Just Julie’s Takes

It’s one thing to conquer the Atlantic lounging in seat 12A on an American Airlines 777, and quite another to shepherd a part of history (all 70+ year old, 24,000-odd pounds of her) through a similar mission…

So, congratulations to two Douglas C-47 crews (and their supporting teams) on their respective successful transatlantic crossings this month! The crew of Whiskey 7 [www.rtn2014.org/whiskey7.html] just reached their destination of Duxford, England [http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/iwm-duxford], on May 23 in time for its airshow over the weekend. The crew of Union Jack Dak [https://www.flickr.com/photos/egbe-enthusiasts/13967383899/in/set-72157644597348802] arrived at Coventry Airport on May 10.

Even for a pilot with a lot of experience flying the DC-3 type, this achievement is significant, and particularly so more than 70 years after the airplane’s first flight. Most of the DC-3s and C-47s today fly short hops, over land, and rarely stray too far from a maintenance base. To cross the Atlantic now in these aircraft, you must prepare as though again mustering for an invasion, though the mission is nowhere near as hazardous.

Union Jack Dak (now N74589) and Whiskey 7 (now N345AB) followed different plot lines in post-war service, but they each played an important part in the Normandy Invasion and survived to tell their tales. Union Jack Dak came to the US Army Air Corps as 42-24064 in 1942 out of the Douglas plant at Long Beach, California, and she was assigned to the 437th Troop Carrier Group. She flew over to England and was based at RAF Aldermaston [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Aldermaston] to prep for the invasion. On June 6, 1944, she and her group towed Waco CG4A gliders over Normandy.

Whiskey 7 is a 1943 C-47A that registered as 43-30652 out of Long Beach in September of that year. She was the lead ship for the second wave of the airborne thrust out of RAF Cottesmore [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Cottesmore], and dropped paratroops from the 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division. Her target? Drop Zone “O” near Sainte Mere Eglise, at which the unit successfully landed on that early morning, one of the few units to hit the planned target. Later that year, she was part of a section that towed gliders in Operation Market Garden over the Netherlands and Germany.

Both airplanes will join the Daks Over Normandy event [www.daksovernormandy.com] in the coming weeks, and we will share in the emotion and reverence those days shall surely bring. That they each made this incredible journey stands as testimony to the dedication of a lot of folks who worked hard to make it happen. Well done.

from May 24, 2014

Plans are everything before the battle and useless once it is joined.

Those words, attributed to General Dwight Eisenhower, proved heartbreakingly true for the invasion forces on D-Day. The command spent countless hours in the preceding months laying out the actions that each company would take as it landed in its sector (labeled Charlie-Dog-Easy-Fox, then Red-Green-White at Omaha Beach). Each had specific orders for regrouping the men, what terrain they would see ahead, and what equipment they would use to penetrate it. The mission: Firing up the draws and blowing up obstacles to clear the way for the tanks and other critical land vehicles that followed behind them.

But on that day, the men who made it ashore rarely landed where the generals’ maps placed them.

The best-laid plans can go awry for a variety of predictable reasons, and a million ones you cannot foresee. A handful will nail you, and their impact will be significant. What planning does is give us a template for seeking information, a schedule of training so we have actions memorized, indeed, muscle memory upon which to rely, and patterns to amend to the actual conditions.

All of that planning was not for naught, when those companies came ashore in the wrong sectors, sometimes a kilometer or more off the mark. In fact, when a man saw a steeple rising above the town ahead, he knew immediately that something was wrong: Either the aerial bombardment had not achieved its goal of destroying that likely enemy observation post, or the town was not the town expected on the soldier’s map. Equally unlucky, but that information was a far cry more useful to the man than not knowing he should look for a steeple at all.

Knowing the lay of the land doesn’t truly happen until you land. Another assumption made with critical consequences was the composition of the hedgerows seen in airborne intelligence photos. The men had just experienced the English hedgerows in their field simulations in Britain, those hedgerows forming a frangible barrier that horses could jump during a hunt, perhaps. The French hedgerow in the Calvados region was a far more formidable construction, built to keep livestock within a field, and made of mounds of solid earth topped by brambly thatch. Daunting at best to climb over, and murderous to the glider pilots attempting to land among them.

Though our simulations and the planning that drives them are more sophisticated now, they still rely heavily on the correct intelligence, and the right estimates about what can go differently. The men at Omaha Beach had a situation outside of that known simulation–and had to rely wholly on the skills and leadership they brought to the terrain they found upon reaching the sand.

from May 17, 2014

But for the weather, D-Day would have come a day earlier.

The low that swept over the Channel on the eve of June 4, 1944, threatened the entire operation, roughing up the seas and driving rain onto troops crammed into the mass formation of landing craft.

The planning that goes into any large-scale operation is almost by necessity complex, and proportional to the number of people in authority (or think they are) that are involved. As I read the history, it’s clear that the planning for the Normandy invasion was no different.

Though Eisenhower was selected and named Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force (what a title!), even that was a process. To be sure, he spent a significant portion of his time in preparation for the invasion ensuring that if he couldn’t get buy in from those in authority below him (or in parallel commands), he had the time and fortitude to lobby at the top, securing his backing from Roosevelt and Churchill to seek his end. This was not always easy, though they knew deeply that he sought approval to ensure success of what has been called the most important military operation in history.

The final decision to move forward had to be made, with only a prediction of the weather clearing based in part on reports of increasing barometric pressure reported from a ship stationed 600 nm off the coast of Northern Ireland. The impending cold front would pass the coast of Normandy by early morning on the 5th. But the “go/no-go” decision? Made by one man alone, in a room in England where the rain fell on and the thundering wind shook the house.

Eisenhower felt weather in his bones, like the native Kansan he was. Air Chief Marshall Leigh-Mallory, concerned about the ability of his air force to execute in the borderline conditions, felt it too and lodged his reservations. In the end, Eisenhower gave the command, simply:

“Okay! Let’s go!”

from May 9, 2014

There is no substitute for being there.

I sat on a hillside above Portsmouth, England, five years ago, with a local aviation historian. We looked out over one of the landing fields used by the combined British and American forces as they prepared and executed Operation Overlord–known to us now as the Normandy Invasion, marked by one unforgettable dawn: D-Day.

With broad gestures, he described the arc each flight of Dakotas took as it assembled for the final line, the heading that would take those airplanes full of paratroopers or towing gliders over the Channel and into the air over the Calvados region of France. I interviewed soldiers who rode on board those Daks, and I talked with the pilots that flew them, either with a stick of troops in the back, or towing a glider.

With this movie in my mind, and the direct knowledge of how it looked, sounded, and felt to see a mass formation of Douglas DC-3s and C-47s march overhead, I could write that part of the airplane’s story (http://www.asa2fly.com/Together-We-Fly-Voices-From-the-DC-3-P1616.aspx).

But across the Channel? Where the action played out in all its terrible glory? No. I’d yet to go visit the beaches where my grandparents’ generation landed, where I could look out and picture where my great uncle, Richard Ellenberger, was on a supply ship standing off in the Channel as the invasion rolled out. Where so many of our young men fell, for a mighty purpose, never to return.

One thing I know from my experience at The Last Time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si0PpuGpgA8), from that grand assembly of DC-3s and C-47s in 2010, is that nothing replaces knowing in your body that physical feeling produced by the sights and sounds when they surround you.

You have to be there to know certain things. In fact, you don’t know what most of those things are until you go. So I’m taking the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see, hear, taste, and feel those things when I visit Normandy for the Daks Over Normandy (http://www.daksovernormandy.com/) celebration and remembrance this June. So I can know this part of the story just a little better than before.

from May 2, 2014