Glider Progress

During its harried 18-month career the Army Air Forces glider program has found the winds of public and official esteem as tricky as the thermal air currents over a mountain peak. Like many another new weapon, the glider was first overlooked, then overdramatized, later overdisparaged.

As a result, when the Army recently disclosed that it had temporarily suspended primary glider-pilot training, some conclusion-jumpers assumed that the whole glider program was being quietly washed out. Actually, the Army had done some realistic figuring on how many transport planes it could get to tow its gliders this year, and how many airborne infantry men could be made ready to fly in them.

This week its decision could be told: it is now concentrating on advanced and combat training of pilots already in hand.

Main combat training center, opened last month, is Bowman Field, Louisville, where advanced pilots will go through a 21-week course aimed to make them "proficient killers," i.e., ground fighters as well as airmen. Most of the men arriving are flight officers, ranking with Army warrant officers; some are lieutenants or captains.

They have had little or no training in fighting procedure, will get it now on a leg-breaking obstacle course, forced marches of 20 miles in five hours, tactical exercises running 48 hours without sleep. Other phases: small arms, infantry tactics, knife wielding, judo and "dirty" fighting.

Report from Crete. Off to a belated start in October 1941, the U.S. glider program was forced into being by public and military outcry after the German air conquest of Crete; British opinion also demanded a big glider force. Later reports on Crete cooled this enthusiasm so far as the military was concerned; it appeared that Nazi paratroops and transport planes had done the real damage while their gliders had suffered brutal losses (best estimate: 50%). U.S. officers now think the Germans misused their gliders, flying them directly onto British airfields and strong points instead of landing troops near by with room enough to organize an infantry attack.

First director of the U.S. glider program was Major Lewin B. Barringer, who was lost in a bomber over the Caribbean last January. Last week the Army called in a civilian expert, Richard C. du Pont (of the Delaware Du Ponts), pioneer sailplane pilot, to take full charge of glider production and training.

Thousands of his craft are already in service, from two-seater trainers to troop carriers. Standard CG-4A glider, worked out by the Army and Waco Aircraft, is a burly, 3,600-lb. flying boxcar that carries 15 men, or an armed jeep, or a 105-mm. howitzer to battle. Three can be towed by a single C-47 (military DC-3) transport.

The Army will train about 100,000 airborne troops this year; one airborne division, the 82nd, is nearing combat pitch now. They are trained to fight alongside ground-bound outfits when gliders are not needed.

But the pilots who will carry them on airborne invasions are a greater problem. Their craft are strictly weapons of opportunity, may be used a few times, or perhaps not at all, before World War II ends. To keep these pilots fit for action, once training has been completed, is still an Air Forces problem.

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