Tony Barton
Company Commander
My father Ted Barton , 87 , was just getting together some stuff to give a talk about his experience as an RAF glider Pilot at the end of WW2 , and I have been helping him out by doing a little digging on the web.
After an interesting but largely uneventful carrer as a Pilot Instructor in Canada ,as part of the Imperial Training scheme which trained thousands of pilots around Calgary , he returned return to idleness in the UK in late 1944 .
Along with many other excess pilots , he was placed into a sort of cold storage at a hotel in Yorkshire, not far from where I now live, bored witless with nothing to do.
After the tragedy of "Market Garden" in September of '44, he was
" seconded " from the RAF after Arnhem along with many of his colleagues , to replace the losses in glider pilots.
Trained all winter , he took part in the Varsity Rhine crossing on the 24th March 1945, landing his glider successfully despite the smoke and the flak : the losses all round were truly horrific.
He was carrying a jeep , 75mm howitzer and limber , and five crew.
He has no photographs of his own service at all , so imagine his and my utter delight when I quickly turned up this pic on the Paradata website :
There are quite a few pics of gliders on this operation , many of them crashed , but oin most of them it's impossible to discern the number .
This one , however , is HIS glider, chalk No. 356 !
The sheer luck of this find is extraordinary.
I shamelessly stole this from the Paradata website, but I have ordered some prints, and I think in these utterly remarkable circumstances they would forgive me.
It's just possible that's him on the right, middle ground, looking bored whilst guarding all those happy Germans.
I just sent this to him.
His response was to wonder who had nicked the unloading channels that ought to be sticking out of the fuselage of the glider...
After an interesting but largely uneventful carrer as a Pilot Instructor in Canada ,as part of the Imperial Training scheme which trained thousands of pilots around Calgary , he returned return to idleness in the UK in late 1944 .
Along with many other excess pilots , he was placed into a sort of cold storage at a hotel in Yorkshire, not far from where I now live, bored witless with nothing to do.
After the tragedy of "Market Garden" in September of '44, he was
" seconded " from the RAF after Arnhem along with many of his colleagues , to replace the losses in glider pilots.
Trained all winter , he took part in the Varsity Rhine crossing on the 24th March 1945, landing his glider successfully despite the smoke and the flak : the losses all round were truly horrific.
He was carrying a jeep , 75mm howitzer and limber , and five crew.
He has no photographs of his own service at all , so imagine his and my utter delight when I quickly turned up this pic on the Paradata website :

There are quite a few pics of gliders on this operation , many of them crashed , but oin most of them it's impossible to discern the number .
This one , however , is HIS glider, chalk No. 356 !
The sheer luck of this find is extraordinary.
I shamelessly stole this from the Paradata website, but I have ordered some prints, and I think in these utterly remarkable circumstances they would forgive me.
It's just possible that's him on the right, middle ground, looking bored whilst guarding all those happy Germans.
I just sent this to him.
His response was to wonder who had nicked the unloading channels that ought to be sticking out of the fuselage of the glider...