Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin – The Glider Pilots of World War II, Scott McGaugh

Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin – The Glider Pilots of World War II, Scott McGaugh

The combat glider is a weapon whose career was almost entirely contained within the Second World War. In 1940 the Germans demonstrated that a well planned and executed glider attack could be highly effective, when a small glider force landed on top of the powerful Belgian Fort Eben Emael. In the following year the German glider force captured Crete, but at such high cost that Hitler forbade them from ever beening used the same way again. However by this point the Allies had already been convinced that the combat glider was worth developing, and both Britain and American began to task of designing and building gliders and creating and training pilots to fly them.

This book combines a history of the American glider force with many eyewitness accounts from the glider pilots themselves, taking use through the dangerous years of training, the slow development of a doctrine for their use, and their actual use in combat.

Two things really stand out from this account. First, the speed with which the US glider force was created, going from nothing at the start of 1941 to a powerful military force by 1944-45. Second, the relatively small number of missions actually carried out by the glider forces – Sicily, Normandy, the south of France, Bastogne, Market-Garden and the crossing of the Rhine. It still comes as something of a surprise to realise that the famous glider assaults on D-Day were only the second time the western Allies had actually used their gliders in combat, and that the first attempt, the invasion of Sicily, had been close to a disaster. A long flight in the dark across the Mediterranean was followed by a disastrous flight across the Allied invasion fleet, which saw nervous gunners across the fleet open fire on the gliders. Worse weather than expected and an inflexible plan meant that many gliders were released too far out to sea to reach Sicily, and many glider pilots and their passengers drowned.

The British image of the glider missions on D-Day is dominated by Pegasus Bridge, where the gliders arrived exactly where they wanted to, and the bridge was quickly captured. However the wider picture is one of some chaos, with gliders scattered across large parts of Normandy. Each mission saw some lessons learned from the previous ones, but seem to introduce new mistakes of their own! I wasn’t familiar with the use of gliders during the battle of the Bulge, where crucial supplies were flown into Bastogne by gliders in some of the most costly missions of the entire war. 

The eyewitness accounts are at the heart of this book. Just about all of the pilots who we hear from saw some of their friends killed, either in the air, while attempting to land, or in combat once on the ground. Even after they had managed to land their fragile gliders in fields that almost always turned out to be smaller or rougher than expected the danger wasn’t over. In most missions the successful glider pilot would then be stuck with the airborne forces behind enemy lines, waiting for the ground forces to reach them so they could return to their units. In some cases they were forced into combat as infantrymen, adding another peril to the many they already faced. 

The result is a memorable account of the risks faced by the glider pilots as they took part in a series of the most significant Allied assaults of the Second World War in un-powered and largely unproven aircraft, flying a type of mission with no precedents, and where the doctrine was largely being developed one mission at a time.

Chapters
1 – Guts and Gliders Wanted
2 – Crashing is a Lonely Sound
3 – ‘Prepare to Ditch’
4 – Pea Patch Savior
5 – Popcorn Popping
6 – ‘The Germans Are Coming!’
7 – ‘Our Men Were Lucky’
8 – Like Hornets at a Church Cookout
9 – They Were Invisible
10 – The Hole in the Donut
11 – Beyond Commendation
12 – World War II’s Orphans
13 – Epilogue

Author: Scott McGaugh
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Publisher: Osprey
Year: 2023


Help - F.A.Q. - Contact Us - Search - Recent - About Us - Privacy