Jumping and Coasting Into War: The Parachute and the Glider

^{National Archives from Army}

^{Paratroopers jump at Munsan, Korea, in an unsuccessful attempt to cut off retreating enemy troops.}

The Belgian government was resolved that 1914 would not be repeated.

Overlooking the Albert Canal, a little north of Liege, the Belgians built Fort Eben‑Emael. Eben‑Emael incorporated all of the technology used in the famous French Maginot Line. It had armored rotating gun cupolas whose low, curved shape made a direct hit impossible, and that could be lowered beneath the surface of the Earth. These cupolas mounted five 60 mm, 16 75 mm, and two 120 mm guns – all quick‑firers. The fort was surrounded by an antitank wall and barbed wire. It had armored positions for searchlights, grenade throwers and many, many machine guns. Everything was underground, protected by a thick‑ness of reinforced concrete that would have defied Big Bertha. Some 700 trained soldiers made up its garrison.

At 5:20 a.m.,on May 10, 1940, seven gliders landed on the top of Eben‑Emael. The Belgian stronghold had practically no antiaircraft defenses. Out of the gliders climbed 55 Germans equipped with flamethrowers and shaped demolition charges as well as the usual infantry arms. They used the shaped charges to blast the cupolas and other armored positions or they burned the defenders out of them with flamethrowers. They tossed explosive charges down the air vents. The defenders fought from tunnel to tunnel when the Germans entered the underground fortress. Some of them even managed to fire on the regular German troops who were trying to cross the canal. The Germans got across, however, and when they brought up reinforcements the next day, the garrison surrendered. The garrison commander shot himself.

While glider troops were attacking Eben‑Emael, paratroopers dropped into Holland and seized bridges, making the vaunted Dutch water‑defenses useless.

Even earlier, during the German invasion of Norway, a long narrow country broken up by fjords and mountains, the Germans dropped paratroops to seize key airfields. They were quickly reinforced by troops arriving on transport planes.

These attacks of troops from the sky seemed to many at that time like something from a science‑fiction tale. For years, there had been reports of paratroopers of the Soviet Union’s Red Army and how they would change warfare.

But the publications that printed these stories also had articles on how the Japanese‑owned fishing boats in Los Angeles Harbor would cover that immense body of water with oil and ignite it, roasting everyone in the Pacific Fleet. Then came the Soviet Union’s fumbling effort against Finland in the Winter War of 1939–1940. No paratroopers appeared, and the Red Army’s campaign was distinguished mostly by its ineptitude. The paratroop threat seemed on a par with the martian threat.

The aerial component of the Blitzkrieg was a shock, but worse was to come.

On May 20, 1941, the remnants of the British force that had been driven out of Greece were holed up on Crete with some 10,200 Greek allies. Soon after dawn, the defenders saw an enormous fleet of aircraft. Suddenly, parachutes blossomed behind the planes, thousands upon thousands of parachutes. Behind the parachutes came planes towing gliders that held artillery, more heavy equipment and more soldiers. On May 26th, Major General Bernard Freyberg of New Zealand, commander of the Allied forces on Crete, radioed his commander, General Archibald Wavell, that Crete could not hold out. On June 1, the Royal Navy evacuated 18,000 men. Some 12,000 of the British force had been captured, and 2,000 had been killed. The British and Americans put new emphasis on developing airborne divisions of their own.

The Allies used their paratroopers for the first time in the invasion of Sicily in 1943. The airborne troops avoided the main German mistake on Crete: dropping directly on enemy troops, something that caused them extraordinarily heavy losses. They landed away from enemy troop concentrations, then attacked outposts, bridges, road intersections, and made it almost impossible for Axis forces to reach the beaches being attacked from the sea.

D day, June 6, 1945, saw the greatest parachute and glider assault in history – one that will probably still be the greatest in history a thousand years from now. Four divisions, two American and two British, parachuted onto Normandy in the dead of the night. It was hardly a flawless operation. Most of the paratroopers landed at a distance from their intended drop zones, and wind scattered them so far that many did not return to their own units for 24 hours.

That wasn’t all bad. The troopers were scattered so widely that the Germans were utterly surprised to find enemy troops among them. The paratroopers took advantage of that surprise and captured many of the Germans’ rear installations. The landings greatly disrupted attempts to reinforce the German troops being attacked on the beaches.

One of the big factors in the success of the airborne assault was that much of Normandy, except for the front‑line troops on the beaches, was defended by second‑line troops with third‑line equipment. Some of the German units were equipped with French tanks left over from the First World War and with under‑powered artillery from the same war. Antiaircraft guns were in short supply. A mass jump, such as those on Normandy with troops wearing static‑line parachutes, requires transport planes to fly in a fairly dense formation at a rather low altitude and continue on course until the last trooper has jumped.

And that is the answer to an antiaircraft gunners’ prayer. Before conditions that permit that kind of jump occur again, troops may be wearing antigravity boots or rocket belts. The glider forces did not have the luck of the Germans at Eben‑Emael. Landing at night in a land of hedgerows and swamps, many of them crashed, and large numbers of troops were killed or suffered disabling injuries.

The German invasion of Crete had breathed new life into the concept of airborne operations, but enthusiasts overlooked a few facts. First, German losses at first were so great that General Karl Student, chief of the Luftwaffe’s airborne troops, thought his men had lost the battle on the first day of the invasion. They dropped directly on the airfields, and the defenders began killing them before they touched the ground. The slaughter was especially heavy at airfields held by New Zealand troops. German General Erwin Rommel said the New Zealanders were the best troops he fought in his North African campaigns.

Most of them were farmers, and they had been using rifles since childhood.

They shot a large proportion of the airborne invaders as they hung helplessly beneath their parachutes. Second, in spite of their skill, the defenders were refugees from the defeat in Greece. They had machine guns without tripods, mortars without shells, almost no motor transportation, absolutely no air cover, and, especially, they had a great shortage of radios. Freyberg was unable to coordinate his troops’ movements; his subordinate commanders didn’t know what other units were doing or where they were. When one New Zealand commander pulled back to regroup, he left a corner of the airfield he was defending uncovered. By a sinister coincidence, Student had just at that time dispatched a fleet of transport planes loaded with regular – not airborne – troops to that airfield. If the New Zealanders had been in their former position, the Germans would have been slaughtered. As it was, they gained a foothold and were able to continue to pour in reinforcements. Nevertheless, German deaths were more than twice those of the British: 5,000 to 2,000. This was largely because of losses the first day.

The Allies conducted more successful parachute drops after D day, seizing bridges just ahead of the ground forces and preventing their demolition by the enemy. These, though, were small scale jumps in territory held by forces whose top priority was getting away from there. One parachute drop was a disaster.

The British “Red Devils” jumped at Arnhem in the Netherlands “One Bridge Too Far,” as Cornelius Ryan’s bestseller put it, ahead of the British ground forces. They were all killed or captured. In Burma, the maverick British General Orde Wingate used gliders to successfully bring troops and artillery to his “strongholds” in the jungle, pioneering what later developed into the “air mobile” tactical doctrine of such outfits as the U.S. First Air Cavalry Division.

Paratroopers jumped twice in the Korean War. Both times, the 187th Airborne Regiment tried to cut off retreating North Korean troops. But each time, the enemy had already retreated farther north than the drop zone. After Korea, troop‑carrying helicopters made both parachutes and gliders largely obsolete.

Special Forces troops use steerable parachutes for small‑scale special operations, but the mass jump of paratroopers with static cord chutes is a thing of the past. Some Special Forces troops jumped to secure airstrips in northern Iraq at the beginning of the Iraq War, but the jump itself seemed to be mainly for exercise. The airfields were undefended.

Still, just about every country in the world has paratroopers, even countries with hardly any airplanes. Paratroopers are considered elite troops. They are much like the grenadiers in the late 18th century – that is, highly trained masters of a military skill no longer needed. In combat, all other things being equal, including leadership, airborne outfits have proven to be neither better nor worse than ordinary infantry. That statement may anger paratroopers or former paratroopers who have been brainwashed to believe that they are superior to all “straight‑legs,” but combat records permit no other conclusion.

Politicians and much of the public – and certainly Hollywood – want to believe it is possible to field mini‑supermen. President John F. Kennedy believed that the Special Forces, the “Green Berets,” were the answer to troubles in Vietnam, but it didn’t turn out that way. Achilles is out of date. The strongest and toughest man ever born can be killed instantly by a bullet from a .22 short – the least‑powerful cartridge generally available. Beyond a certain reasonable limit, strength and toughness are irrelevant. Courage still counts, of course. So does confidence and skill with weapons. But no one became braver by doing 100,000 push‑ups. No one became confident by listening to some leather‑lunged jackass with stripes on his sleeve call him a maggot. And few people became notably better marksmen because of the crash course they got in basic training.

The really skilled are those such as the New Zealanders in Crete, who had the skill before they enlisted. Courage is inborn, but it can be developed by confidence. Confidence comes from trusting the other soldiers in your unit. You trust them, and you know they trust you. Because they trust you, you don’t want to let them down. So you don’t, even though terrified. That’s courage.

Another name for this is morale. And morale is what makes a good unit.

Colonel David H. Hackworth, America’s most decorated living soldier, summed up what makes a good outfit when writing about one of his former regiments, the 27th Infantry (Wolfhound) Regiment. He said, “They weren’t a special unit, just a group of guys who thought they were good, so they were good.”