Silent Wings at War: Combat Gliders in World War II.(Net Assessment)(Book Review)

by John L. Lowden. Smithsonian Institution Press (http://www.sipress.si.edu), 750 Ninth Street NW, Suite 4300, Washington, D.C. 20560-0950, 2002, 304 pages, $19.95 (softcover).

In September 1944 Walter Cronkite, then a war correspondent for United Press International in Europe, flew in a US Waco combat glider during Operation Market Garden--a poorly conceived and executed airborne assault on Holland designed to capture three critical bridges leading to the Rhine River. In the foreword to John Lowden's Silent Wings at War, Cronkite writes of his first--and only--glider flight: I'll tell you straight out: If you've got to go into combat, don't go by glider. Walk, crawl, …