     Just before noon on the 23rd, the aerial resupply of Bastogne began. For four days the beseiged troops had been cut off from resupply, and the weather had made aerial resupply impossible. But now, with perfect weather, the C-47s came. In a gigantic parade lasting three hours, 241 of the transports flew over Bastogne at an altitude of 1,000 feet. From each plane blossomed a bouquet of colored parachutes: blue for blood plasma, green for ammunition, yellow for food, red for gasoline. The Germans threw up a wall of flak but it wasn't enough to deter the American aircraft. Refusing to take evasive action, they flew straight and level. A few were hit and crashed in flames.
     1,446 packages were dropped; 95 per cent of these were recovered in the drop zone. It amounted to 144 tons of supplies. There were 26,406 K-rations -- only enough for a day or two. There were 445 gallons of gasoline, plenty for a beseiged division that wasn't going anywhere. But most of the tonnage was ammunition. Even rationing each gun to only ten rounds, the artillery inside the Bastogne perimeter needed 20 tons of ammo per day. To use artillery the way the American army preferred to fight, they needed a lot more than that.
     The parapacks were gathered up and loaded onto jeeps for immediate distribution to the troops. So desperate was the need for artillery ammunition that some of the first ammo to arrive had been shot off before the last parapacks drifted down to earth.
     The aerial resupply continued. On the 24th there were 160 C-47s. On Christmas Day bad weather interfered, but on the 26th 289 planes made the journey. Bastogne was saved by aerial resupply.
/Aerial Resupply
     The rapid, fluid battles of World War Two often resulted in units cut off behind enemy lines. To deal with this problem, armies and air forces developed the technique of aerial resupply. The basic idea was simple: fly in the supplies on airplanes. In practice, it proved to be difficult.
     The first experience with aerial resupply came the winter of 1941-42, when the first Soviet winter offensive ripped through German lines. The Germans formed hedgehogs (all-round defenses) and were resupplied by air. The technique worked, but the units being resupplied were small and needed little in the way of supplies: food and small amounts of ammunition.
     The next year, the Soviets again broke through German lines, but this time they trapped a much bigger prize: the entire German Sixth Army, with 200,000 men. This force needed 500 tons of supplies per day; the Luftwaffe managed to deliver only about 100 tons per day. (It is instructive to note that the German Sixth Army needed only about 5 pounds of supplies per man per day, while the American 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne needed about 10 pounds per man per day. The difference arose from the Americans' more profligate use of artillery.)
     The Americans mastered the techniques of aerial resupply. At first it was small-scale, used to help out temporarily isolated units on the battlefield. But in August the Americans faced a crisis in supplying liberated Paris with food and coal, and quickly organized an airlift. In September they refined their techniques in keeping supplies moving to Patton's Third Army in eastern France. By the time of the Battle of the Bulge, they had developed an efficient system for aerial resupply./