 Hi, I'm Scott McGaw, author of The Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin, and it's my pleasure to share a remarkable slice of the silent generation on this, the 79th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy. The glider pilots of World War II, I think, are a largely unrecognized and underappreciated part of the greatest generation. Young volunteers who volunteered to fly one-way combat missions with no motors, no parachutes, no second chances in World War II. Young men whose, I think, legacy needs to be recognized, and today, the anniversary of Normandy is a perfect place to do that. They place their fate of their lives, of their families, in the hands of this man, a most unlikely chief of the Army Air Corps, General Hap Henry Arnold. He was an average, barely got into West Point, an average cadet. He graduated 66 out of a class of 111. He did not have very good prospects as a career Army officer, decided to volunteer for something called the Aviation Program and promptly developed a fear of flying and refused to fly for three years. And yet, by the mid-1930s, he had developed a reputation for being a great leader, being very devoted to research and development of military aviation, which was a critical need in the late 1930s. And then, of course, along came Pearl Harbor. It was only a few months after that that he ordered the design of a glider and training programs for its use, something, again, that had not existed before the war, an aircraft that did not exist at the time of Pearl Harbor. And by 1942, he had put together a plan in place so that there would be 5,000 glider pilots, a group of men that you and I had barely heard about 79 years later. And there would be about 5,000 gliders. It was the start of a program that got going by fits and starts in a way. The initial requirements to get into the program were very stringent. Flying experience was required. A shortage of applicants as a result, most young men wanted to be fighter pilots or bomber pilots in those days. So he ordered a reduction in the qualifications. And pretty soon, there were 10,000 young Americans who left home or were already in the Army and now volunteering to be trained to fly an aircraft that they couldn't see yet. They didn't know what it was going to be, but they were willing to serve and sacrifice, I think, in a most remarkable way. And this is what they flew. Some called it the flying component. In reality, it was very sturdy, but certainly vulnerable to enemy fire. Just imagine being inside flying one of these things, towed behind the C-47 plane, about a football field behind. The glider was about 48 feet long, 84 feet wide, literally made of steel tubing covered with reinforced fabric. It was a flying box kite, some people said. It was just a remarkably primitive, if you will, in some ways aircraft, certainly by bomber or fighter standards, only five controls. And yet somehow this aircraft contained 70,000 pieces. Perhaps the most sophisticated part of it was a plywood floor, a honeycomb plywood floor, to be able to hold the payload in terms of, and we'll get into that in just a moment. Imagine volunteering to be towed behind a plane like this within range of enemy fire, 100, 125, maybe a little faster miles per hour. Be towed anywhere from 500 to 2,000 feet off the ground. Be released from that cable, which is really a nylon rope, only one inch in diameter. You're trusting that to keep you airborne for hours before you got to the battlefield. And then drop and land as quickly as you could with a descent rate of 950 feet per minute under most circumstances. Just a remarkable way to do battle, to flying into battle. Again, something that the world had never seen before, but given the realities of World War II combat, it was something that was necessary. And there were young men who were willing to do exactly that. I think it's important to take a look inside the gliders. This really begins to give you and me a sense of what these young men were willing to do. And it was certainly evident in all of their writings after the war, their letters home, the interviews they gave later, and life, and so on. The two pilots you see on the left sat up in a cockpit exposed on all three sides by plexiglass. That's not much reinforcement or protection when you're flying within range of enemy fire. Couple feet behind them might have been a smaller artillery piece, a jeep, a trailer, ammunition, ordnance, or they might have been carrying 13 glider infantry reinforcements into battle. Not only were the pilots, but these infantry men were motorless and defenseless as well. I think it's just a remarkable way of going to battle. And yet they were willing to do that inside a glider that was basically the size of a B-25 bomber to put it in perspective. One of the most remarkable aspects of this invention was that that entire cockpit was hinged so it would be lifted up and out of the way once the glider landed so that the cargo could be unloaded. The glider itself weighed about 3,700 pounds and carried about that much weight in terms of ordnance and supplies and so on. So almost when you think about it, 37,100 pounds of cargo, the glider weighed 3,700 pounds, you're talking about close to a four ton, fully loaded aircraft with no motors, no parachutes, no second chances on its way to combat. And I can't imagine what those young men thought in the back, sometimes flying for hours, largely in the dark, from England to the battlefield on the continent. And yet they did that on every mission that the glider pilots flew. But let's take a moment and talk about gliders and why there are gliders. Obviously it wasn't something that was around it in World War I, advances from one war to the next in weaponry and technology and tactics. The battlefield realities require new inventions, literally on the fly at the start of each war. And gliders were certainly one of those thanks to General Arnold. The basic concept was called vertical envelopment. And the idea, it was this on the right hand side. This is Operation Neptune, Normandy, 79 years ago today. The troops are coming ashore at Utah and Omaha. The Germans obviously are in place. They've been dug in there for years with emplacements that were fully trained on the beach. Well, obviously in order to really be effective and somewhat reduce casualties of the troops coming ashore, the concept was through vertical envelopment to land paratroopers and then gliders behind the front line. In this particular case, six, seven, eight, nine, maybe 10 miles behind the front line. The DZs being the drop zones, the LZs being the landing zones relatively close to one another for the gliders. And the whole notion was that by landing troops and supplies behind the front lines, they would be in a position to stall German reinforcements coming forward, perhaps being in a position to secure routes from the beach inland. A number of things like that resupply each other while the troops fought their way from the beach inland across Normandy's fields and checkerboard fields and hedge rows and that sort of thing. Something that I didn't realize and maybe others don't either is that a paratrooper only carried a day or two or so of supplies with him. And that makes sense when you think about how those guys were being delivered to the battlefield under parachutes. So once they landed in enemy territory, immediately engaging and being engaged by the enemy, it was critical that they be resupplied and that was the primary role of the gliders. As we talked about just a moment ago, the gliders brought in reinforcements, brought in ammunition, communication supplies, medical personnel, communication teams, all manner of things to keep the paratroopers armed, equipped, and able to do battle and basically hang on until the troops coming ashore could link up. So vertical development was the concept. It was employed at every major invasion across Europe, the continent, and gliders played and the glider pilots played a crucial role in that. And we're gonna see here as we walk through some of their missions to give you an idea of just the extraordinary bravery and dedication and willingness to sacrifice that I think makes this slice of the greatest generation just so remarkable. I think it's worth taking a moment just to pause and look at these faces. These were the glider pilots. Some of them were a year or two out of high school. I won't tell you what my priorities were when I was 20, 21 years of age. Some were already in the army, miserable in their posting. Some were married with young children, wives and young children back home. Some of them volunteered for the glider corps simply thinking it was a better way than walking into war to do their part in World War II. Their faces just tell such a marvelous story. I could make up a story or concoct a story for each one of these young men just looking at them and also wondering how what they were feeling and how they were sacrificed, why they would do this? Why they would sign up for an aircraft that wasn't yet invented for a battle tactic, aviation tactic that had never been tried before starting with Normandy 79 years ago today. But they were willing to do that. If there was one thing that I think bonded them all together, nearly everyone in their records that I read, their personal accounts had a love of flying. Some of them already had private pilot's licenses in high school. Some built a couple of cases gliders and towed them behind their cars on airstrips just to get up in the air. And so they volunteered for an aspect of the aviation community, if you will. That was something of a stepchild, especially in the beginning. They were given hand-me-down uniforms and weaponry from the airborne. Beyond that, they flew among strangers. There were many, many occasions when these men, look at these faces, these men would walk up to their glider at four in the morning getting ready to take off at two, two hours later and meet their co-pilots for the first time. And then get in, strap in and take off. And they'd be taking off behind C-47s and their air crews who were told strangers as well. These guys didn't meet each other. Glider pilots were often assigned from one carrier group to another. So it was strangers flying with strangers. Perhaps these young men, before they strapped in, gotten back and introduced themselves, or said hello to the glider infantry who were trusting them to get them to the battlefield several hours away. The amount of trust, training and teamwork was just extraordinary as you read their records, you read their memoirs, their letters home to their families and read the letters coming back from their families to these guys that they would get weeks, perhaps even months, sometimes later. It's important that when we talk about the battles and so on, we remember these faces that this is the real story. This is the soul of brotherhood and the flying coffin as it is with all of the greatest generation, whether they were at sea, on the shore, on land, or in gliders, great faces, great stories behind each one of these. They volunteered to do this, learn how to fly a plane that again wasn't invented. It was a race to put together training programs at various training schools around the country in 1942. Some of them were so primitive that ropes were thrown over the roofs of temporary barracks so these glider pilots could hold onto the ropes during wind storms so they wouldn't be blown away. In the prairies of America, thunderstorms would flood the tents at other camps. One training program was so primitive that it was closed within a few weeks because the sulfur water there was undrinkable as they learned how to fly. And when they learned how to glide, I should say, they initially started in gliders, commercial civilian gliders, whose design was to stay up in the air. Well, they were supposed to be training to get down on the ground as quickly as possible. No one wanted to stay up in the air at 1,000 feet, 500 feet, 200 feet under enemy fire, but they were waiting for the combat glider to be invented and it was gonna take a little bit of time. So for almost a year, these young men were training in aircrafts that helped to some extent, but the real training began when the combat gliders finally came online, largely in 1943. It was a disaster in many ways to begin with. The manufacturing process, the rush to engage contractors with no glider experience to build these resulted in a number of disasters. The photo on the left and at the bottom reflects an event in 1943 when Robertson aircraft showed off one of its gliders at a public event with the top officials of the company, the St. Louis mayor, I believe the president of the chamber of commerce as the VIP crew on the second flight of the day a wing fell off. And seconds later from that photo on the upper left, all those men were killed instantly. A national controversy to some extent had really shown a light on how difficult it was to not just invent a glider, but to establish production standards that would enable them to be reliable. The photo top right is one of my favorites in a sense that one glider pilot wrote that while his instructor was speaking to a group of students about a glider, he literally leaned his arm up against one of those wing struts, the wing fell off, literally sitting there on the ground. I can't imagine going through the training, not being at all sure whether the glider you were being trained for would hold up when you took off. One manufacturer, 95% of his glued parts failed because he was being built in Florida in humidity, produce a horrible failure rate. Another one was trying to build gliders under a circus tent in Florida. That didn't work once a hurricane came along and blew the whole shoot and match away. Inspectors discovered that one contractor was building a prototype inside a dry cleaning plant with the wings sticking out the windows. It's probably a good thing. I suspect that many of the glider pilots didn't know most of this because it was such a fiasco. Some contractors included Steinway pianos, a casket maker, H.J. Hines. It was a real complex web of construction and development and quality control while these men were training to go to battle. And as a result, training could be every bit as deadly. They have a tow rope wrapped around the tail of a glider upper right and took away the tail. That's what would happen. Glider pilots had to learn how not to stand up their gliders up on the nose, right where they were sitting, lower right hand, otherwise you can imagine the casualties and the result of that. Or losing your way, getting disoriented in the dark and landing in a patch of a brush or a stand of trees instead of the prairie, much less a landing zone or a runway while you're learning how to fly these cumbersome beasts. Finally, in 1943, the first mission came and it was a disaster, perhaps almost predictably. It was the invasion of Sicily, largely a British operation with almost 50 American gliders, two dozen American glider pilots. It was put together and the glider portion was planned, was changed so often, so late in the game that there was no real training, no rehearsal. It was a horribly planned mission in many ways. The gliders were spoke, pilots had to fly across the Mediterranean at night over the Allied air, landing force hoping they wouldn't be fired on, approaching the enemy that had artillery in three different locations. In many ways, perhaps the worst part of this mission was that the tow planes were ordered to stay outside artillery range, they therefore released the gliders so far at sea, they had no chance of even getting to Sicily, to land, to the landing zones. And the few that did prove to be flammable, another risk that I'm sure they probably didn't talk much about in training. As a result, the losses were huge. As you can see here, I won't read them all to you, you can see very quickly just how bad the results were. Well, the Allies did take Sicily, I think about eight weeks later, there was so much damage, so much loss for the gliders. General Eisenhower wasn't sure whether the airborne tactic gliders and paratroopers of much more than a battalion in size had any real merits in the rest of the war. It was really a major question whether Normandy was gonna take place. And at this point, Normandy was about 11 months away. So a lot of work had to be done if this was going to become anything significant. And certainly it was. These young men, 79 years ago yesterday, were being told getting the brief, getting ready to fly over Normandy into combat for the very first time. I'll just let you look at these photos, look at these faces. I can't imagine what they were wondering. They were gonna be flying six miles inland into enemy territory, land in enemy territory, be under fire immediately in places like this. The intelligence they received was faulty at best. Hedge rows weren't hedges, they were tall trees, 30, 40 feet in size. The landing zones were actually small farm fields, often too small for some gliders. What would look like in photos of clear fields were actually flooded fields. One glider pilot shared a story that he looked for fields with cattle in it because he figured that perhaps that was a field the Germans had not planted mines in because the French farmers knew that. But this is the reality they faced on their first combat mission. The fields were so small that many glider pilots talked about literally flying through a row of trees to try to slow down their gliders, knock off their wings and somehow come to a stop. These are the larger British firsts of gliders that were much more dependent on larger fields but it was also the same for the American gliders as well. So if they weren't crash landings, they were certainly hard landings to such an extent that literally pilots, glider pilots tried to find ways to slow down by crashing in some respects while preserving their cargo and certainly the lives of their glider infantry. One last look to give you a quick sense of what it would look like from 1,000 feet up or 500 feet up. A landing zone is not an airport. I was surprised to kind of learn that I guess that a landing zone for the gliders might be three or four or even five dozen small farm fields or pastures or just open areas. And when you were released at only 500 feet or 600 feet, the idea was to pick a spot, get down as quickly as you can, deliver your cargo, deliver your infantry and hopefully survive for the next mission. Many, many times glider pilots wrote about the fact that it wasn't just finding a field to land in in a matter of a minute or two, but also the co-pilot watching for other gliders coming into the same field, avoiding mid-air collisions which unfortunately were not always avoided by any stretch. It was chaos in the sky time and time again and certainly 79 years ago today, six waves of gliders, about 500 over two days discovered that this was the reality of glider warfare and what they would have to face in future combat missions throughout the war. These gliders were remarkably sturdy. As I mentioned earlier, the casualty rates for glider pilots was not nearly as high as what some senior officers had feared in the beginning. And yet, as you can see, this was not all that unusual in the sense that only one in 30 gliders were able to be used again, following Normandy. The original concept, they would be reusable to some extent, didn't work out that way. And yet the program was, the mission was extremely successful. You can see here just how much the gliders were able to deliver in two days basically, as they say, six waves of gliders, about 500 of them. I think equally even more important is Utah Beach where the airborne support focused. Casualties on the beach were only about 1%. Omaha, not far away, casualties were closer to 7% of the troops coming ashore. So certainly airborne, the paratroopers and certainly the gliders contributed not only to success, but also saved lives, really proved the concept, although they were test pilots from one mission to the next. And as we'll see, glider warfare changed to some extent, although certainly not their bravery or their willingness to sacrifice. Operation Dragoon was only two months later in Southern France, coming in from the Southeast. As you can see again, it was chaos in the sky in many ways. This time fog was the enemy as much as the Germans were. Like Sicily, the Allied ships off the coast mistakenly fired on the gliders as they passed overhead. Communication coordination between the Navy and the Air Corps still wasn't as effective as it could be or should be or would become later on. I just mentioned the notion of test pilots. And in many ways that was the case. One mission to the next, hopefully they would learn from one mission and make changes and adjustments to the next mission. They weren't always successful Allied ship firings on the glider pilots was an example of that. And yet this one was, again, very successful. This time you can see the accuracy of getting the gliders to the landing zones had increased exponentially from Sicily and more so from Normandy, a great amount of supplies were delivered. Operation Dragoon, of course, was successful and it wasn't long before following Dragoon that because of Dragoon and Normandy, the Russians were soon on their heels backtracking to the East, to the Rhine River. Gliders, the paratroopers, the airborne certainly played a key role in that development at that point. But again, let's pause for just a minute and look at these guys, the glider pilots. Remember those faces we saw a few minutes ago? Well, in many ways, once they got into battle, they were homeless, they were leaderless, they were damn courageous and they had a reputation as being Rapscallians. They were the only unit that I know of in the war that did not have a highly structured command structure and orders, combat orders, once they got on the ground. They reported to their senior glider pilot or combat guy, but fundamentally, once they got to the on the ground, they engaged obviously in enemy fire, returned enemy fire with the Germans and things were secured, their orders were simply get back to base. And if you're in Normandy, that could be back to base in England or Southern France, get back to Italy. Sometimes they would have to hitchhike their way back, common year jeeps or whatever to get back to the beach and hitchhike on a ship or a plane, back to their bases. And there were some that took a few extra days to do that, maybe even a few extra weeks. And those Rapscallians who went on sight, seeing tours on their way back to the bases gave glider pilot something of a checkered reputation, if you will, but nonetheless, these were, I think, incredibly courageous men willing to take on impossible odds, if you will. And maybe they deserve a little break in some ways, but the way they were treated, the way they were organized, commanded was odd and certainly not typical to say the least once they got on the ground. Operation Market Garden, a bridge too far. Certainly a mission that most of us are very familiar with, a huge mission for the gliders. Just imagine 1,900 gliders over a week in the attempt to get to the Arnhem Bridge and the British troops on the ground. This was a mission that I think in some ways encapsulated a lot of what these glider pilots, like that young gentleman in the upper left-hand corner, endured. The go-ahead was given for the mission only four days in advance because of challenges with the weather. The weather was often the enemy of glider pilots and airborne operations. That meant that they had very little time to get as organized and rehearse. In fact, no real true mission rehearsals that should have taken place were able to take place in this case. Some of the waves of gliders had to cross 80 miles of enemy territory. I just can't imagine being towed at 700 or 800 feet an enemy fire, especially if you're the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth wave. So there is no element of surprise whatsoever. The Germans are locked on, they've got your altitude down pat and here you go straight through the artillery bursts behind those C-47s, along for the ride, if you will, in some respects, before you even get to the battlefield. But that's what they did. The photo on the left gives you a sense of just how big these airborne missions were, these glider missions, particularly in this case. One of the things that I found most fascinating about this mission and reading the reports from the glider pilots is this one was so large, there weren't enough glider-trained co-pilots. So in many, many cases, the ranking airborne infantrymen in the back was given a five minute brief on the tarmac strapped into the co-pilot seat and these trained glider pilots completed this mission without a trained co-pilot next to them. I can't imagine how they must have felt, what it must have taken to do that, and yet they did and were extremely successful once again, despite the lack of rehearsals and the delays because of the weather and so on. These are extraordinary numbers of what the gliders delivered. I'll just let you glance at those for a minute. It's the fact that they were able to do that under such difficult conditions, such intense enemy fire over such a long period of time. In fact, at one point, one wave of gliders, only 50% of them were able to get close to their landing zones, only about a 50% effective rate. Others achieved a far higher rate, but for such a mission, it took such a long period of time over so many days, it's understandable that the losses here mounted extraordinarily in some ways. And in some cases, glider pilots engaged in outright infantry duty for several days, a week or more in some cases, as they did in Normandy, before they finally made it back to base. The only mission that was a humanitarian mission for the glider pilots was Bastogne. The Battle of the Bulge only a few, couple of months, three months after Market Garden in September. As most people know, the 101st was surrounded in short order by a surprise German offensive at basically at Christmas, December of 1944. They soon began to run out of supplies. They were not anticipating that, and as usual, they had only brought a few days supplies. General Patton had launched a rescue mission from the south, but was still days away. So the Airborne turned to gliders, as well as C-47s resupply missions. One glider team delivered a medical team that was critically needed one day, along with some other supplies following that one in the afternoon. It was really a two day mission. The following day, another 50 some gliders flew the same mission, supplying inside the encirclement by the Germans. I think one of the things that was, there's a couple of things about this mission that just are chilling to me. Many of them were carrying so much fuel for the tanks and so on, that a conscious decision was made not to include a trained glider whole pilot on the mission. That if these gliders were hit by enemy fire, the odds are that this high explosive cargo would explode and there was no point losing two trained glider pilots when you could lose only one. I'm not sure these guys knew that at the time, but that certainly came out in the records following the battle and following the war. The other thing that is particularly tragic about Operation Repulse is the second day, the major part of the rescue relief mission by the gliders. Earlier that, earlier late in the afternoon of the previous day, Patton's lead tanks had broken through. They had opened a corridor that would have been a safer route for the glider pilots than what the initial glider pilots had flown. That word did not get to the glider pilots in time. So their senior officers made a decision minutes before takeoff basically to fly the same route as the first group had the day before. Once again, no element of surprise. The Germans knew exactly where they were coming from, almost precisely what the altitude was going to be, and it turned into a humanitarian mission that really became a shooting gallery for these four glider pilots that you see some of them on the lower right hand. To give you a sense of how horrific conditions these young men faced, the last squadron of gliders who that flew into Bastogne, 12 gliders, eight pilots became prisoners of war, three became, were killed in action and only one returned to base after hiding for a day from the enemy. Somewhat ironic I suppose at such losses were it was stained on a humanitarian mission. And to many glider pilots points of view and I think deservedly so, many of them kind of had a chip on their shoulder the rest of their lives from this mission, feeling that Patton got all the credit for the tanks coming up and movies being made and so on from the south for Bastogne when in fact they had played a key role as well as the resupply aircraft and so on. They never really got the credit. They felt they deserved and frankly, I'd have to agree with them, that's indeed the case. The last major mission of the war was Operation Varsity crossing the Rhine River into the Fatherland. Another incredibly dangerous mission, the landing zones were not secured by paratroopers this time around, they all went in at the same time. It was the largest one day use of gliders in the war, about 900. They flew about six miles, as you can see on the map into Germany, landed immediately surrounded once again and took enemy fire and fought their way from there. This was the first time to some extent that the glider pilots actually had some degree of combat duty, if you will. They were basically all assigned a secondary combat mission, if you will, not necessarily frontline but from taking up defensive positions. One other distinctive part, element rather of this mission, it was the first all officer combat unit of glider pilots was formed, 288 glider pilots were assigned, temporarily assigned as a combat unit and lo and behold, played a key role in the battle. This is a photo from another, I believe, market garden but I wanted to include it here because of the combat role of the glider pilots in Operation Varsity. And it's something that really struck me when I visited and researched this book and other previous books on the battlefields in Europe. War is incredibly intimate, even for airborne pilots like glider pilots, they'd get out of their gliders, they'd often be under enemy fire, they'd return fire from behind the fuselage, maybe sprint to a wood lot, some trees, find a place to dig in and continue to return fire. There's a glider pilot, you can see the helmet, there's another one. You can get a sense that this wasn't something where you landed your glider, unloaded, and hustled back to base by any stretch of the imagination. But getting back to Operation Varsity, you can see a sense on a one day mission, basically a four hour mission, just what kind of results they were able to achieve, critical, again, resupplying those paratroopers a massive invasion and yet it was one that the glider pilots paid a huge price for. 86 men were killed that day on Operation Varsity, more than Normandy and Market Garden, those were four and five day missions combined. Glider pilots paid an increasingly horrific toll, it seemed, from one mission to the next. And yet they forged a legacy that I think is just extraordinary. I've just quickly walked through five major missions in only nine months, in about a year, from 79 years ago today, in 1944, to surrender in May, in 1945. They did rely on faith, trust, training, and teamwork in each other. Again, looking at those faces, you just get a sense. I wonder what they were thinking. These men, I think this was just before Market Garden. Perhaps they had flown, some of them had flown two or three missions. Perhaps they had probably seen their buddies' private belongings boxed up, the buddies who didn't return from one mission and shipped home and a newcomer take the bunk next to them before the next mission. I wonder what they were thinking at this point. This photo was taken long before the end of the war was in sight and yet they responded to the call time and time again. And it's that legacy that we should remember today because there are very few of them left. This photo was taken a few years ago. When I was younger, I probably passed old men like this and the grocery store or Home Depot and didn't give them a second thought. Now looking back for all I know, they could have been glider pilots or infantry or submariners or my dad who fought Army Corps of Engineers but they came home, glider pilots silently as they flew to the battlefields and rejoined, resumed their lives, reconnected with their families and went on about their business in many ways, silently with very little fanfare, not nearly the number of citations that they should have received. Consider this, every time one of these men got in a glider and flew a mission, he earned an air medal. That's the equivalent of a bronze star. Remarkable when you think about it. Bomber pilots needed five missions for an air medal. Fighter pilots, 10 missions. These men earned one every single time they got in their glider to fly against seemingly impossible odds. Yet they did as silently as the gliders were and then came home and went about their business while the glider program was dismantled very shortly after the war. It's a unique obituary in some respects. Toward the end of the war, something called the helicopter came along that required far less resources and towing troops or gliders into battle. It was far more efficient and so they were declared surplus and they were sold as surplus. A glider required five enormous wooden crates to be shipped to Europe. Those five crates with a glider inside sold for $75 after the war and that $75 bought you 10,000 linear feet of grade A lumber. That's what people bought more than anything else. Living rooms, family rooms, bedrooms, decks, barns were built with glider shipping crates. Well, almost no gliders, none that I'm aware of were reserved for future museums and memorials and tributes to these young heroes who did so much for a country in such a short amount of time. I don't usually have a lot of slides with a lot of text but there are a couple here that I think really drive home. This part of the greatest generation that I suppose in many ways was the silent part of the greatest generation. Harry Loftus wrote, I keep getting flashback of things that happened. I had high school friends and college friends, frat brothers, but I never put them close to the category that I do of those glider pilots. Courage that you would never believe. I can't begin to adequately convey what it was like reading their letters, reading their reflections, much of it later in life, not necessarily when they first came home but the letters they wrote home and what they shared with their wives and their families really stopped me in my tracks in many ways and many times. I'm so glad I had the opportunity to record, if you will, their legacy with Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin. Some came home very philosophical. I can't, of course they did. I can't imagine what they endured some of them flying three, four and five missions in a year's time. Glider pilot Ben Ward wrote, gunfire and explosions ebbed and flowed all around us. We could identify the crackle of small arms fire and the heavier boom of artillery. We listened to men shouting at each other. The worst of all, the sound of voices calling for medics. We puny humans had not changed the course of nature one iota. As I think back, I could cry over the futility of war. Can you imagine being 22 years old and during that 21, 20 years old coming home to mom and dad or your wife and two little girls and somehow resuming a normal life while living with nightmares. Many of these men had for the next 40 or 50 years maybe to this day, the few that are still with us. Excuse me, but don't necessarily share it other than perhaps in notes like this or in their diaries or journals. But that is also part of the legacy of the Glider pilots of World War II. So it's a real honor to share this with you covered a lot of ground in a short period of time. But it's something that I think is important and it's something on a final note, if you will I wanna share with you that they too had wings just like fighter pilots and so on. And it was a G in the middle of those air wings just like that. But if you talk to a Glider pilot that G did not stand for gliders. It stood for guts. And I think that's certainly the case not just in these Glider pilots but anyone who serves our uniform and sacrifices our uniform in uniform for our country whether it's in any armed combat or just devoting four or five, 30 years of their lives in uniform. I think sometimes we underestimate that today only 1% of America serves our country and sacrifices for our country in uniform. And it's up to us, the other 99% to always remember that. And when you have the opportunity to say hello to them it's certainly been my privilege to record their legacy. Here's just a couple of the books that I've written over the years. Obviously the Brotherhood of Flying Coffin or the Japanese Americans of World War II or a remarkable sort of civil war surgeon who basically created triage and the ambulance corps that we've benefited from today or the 47 year Odyssey of the USS Midway on now a museum in San Diego. But I don't think there's a book that's been more rewarding. Then the Flying Coffin, the book we're talking about today and the legacy that we are honoring today. That would not be possible without the support of two groups the Silent Wings Museum, Lubbock, Texas and the National World War II glider pilots committee. Those two organizations for decades have recorded and collected the records, the personal records, the diaries, the interviews, the journals, the letters of these glider pilots and these two groups not done that for so many years unsung in their own way. The Brotherhood of Flying Coffin would not have the soul that it does today. So I wanna thank both those organizations and certainly the National Archives for the opportunity to share this part of the greatest generation on the 79th anniversary of Normandy because it's always been my honor and I hope to continue to showcase and salute Battlefield heroes that I'd like to have over for dinner and I suspect you would too. So thank you very much for your time today. Look forward to sharing another part of the greatest generation in the years ahead.