Douglas C-47 Skytrain

The most important Allied aircraft of the war was never designed to fight. It began as the Douglas DC-3, the airliner that first made passenger flight profitable: developed from the DC-2 for American Airlines, the prototype Douglas Sleeper Transport first flew on 17 December 1935. Fast, comfortable and reliable, the DC-3 was so far ahead of its rivals that by 1938 it carried roughly 90% of the world’s airline traffic, and the airlines finally made money carrying people rather than mail.

When the United States went to war the Army seized on that proven airframe rather than wait for a purpose-built transport. Douglas militarised the DC-3 as the C-47 Skytrain, which first flew in 1941: the passenger windows disappeared, the fuselage floor was reinforced, a large twin cargo door was cut into the port side, the tail and undercarriage were strengthened, and hooks were fitted for towing gliders. What had been the world’s finest airliner became the Allies’ universal beast of burden.

The C-47 was powered by two Pratt & Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp fourteen-cylinder radials of about 1,200 hp each, turning three-blade Hamilton Standard propellers. It was not fast — a top speed of roughly 360 km/h and a cruise nearer 260 km/h — but it was honest and immensely tough, with a range of about 2,600 km, a span of 29.4 m and a length of 19.4 m. A crew of three or four flew it: pilot, co-pilot, radio operator and, on long hauls, a navigator.

Its genius was in what it swallowed. A single Skytrain could carry 28 fully equipped troops, or 18–22 paratroopers, or about 2,700 kg of freight — a jeep, a dismantled field gun, drums of fuel, crates of ammunition — or, with racks fitted, up to 18 stretcher cases as a flying ambulance. It shrugged off rough forward strips of mud and pierced-steel planking that would have wrecked a more delicate machine, and it flew home with damage that should have downed it. Ubiquity and durability, not speed, were its weapons.

After 1945 General Dwight D. Eisenhower was asked what equipment had done most to win the war in Europe, and his answer named no fighter and no bomber. He listed four unglamorous things: the bulldozer, the jeep, the 2½-ton truck — and the C-47 Dakota. It was a soldier’s verdict on a soldier’s aeroplane: the war was won as much by logistics as by firepower, and nothing moved the Allied armies like the Gooney Bird.

The names told the same story of affection. American crews called it the “Gooney Bird,” after the ungainly albatross that runs forever before it flies; the British and Commonwealth called it the “Dakota,” often shortened to “Dak,” a name said to come from the initials D.A.C.T.A. (Douglas Aircraft Company Transport Aircraft). Officially it was the Skytrain, and the paratroop-only version the C-53 Skytrooper. By any name it was the aircraft the ordinary soldier knew best.

The C-47 carried the Allied airborne on its back. On the night of 5–6 June 1944, the unarmed, unarmoured Skytrains of IX Troop Carrier Command — around 900 aircraft — flew the American 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions across the Channel and dropped them behind Utah Beach, holding formation through walls of flak at low altitude with no way to fight back. Others towed Waco CG-4A and Airspeed Horsa gliders full of infantry and jeeps, while RAF Dakotas carried the British 6th Airborne to the flank.

It was not always a triumph. During the Sicily landings of July 1943 (Operation Husky), jittery Allied naval and ground gunners opened fire on a stream of C-47s carrying the 504th Parachute Infantry, shooting down about 23 of their own transports in one of the war’s worst friendly-fire disasters. Yet the Dakota kept flying the airborne into every great assault that followed: Market Garden at Arnhem in September 1944, the invasion of southern France, and the massed Rhine crossing of Operation Varsity on 24 March 1945 — the largest single-day airborne operation in history.

The C-47’s hardest work was flown far from Europe. When the Japanese cut the Burma Road in 1942, the only way to keep China in the war was to fly supplies from Assam in India across the eastern Himalayas — a route the crews called “the Hump.” C-47s, later joined by C-46 Commandos and C-54s, battled savage icing, sudden downdrafts, monsoon storms and unmapped peaks above 4,900 m, often with Japanese fighters waiting. Between 1942 and 1945 the airlift delivered some 650,000 tons of cargo, at the cost of hundreds of aircraft and crews.

Everywhere else the same aeroplane knitted the war together. Dakotas resupplied the Chindits and Merrill’s Marauders deep in the Burmese jungle, dropping food and ammunition to columns cut off far behind Japanese lines; they hauled freight across the vast distances of the Pacific island campaigns; and on the return leg they carried the wounded back to hospital. Wherever there was no road, no railway and no port, there was usually a C-47.

Douglas and its licensees built the type in staggering numbers: roughly 10,000 C-47s, and, counting every military DC-3 derivative, a family well past 16,000 aircraft — among the most-produced transports in history. The variants covered every need: the C-53 Skytrooper for paratroops, the US Navy and Marine Corps R4D, and the RAF’s Dakota Mk I–IV.

It was also that rarest thing — an aircraft flown in numbers by both sides. The Soviet Union had bought a pre-war licence and built the DC-3 as the Lisunov Li-2, turning out more than 4,900 of them, while Japan built it under its own pre-war licence as the Showa/Nakajima L2D “Tabby,” some 485 aircraft. The same Douglas airliner carried paratroops for the Allies, the Red Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy alike.

When the shooting stopped the Gooney Bird refused to retire. It flew the Berlin Airlift of 1948–49 until the larger C-54 took over the run, served throughout the Korean War, and went back into combat over Vietnam two decades later as the AC-47 “Spooky” gunship — “Puff the Magic Dragon” — its miniguns pouring fire onto jungle tree-lines at night. Ninety years after the first DC-3 lifted off, a remarkable number are still flying.

No aircraft did more, more quietly. The C-47 fired almost no shots and sank no ships, yet without it there is no airborne assault on Normandy, no lifeline to China, no swift evacuation of the wounded from a hundred forward strips. Fighters and bombers won the headlines; the unarmed Dakota won the war behind them, and earned from the men who flew and rode in it the affection given to no other machine of the conflict.

• Arthur Pearcy, Douglas Dakota: A Legend in Her Time (Airlife).
• Martin W. Bowman, The Douglas C-47 Skytrain and Dakota (Pen & Sword).
• Michael O’Leary, DC-3 & C-47 Gooney Birds (Motorbooks).