DC–3/C–47

The renowned Douglas DC–3 served in larger numbers than any other wartime transport. Its precursor, the DC–1, originated in 1931 in response to a request from TWA, which wanted to replace trimotored airliners in service at the time. The principal impetus came after a Fokker trimotor went down in a Kansas wheat field killing, among others, Knute Rockne, the famous football coach at Notre Dame University. Public antipathy toward trimotors, including conventional wood-and-fabric construction, spurred the young Douglas company to design a new kind of all-metal twin-engine transport. The airplane’s designers also took advantage of advanced aeronautical engineering techniques of the era, including wing flaps, retractable gear, deicing equipment, NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) cowling, flush riveting, stressed-skin construction, variable-pitch propellers, and state-of-the-art engines with greater reliability and time before overhaul. The melding of all these and other features resulted in an aircraft that soon played a key role in commercial air transportation. By 1938, it was estimated that 80 percent of all U.S. passengers traveled in DC–3s. Designed and built for commercial airline service but adaptable for other purposes, the DC–3 and other airliners of the same era resulted in a fleet of military transports that compiled a heroic record of wartime service.

The AAF’s initial deployment of the DC–3 type actually began with its immediate predecessor, the DC–2, which was the production version of the DC–1. Three variants were eventually purchased and were designated C–32, C–33, and C–39. By 1942, nearly eighty airplanes of all three types had entered service and were capable of carrying fourteen to sixteen passengers. The C–39s, in particular, proved their value early in the war, evacuating large numbers of personnel from the Philippines to Australia and helping to establish an aerial shuttle service from New England to Labrador, thus supporting the demanding routes that continued across the North Atlantic.

In the meantime, Douglas had developed the DC–3 version of its new airliner, equipped with improved engines, aerodynamic refinements, a larger fuselage, and an optional cargo door for handling bulky shipments of air freight. The new DC–3 entered airline service in 1936, beginning a remarkable career. The AAF took first deliveries of this type of aircraft in early 1942, with the designation C–47 Skytrain. The British military service dubbed it the Dakota, and Allied troops around the globe affectionately referred to the airplane as the “Gooney Bird.” With Pratt & Whitney engines of 1,200 hp each, the C–47 had a top speed of 220 mph with a maximum range of fifteen hundred miles. Its crew typically consisted of pilot and copilot and usually included a crew chief to oversee cargo handling. The wartime C–47 transports discarded the roomy, twenty-one–seat interiors of the airline version and installed bench seats along the fuselage walls to seat thirty-two passengers or twenty-seven troops in combat gear. Hospital transport conversions carried up to twenty-four stretcher cases, but medical evacuations in wartime carried several dozen wounded in harried evacuation flights. The big cargo door on the port side facilitated handling of military shipments of six thousand pounds in regular operations, although the C–47s lifted thousands more in military emergencies on shorter hops.

A nearly identical DC–3 variant, the C–53 Skytrooper, lacked the cargo door and went into service as a troop carrier equipped to haul forty-two passengers or twenty-six fully equipped paratroopers. The AAF acquired 378 Skytroopers, and about two hundred more DC–3 types taken from the airlines entered service as the C–48 through C–52, as well as others. All of these shared the basic airframe of the C–47, differing only in seating arrangements, engines, and other details. At a distance, each appeared so similar that reporters and military personnel tended to lump them all under the generic designation C–47. 

The ubiquity of the Skytrain-Dakota-Gooney Bird transport, and its ability to operate from very rough forward airstrips, made it familiar to millions of Allied forces stationed around the world. The C–47 and its relatives not only pioneered in-theater wartime routes but also served as VIP transports, general personnel transports, troop carriers, glider tugs, paratroop assault transports, cargo transports, airborne ambulances, air-sea rescue craft, and special operations aircraft. Supporters of the airplane liked to quote a remark attributed to Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Four things won the Second World War—the bazooka, the Jeep, the atom bomb, and the C–47 Gooney Bird.” By war’s end, some thirteen thousandC–47 variants had been delivered, plus two thousand more built under li-cense by foreign manufacturers. The C–47 played a major role in postwar service, remaining in operational units through the 1960s; in the late 1960s, as the AC–47 Gunship, the redoubtable Douglas transports con-ducted strafing missions during the war in Vietnam.