Before there were helicopters: pilot report on the Fieseler Storch

It was cold. SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Otto Skorzeny turned his back to the biting wind, burying his hands in the deep pockets of his SS topcoat. As he chatted with the bald-headed man he’d come to rescue, he glanced at the small band of exhausted Wehrmacht soldiers huddled in the shelter of their broken glider. They’d just finished clearing a tiny patch of level ground, prying and pulling and rolling away the larger boulders as best they could. Their only hope of rescue lay in that rock-strewn, furrowed patch of ground a couple of hundred feet long perched on the side of the mountain.