Seven hundred and fifty infantry soldiers successfully landed on Crete in gliders. The British army defenders on the island exacted a heavy toll on the 13,000 attacking German airborne troops.
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It became known as the “graveyard of the Germany airborne” division. It is regrettable that Allied military planners did not better heed the costly results of Germany’s May 1941 assault on Crete. They rode their gliders to the ground and into battle. and British doctrine made assault glider operations an integral part of the paratroop infantry, but the glider infantry did not wear parachutes. Marine glider pilot training started in November 1941 but the Marine Corps terminated the glider program in June 1943. The Marines’ first test flights of the XLRQ-1 amphibious assault glider using a Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boat and a Grumman J2F Duck amphibian happened in October 1942.
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The Marine Corps ordered “air troops” to form in October 1940 and began to consider how to use gliders in combat after the German airborne invasion of the Mediterranean island of Crete in May 1941. Navy ran their own independent glider programs. Even after stateside training increased, there was still a shortage of volunteers to train as glider pilots and in Europe, Army leaders had to order pilots from fighter and bomber units to join the glider forces. Army planners, training staff, and glider manufacturers could hardly keep up. The number of trained glider pilots General Arnold required grew from 1,000 to 6,000 by early 1942. companies contracted to build gliders completed a total of 13,909 Waco CG-4As before World War II ended.įrankfort TG-1A training glider at the National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. The glider was designed to land intact for use in repeated airborne assaults, but combat operations took their toll and most crash-landed, damaging many beyond repair. A tow plane such as the Douglas C-47 could haul the Waco at 150 mph and a skilled pilot could stop the glider in a few hundred feet, depending on the load carried and the ground conditions.
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The Waco could haul several different cargoes in addition to the pilot and copilot: 13 infantry soldiers and their gear a jeep and four passengers or a 75mm howitzer cannon and 18 rounds of ammunition plus three passengers. The production model weighed 3,900 pounds empty and could fly at an emergency weight of 9,000 pounds. Several different types and sizes of fighting gliders were built, but only the Waco Aircraft Company finished a prototype glider that could meet all of the Army’s structural and flight test requirements for the workhorse 15-seat type called the CG-4A. Some claimed that their factories were too small while others thought the whole idea untested and too risky. manufacturers of airplanes that were not already fulfilling government contracts for military aircraft were reluctant to get involved. The efforts to create a new military organization, equip it with new technology, and train operators and maintainers amounted to a wartime emergency that was troubled from the start. Army Air Forces Commanding General Hap Arnold ordered the development of an assault glider to carry 15 troops. In February 1941, based on information about the capture of Ft. Marine Corps started programs to design and build assault gliders and train and equip crews to fly them. Military planners around the world took note of Germany’s tactics that day. Other German troops aboard another 30 DFS 230 gliders attacked three bridges vital to the invasion of Belgium and France. The glider-borne German paratroops neutralized the ‘impregnable’ Ft. That day, 78 troops (and their equipment) boarded 11 DFS 230 assault gliders, which were towed by 11 German Ju 52 transports to a point 8,500 feet over Aachen, Germany, where the gliders released and coasted silently for 20 or so miles across a sliver of Holland before sliding to a landing inside the fort’s walls. Eben-Emael during World War II on May 10, 1940, showed a new way to do this: landing military gliders filled with infantry in precise locations. Germany’s surprise attack and swift victory over 650 troops stationed inside Ft. “…the combat glider, the only aircraft built to crash.”Ĭoncentration of force is the essence of military action.
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