AIR: At Twentynine Palms

Since the glider program has been under way, a touch of Tom Swift and His Wonderful Airship has crept into the shoptalk of Army airmen. As of Jan. 1, Army glider pilots, like Army gliders, were rare as four-leaf clovers. Few air experts knew what gliders could do (except for what they had read about Crete). As far as the U.S. public was concerned, gliding was still a game for a few nutty newsreel daredevils around Elmira, N.Y.

First School. Realizing that Hitler doesn't keep some 28,000 gliders just for fun, the Army opened the first of nine full-scale gliding schools...

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