Sipsey Street Irregulars: "The ‘Snatch Method’ Was One Crazy Way to Make a Glider Fly"

Saturday, August 29, 2015

"The ‘Snatch Method’ Was One Crazy Way to Make a Glider Fly"

I have a copy of the original U.S. Army Air Force training film on glider snatches. It is narrated by an obscure Hollywood actor then in uniform -- Ronald Reagan. I've also interviewed glider pilots who participated in "snatches," including one who flew out of Yugoslavia on a mission to bring two Soviet colonels to SHAEF headquarters in an operation that is still classified. Socked in by weather overnight, the glider pilot recalled with fondness the hospitality shown him by the Partisans. He wasn't much for specific details of that night, but he did comment, "Oh, those Partisan women!"

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: A Glider snatch is for women, balloon snatches(if your riding the wind) are for those with balls. Search C-130 STARS; August 29, 2015 at 9:32 AM
Anonymous said...: I've seen videos of a similar technique used for retrieving downed airmen. It involved sending up a balloon attached to a sturdy harness by a long stretchy cable. The "snatching" aircraft captured the balloon/cable in a v-shaped structure on it's nose similar to that used to capture film canisters dropped from the early spy satellites. Think "glider snatch" without the glider.; August 29, 2015 at 11:09 AM
Allen said...: glider snatches?

even for an old sailor, that sounds dirty!; August 29, 2015 at 12:27 PM
Jerry The Geek said...: Oh! John Wayne demonstrated the balloon-snatch in his movie "Green Berets".; August 29, 2015 at 8:40 PM
Galaxie_Man said...: @Jerry The Geek: What was used in the movie "The Green Berets" to extract the NVA officer at the end of the movie was called the "Fulton Extraction System". It is also known as the Fulton Recovery System.

Here's a link to a video https://youtu.be/UsTIeZ03Hk8

I would pay a lot of money to ride it just one time!; August 30, 2015 at 7:21 AM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Saturday, August 29, 2015

"The ‘Snatch Method’ Was One Crazy Way to Make a Glider Fly"

5 comments:

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