Gliders of the US Marine Corps (1942)

LNS-1 gliders of the US Marine Corps flying over Parris Island, South Carolina (May 1942) (Library of Congress)

Recently, while looking for something else, I ran across a collection of 291 photos taken at, or in the air above, the US Marine Corps school for glider pilots at Parris Island in May of 1942. As I did not know that American Marines had flown sail planes during the Second World War, I decided to do a bit of digging.

Having found the aforementioned pictures on the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog of the Library of Congress, I visited the counterpart of that register on the website of the US National Archives. (As the latter serves as a search engine for most of the materials held in ‘America’s attic’, I limited my query to images I could access online.)¹

My quest turned up but two relevant images. These, however, provided important clues to the types of gliders employed by the Marine Corps in the early 1940s: the XLNE and the LNS-1. (Pratt, Read, and Company, of Deep River, Connecticut, a company that specialized in the cutting of ivory piano keys, fabricated the former. Schweizer Aircraft, of Elmira, New York, a company that then possessed more than ten years of experience in the design and manufacture of gliders, built the latter.)

XLNE (Pratt, Read, and Company) (US National Archives)

LNS-1 (Schweizer) (US National Archives)

Note:  If you would like to learn more about American gliders of the Second World War, the Substack of Monique Taylor offers an excellent place to start.