the 101st Airborne Division, Brigadier General Don Pratt, who had been designated to command the seaborne echelon. The mission had originally been planned for glider release at civil twilight on the evening before the amphibious landings, but to protect the gliders from ground fire the time was changed on May 27 to 04:00 on D-Day, 2 hours before dawn. The designated destination in France was Landing Zone (LZ) E, an area co-located with and slightly overlapping one of the paratroop drop zones, DZ C. The area was chosen as central to the operations of the division and because a BUPS beacon ("Beacon, Ultra Portable S-band") was to be in place there on which the serial commander could guide using the SCR-717 search radars installed in the aircraft of flight leaders. The landing zone was a triangle-shaped area a mile in width at its mile-long base along the road connecting les Forges (a hamlet south of Sainte-Mère-Église) and Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. The zone was in depth and its eastern edge ran through Hiesville, the division command post two miles (3 km) west of Ste. Marie-du-Mont. In addition to its central locality, the fields within the zone were on average twice the length of most others in the vicinity. Many of the fields, however, were bordered by trees in height and not hedgerows, a fact that did not show up well on aerial reconnaissance photographs. Air movement table - mission Chicago SOURCE: D-Day Etat des Lieux Glider assault The first of 52 aircraft took off at 01:19. Bright moonlight enabled the tugs to assemble in thirteen flights of four aircraft-glider combinations in an "echelon of four to the right" formation. Shortly after assembly the glider carrying the command post radio broke loose from its tug and landed. The radio was retrieved and transported that evening in mission Keokuck, but the accident meant that the 101st Airborne Division would be out of radio contact with other invasion forces until after link-up with the 4th Infantry Division coming off Utah Beach. The weather along its route had moderated from the dense cloud bank and ground fog that had severely disrupted the parachute drops two hours earlier. Because they were in trail and not in close formation vees, the tugs and gliders were able to penetrate the clouds without losing formation. The columns drew ground fire, however, and one C-47 and its glider went down near Pont