Inside the glider, in the dark, the tank crew sat in their tank with the engine running. The exhaust was ducted out through the side of the aircraft. When the glider stopped moving, the driver pulled a lanyard to release the shackles and drove forward, and the act of driving forward pulled the line that swung the nose open.

If the nose did not open, the plan was to drive through it. This happened.

The General Aircraft Hamilcar was the largest wooden aircraft Britain built during the war, and it existed to do one thing: put an armoured vehicle on the ground behind enemy lines, within minutes of the paratroops.

The idea they sensibly abandoned

General Aircraft’s first sketch had the tank’s driver flying the glider from his own seat, with the turret sticking out through the top of the airframe. Everybody involved, including General Aircraft, concluded this was a bad idea.

What they built instead was a box with wings on top. Putting the cockpit and the wing above the fuselage left the whole cross-section clear for cargo, and the entire nose hinged sideways to open it. The undercarriage oleos could be deflated on the ground to drop the nose and let vehicles roll straight out without ramps.

6 June 1944

Thirty-four Hamilcars went to Normandy. Four flew in the night lift carrying 17-pounder anti-tank guns, of which only two reached the landing zone. Thirty more came in the evening reinforcement lift, twenty of them carrying Tetrarch light tanks of the 6th Airborne Armoured Reconnaissance Regiment.

It did not all go well. One broke its tow rope and landed back in England. One was released early and later attacked, killing four men. One came down in the Channel after its Tetrarch tore loose from its shackles and went out through the nose. Two collided on the landing zone and destroyed both tanks, and a third flipped its Tetrarch while unloading.

Bill Gladden, who was 20, flew in on top of one of the tanks.

The men towing them were under no illusions about what was on the other end of the rope.

Not one Hamilcar came back from Normandy. They were far too large to recover.

Arnhem and the Rhine

At Arnhem in September 1944 the type had its worst day. Two turned over onto their backs on soft ground on 17 September, killing three glider pilots. Others ditched, aborted or were hit by flak, and the third lift — American engineers with bulldozers — was cancelled.

Operation Varsity, the Rhine crossing on 24 March 1945, was the largest Hamilcar effort: 48 of them, carrying 17-pounders, Universal Carriers, eight M22 Locust tanks and a pair of D4 bulldozers. Seven were lost on the way, mostly to tug engine failures, and one carrying a Locust broke up in the air over the Rhine with all aboard. Three more were shot down by flak. Thirty-eight landed.

Afterwards

A powered version was developed for the Pacific, with two Bristol Mercury radials to give it range and let it fly home again. It flew in February 1945 and was overtaken by the end of the war.

Of the 344 built, no complete airframe survives. A large section of one is at the Army Flying Museum at Middle Wallop; another is at the Tank Museum at Bovington, displayed with a Tetrarch inside it — recovered in 1990 from a Wiltshire farm, where it had spent forty-five years as a shed.

Wartime footage of Hamilcars and their tank loads:

British Pathe on the glider-and-tank combination:

And a demonstration of the type being loaded and towed:

Sources: Airborne Assault / ParaData; The Tank Museum, Bovington; Imperial War Museum; History of War magazine, June 2024; the Pegasus Archive.