Paratroopers played such a decisive role in the war that it is easy to forget that in Britain, at least, jumping out of airplanes was still considered a novelty when hostilities began. (Germany, and especially Russia, were miles ahead of the U.K. in this kind of combat.) Some of the early instructors at Ringway, in fact, were stuntmen from a “flying circus” air show. When Jean Claude arrived there, the school had grown into a massive operation—altogether about sixty thousand soldiers passed through it in the course of the war—but Ringway’s training facilities still had a seat-of-the-pants feel, with wooden slides, pulleys suspended from ceiling beams, and mattresses for cushioning falls.
SOE men and women were kept apart from the other paratroop trainees, for secrecy and anonymity. Jean Claude and about a dozen other agents, none of whom he knew, were quartered in a large house near the air base with a walled garden and a two-story garage.
Immediately after their arrival, the students were taught how to fall: ankles together, knees slightly bent, hands over their heads, rolling to the right or left to absorb the shock. They practiced that for several hours. Then they moved on to a zip line with a twelve-foot drop, to practice the same maneuver with some realistic momentum.
The next morning they were escorted to the garage. Looking up, they saw that a round hole, four feet in diameter, had been cut in the second floor. Above it, affixed in the cupola, was a small drum with a cable wound around it, at the end of which was a harness. The drum had a pair of small paddles attached to it. The students climbed up to the second floor and were told to take turns strapping on the harness and stepping off into the hole. They were not given any other instructions. Jean Claude wondered how he was to avoid being maimed. He was astonished to discover that as the cable played out and the paddles whirled faster and faster, they created enough air resistance to slow his descent to a rate that made the impact of landing perfectly manageable.
Working with this rig, the students were introduced to the concept of controlling a parachute using the risers, the web strips that connect the harness to the parachute lines. They became familiar with the quick-release mechanism that freed them from the harness on landing. The most important thing they learned in the garage, though, was the proper procedure for exiting through a hole in the floor. That was how RAF planes were set up to deploy paratroops, as opposed to U.S. aircraft, which sent them out through a door. The students sat at the edge of the hole, and at the command “Action stations” they swiveled their feet into it. At the command “Go!” they pushed upward and out, careful to keep their bodies straight up and down. Leaning too far back could mean snagging a parachute; leaning too far forward could mean breaking a nose or losing teeth.
Just before teatime, the students were taken to a staging area to watch parachutes being packed. This, they were told, was to give them confidence, as they would not have a reserve chute. They were to be dropped at such a low altitude that they wouldn’t have time to use one.
Early the next morning, dressed in jumpsuits, they were driven in a bus to the Ringway airfield. No one spoke much. They boarded a Whitley, a twin-engine medium bomber with a “Joe hole,” as it was called, in its belly. The Whitley took off and flew above the airfield. It was Jean Claude’s first time in an airplane.
At “Action stations,” Jean Claude put his feet into the hole. He felt a mild tension at the sight of the ground moving by below. At “Go!” he went rigid and pushed off. He felt a jerk as his parachute was pulled open by its static line—only a gentle tug, as the Whitley was old and slow. There followed, he recalled later, “an exhilarating feeling of floating with no downward motion over a quiet landscape.” He was aware of loudspeaker instructions from the ground, but he paid little attention, absorbed in the sensation of weightlessness.
Suddenly Jean Claude perceived that the ground was coming up at him very quickly. His feet touched, so lightly that he had to force himself to tumble. His chute collapsed easily, and he bundled it up and walked to the edge of the airfield, where he and the other students giddily compared notes on the wonderful feeling of seeming to hang motionless in the air. They had benefited from a complete lack of breeze; one of them, a small woman, even had trouble with the light morning updraft, and made a frustratingly slow and irregular descent.
The trainers told them that their performance was adequate for a first jump, but that they should pay more attention to preparing to land.
The next morning they repeated the exercise, this time full of confidence. They even sang bawdy songs on the bus. There was some wind, and when Jean Claude took his turn at the Joe hole he saw the ground moving diagonally. He kept his focus on the way down, but his body started swinging in relation to the chute. He tried to minimize the swing by the use of his risers, but he timed it wrong: When he reached the ground his feet were up at the end of an arc, not underneath him. He managed to roll, but he landed with a thump. He was impressed at how much effort it took to collapse his chute even with just a gentle breeze blowing.
The final exercise at Ringway was a nighttime jump. This was made not from a Whitley but from a tethered balloon. The balloon had a gondola big enough for six students and a dispatcher, with a Joe hole in the floor. As the balloon was let up, Jean Claude could see dim blue lights spaced along the cable, but he couldn’t see the ground; there was no moon.
The dispatcher checked each student’s static line to make sure it was clipped on correctly. Then he said casually, “You chaps know the drill well enough so you don’t need me”—and jumped, leaving the students to their own devices.
Jean Claude decided that he didn’t want to be the last to jump, so he went first. Because there was no slipstream from an airplane, his chute took far longer to open this time, and he had a horrifying feeling of freefall. Then he heard his chute deploy with a sharp crack. He didn’t see the ground until seconds before reaching it. He managed to roll into a relatively soft landing and bundled his chute. Then he wandered around the darkened airfield, completely disoriented, until he heard voices. These turned out to belong to other students, who were just as addled by the experience as he was.
That night the SOE agents had a small celebration. The next morning Jean Claude left for London, and a new identity.