Harry Furr wanted to be a pilot. With World War II expanding across the globe, the graduate of Central High School in Oklahoma City tried to join the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was disappointed by the response – his eyesight was not good enough. He was told only those with 20-20 vision need apply, and Harry Furr could only see that well with glasses.
But, Harry Furr persevered, and in a rather ironic twist, he got his chance to fly thanks to Adolph Hitler. You see, Hitler created a glider program when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and used engineless aircraft for the German invasion of Belgium in 1940. Despite heavy casualties suffered by Nazi glider infantry and paratroopers during invasions of Greece and Crete in 1941, gliders had been established as an affordable means of delivering troops and supplies in a war zone. The United States countered the Nazis by establishing its own glider program, reaching out to volunteer aviators like Harry Furr.
The American glider program relaxed the usual vision requirements. Harry Furr eagerly applied, and was quickly accepted. “I was able to get in, and I was very happy about it,” he told me. “I had no idea what I was going to fly, or when or where, but I would be flying,” Furr proudly said.
Furr enlisted in July of 1942 and began two years of pilot training. He learned to fly at the old Wiley Post Airport in Oklahoma City on the corner of May Avenue and Britton Road. He trained on gliders in Vinita, Oklahoma and Spencer, Iowa and Louisville, Kentucky and Dalhart, Texas before heading to Europe in January, 1944.
The beauty of gliders was their low cost – less than $25,000 – and their ability to fly, quietly and undetected, into enemy territory. Made of plywood and canvas, American gliders were towed to altitude by a C-47. Once near the target the gliders cut free from their towing cable and let gravity and the pilot’s skill do the rest. Furr remembered, “they were clumsy, difficult to land, came down pretty fast. They were difficult to manage and weren’t a lot of fun to fly.” Many gliders, quite simply, crashed. The gliders, and their pilots, were important to the Allied war effort, but they clearly were expendable.
Gliders were usually cut free at around 5,000 feet, leaving the pilots little time to seek a landing spot. Pilots were not briefed in advance about where to land, or what they might encounter. Without an engine, lights, parachutes, radio communication or armaments, the gliders had one chance to land, in the dark. Once on the ground, the pilots used the glider’s brakes or skidded into something to stop and unloaded its cargo of men and supplies. The men aboard, and the pilots, then turned-infantry soldier, forced to fend for themselves behind enemy lines.
The first major American glider mission came during Operation Husky, the more than a month-long battle for Sicily in 1943. Harry Furr saw his first combat action in an even bigger invasion: Operation Overlord, at Normandy, on D-Day.
Early in the evening of June 6, 1944, Harry Furr flew a heavy British Horsa across the English Channel to Utah Beach. With 15 men, a Jeep, trailer, medical supplies and co-pilot on-board, Furr’s glider was cut loose at 500 feet. The Horsa brushed the tops of trees as it made its landing in a field. “I smashed the whole front end of that glider out, landing,” Furr said, “but no one was hurt, we got down safe, got the load out OK and we made it out OK. We had to go through maching gun nests to get out of the field. The Germans were throwing in mortars on this field, so it was very intense until we got out of that field.”
Harry Furr flew two more missions in the glider program – Operation Market Garden (Holland) and Operation Varsity (Rhine River Crossing). Market Garden was the single largest glider operation of the war; Varsity was the deadliest, with more than 70 paradrop and gliding towing planes shot down. Seventy glider pilots were killed during Varsity, and another 114 were wounded or injured, but Harry Furr escaped unscathed. “The Germans were expecting us, the enemy fire was horrific at Varsity,” Furr recalled.
(above) Harry Furr, center, and friends pose in front of a captured Nazi flag.
Late in the war, Furr returned to the United States to train for the impending invasion of Japan, when the war came to an abrupt, and welcome, end. Furr was not looking forward to invading Japan, but he wishes the war had ended in a different way than it did. He has reservations about the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Truman had a chance to take some of those officials out to an atoll in the Pacific and show them what we had, and see whether they wanted to continue,” Furr said. “But he didn’t do that. They could have dropped the bomb out in the Pacific and showed them what a horrific bomb it was and maybe the war would have ended then. I’m not proud of our doing that. We destroyed hundreds of thousands of people, which we might not have had to do, but that was the way to end it, so that’s what we did.”
Harry Furr thinks World War II was necessary because “we were tired of what the Germans were doing to the world – they did a lot of things they should not have done.” But, his experience in World War II leads Furr to provide sobering advice to future generations contemplating war. ”Think very carefully about what you are about to do, resolve every available issue before you go to war,” he warned. “Try everything before you pull the trigger. Something might just work.”
(above) Harry Furr with Dick Pryor at Furr’s Oklahoma City home on August 14, 2007.
Until next time, Dick Pryor
(Harry Furr was profiled on the Oklahoma News Report on October 17, 2007. To see the story, click on “Videos” on this website and go to “OETA’s Dick Pryor interviews Oklahoma WWII veterans.”)
October 17th, 2007 at 7:08 pm
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