they forged an amazing legacy of success and contribution to victory in only 10 months starting with Normandy And that that surprised me that how quickly, you know from 44, you know, the war was over in 45. So you started doing the math after chronicling their contributions with Operation Dragoon only two months later in 44 the invasion in southern France that create the giant pincer movement if you will from the north and south
Speaker: Again, a long haul across the Mediterranean, but increasingly more reliably successful with things still to be learned. That's August of 44, literally only a few weeks later, Market Garden, Operation Market Garden in Holland. These are getting larger and larger. Now you're talking north of 1 ,000 gliders and pilots.
Speaker: That's so incredible. How do a thousand gliders, how do they land? It just blows my mind. Exactly. A lot of the reports from the glider pilots that you read, I don't want to say it's more so, but a big share of what they recount is the chaos in the sky.
Speaker: that we're laid out over target because the other guys in front of us or whatever the case might be, or we were stacked up and now I'm at 2 ,500 feet and my C -47 guy releases me. And now I've got a mile and a half, half a mile to get down through enemy fire.
Speaker: Avoiding midair collisions. There's a field over there that's got vegetation in it and grape fields. But the only thing I have left, I can't stay up. I have to get down. I'm dropping, literally.
Speaker: So it's remarkable to think about for all the training and planning when you're being towed for three or four hours, hundreds if not thousands of miles, it's not very, you can't stay choreographed by the time you get across enemy territory and land in enemy territory. From something like 23 bases, market garden, just the planning ahead of time.
Speaker: It has to be a house of cards. And I think too, and just, you know, kind of thinking about logistics also, you know, you're, so you're a glider pilot and this, I think this is also just crazy. You're a glider pilot and you're, you're, you're literally crash landing this glider and in this very dangerous circumstance. Um, there's tons of other gliders. Your parts probably pounding and you're probably breaking a sweat and then you get on the ground and you're like, Oh, thank God. I just survived.
Speaker: And then you just walk back and you're like, well, I guess I gotta do this again. How often did these pilots just keep landing like this? With the five major missions, there were a few pilots that I think a couple did them all. I saw several who ultimately flew all the four major missions. Some flew only one, they're a squad.
Speaker: troop carrier group wasn't assigned again for any number of reasons. I would say the vast majority flew two, maybe three of the major missions typically out of England. But you're right. A lot of what they write about and what they shared with their families and in their diaries was certainly the horror of the fighting on the ground.
Speaker: And then once things settled to some extent, they might have assignments of guarding prisoners or support elements, some combat training, of course, because they were infantry to a certain extent. When they landed there, they didn't grab a gun and go to join everybody at the front, though, correct?
Speaker: Well, they're behind the front. They're in enemy territory. They're surrounded. They're taking enemy fire, literally, as they're climbing, generally speaking, climbing out of their cockpits. And they've got weapons with them, small arms, and they're returning fire. Oftentimes, many, many times, they're returning fire just to get from the glider to cover.
Speaker: to a row of bushes or trees or whatever. They would then report to a designated glider pilot officer and they might fight for a day or two, depending on the circumstances. Some of them remained on the battlefield for several weeks before they finally were able to get
Speaker: back to the channel or whatever it might be and get back to their bases. So there was more of a combat element, I think, than perhaps the war planners initially anticipated. I can't prove that. But yeah, these guys engaged in combat just in the course of landing.
Speaker: much less for a day or two. Market Garden, they were put on the front lines. Three hundred of them were drafted, ordered to take a post for two nights, two days on the front line because of tactical situations on the ground at that time. So they were more involved with combat than perhaps they were initially trained to be or anticipated to be. But again, that's the reality of war when you're in enemy territory.
Speaker: Well, let's wrap up, I guess, in Europe, because the war ends quickly. But the story of the glider pilot program doesn't end in Europe, because then, of course, we're fighting Japan. How does the transition from Europe to Japan work for our glider pilots?
Speaker: Well, near the end of Europe, the basics rudiments were being put together for training for the use of gliders in Japan. And the fundamental challenge was, based on what we've learned about landing in 200 -acre farm fields in Europe, how do we land in rice paddies?
Speaker: in Japan. A whole different concept in terms of how do you land and these are small rice paddies. How do we literally blow up the glider because we can't drag it away. There's not enough room for the next glider to come in and land on these tiny little rice paddies. So that training was taking place
Speaker: in anticipation of the invasion of Japan. And of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed all that. So there were pilots that had already received orders to begin training for the Pacific, the invasion of Japan. Obviously that didn't take place.
Speaker: and peace came to the world in 1945. From there, gliders were already considered in many ways obsolete. While they contributed and the pilots so much to victory in Europe, clearly the resources involved, some of the challenges of reliably getting on the ground and so on were significant. Also, a new technology had come along late in World War II, something called the helicopter.
Speaker: which wasn't as dependent on weather and another aircraft and all those kinds of things. Payloads were minuscule at that time, but nonetheless, certainly it was validated in Korea and beyond. So within a year or two - Was the glider ever used again after World War II? Just in some commercial attempts in post -war, training some exercises up in Canada, supplying
Speaker: some troops that were on winter long training exercises. But fundamentally, no. They didn't prove to be viable from a commercial aircraft standpoint, although some attempts were made. The military technology had moved on from the idea of towing gliders into enemy territory. So they were declared obsolete fairly quickly. Surplus gliders were sold. These were huge. They took five huge crates made of grade A lumber.
Speaker: to ship them to Europe. They were sold as surplus, $75. That was 1945 dollars, but $75 and you could be the owner of a World War II glider. The reality is most people were buying the gliders for the lumber of the shipping crates. Something like 10 ,000 board feet of lumber to get a glider from the manufacturing plant from Ford.
Speaker: to England and that's enough to build a family room, a small addition, a deck, a barn, maybe all of the above. Their parts were scavenged in Europe during the war and afterwards their metal frames were used for cattle feed bins and their wheels were used for farm carts and that sort of thing. So basically they were scavenged and sold to the scrapyard, if you will, put on the scrap heap post -war
Speaker: Very few, if any, that I can recall were reserved for future museums, unfortunately. But again, fortunately, we do have the Silent Wings Museum in Lubbock, Texas, the National Glider World War II Glider Pilots Committee. They've done a remarkable job of collecting these glider pilots' personal legacy recollections and documents and so on. So we do have their legacy. We do have their archives in Texas.
Speaker: Why do you think the story of glider pilots in World War II has largely been forgotten? Well, I think there are a couple things. One, when I read some of their accounts after the war, they felt like they were neglected and overlooked by the military. Were they part of the Army or were they part of the Air Corps?
Speaker: I remember one man writing that we thought we'd get our awards and recognition from the Air Corps. The Air Corps thought, well, we're really part of the Army. And so we were just kind of fell between the cracks, if you will. You know, movies and books have been written obviously about the paratroopers and that part of the airborne legacy and deservedly so.
Speaker: But it just hasn't been some, and they disappeared as quickly as they appeared during the war. I mean, they were gone within, they didn't fly in the States or whatever. And I think the other part is it was a relatively small group of American heroes, in my view, four or 5 ,000 who saw combat in glider missions rather. And they, like most of the greatest generation, they came home and,
Speaker: almost as quietly as they entered enemy territory, reentered private life and didn't share it.
Speaker: My dad was in the army and never said a word about World War II. That was something my mom told us, we don't talk about at the table. Okay. And understandably, with all due respect, I think these men just went about their business. They went on to become map makers and bankers and farmers. And just like everyone else from the greatest generation. And it was such a small slice of their legacy. It's just, unfortunately, to some extent, been overlooked. Well, what are you hoping that readers take away from your book?
Speaker: Wow. The thing, AJ, the thing I always, almost all these World War II books that I've written is how to have faith in every generation that what our nation calls
Speaker: young men and now women will step up and bear the burden, carry the burden for us. I've been involved with the USS Midway Museum for many, many years. And I remember one time a World War II veteran saying, after a man had thanked him for his service and greatest generation and so on, he turned to me and said, you know, I'm tired of hearing that. I said, John, why? He's just thinking, I know he meant well.
Speaker: But he said, you know, we weren't the greatest generation. Every time our nation has called on a generation to step up in uniform, we've done it. Politics notwithstanding and that sort of thing. And I think that's something that
Speaker: always inspires me when I come across some of these unsung heroes and hopefully shine the light on them of appreciation and just recognition that, you know, here's one more example of young men, young fathers, sons and husbands who are willing to put their lives on hold and risk their lives for an aircraft not yet invented. I find that just so inspirational. And it's really, I think, part of a continuum to the 1 % of Americans who serve our country in uniform today.
Speaker: You know, one of the things when we think about recognition, the general public doesn't know much about these heroes, in my view. But in some ways, the military knew then just how remarkable these heroes were and their contributions. They earned an air medal, the equivalent of a Bronze Star, every time they flew a combat mission. By contrast, bomber pilots required five missions before they would earn
Speaker: and deservedly so, an air medal. Fighter pilots, 10 missions. So that begins to give you a sense of the dangers that these glider pilots faced from the standpoint of they were receiving a medal for bravery every single time they took off and headed for the battlefield.
Speaker: Oh, wonderful. Well, Scott, we'll end on that high note. Thank you so much for coming on my show today. This has been such an incredible conversation. If folks want to find you or follow you, are you on social media? How can people follow you? I have a website, www .scottmagaw .com. A couple of different Facebook pages, but Scott Maga Author is the one where I really focus on
Speaker: this story, the Brotherhood story and things that are not in the book. There's just too many things to get in. And some of my other books and the ones that are planned. So scottmcgaw .com and Scott Mcgaw author on Facebook. Wonderful. Well, Scott Mcgaw, Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin, the glider pilots of World War II. Go buy a coffee. Go check it out from your library. It's a story worth reading. And Scott, thank you so much for your time today. My pleasure. Thank you, AJ.
