, Waco gliders are lined up on an English airfield in preparation for the next lift to the Netherlands.
Sedalia Glider Base was originally activated on 6 August 1942. In November 1942 the installation became
Sedalia Army Air Field, (after the war would be renamed
Whiteman Air Force Base) and was assigned to the 12th Troop Carrier Command of the
United States Army Air Forces. The field served as a training site for glider pilots and paratroopers. Assigned aircraft included the CG-4A glider,
Curtiss C-46 Commando, and
Douglas C-47 Skytrain. The C-46 was not used as a glider tug in combat, however, until
Operation Plunder (the crossing of the Rhine) in March 1945. CG-4As went into operation in July 1943 during the
Allied invasion of Sicily. They were flown 450 miles across the Mediterranean from North Africa for the night-time assaults such as
Operation Ladbroke. Inexperience and poor conditions contributed to the heavy losses. They participated in the
American airborne landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944, and in other important airborne operations in
Europe and in the
China Burma India Theater. Although not the intention of the Army Air Forces, gliders were generally considered expendable by high-ranking European theater officers and combat personnel and were abandoned or destroyed after landing. While equipment and methods for extracting flyable gliders were developed and delivered to Europe, half of that equipment was rendered unavailable by certain higher-ranked officers. Despite this lack of support for the recovery system, several gliders were recovered from Normandy and even more from
Operation Market Garden in the
Netherlands and
Wesel, Germany. The CG-4A found favor where its small size was a benefit. The larger British
Airspeed Horsa could carry more troopers (seating for 28 or a jeep or an
anti-tank gun), and the British
General Aircraft Hamilcar could carry 7 tons (enough for a
light tank), but the CG-4A could land in smaller spaces. In addition, by using a fairly simple grapple system, an in-flight C-47 equipped with a tail hook and rope braking drum could "pick up" a CG-4A waiting on the ground. The system was used in the 1945 high-elevation rescue of the survivors of the
Gremlin Special 1945 crash, in a mountain valley of New Guinea. The CG-4A was also used to send supplies to
partisans in
Yugoslavia. After World War II ended, most of the remaining CG-4As were declared surplus and almost all were sold. Many were bought for the wood in the large shipping boxes. Others were bought for conversion to towed camping homes with the wing and tail end cut off and being towed by the rear section and others sold for hunting cabins and lake side vacation cabins. The last known use of the CG-4A was in the early 1950s by the USAF with an Arctic detachment aiding scientific research. The CG-4As were used for getting personnel down to, and up from, floating ice floes, with the glider being towed out, released for landing, and then picked up later by the same type of aircraft, using the hook and line method developed during World War II. The only modification to the CG-4A was the fitting of wide skis in place of the landing gear for landing on the Arctic ice floes. ==Variants==