The C-47 units of the USAAF were an integral part of some of the most dramatic episodes of the European war: the airborne assaults in North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, southern France, Operation Market Garden and the crossing of the Rhine. The mass fratricide off Sicily, the night drop for D-Day and the Bastogne supply missions are also covered, along with more typical accounts of training, formation flying, airdrops and casualty evacuation missions. This book details an aircraft that remains a popular favourite and an acknowledged design classic, carrying out missions every bit as strategically important and as dramatic for the aircrew as those of the fighters and bombers.

From the snows of Alaska to V-E Day in Europe, this is the biography of US Army Air Forces Captain Robert Uhrig during WWII. Told in his own words from extensive diary entries and letters to his wife, "Toots," the story starts in the late 1930s at Patterson Field OH and follows Bob through the war as an aircraft mechanic and then Engineering Officer for the 36th Troop Carrier Squadron and their Douglas C-47s. Bob's wartime career took him from the jump school at Ft Benning to supplying British units in North Africa to the Sicily and Normandy invasions and all the other airborne operations in Europe. Invasion Stripes is also a deeply personal story of love as Bob and Toots endure almost three years of wartime separation with only their photographs and letters to sustain them across thousands of miles. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic, it is a unique and detailed first person story of the American airlift forces of WWII. 248 pages, black and white illustrations, maps.

Late in 1944, thirteen U.S. B-24 bomber crews bailed from their cabins over the Yugoslavian wilderness. Bloodied and disoriented after a harrowing strike against the Third Reich, the pilots took refugee with the Partisan underground. But the Americans were far from safety. Holed up in a village barely able to feed its citizens, encircled by Nazis, and left abandoned after a team of British secret agents failed to secure their escape, the airmen were left with little choice. It was either flee or be killed. In The Lost Airmen, Charles Stanely Jr. unveils the shocking true story of his father, Charles Stanely-and the eighteen brave soldiers he journeyed with for the first time. Drawing on over twenty years of research, dozens of interviews, and previously unpublished letters, diaries, and memoirs written by the airmen, Stanley recounts the deadly journey across the blizzard-swept Dinaric Alps during the worst winter of the Twentieth Century-and the heroic men who fought impossible odds to keep their brothers in arms alive.

From Pearl Harbor to VJ-Day, the humble Douglas C-47/R4D carried out missions every bit as strategically important, and as dramatic for the aircrew involved, as those of the fighters and bombers in the vast Pacific/CBI theatres. The C-47's wartime operations paved the way for post-war military and civil air transport, proving that aircraft could safely conduct routine flights from the USA, Australia and India throughout the Pacific and South-east Asia. The flights also demonstrated how the USAAF was able to invest in, and carry out, a mission that it had barely prepared for in terms of doctrine pre-war. In addition to linking theatres, the C-47 found itself in the vanguard of combat operations on virtually a daily basis in New Guinea, Burma, the Philippines, the SWPA and China. The importance of these missions, and the dangers faced by crews tasked with carrying them out, is chronicled in numerous first-hand accounts from the aircrew involved in this unique volume on the Allies' favourite transport aircraft of World War 2.