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...101st Airborne Divisions the Cotentin Peninsula. Their mission was to strike the German Utah beach defenses from the rear, black enemy counterattacks on the beachhead, take key communication centers, and seize bridges and causeways over rivers and marshes. Approximately 100 additional C-47s dropped gliders laden with more troops and equipment before the first amphibious forces landed. (1)
How well did the pre-dawn troop carriers do? The common impression is that they did very poorly. (2) The troops seemed to have been scattered all over the peninsula. In this paper, want to explore that impression and raise some other questions. Why were the troops so separated from each other? Just how scattered were the drops after all? Were there other reasons the airborne divisions took so long to assemble? In short, has history been fair to the troop carrier pilots?
There were eight primary reasons the airborne troops were scattered. First of all, the paratroopers and same of the gliders dropped at night. There were no night vision goggles in 1944. Darkness obscured the visibility of key landmarks. However skilled the pilots and navigators, they could not manufacture the light needed to see what they were looking for. They had to depend on what little moonlight was available and a few lights set up on the ground by pathfinders. Besides that, they had only the light from enemy antiaircraft artillery fire and from the crashes of their burning comrades. Some of the pilots mistook flooded fields on the Cotentin peninsula as the English Channel and dropped their troops too early. Others waited too long and dropped their paratroopers into the English Channel because they could not see they had re-crossed the coast. (3)
Secondly, there were unexpected clouds. As most of the troop carrier airplanes crossed the coast of France, they entered a thick cloudbank. To avoid colliding in the haze, the pilots instinctively spread out the tight nine-plane V formations into which they had been packed, the ones on the left going farther left and the ones on the right going farther right. Some of the airplanes climbed and others descended. By the time the airplanes emerged from the clouds, some seven minutes later, they were too far apart to see each other in the darkness. They could no longer use each other to determine where and when to drop. (4)
Thirdly, there was heavy flak, especially for later formations. The Germans threw up tremendous amounts of antiaircraft fire when they heard the hundreds of aircraft flying just a few hundred feet overhead. Searchlights and tracers illuminated the sky, further blinding the pilots and illuminating airplanes no longer obscured by clouds. Three quarters of the troop carrier pilots had never been under fire before. Many instinctively changed course, going to the right or left, climbing or descending. Some C-47 pilots, to avoid being hit, increased speed more than 50 knots over the 100 knots prescribed for the drops. (5) Despite these maneuvers, many C-47s fell to flak, although not as many as British Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory had predicted. (6) Of the troop carrier airplanes that...
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