Waco CG-4 Hadrian
The Waco CG-4 was the standard American assault glider of the Second World War, designated CG-4A by the United States Army Air Forces and named Hadrian in British service. Designed by the Waco Aircraft Company of Troy, Ohio, after Germany's glider coup at Fort Eben-Emael in 1940, it was an unpowered aircraft of wood and metal under fabric, flown by two pilots and loaded through an upward-hinged nose with 13 troops, a jeep or a 75 mm howitzer. Sixteen American companies completed 13,909 of them. Towed into action behind C-47s, CG-4As served in Sicily, Normandy, Burma, the Netherlands, the Rhine crossing and the Philippines; most were wrecked where they landed, but a few survive, restored, in museums.
Why It Mattered
Germany's glider assault on Fort Eben-Emael in May 1940 demonstrated a new tactic: infantry landed silently, as formed units, at exactly the point chosen for them. Military planners around the world took note, and in February 1941 the U.S. Army Air Forces' commanding general, Hap Arnold, ordered an American assault glider able to carry 15 troops. Waco's design became the standard American assault glider, the CG-4A, because a glider sets its soldiers down concentrated near their target instead of scattering them across the countryside, as parachutes do, and it can bring their heavy equipment with them. Sixteen companies completed 13,909 of them, and CG-4As carried airborne troops into battle across Europe and Asia. General William C. Westmoreland called the combat glider "the only aircraft built to crash."
Design Notes
The CG-4A's frame mixed metal and wood under a fabric skin, a combination the Dumfries Aviation Museum contrasts with Britain's all-wood method of construction. It had no engine: a tow aircraft — usually a Douglas C-47 — hauled it aloft on a 350-foot nylon rope and released it within gliding reach of the landing zone. Its nose section hinged upward, opening the full width of the fuselage for loading. Behind the two pilots there was room for 13 infantry soldiers and their gear, or a jeep with four passengers, or a 75 mm howitzer with eighteen rounds and three passengers. The production glider weighed 3,900 pounds empty and could be flown at an emergency weight of 9,000 pounds. Waco designed it to come down intact and be used again in later assaults, though in practice most landed too hard to fly again.
Operational History
Flight testing began in May 1942, and the sixteen contracted companies completed 13,909 CG-4As before the war ended. In the spring of 1943, an RAF Hadrian became the first glider ever towed across the Atlantic. The type's first large operation was the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, when gliders flew 450 miles in tow from North Africa to reach the island. That night assault went badly: tow planes released 65 gliders too early, they came down in the sea, and more than 250 men of the First Air Landing Brigade drowned. From March 1944, CG-4As working in Burma landed troops, ammunition, medical supplies and even mules for Wingate's Chindit forces, deep behind Japanese lines. The Burma operation moved more than 9,000 Chindit fighters some 165 miles behind the Japanese front. Gliders then took part in the Normandy landings of June 1944, the invasion of southern France that August, and Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands in September 1944. On 26 December 1944, eleven CG-4As landed inside the 101st Airborne's perimeter at Bastogne with medical staff, gasoline and artillery ammunition; fifty more arrived the next day. Operation Varsity, the Rhine crossing of 24 March 1945, was the largest one-day airborne operation of the war: 610 C-47s towed 906 Waco gliders. In June 1945, six CG-4As and a CG-13 made an air assault on the Camalaniugan airfield at the northern tip of Luzon in the Philippines.
Afterlife
The fighting gliders never saw combat again once the war ended. Most surviving CG-4As were declared surplus and sold; one Pennsylvania farmer bought a glider in 1946 for $75, wanting only its crates, which he turned into chicken coops, and left the airframe to rust in his field. The type's last military use came in the early 1950s, when the U.S. Air Force flew CG-4As on skis to reach scientific parties on Arctic ice, picking them up afterwards with the hook-and-line snatch method developed during the war. That farmer's glider was eventually rescued by the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Long Island, whose volunteers restored it over several years and hung it in flight, packed with troops, as it would have looked on D-Day. In Scotland, the Dumfries Aviation Museum displays a Hadrian rebuilt by the Assault Glider Trust between 2005 and 2014 from an original frame supplied by the Silent Wings Museum in Texas, with one side deliberately left uncovered so visitors can see its structure.