Lt. Col. David Hamilton, the last surviving C-47 pilot who flew pathfinding paratroopers into France during the 1944 D-Day invasion, died Jan. 5 at the age of 102.
Hamilton was born in Watford, England, in 1922 and lived in Paris until he and his family moved to New York City when he was six years old. His father flew in World War I and his older brother was a pilot with United Airlines, so when Hamilton joined the U.S. Army Air Forces on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his goal was to fly.
It took a few years, but in early 1944 the newly-trained C-47 transport pilot arrived in England, where his substantial amount of instrument flying experience earned him a slot in the Pathfinders, a special unit of 20 C-47 crews forming up ahead of the D-Day invasion.
The Pathfinders carried about 300 Pathfinder paratroopers just two hours ahead of the larger invasion of approximately 13,000 paratroopers. The ground troops’ goal was to mark landing zones and drop zones to guide in the other aircraft.
The Pathfinder aircrews used a suite of cutting-edge radar and radio navigation equipment. One was the SCR-717 microwave navigation radar, which, according to the National Air & Space Museum, involved a rotating dish in a radome mounted below the C-47. The dish emitted radar waves that reflected off the terrain and gave the navigator a picture of the shorelines, rivers, roads, and cities below on his cathode ray tube display.
“We had a $100,000 airplane with $500,000 worth of radar in it,” Hamilton told the American Veterans Center in 2022. But the investment paid off when the C-47 flew at night at low altitude.
“I could fly anywhere in northern Europe at night 25 feet above the ground and know I was safe,” he said.
Taking off for his first combat mission late the night of June 5, 1944, Hamilton said he was not scared, but he was aware of his responsibility as aircraft commander.
“It exceeded that of a fighter pilot who only had himself and his airplane,” he told the Commemorative Air Force in 2021. “I had myself, my airplane, and a crew, plus all the paratroopers and an observer. So I had, you know, 26 people on that airplane when we took off.”
Once over the English Channel, they descended to just 50 feet above the water to get below German radar, then lifted up to 900 feet over the coast of France where they ran into a cloud bank. The clouds wreaked havoc on the Pathfinder formation, as pilots lost sight of the planes in front of them, according to the Air Mobility Command museum, but Hamilton managed to keep track of his flight commander’s right wing.
“I pulled just down the bottom of the cloud bank, broke out, gave them the green light, out they went,” he said. “Took about 10 seconds to get 20 troopers out.”
Hamilton then had to lift his right wing fast to avoid clipping the steeple of a church at Sainte-Mère-Église, he said. But the way back took the crew’s breath away, as the navigator showed them the radar display of the English Channel filled with invasion ships.
“Every individual ship was a dot. It looked like you could walk from England to France,” he said. “[That’s] the one mission that I always look back on as the most important mission I ever flew, because D-Day was so important and it was the beginning of something that was so important. And I didn’t start to really feel that until I saw that picture.”
On returning to base, Hamilton’s crew found their C-47’s wingtip blown off and engine controls damaged by 20mm cannon fire, along with 300 tiny holes from .25 caliber machine pistol rounds. He later found out that six of the paratroopers who stepped off his plane were shot before they hit the ground.
“They took a beating,” he said.
A Lifelong Storyteller
D-Day was just the start of the war for Hamilton, who dropped everything from British spies over southern France to winter clothes and ammunition over Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. He ferried Allied generals to the battlefields, took a captured German general back to England, and carried gravely wounded soldiers out of Holland after Operation Market Garden.
After the war, Hamilton flew C-47s and C-54s for civilian airlines, but he rejoined the Air Force to serve in the Korean War, where he flew 51 missions in RB-26 reconnaissance aircraft, according to the Commemorative Air Force. He received the Distinguished Flying Cross, five Air Medals, and two Presidential Unit Citations. He played a role developing the Sidewinder missile and analyzing intelligence during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Hamilton retired from the Air Force in 1963 and went on to become “an executive with a well-known food and liquor distributor,” according to the San Diego Air & Space Museum.
“Beyond his military achievements, Hamilton was a cherished storyteller and educator, often sharing his experiences at airshows, universities, and other events,” wrote the Commemorative Air Force.
Indeed, his flair for storytelling never faded. In his 2021 interview with the Commemorative Air Force, the 99-year-old recalled crash-landing a C-47 in a field in England, where the belly-mounted radome stopped the aircraft from hurtling over a 200-foot cliff.
“The only thing that was damaged in the plane, other than the plane, was three cases of Italian whiskey,” he said. “Well, not whiskey, wine–Strega, I don’t know if you know what Strega is, but you don’t want to drink it. They put it and battery acid in the same category.”
In 2019, Hamilton enjoyed his second trip aboard a C-47 over Normandy as part of a 75th anniversary celebration of D-Day, albeit this time without anti-aircraft fire. The next month, he flew a C-47 again over Oklahoma.
“His continued involvement in CAF events, including airshows and educational programs, made him a beloved figure in the aviation history community,” wrote the Commemorative Air Force.