D-Day: The Minuteman Maker

What does the D-day invasion of Normandy, the Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile, and the A-10 “Warthog” have in common?

His name is Glen Ogilvie, a Utah boy who went from the D-Day beach landings in northern France, to reporting directly to the United States Secretary of Defense, responsible for worldwide war readiness.

I first met Ogilvie at the Fort Douglass Museum on the 75th anniversary of D-Day. He sat on a bench near the front door, happily narrating personal experiences from WWII to a small crowd of patrons. His hair was neatly combed, and his watery dark brown eyes were alert behind his glasses. He wore a pastel yellow madras button-up shirt with short sleeves, khaki slacks, and brown loafers. The Fort Douglas Museum Director and Museum and Historical Collections Curator, Beau Burgess nudged me with his elbow and pointed excitedly at a cloth map that was spread over Ogilvie’s lap. I took a step closer and saw that it was a map of Omaha and Utah beaches. It was creased, torn, marked with handwritten notes, and sweat-stained from being carried in his pocket. From the tattered left corner, next to the legend, I read: Published by the War Office, 1914, 4th Edition 1943.

Ogilvie noticed my interest in the map and explained with a wry smile, “This is from a P-47 [Thunderbolt]. The airplanes got new maps for each sortie, so I thought, why not save one?”

The next time I saw Ogilvie was at his home in Salt Lake City. I was there to record an interview for the 2019 Veterans Day Concert, which would feature stories from D-Day. We sat together in his living room, decorated with some of the model aircrafts that bookmarked his long career. There was a P-47 Thunderbolt, a P-38 Lightning, and the A-10 Thunderbolt II, nicknamed “Warthog.” Warm sunlight streamed through the open front door as he began to tell his story.

The winter of 1927 had brought heavy snowfall to the Salt Lake Valley. As a 10-year-old paperboy, Ogilvie remembered walking west along 100 South on his usual route, through deep snowdrifts. When he reached the end of the road, he cut diagonally across an open field, over fences and railroad tracks. His fingers were stiff, and his toes numb from the cold by the time he reached North Temple, which was then only a gravel road. One of his regular stops along that road was the Hinkley family home, where 17-yearold Gordon B. Hinkley lived.

The paper route stretched to the end of North Temple, past the Army’s airfield, dotted with fabric-covered P-12 biplane fighters, to the airport proper, where he placed newspapers on the seats of Fokker Triplanes for Western Air Express. Not far from the runway where the mail planes idled, there was a hangar that belonged to Ray Peck, former airplane racer and owner of Thompson Flying Service. This was where Ogilvie’s love for airplanes began, and would eventually lead him on a long, decorated career in aviation and aerospace. Thompson Flying Service rebuilt airplanes and repaired airplane fabric. When the Great Depression struck, Peck’s business was grossly undermanned and on the verge of bankruptcy. Peck saw Ogilvie delivering his newspaper one morning and had an idea. He offered Ogilvie a job repairing airplanes in his hangar, and in return, proposed to pay the young boy in airplane rides. Ogilvie happily agreed and started right away. He began by feeding a needle back through the fabric on the airplane's wing, then learned how to apply resin to keep the fabric strong. He kept careful track of his hours and flew regularly. Eventually, these rides turned into flying lessons. In a notebook from his childhood, Ogilvie annotated over 58 flights.

“That, I think, is what made all the difference,” he recalled, looking back on the day he went to Fort Douglas to enlist in the Army. It was April 5, 1943. Instead of commissioning as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army infantry like his older brother, Kendall, Glen Ogilvie enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces, a predecessor to the U.S. Air Force. Less than two years earlier, Japan had attacked the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, thrusting the U.S. into World War II. Twenty-one ships and more than 300 aircrafts were destroyed, with nearly 2,400 U.S. casualties. At the time, it was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil.

The Germans and other Axis powers had declared war. The Army Air Forces was in desperate need of experienced Airmen for both the Pacific and European war fronts. As Sun Tzu said, “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war.” Ogilvie was already an Airman.

“I decided to sign up for the military while I was attending the University,” he said. According to the National WWII Museum, only 39 percent of service members volunteered. The rest were drafted. Glen Ogilvie and his oldest brother Kendell were among those few who volunteered. “I had no idea what war was,” Ogilvie admitted. As world events unfolded around him, he watched with only minor anxiety, and wondered, “What’s going to happen next?” He was shipped off to basic training at Miami Beach, Florida, and then to engine school at Parks Air College in St. Lewis, Missouri.

To graduate from engine school, Ogilvie had to be able to assemble a P-47 Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp engine from scratch. Thankfully, he already had a lot of experience repairing airplanes and graduated top of his class. He was briefly reunited with his brother Kendell while quartered at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in preparation for transport to the European Theater of Operations. In October 1943, he set sail from Boston, Massachusetts, to the United Kingdom aboard the SS Argentina. The designated troop transport ship had been refitted with bunks made of pipes and canvasses, packed close together.

“They were so close,” Ogilvie remembered, “that if you wanted to roll over, you had to slide into the aisle, turn over and slide back in.” Ogilvie spent most of his days at sea above deck on a lawn chair, until they arrived at Scotland. From there, they took a train to Royal Air Force Station Ibsley, in Hampshire, England, where they were encamped for several weeks. During the war, the United States Army Air Forces referred to the camp by its codename, Station AAF-347.

Ogilvie was assigned as assistant crew chief in the 366th Fighter Group, overseeing the maintenance of P-47 Thunderbolts. His duties included starting the engines, loading bombs on the wings, and filling the underbelly fuel tanks for long sorties across the English Channel. “Quite often, we’d lose an airplane,” he said solemnly. The 366th Fighter Group swept over Normandy, attacking convoys and gun emplacements. One day, Ogilvie noticed “a lot more sorties than usual.” Over 11-thousand Allied aircrafts flew some 14-thousand sorties out of England that day. The roar of the engines woke people in nearby towns. Airplanes filled the sky, and for the first time, they were flying with their navigation lights on.

“Nobody told us what was going on,” Ogilvie said. “A couple C-47s landed and we were loaded onto the aircrafts, headed for France.”

It was D-day.

“When I looked down into the ocean, I could see all these ships. The ships were lined up all the way from England to France, end-to-end and side-by-side. Above them were great big balloons. So of course, at that time, I knew something was going on.” The 366th was the lead air asset on D-Day, engaging German strongholds along the French coast. When the pair of C-47s reached the shores of Normandy, Ogilvie noticed the second aircraft had dropped back, and disappeared. “I never saw it again,” he explained. He looked out the window and saw black smoke in the sky from antiaircraft flak. They were flying over the front lines. “Then I knew for sure what was going on.” This was war. For the first time since his enlistment, Ogilvie felt truly afraid. “Anxiety and certain reflections came to my mind,” he confessed somberly. The plane descended quickly and landed hard on Omaha Beach. When the C-47 finally came to a halt, the tip of the nose was less than a foot from the embankment at the end of the dirt runway. As Ogilvie rushed off the plane, he saw holes in the wings, torn by small caliber bullets. In the distance, a German MG-42 “Buzzsaw” machine gun made a distinct zipper-like sound that he would never forget. Looking at the holes in the wings, he thought of his brother, Kendall, and not for the last time, silently said to himself, “I’m glad I’m not in the infantry.”

Kendall had been among the first to wade ashore at Omaha Beach. Of the four platoon officers in his company, he was the only officer who wasn’t shot or killed. Ogilvie wasn’t far behind his brother. From the airfield, he piled into a truck with the other troops from his flight, and they drove a short distance to an apple orchard, where they set up a temporary camp. It rained all night, and Ogilvie fell asleep to the sound of gunshots and raindrops. The shooting was so close, he could distinguish between the sounds of pistols and the rifles.

The next morning, he was taken up the hill to where they were building an airfield. Across the road from the airfield, Allied forces actively engaged the Germans, forcing the enemy line back into the trees. It took the Army engineers only four days to level the ground and lay 1,800 feet of steel along the dirt runway.

The 366th Fighter Group was the first Army Air Forces unit to establish themselves on French soil. Only ten days after the D-day landing at Omaha beach, the first airplane took off from the new airfield. As assistant crew chief, Ogilvie was assigned to a new P-47. He filled the tanks, loaded a thousand-pound bomb, started the engine, and watched the pilot take off. He would never see the plane again. The following day, another pilot explained, “He’s gone. His airplane blew up—completely.” He later learned that the pilot had dropped the bomb while flying too close to the impact area. The fortunate planes that did come back were “pretty beat up,” according to Ogilvie. It was his job to patch them up and get them flying again.

The next time Ogilvie ran into Kendell, his older brother was the commander of a field artillery observation battalion, having taken on the role of another deceased officer.

The 366th followed Allied ground advances throughout the remainder of the war, taking over captured airfields to remain close to the action. They primarily engaged in dive-bombing missions, providing air support to Allied armored columns during the breakthrough at St. Lo, attacked anti-aircraft emplacements near Eindhoven, Holland, during Operation Market Garden, flew reconnaissance missions over the Battle of the Bulge, and escorted bombers during the crossing of the Rhine River. On their last mission, the group attacked the harbors at Kiel and Flensberg, May 3, 1945. Five days later, the Allies formally accepted the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany.

Glen returned to Fort Douglass following V-E Day, and separated from the military November 2, 1945, with the rank of sergeant. He went back to school at the University of Utah and graduated with a degree in engineering. Thanks to his boyhood connections at Thompson Flying Service, he was able to get a job at Challenger Air Lines as the president’s aid. He worked there until Challenger Air Lines was purchased by General Tire and Rubber Co, becoming Frontier Air Lines.

He would go on to be a liaison engineer for The Marquardt Corporation, providing engineering support manufacturing a prototype ramjet engine. Later, he would become a development engineer for Hercules Powder Company, working in rocket motor development. He provided cost data and schedules for all rocket development proposals to the Air Force and Navy. Hercules’ major rocket systems included the Minuteman I, Minuteman II, Polaris, and Poseidon. From there, he would go on to work as an aerospace and weapon system engineer for the Air Force Ogden Air Material Area where he was not only responsible for the Minuteman missile’s war readiness, but also worldwide war readiness, reporting directly to the United States Secretary of Defense. He served as advisor to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, providing flight failure analysis on the Minuteman. He was also a system engineer for the Air-2A Genie, the world's first nuclear air-to-air interceptor missile and the air-to-surface television-guided AGM-65 Maverick missile. While at the Air Force OAMA, he was responsible for the development of the A-10 “Warthog” GAU-8 seven-barrel Gatling-style autocannon, to assure acceptable performance and supportability before going into Air Force inventory. On the wall in his living room, next to his model airplanes, he had a pair of 30mm caliber rounds mounted.

When the Army suggested to the Air Force that they create unmanned aerial drones for combat operations, Ogilvie was sent by the Air Force on a special assignment to an Army Base in Alabama to witness a drone demonstration. As the chosen representative to witness the demonstration, he provided the Air Force with an evaluation. It was his recommendation to develop drones for combat. Many of Ogilvie’s postings remain classified to this day.

As I walked out of Ogilvie’s house after the interview, the words of Gen. George S. Patten came to my mind: “Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood.”

The D-Day invasion of Normandy and the ensuing war had brought out the best in Ogilvie. When he was afraid, he never let that fear overcome his sense of duty. His story is only one of many that emerged from the smoke and ashes of WWII. I realized we would only be able to use a few soundbites from the four-hour interview and felt compelled to write it down. In a letter he wrote to me afterwards, Ogilvie said “[Our] stories need to be read... Thank you for all of your effort in this valuable work needed to preserve our veterans’ history.”