Today's reading is an account of Operation Bunghole by Captain Cornelius Turner. Bunghole,

the Glider Operation into Yugoslavia, was a truly allied undertaking. The towing aircraft

was C-47s of 64th troop carrier group, USAF, the Glider pilots British flying American

Waco gliders. It was mounted at very short notice at the request of 1334s, war office

intelligence and the human cargo consisted of a high-ranking Russian general and staff

officers under command of General Cornelius. The first intonation to the independent Glider

squadron, stationed at Comiso Airfield in Sicily that anything was afoot, came in the form

of instructions to fetch immediately from one of the air strips near Kerawan in Tunisia

three horse-a-gliders that were said to be lying there. We flew over with the American

troop carrier squadron to which we were attached and landed at dusk on the desolate abandoned

strip. There the gliders were, looking utterly lonely and dejected, the last remnants,

but for the wrecks and the rusty tin cans of the masses of men and machines that had packed

these air strips, roads and olive groves, when this area was the first airborne Div HQ and

the base for the Sicily landings. These horses had been at the mercy of wind, rain and

the Arabs for six months, but there was no question of a proper inspection nor indeed

anyone who was qualified to carry one out. In the morning the pilots got in tentatively

checked the creaking controls, patented the woodwork trustingly and flew them 250 miles across

the Mediterranean to Sicily. There are immediate orders, but to carry straight onto

Bari in Italy, with each glider loaded with a jeep and anything else that would make

up a £7,000 load. We tested the loading, for we never had any loading charts, by arranging

the load so that a body swinging from the tail could just raise the front wheels clear

of the ground. Our well-attested experience was that this simple method is always satisfactory.

...