From Facebook: National WWII Glider Pilots Committee
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Alan S Boyd passed away Sunday, October 18th, at the age of 98. He was a wonderful person. I had the opportunity to meet with him several times and he was always so gracious and helpful. He was our First Secretary of Transportation under President Lyndon B Johnson in 1966, he went on to be the CEO of Amtrak, then the President of Airbus Industries.
However, what I found to be his most important work was during WWII. He started out from the very beginning in 1943 as a Troop Carrier Pilot. He was assigned to the 436th Troop Carrier Group, 82nd TC Squadron. He was a Command pilot and flew hundreds of missions to the front lines with resupplies and returning with wounded then flew four of the five combat mission in the European Theater of the War.
For Normandy he dropped the 82nd Airborne then went back to base and towed gliders loaded with elements of the 82nd glider-borne units back to the Cotentin peninsula., each trip under enemy fire. He volunteered to fly the invasion of Southern France. For Holland he dropped paratroopers of the 101st Airborne and also towed gliders to the LZ loaded with the 101st glider-borne troops, again under enemy fire. He dropped resupplies to the 101st in Bastogne and during the Varsity Operation he was busy picking up wounded from Remagen, Germany, and delivering supplies to the Army divisions preparing to cross the Rhine.
After the invasion of Germany, Troop Carrier began flying to the newly found concentration camps. He Remembered well what he experienced the first time his 436th Group picked up Russian repatriates:
“God they were scarecrows. I’ll never forget they were just bags of bones. The first one came up to my plane, and as I was getting ready to help him into the plane, he fell to his knees and began kissing my shoes; it made me cry. I had no idea what to do. I was trying to get him to get up but he just kept kissing my shoes. I felt all kinds of emotions from humility, embarrassment, surprise, confusion, pride, bewilderment, anger; you can’t imagine the sort of thing that humans do to each other. I cannot figure out how people can be so inhuman to other nationalities.”
In all his combat flights he flew through heavy flak and small arms fire, yet, his plane, Wishwell E (call sign Easy), which he flew throughout the entire war and was the plane he flew to Europe, in 1944, over the southern Route, and back to the US, in 1945, was never hit by enemy fire.
In 2016 he wrote the book "A Great Honor" and goes into details on his missions. The book is fun to read and he never had reservations about making fun of his mistakes. Because he wrote it it in his voice it makes the book a wonderful read.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/u...boyd-dead.html