Foreword for Into The Valley, The Untold Story of USAAF Troop Carrier in WWII

his book is about an innovation called the use of the third dimension, a new concept of battle, something which began when soldiers found they could get up off the land and sea surfaces and move through the air to carry the battle to their enemies. Charles Young’s work is a major contribution to the story of how movement through the air has dramatically changed the way the soldier fights the ground battle. When Admiral Nelson defeated the Spanish and French fleets at Trafalgar he didn’t have to worry about enemies under or above the sea, and when Emperor Napoleon attacked at Waterloo he wasn’t concerned about air strikes or paratroopers arriving from the skies. The era of the Wright brothers changed all that. Fighting in and from the sky had its beginnings long ago, at least in theory, but it was in World War II that the concept came into its own, when the technology and the tactics converged with astounding results. Aircraft—bombers and fighters and reconnaissance planes and transports—changed the face of battle in significant ways, and one of the most dramatic new forms of attack became the uniting of aircraft and soldiers to create an extraordinary quantum leap in mobility on the strategic and tactical battlefields. Suddenly there were new opportunities and new vulnerabilities. All the so-called rear areas, all the flanks, everywhere was open to surprise attack by ground troops who could be lifted into battle and even supported with firepower and logistics from the air. As I have said elsewhere, there is now always the possibility of a new “flanking” movement—over the top—which has added a complexity to battle that when combined with the rest of the technological explosion has caused a revolution in military thinking. We are in the grip of that revolution, where everything we know about tactics, about firepower and mobility, is now transient, subject to change without warning.

Although there were ample indications earlier, as far back as the American Civil War, it was the German Blitzkrieg at the start of World War II which brought in paratroopers and Stuka dive bombers and air resupply to achieve overwhelming air mobility and firepower advantages. The “Blitz” made it clear to Americans and their allies that we would have to rewrite the book on warfare if we were to be able to deal with such opponents. We immediately began our own paratrooper training and we took the first steps to build an airlift organization that became the Troop Carrier Command.

Charles Young came along about that time. In the 1930’s, as a gangly, gutsy kid, he had been one of the last of the barnstormers, the legendary open-cockpit biplane pilots who flew stunts with the flivvers of the air—those makeshift conglomerations of struts, ribs, wires, and patched-up fabric, powered by unreliable engines of the same vintage as the Model T Ford—and who treetopped along from town to town offering rides to thrillseekers and thus earning just about enough to keep their planes flying. Hoping to become a pilot with the airlines, but also sensing war clouds on the horizon, Young joined the Army and went to flying school, where in heavy competition he got his wings easily, flew fighters and bombers for two years, and then moved into the reserves. In the meantime he signed up with American Airlines, flying the new Douglas transport, the DC-3, and learning what life was like for a barnstormer in a big flying organization.

Such learning and maturation came in handy when the Army Air Force two years later tapped Charlie Young to return to active duty along with many other airline pilots to help start the work of planning and teaching and putting together the building blocks of what would soon be First Troop Carrier Command. From then on, the link between paratroopers and troop carrier crews would become Charlie Young’s story, and he relates it here, further along in life, after several decades of searching back for fist-hand accounts from his crews and his colleagues, the fliers and paratroopers at all levels of troop carrier and airborne units that fought World War II. Young remembered the people who made Troop Carrier Command happen, and he has stayed in touch with them down through the years. They have responded generously to his requests for stories of their personal experiences, which he has recorded, but he has done much more than just that. With consummate skill he has assembled an unprecedented collection of journal entries, fragments of letters, official records, newspaper clippings, selections from unit histories, passages from radio broadcasts and briefing notes, masterfully organized to flow along with the tide of battle and the overall history of the war. But above all this is Charlie Young’s own story, drawn from his private diaries, pilot logs, letters, and experiences.

For two years Young moved from airfield to airfield, planning, advising, teaching, encouraging, as the scattered squadrons worked out their individual and collective training tasks. Young was not only a teacher; he was a superb and inspirational leader who quickly worked his way up to command the 439th Troop Carrier Group, and as a lieutenant colonel led his 81 aircraft, flying at the point of the leading serial, into the cauldron that was Normandy on the night of 5-6 June 1944. This, without doubt, was his greatest moment, and he carried out his mission to the letter. He had made a bet with Colonel Bob Sink, CO of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, that he could put him on the ground within three hundred yards of the place Bob pointed out on the map. When these two warriors were to meet again it would be Bob Sink who paid double on the bet.

On the framework of the progressive development of Troop Carrier doctrine, this book lays out compact, accurate sketches highlighting the battle chronology of airborne operations during WWII. On top of that structure, the chapters lead off with brilliant capsule histories written by Charlie Young’s son, Charles D. Young, which carry the reader into the action with a background that allows them to ride with the crews and understand what’s happening. Then come the stark and graphic individual narratives written by Charlie Young and by many other participants in these historic battles, the eyewitness accounts of moments of anguish and fear and confusion and above all of courage—there were missions to be accomplished, duties to be seen to, orders to be carried out; there was killing and dying to be done, and a lot of both.

In the background of these stories, and set against the history of the war, Young lays out the creation and the life of a new air command that filled a need previously unknown. He tells how it expanded from a small mixed bag of airplanes into the more than two thousand power aircraft and gliders that took part in the largest airborne assault in history, Operation VARSITY, in support of the Rhine crossing in March 1945. For the first time, we get a look into a flying organization that deserves far more credit than it has ever, even to this day, received.

The Troop Carrier Command was built from scratch. There was no precedent for it, which is why veteran airline pilots like Charlie Young were so much in demand, and they formed the core of experience as this organization mushroomed into existence. It required a special kind of warrior who charged through the sky into the thickest of the fighting and the place of most danger, flying not a fighter or a bomber but a vulnerable transport aircraft, lightly armed if at all, more often simply relying on surprise or darkness or whatever protection his escorts could provide. Sometimes coming in at low level, often climbing at the last minute to ensure enough height for parachutes to open (500 feet or less), he flew in tight formations and on a straight line into the teeth of enemy fire, a gunner’s perfect target in the sky, willing to pay the price in order to put the paratroopers where they had to go. To me the best example of all, the epitome, is a moment described in this book by one of the troop carrier pilots and confirmed by his crew and observers on the ground below. His plane hit and afire on a run into surrounded Bastogne towing a supply glider, Second Lieutenant Joe Fry followed his unwritten orders, which were if you are hit, keep towing the glider as long as the plane will fly. He stayed at the controls and on course until over the landing zone, although by this time the glider pilot described the flames as reaching “half way down the towrope.” When the glider cut loose, and the plane’s crew out, he set the automatic pilot, but was too late to get through the cabin, already consumed by fire. Instead, he climbed through the cockpit’s top hatch, and with the plane already wallowing near stalling speed, mushing downward, he crawled back along the top of the aircraft in the almost-still air. As the fiery plane slowly rolled into its death dive he slid off, by now only semi-conscious, and hit the tail’s horizontal stabilizer (which split open his chest parachute) and drifted to the ground, still inside the defensive perimeter of Bastogne. His comment: “The GIs who picked me up were very generous with their liberated cognac.”

Much has been written on the airborne operations of World War II, but Young shows us the realities of life in the flying units that lifted the troops into battle. The development of the use of the third dimension—the air—in the conduct of ground war did not run smoothly, and does not today. There have been many setbacks and much controversy. The concept itself was always under heavy fire from critics and under a good deal of doubt among its creators. After the Sicily airborne operations in 1943 there were moves in British and American military circles to cancel or severely restrict future efforts, as the Germans had done after Crete. General Eisenhower himself lacked confidence in the efficacy of attacking via the air flank, and indeed almost canceled the Normandy jump. Although airborne operations in Normandy accomplished all assigned missions by the end of the first day, the later complaints that the landings were scattered (as in Sicily) created in some the conviction that success had been more a matter of coincidence and luck than good tactics or indeed, a viable concept. This was a mistaken impression. The air assault carried its objectives against heavy opposition and was key to the successful early establishment of the amphibious landings and the quick expansion of the initial beachheads to sustainable size. In fact, the success at Normandy led to an explosion of new plans for more airborne strikes, but ground operations moved so quickly across France that plan after plan became obsolete before it could be executed. Also, there was a demand that air transport be put to other uses, including especially carrying fuel forward, and lingering doubts about airborne operations that were reinforced when the next major air assault went in against the bridges needed for a deep strike into Germany by way of Holland. This overly-risky operation (MARKET-GARDEN) failed and resulted in a conservatism that prevailed in the way the design of the final great air assault across the Rhine was limited in order to virtually ensure a complete success.

Hindsight is wonderful, and we always possess plenty of that. Looking back now, we can see how a few visionaries took some long chances with new technology like the developing passenger aircraft, the parachute, the glider, and stretched the envelope of possibility to the point of breaking in order to prevail in battle. This continues today as the U.S. forces try to stay at the forefront of change. In this poignant collection of sometimes happy but far more often sad remembrances of hard choices, costly sacrifices, and lost friends, Charlie Young has added to our understanding of how this great period of military innovation took place by telling of the vision and skill and determination, of the talent and irrepressible humor and dedicated selflessness, and ultimately of the courage of those who flew with Troop Carrier Command.