BELIEVING THAT THE best way to begin to solve any problem is to assemble the finest minds to work on it, Rock and Strange brought instructors and parachute packers from the Royal Air Forces’ parachute training base at Henlow to Ringway in late 1940 to discuss a parachutist training curriculum.
Aircraft and parachutes would certainly have been helpful at this point, but Rock had none. Fortunately, he was able to wrangle six more Whitleys from the RAF (planes the troops would call “flying coffins,” as they would also call the gliders), along with some pilots, and a few modified Irvin aircrew parachutes. For students, Rock had members of No. 2 Commando—which had been formed just a few weeks earlier—assigned to Ringway for airborne training. In addition, as an incentive to induce volunteers into the parachute program, the Army offered extra pay of two shillings per day. It needn’t have bothered—the “glamour” and prestige of being a part of such a daring and elite force was enough. In fact, interviewing officers rejected three-quarters of all applicants, going only for the “pick of the crop.”1
Thomas E. Davies of Dorchester recalled that he volunteered for the airborne in January 1941 from his current unit, and was immediately impressed with the stringent physical standards just to be able to qualify to take the course. “Out of a batch of forty or more applicants at that time from the battalion,” he noted, “just two of us eventually went on to take the parachute training course.”2
As jumping out of a perfectly good airplane is not an activity that comes naturally to most people, a plan had to be devised that would teach this most unusual of skills to a large number of willing subjects. Jumping from a plane is one thing, landing after a jump was quite another. The technique being stressed by the instructors was to keep the feet and knees together, and to roll upon touching down—left, right, forward, or back.
In Britain, much of the vigorous training was done “on the fly,” meaning that teaching methods evolved as the course evolved. What worked was kept and integrated into the curriculum; what didn’t work was jettisoned. One particularly unpopular training method involved swinging the men on a trapeze above a sand pit. At the top of the forward swing, a height of fifteen feet, the trainee was ordered to let go so that he fell onto his back—an experience that was supposed to simulate the type of backwards landing experienced while dropping from an oscillating parachute. So many men were injured that it was discontinued.
After a few grueling weeks of physical conditioning and learning to jump into sand pits from various heights, the first actual jump from an airplane by a British soldier took place on 13 July 1940. The airplane ride was anything but pleasant. Inside the fuselage the paras were strapped into seats where each of their senses was assaulted. The roar of the two 1,145 horsepower Merlin X engines filled the space and made talking in anything less than a full-volume shout into the ear of the man next to one virtually impossible. The craft shuddered and vibrated to the point that the paras felt it would shake itself apart at any moment. The overpowering smell of aviation fuel and the lacquer with which the plane had been painted made for a nauseating combination. The interior metal “skin” of the Whitley was always cold to the touch, except on summer days, when it felt like a hot baking dish. The final sense—taste—was the palpable air of fear that exuded from the ten or so men who were about to put their lives in the hands of the WRAF (Women’s Royal Air Force) parachute packers.3
Airborne volunteers soon became the military’s version of Hollywood stuntmen—asked to perform amazing feats of derring-do with no guarantee that they would not be killed or seriously injured in the process. For example, exiting a Whitley, which had been modified by having the rear turret of the bomber’s fuselage removed, was an exercise in overcoming fear. Once at altitude, the parachutist stood in this windy space, clutching a handrail and facing forward. At the appropriate moment, a “dispatcher” pulled the chute’s ripcord, allowing it to billow out into the slipstream of the bomber and violently yank the unfortunate soldier into space, like a tooth being extracted by some demented dentist. This “pulloff” method of exiting a plane was hated by one and all.
It was later scrapped in favor of an only slightly less hazardous method. The Whitley’s small belly turret was removed so that men could exit through the three-foot hole in the fuselage floor, but this also presented its own dangers and challenges. The paratroopers were required to scoot on their rear ends along the floor and drop one at a time through the small hole. This time-consuming method resulted in planeloads of soldiers being scattered across a wide area below. Even worse, accidents in leaving the planes were frequent, with paratroopers hitting their heads or bashing in their teeth on the lip of the hole—a mishap referred to by the paras as “ringing the bell.” A number of troops died or were seriously injured in the process.4
The trainees learned to exit through the hole in the floor before they actually got to jump from the moving aircraft. Thomas Davies recalled that his group leaped “through apertures that were cut in the bottom of the fuselages of obsolete aircraft [mounted on a scaffold] to drop about twelve feet onto large coconut matting, which helped to break the impact of the fall.”5
Jumping from an actual Whitley was, as one parachutist put it, “vile from the comfort point of view. The dark, noisy, draughty, smelling and cramped bowel of the aircraft was no health resort…. The Whitley was nicknamed ‘the Elephant’ and the aperture had a very obvious nickname also.”6
The British didn’t believe in reserve chutes. Part of the reason was the bulk. With a parachute strapped to a soldier’s back, and another one on his chest, it would have been next to impossible for him to squeeze through the small opening in the floor of the fuselage. Another reason was financial. Silk parachutes cost £20; if the single parachute failed to open properly, well, it was “Tough luck, Tommy.”7
Having a reliable parachute was one tool essential to every paratrooper. Members of the WRAF were charged with packing the chutes and took their jobs with the utmost seriousness. But they often engaged in cheery banter with the trainees as they handed out the packed, multicolored devices, such as, “If this one doesn’t open, just bring it back and we’ll be happy to replace it.”8
More and more volunteers began to arrive at Ringway and by 25 July 1940, 135 drops had already been conducted when the first death occurred: a trooper named Evans, of No. 2 Commando, died when his parachute malfunctioned.9
IT WAS NOT all work and no play. During breaks in their training, the paras at Ringway would relax by heading into nearby Manchester to visit the pubs, and with any luck, pick up girls. After downing a few pints—most of which were bought for them by the grateful civilian patrons—at such establishments as the Crown and Kettle on Oldham Road, The Athenaeum on York Street, or the Didsbury on Wilmslow Road, the well-lubricated paras-in-training would break into song, usually with one of their number accompanying them on an out-of-tune piano: “Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye,” “We’ll Meet Again,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” and “There’ll Always Be an England.” But one song that seemed to be sung time after time, once Luftwaffe boss Hermann Göring had called off his hounds and the British at last felt that they might actually win the war, was a ribald ditty called “No Balls At All,” sung to the tune of “The Colonel Bogey March.” It went:
Hitler … has only got one ball;
Goebbels… has two, but veree small.
Himmler … is very sim’lar;
But poor old Göring’s
Got no balls at all!
THE FIRST “MASS” jump at Ringway took place on 11 November 1940, when fifty paratroopers put on a demonstration for several high-ranking British officers and dignitaries, including His Royal Highness, Prince Olaf of Norway. The troops were dropped by four Whitleys near Shrewton on Salisbury Plain, not far from Stonehenge. That same month, the dashing Lieutenant-General Frederick Arthur Montague “Boy” Browning, former commander of the 24th Guards Brigade and husband of British novelist Daphne du Maurier, was appointed commander of Airborne Troops. Browning had graduated from Sandhurst in June 1915 and shortly thereafter, was posted to the trenches in northern France where he was commended for his bravery; before turning twenty, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and French Croix de Guerre.
On 20 November, No. 2 Commando was renamed No. 11 Special Air Service Battalion, or “SAS” for short. By the end of 1940, the British 1st Airborne Division came into existence.10
Knowing that, as an elite outfit, paratroops needed to have the highest level of fitness and discipline, Browning insisted that the airborne program recruit a great number of sergeants from the Guards Regiments, as he felt that only they could achieve the high standards that were required.11
TO YOUNG, MILITARY-minded men, a sharp-looking uniform is a strong attraction and often a deciding factor in what branch of service to join. The British parachutist’s combat uniform was distinctly different from that of the ordinary soldier. The flat “pietin” helmet that had been worn by British (and American) ground troops since World War I was totally unsuited for airborne purposes. The trainees started out with a tight-fitting “balaclava-style” leather flying helmet, but this was soon replaced by a rubber-padded, turban-like canvas headpiece for greater protection. This was later discarded in favor of a steel helmet with a hard rubber rim, which, in turn, was superseded by the now-classic, rimless, “inverted soup bowl” helmet wrapped by a camouflage cover.
The paratrooper’s wool tunic was also adorned with an embroidered pair of wings with a parachute in the center, sewn near the shoulder on the right sleeve. A pair of black leather boots with short canvas leggings completed the outfit.12
While the parachutist wore the standard heavy, brown-wool battledress underneath, he covered it with what was introduced in 1942 and called the “Denison smock”—a multipocketed, hip-length, windproof garment that reduced the chances of a paratrooper getting snagged on a plane’s surfaces while exiting. It also had a flap or “tail” that could be snapped between the legs to keep it in place during jumps.
The “first pattern” smock replaced an earlier model that was copied directly from the German Fallschirmjäger design, which was more like a bag with sleeves and leg holes into which the parachutist stepped. The “first pattern,” by contrast, was of a “pull-over” or anorak style that zipped up the front and had swathes of brown and green camouflage coloration. Paratroopers liked the smock and were also prone to give it a final dressingup with a loose-weave camouflage scarf tucked in around the neck. (In 1944, just in time for Operation Overlord, the “second pattern” was issued. This had buttoning tabs at the cuffs and a darker color more suitable for blending in with the foliage of northern Europe; the first pattern was of a lighter shade that better matched the sands of North Africa, Sicily, and the Mediterranean area.)
But, as author Gregor Ferguson has observed, “In retrospect, it seems that more time might profitably have been spent on confronting the vital problem of how long it was going to take an unarmed man, stumbling around a rough DZ at night, to find his weapon; and rather less upon the special clothing developed for him to wear while he did the stumbling.”13
Although it seems logical to assume that paratroops would carry their own weapons into the “dropping zone,” as the British called it, Rock and Strange wrestled with the question if that was really the best method. After all, a paratrooper, trying to exit through the small hole in a Whitley, might have his Enfield rifle or Sten gun get hung up on the lip of the hole or torn from his grasp the moment he hit the slipstream.
One solution Rock and Strange devised was the “CLE Container” (Central Landing Establishment)—a hollow, bomb-like metal shell into which weapons, ammunition, and other supplies could be stowed and dropped by parachute. The idea was that the container would be dropped along with the paratroops that would, upon landing, retrieve it. The flaw in this thinking was that the paras would be unarmed and defenseless in enemy territory until they could find the container—if they could find the container.14
Like the uniforms, the parachutes themselves also underwent modification. Instead of having a “despatcher” pull the ripcord as the parachutist departed the plane, the parachutes were now attached to the aircraft’s structure by means of a strap or static line that automatically pulled the chute out of its pack as the jumper dropped from the hole.15
AT LAST IT came time for Boy Browning to see if he had trained an airborne unit capable of carrying out a combat mission. And just in time, too, for the troops were becoming restless with nothing but endless training and no apparent prospects for seeing action.16 The mission dreamed up for them was Operation Colossus—an ill-conceived attack on the Tragino aqueduct at Calitri in southern Italy set for 10 February 1941. The mission’s grandiose stated goal was to cut off the supply of fresh water to Italian military bases in the region—as well as to the two million inhabitants of the province of Apulia—in the expectation that it would disrupt Italian operations in Africa and Albania.
The battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel C.I.A. Jackson, gathered his 500 men and informed them that he needed a small group of volunteers for a deep and very dangerous penetration into enemy territory. Without divulging the nature of the operation, he made it clear that the mission was hazardous in the extreme, the chance of being extracted was nil, casualties were apt to be very high, and the possibility of the survivors being shot by the enemy as spies or saboteurs almost certain. When Jackson asked for volunteers, all 500 men stepped forward.
Seven officers and twenty-eight members of No. 11 SAS, under Major T.A.G. Pritchard, were ultimately selected for this near-suicidal operation. The group was dubbed “X Troop” and underwent six weeks of intense training at Tatton Park, where a full-scale replica of the aqueduct was built. One man—Lance-Sergeant Dennis—died during training when a strong gust of wind blew him into an ice-covered pond where he drowned before he could be rescued.
Three days before the operation, X Troop was transported by air to Malta, from where the raid would be launched. While British planes bombed Foggia to create a diversion, the men of No. 11 SAS, carried in six Whitleys, jumped near the objective. One aircraft dropped its paratroopers in the wrong valley and they failed to make it to the objective; much of the explosives were also lost. The remaining troopers found the aqueduct and attacked it with a lesser charge of demolitions. The damage was less than total and the Italians repaired the aqueduct in less than a week. The paratroopers, stranded well behind enemy lines, were forced to infiltrate some fifty miles through enemy territory to meet a submarine, HMS Triumph, which was supposed to take them back to Malta on 15–16 February. However, the submarine was recalled when it was learned that the landing site, at the mouth of the Sele River, had become untenable. There was no way to inform Pritchard and his men of this change in plan, so, despite splitting into four separate evasion groups, the paratroops were all captured by the Italians over the course of the next few days. Luckily, they were not executed.
Although the operation was considered a “glorious failure,” the daring attack did serve to bolster British home-front morale and gain recognition for the airborne troops. More importantly, the operation gave the British military establishment valuable information about conducting raids of this type that would serve them well in the future.17
In the spring of 1941, the German advance into the eastern Mediterranean area was running smoothly, with Yugoslavia being knocked out of the war and Greece trying to stave off defeat following Germany’s 6 April 1941 invasion (which was only in Greece because Germany’s Axis partner, Italy, had badly botched its attempted conquest of its neighbor across the Adriatic Sea). Barely holding Greece were two British divisions and a tank brigade. In an effort to destroy the British formations by preventing them from withdrawing from southern Greece, the Germans mounted a successful airborne assault by the 2nd Fallschirmjäger Regiment of Generalleutnant Wilhelm Süssmann’s 7th Flieger Division against the bridge at the Corinth Canal on 28 April 1941. A group of engineers in gliders came in first, followed by a flight of 200 Ju-52s that dropped the rest of the regiment by parachute, effectively cutting off the British escape route. After Greece was secured, it was then a matter of Hitler deciding where to strike next.
While some thought Hitler would invade Malta, the Germans decided to reprise their remarkable airborne/glider feat sixteen months after the fall of Eben Emael against the British-held Mediterranean island of Crete in an operation dubbed Merkur (Operation Mercury). The British garrison on Crete was commanded by the just-arrived (30 May) Major-General Bernhard Freyberg, a New Zealander who had fought at Gallipoli during World War I. If the Germans could capture Crete, it would give them a definite advantage in the eastern Mediterranean, as the airfields there could be used to launch raids deep into the Balkans and the Rumanian oil fields, or be used as a base for operations into North Africa, particularly Egypt and Palestine. Additionally, the harbor at Suda Bay could be turned into a naval base. The Germans felt the time to attack Crete had arrived.
On 20 May 1941, the sky above the island’s sun-bleached northern coast suddenly darkened as swarms of German aircraft filled the sky. Landing in seventy-four combat gliders, and with an additional 15,000 paratroopers carried by 500 transport aircraft, the Germans swooped down on the British garrison at four points: Heraklion, Retimo (Rethymnon), Canea, and the Maleme airfield. Unfortunately for the Germans, Wilhelm Süssmann, the 7th Flieger Division commander, crashed while approaching Crete in a glider and was killed; he was succeeded by General major Alfred Sturm.
The fighting on the parched, rocky ground was fierce with the casualties on both sides high, but the entire island was in German hands within two weeks. The victory was Pyrrhic, though, as the invaders suffered heavy losses in the assault—about 6,000 of all ranks killed, with 3,674 being airborne and glider officers and men.* In addition, 220 aircraft were lost.18
ALTHOUGH CRETE WAS important to Germany’s operations in the Mediterranean and North Africa, nothing was as important as Hitler’s next target: the Soviet Union. A force of three million men, accompanied by thousands of tanks, guns, and aircraft, was secretly assembled along a thousand-mile front that stretched from Finland in the north to the Black Sea in the south.
Soviet leader Josef Stalin had been lulled into inactivity by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact—a mutual nonaggression treaty that had been signed on 23 August 1939—and was not expecting to be invaded. This changed on 22 June 1941, when Hitler stunned Stalin and the world by unleashing his forces eastward into the Soviet Union in Unternehmen Barbarossa (Operation Barbarossa). But paratroopers or glider forces played no part in it; the 7th Flieger Division was back in Germany, still recovering from the Crete mauling. It wasn’t until September 1941, after the unit had been reconstituted, that the Fallschirmjäger division saw action at Leningrad to stiffen the line.19
Two months after the Crete campaign ended, Hitler summoned Student** and other Fallschirm commanders to his headquarters to present them with Knight’s Cross medals. Although an admirer of the audacity and élan shown by the airborne forces, Hitler quietly told Student after dinner, “Of course you know, General, that we shall never do another airborne operation. The day of the parachutist is over. The parachute arm is a surprise weapon, and without the element of surprise there can be no future for airborne forces.” So saying, Hitler closed the door on further large-scale operations involving gliders and paratroops.20
Interestingly, about the time the Germans decided that the losses suffered by their airborne and glider troops were more than they could bear, the Americans and British were going full steam ahead to adopt the principles and strategies of airborne and glider warfare. Therefore, while the Germans continued to recruit and train Fallschirmjäger because of their elite status and attendant esprit de corps, they no longer committed them to battle via the air—only on the ground. Except for a few small-scale raids (such as Otto Skorzeny’s glider assault to free the deposed Italian leader Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop “prison” in September 1943), they were used as ground troops; never again would the skies be filled with vast numbers of dreaded German gliders or parachutes. Wars are won or lost on such decisions.21
Seeing the Germans’ success in Crete, however, and not knowing that the Germans had permanently abandoned the paratroop/glider concept, the British redoubled their efforts to create an effective airborne fighting force. Soon, so would the Americans.
FOLLOWING THE TRAGINO aqueduct operation, and seeing the role that Germany’s parachute and glider formations had played in the capture of Crete, the British decided to expand their airborne forces; on 15 September 1941, the 1st Parachute Brigade came into existence. The British were also making progress in the recruiting and training of glider pilots, and on 10 October 1941, the 31st Independent Brigade Group, which had just returned to England from India, was renamed the 1st Air-Landing Brigade Group.22
With the 1st Parachute Brigade now formed, the 2nd Brigade was raised. At the nucleus of this brigade was the 4th Parachute Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel M.R.J. Hope-Thompson. Also joining the brigade were the 5th (Scottish) Parachute Battalion, formerly the 7th Battalion; The Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, led by Lieutenant Colonel A. Dunlop; and the 6th (Royal Welch) Parachute Battalion, formerly, 10th Battalion, The Royal Welch Fusiliers.23
Commanding both the 1st Parachute Brigade and the 1st Air-Landing Brigade Group was Brigadier Richard Nelson “Windy” Gale. A bear of a man—6’3” and over 200 pounds—Richard Gale was born in London on 25 July 1896, but spent much of his youth in Australia, returning to London with his parents in 1906.
At the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, he rushed to join the army but was rejected because he was deemed physically unfit. He worked hard to get himself into shape, and, in 1915, he applied for and was accepted into the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, Britain’s equivalent of West Point. But, because of a severe manpower shortage—especially of subalterns, who were being lost at an alarming rate on the front lines in France—Gale was posted to a machine gun company the next year. Involved in heavy fighting during the Battle of the Somme and the Ypres Salient in 1917, he had numerous “near misses,” and was hospitalized for mental and physical exhaustion. He was returned to his unit in January 1918 and remained at the front until the Armistice, being promoted to captain during that time.
After the war, Gale decided to remain in the army and was posted in 1919 to the 12th Battalion, The Machine Gun Corps, in India. The following year, Gale’s company was transferred to India’s North West Frontier, where the Third Anglo-Afghan War was taking place. In 1921, the Machine Gun Corps was disbanded and Gale was sent to the Worcestershire Regiment and their 3rd Battalion, stationed at Fyzabad. This battalion was also disbanded and in 1922 Gale transferred to the Machine Gun School in India. He finally returned to England in January 1936, just as it seemed a new European war was on the horizon.
In London, Gale, still a captain, was posted to the War Office as a staff officer, where he kept abreast of the latest in military developments. After some time, however, he tired of his desk job as a “Whitehall Warrior” and requested a return to the field. Once war broke out, promotions came more swiftly and soon he was a lieutenant colonel. On New Year’s Day 1941, he was given command of the 2nd/5th Battalion, The Leicestershire Regiment. Nine months later, Gale left the regular infantry, was promoted to brigadier, was transferred to the Airborne Forces, and given command of the 1st Parachute Brigade.
In April 1941, as more months of training went by, jumping from tethered barrage balloons was added to the training curriculum at Ringway. Some of the new recruits liked this method of training, for they could jump from a great height (800-1,000 feet) without experiencing the violent thrashing caused by the Whitley’s propwash and slipstream. But even this “kinder, gentler” way of jumping was not favored by all; the parachutist had to fall about 150 feet before his chute opened, creating a brief-but-terrifying sensation that he was plunging to his death.24
Thomas Davies recalled that suspended below the balloon was a basket holding four men and an RAF jumping instructor. Once the instructor gave the signal, each man in turn dropped through the aperture in the floor of the basket and fell earthward, reaching speeds of 125 miles per hour. As Davies put it, “In a matter of seconds, I was plummeting to the ground experiencing a sort of gripping sensation in the pit of my stomach which made me want to curl up, as I sensed the mad rush of air through my mouth and nostrils as my body dropped like a stone…. Then, just when I was sure something had gone wrong, and I was overwhelmed with an urge to scream, a giant hand swept me up by the shoulders and a great flood of relief rushed over me as the silk canopy of the parachute billowed open above me like a huge coloured mushroom, and there I was floating gently earthwards feeling a wonderful sense of exhilaration.”25
On 15 September 1941, the Brigade was formed as follows: 11 SAS Battalion became the 1st Parachute Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel E.E. “Dracula” Down (so called because of his rather frightening countenance); the 2nd Parachute Battalion was under Lieutenant Colonel Edwin W. C. Flavell; and the 3rd Parachute Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel G.W. Lathbury.26
Unfortunately, and much to his displeasure, Gale was posted back to the War Office in the spring of 1942 to become Deputy Director of Staff Duties for Air and would not command the Brigade when it left for North Africa towards the end of 1942. But his return to a command position was coming.27
DESPITE THE INHERENT dangers, primitive equipment, and punishing physical training, the ranks of the airborne brigades continued to swell, growing to four battalions by November 1941, and later to seventeen. Now it was necessary to find more missions for them.28
While the British Army contemplated various ways to test the combat readiness of its fledgling parachute force, the United States was thrust into the war on 7 December 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and other American military installations in the Pacific. The “sleeping giant” was awakened and soon the full might of the United States—the world’s greatest economic engine—would be brought to bear against Germany, Japan, Italy, and other members of the self-proclaimed Axis. As William L. Shirer wrote, Pearl Harbor was an event “that transformed the European war, which [Hitler] had so lightly provoked, into a world war, which, though he could not know it, would seal the fate of the Third Reich.”29
On 30 January 1942, the U.S. War Department, remembering the lessons of Norway, Eben Emael, and Crete, directed that the Army create four parachute regiments. To achieve this goal, the Infantry School at Fort Benning would, by the middle of summer, establish a parachute training section to train the volunteers who would soon be flocking to the post to learn how to become paratroopers.30
WHILE AMERICANS WERE lining up at recruiting centers and American factories were gearing up for the most concerted industrial effort the world had ever seen, the British decided to mount another small airborne raid, this time at Bruneval—site of a German radar installation along the English Channel coast in occupied France. A number of similar radar sites had been identified by Royal Air Force aerial reconnaissance missions during 1941, but their exact purpose and the nature of the equipment used at them was not known. However, many British scientists believed that these stations were connected with the heavy losses being experienced by RAF bombers conducting missions against targets in occupied Europe.
A request was therefore made by these scientists that one of these installations be raided and the technology it possessed removed and brought back to Britain for further study. Due to the extensive coastal defenses erected by the Germans, it was believed that a commando raid from the sea would only inflict heavy losses on the attackers and give sufficient time for the garrison at the installation to destroy the radar equipment. Such a raid, however, seemed perfect for an airborne force.
On the night of 27 February 1942, after a period of intense training, a small detachment of airborne troops–-Major* John Frost’s C Company, 2nd Parachute Battalion—was dropped into France a few miles from the installation. The force then proceeded to assault the villa in which the radar equipment was kept, killing several members of the German garrison during a brief firefight and capturing the installation. The force dismantled the equipment and removed several key pieces to take back to Britain. After another battle to eliminate German sentries guarding the beach, the raiding force was then picked up by boats and taken back to England.
The Bruneval raid was a complete success; the airborne troops suffered only a few casualties (two killed, six wounded, and six missing) and the radar equipment they brought back, along with a captured radar technician, allowed British scientists to study German advances in radar and to create countermeasures to neutralize those advances.31
While the Tragino and Bruneval raids gave the British valuable lessons both in what to do and not to do, the commanders and planners knew that they still had a long way to go.
Such small-scale actions—in reality nothing more than commando raids conducted by parachute—were hardly more than annoying pinpricks, entirely too small to make much of a contribution to winning the war. Something much larger would need to be undertaken—something on the order of a massive invasion of a continent. But such a grandiose scheme was two years into the future.
AS 1942 PROGRESSED, the British continued to work out the kinks in their airborne doctrine, and many kinks there were. For one, they discovered that if the silk canopy got wet, it was not likely to deploy—an almost always fatal occurrence given the absence of a reserve chute.
For another, after a parachutist died in training when his chute “Roman candled”* (what the Americans called a “cigarette roll” or a “streamer”), i.e., pulled out of the pack but did not fully open, two men, James Gregory and Raymond Quilter, owners of the GQ Parachute Company, came up with an improved deployment method superior to the Irvin aircrew model. Whereas the Irvin chute’s canopy deployed first and then pulled the rigging lines from the canvas backpack—giving the parachutist a good, eyeball-popping jolt in the process—the GQ model was designed to allow for both the canopy and lines to pay out completely before the canopy filled with air. The new parachute, with its more comfortable harness and twenty-eight-foot canopy, was called the X-Type because the harness straps formed an X across the chest32
BOY BROWNING’S PARACHUTE battalions, which had, until now, been part of no larger parent organization, were formed into The Parachute Regiment on 1 August 1942, as a segment of the newly created Army Air Corps. Browning desired that the regiment should have some distinctive characteristics that would gain it further recognition, so he had an artist, Major Edward Seago, design a unit emblem: a depiction of the mythic Greek warrior Bellerophon astride the winged horse Pegasus.
To top off the uniform, Browning chose a beret. Gregor Ferguson notes, “An orderly was paraded at Wellington Barracks in London to model different shades of red, blue and green. The assembled ‘brass’ could not make up their minds between maroon and blue, so the orderly’s opinion was sought; he chose the maroon, and his preference was endorsed by General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.”33
With a sharp-looking uniform, and a few daring raids under its belt, the British parachute establishment was off to a promising start. The question was, what role, if any, would such a military contingent play when it came time for the Allies to invade the European continent?