The Planes With No Engine

BELGIUM’S EBEN EMAEL WAS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE strongest forts in Europe before it fell to 78 German troops in May 1940. Wire-service reports carried headlines like MYSTERY SURROUNDS NEW NAZI WEAPON LAUDED BY GERMANY .The stories included speculation about possible “death rays.” A few days later, with conjecture still rampant, a report said that the Germans had entered the fort “by means of a novel kind of airplane” that could land in a small area. “It is believed the sudden appearance of this glider petrified the defenders” and rendered them “incapable of proper reaction to surprise.” The news alarmed the Allies as well as American officials, who were preparing for war even though the United States would not enter the conflict for another year and a half. By the time German troops swarmed down in gliders to capture the Greek island of Crete in May 1941, the U.S. Army had its own glider program under way. Maj. Gen. Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold assured a group of glider enthusiasts in July 1941 that “we shall have a glider force second to none, ready for service whenever and wherever it may be needed.”

Why gliders? What were they good for? The main job of gliders was to move men and equipment to the battlefront, sometimes behind enemy lines. For certain jobs they were better than airplanes, for a number of reasons: They did not need a runway and a long approach in order to land; they were virtually silent in flight; with no engines to knock out or fuel to burst into flame, they were hard to shoot down; they were cheaper than airplanes; and the pilot training was easier.

Another valuable technique that came to maturity during World War II was dropping paratroopers from planes, and this has proved to be more enduring. Yet paratroopers could be only lightly armed, and they tended to disperse over a large area on their way down. For landing a group of men as a unit in a specified place, sometimes along with a vehicle or a piece of artillery, gliders were the only reliable solution.

Army gliders were bare-bones, purpose-built troop transports, meant to be towed into the air by powered airplanes and, in most cases, used once in combat and then abandoned. They had never been employed in warfare before World War II, and with the development of helicopters, they never have been since. But the Normandy invasion and subsequent liberation of Europe would have been much harder without the roughly 10,000 American gliders that were used in the conflict.

In mid-1940, just after the taking of Eben Emael, the British journal Flight assessed the potential of gliders for carrying troops. Without the weight of an engine or fuel tanks, a glider could carry a heavy payload. A slow landing speed would permit the use of skids instead of heavier and more complicated wheeled landing gear, so the motorless craft could land silently, almost anywhere, with no need for a runway. A transport plane carrying 20 troops could increase its capacity by 50 percent, with only a small decrease in speed, by towing a glider with 10 troops. Finally, of course, glider pilots would need less training than power (i.e., airplane) pilots. Flight admitted that a glider could be shot at easily, but the magazine expected that “it would probably still glide down imperturbably, unless the control cables were cut, the pilot dead or the tail shot off. ”

THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES, WHICH WAS MEANT TO RE store peace to Europe after World War I, had perversely led to the development of military gliders. Its terms had severely restricted Germany’s production and use of airplanes, thus spurring both military and civilian interest in gliders. As early as 1922 Hermann Goering, a World War I veteran and early Nazi supporter who would later become chief of the Luftwaffe , called glider instruction for youth the first of three steps in the redevelopment of Germany’s air power. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Goering’s policy was put into effect, giving Germany a pool of personnel with flying experience.

The United States had gliding and soaring enthusiasts, but without treaty restrictions to get around, the Army Air Corps took no interest in gliders. In fact, a decade-old War Department policy requiring specific permission for any glider-flying by Army personnel was not removed until June 1941. A few months earlier, on February 25, as Germany’s success at glider warfare started to cause concern, General Arnold had requested an investigation of potential uses of “a type of glider that can be towed by aircraft,” along with design studies for 2-, 8-, and 15-person gliders.

With war threatening, things moved fast, and on March 8, preliminary engineering requirements were sent to 11 companies. Four of them responded favorably, and before the design studies were completed in May, the Air Corps ordered experimental versions of 2-place training gliders and test versions of 8—and 15-place cargo gliders. (The Navy also considered the use of gliders to transport Marines, but the idea never got past the experimental stage.)

Procuring small quantities of trainer units from existing glider and light-aircraft companies was fairly easy. However, no company had experience in the manufacture of large cargocarrying gliders, and most aircraft companies already had production commitments to meet the needs of the war in Europe. The Army’s Matériel Division was instructed to order gliders only from companies not already manufacturing metal or combat planes.

Of the four companies that had shown interest in building 8—and 15-place gliders, three produced experimental craft that failed structural tests. The fourth was the Waco Aircraft Company, of Troy, Ohio. On June 17,1941, the Air Corps (soon to be renamed the Army Air Forces) gave Waco a contract to build full-size prototypes of an 8-place glider, designated the XCG-3, and a 15-place glider, the XCG-4. The XCG-3 was accepted for quantity production in April 1942. Waco delivered the first flight-test XCG-4 to Wright Field the following month. By then 11 companies had won production contracts for a total of 640 of the 15-place gliders, now called the CG-4A.

The CG-4A consisted of a canvas-covered framework of welded steel tubing with wooden wings and floor. The use of wood conserved strategic materials and enabled hard-pressed wartime contractors to hire workers with no experience in aircraft production. Furniture and ladder manufacturers, as well as the piano maker Steinway and Sons, built wooden subassemblies.

It had a wingspan of 83 feet 8 inches and a wing chord—the distance from leading to trailing edge—of 10 feet 6 inches. It was neither armed nor armored and weighed about 3,000 pounds, with a maximum normal designed gross weight (i.e., weight including pilots and passengers or cargo) of 7,500 pounds and a maximum emergency gross weight of 9,000 pounds. The entire nose and crew compartment could swing upward, creating a 70-by-60-inch opening for loading and unloading. In addition to a pilot and co-pilot, it could carry 13 equipped airborne troops, or a 75mm howitzer, or even a jeep.

The maximum designed speed was 150 mph, with a stalling speed (the speed at which the wing ceased to develop sufficient lift for continued flight) of 49 mph under a normal load. The pilot training manual said that at a landing speed of 60 mph, the CG-4A would descend at about 400 feet per minute and would require a landing run of 600 to 800 feet. The pilot could shorten the landing run in small areas by tilting the glider forward onto its nose skids. Some CG-4As also carried a tail parachute to increase the rate of descent and further reduce speed.

CG-4As used for training were equipped with permanent landing gear, shock absorbers, and brakes. For gliders participating in actual operations, takeoff gear consisted of wheels that were dropped after leaving the ground. Landings were to be made on wooden skids under each side of the glider’s belly. After pilots learned that it was hard to control a glider on skids after landing, they often chose to leave the wheels on. This gave the pilot braking and steering control using the glider’s hydraulic brakes.

The craft had a door, an emergency exit, and four small round windows on each side of the fuselage. A technical manual said that the windows were meant to “help minimize airsickness on the part of the airborne troops. Men aft of the center of gravity tend to become airsick very easily. There are two racks of sanitary containers in the ship for this possibility.” (In a pinch, the men could also use their helmets.) The CG-4A’s pilot-training manual said that the glider was “simply a cargo-carrying airplane without engines” that “reacts to the same aerodynamic forces with the same controls and in the same manner as the airplane.”

Waco received the first production contract for its CG-3A on March 21,1942. In July this glider was dropped in favor of the larger CG-4A, of which more than 10,000 were eventually manufactured, 1,074 by Waco itself and the rest by more than a dozen other firms.

AFRAID THAT ITS NEEDS WOULD EXCEED PRODUCTION , in early March 1942 the Army Air Forces violated its policy against using established aircraft companies for glider production by asking Cessna, which had been producing twin-engine trainers, to get ready to build 200 CG-4As per month. The result is a typical example of accelerated wartime production. On April 7 the Wichita Beacon announced that Cessna had purchased a 110-acre tract near Hutchinson, Kansas, with plant construction to begin immediately. Within 40 days equipment was being moved into the plant. A June 4 account says the first gliders were scheduled to leave the assembly line the following week. In November of that year Cessna delivered 407 gliders, almost three times the monthly output of any other contractor during the entire program. Soon afterward, however, Cessna returned to producing powered aircraft.

Like most contracts, the Cessna operation required cooperation with subcontractors, in this case the Boeing and Beech plants in nearby Wichita as well as many smaller companies that made glider subassemblies. Many of the subcontractors for other glider makers had names not associated with aircraft production. For example, both H. J. Heinz and Anheuser-Busch made wing panels and parts.

Primary contracts for CG-4A production were distributed among 16 firms, some of which had no relevant experience. A few of them may have existed solely to obtain government work. For example, National Aircraft received a contract in March 1942 to manufacture 30 CG-4As. The fivemonth-old company had been incorporated by a group of Elwood, Indiana, business owners, none of whom had any background in aircraft production. When the company’s contract was terminated a year later, National’s total production stood at one CG-4A, with a unit cost of $1,741,808.88.

Robertson Aircraft Corporation, an aircraft service and training company in St. Louis, was also given a contract in March 1942. While not a manufacturing company, it had a distinguished background: It had started out delivering airmail in 1926 with Charles Lindbergh as its chief pilot. Nine months after receiving its contract, no gliders had been delivered, but the company was allowed to continue production, and by the end of July 1943 it had delivered 63 gliders. On August 1 the company’s sixty-fifth glider went on a demonstration flight at Lambert Field in St. Louis. The passengers included Robertson’s president and vice president, the mayor of St. Louis, and several other local officials. During the flight a wing of the glider disintegrated, and all aboard were killed in the crash. The complex system of subcontracting and subassembly at various factories made investigation difficult, but the cause was traced to the failure of an inner wing fitting produced by a former coffin manufacturer in St. Louis.

Other glider contracts were given to large companies with substantial production experience. Ford Motor Company was awarded a contract for 1,000 CG-4As in mid-1942. Ford knew plenty about making aircraft; it had built the Trimotor airplane from 1926 to 1933 and was already manufacturing bombers at its Willow Run plant in Michigan. Ford made its gliders in a woodworking plant where station wagons had been assembled before the war. Because of the wartime labor shortage, thousands of former Ford employees, some more than 70 years old, were called back.

Onetime mechanics and lumberjacks cut and tailored fabric to cover the wings, fins, rudders, and fuselages of the surprisingly complex gliders. For example, the CG-4A’s honeycombed floor measured 13 feet 6 inches by 6 feet 2 inches and consisted of 216 cells in a reinforced spruce framework; assembly of the 300-pound floor required 420 clamps to hold the structure in place while the glue dried. By November 1944 Ford had produced 2,418 CG-4As, more than twice as many as any other contractor, at a unit cost of $14,891. This was about $4,500 less than Waco, the next most cost-efficient producer.

The Army was not so efficient, however, when it came to figuring out what to do with its gliders. On March 26, 1942, Hap Arnold wrote: “Our glider development and procurement is proceeding without benefit of a definite plan. … Get the staff busy on the plans for ultimate use of these gliders.” The Germans had used gliders in situations that took advantage of their silent approach and low landing speed. U.S. doctrine on their use was less sharply defined. The Army stumbled through several costly glider operations before learning the importance of air superiority, daylight, and good weather. Martin Wolfe, a D-day veteran, later wrote of “mushy thinking by military leaders” regarding glider missions. Even after Normandy, he said, officers disagreed over such fundamental points as whether the Troop Carrier Command, of which gliders were a part, should serve as “freighters or fighters.”

The Army first used gliders in combat during the invasion of Sicily, in July 1943. A combination of strong winds, inexperienced pilots, miscalculations by lead towplane navigators, and friendly fire from naval guns made the operation a costly one. Of the 137 gliders involved in the first part of the operation, only 68—not even half—landed on the island. Casualties were put at 605 men, 326 of whom were missing and presumed drowned.

MORE SUCCESSFUL WERE THE EFFORTS OF THE 1ST AIR Commando Group in Operation Thursday, which supported the British general Orde Wingate’s forces in Burma. In March 1944 the group moved troops and supplies to construct landing strips for airplanes in the Burmese jungle. Gliders landed at night in clearings 165 miles behind Japanese lines. Flight Officer Jackie Coogan, the former child actor and future Uncle Fester on television’s “The Addams Family,” piloted the lead glider on a mission to a clearing called Chowringhee.

Coogan landed and set out smudge pots to guide the other gliders while the Gurkha troops he had carried fanned out to secure the area. One of the other 11 gliders crashed, destroying the small bulldozer it carried, but the next night five more gliders brought in a replacement bulldozer and other equipment. Later gliders brought medical and communications equipment and additional supplies, including 2,000 mules in bamboo stalls. Flight Officer Alien Hall, who served with the 1st Air Commando Group, said: “We were doing things in Burma with those gliders that we were never taught in flight school. But it was the only way to get men and equipment down into a jungle clearing or other sort of open space.”

Wingate recognized the unique capabilities of gliders, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower requested that some of the personnel involved in Burma come to Europe to assist in the Normandy invasion. Operation Neptune, the airborne component of that campaign, involved hundreds of glider missions supporting the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions. In fact, the first mission of the D-day invasion took place on June 5, shortly before midnight local time, when three British gliders carried 90 troops to a bridge near Caen. The commandos secured the bridge, thus preserving a vital road link for reinforcements and preventing a German counterattack.

Martin Wolfe served in Normandy, with the 81st Troop Carrier Squadron, as a radio operator in a Douglas C-47, which was used to drop paratroopers and tow gliders. He wrote in his book Green Light! of how the rows of gliders and towplanes lining up before a mission made an impressive sight: “In the center of the runway would be two lines of C-47s flanked left and right by two lines of gliders. Just off the runway would be two lines of glider mechanics with jeeps and trucks, ready to hook up to the gliders and help out in case of trouble. Snaked out on the ground in front of each glider would be its 300-foot long, thickly braided nylon rope. Each C-47 would inch forward to a position in front of its designated glider and cut back its engines. Glider mechanics would dash forward with the rope and attach its front clasp to a hook on the plane’s tail.”

The C-47 slowly took up the slack in the towline, and on signal the power pilot pushed the throttles forward hard. “You could see a glider pilot fighting the tendency of his glider to fishtail from one side to another as it picked up speed,” Wolfe continued. At 60 mph the CG-4A lifted off; the towplane continued to pick up speed and lifted off at about 85 mph. Four squadrons, totaling as many as 48 towplanes and their gliders, could be flying in formation in only half an hour.

During combat, Wolfe said, gliders did not actually land. They “crashed, more or less successfully. Slow and easy targets, flying directly over enemy positions, gliders had to get down quickly. A skillful pilot might be able to stay up five minutes or more—if he wanted to take his chances on the flak and bullets whizzing around him. ” Glider pilots who were under fire and landing too fast sometimes aimed the fuselage so that it would slide along the ground between two obstacles, such as trees, shearing the wings off to slow the glider.

Aerial photographs of Normandy that the pilots had used in training had failed to show clearly the small size of individual fields bordered by earthen barriers several feet high, deceptively called “hedgerows.” Worse, some of the fields were flooded and others had been studded with “Rommel’s asparagus,” 8-inch wooden poles about 10 feet high, sometimes with cables strung between them to set off mines as gliders landed.

An officer in the 81st, Darlyle Watters, wrote that after he landed, “The only noise we could hear was that of gliders coming in, most of them crashing. It was a nightmare to see those big gliders come in, hit trees and hedgerows and literally disintegrate. Some of them were in terrible shape. One of the boys in our Squadron went right by my glider at about 50 mph, hit the trees and hedgerows on the end of the field, tore one wing and the gear off, went on through the hedgerow, and hit the one across the road a hell of a whack.” Watters said it was the surprise of his life to see all the occupants crawl out of the wreckage.

Others were not so fortunate. One D-day glider pilot, John C. Hanscom of the 438th Troop Carrier Group, recalled coming upon “three gliders, one completely burned, the second a mess of kindling wood. The third had apparently made a perfect landing, but directly into the face of enemy machine-gun fire. The two pilots sat stiff and cold in their seats.”

An 82nd Airborne after-action report shows that of 1,363 personnel transported to Normandy on 237 CG-4s, 104 were killed in action, evacuated, or missing. Roughly three-fourths of the jeeps, trailers, and guns brought in were serviceable. Only 53 CG-4As landed intact, while 112 were damaged, 67 were destroyed, and 5 were missing. About 56 landed in their landing zones; many came down miles away. By most measures the CG-4A fared a little better than the larger, heavier British Horsa, which was also involved in the operation.

Walter Cronkite, then a United Press correspondent, rode a glider in Operation Market Garden, the invasion of Holland in September 1944. Decades later he recalled, “Riding in one of those Waco gliders was like attending a rock concert while locked in the bass drum.” He said the glider’s canvas covering “beat against the frame with enough decibels to promise permanent deafness.” Cronkite continued, “The sight from aloft was incredible—other C-47s and their gliders filled the sky, it seemed from horizon to horizon.”

He saw a nearby C-47 take ground fire and one engine burst into flames. In light of the experience gained in the Normandy invasion, with its distressingly wide dispersal of paratroopers and gliders, C-47 crews were ordered to take no evasive action against flak or small-arms fire after the run-in to the drop or landing zone began. They were to hold their course in their unarmed, unarmored, and slow-moving aircraft. Even their gas tanks lacked the self-sealing rubber liners that fighters and bombers had.

Cronkite continued: “I suddenly became aware that my glider mates were bracing and that our pilot was tense. And then he pushed the lever that released us from our tow. We dropped like a stone—plunged straight down, it seemed to me.… I don’t think we were more than a hundred feet from the ground when our pilot pulled back on the elevator controls. It seemed that we were pulling enough g’s, enough force of gravity, to push us all right out of the bottom of the glider. The pilot leveled off and made a 180-degree turn into the wind, and I was aware then that other gliders were landing just ahead of us and that there were still others to our sides also going into the same large field.”

The glider’s nose plowed into the dirt, the tail flew up, and all was still. As Cronkite and the infantrymen moved to a drainage ditch for cover, other gliders zoomed past and “two collided almost above us, and a jeep and a howitzer, and soldiers, came crashing down.” Such scenes were far from unusual. One glider pilot said a large glider operation was “like Piccadilly Circus at high noon with the traffic being directed by an insane policeman.”

In Silent Wings at War , John L. Lowden recalls that in the same operation, he piloted a glider carrying six men, a jeep with extra fuel, grenades, ammunition, and bazookas with rockets. “One German sharpshooter was obviously tracking my towplane and glider. The tracer bullets started near the tail of the towplane and then lazed steadily toward me. This happened twice and I knew that between each tracer there were five slugs I couldn’t see. The gunner’s clip seemed—to my craven relief—to run out about ten feet in front of my glider. Each time I kept waiting for the unseen slugs to come slashing through the nose.” Of the 48 gliders heading for Lowden’s landing zone, 44 reached it.

Gliders remained in use through Operation Varsity, the crossing of the Rhine in March 1945. Flight Officers Bruce C. Merryman and John W. Heffner piloted a CG-4A containing a medic and a jeep loaded with medical supplies. “We cut loose over our landing zone and started down through heavy flak and smoke,” Merryman wrote. “Only moments after I popped the tail ‘chute to slow our descent—we were now down to about 15 feet—we took a direct hit to the rear of the cargo section from an 88 [a famously powerful German fieldpiece]. The concussion blew the jeep forward, which snapped the rope tie-downs. The cable attached to the jeep did its job and released the nose latch, which raised the nose section to the up-and-locked position.

“This left Heffner and me strapped in our seats with our feet pointing heavenward—and we were still airborne! The jeep, with the trooper still in the driver’s seat, flew out of the glider and landed upright with no damage to it or the trooper. Heffner and I crashed nose down immediately behind the jeep. We looked like two guys sitting in chairs that had been tipped over backwards.”

After World War II, gliders disappeared from military thinking, replaced by helicopters and the C-123, a transport airplane that evolved from earlier designs for large gliders. However, said Air Force Lt. Col. Jonathan C. Noetzel in 1993, “the glider remains a viable platform for limited, specific missions requiring true stealth and silence.” For example, Palestinian terrorists have used hang gliders to evade detection in attacks on Israel.

Was the glider experiment worthwhile? In an Army Air Forces history written soon after the war, Lt. Paul M. Davis and Amy C. Fenwick concluded that the glider program was justifiably criticized: “The glider program was in some respects poorly managed. Especially in the production of gliders the cost was excessive. The problems of glider production were severe. But,” they continued, “judged in relation to the part gliders have played in defeating a stubborn enemy, the glider program was, in a general sense, successful.”