A PRIME MOVER of the idea of airborne forces was Luftwaffe Generaloberst Kurt Student, generally acknowledged as one of Germany’s most innovative generals. Born on 12 May 1890 in Neumarck, Bran denburg, Prussia, he grew to exemplify, in the words of an English biographer, “some of the best characteristics of the German professional soldier…. German airborne forces were almost the unique creation of this one man and were largely sustained by his continuing determination and drive.”
At eleven years of age, knowing that he would be unable to pursue his dream of a medical career due to limited family resources, he entered the Royal Prussian Military Academy School at Potsdam, and then went on to the Hauptkadettenanstalt (Main Military Academy) at Lichterfelde, near Berlin. In March 1910, he was commissioned an ensign in a Prussian unit, the Regiment Graf Yorck von Wartenburg. Shortly thereafter, he began taking flying lessons and, in 1916, found himself an aviator in command of a fighter squadron. Although badly wounded in the head during aerial combat in October 1917, he recovered and was allowed to remain in the service, despite the downsizing of the German military man-dated by the Treaty of Versailles.
Although the Treaty proscribed a German air force, the Germans nevertheless continued to secretly develop fliers, aircraft (including gliders), and doctrine during the interwar years. And, after Hitler gained the office of Chancellor in January 1933, Student was named Director of Technical Training Schools for the air arm, which had been detached from the War Ministry and was now a part of the Minister of Aviation, headed by a Great War ace, Hermann Göring.
As Nazi Germany moved ever closer to another war, Student was heavily involved in the development of various aircraft and flying equipment, including the parachute. In early 1938, he was given command of Fliegerdivision 7 (7th Air Division) and, after watching a demonstration of several thousand Soviet parachutists, became intrigued with the idea of delivering infantry troops to the battlefield by parachute.
The conservative generals in the German High Command were slow to warm to the idea of airborne warriors, but Student pressed ahead. Finally persuaded, the High Command turned the 7th Flieger Division into a paratroop unit and a new division, the 22nd, into an air-landed (glider) division. Meanwhile, at a Darmstadt experimental station, Student championed the design and development of a nine-passenger military glider (the DFS 230)—the largest glider that could be towed aloft by a Junkers Ju 52/3—and began thinking of new ways to turn the skyborne soldiers into a potent battle force.
But there was little in the way of history to tell Student and his staff how to recruit, train, and employ parachute and glider troops. Everything about the fledgling airborne and glider forces had to be created “on the fly”—from formation flying (to prevent parachutists from being struck by following aircraft) to how the paratroops should exit a plane (a news-reel of the day showed Soviet paratroops crawling out onto the wing of an aircraft and leaping into space). Although never a rabid follower of Hitler or the Nazi regime, the dedicated and driven Student did his best simply because of his devotion to Germany.1
Student’s hard work paid off. On 12 March 1938, during the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, the Germans used paratroops to secure the perimeter of the airfield at Wagram, northeast of Vienna. This was quickly followed by a battalion of troops brought in by thirty-seven transport planes, while other planes delivered artillery, ammunition, and equipment. This dramatic action demonstrated to the German High Command that the effective employment of lightly equipped airborne troops to seize an objective until better-equipped follow-on troops could arrive was feasible.2
THE CONCEPT OF using a parachute to allow oneself to land safely after dropping from a great height is not new. A Frenchman, Louis-Sebastien Lenormand, is credited with jumping out of a tree while holding two parasols to slow his fall in 1783 (no word on whether or not they did the trick). Two years later, another Frenchman, Jean Pierre Blanchard, reportedly was the first to make a parachute out of silk and jump successfully from a balloon. The names of those who jumped unsuccessfully have been lost to history, but many intrepid balloonists thereafter also used these last-ditch safety devices when hotair ascents were all the rage–and very dangerous for the basket-borne occupants.3
These initial jumps seemed to be for fun and recreation, but some people were beginning to think of this new device in military terms. In the year between Lenormand’s parasol jump and Blanchard’s silk-assisted leap, the inventive Benjamin Franklin mused after watching the Mongolfier Brothers demonstrate one of their balloons: “Where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, so that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not, in many places, do an infinite deal of mischief before a force could be brought together to repel them?”4
Nor are gliders a recent invention. Leonardo da Vinci made sketches and scale models of flying devices in the 15th century that resembled later gliders. In 1799, the Englishman Sir George Cayley devised a flying contraption with fixed wings and “flappers” that provided thrust and a movable tail that allowed for control. Then came a host of experimenters: Otto Lilienthal in Germany, Percy Pilcher in Britain, Lawrence Hargrave in Australia, and John Montgomery and Octave Chanute in America. Before they mastered the intricacies of powered flight, the Wright Brothers, Orville and Wilbur, designed and built numerous fullscale gliders. In fact, the craft that briefly lifted off the sands at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903 was little more than a wood-and-fabric glider with an engine bolted to it.5
During the First World War, balloons were frequently used to get a high-angle view of enemy lines—a fact which often brought swarms of enemy aircraft shooting at them; the balloonists had no option but to employ parachutes as a way of escaping a fiery death. Winston S. Churchill, then Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, had the idea of air dropping saboteurs behind enemy lines to knock out bridges, factories, and communications. At the same time, the American Colonel “Billy” Mitchell was working on a plan to drop troops by parachute from a British bomber onto the German-held city of Metz. Had it not been for the signing of the Armistice, Mitchell’s plan likely would have proceeded.
Military minds continued to be intrigued by aerial transport and parachute operations during the interwar years. The United States was one of the earliest nations to experiment with the idea of moving troops by aircraft, although the possibility of dropping them en masse by parachute had not yet occurred to the War Department. In 1931, a group of soldiers from an artillery battery were flown ninety miles across Panama, but there was no parachute jump at the end. The following year, during Army maneuvers in Delaware, a small detachment was again moved by air to a landing field behind “enemy” lines.6
The Russians were particularly keen on the airborne idea and during maneuvers in 1927, eight Soviet soldiers took part in the first “mass” parachute training jump in military history. Inspired by the success of this demonstration, Stalin had several thousand paratroops trained by the mid-1930s, calling them “locust warriors.” In 1936, two battalions of troops, along with 150 machine guns and 16 light field guns, were airdropped into a field near Kiev. As Canadian military historian Brian Nolan wrote about the event, “For centuries, practitioners of the art of war dreamt, designed, and launched any number of manoeuvres to outflank their enemies. Now, by arranging one swoop from the sky, a general could place an attacking force anywhere he desired, adhering to Napoleon’s maxim: if you can outflank the enemy, you will surely derange and confuse him.”7
That September, the Soviets did it again, this time dropping 5,200 paratroopers at once. While military observers from various countries may have been impressed, it was Kurt Student and the Germans who most took the demonstration—and the lesson—to heart. Despite the fact that the Soviets used airborne troops extensively in their 1939 invasion of Finland, they suffered high casualties. The French, too, organized a battalion of paratroops in 1939, but it was disbanded before war came.8
As late as the fall of 1939, the United States still had not taken any steps toward military parachuting. But with England and France now at war with Germany, thinking began to roll in that direction. A meeting of the Chiefs of Infantry, Engineers, and Air Corps to decide which arm of service would be responsible for a contemplated detachment of “air infantry” was held; it was decided that the training and control of this new corps would be the responsibility of the Chief of Infantry. On 25 April 1940, just two weeks after Germany’s invasion of Norway, the War Department granted approval for the Army to form a “test platoon” of parachutists at Fort Benning, Georgia, under the supervision of the commandant of the Infantry School. Major William C. “Bill” Lee, a World War I combat veteran, appointed twenty-seven-year-old First Lieutenant William T. Ryder, who had been studying and writing about paratroops for some time, platoon commander.
Like the Pony Express in the previous century, which advertised for “orphans” because the job was so dangerous, Ryder filled his ranks only with unmarried volunteers. Forty-eight bachelors of the 29th Infantry Regiment were selected to form the basis of a parachute test platoon. Once Ryder had his group, he whipped his men into superb physical condition. Soon the daily three-mile runs in the punishing Georgia heat and humidity turned into five-mile runs. To harden them for the shock of landing, Ryder had them jump from the backs of moving trucks. To enforce discipline, he and his NCOs punished every mistake, no matter how minor, with push-ups. To accustom them to heights, Ryder had the volunteers jump from towers—short platforms at first, graduating to increasingly higher ones, to finally dropping from a 250-foot steel tower modeled after one designed for wire-controlled parachute drops at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The men learned to pack their own parachutes, then do it again while blindfolded. Soldiers who couldn’t stand heights or the grueling training regimen dropped out, replaced by others who wanted the glory of being paratroopers, even though the United States was not yet officially at war.9
Then it came time for the test platoon to jump from an actual airplane, an obsolete C-39 (an amalgamation of a DC-2, DC-3, and B-18). On 15 August 1940, the men of the test platoon watched as a 150-pound dummy was thrown from a plane to simulate a parachute drop. Its parachute failed to open and the dummy smashed to the ground fifty feet in front of them. With this portentous event fresh in their minds, the next day the test platoon stood in ranks at Fort Benning’s Lawson Army Airfield. Ryder, wearing a one-piece Army Air Corps twill coverall, a plastic Riddell football helmet, and brown, shin-high boots, told his men that he would make the first live jump. The aircraft would then return, gather eight enlisted paratroopers drawn by lots, and go back up.
The lieutenant and the jumpmaster, Warrant Officer Harry “Tug” Wilson—the Army Air Corps’ most experienced parachute jumper at that time—took off. As the C-39 passed over the drop zone (DZ) at an altitude of 1,500 feet, Ryder crouched in the open doorway and looked at the ruddy Georgian landscape below him. On Ryder’s back was a T-4 parachute pack containing a precisely folded, twenty-eight-foot diameter silk parachute that was attached to a static line that was, in turn, connected to an overhead steel cable running the length of the plane’s interior. On his chest, attached to his main harness, Ryder had a rectangular bundle containing a smaller, twenty-two-foot reserve chute.
As the plane approached the drop zone, the pilot throttled back to ninety miles per hour. Jumpmaster Wilson leaned out and saw the red panels marking the forward edge of the drop zone, slapped Ryder sharply on the left leg, and then the lieutenant took a leap of faith into space. Two seconds later, he felt the jolt of the parachute’s opening shock. After about a minute’s descent, he landed safely and rolled forward in what in training is called a “PLF”—parachute landing fall. Lieutenant William Ryder had just made history by becoming the U.S. Army’s first parachuting officer.
The plane returned to Lawson field and the eight selected enlisted men boarded, then the C-39 took off. Ryder later wrote: “Although Tug was Jumpmaster, I wanted to be at the door with him as each man made his first jump. This would not only give me the chance to observe closely each man’s reactions and performance, but somehow it seemed proper and fitting to do so. As we climbed and circled for the next jumper, I conveyed to the men as best I could, the elation, satisfaction and confidence I’d experienced from my jump…. I joined Tug by the door and, with eager anticipation, awaited the historic occasions of the first enlisted man’s qualifying parachute jump.” That enlisted man was Private William “Red” King. His jump, like Ryder’s, was a success.10
After the first eight men jumped, it was the rest of the platoon’s turn. On that first jump, the name of the Apache Indian chief Geronimo became associated with American paratroopers. How this came about is a curious story. It seems that a member of the test platoon, Private Aubrey Eberhardt, a 6’3” farmboy from Georgia, having just seen the Paramount Western Geronimo at the post theater the night before, was asked by his buddies if he were fearful of the next day’s jump. The twenty-four-year-old Eberhardt scoffed at any suggestion that he might be scared and, to prove it, told his companions that he would yell “Geronimo!” when he departed the aircraft the next day rather than the counting of “One thousand! Two thousand! Three thousand!” that the unit had been taught as a way of timing to see if their main chutes had opened.
As he dropped, Eberhardt was true to his word, repeatedly yelling “Geronimo!” all the way to the ground. Soon the others in the platoon followed his lead and the shout caught on. As the test platoon grew into a battalion (the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion, activated on 2 October 1940) and the battalion into a regiment (the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment, activated 15 November 1942 at Camp Toccoa, Georgia), the tradition was continued. The name Geronimo even appeared on the soldiers’ uniforms and became the unit’s motto.
As Ed Howard noted in his treatise on the tradition, “The cry also found its role in the civilian sector, introduced to the public by the intense media coverage of America’s shock troops—the paratroopers. The Geronimo cry had entered the public mainstream, and to the public, Geronimo was a novel expression of bravery, carried by the equally new type of warrior—the paratrooper. It is no wonder the shout caught the attention of America, as it went hand in hand with the larger-than-life paratrooper. To the red-blooded American boy, the jump cry of the paratrooper seemed like just the thing to say for his equivalent event. What did little Johnny shout when he jumped from great heights such as the top bunk? ‘Geronimo!’ Across America the cry would be identified with a subsequent act of bravery, usually followed by pain!”11
During the next six weeks, the platoon averaged one jump per week, either mass or individual, varying in heights from 750 to 1,500 feet. By September 1940, all the test platoon members had made five jumps—a number that became the standard to qualify for a parachutist’s badge.12
EVER THE MILITARY thinker (it was he who conceived the idea of tracked, armored fighting vehicles—“tanks”—in the First World War), British Prime Minister Winston Churchill realized that, with the introduction of gliders and paratroops, the Germans possessed a revolutionary new weapon that threw the old concepts of land warfare right out the window.
During the summer of 1940, the so-called “Battle of Britain” raged as Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe tried to destroy the Royal Air Force in order to gain control of the skies prior to Unternehmen Seelöwe (Operation Sealion)—the planned invasion of Great Britain. Throughout the summer, vast hordes of Heinkels, Junkers, Dorniers, and other German aircraft crossed the English Channel on a daily basis to pummel the RAF airfields in southern England and East Anglia, but the British fighter pilots were like swarms of unrelenting hornets that refused to be swatted out of the sky. Hundreds of German aircraft were sent crashing into the Channel or into the green fields of England or limping back, damaged, to their bases in France and on the Continent.13 Eventually, Hitler abandoned altogether the idea of invading the British Isles and soon turned his attention to invading another foe: the Soviet Union.
From his cigar-smoke-shrouded offices at Number 10 Downing Street on 22 June 1940, Churchill sent a memo to General Sir Hastings Ismay, head of the Military Wing of the War Cabinet Secretariat: “We ought to have a corps of at least 5,000 parachute troops. I hear something is being done already to form such a corps but only, I believe, on a very small scale. Advantage must be taken of the summer to train these forces who can nonetheless play their part meanwhile as shock troops in home defence. Pray let me have a note on the subject.”
Thus, the British Airborne Forces were born. But it would be a long, slow, and painful birth.14
As Churchill had alluded, the Air Ministry had already begun to set up a parachute training school (PTS) at Ringway Aerodrome, the civilian airport five miles south of Manchester. But the Prime Minister’s interest suddenly gave the enterprise new impetus. The Central Landing Establishment was also formed at Ringway and inquiries went out to British firms to see who could build military gliders, which were quickly nicknamed “kites.”
John Rock, a major in the Royal Engineers, was posted to Ringway on 24 June 1940 to “take charge of the military organisation of British Airborne Forces.” Unfortunately, there was as yet no “military organisation of British Airborne Forces,” so he had to devise everything from scratch. To assist Rock, Squadron Leader Louis A. Strange was named the Central Landing School’s commanding officer.
One of the first things Rock and Strange needed was a “dropping zone” where the parachutists—once they had some—could land. They found it on the nearby spacious estate known as “Tatton Park,” owned by Lord Maurice Egerton, a pilot and aviation enthusiast. Strange noted that Lord Egerton “gave us every possible support, assistance and encouragement. We cut down his trees, we knocked down his gateposts, we landed all over his park. I cannot ever remember him having any complaints. He was always helpful and full of encouragement. He would suggest that such and such a tree ought to come down. To Lord Egerton’s co-operation in those days, I attribute a great deal of the early success of the PTS.”
As the size of parachuting activities at Ringway and Tatton Park grew over the next few years, the level of Lord Egerton’s support and cooperation seemed to grow commensurately. By February 1943, Ringway and Tatton Park had hosted 92,000 jumps, including those by RAF personnel, Marine Commandos, and several thousand men and 100 women of SOE—the Special Operations Executive, a force of irregulars trained to conduct sabotage and clandestine operations behind enemy lines. Many foreign troops also trained here, including American, Belgian, Canadian, Czech, Dutch, Norwegian, and Polish.15
IN ADDITION TO being tasked with setting up a training program for military parachutists, Rock and Strange were also given the responsibility of finding and training glider pilots. It was not an easy assignment. Men with an aptitude for piloting motorless craft had to be recruited and then trained to function in military operations. Again, there was precious little knowledge or background upon which to draw. The British civilian glider program was miniscule and the majority of men who wanted to fly were already in the Royal Air Force (RAF), either on active flying status or learning to pilot the fighters and bombers.
As no British military gliders then existed, the Ministry of Aircraft Production contracted the Feltham, Middlesex, firm of General Aircraft Ltd. to design and produce 400 initial gliders of a type dubbed the “Hotspur” that could carry ten men. (The first Hotspur model, the Mark I, first flew on 5 November 1940.) Additional contracts were written to produce the “Horsa,” made by a company called Airspeed, and the giant General Aircraft “Hamilcar,” that could carry artillery pieces and small tanks. The Horsa (according to legend, Horsa and Hengist were two mythic brothers who are said to have led the fifth century settlement of Britain by the Anglo-Saxons) was a large, troop-carrying glider with a rounded, streamlined shape. Its tubular fuselage was sixty-seven feet long, it had a wingspan of eighty-eight feet, could carry a crew of two and twenty-five troops, and was made mostly of plywood, giving it an empty weight of 8,370 pounds.
The first Hamilcar glider prototype did not fly until the spring of 1942. At 67 feet in length, and with a 110-foot wingspan, it would be the war’s largest wooden aircraft. Because of its size and weight (18,400 pounds), the Hamilcar (named for Hamilcar Barca, the ancient Carthaginian general and father of Hannibal) required a powerful tow plane, and the four-engine Handley Page “Halifax” bomber proved to be ideal for the task.16
Eventually, the 1,015 Hotspurs that were built did not see action but were used exclusively for training. The bulk of the combat glider operations would be flown by the Horsa (over 3,700 built) and the Hamilcar (344 built).17
As the first Hotspurs slowly began to arrive at Ringway, Rock and Strange were given four obsolescent AW-38 Armstrong-Whitworth “Whitley” bombers and a handful of Tiger Moth and Avro 504 biplanes to tow them. By December 1941, the Glider Pilot Regiment was formed under the command of Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) George Chatterton, a former RAF fighter pilot. His standards were high: only about a tenth of those who volunteered earned their Army Air Corps glider pilot badge.18
Despite the inherent dangers of flying or riding in gliders, a great many British lads wanted the opportunity. William Kenneth Marfleet was one of them. Employed as a dentist’s apprentice when war broke out, Marfleet left his job to join the Royal Air Force. The RAF, however, deemed him too short to be a pilot and so he was posted to the Royal Dental Corps. Unhappy with the assignment, he volunteered for the Glider Pilot Regiment shortly after it was formed and was accepted.
Marfleet’s skill at piloting the unpowered craft soon became apparent, and he demonstrated his prowess at the controls when he won a competition among other pilots in his RAF Harwell-based squadron to see who could bring his glider down closest to a target on the ground. As the unannounced day for the invasion of France drew near, Marfleet and others repeatedly practiced landing on a tiny spot on the ground, usually at night. Eventually, Marfleet learned that his mission was to be one of the most dangerous of them all.19
WHILE PARATROOPERS BACK in Georgia were filling the air with shouts of “Geronimo!” a parallel effort to begin a glider program was also moving forward. In February 1941, Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Air Force, ordered a feasibility study of gliders. His initial idea was rather preposterous: fitting a jeep with detachable wings so that it could be towed in the air, glide onto a field or roadway, shed its wings, and continue its mission as a vehicle. However odd, the scheme did show that some creativity was being applied to the problem.20
At first, the Army Air Force was not keen on the idea of gliders, having already banned military pilots from flying the unpowered craft. One of the problems was the fact that there was a general shortage of pilots in the United States. Trying to find enough personnel qualified to fly the bombers and fighters and transports in the war everyone saw coming was hard enough; finding even more personnel to pilot gliders and the planes required to tow them seemed to be an impossibility; in 1940, there were only 160 licensed glider pilots in the entire U.S.
Another major hurdle was the fact that American manufacturers had never built vast numbers of large gliders before. Small, one-and two-seat sport gliders had been made by a handful of specialist firms since the 1920s, but there was no knowledge base as to how to go about designing and constructing unpowered aircraft that could carry ten or twenty soldiers and all their equipment.
The third problem was that, in the summer of 1941, the United States was not even in the war. Congress and the majority of the populace were decidedly against the nation becoming involved in another European conflict, so there was little enthusiasm and even less money available to fund either a glider and/or an expanded paratrooper program.21
While Hap Arnold was having sleepless nights worrying about the procurement and production of gliders, the concurrent need for glider pilots and facilities at which to train them became acute. Arnold declared on 4 March 1941 that Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, would become, in addition to the Air Corps’s experimental aircraft test center, the place where a troop-carrying glider would be designed. According to Arnold’s specifications, the glider would need to be capable of carrying from twelve to fifteen armed troops or an equivalent weight of cargo. The procurement officers at Wright were also directed to immediately place orders for gliders with civilian manufacturers. America was getting a late start in the “vertical envelopment” field and needed to catch up in a hurry.
Arnold also directed the people at Wright to contact one of five civilian gliding clubs in America—the Elmira (New York) Area Soaring Corporation—and come up with a contract that would have the club establish guidelines for the training of military glider pilots. Half of an initial batch of instructors would be trained by Elmira and the other half by the Lewis School of Aeronautics in Lockport, Illinois; training would commence on 1 June 1941. Germany’s glider-borne invasion of Greece in April added new impetus to the push for an American glider force. Thus a plan to train 150 power-plane pilots in the art of flying gliders—who would then, in turn, instruct glider-pilot cadets—was approved by Arnold.21 At Arnold’s insistence, Lewin Barringer, an experienced glider pilot, became Major Lewin Barringer and head of the Office of the Director of Air Support.22
Everything gained even more importance, of course, when the Japanese suddenly thrust the U.S. into the war on 7 December 1941. Because the British had been in the war since September 1939, and were far ahead of the Yanks in both glider and paratroop doctrine, they loaned plans for their own thirty-seat glider, known as the “Horsa,” to the Americans. Hap Arnold showed the plans to Jack Laister, the president of the St. Louis-based Laister-Kauffmann Company, which had produced the Army’s first experimental glider, and asked if the company could build something similar. Laister said he could build something even better and set about trying to back up his words.23
Another school was opened up at the Twenty-nine Palms Air Academy in California. In May 1942, the War Department determined that it would need 6,000 glider pilots, a quota the five gliding civilian schools in the country could not hope to meet, so an aggressive program to recruit flyers and establish military schools was established.
The first American soldier to earn his glider pilot wings was Staff Sergeant William T. Sampson. After his wings were pinned on during a ceremony at Washington National Airport on 28 June 1942, someone asked him what the “G” in the center of the pin stood for; Sampson replied: “Guts.”
The Army Air Force also began combing the country for military and civilian airports that might be suitable for establishing glider-training schools. Within months, these were opened at such places as Wickenburg, Arizona; Victorville, California; Fort Morgan, Colorado; Pittsburgh, Kansas; Southville, Mississippi; Fort Sumner and Tucumcari, New Mexico; Okmulgee and Vanita, Oklahoma; Greenville, South Carolina; and in Texas at Amarillo, Dalhart, Hamilton, Lamesa, Waco, and the South Plains Army Air Base in Lubbock, among others. After April 1943, all advance glider training would be conducted at Lubbock.24
Naturally, the powered-flight people at the various airfields were not always thrilled to discover that they would have to share their runways, hangars, etc. with gliders. When glider tests were being conducted at Wright Field, the base commander grabbed the microphone and shouted over the public-address system, “Get those bastards off the field!” The glider test branch at Wright became known as “The Bastard Bunch.”25