摘要：It's never a good idea to start an operation by crashing. Yet in the dark hours before dawn on June 6, 1944, hu ndreds of soldiers in two reinforced U.S. battalions did just that as they entered the continent of Europe at the outset of the great D- Day invasion. In award-winning films like The Longest Day and popular tele- vision series like Band of Brothers, Hol- lywood has rightly lionized the thou- sands of American paratroopers who jumped into the darkness in France over Sainte-M¨¨re-Eglise and Carentan. The hundreds of men who barreled into Norman hedgerows in flimsy wooden gliders get a scene or two at best. In Saving Private Ryan, for exam- ple, the Rangers come upon a crum- pled CG-4A-WO Waco glider and ex- change sardonic asides while contemplating the mortal remains of an unnamed one-star general.
