Today’s film highlights activities at an Airborne Glider Base in England in 1944 just before the D-Day invasion. The roll opens with airmen painting the invasion stripes on a glider and then a C-47. The base band rates a whole minute of film. The meat of the roll is four minutes (four camera rolls) of glider loading, takeoffs, over the shoulder shots in the cockpit, vertigo-inducing shots of the ground, and a landing that disgorges a jeep and a squad of men that immediately go on patrol! The film is actually probably a good reflection of the Army’s glider assault doctrine as it was understood at the time.
A screener for this reel doesn’t exist elsewhere! I shot it from the flatbed film viewer at the National Archives (NARA). The description in NARA’s on-line Catalog dates everything from August 11th, 1944, while the evidence of my eyes says otherwise. The painting was only ordered on June 3rd, 1944. The stripes were ordered removed a month later, when they made Allied aircraft on the ground an easier target.
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