how to transpose fields with awk array?

Question

I am currently having trouble efficiently transposing fields within a txt file from columns to rows.

I have the following input:

1 2 3
A B C
D E F

and I would like the output to be:

1 A D
2 B E
3 C F

As of now I am isolating each field to a new file and transposing with:

awk 'BEGIN {FS="\t";ORS="\t"}1' input | awk 'BEGIN {OFS="\t"} {$1=$1;print}' > output

This is very inefficient and takes up disk space, so I was wondering if this could be accomplished with an awk array.

Any help would be appreciated, Thank you