By Benjamin Rothstein

DOVER – Thursday, June 6 marks 80 years since the D-Day invasion.

Anyone who wishes to view a piece of history or pay their respects to the soldiers involved need not travel far to do so — only to Dover Air Force Base’s Air Mobility Command Museum.

Two of the museum’s indoor displays are directly tied to D-Day: A C-47A Skytrain named the “Turf and Sport Special,” named for the Turf and Sport horse racing magazine, and a CG-4A glider, a one-time use aircraft that was prepared for D-Day but never took to the sky.

“Turf and Sport Special was one of about 1,200 airplanes used in the largest invasion ever in the history of mankind,” said museum operations manager Michael Hurlburt. “That one dropped 18 paratroopers into Sainte-Mère-Église, France, which is a town in Normandy, on what is known as D-Day, but the official name of the entire operation was Operation Overlord.”

The Navy and Airborne parts of the operation were dubbed “Operation Neptune.” The 18 paratroopers in the Turf and Sport Special were part of the 82nd Infantry.

“I tell people all the time jumping is the easy part,” said Mr. Hurlburt. “Once you hit the ground, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. You don’t know when the next time you’re going get a good night’s sleep. It might be weeks before you find your way to an ally base.”

Paratroopers loaded up with food, clothing and ammunition, which meant they were jumping with bags strapped to them weighing 100-120 pounds on top of the weight of their parachute.

Turf and Sport Special flew many other missions as well, including Operation Market Garden and Operation Varsity, but by the early 1980s it was sitting in Pennsylvania in bad shape.

“The brand-new Chinook heavy lift helicopters (used) this since it was kind of dead weight. They didn’t care about it. They put straps around it and lifted it, flew with it, put it back down, just to practice lifting heavy things with this brand-new helicopter,” said Mr. Hurlburt.

He said that three other museums had turned the Turf and Sport Special down before a group of Reservists at Dover Air Force Base, fresh off the restoration of a B-17, decided to take a stab at it. A couple years of hard work later, the C-47A became the Air Mobility Command Museum’s first exhibit.

Since then, Mr. Hurlburt says he has seen the plane, and its paratrooper-dressed mannequins elicit responses from veterans.

“To include World War II veterans that come in, I’ve been asked a few times by 80-, 90-, 100-year-old men, they want to take a picture with their buddies,” said Mr. Hurlburt. “They want to put their arm around them and pose with them because they look identical to what they remember eighty years ago.”

In 2019, for the 75th Anniversary of D-Day, two of the surviving paratroopers who jumped from the Turf and Sport Special, George Schenkle and Joe Morettini, visited Dover and signed the plane’s side.

At one point in the ’90s, the plane’s aerial engineer, W.E. “Bing” Wood, visited the museum, and he knew immediately the plane was his. He recognized bullet holes the plane sustained and shrapnel holes on the bottom of the plane he covered himself.

The CG-4A glider, which could also carry troops to the ground, had the advantage of being able to transport large machinery, like a jeep, its nose opening to let the vehicle out. They were one-time use, often broken upon landing.

There are no engines on board, and electric components were limited to things like battery-operated lights. It was also effectively silent—but only on the outside. That was due to the fabric that made up the glider’s outside.

“With a wind beating on it, (glider-men) compared it to sitting inside of a bass drum at a rock concert for hours on end,” said Mr. Hurlburt. “They would have had to wear double hearing protection. You couldn’t even talk to the guy sitting right next to it because it was so loud.”

Mr. Hurlburt said the same type of fabric was used on several aircraft at the time, including the Turf and Sport Special, to preserve the metal supply.

The glider featured very limited flight instruments, limited to things like airspeed sensors and altimeters, which are analog, and physics based.

According to Mr. Hurlburt, many gliders like the one at the museum went unused during the invasion and war. Interestingly, when the military began selling them after the war, they flew off the shelve s —but not for the gliders themselves, but for the high-quality crates they came in.

Mr. Hurlburt puts the D-Day invasion in high regard.

“It’s just an honor to be here. Not only for the 75th for the 80th (anniversary, but also) the job that I have, working with these airplanes that were there and getting to meet those people that were there, they’re called the greatest generation for a reason,” said Mr. Hurlburt.

“What they did (on D-Day) is why we’re not (speaking) German right now — the hell that they went through to save the world from the Nazis,” he added.

The Dover AMC Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.