The basic role of the American and British airborne troop carrier organizations in World War II was to bring large formations of aircraft, flying at relatively low levels, to deliver the forward combat soldiers in key Allied invasions, as both paratroopers and glider-borne infantry. No aircraft of the time was better suited to that role than the Douglas C47 / Skytrain / Dakota.
The job of the air crews was demanding and dangerous. Flying unarmed aircraft, they had virtually no means of protecting themselves over enemy-occupied territory. In the beginning, their operations were flown at night, without navigation lights. They struggled to maintain tight formations, mere hundreds of feet from the ground and at very low airspeeds. Their exposure to both enemy flak and small arms fire was so extreme that steel-pot infantry helmets were part of their required flying kit.
Until the final year of the war, the pilots had to rely on dead-reckoning and the crude, often unreliable navigation technology of the day, with minimal ground-to-air communications to assist them. Locating and reaching the drop and landing zones could range from the difficult to the nearly impossible. In many cases, the airborne and glider troops landed well away from their prescribed destinations, widely scattered and sometimes hopelessly separated from each other, their units, and their commanders. As with some bomber crews in the Royal Air Force of WWII, a few troop carrier pilots were accused, rightly or wrongly, of what was then called “creep-back,” a proclivity for dropping their paratroopers or releasing their gliders early, short of the target, in order to depart the danger zone sooner and possibly improve their chances of surviving the trip. The pilots were frequently facing combat for the first time and some were as frightened and apprehensive as most or all of their passengers. Like the paratroopers, however, most of them accepted the odds and took their chances.
C-47A No. 43-15211, which would do the bulk of its World War Two military service with the 439th Troop Carrier Group, United States Army Air Forces, was completed and rolled out at the Long Beach, California factory of Douglas Aircraft on February 14, 1944 and delivered to the Air Force on the 19th. It was one of 2,954 C-47A-80-DLs produced in the Long Beach facility between 1941 and 1946.
This aeroplane was accepted as a part of the USAAF inventory on March 1, 1944 after only two hours and fifty-five minutes of test-flying. Its first military flight was to Mobile, Alabama, where it was fitted with long-range fuel ferry tanks and other military equipment prior to departing for Baer Field, Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the 1st Troop Carrier Processing Unit. There, it was assigned its first crew: 2nd Lieutenant Russell W. Barron, pilot; 2nd Lieutenant Charles A. Trimble, co-pilot; Corporal Jack H. Hadsell, crew chief; and Corporal Carmine P. Percaro, radio operator.
Army Special Orders Number 70 detailed the deployment of 43-15211, together with twenty-three other C-47As, many of them sister ships of ’211 as part of the same construction batch. They were sent to Morrison Field, West Palm Beach, Florida, where the crew would receive secret orders regarding their final destination. These orders were not to be opened until the crew was two hours into the flight from West Palm Beach.
On March 15th the aircraft arrived at Morrison Field after a three and a half hour flight. They left the next day on a six-hour flight to Borinquen Field, Puerto Rico, and learned on opening their sealed orders that they were bound for the European Theatre of Operations. Their next stop, on March 17th, was Atkinson Field, Georgetown, British Guiana, a seven-hour trip, followed by a seven-hour leg to Belem, Brazil, flying over the Amazon delta and skirting “head-hunter” territory. Their final landfall on the South American continent was Natal, on the Atlantic coast of Brazil, after six and a half hours in the air.
The next stop for the crew would be Wideawake Field on tiny, volcanic Ascension Island in the mid-Atlantic. In poor weather conditions the thirty-five-square-mile speck might easily have been missed, but, thanks to the addition of radio compasses and beacons, the crew’s eight-hour flight and the treacherous final approach through low cloud and severe turbulence was rewarded with a safe and welcome arrival.
After a few days rest on Ascension, the C-47 crew departed for Roberts Field, near Monrovia in Liberia, West Africa, a six and a quarter hour jaunt, followed by a five-hour leg to Dakar in French West Africa, where they arrived on March 25th, tired but in good spirits. The next stretch—eight and a half hours—was almost entirely over desert; their destination, Marrakech, Morocco, where they briefly visited the French part of town.
Putting Morocco behind them, the crew began the most dangerous part of the journey—a long flight to England across the Bay of Biscay, which was heavily patrolled by Junkers Ju 88s and Messerschmitt Bf 110s of the German Air Force. A USAAF B-24 bomber had been shot down in the area the day before. But luck was with the ’211 crew and they landed safely at RAF Valley, Anglesey, Wales, as ordered.
Following another brief rest period, they took the C-47 on to USAAF Station 462, Balderton, near Newark in Lincolnshire and parted company with the aeroplane that had brought them from America to Britain and to war. The crew and the aircraft would be assigned to the 92nd Troop Carrier Squadron of the 439th Troop Carrier Group, one of four squadrons making up that group, each with a full complement of eighteen C-47s.
The 439th was under the command of Major Charles H. Young, a former “barnstormer” pilot in the mid-1930s. Major Young, a native of Argonia, Kansas, entered Army pilot training as a cadet at Randolph Field, San Antonio, Texas, in October 1936. He was the first in his class to solo and his fifty-five-minute record still stands in the U.S. Air Force for minimum flight time with an instructor prior to soloing. On graduating, he served two years on active duty before joining American Airlines as a pilot flying the Douglas DC-3 Sleeper Transports. He was recalled to the Army in the spring of 1942 and helped in the organization of the Troop Carrier Command. In January 1944, he was appointed commander of the 439th, one of the youngest group commanders in the ETO. After the war he returned to American Airlines to complete a thirty-five-year career, ending as a Boeing 747 captain with nearly 27,500 flying hours in his logbooks.
Second Lieutenant Verne H. Mays, a native of Los Angeles, was assigned to the Troop Carrier Command in February 1943. He was sent to the 60th Troop Carrier Squadron, 63rd Troop Carrier Group, and in just two weeks, was checked out as a Pilot in Command and instructor for new co-pilots. His group was assigned to Fort Benning, Georgia, for training in dropping paratroopers, and then to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he and his fellow C-47 pilots flew jumps and glider towing exercises under combat conditions with the 101st Airborne Division. The 63rd became an overseas training group and Mays was promoted to 1st Lieutenant and Flight Leader / Instructor. He volunteered for overseas duty, arriving in England on May 30, 1944, where he was ordered to the 92nd Troop Carrier Squadron.
The DC-3 production line at Douglas Aircraft, Santa Monica in 1939. By then the plant was struggling with the production demands of commercial, military and lend-lease aircraft orders. Both the factory and the airfield on which it was located were far too small for the company’s needs and major expansion began with the construction of new facilities at El Segundo near the site of the present Los Angeles International Airport as well as in Long Beach and in Oklahoma City.
As a 1st Lieutenant with more than 800 hours flying C-47s, Verne Mays took part in some of the most significant and memorable airborne operations of the war, including Operation Dragoon, the Allied invasion of southern France, on August 15, 1944, only a few months after the D-Day landings at Normandy in northern France. One of the two aircraft he flew on the 15th was that same C-47A, 43-15211, now squadron-coded J8-B.
The 439th was based in a wheatfield outside of Orbetello, Italy in August and Mays was assigned to fly J8-B in the glider-towing mission one afternoon. It was the aeroplane normally flown by Major Cecil E. Petty, who would become commanding officer of the 92nd squadron. Verne had flown a four-hour para-drop mission that morning in another aircraft with Colonel Harry Tower, the 439th Executive Officer. As one of the most experienced C-47 pilots in the group, Mays was asked by Tower to fly with him as they led the forty-five-ship para-drop formation.
The weather had been hot and dry with no recent rain and the airstrip was dusty. Water trucks had been sprinkling the surface all day on the 14th to keep the dust down. The take-off for the para-drop mission was set for midnight. It was led by Colonel Charles H. Young, commanding officer of the 439th, and the first take-offs were uneventful. However, as they continued, more and more dust was stirred up, reducing visibility for the pilots waiting their turn on the runway. When it was the turn of 1st Lieutenant Michael Drozda, piloting C-47 42-92735, the dust cloud churned up by the preceding aircraft was huge. Not only did it dramatically reduce his visibility, but the dust ingested by his engines before and during his take-off roll resulted in a critical loss of power, causing his plane to stall out at the point of leaving the ground. The C-47 veered to the right and careered off the strip directly towards the makeshift control tower, scattering the Group Operations Officer and others there. The plane ground to a halt short of the tower and burst into flames. Many years later Mike Drozda stated that he believed that there had been no serious injuries to his crew or to any of the paratroopers on board. He, however, spent three months in an English hospital before being evacuated to Georgia where he had surgery on his right shoulder. He was in hospital for nearly eleven months before emerging with only limited use of his right arm.
Colonel Young, in the lead ship of the formation, passed his checkpoint on the northern tip of the island of Corsica and was flying his C-47 on autopilot and adhering strictly to his course. Ten minutes before their estimated landfall in southern France his navigator gave him a course correction of 15 degrees to the right, which surprised him as he was certain that the aircraft could not have strayed from their heading. Even so, Young became convinced that the navigator was correct. Young made the course correction and moments later was told by the navigator that they were crossing over the French coastline. Breaks in the heavy cloud cover then revealed a few lights, confirming their landfall. Continuing on course towards the drop zone, they arrived at a point four minutes from the drop and Young flipped the switch illuminating the “stand up and hook up” red light. He then slowed the aircraft to the required jumping airspeed and, as they neared the estimated drop point, hit the switch for the green “drop” light and the paratroopers jumped into the night through the cloud layer with no assistance from their pathfinders.
Colonel Young believed he had delivered the airborne troops to their drop zone. He learned later from one of them, 3rd Battalion Commander Melvin Zais, that he had not. Zais told Young that his men had landed twelve miles from their assigned position and had cursed Colonel Young every step of the way as they force-marched back to the DZ. But when they finally arrived and saw the acres of sharpened stakes and poles sticking up from the drop zone, they were grateful to have missed it and glad to have walked the twelve miles. “We will be happy to jump with you again any time,” Zais told Young. That was the only time the colonel missed a drop or landing zone during the entire war.
That same afternoon the dust was again a factor. It delayed the assembly of the towships and gliders. When Lt. Mays returned from the morning para-drop mission and was ordered to fly the afternoon glider mission in J8-B, he learned that he was to lead the 92nd Squadron as well. The forty-seven C-47s and CG-4A gliders made the trip in perfect formation and a bright, blue sky. When the mass of aircraft reached the French coast, the morning cloud and fog layer had lifted and most of the gliders were able to make reasonably safe landings. Colonel Young wrote later, however, that they had encountered some congestion over the two LZs, with many of the aircraft and a number of supporting P-51 fighters seeming to go in all directions at once, and visibility on the approach to the LZ hampered by smoke from battle in two of the nearby harbours. After passing Corsica on the way to France, one of the gliders had to be ditched in the sea when it developed a structural weakness. The personnel aboard were later rescued. All of the C-47s and nearly all of the gliders reached the landing zones. The congestion described by Colonel Young happened when several aircraft from the various participating groups arrived later than their assigned times over the landing zones, creating chaos and dangerous delays.
In the congestion, most of the gliders were released at higher than intended altitudes, but somehow the glider pilots managed to manoeuvre and dodge one another in their landing approaches. As they came down, they were shocked to see that the landing zones were studded with obstacles—poles set in the ground fifteen to forty feet apart with taut wires stretched between them. Fortunately, the paratroopers had already cut the wires, making it possible for the glider pilots to weave their way between the obstacles and the majority landed safely. Even so, many of the gliders had their wings sheered off by the poles. Of the flight that August afternoon, Verne Mays recalled: “By the time we reached the French coast the fog had lifted and our gliders were able to land okay. Major Petty’s crew chief had kept his plane in perfect condition and it performed beautifully for us.”
Before Dragoon there was Overlord—the Allied invasion landings at Normandy on the Channel coast of France in June 1944. British military historian, lecturer and journalist, John Keegan: “As spring became summer in 1944, yet more exciting manifestations of American military power thrust themselves on our attention. The GIs whom we had got to know had, we now grasped, been engineers, builders and truck drivers, who had been creating settlements for the fighting troops still to come.
“They were now among us. And with them they brought a new wave of equipment, half-track scout cars, amphibious trucks, and gigantic transporters laden with tanks and bulldozers—a machine previously unknown in Britain—which held to the main roads and, when in convoy, were usually seen heading southward towards the ports of Hampshire and Dorset, on the Channel coast opposite France.
“American aircraft, too, appeared in great numbers, Liberators, Dakotas and occasionally the dramatically twin-boomed P-38 Lightning, glimpsed rocketing across the sky like a shape of things to come.
“Dakotas [C-47s] were the most common, and the source of the most arresting experience I underwent that fresh, green spring. Some forgotten journey brought me unexpectedly upon an airfield, over which a cloud of aircraft hung, turning and swooping. But it was unlike any formation I had ever seen, in that the planes were linked together in pairs by spider-thin cables. Suddenly and successively the cables fell slack and the second in each pair of aircraft began to descend towards the runway. Strangest of all, they had neither propellers nor engines, their descent was silent and, when they touched the ground, they came to a halt within a few yards. From their interiors men tumbled out and formed ranks, from which brilliant red and green flares were shot in sputtering arcs towards the departing Dakota tugs. I had had my first sight of a method of war which I had not dreamt, a glider assault on the rear of the enemy.
“But not my last. One evening some weeks later [on the night of June 5, 1944] the sky over our house began to fill with the sound of aircraft, which swelled until it overflowed the darkness from edge to edge. Its first tremors had taken my parents into the garden, and as the roar grew I followed and stood between them to gaze awestruck at the constellation of red, green, and yellow lights which rode across the heavens and streamed southward towards the sea. It seemed as if every aircraft in the world was in flight, as wave followed wave without intermission, dimly discernible as darker corpuscles on the black plasma of the clouds, which the moon had not yet risen to illuminate. The element of noise in which they swam became solid, blocking our ears, entering our lungs and beating the ground beneath our feet with the relentless surge of an ocean swell. Long after the last had passed from view and the thunder of their passage had died into the silence of the night, restoring to our consciousness the familiar and timeless elements of our surroundings, elms, hedges, rooftops, clouds, and stars, we remained transfixed and wordless on the spot where we stood, gripped by a wild surmise at what the power, majesty and menace of the great migratory flight could portend.
“Next day we knew. The Americans had gone. The camps they had built had emptied overnight. The roads were deserted. No doubt, had we been keeping check, we would have noticed a gradual efflux of their numbers. But it had been disguised until the last moment and the outrush had then been sudden. The BBC news bulletin told us why. ‘Early this morning units of the Allied armies began landing on the coast of France.’ ”
In the very early hours of June 6, 1944, Major Cecil Petty, flying 43-15211, the C-47 coded J8-B, from its base at Upottery in Devon, England, dropped elements of the 1st Battalion, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment near Drop Zone “C” in Normandy. The DZ was situated close by Sainte Marie du-Mont, but most of the paratroopers landed near the village of Ecoquenauville, between the DZ and the town of Sainte-Mère Eglise.
The 506th PIR had been activated in July 1942 at Mount Currahee, Camp Toccoa, Georgia, as part of the new 101st Airborne Division. The regiment took its motto from the Cherokee Indian word, Currahee, meaning “Stands Alone.” In September of 1943 it deployed to England where it continued training for the Normandy invasion. When the men of the 506th jumped into the black sky of northern France that June night, they were tasked with the seizure of the high ground directly behind the landing beaches.
They had left England at 1:00 a.m. on the 6th. As they crossed the French coast, a thick low-cloud layer coupled with intense enemy flak scattered the eighty-one C-47s of the airborne force so widely that only nine of the planes managed to deliver their paratroopers precisely over the drop zone. Their particular role in the activities of D-Day was code-named Operation Chicago. Their erratic jump patterns, due to the heavy flak, caused many of them to land as much as twenty miles from their designated landing positions. As it happened, the Germans were ready and waiting for those men who did arrive on their assigned drop zone. Within the first ten minutes of the drop, enemy troops had killed the American battalion commander, his executive officer, and much of the 3rd Battalion. The only members of that battalion to survive were those who came down outside of their DZ. These two planeloads of paratroopers quickly reorganized themselves and succeeded in capturing their objectives—two bridges over the Douvre River. The men of the 506th battalion, though scattered, managed to join up into small fighting groups and, before the arrival of the initial seaborne landing forces on the invasion beaches, were able to capture nearly all their objectives and secure most of the high ground overlooking those beaches. They included the men of Easy Company—some of whose extraordinary exploits are described in the chapter AT WAR, in the book Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose, and featured in the television series of the same title. General Maxwell Taylor, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, had promised his troops they would be relieved and returned to England after three days of battle in Normandy. They were involved in the fight in Carentan for thirty-three days.
In the cockpit of a C-47 just before starting engines;
Passing the southern chalk cliffs of the Isle of Wight.
U.S. Army General John R. Galvin, who from June 1987 to June 1992 served as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe and Commander-in-Chief, United States European Command, wrote of the D-Day operation: “. . . all three airborne divisions [the 101st, 82nd, and the British 6th Airborne] were able to report that their major missions had been accomplished. The British 6th held the crossings over the Orne south of Caen; the 82nd controlled Sainte-Mère Eglise and the crossings over the Merderet; the 101st had opened the four exits off the beach and dominated the crossings over the Douvre. Although the paratroopers fought through their first hours in Normandy as semi-isolated battalion fragments, all three airborne divisions were able to take over operational control by the end of the day and coordinate the continuing push to expand the beachhead.”
Allied casualties of June 6th are estimated at approximately 6,600 Americans killed, missing, or wounded, including 2,500 airborne personnel. British casualties are estimated at 2,750 killed, missing, or wounded, including 650 from 6th Airborne. Canadian casualties are estimated at 946. German casualties for that day are estimated at between 4,000 and 9,000. Out of approximately 2,000 men from the 506th who jumped into France that night, 231 were killed, 183 were missing or prisoners of war, and 569 were wounded—a casualty rate of roughly 50 percent. For their achievements on D-Day and in the following month, the regiment was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation.
After D-Day, the 439th Troop Carrier Group and C-47 J8-B flew a mission from Upottery on June 7th. They brought additional troops into Normandy in a combination of fifty Horsa and Waco gliders which were released over Landing Zone “W” about three miles south of Sainte-Mère Eglise. The trip was uneventful except for one C-47 with engine trouble which landed safely at Warmwell, near Poole in Dorset. Over the next few weeks, while new landing strips were being prepared in northern France for the Allies and supply lines were being arranged, there was very little for the flight crews and airborne troops to do. It fell to the squadron commanders to channel the energies of the men in the interim. Their solutions ranged from the frivolous to the educationally worthwhile and included staged aerobatics, wing-walking and other stunts, ground contests such as pari-mutuel bicycle races, tug-of-war, greased-pig-catching, and glider spot-landing competitions between the four squadrons. There were also demonstrations of how a C-47 could lift three gliders at once and how it might be made to evade an attacking enemy fighter plane. Obviously, the C-47 could not outrun the fighter, but the microphone and earphone-equipped crew chief in the astrodome could inform the pilot of the fighter’s location and distance from the transport. As the enemy plane got close enough to open fire, the C-47 pilot would slow his aircraft, lower his landing gear and flaps, throw the big plane into a hard 90-degree left or right turn and drop it behind one of southern England’s many low hills. Such evasions frequently worked, at least in exercises, as the fighter, with its relatively heavier wing-loading, could not stay with the C-47 during the manoeuvre.
On June 24th, J8-B and seventy-four other C-47s of the 439th flew a vital resupply mission out of the Greenham Common and Ramsbury air bases in southern England into the A-2 and A-6 airfields behind the Utah beachhead in Normandy. The transport aircraft were escorted by Spitfires and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters. It is believed that the cargoes of the C-47s that day were mainly ammunition—probably a mixture of 105mm and 155mm shells, and .30 calibre rounds for use in the continuing fighting on the Cotentin Peninsula. The transports returned to Upottery in a medical evacuation mission, repatriating Allied wounded from the invasion battle.
When the Allies launched Operation Market-Garden, it was the largest corps-sized airborne drop in history. Riding high on the success of the Normandy and southern France invasions, Allied planners devised an intriguing but unrealistically aggressive scheme for invading German-occupied Holland. In it, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery was to head the Allied armies across the lower Rhine River at Arnhem. It was a two-part operation. The ground assault part was code-named Garden; the objectives of the three simultaneous, coordinated daylight airborne troop-carrier operations, called Market, were German targets in Arnhem, Nijmegen, and Eindhoven. The drop zones were as much as eighty-five miles into enemy territory. The job of the airborne forces was to open a sixty-mile-long corridor for the ground forces, and the airborne assault aspect was planned to take three days, beginning on September 17th.
The interior of a restored C-47 as it would have appeared in the Second World War.
On that day the 439th and J8-B were flying from Balderton airfield in Nottinghamshire. The group was to drop 388 paratroopers to the south of Nijmegen. They flew in multiple lanes along two separate air routes in order to reduce the time over the DZ for the group. Their accuracy over the course of the operation was excellent, even though they experienced a weather delay on the second day.
Troops of the Ninth U.S. Army Infantry at Fort Sam Houston, Texas in WWII.
The Allies had overstretched their supply lines into Europe after the landings in Normandy and southern France and the advance of many units was halted by their lack of gasoline, food, and ammunition. When not required to fly airborne missions, some of the troop carrier aircraft were used to bring these supplies to the front, weather permitting.
The enemy resistance in Holland was surprisingly heavy, but the Americans managed to take their objectives when aided by advancing British ground and armored elements. The British plan, however, could not succeed. Commanders ignored or discounted intelligence information and photographs provided by the Dutch underground, which proved that two German panzer divisions were refitting in the Arnhem area and posing a massive and powerful threat to the Allies. In another critical error, the drop zone established for the Arnhem sector was located much too far from the Rhine bridge—the primary British objective in the sector. And, in a further example of wishful thinking, the plan required three consecutive days of good weather over the North Sea for the airborne operation, when it was well known that the weather there in September was unpredictable. One of the most critical failures of the overall operation was poor Allied communications in Holland. So poor were they that operational control was often totally jeopardized. Furthermore, there was no ground-to-air communication, which caused a two-day delay in the arrival of reinforcements to the Arnhem sector.
The lives of many C-47 airmen were lost in the effort to bring the desperately-needed troop reinforcements and supplies to the areas—some of which had already been lost to the enemy.
While stationed at A-39, Chateaudun, between the French towns of Orleans and Le Mans, the 439th was called on to fly troop-transport, supply-drop, and medical evacuation missions in support of the counter-offensive against German forces in the Ardennes—the Battle of the Bulge. The German offensive had begun December 16th and caused the Allied troop carrier units to begin airlifting some 11,000 men of the 17th Airborne Division from England to the Reims area in a series of night flights between December 22nd and 29th. During Operation Repulse, the 439th and other units of the IX Troop Carrier Command participated in an intensive routine of troop transport and resupply activity, including resupply of the 101st Airborne troops then struggling to hold out in the southeastern Belgian town of Bastogne, besieged by German forces. Of the 2,127 sorties flown in that period by the C-47s, 927 were flown to Bastogne. The deliveries included gasoline, food, fifty gliders carrying heavy ammunition, and a team of army surgeons.
With ammunition for the artillery at a critically low ebb by Christmas Day, two 50th Troop Carrier Wing groups based in France, the 439th and 440th, received an urgent request that a special glider mission be flown in on the 26th. Weather conditions in England prevented any such missions originating there, so it was up to those two groups in France to carry the freight. The mission was then delayed until the 27th.
Bringing in seventy-six tons of 155mm artillery shells was challenge enough in reasonable circumstances, but on this occasion the situation was made worse when insufficient numbers of the scheduled protecting fighters showed up to do their job. Enemy flak was intense and concentrated and 26 percent of the C-47s were shot down. Only the courage and determination of the air crews and glider pilots made possible the safe delivery of more than 70 percent of the cargo to the landing zones.
A C-47 fuel quantity gauge;
The pilot of 049, one of the glider-towing C-47s, was Joe Fry, his co-pilot, George Weisfeld. The flight was mostly uneventful until the group was approaching the Bastogne area. Nearing the landing zone, 049 was hit by flak in the belly of the aircraft, aft of the wing trailing edge. A fuel tank must have been ruptured as a fire suddenly broke out and began to take hold in the main cabin. Fry ordered his crew to bail out and the radio operator and crew chief left immediately. Co-pilot Weisfeld, though, chose to help Fry control the aeroplane to the glider release point and said: “Joe, I’ll stay with you until you’re ready to leave.”
As they neared the release point, flames from the C-47 had reached half way along the tow-rope to the glider being flown by J.D. Hill. Hill released his glider from the rope and Joe Fry told Weisfeld: “Let’s get out of this son of a bitch before it blows up.” The co-pilot made it through the cabin and jumped from the back hatch, but was severely burned in the process. Fry, meanwhile, did his best to stabilize the aircraft and set the auto-pilot. He put on his chest parachute pack and opened the cabin door. The entire cabin was then afire and impassable. Closing the door, he re-entered the cockpit and jettisoned the top escape hatch. Climbing out into the windstream, he was surprised by the minimal wind blast and realized that the plane must be close to stalling out. He began crawling back along the top of the fuselage, hoping that he wouldn’t slip and fall into one of the propellers. As he passed the astrodome, he looked down and saw that the fire was then consuming the crew compartment. His memory of the experience briefly blanks out at that point. His next recollection is of dangling behind the shroud lines of his parachute, above and behind the tail section of the C-47. Evidently, he had either jumped or been thrown off the left side of the burning aeroplane and had hit the left horizontal stabilizer, his ’chute wrapping around the leading edge when the pack split open, allowing the parachute to stream out. Ground witnesses to the incident stated that the plane was no more than 300 feet up at that moment. No one is certain about what happened next. Fry thought that the aeroplane either exploded or melted apart at that point. The drag of the ’chute and Fry’s weight pulled him free of the stabilizer and the parachute then inflated just enough to deposit him safely in the snow. He had bruises and burns and an injured right leg, and his uniform was saturated with melted aluminum, but he had survived, landing just inside Allied lines. Some 101st Airborne troops nearby ran over and dragged Fry to their rifle pit where they plied him with cognac.
U.S. Army practice parachute jumps in WWII;
An American fifty-dollar commemorative coin.
The glider tow-cable hook-up to a C-47;
A mass formation of C-47s in the Arnhem operation, Market-Garden, September 1944;
U.S. Army paratroopers being dropped at low level by C-47s over northern France on D-Day.
U.S. Army paratroopers en route to jump in the invasion of southern France, Operation Dragoon, August 15, 1944;
A C-47 taking off with a Horsa glider in tow heading for Normandy from an English airfield on D-Day, June 6, 1944;
Upottery, USAAF Station 462, was located in Devon in the southwest of England, between Exeter and Taunton. Originally built for American medium bombers, Upottery was first occupied by the C-47s of the 439th TCG on April 26, 1944, when the group moved from its training base in England at Balderton. Constructed with three runways, two hangars and many aircraft dispersals, it was also furnished with a variety of Nissen huts and other typical air base buildings of the time—all of which served the needs of the 439th until the bulk of the organization departed for a new assignment in Orbetello, Italy, on July 17th. The air echelon returned to operate from Upottery on a few occasions before taking up other temporary residences at new airfields in France during September. Upottery airfield was then occupied by PB4Y-1 units of the U.S. Navy, flying anti-submarine patrols for the duration of the war. The air base was closed in November 1948. Much physical evidence of its existence remained in 2008, as illustrated by the accompanying images, some of which were photographed from the C-47 J8-B.
Training for Operation Varsity, the Allies’ crossing of the Rhine River into Germany, took place during January and February 1945. Some 50,000 flying hours were logged, of which 21,000 were formation practice and 9,000 were glider towing. The balance related to instrument flying, navigation and transition flying for replacement personnel. Just under 20,000 paratrooper jumps were made. With the relocation of the 50th Wing to France the preceding fall, its groups practiced a total of 4,329 glider tows during the first half of March. In the run-up to Varsity, most of the Wing C-47s had been re-equipped with self-sealing fuel tanks. Reinforced noses and parachute arresters had been added to the gliders. Improvements were made to navigational methods. The glider pilots, in addition to having increased infantry training, were required to make a minimum of five practice landings a month. Combat Control Teams were organized to improve communication links with ground troops and the air resupply missions, as well as the coordination of battlefield medical evacuation—a procedure pioneered by members of the 439th Group in the Remagen area on the Rhine. Additionally, Allied night and day fighters were provided by the U.S. Ninth Air Force beginning March 20th, to protect the bases used by the troop carrier groups in France.
Operation Varsity was to be the largest one-day airborne assault mission of all time. Those doing the planning felt they had learned a thing or two from the mistakes of Arnhem. This time the airborne operation would be completed in daylight, moving more than 17,000 airborne troops, 7,000,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, 1,200 vehicles, and 130 artillery guns to a relatively small DZ / LZ area behind enemy lines. They would do the job with 1,836 transport aircraft and 1,348 gliders. The whole plan hinged on being able to contain the enormous enemy resistance anticipated when the Allied forces entered Germany. It depended heavily on Allied capture of the bridges across the Issel River and on quick crossings enabling the Allied forces to negotiate the flood plain rapidly and reach the Ruhr industrial area.
To expedite the airborne effort, the air formations would employ three lanes and one additional lane at a higher altitude. There was also to be an assembly of 240 B-24 Liberator bombers bringing further supplies to be dropped fifteen minutes after the troop carrier formation. So great was this combined air fleet that more than three hours were required for it to pass a given point on its route to the Rhine.
With few exceptions, the troop carrier deliveries arrived with amazing accuracy, but the operation was not without problems. The nearby German town of Wesel was burning furiously—the result of an earlier Allied shelling—as the transport aircraft came into the area. The fires created immense smoke plumes, shrouding the drop and landing zones in smoke more than 2,000 feet thick in places. The troop carriers were further threatened by having to fly through the heaviest concentration of anti-aircraft fire yet experienced in an airborne operation. In the action, 394 IX Troop Carrier Command aircraft were hit by the flak and more than half of the gliders descending into Landing Zone S were hit on the way down.
In spite of the intense air and ground opposition put up by the Germans in the drop and landing zone areas, the airborne operation and the Rhine crossing were successful, causing Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower to say of the operation: “It sealed the fate of Germany.”
In March 1945, Verne Mays was promoted to the rank of captain and between April 8th and 22nd he flew eight additional 439th TCG C-47 resupply missions, carrying food, clothing, medicine, gasoline, ordnance equipment, and other supplies to the front lines and evacuating patients to rear zone hospitals. In these last eight wartime missions, he logged 58.10 flying hours.
The highest ranking airborne commander of the war, General Mathew Ridgeway, said that the troop carrier pilots were “as skilled as any aviators I ever knew, and God knows they were brave men, both in the air and on the ground. In the run to the drop zone, they flew formations tighter and more precisely than any the bombers ever flew, and they did it at night. They couldn’t take evasive action, either, no matter how hot the fire from the ground might be.”
One of the last military assignments given to the C-47s of the 439th TCG was the repatriation of Allied prisoners of war from camps in Germany to France. The C-47 J8-B served in that capacity during May 1945. After the war, it served with several air force units in Germany and is believed to have participated in the Berlin Airlift.
Veterans of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, Earl McClung, far left, and Don Malarkey revisiting Upottery, the Devon, England airfield from which they flew to Normandy on D-Day.
Restored D-Day veteran C-47 N1944A in the air again in 2008.
