Silent Wings at War: Combat Gliders in World War II - Net Assessment - Book Review

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2003 by Robert B. Kane

by John L. Lowden. Smithsonian Institution Press (http://www.sipress.si.edu), 750 Ninth Street NW, Suite 4300, Washington, D.C. 20560-0950, 2002, 304 pages, $19.95 (softcover).

In September 1944 Walter Cronkite, then a war correspondent for United Press International in Europe, flew in a US Waco combat glider during Operation Market Garden--a poorly conceived and executed airborne assault on Holland designed to capture three critical bridges leading to the Rhine River. In the foreword to John Lowden's Silent Wings at War, Cronkite writes of his first--and only--glider flight: I'll tell you straight out: If you've got to go into combat, don't go by glider. Walk, crawl, parachute, swim, float--anything. But don't go by glider." His remarks capture the essence of the Allies' use of gliders in combat during World War II--harrowing, dangerous, and costly in terms of equipment and human casualties.

Lowden, one of the heroic glider pilots who managed to survive, chronicles the origins of these aircraft and the use of the American Waco and British Horsa gliders in seven major airborne assaults in World War II. As a second lieutenant, the author served in the 1st Allied Airborne Army in Europe, receiving the Air Medal with Bronze Oak Leaf Cluster, Presidential Unit Citation, Bronze Arrowhead of initial assault troops, and seven unit battle stars. His book blends his personal experience as a pilot with both the history of combat gliders and the accounts of 39 other combat glider veterans. As a result, Silent Wings at War is more than just a memoir; it is a fast-paced history of this most dangerous of air missions--one inadequately covered by the historiography of World War II.

Lowden begins with his own history and moves into the beginning of the war. He documents his enlistment in the US Army and his training as a glider pilot; provides a vivid picture of an aircraft made of steel tubing, plywood, and canvas, loaded with equipment and/or troops, and towed by a C-47; and paints a vivid picture of what it was like to pilot this fragile craft as it glided to what one hoped would be a sale, uneventful landing. In reality, as Lowden relates, the typical glider landing was bumpy--so much so that the aircraft was often either damaged or destroyed.

The author then addresses in detail how the Allies employed gliders in combat--including Sicily, Normandy, Holland, and Burma. One gets the impression that the planners of the European operations had great expectations that the gliderborne troops would accomplish their missions but little understanding of the hazards involved. In virtually every one of these operations, "whatever could go wrong, did." For example, British and American naval gunners of the invasion fleet off the coast of Sicily shot up Allied formations flying from North Africa before the tow planes released their gliders. Time and again, pilots of the tow planes broke off too early, enemy ground tire took its toll on the gliders, and many of them failed to find their assigned landing zones. At least 25 percent of the gliders used in each of the three major European glider operations were too severely damaged to be flown again or were destroyed in flight or upon landing.

After I finished reading this book, I wondered, like Walter Cronkite, why anyone in his right mind would fly a glider at all--not to mention repeatedly. Many of them had washed out of pilot training, some volunteered, and others were drafted into glider training. Those like Lowden, who continued to fly gliders, were in a special class--equal to the bravest of the fighter and bomber pilots of World War II. They had the guts to fly an unprotected, unarmored wooden crate to an unknown landing zone, miles into enemy territory--usually at night. The fact that many of them survived multiple operations under these conditions is a testament to their courage, skill, and sheer luck in what was probably the most hazardous flying mission of World War II.

Lt Col Robert B. Kane, USAF

Maxwell AFB, Alabama