Raymond Seeley

Lieutenant Raymond Seeley, son of Mr. and Mrs. Gerard U. Seeley, 31 South Perry street, is serving with the 440th Troop Carrier group, First Allied Airborne army, as pilot of a CG-4A glider. His unit, which has received a Presidential Unit citation, participated in the invasion of Normandy, the paratroop and glider operation in southern Frances, the airborne invasion of Holland, and the aerial resupply of the American troops at Bastogne. He is wearer of the Air medal with one Oak Leaf cluster. A graduate of Poughkeepsie High school. Lieutenant Seeley was employed as a bookbinder at Trussell Manufacturing company before entering the service in 1940.

Published in the Poughkeepsie New Yorker June 17, 1945 page 4A

Ray Seeley was part of the first group to be inducted in the first ever peacetime draft in U.S. history.

The time was November 1940 and he would be expected to serve one year.

But when that year was extended later because of the threat of war, Seeley decided he had to get out of the infantry and volunteered for the Air Corps.

He was accepted, went to armament school and was assigned to a base in Moultrie, Ga., as an aircraft mechanic when, in the summer of 1942, the army put out a call for volunteers to join the glider program.

Seeley initially had no interest in becoming a glider pilot but was prodded into volunteering by his buddy, and English immigrant who was irate over the pasting English cities were taking in the German blitz.

“I said ‘No I won’t volunteer. It is too impractical,’” Seeley recalled. “But he haunted me until we both eventually signed up. The funny thing is that they took me and not him.”

Seeley said he had seen engineless sailplanes before, but nothing like the 7,500 pound, 48 foot fabric gliders that could carry a jeep or an artillery piece along with up to a dozen fully-armed men.

“We learned out basics in small, light airplanes,” said Seeley, recalling his training experiences, “We’d have to cut off the engine and shoot deadstick landings, floating down on the air currents.”

“You had to estimate your landing area correctly because there was no room for mistakes with no power.”

And just to make the exercise more interesting, the Army would set up bamboo poles and other obstacles for the trainees to get around in their landings.

Eventually the trainees moved on to sailplanes, small versions of the glider.

“That was nice. There was no noise at all because there was no engine, Seeley said. “All you could hear was the slight whistle of the wind through the winds. Actually, you could even see the wings flap a little as the air rushed by them.”

Written by Harvey Auster, Journal Staff, published in the Poughkeepsie Journal September 18, 1986 page 14D

Memories of “Market Garden”

Recall their roles as glider pilots during the “Bridge Too Far” campaign

Sept 18, 1944, was Ray Seeley’s 25th birthday, but he wasn’t sure his life would extend beyond that anniversary day.

Flight Officer Seeley sat at the controls of a large CG4A cargo glider holding a jeep and five men from the U.S. 82d Airborne Division as they headed for an area between the Waal and Maas rivers near the Dutch city of Nijmegen.

The glider was one of 2, 596 being towed from England to a wide area behind German lines in western Holland.

The 35,000 American and British troops the gliders carried were part of the largest armada of troop carrying aircraft ever assembled for a single operation. The airborne troops, in conjunction with the massed tank columns of the British Second Army already heading northward into Holland from Belgium would try to force a crossing of the Lower Rhine into Germany in an operation called “Market Garden,” which was chronicled by author Cornelius Ryan in his book “A Bridge Too Far.”

Market Garden, an ambitious plan developed by British Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, was planned as a daring daylight assault to sweep through western Holland, capture several vital river and canal crossings, and slice into the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of the Reich.

Seeley, 67, a Hyde Park resident, vividly recalls that day in his engineless “flying coffin,” made of canvas stretched across a light tube=metal skeleton. As he sat at the controls, he could hear the whistle of the wind as it rushed across the 83-foot wingspan of his glider, which was attached to a cargo plane by an inch-thick nylon rope.

As the gliders crossed the Dutch coast, just south of Rotterdam, they were flying just 500 feet from the ground. Seeley could hear the small-arms fire being aimed from the ground at the aerial armada and watch as the Germans opened the dikes to flood the coastal fields.

Some of the gliders were hit. A friend of Seeley’s told him later the one German shell hit the tow rope and he watched nervously as the rope slowly unraveled.

“He said it scared the hell out of him. He said he thought he wasn’t going to make it to the drop zone,” Seeley recalled.

But he did.

Approaching Nijmegen at high noon, Seeley cut his tow rope and began riding the air currents to earth aiming for a pasture. On the way down, a shell from a German .88mm field gun ripped away a portion of the glider’s tail.

Seeley, a member of the 95th Squadron of the 440th Troop Carrier Command, had also piloted a glider during the previous month’s Allied invasion of Southern France.

For the Nijmegen operation, he was armed with a 45 automatic pistol and a Thompson submachine gun. But since he figured glider pilots would not be in the fighting for very long, he had filled his cartridge boxes with food, not ammunition.

When his glider landed, Seeley discovered that he had come down in the middle of a firefight between Americans and Germans on both sides of the pasture. His main problem was that he wasn’t sure who was on which side.

Seeley then lit out “like a deer” running for cover and hopefully, friendly lines. “I think I could have outrun Jesse Owens that day,” he said.

“It was scary,” he recalled. It wasn’t until he got to friendly lines that he remembered he had left behind the food he had so painstakingly put in his cartridge boxes.

A day later, some of the men who had been in his glider found him. They came bearing him a gift – his own food.

“They said they brought it to me as thanks for getting them down in one piece,” he recalled.

The linkup with ground forces driving up from France and Belgium stalled and the airborne troops had to hold out against German counter attacks for a week before being relieved.

“We were supposed to be pulled right out to go back for a possible second glider operation,” Seeley recalled, but he and the other glider pilots were trapped in the area with the other troops for that week.

During that week, the troops ran short of food and ammunition, as bad weather prevented resupply by air, Seeley recalled.

Three months later, on Christmas Day, 1944, Seeley would be awarded a battlefield commission to second lieutenant and be named squadron commander.

Among the options considered and later rejected during the planning of Operation Market Garden was to send the First Allied Airborne Army to secure a bridgehead on the Rhine near Wesel, about 40 miles southwest of Arnhem just of the Dutch-German border.

After Operation Market Garden failed in September 1944, the American high command decided to give the Wesel plan another shot early in the spring of 1945.

It would be the last mission for Seeley.

The plan was to ferry troops across the Rhine (which had already been crossed by U.S. troops on March 7 at Remagen and have them establish a foothold on the east bank of the river near Wesel to allow ground forces to cross in strength.

If Seeley had reason to be nervous during previous operations, those reasons seemed rather trivial compared to what he faced now.

As the mission began on March 24, 1945, he took off in a glider loaded with nitroglycerine, TNT, explosive primacord, and landmines.

Another glider carrying a similar load got hit by groundfire.

“It went up in one big puff. They never did find the pieces. That was one scary load,” he said.

“It was a rough mission,” Seeley said. “The Germans gave us a rough time there. They had machine gun nests set up in the basements of the houses.”

The action was a success, and shortly afterwards Seeley was rotated back to the United States where he began training for an airborne invasion of the Japanese home islands. But before that could happen, the newly-developed atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki and the war in the Pacific ended.

Written by Harvey Auster, Journal Staff, published in the Poughkeepsie Journal September 18, 1986 page 1D and 14D