I doubt we'll see better coverage of American glider operations in World War II. Of course the Brits and the Germans used them too, with about the same degree of success, but this features American pilots and two familiar newscasters who flew with them, Walter Cronkite and Andy Rooney.
The first half hour or so details the problems the American glider program had in getting off the ground, so to speak. We were late to the party. German gliders, having evolved from their pre-war sailplane training at a time when the Luftwaffe was virtually forbidden, capture the Belgian fort of Eban-Emal in an extraordinarily successful glider attack. The result was the German penetration of the impregnable Maginot Line and the fall of France.
Events didn't flow so smoothly after that initial success. A German airborne attack in Crete came close to failure and cost far too many casualties. Hitler never used gliders again.
In America, there were bureaucratic conundrums. A glider pilot is a sort of chimera. He hasn't been trained to fly an airplane, though some volunteers may know how to do it. The aircraft itself is fragile, made of canvas and aluminum tubing. It's designed to do only one thing. Lose altitude and crash land in the right place. Once on the ground, the pilot deplanes with his twelve troopers and fights as an infantryman. Volunteers were mostly enlisted men. So what should their ranks be? Should they join the officer corps as ordained pilots? Are they even entitled to wear wings on their chests? In the end it was decided that they be designated Flight Officers, called Warrant Officers in other branches, and they were awarded wings with a "G" on the shield.
The job could be extremely dangerous and sometimes, as in the case of the Polish gliders at Arnhem, practically suicidal. Most audiences hear little of gliders because so few of their operations went very well and because their use is not nearly as dramatic as the use of parachutes.
Yet, when they worked, they worked well enough, as they did in southern France and at Pegasus bridge before the Normandy landings. But the slow, defenseless gliders could also be prepared for by an alert enemy and the results could be catastrophic. The glider pilots interviewed here seem to agree that their most difficult mission was in landing across the Rhine River into Germany, which may be one of the reasons we hear so often about the Bridge at Remagen and so little about glider operations that supported the crossing.
