My research shows that the C-53 Skytrooper (paratroop version of the C-47 Dakota) carried 28 men in addition to the crew. One source states that the 101st AB had 12,335 men. This would equal about 440 C-53s. BUT I know that a lot of those men were in Glider regiments, AB artillery battalions, a medical company, etc… which no doubt had different transport needs. And I can’t seem to find that info.
So is there an official listing of exactly how many aircraft were used to drop an airborne division on, say, D-Day?
Looks like roughly between 100-200 planes per infantry regiment, with the support troops being landed by glider.
So… in Normandy it was 432 for the 101st, 369 for the 82nd, and in Operation Varsity, it was 541 for the 17th Airborne, at least for the actual paratroopers.
No, that’s just the actual paratroop numbers. The gliders roughly double that, based on the Operation Varsity counts - the total number of planes for the 17th Airborne was something like 908.
I may have misread about the 541 though- that was the number of transports for both the British 6th Airborne and the US 17th Airborne, not including the glider towing planes.
Here are links to the wikipedia pages for all the US airborne drops in WWII:
Just to note, what exactly constituted an airborne division in WWII is a bit screwy, for example the maneuver elements of the 101st:
So the 501st PIR was technically only attached to the 101st, not an organic part of the division even though it was attached for the entire duration of the war. The 506th PIR was in the same boat but became a formal part of the division on 1 March 1945. The 401st GIR never actually fought as a separate unit; its two battalions were broken up with one battalion attached to the 327th GIR and the other to the 325th GIR of the 82nd Airborne Division where they made up the ‘third’ battalion in those regiments.