ARMY AIRBORNE HISTORY
- Posted on 19 Oct 2024
- 54 min read
By Prosper Keating
The widely accepted version of parachute assault history is that the Soviet Union’s Red Army pioneered mass drops of parachute infantrymen in the 1930s, inviting German, French and British army generals and staff officers to witness these exercises. The Germans then formed the Fallschirmjäger units that brought them victory in 1940. As is often the case, the actual history is more complicated.
The first military parachutists were French balloon observers. Tethered military observation balloons were filled with highly inflammable gas. The occupant of the first French observation balloon shot down, a Sergeant Schmitt, was very lucky to survive the incident on 9 October 1915 although he was badly hurt.
However, when an observer of the 34° Compagnie d’Aérostiers was shot down a few days later on 14 October 1915, he burned to death. His CO demanded parachutes for his men and other commanders quickly followed suit. The French high command posed no objections and their example was soon followed by the high commands of the other belligerents. However, the Germans were the only participants to equip their aviators with parachutes.
However, the US Army Brigadier-General in charge of all American aviation units in France, William ‘Billy’ Mitchell, was one of the military visionaries who saw the parachute’s potential as a tactical means of delivering infantry assault units. Like others, Mitchell would have been aware of the Italian Army’s use of parachutes as a means of tactical insertion.
A number of Italian signallers equipped with carrier pigeons had been dropped behind Austrian lines in the Tyrolean mountains. The first was of these were Lieutenant De Carlo and Rifleman Bottechia who dropped from an aircraft on May 25 1918. Two brothers named De Carli jumped on July 29 1918. Another was Lieutenant Alessandro Tandura, dispatched on the night of 9 August 1918 over the Tyrolean mountains. Lieutenants Barnaba and Nicoloso jumped over the Piave valley in October that year.
Lt Tandura is generally considered to have been the first ‘para-commando’. Dropped into his native region of Vittorio Veneto, whicn was occupied by the Austrians, Tanduro spent three months at large, helped at times by his family. As well sending information back to his superiors, Tanduro carried out acts of sabotage that would earn him Italy’s highest military award: the Gold Medal for Military Valour.
The British and French air forces of the First World War lost tens of thousands of trained pilots, observers and air gunners because it was felt by their high commands that issuing aircrew with parachutes would encourage them to abandon their aircraft when engaged by the enemy. The US Army high command shared this opinion.
Two decades later, as Italian Governor of Libya, Marshal Balbo formed a colonial parachute battalion in 1938. The 300-strong unit consisted of Libyans commanded by Italian officers. A second battalion of Libyans was formed and sent for parachute training in Italy. After high death and injury rates during this training, the new colonial battalion was disbanded and replaced by an all-Italian parachute battalion.
By 1941, the Italian Army had two parachute regiments, which would form the cadre of the 185th Folgore Parachute Division at the end of 1941. On April 30 1941, an Italian parachute battalion jumped over the Greek island of Cephalonia. a number of its paratroopers were dispatched over the sea and drowned.
The spring of 1941 also saw the German invasion of Crete, which resulted in such heavy losses amongst the Fallschirmjäger that Hitler forbade any further large-scale parachute operations. This was not, however, the last time that Germany would carry out parachute operations during WW2.
In South America, the Peruvian Army deployed paratroopers in July 1941 during the Peru-Ecuador War but the numbers of men quoted as jumping vary quite wildly. The next operational use of paratroopers in Latin America or the Americas in general would be during the abortive ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba in 1961.
The Folgore was scheduled to jump on Malta with the German Fallschirmjäger but the operation was cancelled and the Folgore carried out no parachute operations during WW2. Nor did the 184th Nembo Division, formed in 1942, although both divisions proved formidable adversaries as ground troops in the North African and Italian campaigns, during which the Nembo Division remained allied with the Germans after the majority of Italian armed forces switched sides in 1943. The Folgore would be reactivated in the 1960s.
After experiments at the Orly airfield south of Paris in 1918, Billy Mitchell felt confident enough to propose parachute training for units of the 1st US Infantry Division with a view to jumping on and capturing the eastern French city of Metz from 1200 Handley-Page bombers provided by Great Britain’s Royal Air Force.
Like other military visionaries, Mitchell was viewed with suspicion by his high command and the proposal was obstructed. With the end of the War in November 1918, Mitchell’s experimental unit was disbanded but Mitchell reformed it at McCook Airfield in Dayton, Ohio. However, the US Army would not begin serious unit-scale parachute training until 1940.
Nonetheless, the parachute assault experiments conducted by the US Army and the US Navy at McCook in the mid to late 1920s were noted in detail by a foreign military observer, one Captain Minov of the Soviet Union’s Red Army. Minov was one of the younger Red Army staff officers pushing for the development of Soviet parachute forces. General Tukhachevsky, promoted to Marshal in 1935, was tasked with creating the Red Army’s parachute arm.
The Soviets set up a parachute training school at the Tushino airfield in the north-west suburbs of Moscow. In 1935, in the presence of a delegation of foreign military attachés and staff officers, the Red Army staged a parachute exercise outside Kiev involving 1200 paratroopers with equipment and heavy loads dropping from four-engined Tupolev bombers. As film and photographs show, the Russian paratroopers climbed out along the wings of the bombers and at a signal from their commanders, peeled off one by one, waiting to clear the aircraft before pulling their ripcords.
The French and German high commands took careful note of the reports submitted by their observers but the British would not take the first steps until ordered to do so by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in June 1940 after the Wehrmacht’s highly effective deployment of its Fallschirmjäger in Norway and the Low Countries the previous month.
By 1937, the USSR had 100,000 paratroopers under arms and 1.5 million civilians trained as parachutists in ‘civilian’ sports and parachuting clubs, and associations sponsored by the Red Army. The establishment of these clubs was an effective way of increasing throughflow of trainee parachutists, whose training courses were run by Red Army parachute jump instructors.
In 1935, the French high command sent five officers to Moscow-Tushino to qualify as parachute jump instructors or PJIs. One of them, Captain Frédéric Geille of the Air and Space Force, was tasked on his return to France with setting up the first French parachute training school: the Centre d’Instruction au Parachutisme or CIP.
The CIP was based at the Pujaut airfield near the southern French town of Avignon. Geille’s second-in-command was a Red Army officer cadet named Kaïtenov, who died in a parachuting accident in 1936. Another of the French officers who qualified with the Red Army as a PJI was Captain Pechaud de Rieu, who was ordered to report on the Red Army’s civilian parachute training programme. Pechaud de Rieu wrote of these Red Army-run sports clubs: “The preliminary training of Soviet youth is highly developed. […] Parachuting has become the most popular skill. It is the least costly and easiest to teach. Perhaps it is the national temperament but [parachuting] has become a veritable national sport.”.
Following Pechaud de Rieu’s report, the French high command proposed la Préparation Militaire Parachustiste or PMP to the Minister of War on 26 November 1935. The PMP exists to this day in the form of a ten-day course at the French parachute training school in the southern French town of Pau for young people during their school holidays. Successful students receive a parachute qualification badge. Like the British ‘Lightbulb’ or ‘Parachute without Wings’, it does not signify that the wearer is a paratrooper but merely that he — or she — has passed a military parachutist course. Of course, as discussed elsewhere in Hermes, Britain’s Royal Air Force rendered it effectively impossible for women to obtain parachute wings or ‘lightbulbs’ for almost eighty years.
The parachute training of civilians of school age by the French parachute and airborne school near Pau — l’École des Troupes Aéroportées or ETAP — is not limited to French trainees. ETAP also accepts British female trainees from Britain’s First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) in memory of the FANY girls parachuted into German-occupied and Vichy France as Special Operations Executive agents. Of the FANY strength of 6000 during the Second World War, 2000 were involved with the SOE.
Some of the FANYs who were parachute-trained at N° 1 PTS and other establishments during WW2 put their wings up on their return home as they had, in effect, carried out combat jumps. Female trainees were required to do one jump less than their male comrades to qualify as parachute-trained, meaning that they did not carry out sufficient jumps to qualify for the parachute wings — or even the ‘lightbulb’.
The FANYs who are selected to attend parachute training at ETAP receive the full French Brevet Parachutiste, which they wear above the lefthand chest pockets of their camouflage jackets and N° 2-style walking-out dress, like British Army personnel who have earned foreign wings.However, no FANYs have attended any British military parachute schools since the 1939-1945 War.
When still the FANY Commandant, Philippa Lorimer MBE said: “In recent times, FANYs have never asked to go to No 1 PTS, so that means they have never been ‘barred’. I cannot envisage that it would ever be appropriate for members of the modern Corps as they are not part of the British Armed Forces –– Regular or Reserves.
“They are in fact all volunteers, in an independent charity, which works closely with the Military, as well as some other civilian organisations, and the Police. We are no longer nurses, combat medics, nor indeed SOE agents! However, all of our members are hugely proud of the history of the Corps, the role and heroism of the female SOE agents, and our strong links to the French Paras.”.
Given the well-documented failure of the RAF not just to put future paratroopers through parachute training but to provide the resources and aircraft to enable qualified paratroopers to remain in date — despite receiving £50 million from the Army each year to train Parachute Regiment, Airborne and Special Forces paratroopers — it is unlikely that any request to the RAF from the FANY or any similar organisation to earn the parachute wings of their own country would be successful.
The first French parachute assault units were formed in 1937. These were the 601° Groupe d’Infanterie de l’Air or 601 GIA, based in Reims, and the 602° GIA, based outside the Algerian capital of Algiers. Algiers was part of metropolitan France rather than being one of the colonies and protectorates making up the French Empire.
These early French parachute units came under the command of the French Air and Space Force rather than the French Army. The situation was similar in Germany, where responsibility for the formation of the first Fallschirmjäger units and the parachute training schools where they learned to jump from aircraft was assumed by Air Force commander Hermann Göring.
The first German parachute unit was formed in January 1936 with volunteers from the Prussian Police Regiment ‘General Göring’ and the Sturmabteilung-Standarte ‘Feldherrnhalle’. Like the Luftwaffe in general, it was a purely National Socialist creation with no older traditions like the regular German Army. However, they created their own traditions.
The new unit was listed on the Order of Battle or ORBAT as I. Jägerbataillon ‘General Göring”, with 15. Fallschirm-Pionierkompanie as an attached arm. By 1938, the battalion had become Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 1, based in Stendal. However, the German Army or Heer had no intention of being outdone by Göring’s Luftwaffe.
By order of Army High Command, the Fallschirm-Infanterie-Kompanie (FIK) formed up in Stendal on 1 April 1937. An Army version of the Parachutist Badge awarded to Luftwaffe paratroopers was instituted on 1 September 1937. The FIK became the Fallschirm-Infanterie-Bataillon on 1 June 1938, with command given to Luftwaffe Colonel Richard Heidrich, a WW1 veteran who qualified for his parachutist badge in 1938 aged forty-two. Although he was a Luftwaffe officer, Heidrich would proudly wear the Army version of the Parachutists Badge earned with the Fallschirm-Infanterie-Kompanie until the end of the war.
Göring then arranged for the FIB to be placed under the command of the Luftwaffe’s 7. Flieger-Division on 1 July 1938. The FIB would then transferred to the Luftwaffe as II./Fallschirmjäger-Rgt 1 on 1 January 1939 in a takeover that was very unpopular with the Army paratroopers. Some spoke derisively of their Air Force comrades as “shirt and tie soldiers’.
Some of the officers and men of II./Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 1 were still wearing Army uniforms during the invasion of Poland and right up to the invasion of the Low Countries. Former Army paratroopers continued to wear their Army Parachute Badges — abolished on 1 January 1939 — throughout the war and many examples of these badges, struck in high quality aluminium, bear evidence of multiple repairs, so treasured were they by their owners. II./FJR1 would later form cadre for Fallschirmjäger-Rgt 3 in August 1940, commanded by Heidrich.
The Army Parachutist Badge would be reinstituted by Army High Command in June 1943 for members of the 15 (Fallschirm) Kompanie of the 3rd Battalion of the Brandenburg Division’s 4th Light Infantry Regiment and soldiers of the newly-forming Fallschirmjäger-Bataillon ‘Brandenburg’, placed on the Army ORBAT in February 1944. The 15th (Parachute) Coy took part in the successful capture of the Greek island of Leros in November 1943 from its numerically superior Anglo-Italian occupying force.
Another unit entitled to the reinstituted Army version of the Parachutist Badge was SS-Fallschirmjäger-Bataillon 500, formed in the winter of 1943-1944 on Adolf Hitler’s orders after the rescue of deposed Italian dictator Benito Mussolini by Luftwaffe paratroopers and Waffen-SS commandos who were delivered by assault gliders.
Hitler asked why the Waffen-SS had no parachute units. In fact, there had been an attempt to raise such a unit before the war — when the Waffen-SS was still known as the SS-Verfügungstruppe — but the demonstration jump outside Berlin went badly when the the first paratrooper through the door plunged to his death because of a parachute malfunction.
However, very few members of SS-Fallschirmjäger-Bataillon 500 received the Army badge because the Berlin firm contracted to make them — on the same dies as the prewar examples — made enough to supply the Army’s Brandenburg parachute units but no more than that. So most of them received the Luftwaffe badge after qualifying at the Luftwaffe’s Fallschirmschule III — Parachute Training School 3 — moved from its home base in Braunschweig to Serbia.
The Waffen-SS Parachute Battalion’s only airborne operation took place on May 25 and 26 1944 when the Battalion landed by parachute and assault glider on Yugoslav partisan leader Marshal Tito’s headquarters in the Bosnian town of Drvar. They failed to get Tito but they captured his brand-new tailor-made tunic and the Wilys jeep presented to him by the Americans. They also held Winston Churchill’s son Randolph captive for a few hours during the battle without realising the importance of their prisoner, who, like his father during the Boer War, managed to escape from his captors without their being any the wiser.
The 1100-strong battalion was almost wiped out, with just 182 men fit to fight at the end of the battle but even the Yugoslavs admitted to losing some 4000 of their best soldiers. SS-FJ-Btl 500 would henceforth be used as a mobile reaction force on the Eastern Front and would be virtually wiped out again before the survivors were used as cadre for a new unit listed as SS-Fallschirmjäger-Btl 600 in the autumn of 1944, whose new recruits would never undergo parachute training, which had been suspended in the summer of 1944.
The main German parachute training schools were in Stendal and Wittstock but the Wehrmacht had other establishments in occupied countries, most notably in France where the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht had decided to form its new 1st Parachute Army or 1. Fallschirm-Armee, created in September 1943. Fallschirm-Schule 4 was based in Dreux, west of Paris, with detachments based in other locations across the country. Fallschirm-Schule 3 had moved to Serbia to train the new Army paratroopers and it was there that the new Waffen-SS parachute battalion was sent.
The parachute jump instructors at these schools were for the most part seasoned combat veterans; paratroopers first and parachute jump instructors second. Detachments of instructors and riggers were sent to various locations to train or retrain paratroopers. At the end of 1944, six months after the closure of the parachute schools the previous June, the Wehrmacht retained one such detachment, which prepared the men who carried out Nazi Germany’s last parachute operation as a precursor to the counter-offensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge.
By this stage of the Second World War, the British Army’s Airborne Forces were well-established, comprising The Parachute Regiment, attached arms and, of course, the Special Air Service. The British Indian Army also had its own airborne forces whose paratroopers were trained at N° 3 Parachute Training School (PTS) in Chakala, near Rawalpindi.
N° 1 PTS was based at RAF Ringway just outside Manchester. There was never a N° 2 PTS but there was N° 4 PTS at RAF Ramat David near the Palestinian port city of Haifa. N° 4 PTS’s history began in September 1941 when Special Air Service co-founder David Stirling ordered his fledgling unit to build a parachute training facility at RAF Kabrit on the shores of the Great Bitter Lake in Egypt’s Canal Zone. The lake is part of the Suez Canal infrastructure.
Although it was located on an RAF airbase, the SAS training camp was under Army control. When two SAS volunteers were killed in parachuting accidents in October 1941, Stirling asked N° 1 PTS to send him some Ringway-trained PJIs. Three Army PJIs duly arrived from England: Lieutenant Peter Warr and Sergeants Ian McGregor and Sean Young. The SAS was consequently able to provide sixty-five parachute-trained troopers for the planned relief of Tobruk in mid-November 1941.
Although the SAS parachute operation was not a success, Lt Warr and his fellow Army PJIs were kept busy training the Free French soldiers from the 1ère Compagnie de Chasseurs Parachutistes who arrived at Kabrit in January 1942. 1 CCP was redesignated as the French Squadron, Special Air Service and placed under Stirling’s command. They would later become the 4th SAS Regiment in 1944.
Captain Peter Warr’s MBE citation in 1942 stated: “This officer has shown untiring devotion to his task of creating parachute training facilities and staff of parachute instructors in the Middle East. He has succeeded in building up these facilities to a high degree of efficiency in spite of shortage of material and equipment; these he has overcome by enterprise and by improvisation.”. There was no decoration for Sgt Jim Almonds, who built the facility.
In March 1942, [temporary] Major Kenneth Smyth late of the South Wales Borderers, a staff officer who had recently passed Parachute Regiment selection and earned his parachute wings at the relatively advanced age of thirty-five, was sent to Middle East HQ in Cairo as an Acting Lieutenant Colonel tasked with forming a new parachute brigade. After convincing the generals at MEHQ to let him begin recruitment, Smyth set up his base at the Royal Army Service Corps Base Depot at Geneifa, which was not far from Kabrit.
Smyth’s takeover of the SAS training camp at RAF Kabrit was a logical step. As an operational security measure, he named his acquisition ‘N°4 Middle East Training School but any spies in the service of the Germans could see the various types of aircraft flying circuits from the airfield and dropping paratroopers over the drop zone on the eastern shore of the lake. Once Smyth had done the ground work, command of the newly-forming 4th Parachute Brigade was given to Lieutenant Colonel John ‘Shan’ Hackett, who was duly promoted to Brigadier. This was not a snub to Smyth. Shan Hackett was Smyth’s senior on the Army List and the two men were friends.
Hackett had to put his career on the line when facing the obstructive tactics deployed against the formation of 4th Para Bde by anti-Airborne staff officers at MEHQ. He sent a very frankly-worded letter to MEHQ, threatening in effect to resign if the hindrance continued. Fortunately for Hackett and for Britain’s new military elite in general, they had a powerful ally in Churchill and 4th Para Bde’s ORBAT was almost complete in time for the invasion of Sicily.
Smyth’s achievements were publicly recognised in his OBE citation in May 1943, which stated that he “did almost unaided the preliminary work necessary for the formation of 4 Parachute Brigade.”. Smyth was also entrusted with the formation and command of 4th Para Bde’s 10th Parachute Battalion. Army PJI Peter Warr was appointed a company commander in the new battalion.
In May 1942, 4 METS was placed under the command of an RAF Wing Commander as an inter-service diplomatic nod to the RAF. In December 1942, the parachute school was detached from 4 METS moved to RAF Ramat David in Palestine in January 1943. By this time, there were no longer any Army PJIs on the school’s staff; as they had all been reassigned to combat duties and been replaced by their non-combatant RAF counterparts. The same was true of N° 3 PTS in India, which was initially an Indian Army establishment set up on an RAF airbase. Modern parallels would include the Parachute Training Support Unit and 47 Air Despatch Squadron at RAF Brize Norton, which are both Army units.
In 1945, the Royal Air Force created a new PJI badge that reflected the granting of honorary aircrew status to PJIs serving as despatchers aboard RAF transport aircraft in the various theatres of the 1939-1945 War. This new badge was the same as the half-wing awarded to RAF navigators and air gunners but with a parachute replacing the N and AG abbreviations within the laurel wreath.
This new badge replaced the first PJI badge, which resembled the British Army parachutist badge or ‘lightbulb’ but on dark blue backing with a stylised laurel wreath, following the design of other trade badges. Introduced in 1942, there were versions on RAF, Army and tropical backing.
Army and RAF non-commissioned PJIs wore the PJI badge on their upper right sleeves above their stripes and below their parachute wings when the wings were worn on the shoulder rather than the chest. Commissioned PJIs also wore the badge on their right arms but on a pale blue brassard, which was removed when the officer was not on duty.
No Army personnel are known to have received or worn the new PJI half-wing. No reasons for the apparent lack of objections from the British Army’s Airborne Forces to the takeover of parachute assault training by the RAF are recorded in the files. Perhaps it was because of the substantial reduction in numbers planned for Airborne and Special Forces now that the war was over.
The British Army is the only NATO member whose paratroopers and special forces are trained in static and freefall parachuting assault and insertion techniques by non-combatant air force personnel. The actual parachute training skills of RAF PJIs are irreproachable but as reported in the national press, this anomalous arrangement has often been problematic at both an administrative and operational level; preparing paratroopers for a spearhead combat role or special forces insertion is far more complex than simply delivering basic parachute training.
Defenders of this status quo sometimes cite the WW2 Luftwaffe parachute schools as a leading example of how a nation’s air force can provide efficient parachute assault troops but the Fallschirmjäger of the late 1930s and early 1940s were infantry soldiers through and through. So were their instructors, as the combat awards many wear in wartime photographs show.
In any case, the postwar German experience is more relevant to the Cold War epoque and the current day. When West Germany was finally permitted to reform its armed forces in 1957, their Fallschirmjäger were army soldiers, as were their PJIs, even if they were WW2 veterans who had served previously as Luftwaffe paratroopers. Although the prewar French parachute units were part of the Air Force, the wartime Free French parachute units had all come under French Army command and this would continue after 1945.
Some pundits point to the establishment of the Parachute Training Support Unit at Brize Norton, staffed by Army PJIs wearing the PJI half-wing on khaki backing, as evidence of some progress towards a far more logical and pragmatic arrangement whereby future paratroopers are trained by Army PJIs with combat experience in Britain’s recent armed conflicts.
However, the Army PJIs are not trained to the same level as their RAF colleagues. They have been restricted from certain duties such as dispatching jumpers from aircraft by the RAF, for example, and in this respect, they are not very different to the Assistant Parachute Jump Instructors of the Cold War-era Territorial Army parachute battalions and attached arms.TA APJIs were permitted to dispatch men from tethered balloons but not powered aircraft. Adding to the difficulties is the Army’s lack of aeroplanes or helicopters capable of dropping paratroopers.
Since the end of the Second World War, Britain’s Airborne Forces have sometimes faced an uncertain future for various reasons and this has not changed. However, plans are in hand at Army Headquarters to increase the number of Army PJIs and to obtain the necessary training abroad if necessary, just as the various UK Special Forces units now find the need to send their soldiers overseas for HALO and HAHO training.
In the next instalment, we shall compare some of the various NATO parachute and airborne forces with those of their British comrades during and after the Cold War.
