Wee Bee
The mental picture I keep getting, is a whole flock of them buzzing away
towards an objective, at night, (for stealth like many paratrooper landings
of the time did) and how many would crash into another. *I wonder if they
put bumpers on them? g
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I donno Jim. Maybe the one with the different tail came with a built-
in parachute.
The Thing was, despite all the hype about paratroops, while the
POTENTIAL was there, given Crete (for the other side) D-day and
'Market Garden,' on the basis of cost vs effectivess most 'airborne'
troops ended up perform normal infantry roles, which raised the
question: Should we train ALL infantry to jump from airplanes? Or,
do we even need the capability? Because based on... Market Time?
Market Garden? (Can't remember ****) Someone in the British
Parliament said we could have saved everyone a lot of time, trouble
and MONEY if they'd simply landed their gliders inside the POW camps,
because that's were x-percent of the troops ended up anyway. And
American congressmen weren't far behind, pointing out how many
THOUSANDS of C-47's we had assigned to give someone a ride they never
took, and when they DID take the ride (Sicily, Normandy) they often
ended up at the wrong place anyway.
If you broke it down into numbers of airplanes and the amount of
training, its seems we could have gotten the same bang for our buck by
simply stuffing volunteers into a little mass-produced airplane,
wishing them well and crossing your fingers.
-Bob
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