Four Hours of Fury

by James M. Fenelon

  • • •

  In an embarrassingly belated effort, Brereton advised the War Department on Tuesday, March 6, that the “present production of gliders is insufficient to meet the operational requirement” and requested “all gliders be shipped immediately to this theater on highest priority as soon as they are manufactured.” Given the lead time necessary to get a glider from the assembly line to the flight line, it was unclear in which operation Brereton hoped to use these gliders.

  Gliders couldn’t be flown over the Atlantic like powered aircraft. They had to be delivered via cargo ship, requiring each CG-4A to be disassembled and boxed into five large crates.

  At this stage the gliders battled for priority over all of the other vital materiel necessary to wage war: soldiers, food, gasoline, artillery, tanks, jeeps, half-tracks, trucks, weapons, medical supplies, a cornucopia of ammunition, and pallets of bottled beer. Logisticians, with the greed of misers, loaded supplies into every available square foot of cargo space and were often reluctant to surrender the space to the massive wooden crates taking up over 6,000 cubic feet for a single glider.

  Once the gliders were unloaded in Europe, the exacting process of attaching the wings and the tail section, securing the cockpit, running control cables, installing tie rod cables, and tightening horizontal tension bars took a well-trained team almost 250 man hours to reassemble a single CG-4A. Even presuming east coast harbors had stacks of crated gliders awaiting a berth, it would still take several weeks for any to arrive—far too late for either VARSITY or CHOKER II.

  A few days after his plea for more gliders, Brereton ordered troop carrier units to curtail training flights to avoid damaging any of the remaining gliders.

  Through the combined efforts of construction and recovery, Troop Carrier Command confirmed in mid-March that their inventory contained the 906 CG-4As for VARSITY as well as the 926 necessary for CHOKER II, with the caveat that the two operations would again essentially drain their entire supply.

  • • •

  Watching all the activity from the sidelines were the glider pilots themselves. From their tents they could see the sequestered airborne troops preparing behind barbed wire fences and witness the CG-4As being maneuvered onto hardstands around the runway. While they too had been restricted to base and recognized the activity of an imminent mission, they’d been neither briefed nor given any official details.

  As they debated what lay ahead, the demands of supporting both VARSITY and CHOKER II continued to strain Airborne Army’s resources, this time in the form of personnel. They finally had enough gliders; now they just needed to find pilots to fly them. Operational flights required gliders to be manned by both a pilot and a copilot, the standard operating procedure stating that “only in emergencies will there be but one rated pilot in the glider.”

  With these parameters as a barometer, it can be said American glider missions had been operating in a state of emergency since their debut in the November 1943 invasion of Sicily, when the CG-4As were launched with a single pilot in the cockpit. The shortage occurred again in June 1944, during the invasion of France. About that mission, the 82nd Airborne’s commander later noted, “Each co-pilot’s seat was occupied by an airborne trooper. Incredible as it may seem, these men sitting in the co-pilot’s seat had been given no training either in flying or landing the glider, and some of them found themselves with a wounded pilot and a fully loaded glider on their hands as they came hurtling in through flak-filled space.” Preferential selection of a copilot in these cases went to one of those troopers in the cargo area who answered positively to the pilot’s question of “Have any of you ever driven a bus or a tractor? . . . or a car?”

  By MARKET GARDEN in September 1944 the situation had only improved because planners waived the copilot requirement altogether. The Air Force had enough pilots to put two in each cockpit, but doing so would have drained their reserve pool, and thus only a fraction of gliders had copilots. After the Holland operation, the Air Force addressed the perennial shortage by extending the training of stateside C-47 pilots by two weeks to get them dual-rated prior to overseas duty. The transport pilots complained bitterly about being “forced” to fly the CG-4As, but after a handful of flights they were officially rated as glider pilots.

  A few weeks prior to VARSITY, Brereton and the Air Force commanders solved their shortage of glider pilots by seeking 300 volunteers from the ranks of troop carrier pilots.

  Twenty-year-old Lieutenant Zane Winters, a C-47 pilot, recalled how he volunteered to copilot a glider in VARSITY. A few days before the mission, the squadron commander “called us out, and when we were all lined up, he said, ‘will all power pilots who are qualified glider pilots take one step forward.’ When we had taken one step forward, he thanked us for volunteering to go on the glider mission coming up.”

  • • •

  Fundamental to the glider pilots’ experience in World War II was that no one knew what to do with them. The Air Force treated them as second-class aviators, and once on the ground, where they served as poorly organized quasi-infantry, they were forced to rely on their wits and the charity of airborne troops to stay alive. Their commanders ignored them, and the airborne units only paid them attention after they became an operational burden.

  Many pilots took advantage of the poor coordination. During MARKET GARDEN, hundreds of disorderly pilots struck out on their own, reportedly leaving the battlefield to seek the pleasures of Brussels. Glider pilot Don Pinzel recalled, “They got into Brussels, most of them, and that was it. They never reported out to the airfield to be flown back to England.” Some of the pilots, wanting to experience combat, went so far as to attach themselves to airborne units for a few days of fighting.

  General Jim Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, sent Troop Carrier Command a scathing critique following MARKET GARDEN, describing the glider pilots as more of a “liability” to his division than an asset.

  Gavin caveated his evaluation by stating that he did “not believe there is anyone in the combat area more eager and anxious to do the correct thing and yet so completely, individually and collectively, incapable of doing it, than glider pilots.” But Gavin made it clear, they were mostly “in the way” and “aimlessly wandering about.”

  The troop carrier units contributed to the problem by neglecting to properly equip their glider pilots. Only half received maps and those were 1:100,000 scale, upon which one centimeter equaled one kilometer on the ground—virtually useless as a navigational aid once on the battlefield. None of the pilots were issued compasses. The pre-mission briefings, deemed as “unsuitable,” failed to orient the pilots as to where and when to assemble.

  Without proper equipment or a fundamental understanding of the evacuation plan, it’s unsurprising that the pilots became an “amorphous mass, almost without organization.”

  • • •

  While Army doctrine dictated that “all glider pilots should be given intensive combat training consisting of basic infantry drill, infantry tactics, and the use of infantry weapons,” after-action reports described their training as “short and relatively sketchy.” Squad-level drills, where team building and organizational discipline take place, had been largely ignored.

  To function effectively, teams must have opportunities to build trust and familiarity; the lack of a consistent organizational structure in the troop carrier units—caused by constantly transferring glider pilots from squadrons not scheduled to fly glider missions to those that were—negatively impacted morale and training, which in turn handicapped the glider pilots’ performance on the ground. As one postwar report noted, better organization would have allowed the pilots to follow “a coherent and continuous training program of their own working with . . . slack periods [spent] on realistic infantry practice instead of stagnations during the long periods when the squadrons they were assigned to were preoccupied with non-glider activities.”

  Flight Officer Bill Knickerbocker candidly recalled, “We were
bitter about the up-rootings and were generally treated as the enemy by our new outfits, but we felt the same about them so it worked out evenly.”

  Changes had to be made for VARSITY. In the aftermath of the criticism, troop carrier units agreed to issue glider pilots the necessary infantry equipment that had been lacking in previous missions: compasses, maps, canteens, and entrenching tools to dig foxholes.

  Airborne Army directed the 17th Airborne to provide additional infantry training for the pilots to improve their level of readiness for ground operations. The training taught the pilots vital battlefield skills and served to boost the airborne commanders’ confidence that the pilots would be better prepared to carry out their ground assignments. In early March, before moving into their marshaling camps, the glider riders of the 194th jammed into two weeks 200 hours of training for their future chauffeurs.

  The curriculum included 75 hours of weapons training with rifles, carbines, submachine guns, automatic rifles, light machine guns, bazookas, grenades, and mortars; 14 hours on the subject of “technique of rifle fire, landscape and field firing”; 18 hours on scouting and patrolling; and a vital 20 hours on “tactics, rifle platoon in defense,” with the remainder of the training including map reading, demolitions, hasty field fortifications, employment of land mines, first aid, personal field sanitation, an assembly exercise, and overviews on military government, the organization of an airborne division, and the lawful rules of land warfare.

  A vocal minority of the pilots complained about the intensified training—which required fourteen-hour working days—protesting that if they were withdrawn rapidly enough there’d be no need for the extra training. The majority, however, welcomed the renewed focus on their welfare and realized—some from previous experience—that evacuation out of the combat zone had the potential of varying wildly from a few hours to a few days.

  * * *

  While air and ground crews remained ignorant of VARSITY’s details, squadron commanders and key personnel had already been briefed. Their knowledge, and the need to ready the aircraft for the complex choreography required to get them off the ground in an organized manner, sent activity at the airfields into a fevered crescendo.

  Enterprising ground crews headed to an Army ordnance depot outside of Paris to scavenge armor plating from destroyed tanks. They installed the chunks of metal under the seats of their pilots and copilots; at a minimum it provided psychological comfort and reinforced the “flak resistant” seat pads.

  To carry the paratroopers’ external equipment—bundles of weapons, additional supplies, and howitzers—racks had to be bolted into place on the bellies of the C-47s and C-46s. The para-racks increased drag and fuel consumption but boosted the amount of equipment dropped in the first wave of the assault. The ground crews installed the racks, and the paratroopers would later rig them with the supply bundles.

  The C-46s, however, arrived without the Air Force having settled on a safe means to drop external loads. The aircraft was so new that experiments on how to best secure and drop external bundles were still under way in the States. The planes did have the shackles necessary to attach bundles to the belly; missing was a way to protect the bundles from being torn off by the slipstream during flight. Stateside testing had yet to provide a solution.

  Flight engineers and ground crews in Europe improvised an answer, cannibalizing the external fuel tanks of P-51 Mustangs. The nose cone of the tanks proved rugged enough to effectively shelter the bundles in flight. In the days before launch, crews procured enough tanks to construct 1,350 hoods, more than enough for VARSITY.

  Several crates of self-sealing gas tanks arrived late, causing rushed installations in as many C-47s as possible. The tanks were designed with an internal rubber bladder, which prevented leaking fuel from escaping when punctured by flak. The special tanks significantly reduced fire hazards, but shortages meant many would fly without. None of the newer C-46s had self-sealing tanks, which later proved to be calamitous.

  The CG-4A gliders also required last-minute upgrades. Specialized devices such as deceleration parachutes needed to be installed. Troop Carrier Command had requested 3,000 from the States on a high-priority basis, but only received a little over 300 before D-Day. Fortunately, when these were combined with the on-hand stock, there was enough to ensure the majority of gliders would be equipped with the chutes.

  Another important attachment was a contraption known as a “Griswold nose,” which bolted to the front of the cockpit. The reinforced steel cage resembled a five-point spiderweb and provided protection to the pilots from trees and fence posts. However, a shortage of them, and the thirty-two man-hours required for installation, meant only a handful of VARSITY gliders would go in with this life-saving amenity.

  In far better supply were “Corey Skids.” When anchored under the cockpit, these four-foot-long, one-foot-wide wooden skis served to deflect logs or other objects that could damage the glider’s nose or the pilots’ legs. They offered scant protection when compared to the Griswold nose, but were better than nothing.

  After retrofitting the gliders, ground crews manhandled them into position on the airstrips. They needed to be maneuvered into their staggered formation for takeoff and made accessible to the infantrymen for loading equipment.

  Personal survival equipment continued to flow in daily from supply depots for distribution to aircrews and glider pilots: 1,554 flak aprons, 1,865 flak vests, 1,732 flak helmets, 2,074 flak pads, 361 fighting knives, 650 Thompson submachine guns, 1,187 pistols, 524 carbines, and 1,658 fragmentation grenades.

  • • •

  At camp B-54 Thirteeners lined up in their baggy olive-drab combat uniforms to collect their parachutes. The division’s parachute maintenance personnel issued the chutes early so paratroopers could work out the intricate strategy of how they wanted to rig their equipment. Successfully snaking out of a parachute harness while lying down and under fire depends on one’s familiarity with the equipment and how it’s arranged.

  To their advantage, the chutes had the new single-point quick-release harness; but some troopers still viewed the device with suspicion, afraid it might snap open during descent. As the troopers shuffled through the distribution point, each grabbed a main and a reserve parachute. Invariably some glib soul cheerfully commented, “If it doesn’t work, just bring it back and they’ll issue you a new one.”

  Jumping with a reserve parachute stimulated debate. Do we even need this thing? Many troopers thought dropping at 600 feet made the second chute pointless. By the time you realized you needed it, it would be too late.

  Paratrooper John Magill decided he would jump with his. “It was psychologically comforting to feel it on the midriff, and it could be an important buffer against flak or small arms fire on the way down.”

  Those who wanted them could grab padded canvas containers for their weapons. Miley himself had been the first to prove it possible to jump with a rifle in both hands, but doing so meant the jumper’s hands were full in the vital seconds he might need to yank the handle of his reserve. The containers allowed troops to jump with their weapons attached rather than dropping them separately.

  The original design required disassembling the M1 Garand rifle into two sections to fit inside. Not ideal. So the riggers of the parachute maintenance company added extensions to the bottom to accommodate an assembled and functional rifle. The elongated container snapped to the right side of the parachute harness. The placement required a jumper to focus his landing to his left to avoid injury by rolling onto the rifle.

  Those jumping with tommy guns or M3 grease guns often opted to tuck them under the parachute harness on their right side or secure them horizontally across the top of their reserve parachute. It came down to personal preference. Several troopers taped two of their thirty-round submachine gun magazines together for a quicker reload in a tight spot.

  Troopers spent a lot of time configuring their equipment, making adjustments and trade-offs to their loads; it was the one thi
ng over which a soldier had control. And the better soldiers were known to obsess over the details: oiling a rifle to make sure it wouldn’t jam; taping up extra webbing to keep it out of the way; cutting the handle off a toothbrush to carry a bit less; packing brass knuckles to make it that much more personal. Being prepared meant a better chance of survival. Magill noticed that the veterans preferred to pack extra ammunition or grenades rather than the additional rations favored by replacements. Magill, a veteran himself, focused first on surviving his landing: “Being equipped with the 45 caliber pistol did give me access to a weapon while descending, even though it was short range in effectiveness.”

  He was lucky to have a Colt 45. Pistols were much sought after as every paratrooper wanted a sidearm at the ready upon landing. Troopers carried them in hip or shoulder holsters; the more cavalier wore theirs in a cross-draw fashion, emulating their favorite western bandit. Some cut down the holster flaps to ease their quick-draw.

  Magill pinned a grenade to the upper pocket of his combat jacket for “quick emergency use immediately upon landing.” Weighing just over twenty-one ounces, the Mark 2 hand grenade was light and deadly. Its explosive charge sprayed iron shrapnel up to thirty yards. A fuse delay of four to five seconds gave troopers plenty of time to throw it after pulling the pin and releasing the spoon, which activated the fuse. Anyone familiar with a baseball could easily throw one. Most troopers opted to carry at least two.

  Magill also strapped his fighting knife to his right calf for easy access. As a forward observer for the artillery, his primary weapon was his radio, but he’d later have cause to wish he’d armed himself with more than just a pistol and a knife.

  • • •

  Each trooper also picked up an individual first-aid pack. Containing a field dressing, a tourniquet, and a syrette of morphine, the hermetically sealed packet was covered in a lightweight olive canvas that could be easily ripped open. Two attached eleven-inch cotton ties allowed the kit to be secured to equipment.