Charles Masters’s father was never able to show his son what he did in World War II. The movies of the 1950s had plenty of fighter planes and tanks, but there were never any gliders.
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“Someone once said, ‘If there’s a book you really want to read and it hasn’t been written, then you should write it yourself,’” says Masters, who’s devoted nearly all of his free time during the past four years to researching and writing Glidermen of Neptune: The American D-Day Glider Attack, which has been published by Southern Illinois University Press and goes on sale this week.
Given the dearth of information on the subject, Masters relied heavily on interviews with surviving glidermen. Masters contacted some through Fort Bragg, home of the 82nd Airborne Division, which, along with the 101st Airborne, provided the glidermen and paratroopers for the D-day invasion. The Silent Wings Museum outside of Dallas and an association of glider veterans put him in touch with many others. All told, he interviewed 106 glidermen. “I talked to them over the phone, I went to their reunions,” he says, “and every one of them to a man gave me his time. They filled in many of the gaps left by the history books, and they told me their stories.”
The larger gliders, or Horsas, could carry 28 men or a jeep and a light artillery piece, but they were made of plywood and often splintered upon impact. “They were even more dangerous than the Wacos [smaller canvas gliders] because guys got huge slivers in them. . . . Some were literally impaled on six-foot-long splinters.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Nathan Mandell, courtesy Southern Illinois University Press.
