Veterans’ Flight Plan Calls for a Soaring Glider : WWII Pilots Are Scavenging World for Parts to Waco

So quiet was his approach that Heaven was unaware A glider pilot had met his fate And was now standing at the Pearly Gate. “How could this happen?” the Lord exclaimed, “For unto Me is known all things.” The glider pilot’s answer was, “I came on Silent Wings.” --Joyce Darling Hill

There’s a naked piece of one on a farm near Greenville, Mich., and it is used as a cow feeder.

Ed Cogan can see what it was, the fuselage cage of a 1944 combat glider. . . .

In a box in a barn in Wisconsin there are unused bits and pieces that a restorer of antique airplanes once bought as parts of a Waco cabin biplane.

Cogan recognizes the rusted ribs as the tail section of a Waco glider, a linen-covered bundle of firewood that almost killed him when he flew one to the Normandy invasion 40 years ago. . . .

Cannon Driveshafts of North Hollywood was built by engineer Ted Cannon in 1945, and he framed the building with box beams of laminated spruce bought at a government surplus sale.

A Whispering War

Cogan knows they are the main spars from Waco CG4A gliders and priceless souvenirs of a whispering war that military historians seem to have forgotten.

But Cogan hasn’t forgotten. Nor have an estimated 1,500 ex-glider pilots who form the National World War II Glider Pilots Assn. They’ve commissioned Cogan, 65, of La Mirada, and another Waco veteran, Al Jennings, 65, of Corona, to go after the Michigan fuselage and the Wisconsin tail assembly and any other Waco leftovers littering hangars, ditches or museum dumps from Terrell, Tex., to Oosterbeek, the Netherlands.

When all their foraging is done, Cogan and Jennings should have collected about 70,000 parts from heaven knows how many broken carcasses. It should all come together as one complete Waco CG4A (C for Combat; G for Glider), a troop-carrying birdcage that doubled as a 15-place death wish.

And then Cogan and Jennings will hitch their motorless bandwagon to another World War II star, a C-47 transport, and barnstorm the country, from rural air show to national aviation festival, to educate “a whole generation of Americans that never heard of combat gliders used in World War II,” Cogan said.

“One aim of our association--and it’s written into articles adopted in 1971--has always been to rebuild a CG4A. Actually, we want to build two. One for go, one for show.

“The one for show is already on display at the Silent Wings Museum in Terrell, Tex. But that’s got two-by-fours in the wings and obviously will never fly again. So now we’re going ahead with the CG4A for go, and when it’s finished it will be the only flying combat glider anywhere in the world.

“We’ve got an instrument panel, with instruments; a fuselage complete with nose section, two wing spars given to us by Ted Cannon, two wheels, oleo struts, cockpit plexiglass. . . . We’re short the tail section, some wing ribs, pulleys, struts, things like that.”

More than 14,000 combat gliders were built by the United States during the final three years of World War II. Their purpose was singular: They were to carry troops and equipment into battle, often behind the lines, always on top of the advance. Despite their potential for recovery and reuse, Wacos (costing $20,000 apiece) became disposable and were left to rot or be looted where they crash-landed in Sicily, France, the Netherlands, Germany and the Philippines.

Only five gliders have been preserved to sit as static exhibits at military museums in France and the United States.

The hundreds that were stranded at U.S. training bases and 15 assembly plants (including the Ford Motor Co. and Cessna Aircraft) at war’s end were sold as government surplus. For their metal frames. For their plywood and timbers. For chicken coops and hay bins and the Cannon Driveshaft building.

Therefore, Cogan believes, their bones and bits must still be hanging around.

Negotiations Opened

He knows that the Confederate Air Force headquartered at Harlingen, Tex., a worldwide organization dedicated to the preservation of World War II aircraft, “probably has enough parts to build two CG4As.” Cogan and Jennings have opened negotiations to get them.

There was a healthy length of fuselage and other parts left over from the project that placed a Waco on display at the Silent Wings museum. Cogan and Jennings recently drove to Terrell and came back with them.

“During the war, each glider was disassembled and packed into five huge plywood crates for shipping overseas,” Cogan said. “After the war, they were sold as surplus but buyers were only interested in the crates. They paid $50 for each one, pulled out the glider parts and dumped ‘em to use the crate.

“It’s entirely possible that one day we’ll get a call from some guy who’ll tell us: ‘Hey, fellas, I’ve got this old crate and guess what I found when I opened it up? A glider.’ ” Two hundred members of the combat glider association, licensed pilots all, have been drafted to aid the reconstruction project. The cost, in volunteer talent and donated dollars, is expected to top $200,000. Jennings has explored vocational schools where the craft of attaching fabric to a metal framework still is taught. Assembly, with the assistance of John O’Malley, an ex-Army Air Force glider mechanic and line chief, will be at Chino Airport . . . and Cogan and Jennings, both light-plane owners, plan to be at the control wheels for the maiden tow and touchdown.

“We’re going to fly it with a Jeep in it, behind a C-47, just like the old days,” Jennings said. “I’ve made a commitment to myself, to the association. Maybe I was a blabbermouth to have said it publicly, but I have stated that we’re going to fly it to the Oshkosh (Wisconsin home of the Experimental Aircraft Assn.) air show in 1990 and we will.

“I’ll be 70 years old then but I’ve no doubts that I can pull it off. That big old bird was a wonderful thing. Reliable. Easy to handle. When I get in it again and handle those controls, it will feel like I never left it.”

The Waco really doesn’t deserve such a large helping of Jennings’ sentiment. For his military career as a glider instructor, also his chance to see combat, were ended by a broken leg suffered in the crash of a Waco.

Cogan, now a book distributor in Fullerton, did see combat: first as an aviation mechanic at Pearl Harbor on that infamous day in December, then as a glider pilot on D-day plus 18. Cogan doesn’t remember much of the invasion. His resupply glider hit a tree while landing. He was in a coma for 35 days.

Such smashes, plus ditchings and complete disappearances, were common. In one small phase of the Normandy landings, relates a recent study of World War II glider operations, only 49 of 72 gliders that took off from England ever arrived in France. During a 68-glider mission in Burma, according to “Silent Wings” by Gerard M. Devlin, 31 GIs were killed and 30 seriously wounded in crashes before the enemy had even been engaged.

High Casualty Rates

Successes of glider operations, claim the military histories, were generally limited. Casualty rates were high. That, agree Cogan and Jennings, did much to lessen the image of combat gliders during World War II. Paradoxically, they add, the incredible dangers faced by glider pilots did not seem to enhance their prestige among other fliers.

Fighter, bomber and transport pilots, Cogan said, often looked down on gliders as unglamorous and their airmen as marginally trained, for the Waco was an unpowered airplane, neither fish nor fowl. Most glider pilots were either washouts from powered flight school (as was Cogan) or men too old for bombers or fighters.

They wore different wings, one with a “G” in the center shield. They wore different rank, as flight officers. And only one drinking song was written for the glider pilots:

I love the high tow, I love the low tow, “I love to listen to the whistle of the wind; “But when you flush the toilet on the tow ship, “Brother, that’s where I came in.”

Yet that diminishing of their past has only added spice to the rebuilding challenge facing Cogan and Jennings.

“I want this (rebuilt CG4A) to be a flying memorial to glider pilots, living and dead, and the airborne troops who rode with us,” said Jennings. “Every time airborne operations come into a conversation, the thoughts immediately go to paratroopers. In actual fact, of all airborne troops landed during World War II, two thirds went in by glider and only one third by parachute.”

Jennings considers the glider pilot to be an unsung military hero alongside sailors of PT boats and pilots of light observation aircraft.

“But I’ve reached the point in life when I don’t get agitated by this.” Well, almost. “You know, I can hardly wait for that day when we fly the CG4A into our first air show.”

Cogan accepts that glider pilots didn’t win the war. But he knows that they helped and that rebuilding one of their old gliders will keep that assist alive. He also recognizes that of 6,000 Americans who trained as glider pilots, 2,000 survive and just about all have grandchildren.

Those veterans, he said, must feel as he does.

“I think about that when my granddaughter asks me: ‘What did you do in the war?’ And I say: ‘I flew gliders.’ I would feel a deep sense of loss if she didn’t know what I was talking about.”