WWII: D-Day C-47 Turns Up in Bosnia
Hello everyone! It’s your errant WWII blogger emerging from the holiday mists. I really didn’t intend for our Thanksgiving break to be quite this long, but sometimes circumstances have a way of jumping in the driver’s seat and taking control. So, as a friend said, we’re three-quarters of the way through the Hallothankmas holiday season and trying to keep our heads above the ho-ho-ho waters until 2008 rolls in and we can breathe again.
The last time we talked I shared a story about a P-38 uncovered by beach eroision in Wales. Now I have a report of a Douglas-C47 that has turned up in Bosnia near Sarajevo. It last flew 13 years ago during the Bosnian war for independence when bullets riddled the fuselage. But this is one tough plane. It’s been around since 1944 and flew as an unarmed cargo plane during the Normandy invasion when it dropped paratroopers behind enemy lines to sabotage German batteries preparatory to the landings.
The plane will be taken to Merville, Normandy, restored, and displayed in the local museum. The radio operator on the craft, Joseph “Buck” Buckner died in 2003 but his son said he could recite the plane’s tail number without hesitation. The plane was so heavily damaged at Normandy with holes in the wings and fuselage it couldn’t take off again after its final drop. Engineers patched it up and it went in again for Operation Market Garden, the mission in the Netherlands immortalized in A Bridge Too Far. Ditto for a mission to Belgium. And it appears the C-47 continued to get shot up right through 1994.
This baby deserves to rest quietly in a museum and have its story told. (Click here to read the Houston Chronicle’s article on this story.)
Ready to read more 451Press blogs? Try “Plastic Bags into Placemats” at GloballyGreenLiving.com or “Five Things Chevy is Doing Right Now to Help Us All Do More and Use Less” at NaturalAndSustainable.com.
WWII, World War II, Normandy, C-47
June 9th, 2008 at 9:34 am
hey dis is so kool there is so much info on d-day its so kool its geat…….. it just seems so important and intresting i love reading about it………….. but i should let you know that it is also sad reading about what happend to them and how many people died.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Great articles & A nice site….
June 22nd, 2010 at 4:51 am
Yeah, although I adore her to pieces I mostly feel down that she went a little crazy a while back.