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RAF Upottery was built as a late-war troop carrier station in Devon, created to support the airborne phase of the Allied return to Europe. Officially opened on 17 February 1944, it was known to the United States Army Air Forces as AAF-462 (code ‘UO’) and quickly became associated with the Douglas C-47 Skytrain. Its location, away from the east-coast bomber concentrations, made it ideal for the intensive training needed for parachute and glider operations without constant disruption from heavy bomber traffic.
The airfield’s most famous moment came in the early hours of 6 June 1944. The 439th Troop Carrier Group (IX Troop Carrier Command, Ninth Air Force) moved in and trained hard for the invasion, operating roughly seventy C-47s. The group’s squadrons at Upottery were the 91st (L4), 92d (J8), 93d (3B) and 94th (D8) Troop Carrier Squadrons. On D-Day the group carried paratroopers of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division into Normandy, including men of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The following day, the same unit released gliders bringing reinforcements and equipment into the expanding bridgehead.
Those missions weren’t one-offs. Troop carrier work demanded relentless repetition: formation flying at low level, timed runs to dropping zones, and glider-towing drills, including the dramatic ‘pick-up’ technique used to snatch a glider into the air using a cable. Crews also learned to operate in darkness and poor weather, with navigators and dispatchers working to tight second-by-second schedules. The risks were real: collisions, flak, and the hazard of overloaded aircraft crossing the Channel at low altitude.
After Normandy, Upottery’s story follows the wider airborne campaign. The troop carrier groups that trained here were part of the machine that could concentrate lift capacity quickly – moving men, weapons, and supplies by parachute and glider when roads and ports were blocked. In 1944-45 this role expanded beyond combat drops to include resupply tasks, casualty evacuation, and the movement of personnel between forward fields and the UK. The airfield’s infrastructure – hardstandings, fuel, maintenance, and briefing facilities – was designed around rapid turn-round and mass take-off waves rather than long-range sorties.
Upottery later gained a second kind of wartime significance through memory and storytelling. It featured in popular portrayals of the airborne invasion, which helped fix the site in public imagination as one of the places where ordinary aircrew and soldiers stepped onto aircraft for an extraordinary night’s work. Behind the headline moments were thousands of routine tasks: rigging parachutes, checking engines, loading bundles, marking aircraft, and running operations boards that tried to keep order amid the chaos of a major campaign.
Today, understanding RAF Upottery means seeing it as a specialised ‘air bridge’ station – built for a short, intense purpose and judged by whether it could deliver people and equipment to the right place at exactly the right time. That is why the units and aircraft associated with the base, especially the 439th Troop Carrier Group and its C-47s, remain central to its World War II identity.