I got an email a while back from a reader named Gus who'd just finished Omar Bradley: General at War. We got to talking a bit about aircraft that the general had flown in; Gus is a buff and a pilot from way back, and we've had quite a bit of fun talking about the old planes.
Most readers will probably shoot right by the section on the C-78, a plane Bradley took to cross the Channel during one of the (many) crises after D-Day. I'd noted in the book that it was a small and slow plane. Gus seconded that, and also noted that the type was re-designated as the UC-78, though as far as I can tell the two planes were essentially the same. Here's a photo; it's a later version than anything Bradley would have used or probably even seen during the war, but it'll give an idea of the aircraft's size:
What you can't get from the photo is the fact that it was made out of wood.
So to put the aircraft in perspective: The fate of the Normandy invasion and the entire European campaign rested on the pluck of spruce, a pair of Jacobs radials, and the skill of a pilot who, no matter how ballsy he was, would have been a fat target for a passing Messerschmidt.
Not that Bradley's trans-Atlantic transport would have fared much better against a flight of Me-109s or Focke-Wulfs, but at least there would have been room to grab a parachute:
The general did get balled out for flying in the slow and unescorted C-78, but as usual he shrugged it off.
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