The Horsa Glider In the mid 60s as an 11yr old boy my family relocated from the suburbs of Oxford to a farmhouse near Standlake in West Oxfordshire, miles from anywhere, our nearest neighbour being Ÿ mile away. As children we had to make our own entertainment as children will do everywhere, what has this to do with anything you ask? Well how many kids can say they spent hours pretending to fly their own Horsa glider? Next to our new home and part of the property was a large, untended orchard. In the orchard was the remains of a glider, the wings were missing (used for firewood I am led to believe) but even after 20+ years the body was surprisingly intact if a little overgrown with weeds. There were no instruments left in the cockpit but the seats and flying columns were there as were the rudder pedals, what more could a young lad want? According to the farmer down the hill the glider had crash landed in 1944 when it suddenly lost its tow shortly after take off from nearby RAF Brize Norton, unable to regain the airfield the pilot or pilots had instead crash-landed in the orchard. Whichever department of the War Office who oversaw collection of this sort of thing obviously decided it wasn’t worth the time and effort required to recover the entire airframe from such a difficult place so had stripped it of all the important and easily transportable parts and left the rest to rot. The Cockpit In the 60s as a young child the significance of this aircraft was lost on me, we were not taught about the war at Witney Grammar despite, or maybe because of, the fact many of our teachers had fought in it, it was therefore many years later I learnt of its importance. The AS.51 Horsa was a troop-carrying glider built by Airspeed Limited and subcontractors and used for air assault by British and Allied armed forces and was named after Horsa, the 5th century conqueror of southern Britain. The Germans had been the pioneers of airborne operations, conducting several successful operations during the Battle of France in 1940, including the use of glider-borne troops in the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael. Impressed by this, the Allied governments decided to form their own airborne formation. This eventually led to the creation of two British airborne divisions, as well as a number of smaller units. The British airborne establishment began development in June 1940, when the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill,
A prototype on tow directed the War Office to investigate the possibility of creating a corps of 5,000 parachute troops. E-Zine 2014
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Volume 6 Issue 1 | 48
