Wayward Javelins: Us Gliders from Sicily to Normandy

By Dr. Gregory F. Withrow

In the first comprehensive narrative of the operational, strategic, and historiographical significance of the American glider forces on D-Day, Dr. Gregory F. Withrow goes far beyond setting the record straight regarding the reputations of the much-maligned Troop Carrier Command pilots and the gliderborne troops often labeled as incompetent, substandard soldiers, or even as cowards in Sicily, Burma, and Normandy. Using extensive primary-source analysis--unit records, veterans' diaries, correspondence, personal interviews, and postwar assessments--he reassess the role of gliderborne soldiers, glider pilots, and tow-plane crews in Allied airborne operations. He examines how Operation Ladbroke led to the negative perception of Troop Carrier Command pilots through Eisenhower offering them up as sacrificial lambs in effort to maintain the alliance with Britain, and how Operation Thursday became a proof of concept in March 1944, only two months before the launch of Operation Neptune, the airborne element of Operation Overlord.

Having recovered access to original copies of Detroit Mission glider pilot interrogation reports, Withrow interweaves the detailed narratives of Troop Carrier Command pilots and crews and the 82nd Airborne Division who flew aboard the Detroit Mission gliders into the maelstrom over the Cherbourg Peninsula during the dark morning hours of June 6, 1944, with other primary source accounts from missing aircraft reports and details provided by paratroopers on the ground who witnessed the chaos of the landing gliders unfold. Withrow's forensic analysis of Detroit Mission adds a heretofore unseen reality to the historiography of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

The book identifies 80 percent of the 82nd Airborne Division soldiers manifested on the 52 Detroit Mission Waco CG-4A gliders and plots the specific landing sites of 46 of the 52 gliders, including all 16 gliders transporting the 57mm M1 Anti-Tank Guns crucial to the support in securing the bridgeheads across the only two causeways over the Merderet at La Fi re and Chef-du-Pont, just west of Sainte-M re- glise. Both aspects are totally new in the historiography of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1636247660
• ISBN13: 9781636247663
• Release Date: May 2027
• Publisher: Casemate
• Length: 368 Pages