I saw a little article over at David Axe’s excellent spot which I almost passed by with barely a blink. I’m sure if I’d actually bought that Grecian Formula and used the stuff I’d have grabbed onto David’s post immediately.

During World War II, U.S. C-47 twin-engine transport planes delivered commandoes and civilian spies behind enemy lines in France, Yugoslavia and Burma to fight and spy on the Germans and Japanese. More than 60 years later the old “Goonie Birds” are still at it. U.S. Special Operations Command uses a handful of the seemingly eternal airplanes for hush-hush missions in Africa, South America and Central Asia, where C-47s and their DC-3 civilian equivalents are still common and prized for their ruggedness and inoffensive looks. The 6th Special Operations Squadron based at Hulbert Field in Florida flies modified DC-3s (pictured below) alongside equally ubiquitous Russian-made helicopters and transports and Huey choppers.

The C-47 was the militarized version of the Douglas Aircraft DC-3, the plan that made “modern” air transport in the US possible. The arrival of this plane made west-to-east trips across the States seem like a civilized affair, doing the trip in 15 hours, with three refueling stops. East to west took a bit longer. Before the DC-3, you made the day trip in smaller commuter planes, and traveled (and slept) at night on trains.

The DC-3/C-47 flew under about more than 50 national flags and a slew of commercial airline liveries. During the war years, and for about 10 years afterwards, it seemed like just about every airport in the world had at least one of these planes on it.

It was the ubiquitous air transporter for the US Army, hauling people and goods in every war theater around the world. It was so familiar that it became better known as a symbol than the American flag. They carried paratroopers and supplies throughout the Pacific and China-Burma-India theaters, and were the lifeline for the units known as “Merrill’s Marauders” and General Bill Slim’s Chindits. They, along with their yoke-mates, the Curtis C-46, carried fuel and supplies over the “hump” of the Himalayas, from India to China, supplying Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces.

During GEN Douglas MacArthur’s Hopscotch advance along the New Guinea coast C-47’s ferried men and supplies from Australia across the Owen Moresby mountain range to the north coast of New Guinea. Every now and then one of these planes would crash, for one reason or another, and groups of natives living in the interior built a religion around the magical birds in the sky that occasionally brought them great wealth and marvelous mysteries. The 1960s hit film Mondo Cane had a bit about New Guinea cargo cults, portraying them quite sympathetically.

The C-47 and C-46 broke the back of the Russian embargo of Berlin, transporting millions of pounds of food and coal to an isolated city. At its height in 1948 the Berlin Airlift was landing a plane every 30 seconds in Berlin.

Throughout the 50s and 60s the C-47 was seen all over Southeast Asia and Central Africa moving goods, sometimes “political” cargo, if the price was high enough. There was always a good market for guns, and the world was awash in them back then, just as it is today. Flying Tiger Airlines used a lot of surplus C-47s after the war, and flew into a lot of small airfields all over Eastern and Southeastern Asia, carrying a lot of different cargoes. If the whispers are right, some of them were "political."

During our last little unsuccessful adventure in overseas power projection, many of us knew the C-47 as “Puff” the night-time savior, with 7.62 mini-guns that put out rounds at 6,000 per minute, and broke the back of many an NVA attack. They fired 1-in-6 tracer and at night you’d see them operating, throwing a line of fire that looked like a straight line of laser red cover. If I remember the statistics right, a two second burst was enough to put a round every six inches across a football field.

In the age of jets that fly at twice the speed of sound, it’s interesting that a museum relic that first flew in 1935 at 150 mph is still in the air, and still working for the Air Force.