61 plywood planes vs. the German Army: One night’s suicide mission saved thousands of lives

At 07:00 on December 27, 1944, Flight Officer Robert Mitchell sat in the cockpit of a Waco CG-4A glider at an airfield in France, watching ground crews shove crates of high-explosive ammunition into the hollow belly behind him. He was 24 years old with fifteen training flights and exactly zero combat missions.

The aircraft he was about to pilot was a skeleton of steel tubing covered in doped fabric, featuring a plywood floor and a nose that hinged upward like a whale’s mouth. It had no armor, no engine, and no parachute. Mitchell wasn’t “flying” in the traditional sense; he was a passenger in a 9,000-pound kite tethered to a Douglas C-47 by a 300-foot nylon rope.

His orders were a death warrant: ride that rope through a gauntlet of German 88mm flak, cut loose at 600 feet, and glide into a frozen perimeter where 11,000 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division were down to their last bullets.

THE SIEGE OF NUTS

Bastogne was a pressure cooker. Seven days earlier, Hitler had launched his final gamble—the Battle of the Bulge. The “Screaming Eagles” of the 101st were completely surrounded. When the Germans demanded surrender, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe famously replied, “Nuts!”

But defiance doesn’t reload a machine gun. By Christmas, the 101st was starving. Medics were operating with kitchen knives. Artillerymen were down to two shells per gun. The weather had been a soup of fog and snow for days, grounding all relief. December 27th brought the first clear sky, and with it, the “Flying Coffins.”

THE FLAK CORRIDOR: 4 MINUTES OF HELL

Mitchell’s squadron commander had made a chilling decision: no co-pilots. The mission was too dangerous. If a flak shell hit a glider loaded with three tons of TNT, both pilots would be vaporized. Better to lose 50 men than 100.

At 08:00, the C-47’s engines roared. The nylon rope snapped taut, and Mitchell’s wooden box lurched into the air.

The Mission Statistics: | Metric | Details | | :— | :— | | Fleet Size | 50 Waco CG-4A Gliders | | Cargo | 150 Tons of Ammunition & High Explosives | | Release Altitude | 600 Feet | | Survival Probability | Estimated < 50% |

The flak appeared eight miles from Bastogne. Black puffs of 88mm shells marched across the sky. Mitchell watched a C-47 to his left take a direct hit; its engine turned into a blowtorch. The crew bailed, but the glider it was towing cut loose too early, plummeted, and exploded in a pillar of orange flame on the frozen Belgian soil.

A shell burst directly beneath Mitchell. The blast lifted the glider twenty feet into the air. Shrapnel shredded the fabric tail, and the control stick shuddered like a living thing. Mitchell smelled the cordite—sulfurous and biting—through the holes in his fuselage. He was now a 3,000-pound bomb with wings, flying through a curtain of steel.

RELEASE AND THE CRASH-LANDING

At 09:30, the red release light flashed. Mitchell pulled the lever. The nylon rope whipped away, and the C-47 banked hard to escape.

Mitchell was now in total silence. No engine drone—just the whistle of wind through his shattered wings. He was at 600 feet, descending at 400 feet per minute. He had sixty seconds to live or die.

He aimed for a snow-covered field where paratroopers were frantically waving orange panels. German 20mm tracers arced up from the tree lines, stitching holes in his plywood floor. A round cracked a wooden rib in the right wing. The glider began to yaw.

“Hold it together,” Mitchell whispered, gripping the stick until his knuckles turned white.

He hit the ground at 70 mph. The right landing strut, weakened by shrapnel, buckled instantly. The glider skidded sideways, the right wing digging into the frozen earth and snapping off like a dry twig. The cockpit separated from the cargo bay in a scream of splintering wood.

Mitchell was thrown forward, his head slamming into the instrument panel.

FROM PILOT TO INFANTRY

When Mitchell opened his eyes, a paratrooper was yanking the cockpit door open. “Can you move, pilot?”

Mitchell stumbled out into the snow. He wasn’t dead, and the three tons of ammunition behind him hadn’t detonated. Within seconds, the paratroopers were ignoring him, feverishly unloading crates of .30 caliber rounds and 105mm shells.

“We were down to eight rounds per man,” a lieutenant told him. “You just gave us fifty boxes.”

Of the 50 gliders that took off that morning, only 32 made it. The mission suffered a 42% casualty rate—the deadliest glider operation of the war. But those 32 wooden planes delivered 96 tons of ammunition, the lifeblood the 101st needed to hold Bastogne until the German offensive finally broke.

But Mitchell’s mission wasn’t over. In Bastogne, a pilot who lands becomes an infantryman. For three days, Mitchell sat in a 6-foot-long foxhole with a paratrooper named Hansen, holding a borrowed M1 Garand against German probes in 12-degree weather. He traded the flight stick for the rifle, watching the “Screaming Eagles” hold the line with the very bullets he had delivered.

EPILOGUE: THE FORGOTTEN WINGS

On December 31st, a truck convoy finally pulled Mitchell and eleven other surviving pilots out of the perimeter. Mitchell returned to France to find his bunk exactly as he had left it, with the letter to his mother still resting on his pillow.

The mission was never publicized. The Army treated gliders as disposable assets and their pilots as expendable cargo. By 1950, most of the 13,900 gliders built for the war had been burned for scrap or buried.

Robert Mitchell died in 2003. His obituary mentioned his service but omitted the glider. Yet, the history of the Battle of the Bulge is written in the wood and fabric of those “Plywood Hearses.” They were the only planes in the world that could fly into a meat grinder without an engine and come out with a miracle.

Note: Some content was generated using AI tools (ChatGPT) and edited by the author for creativity and suitability for historical illustration purposes.