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WAR EXPERIENCES OF A GLIDER PILOT — Part 1

Training

My name is Ron Willcox and I am now 83 years old.
I was a glider pilot during the war. The training glider was called a Hotspur.
There wasn’t a lot of room to sit and if you were a big man it was quite difficult to get in, and you would have to sit with your knees bent all the time. It’s rather like a ‘go kart’. We had a speed indicator which was the main instrument that you needed, and we also had an altimeter.
Some bright person decided that the glider person might have to go in the ‘low toe’ position and they attached a string device to an instrument in the glider which had 2 bars, lateral and vertical and if you had to go in the low toe position because of the cloud you couldn’t see the towing aircraft, which was quite often.
You were supposed to use the ‘angle of dangle.’ Some people did some prodigious distances in these gliders and it isn’t widely known but six gliders went to North Africa, which was a 10 hr trip behind the Sterlings.

The normal bodily functions were done in the gliders. These days it’s slightly different, we still travel many miles and now have tubes coming out of the aircraft, and the waste vaporizes on the way down!

The wing span of the Hotspur glider was about 45-50 ft across and the fuselage was very thin and somewhat shorter. It was made of plywood and fabric on the outside... The pilots sat one behind the other, and if you were pushed, you could get 5 or 6 other people sitting behind each other as well. We couldn’t stand up in it. The Horsa glider was larger and you could get about 32 people in it with all their equipment. It didn’t include large guns or anything large, just small arms but they used to take jeeps in them, and we used to take anti tank guns in them.

We flew about 60-70 yds from the tug plane and you always had slip stream problems.
We had a system whereby they had a high tow and a low tow position. Because there was no engine all you could hear was the wind and the faster you went the more noise you got. We had quite big flaps on the Horsa, but they were operated by two large air compression cylinders in the cockpit, but with 80 degrees of flap you could virtually come down into a 25 knot wind almost vertical - providing you kept your indicated speed up. If you had got much of a load on you hadn’t got much to play with quite frankly.
I’ve got an account in my log book somewhere, where I took up a gentleman, who was Air Vice Marshall Whittle (of jet engine fame) when I went to Great Witley after the war. It was in September, on the anniversary of the Battle of Britain, and he wanted to fly in a glider again, so I had the pleasure of taking him up. He asked me what I was going to do, and I told him that as there was a fairly strong wind that day I would do a dive approach from 5,000 feet, so we got up to 5,000 feet and we got over the caravan at the end of the runway where they control everything and I pulled off, and put the nose down and the full flap on, and we landed about 80 yards the other side of the caravan. He never spoke to me again! I digress!

Taking Off and Landing

This is chiefly the responsibility of the tug plane, but the glider pilot’s responsibility is to make sure he makes it as easy for the tug pilot as possible. When you are on the ground waiting to take off you have got to take up the slack very slowly. And then as he accelerates and when you feel that the glider is ready to take off at about 65 knots, you try to take the glider up a few feet to release the drag on the towing aircraft and hold it there until the he sees the tug start to lift off, and then he moves up and he is in the high tow position. In other words the rope is above the towing aircraft.
He stays in the high tow position and he keeps that position as the tug goes up.
When the tug pilot’s ready to make his turn the glider pilot will spot that immediately, and go round with him. So it’s a fairly straight forward thing, but the big thing is that if you’ve got a full load, you have got to make it as easy as you can for the tug pilot to get that power of plane off the ground with as much power and energy as possible.
If you were on a Military aerodrome you would need at least a 1500 yards run way.

In the Air

The flying height was around 4000-5000 ft until you got near your landing zone. It was rather important that we got down precisely where we should get down, and the target had got to be round about 20-30 metres as to where you should stop, and that isn’t very difficult to do if the weather is reasonable, and there are no objects in the way and a good glider pilot should be able to do that.

Reaching the right area

At 4,000-5,000 ft you can map read your way in pretty well, and if you study your landing maps before you go, which we did, it was fairly straight forward.

Coming Down

Depending on what kind of opposition you’ve got, for instance when we did the German landing across the Rhine there was lot of ack ack fire at us from the troops on the ground, and the best thing you could do was to get down fairly quickly , and use your flaps at the last minute as a braking mechanism.
We got away with it, except that I lost my second pilot on that Rhine crossing. He had a bullet through the lung.
We would be travelling at about 75-80 knots with a full load on as we came into land, (about 85-90 miles an hour).
We had wheels on the Horsa.
Landing didn’t really worry me much at all, we tried not to get too close to the enemy troops, particularly if they were dug in, and aimed to keep a bit of breathing space between the rifle and the glider if possible.
The German minds are very regimented and they put the telegraph poles in straight lines, and about 60-70 ft apart, which was not quite the width of the glider, but we could take a few feet of the wing tips without causing too much of a problem and the advantage of that was that we could slow down a bit faster!

This story was submitted to the People's War site by June Woodhouse (volunteer) of the CSV Action Desk at ´óÏó´«Ã½ Hereford and Worcester on behalf of Ron Willcox (author) and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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