Dad's story on gliders

I was raised pretty much around older folks close to Mom and Dad's age which was 40 to 50 when I was born. So when I got to that curious age of 8 to 10 I was talking to 60-year-old folks. Dad was born, raised and worked on cattle ranches that ranged in size from small places of maybe 1,200 acres to some that were in the 70,000-plus acre size. He had lived a hard life; so he was chock full of stories.

Dad was the foreman of a fairly large ranch north of Lakeside, Nebraska, called The Joy. I believe it was around 36 sections, or 23,000 acres. Lakeside is east of Alliance, Nebraska. Dad one time mentioned how the Army used gliders out of the Alliance airport to train pilots. He mentioned it, and I just threw it in the back of my mind as a tall tale. I thought of it again several weeks ago.

Come to find out the Army was needing pilots during WW2 to fly the C-47 and C-53 troop transport planes, so they came up with the idea of training them in gliders, which were cheaper and safer if wrecked. The area they chose was the Sandhills of Nebraska, which were perfect according to the experts. Nebraska has a fairly dry climate, land was relatively cheap, access to the railroad and almost no trees to impede landings. The land southeast of Alliance seemed perfect.

So in the spring of 1942, the Army selected the site and right at 5,000 construction workers moved to Alliance and began working. Before they arrived, Alliance's population was 6,669. From what I've read, there was an immediate housing shortage. (Who could have guessed!?) One article I read said that there were workers in garages, store rooms, cellars, attics, and some even brought their own trailers. To provide housing, a federal housing project was constructed at the east edge of Alliance, consisting of apartment complexes with no frills whatsoever. They all looked the same with plain stucco walls, coal heating stoves and rows of chimneys. Locals called it Chimney Town. Even with this expansion in Alliance, one writer said that as many as 775 buildings were built to house the workers and the planes and needed storage. In a matter of months four 9,000-foot runways were constructed and training commenced.

The primary mission was to train the air crews for the C-47 and C-53 airplanes but also to train the airborne troops they would be carrying. Some of the troops were training for deployment to the European Theater, but some were also training for an expected invasion into Japan. The two main aircraft used were the C-47 Skytrains as powered troop carriers and CG-3/CG-4 Waco glider troop carriers. The way I understand it, and I sure could be wrong, the C-47, which was a DC-3 basically, pulled the CG-3/CG-4 glider on a long cable. The glider has no power whatsoever but simply glides along.

After the gliders and paratroops left Alliance, the Alliance airfield was temporarily used in the fall of 1944 for the training of B-29 Superfortress crews. The crews for the B-29s also learned how to accurately drop bombs and read navigational and aeronautical and bombsight equipment. The following summer, the airfield was used to train for the proposed invasion of Japan, which ended when Japan surrendered on Sept. 6.

Dad said on a regular basis they would see the C-47s pulling the Waco gliders over the valleys up where The Joy was located. Flyovers were quite common. Dad said that every now and then something would go wrong and the Waco glider would have to turn loose or unhook from the C-47 and then glide in for a landing. The way Dad talked, when they ended up landing up in the Sandhills, they'd have to load the glider on trucks and haul them back to the Alliance airport. It was also fairly common to see planeloads of paratroopers jumping out of the C-47s.

Our memories need just a tiny reminder to unearth information that has been buried for 50 or 60 years. Wish I could remember some of the other stuff Dad talked about.