According to the documentary Silent Wings: The American Glider Pilots of WWII, World War II is the most chronicled event in our human history – except for the mostly untold story of the American glider pilots. Just over 6,000 volunteer pilots flew infantry and supplies behind enemy lines in fragile, defenseless, and engineless airplanes.
These were one-way trips on the aircraft; without engines, there was no way to fly home and the glider corps were both rated pilots as well as infantrymen who strapped on their light arms once on the ground and fought their way to their ground forces. The expendable gliders were unsalvageable once landed; as former WWII war correspondent and glider rider Andy Rooney says, each glider landing was “a planned accident and you hoped to survive the accident.”
After Hitler sent eleven Nazi gliders into Belgium to easily overcome the hitherto unassailable Fort Eben Emael, the Allied forces scrambled to design, build, and fly their own glider force. In 1941, U.S. General Hap Arnold got the glider program off the ground, so to speak; Cessna and Ford produced the 8- and 15-person powerless planes at a cost of around $15,000 per glider.
U.S. gliders were involved in most of the major offensives after Pearl Harbor. The invasion of Sicily was their brutal introduction; headwinds and Axis antiaircraft guns made it impossible for the gliders to reach the designated landing zones and many had to make water landings with no life rafts. Many of the unmarked gliders that actually made it to Sicily were then shot down by panicked friendly fire that didn't recognize the planes. Burma was a much more successful operation as the American gliders delivered over 9,000 British and Indian troops in the first six days, ultimately stopping the Japanese from getting into India.
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