IN THE PRE-DAWN darkness back in England, the C-47s that had survived the first run over Normandy were returning to pick up the gilders. Many had battle damage, and crews worked quickly to patch them up if they were reparable. Fuel trucks came around and topped up the tanks. In some planes flight crewmen were dead or wounded; ambulances came and took them away while pilots and co-pilots, shaken by their ordeal—and in many cases, close brushes with death—puffed on cigarettes to steady their nerves. Truckloads of infantrymen were at the airfields, nervously waiting to board the gliders and take part in the drama that was D-Day.
One of the ground crewmen, Don Sipe, recalled preparing the gliders for their flight to Normandy. “I was in charge of hook-ups, sorting out towropes, and positioning aircraft,” he said, noting that the anxiety and tension among the glider troops boarding the planes was high. “It was a mess. Soldiers were getting sick, puking into their helmets.”1
The 101st would be supported by two glider missions early on 6 June—Mission “Chicago” and Mission “Keokuk.” Both were scheduled to come in at Landing Zone “E,” just west of Hiesville. The fifty-two Mission Chicago gliders would bring Colonel Joe Harper’s 327th Glider Infantry Regiment into France at approximately 0400 hours. Chicago’s combined payload totaled 148 glidermen and their equipment, sixteen field guns, twenty-five vehicles, a small bulldozer, two-and-a-half tons of ammunition, and eleven tons of miscellaneous equipment and supplies. Brigadier General Don Pratt would be in the first glider of this mission. The second 101st lift, Keokuk, would arrive in France on the evening of D-Day.2
One of the glider pilots in the Chicago mission, Lieutenant George E. “Pete” Buckley, said, “We were quite proud of the fact we were to be the leaders of the glider phase, but some of us I’m sure, secretly wished that we hadn’t been so good on our training operations. Then the crap really hit the fan: we learned that we were going in at night because the paratroopers who had preceded us could not wait until dawn to get the anti-tank guns, ammunition, medics, jeeps, and medical supplies which we would be carrying. This was a tough nut to swallow. Most of our training in the States and in England had been for early dawn or full day-light landings, with very little night landing practice. The thought of a night landing in enemy territory, in strange fields with a heavily loaded glider, sounded like a recipe for disaster.” To make things worse, the pilots also knew about the anti-glider poles the Germans had planted in the landing zones.3
The glider lift of the 82nd Airborne’s Mission “Detroit” was simultaneously preparing to takeoff. The Detroit gliders were scheduled to land at LZ “O” before dawn on D-Day. Forty-four of the gliders carried personnel of the 81st Airborne Anti-Aircraft and Anti-Tank Battalion and sixteen 57mm anti-tank guns. Two gliders carried engineers of the 326th Airborne Engineer Company and a small bulldozer. Two others had the personnel and equipment of the 101st Airborne Signal Company, plus staff members of the division headquarters; three others carried the medical equipment and supplies of the 326th Airborne Medical Company that would establish a field hospital.
They would be followed by Mission “Elmira,” which would land at 2100 hours that evening. The troops of Colonel Harry L. Lewis’s 325th GIR would be brought in by Missions “Galveston” and “Hackensack” the next day, 7 June. Like Chicago and Keokuk, they would land at LZ “E”—if the LZ were secure.
Shortly after midnight on D-Day at Aldermaston, the C-47s of the 434th Troop Carrier Group’s 53rd Troop Carrier Wing were revving up, ready to depart with fifty-two Waco CG-4As and thirty-two Horsas in tow. From Welford Park, the 435th TCG would tow twelve Wacos and thirty-eight Horsas; the 436th would takeoff from Membury with two Wacos and thirty-eight Horsas; the 437th at Ramsbury would pull sixty Wacos and eighteen Horsas; and the 438th would lift fourteen CG-4As and thirty-five Horsas from Greenham Common.
Just finding enough men to pilot the gliders had been a chore. Due to the shortage of trained pilots, in many cases the co-pilot’s seat was manned by a paratrooper or glider trooper who might have had, at most, an hour or two of lectures on how to fly and land the machine if the pilot became incapacitated while in flight—which did happen. As General Gavin later said, “Having to land a glider for the first time in combat is a chastening experience; it gives a man religion.”4
The glider forces would follow a different route than that taken by the paratroopers. Instead of coming in and crossing the Cotentin from the west, the gliders would be towed to the part of the peninsula just north of Utah Beach and released on an east-west heading.5
It was then time for Mission Chicago to get underway. At 0119 hours, the first contingent of 101st glidermen of the 327th GIR took off from RAF Aldermaston and headed for LZ “E.”6
AT ABOUT 0400 hours the first swarms of gliders began appearing behind their tow planes over the Cotentin, cutting loose and beginning their lazy, silent circles like huge nighthawks riding currents and looking for their assigned landing spots. One by one they began coming in, some chasing cows as they glided to a safe stop, their infantrymen pouring from them and taking cover in the hedgerows; other gliders pitching nose first into the soft fields and flipping over onto their backs, screams and shouts emanating from their canvas-covered fuselages; and some smashing at full speed into the hedgerow berms or the upright poles or into gliders that had already landed. In fields where the Germans had set up machine guns, the MG-34s and MG-42s opened up on the crates, shredding the plywood or canvas sides—and the defenseless troops inside them. It looked like total confusion—and it was.
Second Lieutenant Richard H. Denison, a navigator in a C-47 tow plane, mused on the character of the glider pilots, calling them “an unusual breed of men. Every time you made a glider landing, it was a controlled crash, and you were committed; there was no return…. Upon talking with these people later on, I found that they were bitter, difficult to manage, and simply had no compunction about telling the commander or any officer to go to hell…. They were a tough bunch of what I consider very brave men.”7
One of the tough glider pilots was Robert Butler, who was at the controls of a CG-4A Waco. Having attracted a lot of flak ever since crossing the coastline of France, Butler knew that an even hotter reception awaited him and everyone else in the glider. “Nearing our landing zones at Sainte-Mère-Église,” he said, “the tow planes kept getting higher and higher, which was our largest worry because, when we released, we had to circle and circle in order to come back to our proper landing area. A lot of this was caused by mass confusion, and too many planes coming in at pretty much the same time, and an exceptionally large amount of ground fire coming up at us. Many gliders as well as tow planes were shot down.”8
The glider immediately ahead of Butler, dubbed “The Fighting Falcon,”* contained Brigadier General Don Forester Pratt, the 101st’s assistant division commander. Lieutenant Colonel Michael C. “Mike” Murphy, regarded as the senior U.S. Army Air Force glider pilot in the European Theater, was at the craft’s controls. In the co-pilot’s seat was Second Lieutenant John M. Butler (no relation to glider pilot Robert Butler). Behind the cockpit was Pratt’s jeep, loaded with command radio equipment and securely fastened to the inside of the fuselage. Because the jeep took up most of the cargo space, Pratt had no other place to sit than in the vehicle’s front passenger seat. His aide-de-camp, First Lieutenant John L. May, was crammed in behind the jeep.
Once it was determined that Pratt would be riding in it, the general’s staff decided to have armor plating installed all along the bottom of the replacement Falcon’s fuselage—a move that added several hundred pounds of weight. Colonel Murphy did not learn of this additional weight until just before takeoff, and it concerned him greatly. The glider was already packed with extra gasoline in five-gallon cans, several heavy radios, four people, and a jeep weighing almost 2,300 pounds. With this added armor plating, Murphy estimated that the Falcon was more than 1,000 pounds over the safe limit. He later said that the craft, once airborne, handled like a freight train. Even more importantly, the glider’s center of gravity and flight characteristics had been significantly altered.
At exactly 0119 hours on 6 June, the lead C-47, piloted by Colonel William B. Whitacre, commanding officer of the 434th Troop Carrier Group, rumbled down the runway with “The Fighting Falcon” in tow. The rest of the Chicago force followed at thirty-second intervals.
Except for one incident, where a glider became detached from its tow plane and landed four miles from the base, the takeoff went smoothly. This glider was carrying critical long-range command and control radio equipment needed by the airborne troops, but it would be several hours before the glider could be recovered and sent on its way again.
The aerial flotilla flew at 2,000 feet across the Channel. Reaching the coastline, the planes and gliders descended to 600 feet. Colonel Whitacre noticed that the moon was bright enough to see the trees, buildings, roads, and fields below. As the formation approached the release point, the German AA gunners opened up. General Pratt’s glider was punctured several times by small-arms fire—an effect that Colonel Murphy said sounded like popcorn popping.
The clouds parted over the LZ and the pilots had a good look at the ground below. At almost exactly 0400 hours, as the formation passed to the west of LZ “E,” near the little village of Hiesville, Whitaker turned on the green “release” light and Murphy hit the control that separated the glider from the mothership; he could hardly wait to get down because of all the physical work. Trying to keep the overloaded, bobbing and weaving glider steady for over two-and-a-half hours had put a severe strain on his arm and leg muscles, not to mention his nerves.
Rather than follow the standard practice of making a slow turn and gliding into the LZ, Murphy made a steep climbing turn to the left. He did this because he wanted to gain as much altitude as possible to give himself time to figure out the flight characteristics of the heavy, unstable craft. With the moon shining brightly, Murphy was able to pick out his LZ—1,000 to 1,200 feet in length, sloping downhill, and rimmed with tree-covered hedgerows. As Murphy began his one and only approach, he saw First Lieutenant Victor Warriner’s No. 2 glider swooping in and touching down just ahead and off to his right. Then his skids touched down, but instead of coming to a halt within 200–300 feet as had always happened in training, the heavily laden glider began skating across the wet pasture as though it were an an ice rink. Murphy and his co-pilot saw the berm on the far side of the field rushing toward them at a high rate of speed and braced for impact. When he realized that the glider was going to hit the hedgerow, Lieutenant May, Pratt’s aide, threw himself behind the jeep in hopes that it would cushion the collision.
Without brakes, the CG-4A slammed into the hedgerow at an estimated eighty miles per hour, splintering the plexiglass windscreen, crushing the metal tubing in the nose into an unrecognizable mass, and breaking both of Murphy’s legs.
Murphy, pinned in the wreckage and in excruciating pain, looked over at his co-pilot Butler, who had taken the full force of the impact with a large tree and was dead. Murphy then looked out through the shattered windscreen and saw several German armored vehicles nearby, their crews pointing their weapons at his glider—and Warriner’s, too, which had also smashed into the same hedgerow a few yards away. The Germans dismounted and, with the help of flashlights, made a cursory inspection of the gliders. Satisfied that the occupants were dead, the Germans departed. In a great deal of pain, Murphy lowered himself to the ground and took cover in a ditch. A few moments later Lieutenant May, bruised but otherwise unhurt, approached him with the tragic news that General Pratt was dead.
A doctor in Warriner’s glider, Captain Charles Van Gorder, came over to assist and found that Murphy had indeed broken both legs and torn up his left knee, but Murphy refused morphine because he wanted to be alert in the event the Germans attacked. Van Gorder then checked Pratt for any signs of life; there were none. The doctor’s cursory examination revealed that the general had suffered a broken neck, probably from whiplash. The violent forward motion of his head, possibly slamming into one of the metal crossmembers of the glider’s airframe, had likely severed his spinal cord. Pratt became the second American airborne general to die in combat.* His superstition about the “hat on a bed” had proved ominously accurate.9
About ten minutes after the 101st’s initial gliders had arrived in France, C-47s towing the first gliders of the 82nd’s Mission Detroit began to appear in the Cotentin’s flak-filled skies.10 After a nearly two-hour flight, Second Lieutenant Richard H. Denison, a navigator in a C-47 towing a CG-4A Waco glider with 82nd Airborne glider troops aboard and a 75mm anti-tank gun inside, was about to reach the release point near LZ “O,” a few hundred yards northwest of Sainte-Mère-Église. It was 0410 hours and the anti-aircraft fire, now that the flight had emerged from thick cloud cover, was coming up fast and furiously. The crews had been told that pathfinders would have already marked the landing zones with Eureka beacons to help the tow planes find the LZs, but Denison noted that “this was not the case,” so the C-47 crews were on their own. Denison said, “Locating one field that was designated as your drop zone turned out to be much different with heavy ground fire when the field was surrounded by a lot of other fields. I guess it’s one of those things about war; the best-laid plans don’t always work out.”
The release signal was given to the glider pilot, but he chose not to cut loose. “We were at 800 feet and flying at only 120 miles per hour,” Denison said. “I certainly did not blame him [the glider pilot] for not wanting to cut off. The flak was coming up, with many tracers. Since our glider pilot had chosen not to cut off, we then made a 360-degree turn, continuing our low speed at the same altitude, and brought the glider back to the area again.”
Glider pilots were given only one chance to not release their tow rope, if they did not cut off on the second pass, the pilot of the tow plane would do it for him. On this second pass, the glider pilot pulled the release mechanism and the two winged vehicles separated. Denison couldn’t wait to get out of there. He remembered, “When the glider cut loose, we put the throttle to the firewall, went down to the deck, and increased our speed to about 220 miles per hour, coming down as low as we could get. A tree loomed up ahead of us, and I yelled, ‘Watch out for the tree,’ so loud that I was hoarse all the way back to England.”11
Somewhere between seventeen and twenty-three gliders landed on or near LZ “O.” Although most of them were wrecked upon landing, only three soldiers were killed and twenty-three seriously injured. Eleven jeeps did not survive the landings but eight howitzers did, and they were quickly made ready for action.12
Sergeant Len Lebenson, a member of the G-3 (Operations) staff of 82nd Airborne Division headquarters, was riding in a glider with Brigadier General Francis A. March, Division Artillery commander, and a dozen members of the 80th Anti-Aircraft Battalion. Lebenson recalled that they began catching flak as soon as they crossed into France and separated from the tow plane: “Then we suddenly knew that we were flying on our own. In other words, we weren’t being towed anymore; we had been cut loose. That is a very unusual feeling, flying through the air without a motor. It’s noiseless. All you hear is the rushing sound of the air, but other than that it’s very quiet. But the quiet was punctuated by the noise of some explosions.”13
The landing was a white-knuckle affair. “We hoped to land in an open field but nevertheless braced for an impact,” Lebenson said. “We were descending rapidly and suddenly there was a sharp plunge upward as the pilot desperately pulled up to avoid something. This was followed by a pancaking down and then we tore with a splintering crash against some kind of building, were spun violently around, and came to rest with another impact against still another object. After the final crash there was a brief moment of quiet. We certainly had arrived with a bang!”14
Luckily, Lebenson and the others were tightly strapped into their seats and all but one escaped injury. Lebenson found out after he climbed out of the wreckage that the glider had missed a house, hit a tree and the corner of a shed, and came to rest against another tree. “Pieces of the glider were strewn over a relatively small field,” he said.15
Another of the glider troops was Private first class Philip McKnight, assigned to the 325th GIR. His glider—holding twelve troopers, two pilots, and a lot of equipment—had had a major problem when it left the ground. He said, “We noticed that the [hinged] nose of the glider was not fastened properly. Several of the men tried to refasten the nose while in flight. It could not be done, so we circled and landed back on the air-field while all the other planes and gliders went on to France without us. After the nose of the glider was refastened and hooked back to our plane, we went to join the other gliders.”
As McKnight’s glider and tow plane arrived late over Normandy, the gunners below—fully alert following the earlier passage of paratroopers and gliders—began to fire at them. “Instead of taking us to our designated landing zone, our tow plane continued to pull us inland up the coast to escape the firing,” he said. “Our landing was to be to the right towards Sainte-Mère-Église…. The pilot eventually told us to release near Caen, approximately eighty miles from our original landing zone. We landed in a perfectly flat pasture and rolled to a stop near a wooded area and overtook a lone German soldier.” Probably no group of invaders landed farther from their intended drop zone on D-Day than did McK-night and the men of his Waco.
Once McKnight and the others got their bearings and figured out where they were, they decided to work their way toward the coast. But it was still dark and the seaborne troops had not yet arrived. By the time the landing craft hit the beaches, McKnight’s group came under friendly fire and was forced to retreat and hide out for all of D-Day.*16
Glider pilot Second Lieutenant John L. Lowden heard later about the fate of two of his friends who were flying a Horsa and landed safely in a field. “The cargo they were carrying was a combination of airborne troops and anti-tank artillery,” he noted. “The pilot was standing behind the co-pilot waiting for the troops to dislodge the jammed evacuation door when he was killed instantly by a burst of submachine-gun fire through the nose of the glider. In a few shattering seconds the troops were cut to pieces. The only eventual survivor was the co-pilot, who huddled under a heap of bodies, playing possum. Later in the day, German troops strolled through the glider and casually fired a bullet into the head of any trooper who moaned or moved when prodded. For twenty-four hours, my friend feigned death, lying in two inches of blood, while heavy fighting raged around him. Only after American troops had finally secured the area did he dare come out of hiding.”17
Outside Sainte-Mère-Église, Sergeant Otis Sampson, E/505/82nd, saw the gliders approaching LZ “O.” He said, “Then the gliders came in. On being cut loose, they would circle the landing fields; the British-built Horsas were too big for those small fields with their high-bordered tree hedges. I heard some crashing through them. The smaller American Wacos seemed to do all right. One of them landed in the top branches of a high tree, like a bird that had come to rest.”18
Spencer Wurst noted, “The glider troops that came in that morning took a terrific beating. This is one of the most sickening things I remember. The Germans still controlled the gliders’ LZ, and the landing had to be diverted at the last minute. There was a lot of confusion, and some of the pilots were forced to find the nearest available spot to land. They were under a lot of heavy small-arms fire and flak, and I think they misjudged the size of the fields. If we saw them or heard them coming in at treetop level, we just crossed our fingers. There was nothing else we could do. Within a few seconds, they slammed into the hedgerow at the other end of the field. In town, others almost hit the aid station and the schoolhouse, and one actually knocked out Company D’s CP. I can still hear those gliders hitting the hedgerows, tearing off wings, smashing equipment, and mangling and killing the crews. We picked up eight of our sixteen 57s [57mm anti-tank guns]…. I suppose it’s miraculous we even got as many guns as we did. But often there was no crew left to operate them, and now we saw the real value of the cross-training we had undertaken back in Northern Ireland, because we sometimes had to man the 57s ourselves.”*19
To hamper the Germans from returning to Sainte-Mère-Église, Private first class Leslie Cruise and other paratroopers had set out mines on one of the roads leading into the town, then dug foxholes and set up firing positions to establish a roadblock. After the first gliders began landing in the area, Cruise heard equipment being off-loaded, followed by the sound of an American jeep being started. The jeep, with two soldiers in it, came tearing up the road toward Cruise’s position. The paratroopers tried shouting to warn the jeep’s occupants of the roadblock and mines, but the vehicle flew past them at a high rate of speed. Cruise said, “The occupants of the jeep were in a big hurry as we at the roadblock heard their running motor coming in our direction. Above all the noise, the distinct yells at the roadblock of ‘Hit the ground!’ were heard clearly and we all buried ourselves in the dirt of our foxholes. The driver must have thought our men were Germans and was not about to stop. Down the road they rode on full throttle.”
“KAPOW ! BLOOEY ! BANG ! BOOM !—a deafening crescendo of explosives sounds as a number of our mines blew the jeep and its troopers into the air,” continued Cruise. “All hell broke loose—flashing lights with pieces of jeep and mine fragments raining down around us. Directly across the middle of our minefield they drove and immediately their direction became vertical, and in an arching skyward path they landed in the hedgerow beyond. We could hear the thump and bangs of falling parts all around us. The men had left the jeep on first impact and they had become the first casualties in our area, but they would not be the last. We had lost about half of our mines, which we had so carefully delivered, and they would be sorely needed in case the Krauts should attack. Those GI’s sure wrecked the hell out of our defenses.”20
The defenders would indeed need the mines, for it wasn’t long before the Germans tried to retake the town.
A FEW HOURS after the American air assault, the first reports filtered back to SHAEF headquarters. Eisenhower’s naval aide, Captain Harry Butcher, recorded in his diary that at around 0640 hours on D-Day, the phone in his tent rang; it was Air Marshall Leigh-Mallory. “He was filled with information, good information,” noted Butcher. “Only twenty-one of the American C-47s out of the 850 were missing. Only four gliders were unaccounted for. On the British [side], eight C-47s were AWOL out of some 400. Amazing good luck. And an RAF Intruder had seen the British paras drop, and it went off smooth, smooth indeed. Grand, said I, I’ll tell the boss as soon as he wakes up.”
Butcher went over to Ike’s tent to inform him but found him up and smiling; Admiral Bertram Ramsay had already given him the news.21 Although the early reports were still sketchy, and the enemy had yet to strike back in force, D-Day, just a few hours old, was starting to look like a qualified success—at least when viewed from far-off England. What was actually happening in France was an entirely different matter.
The question remained: could the parachute and glider troops hold out until the seaborne forces reached them?