“This day is call’d the feast of Crispian: He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, / Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, / And rouse him at the name of Crispian. / He that shall live this day, and see old age, / Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say, “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.” Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, / And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.” / Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot, / But he’ll remember with advantages / What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, / Familiar in his mouth as household words . . . / Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. / This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, / From this day to the ending of the world, / But we in it shall be remembered . . .”
– The King’s address to his men before the Battle of Agincourt in France, October 25, 1415. King Henry the Fifth, by William Shakespeare
During Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion landings at Normandy, more than 1,650 sorties were flown by C-47s and C-53s carrying paratroopers and towing more than 500 gliders from bases in England. Assembling and flying in waves of four abreast, they formed an amazing aerial parade between England and France. “The steady stream of transports,” reported CBS news correspondent Charles Collingwood, “kept coming and coming in an endless skytrain. The awe of it stopped the fighting in some sectors as men looked skyward with unbelieving eyes.”
While D-Day is the best known invasion operation of the Second World War, it was actually not the largest airborne assault of that conflict. That event began on September 17, 1944, when Allied airborne troops made the initial drops and glider landings in Holland. A force of 1,546 C-47s, C-53s, and Dakotas, with 478 gliders launched from twenty-four air bases in England, was followed the next day by a second wave of 1,306 transport aircraft and 1,152 gliders. By the ninth day of the assault, 4,242 transport aircraft sorties and 1,899 glider sorties had been flown, prompting General Maxwell Taylor, later Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, to remark: “. . . [this operation] was the best that the division has ever made in combat or in training. Much of the credit for the success of the operation has to go to that old workhorse, the C-47.”
C-47s and the gliders they will be towing to the Normandy landing zones on June 6, 1944.
The Allied campaign in North Africa was nearing its end and the British and Americans were debating their next major objective in the war. Clearly, they were not yet ready to mount the massive invasion landings in France that would come in 1944. Eventually, they agreed that, with the support of their naval forces in the Atlantic and Mediterranean oceans, their next target had to be the German defenses on the Italian island of Sicily. After a thirty-eight day campaign, beginning on July 9, 1943, Sicily would become the first significant portion of enemy-occupied land to fall to the Allies in the war. It would serve as a base for their invasion of Italy and provide an important learning experience for many British and American officers and enlisted men who would participate in the Normandy landings the following June. The decision to invade Sicily was taken in January 1943 by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a conference at Casablanca, Morocco.
Sicily lies ninety miles from the African coast and only two miles off the Italian peninsula. The operation was to be code-named Husky and the overall effort would combine amphibious landings and airborne drops with glider landings. The goals were to throw the enemy forces off the island, to open the shipping lanes in the Mediterranean, and to contribute to the fall of the crumbling Mussolini government in Italy. The supreme commander of the operation was U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower. His deputy and designated commander on the ground was British General Harold Alexander and the main Allied assault forces were the British Eighth Army, commanded by Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, and the U.S. Seventh Army under the command of General George S. Patton.
The operation involved seven army divisions coming ashore along a 100-mile front in the southeast of Sicily. They were supported by elements from two airborne divisions dropped behind the German lines. Four British divisions, a separate brigade, and a small commando unit were landed on a forty-mile section of coast from Pachino Peninsula to the port of Syracuse, to be captured in a joint effort by glider-borne troops and the British amphibious forces. In the west of the island, three divisions of Patton’s Seventh Army were landed near the Gulf of Gela, supported by additional American paratroopers.
On the night of July 9 / 10th, three hours before the main Allied ground forces began coming ashore on the southeast and southwest coasts of Sicily, the first airborne units arrived over the island. Of the four elements involved (two British and two American), the Americans were making their first combat jumps. As they neared the drop zones, strong winds drove the C-47s off course, resulting in fewer than half the U.S. paratroopers reaching their rallying points. The British gliders were also badly scattered and many of them went down in the sea. Roughly one-third of the intercom connections between the C-47s and the gliders failed. The pilots of the C-47s found it difficult to judge the release points accurately and many of the gliders were released offshore. Some of them were diverted by enemy ground fire. Nearly eighty gliders were ditched at sea with the loss of more than 250 men. One glider was shot down and only fifty-four of the gliders made relatively normal landings, with twelve of them reaching their actual landing zones. Fewer than ten per cent of the gliders landed in their target zones. The transport aircraft completed the mission without loss.
A Royal Air Force Dakota paratroop transport aircraft operating in the far east.
Patton’s men were overextended in the heavy fighting and urgently needed reinforcements. The general ordered 2,000 more paratroopers from his reserves in North Africa to be dropped near Gela during the night of July 11th. With substantial activity by enemy aircraft over the American sector all day on the 10th, warnings went out to the Allied army and naval units in the area in order to prevent any “friendly fire” incidents where Allied transport planes might be shot down on the 11th. Unfortunately, when the C-47s began appearing over the beaches, a German air raid had just taken place and many over-eager anti-aircraft gunners on land and aboard ship fired on the transports, downing twenty-three and damaging a further thirty-seven of the 144 aircraft. In the wake of the action, it was discovered that word of the impending drop had not reached all Allied units in the area. A nearly ten percent casualty level was experienced by the paratroopers in the action.
Relations and communications between Montgomery and Patton were less than cordial and, when Monty’s army became bogged down in its northeastward push towards the vital port of Messina, Alexander directed Patton to halt his own advance to the northwest and move east to protect Montgomery’s left flank. Instead, Patton ordered his force towards the capital, Palermo, later claiming that Alexander’s order (via radio transmission) had been garbled. Alexander then ordered an assault on Messina and Patton’s army moved into that city on August 17th, a few hours before Montgomery’s men reached it and only hours after the last German and Italian troops had left.
In the initial airdrop of the Sicilian campaign, 147 aircraft (including 112 C-47s) towed 137 Waco CG-4 gliders and eight Horsa gliders with a total of 1,600 British airborne troops to landing areas near Syracuse. Operation Husky One followed at night with 3,400 U.S. paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne arriving in 226 C-47s. Jumping in the darkness, most of the paratroopers were widely scattered, once again, and heavy losses resulted. Eight of the C-47s were shot down. The next drop, Husky Two, had more than 140 C-47s bringing paratroops in support of the 82nd. The effort was marred by poor coordination and communications, resulting in twenty-three of the aircraft being shot down and a further sixty badly damaged.
The next drop in the campaign, called Operation Fustian (another disastrous effort), caused the United States Army Air Force to institute the application of what became known as “invasion stripe” markings on all C-47s used in future operations. During Fustian, fourteen C-47s were shot down; fifty more were badly damaged and, of the 132 aircraft dispatched, twenty-seven returned from the mission without being able to complete their drops. In a spectacular event during the Sicilian campaign, one C-47 was so badly holed by enemy shell fire that the pilot was forced to ditch in the ocean. After ordering the jettisoning of all loose gear and preparing those on board for the water landing, he made his descent to the waves. He misjudged his angle of approach and, incredibly, on impact the plane bounced back into the air. Gambling that it was still capable of flight, the pilot coaxed the transport up to a height sufficient for him to nurse it home to his base.
The Allies had learned valuable lessons in the Sicilian campaign that would pay dividends in the Normandy assault. They learned from the inaccuracy of their airborne drops, from their communications and logistical problems, and from their problems with close air support for their ground forces. They certainly learned from their inability to prevent the enemy from successfully evacuating more than 100,000 men and 10,000 vehicles from the island by the end of the campaign. Even so, they had achieved their main goals in driving the enemy forces from the island and in reopening the Mediterranean sea lanes to Allied traffic. The Germans had been obliged to take military personnel from other war theatres to fight in Sicily. The Italian dictator Mussolini would soon fall, leading to the collapse of the German-Italian Axis and the ultimate surrender of Italy to the Allies. The Americans and British had lost more than 5,500 personnel killed, with more than 17,400 wounded and captured. Enemy dead numbered 29,000 with 140,000 captured. The Germans had successfully evacuated more than 100,000 men from the island. The Allied invasion of Italy followed in September.
Field Marshal Montgomery had devised what he believed to be an ideal plan to shorten the war through an airborne landing near Arnhem in Holland. The plan was code-named Operation Market-Garden and it was relatively simple. Monty knew from his intelligence reports that the closer the Allies came to entering Germany at the Rhine River, the more stubborn the enemy resistance would be. He proposed dropping a large force of paratroopers that would eliminate the German resistance, outflank the enemy defenses on the Siegfried Line, assist in the Allied crossing of the Rhine and attack the German defenses beyond the river. Market-Garden was meant to spearhead the British and American forces through Holland and across the Rhine into Germany for the final push towards Berlin. The overall campaign required the Allies to capture five key river and canal bridges and to secure the roads needed for their armored and supply vehicles.
The Americans, and Eisenhower in particular, were not enthusiastic about Montgomery’s plan, believing it would drain away precious supplies and equipment from their own drive towards the Rhine. But when the Germans began launching a new vengeance weapon on London, the V-2 rocket, on September 3, 1944, Eisenhower changed his mind. The first series of these rocket launches was flawed, but by September 8th the Germans were putting the deadly weapons down on the British capital. In the next few months, more than 1,400 of the big missiles were fired at England, most of them landing in the London area. These attacks continued until March 27, 1945 when the final V-2 landed on the Elm Grove, Orpington, home of Mrs. Ivy Millichamp, 34. Mrs. Millichamp was the last of 2,754 British civilians killed in the London area by the rocket attacks, with another 6,523 Britons injured.
A C-47 rfe-supply flight originating in Massachusetts in 1943.
The V-2 was supersonic. On launch it climbed to a height of fifty miles before its rocket engine shut off. It then arched over and fell silently on its target. British civilians were accustomed to the unsynchronized drone of enemy bombers, the whine of falling bombs, and the sputtering progress of the V-1 flying bomb, but this was something entirely new and terrifying. No sound, no warning—only a devastating explosion.
The Americans accepted that the V-2 launch sites in northern Europe had to be destroyed and that the effort to do so would be made easier with a successful operation in Holland. Accordingly, when Field Marshal Montgomery ran into a stone wall, trying to obtain supplies he needed for Market-Garden, Eisenhower was quick to intercede on his behalf.
It was believed that the strength and morale of enemy forces in Holland were low. The 16,500 Allied paratroopers who jumped into Holland on September 17, 1944 and the 3,500 troops who landed there in gliders soon discovered that their intelligence reports had been spectacularly incorrect. Tanks of SS panzers were awaiting them in Arnhem and the spirits of the German fighting men were, in fact, high.
The order of assignments called for the British First Airborne Division to capture and hold the vital bridge at Arnhem. The American 101st Airborne Division was charged with taking the Zuid Willems Vaart Canal at Veghel and the Wilhelmina Canal at Son, while the American 82nd Airborne Division was ordered to capture the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen. The British First Airborne had not participated in the D-Day landings at Normandy, having been kept in reserve and inactive since June. They were, as their commander, Major-General Robert Elliot “Roy” Urquhart put it: “restless, hungry, and ready for anything.” Urquhart himself had never before parachuted or participated in a glider landing. He was also subject to air sickness and had expressed surprise when he was appointed to command the division. The commander of the 101st was Major-General James Gavin and the 82nd was headed by Major-General Maxwell Taylor, both experienced airborne combat leaders. In addition to these forces, the Polish Parachute Brigade, under the command of Major-General Stanislaw Sosabowski, had been incorporated into the British First Airborne Division.
The last dance before shipping out to the European Theatre of Operations in 1944.
The plan called for the Allied ground troops to link up with the airborne troops after the bridges and canals had been taken. The American parachute drops were largely successful with relatively few losses in men and aircraft. Most of the British paratroopers, however, were dropped too far from their objectives and lost the element of surprise as a result. While they did manage to capture the north end of the bridge at Arnhem, they then became caught up in an intense counter-attack by enemy forces there. The outnumbered British troops fought hard but soon came under fire from German Tiger tanks and suffered heavy losses. Further German attacks and deteriorating weather conditions caused a crucial delay in the arrival of British reinforcements, ammunition, and supplies, and on September 25th, Montgomery was forced to order a withdrawal from Arnhem. In the disastrous campaign, 1,130 of his paratroopers had been killed and 6,450 were captured by the Germans, whose own killed and wounded were estimated at 3,300.
The operation was largely a fiasco, but the bravery and achievements of some British airborne personnel resulted in the award of five Victoria Crosses and this comment from General Eisenhower: “There has been no single performance by any unit that has more greatly inspired me or more excited my admiration than the nine-day action by the 1st British Parachute Division between September 17th and 25th.”
Hitler’s assault in the Battle of the Ardennes—a last attempt to regain the initiative from the Allies, had failed by January 1945.
By early March the Americans and British had incurred severe losses in men and equipment while fighting their way to the banks of the Rhine. British forces under Montgomery were set to cross the river and secure a bridgehead on the eastern side. From there his infantry and armored divisions were to move onto the north German plain and into the final phase of the European war.
On March 24, 1945, in the last days of the European conflict, the Americans and British mounted Operation Varsity, among the most important and controversial actions of the war. Varsity required an immense effort: 2,926 C-47 / Dakota sorties to bring more than 14,400 troops and their equipment to the Rhine River—the final barrier separating the Allies from the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial center. In an area between the cities of Wesel and Emmerich, the American 17th Airborne Division and the British 6th Airborne Division needed to capture several important objectives, including road and rail bridges. In this largest and most successful airborne operation in history, the combined forces were charged with securing and deepening the Allied bridgehead east of the Rhine. The German ground forces were clearly expecting the invasion and fought savagely before yielding ground, in and near the drop zones.
Prior to the airborne landings, the enemy propagandist Axis Sally had taunted the American troops: “We know you are coming 17th Airborne Division. You will not need parachutes; you can walk down on the flak.”
During the evening of March 23rd, many of the Allied paratroopers wrote their “last letters,” to be posted after the impending drop—letters in which they were allowed, for the first time, to tell where they were going. Normally, Company officers had the chore of censoring the letters of the enlisted men. On this occasion, a corporal wrote eleven “last letters” addressed to eleven different women, in which he swore his undying devotion to each one.
In the book, Airborne at War, Lieutenant-General Sir Napier Crookenden provides this description of British paratroopers boarding their aircraft at RAF Wethersfield in the early hours of the 24th. Crookenden, a senior airborne commander in the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, won the Distinguished Service Order while in command of the 9th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment at the Rhine crossings: “The men climbed in, sat down on the hard metal seats along the side of the fuselage, and strapped in. Our American pilots and crew-chief, a senior Warrant Officer, came down the fuselage, talking to the men and checked with me: ‘I’ll give a four minute red, OK?’ There was a lot of cheerful backchat and then the engines started. Soon we were taxying round towards the runway in a long queue to the sound of 160 Pratt and Whitney engines. I was sitting at the aft end of the stick, opposite the open door and had a good view of take-off. Our C-47 turned onto the runway, lined up with two others in a tight V-formation and all three set off together, the two outside aircraft tucking their wings in behind those of the leader.
The ubiquitous Zippo lighter.
“Thirty-one minutes later all eighty aircraft from Wethersfield were in the air and forming up into ‘nine ship elements,’ in three vics of three, and then into ‘serials’ of forty aircraft each.
“The rest of the American aircraft carrying British parachute troops took off without incident and on time, except at Chipping Ongar, where a V-1 buzz-bomb caused some excitement as it passed overhead just before take-off at nine minutes past seven. At Boreham, the IX Troop Carrier Command report states, ‘emplaning was briefly delayed, while the British finished their inevitable tea’.
“At Wavre in Belgium our column turned to the northeast, on course for the Rhine, and joined the 17th Airborne Division aircraft, coming up out of the southwest. Looking out of our starboard windows I could see their aircraft and gliders stretching back for miles, while from the door on our port side the parachute aircraft, tug aircraft and gliders of our own division from England were still coming up over the horizon. Ahead the two streams of aircraft, each nine aircraft wide, were flying on, side by side, towards the northeast. It was a thrilling sight and a massive demonstration of air power, never likely to be repeated.
“There was some singing in the early part of our three hour flight, but most of the men went to sleep or relapsed into the usual state of half-conscious, suspended animation, until the yell of ‘Twenty minutes to go’ woke us up and sent the adrenalin pumping through our veins.
“We were over the battle-scarred wilderness of the Reichswald and the terrible ruins of Goch, when the order ‘Stand up! Hook up!’ brought us to our feet. Each man fastened the snap-hook on the end of his parachute strop to the overhead cable, fixed the safety pin and turned aft, holding the strop of the man in front in his left hand and steadying himself with his right on the overhead cable. The stick commander, Sergeant Matheson, checked each man’s snap hook, we all checked the man in front and beginning with the last man of the stick shouted out in turn ‘Number Sixteen OK!—Number Fifteen OK!’ and so on down to myself at Number One.
“Just aft of the door stood the crew chief in his flying helmet and overalls, listening on the intercom for our pilot’s orders. I was watching the red and green lights above the door and I am sure the rest of the stick were too. The red light glowed, the crew chief yelled ‘Red on. Stand to the door’ and I moved forward, left foot first, until I was in the door with both hands holding the door edges, left foot on the sill and the slip stream blasting my face.
“Then the great, curving river was below me and seconds later, a blow on the back from the crew chief and a bellow of ‘Green On. Go!’ in my left ear sent me out into the sunlight. Once the tumbling and jerking were over and my parachute had developed, I had a wonderful view of the dropping zone right below me. I could see the double line of trees along the road on the west and the square wood in the middle of the DZ. The ground was already covered with the parachutes of the 8th and Canadian Battalions and I could see them running towards their objectives. There was a continuous rattle of machine-gun fire and the occasional thump of a mortar bomb or grenade, and during my peaceful minute of descent, I heard the crack and thump of two near misses. It was clearly a most accurate and concentrated drop and I felt a surge of confidence and delight.”
American General James Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, and flying with the British as an observer above the transport planes, recalled: “It was a new experience to fly an airborne mission, but not jump it. It was an indescribably impressive sight. Three columns, each nine ships or four double-tow gliders across, moved on the Rhine. On the far side of the river it was surprisingly dusty and hazy, no doubt caused by the earlier bombing and artillery fire. On the near bank of the Rhine, clearly visible were panel letters to guide the troop carrier pilots. Yellow smoke was also being used near the panels. It was hard to see how any pilot could make a serious navigational error. The air armada continued on and crossed the river. Immediately it was met by what seemed to me a terrific amount of flak. A number of ships and gliders went down in flames and after delivering their troops, a surprising number of troop carrier pilots we saw on their way back were flying aircraft that were afire. The crew I was with counted twenty-three ships burning in sight at one time. But the incoming pilots continued on their course, undeterred by the awesome spectacle ahead.”
Crookenden: “Over DZ ‘A’ seventy of our aircraft were hit by 20mm shells or machine gun bullets and our 316th Group commander’s lead aircraft was hit and set on fire, just as the last man jumped. Luckily the crew were all able to bale out safely.
“Things were rougher for the 5th Parachute Brigade on Dropping Zone ‘B’. Here the Dakotas from Boreham and Wethersfield dropped nearly 2,000 men of the 5th Brigade between three and eighteen minutes past ten, but they met a lot of flak. Two aircraft were hit and burning as they ran in, but kept a steady course until all had jumped. In other aircraft seven men got tangled in the strops and failed to jump. As the tight formation of 315 Group aircraft banked to port and began their turn for home, they ran into intense light flak from the German 7th Parachute Division in the woods near Mehr. Ten aircraft were shot down in the next minute and crashed east of the Rhine and seven came down in friendly territory west of the river. Seventy more were damaged, six aircrew were killed and fifteen wounded in the planes, and twenty were missing.
“The RAF Halifax, Stirling, and Dakota crews were briefed to release their gliders over the target area at 2,500 feet, in contrast to the American practice of releasing gliders at 600 feet, and this, coupled with the smoke and dust over the landing zones, resulted in only seven RAF aircraft being shot down and thirty-two damaged. 402 of the gliders were released at the right place, although a few of them were cast off too high at about 3,500 feet. Visibility was down to about 1,000 yards and the glider pilots’ difficulties were increased by intense machine-gun and artillery fire from the ground. Ten gliders were shot out of the sky and 284 more were damaged by flak. The gunners on a German 88 on Landing Zone ‘P’ caused a lot of damage and casualties, as they held their fire until a glider had touched down, traversed round as the glider made its landing run, and then fired, as the glider stopped. Thirty-two gliders were completely destroyed on the ground and thirty-eight more were under such heavy fire that their crews could not unload them.
A village road sign dedicated in Normandy in honor of Private O.A. Ham. 531st U.S. Army Engineers. Ham died in action June 10, 1944;
The stole of an American padre which was found on Omaha Beach after the D-Day landings;
A German machine-gun position at Pointe du Hoc, the site of an American cliff assault on an enemy gun battery, casemates, and a blockhouse.
“In spite of these hazards ninety per cent of the Horsas and Hamilcars landed on the correct zones and many of them within a few yards of their objective—a bridge, a farm, a corner of a wood, or a crossroads. In the British landings thirty-eight officers and sergeants of the Glider Pilot Regiment were killed, seventy-seven were wounded and 135 were missing. These were heavy losses, heavier than on the first day at Arnhem or in Normandy, and might have been heavier still if some of the American 513th Parachute Infantry had not been dropped by mistake on Landing Zones ‘P’ and ‘R’, and if both the American and the British glider men had not run straight from their various touch-down points to attack the German gunners.
“The crews of IX Troop Carrier Command were by now a disciplined, highly professional and experienced bunch, and although this particular group was probably one of the best, all of them could fly these tight, precise formations and knew the importance of a steady platform for their jumpers and an accurate and consistent tow for their gliders.
“Each aircrew member wore armor—flak helmet, flak vest, flak apron over the legs and a flak pan to sit on. He was armed with a trench knife and a Thompson sub-machine gun, a carbine or a Colt .45 pistol and each aircraft carried hand grenades. Most of the C-47s had by now been fitted with self-sealing fuel tanks, but they were still vulnerable to ground weapons, particularly as they ran in to a drop zone or a landing zone on a straight and level course at 110 mph and only 600 feet above the ground. Operation Varsity was the culmination of a lot of flying, and the American orders for it included the recommendation of each serial leader for the American Distinguished Flying Cross and of each aircrew member for the Air Medal.”
Operation Varsity successfully opened a northern route through Germany’s industrial centre. The cost, however, was high—1,111 Allied soldiers were killed. Among the glider pilots and transport aircraft pilots and crews, ninety-one were killed, with 280 wounded and 414 missing. Eighty aircraft were shot down.
Military historians have argued for years about the relative value of Varsity and the airborne phase of that operation. Some have claimed that it was unnecessary and that British Field Marshal Montgomery was merely “showboating” to enhance his own reputation. Monty denied such claims while asserting that the efforts of his men in driving an additional hole through the German front led to an insurmountable problem for Hitler’s forces. In general, Montgomery’s position has been supported historically.
