Gliders and gliding had been central to German aviation since the nineteenth century. When the Third Reich weaponized every aspect of flight in the 1930s, the new Luftwaffe’s pilots trained on gliders. Large gliders delivered German troops and weapons onto the battlefield, along with paratroopers. The widely reported successes of German glider troops in 1940-41 – Fort Ében-Émael, the Netherlands, Crete – led to both Britain and the US starting large-scale efforts to design, build, and operate military gliders and to organize units that would fly into combat aboard them.
In the US, the glider program became the responsibility of the Army Air Forces, which, until then, had little interest in gliders. The Army’s new airborne divisions – two at first, eventually five – relied on combined-arms air assault and resupply capabilities made possible by these gliders. The US was able to send large glider-borne forces into combat starting with their disastrous use in the invasion of in Sicily in 1943, and following with Anglo-American air assaults in Normandy, southern France, the Netherlands, and Germany, the latter a costly success as Operation Varsity crossed the Rhine.
This book’s subject is the US Army Air Forces' glider pilots in the European Theater of operations (ETO), including the origins of the glider pilot program, production of gliders, and how they came together in the combat. This is not, to use the cliché, an “untold story”. There have already been several books on US gliders, as well as an extensive literature of unit histories and operational accounts of their combat use. This book differs by relying primarily on accounts by glider pilots that are held by a number of archives, most notably the Texas-based Silent Wings Museum (which also exhibits a rare, restored WACO CG-4A glider). Many of these are oral history accounts, made decades after the event. While the author does not directly cite the mission reports, operational records, and unit histories held by the National Archives in Washington, DC, and the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, comparing the oral histories with contemporaneous accounts would make both more valuable.
The author successfully uses this material to tell the stories of a number of glider pilots, their training, and their combat missions, showing them as individuals and describing their motivations and the conditions under which they lived, trained, and flew. Though the author focusses on the hazards and successes of individual pilots and their missions, the book provides insights on the whole airborne operations capability made possible by gliders.
The research and writing are both well done, although there are a few glitches that should have fallen to an editor’s red pen. The total lack of maps is also a drawback, especially when there are several non-copyright sources that could have provided them. Mentioned only briefly are specialized glider units (often overshadowed by the parachute infantry), glider development, the war against Japan, the Marine Corps glider program (which never saw combat) and the parallel British glider effort. Also not covered is the technique, used only a few times for casualty evacuation in the ETO, of glider pick-up by a low-flying hook-equipped aircraft, certainly a dramatic enough way of getting airborne to be worth mentioning.
Wartime gliders were expendable, their passengers less so – ten percent losses were the best-case planning estimate – but both were doomed unless the glider pilots were able to survive both the enemy and the laws of gravity. As the title suggests, many did not. The author’s narrative contains much about the losses glider operations entailed, not all inflicted by the enemy. Gliders came apart in mid-air, their pilots and passengers doomed by failures in construction or in assembly (gliders were shipped overseas crated as kits). There are certainly enough fatal crashes – many of them terribly avoidable – to hold any reader’s attention. Yet the author provides numbers that show that pilot fatalities were about evenly divided between combat and accidents, causation similar to the losses experienced by US Navy pilots. Except for missions where things went horribly wrong, like Sicily, glider pilots had a better chance of surviving than many bomber crews.
Our Reviewer: David Isby’s writings on current and historical airpower include The Decisive Duel: Spitfire vs. 109 (London: Little Brown, 2012) and Fighter Combat in the Jet Age (London: Harper Collins, 1997) and articles for Air International, Air Forces Monthly and other magazines. A veteran historian, defense analyst, and war game designer, Isby has quite a number of other books, articles, and games to his credit covering the Second World War, the military institutions of the Soviet Union, and military aviation in general. During the Soviet-Afghan War he observed the fighting on the front lines, and he is the author of Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires: A New History of the Borderland (New York: Pegasus, 2011). His previous reviews include A Military History of Afghanistan, The Elite: The A–Z of Modern Special Operations Forces, Taranto and Naval Air Warfare in the Mediterranean, Airpower in the War against ISIS, Korean Air War: Sabres, MiGs and Meteors, 1950–53, How the Army Made Britain a Global Power, Modern South Korean Air Power, Dirty Eddie's War, Air Battle for Moscow, 1941-1942, The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, A History of the Mediterranean Air War, 1940-45, Volume Five, From the Fall of Rome to the End of the War, 1944-1945, The Mighty Eighth, Under the Southern Cross: The South Pacific Air Campaign Against Rabaul, Rearming the RAF for the Second World War , Red Dragon 'Flankers': China's Prolific 'Flanker' Family, The Cactus Air Force, Eagles Overhead, and Bomber Command.
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Note: Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin is also available in e-editions.
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