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Hello and welcome to another World War II podcast.

I'm Angus Wallace.

In this episode we'll be looking at the use of gliders during the war and I'm joined by

Matt Yates.

Matt is a member of Chalk, a living history group in the northeast of England who specialised

in the British glider regiment and its activities from 1942 to 1945.

I have to say other than watching films like a bridge too far and the longest day

I know very little about gliders and their use. So Matt

where did the idea of using gliders come from? Basically the ally started using gliders

as a direct result of seeing the Germans used them and the Germans had been using gliders

since the late 1920s and that was obviously because they were forbidden by the Treaty of Vissai to train pilots,

powered pilots, but they were allowed to glide.

So it took off massively in a typical kind of

Teutonic sports way. And then they developed the first troop carrying gliders which they used in Belgium, where was the other one? Crete very effectively.

The British have been watching this, the age-old story of course is that Churchill then issued an

order to raise an airborne force of so many paratroopers, so many glider-born. In the very

very early days in 1940, they basically had to beg, borrow and steel gliders, sailplanes, not even gliders,

but sailplanes from all over private, all over the country at private gliding clubs where they then trained them at

Ringway in Manchester. The regiment itself was formed in February of 1942. It

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