The glider Greenville's schoolkids bought

In the spring of 1943, the kids of Greenville’s public schools sold war bonds until they had raised more than $72,000 — enough to buy four military gliders. Not toys: the real thing, troop-carrying aircraft with no engine, built to be towed behind a plane and cut loose over a battlefield. The town had a special reason to care. They were made right there, in Greenville, at the Gibson Refrigerator plant.

Gibson normally turned out iceboxes. During the war it switched to the Waco CG-4A glider and became the country’s second-biggest producer of them, behind only Ford. Each glider had something like 70,000 parts and could carry a pilot, co-pilot, and thirteen soldiers. So when the schoolchildren pooled their bond money, they were buying back the thing their parents and neighbors were building on the line.

On May 19, 1943, they christened one of the gliders “The Fighting Falcon” at a ceremony on Black Field. For pulling it off, the students were given a Distinguished Service Award from the U.S. Treasury — the first time a group of schoolchildren had ever received it.

The story didn’t end on the home front. In honor of what the kids had done, the Army ordered a Fighting Falcon to fly lead. At 1:19 in the morning on June 6, 1944 — D-Day — the first glider in a column of fifty-two crossed into Normandy with a big “1” chalked on its nose. At the controls was Lieutenant Colonel Mike Murphy, the highest-ranking glider pilot in the force. That glider didn’t survive the landing.

Today a hand-built replica of the Fighting Falcon sits in an old 1902 schoolhouse on Cass Street, in a museum run by people who still tell the story like it happened to their own family. In a way, it did.