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The Means and a Template for Imitation:
Early Developments and German Airborne Operations in Scandinavia and the Low Countries to 1940
Deploying troops from the air is currently a routine and commonplace military technique and has been so for the better part of a century, but the notion preceded the means by a considerable period. The idea of a man-carrying parachute dates back to at least the 1480s, when the Florentine artist and inventor Leonardo da Vinci sketched a design consisting of four equilateral triangles formed into a pyramid-shaped canopy supported by a wooden frame. Da Vinci does not appear to have carried out any full-scale tests of his design, but its basic soundness has been proven in more recent trials. On 18 June 2001 British skydiver Adrian Nicholas used a precise, seven-metre-tall replica of da Vinci’s design constructed using contemporary tools, materials and techniques to carry out a balloon jump at Mpumalanga in South Africa. The design worked perfectly in a descent from 10,000 feet, although Mr Nicholas cut himself free at 2,000 feet and completed the descent with a regular parachute; the separation was prompted by fears that the 187-pound bulk of the da Vinci replica would cause injury on landing.1 The effectiveness of da Vinci’s pyramidal canopy was reinforced eight years later when Swiss base-jumper Olivier Vietti Teppa successfully landed using a version that dispensed with the wooden frame and was manufactured with modern lightweight material. The modern version also performed perfectly in a 2,130-foot jump from a helicopter at Payerne military airfield near Geneva on 28 April 2008, with a lack of steering ability being the only reported drawback.2
Although he also drew up designs for armed chariots and a tank-like vehicle da Vinci does not appear to have considered the military possibilities of his parachute. It took a further three centuries for the idea of applying the basic concept to purely military ends to occur, and then using hot air balloons rather than parachutes. On 19 October 1783 three Frenchmen took to the air in Paris to become the first human passengers in a tethered hot air balloon, and a free flight with two passengers was carried out a month later on 21 November. On the latter occasion the balloon was launched from a royal hunting lodge in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris and attained a height of 500 feet, crossing the River Seine before landing safely within the city after covering around five miles. US Ambassador, scientist and Founding Father Benjamin Franklin was among the worthies in attendance and he was so impressed that he wrote a detailed and glowing description of the balloon for the President of the Royal Society in London, urged the inventors to develop a method of steering the craft once aloft, and also hypothesised on the military potential of what he had seen:
Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line…And where is the Prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, as 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?3
Given the novelty of what he has witnessed, Franklin can be forgiven for failing to fully appreciate the practical drawbacks of his hypothesising. Given the total vulnerability of balloons to the vagaries of wind and weather, there was no guarantee that the troop-bearing balloons would arrive safely in the selected prince’s territory. It was also highly likely that any that did so would be widely scattered and thus unlikely to be capable of generating more than negligible amounts of mischief at best. Nonetheless, Franklin was thinking along the right lines and he also inadvertently touched upon another factor, that of cost in both fiscal and manpower terms; writing just over two centuries after Franklin on the British airborne debacle at Arnhem, John Terraine criticised the ‘…sheer wastefulness of the airborne style of war’, the waste of elite troops and drain on other resources.4
Those points are arguable, but while balloons were of limited utility from a military perspective they did provide the means to advance development of the parachute for over a hundred years. Two years after the Bois de Boulogne demonstration witnessed by Benjamin Franklin a French balloonist named Jeanne Pierre Blanchard used a dog to test a small parachute based on da Vinci’s design. The animal landed safely but, apparently unimpressed by the experience, fled the landing site and was not seen again; according to some reports Blanchard went on to make a jump himself in 1793, which resulted in a broken leg after an excessively rapid descent. The first successful human descent appears to have been carried out by another Frenchman, André-Jacques Garnerin, on 22 October 1797. Garnerin attached his silk parachute, of the rigid type which used umbrella-like spokes to support the canopy, to a balloon for the ascent over the Parc Monceau in Paris, and landed safely after jettisoning the balloon at a height of 3,000 feet. He repeated his feat in London in September 1802, using a twenty-three-foot-diameter canopy made of canvas and this time descending from a reported 8,000 feet. The descent took over ten minutes and was marked by oscillations so severe that eyewitnesses claimed the passenger basket swung up level with the canopy on several occasions. Despite a heavy landing behind St. Pancras church, Garnerin was unscathed apart from cuts, bruises and nausea.
A subsequent effort by a British inventor named Robert Cocking was not so fortunate. Cocking was convinced that a canopy with the open side up would cure the oscillation problem and he therefore constructed a convex framework of hoops formed from tin tubing connected with timber stringers to support the canopy; the latter was constructed from panels of Irish linen and the whole apparatus weighed in at just under 400 pounds including the passenger basket and Cocking himself. It took two years to develop a balloon capable of lifting such a payload, and Cocking finally took to the air to demonstrate his invention to a large crowd amid much fanfare over Vauxhall Park in London just before sunset on 24 July 1837. Cocking cast off from the balloon at a height of approximately 4,000 feet and initially the parachute remained stable as advertised, but then a section of the tubular frame buckled, tearing the canopy and precipitating a total collapse that sent the unfortunate Cocking plummeting to his death. His spectacular public demise not only earned Cocking the dubious honour of being the first recorded parachute fatality, but also prompted a typically British knee-jerk reaction from Parliament, which passed legislation banning British subjects from parachuting. Foreigners, however, were still permitted to perform parachute jumps in Britain for entertainment purposes.5 Parachute research and experimentation thus continued on the Continent and the United States where governments were less restrictive, and the latter hosted three successive developments that saw the parachute develop virtually into its current form. The first was the invention of the ‘limp’ parachute canopy that dispensed with the supporting framework used hitherto, by trapeze artist brothers Samuel and Thomas Baldwin. The brother’s aim was to develop a parachute for demonstration and emergency use from balloons, which they realised by using a limp canopy to reduce bulk and save weight; this permitted the parachute to be stowed aboard the balloon in a container until required. After experiments with scale models and a full-size canopy weighted with sandbags over a period of years, Thomas Baldwin successfully tested the concept using an oversized canopy dubbed ‘Eclipse’ on 30 January 1887, jumping from a balloon tethered at 5,000 feet in front of a large crowd in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Such jumps became a popular feature of travelling carnivals thereafter, and there matters essentially remained for a quarter of century, until powered flight overtook balloons as a method of delivery.
The second development came from another carnival parachutist named Leo Stevens, who designed and fabricated a cone-shaped metal container for mounting a parachute on an aircraft for emergency use by the pilot. Stevens’ device was successfully if somewhat precariously tested by Captain Albert Berry on 28 February 1912. Flying as a passenger in a Benoit pusher biplane piloted by Anthony Jannus, Berry had to climb down onto the axle of the machine’s landing gear and unship the parachute container before making his jump from an altitude of 1,000 feet. He
landed safely inside the perimeter of Jefferson Barracks, Missouri but not on the drill field as planned, alighting instead behind the mess hall. He was carried back to the field by a crowd of enthusiastic soldier onlookers, some of whom set off in pursuit of his abandoned parachute, and thus became the first man to carry out a parachute descent from a powered aircraft. The third development came from yet another American carnival parachutist named Charles Broadwick who had turned his hand to designing parachutes and balloons. Also seeking to perfect the parachute as an emergency item for pilots like Stevens, Broadwick turned his attention to securing the parachute to the body. Early pioneers like Garnerin and Cocking had attached their parachute canopies to baskets of the type used by balloonists, Thomas Baldwin had improvised a harness from knotted rope and Berry was apparently not attached to his parachute at all; according to one account he actually descended on a trapeze bar attached to the parachute rigging lines.
Broadwick addressed this with his ‘parachute coat’, which mounted the parachute canopy in a pouch stitched to the back of a sleeveless jerkin. The apex of the canopy was attached to the inside of the pouch flap with a break cord, and a length of rope with a hook was attached to the outside of the flap. The hook was to be attached to a strongpoint on the balloon or aircraft before the jump, and the weight of the parachutist’s body would then pull the flap open and allow the canopy to deploy from the pouch without any input from the jumper. Broadwick had thus not only invented a practical means for the parachute to be worn on the body, but also the static-line method of canopy extraction and opening that remains the standard method for military parachuting to this day. The parachute coat was demonstrated to a delegation from the US Army Signal Corps at the US Army Flying School at San Diego in April 1914. As an additional bit of salesmanship the demonstration was carried out by Broadwick’s twenty-two-year-old daughter Tiny, jumping from a Curtiss biplane piloted by one of the school’s civilian instructors. Ms Broadwick was herself a seasoned carnival parachutist who had been jumping from the age of fifteen, and she made a perfect landing in front of the suitably impressed General Scriven, head of the Signal Corps delegation. Despite Scriven’s presumably positive report the Broadwick parachute was not adopted by the fledgling US Army Air Service.6
Thus by the outbreak of the First World War the parachute was a practical proposition, although it did not fully resemble the modern item with a backpack mounted on a harness of webbing straps until American entrepreneur Leslie Irvin came up with the competition-winning model formally adopted by the US Army following a demonstration at McCook Field near Dayton, Ohio on 19 April 1919. The major omission in 1914 was therefore aircraft, for with the isolated exception of Igor Sikorski’s giant four-engine Ilya Muromets that flew that summer, there were no machines of sufficient size or payload to carry parachutists.7 The more standard service machines were too small and/or underpowered to carry parachutes for the emergency use envisioned by Stevens and Broadwick; some models tested by the British Air Board in January 1917 weighed up to 40 pounds for example.8 As a result the carriage of parachutes did not become a viable option for the pilots of powered aircraft until the latter stage of the conflict when the machines had become more developed, and even then only the Germans appear to have used them operationally; the Luftsreitkräfte issued powered-aircraft crewmen with a static-line parachute designed by Otto Henecke from May 1918.9 Henecke’s parachute pack was stowed as the airman’s seat cushion, with the rigging lines attached to a harness via two D-rings; in an emergency the parachute container was jettisoned prior to baling out and the weight of the airman’s body pulled the canopy free.10 Despite its rather cumbersome-sounding nature, the system appears to have worked well. Fighter ace Ernst Udet used the system twice in the last six months of the conflict, for example, and US fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker recorded witnessing an opponent using a parachute to escape from his burning machine in his memoir.11
Parachutes were more widely employed as an emergency device by the crews of observation balloons which, with the onset of trench warfare, rapidly became a primary means for both sides to monitor enemy activity and provide data for their artillery. The highly flammable hydrogen gas with which they were filled made manning such craft a fairly risky business at best, and the hazard increased significantly when they became priority targets for enemy aircraft, which were frequently equipped with special incendiary ammunition. All sides thus began to issue parachutes to their balloon crewmen in 1915. The British Army adopted inventor and railway engineer Everard Calthrop’s ‘Guardian Angel’ parachute and possibly another model produced by the balloon manufacturer C. G. Spencer & Sons, while their opponents used a model designed and produced by the German female parachute pioneer Käthe Paulus.12 All appear to have been static-line operated and were stowed on the balloon rather than the crewman, who wore a harness that was attached to the parachute rigging lines before the ascent. The major difference appears to have been the location of the parachute pack on the balloon: the British stowed the container on the outside of the passenger basket, while the Germans preferred to locate it out of the way above the basket on the rigging. Like Broadwick’s model, the Guardian Angel and Paulus parachutes had been originally designed for use by powered-aircraft pilots, but were rejected by their respective officialdoms. Parachutes were also employed during the conflict for more offensive tasks. In the man-carrying role they are reported to have been used to insert small sabotage and intelligence carrying parties behind enemy lines,13 although it is unclear what aircraft were employed to carry them. The British used them to deliver individual agents and their equipment including carrier pigeons on the Western and Italian fronts.14 Perhaps more pertinently for future developments, they were also employed by the British for dropping supplies to conventional ground forces.
In May 1915 an Anglo-Indian force built around the Indian Army’s 6th Poona Division commanded by Major-General Charles Townshend began an advance up the River Tigris in Mesopotamia, with the intent of securing Baghdad. The town of Amara was captured on 3 June, followed by Kut-al-Amara and Aziziya on 28 September and 5 October 1915 respectively. Progress was slowed by unexpectedly severe climatic conditions, a concomitant shortage of medical personnel and supplies, and logistic difficulties; large numbers of native rivercraft, nicknamed ‘Townshend’s Regatta’, were pressed into service in an effort to relieve the latter. The advance stalled at Aziziya for over a month due to high-level political wrangling, and was reversed after an inconclusive battle with Turkish forces at Ctesiphon, twenty-five miles short of Baghdad, between 22 and 25 November. Having suffered over 4,000 casualties, Townshend withdrew to Kut-al-Amara where his 8,500-strong force was invested from 7 December 1915. The resulting siege saw the first large-scale attempt to supply a ground force from the air. Beginning in March 1916, parachutes were used to deliver a 70-pound millstone and a host of other items including medical supplies, mail and newspapers, parts for the garrison’s motor launch engine and wireless components. Some items were free-dropped. In mid-April Townshend requested a minimum daily supply of 5,000 pounds, made up of chocolate, flour, salt and ghee cooking oil. A total of 3,350 pounds was delivered on 15 April and over the next fourteen days leading up to Townshend’s surrender to the Turks on 29 April 1916, 140 separate flights had delivered a total of 19,000 pounds of supplies, all but 2,200 pounds of which reached the Kut garrison.15
The effort at Kut might have been abortive but the idea of supply by air caught on in the Middle East; in September 1918 the single Handley Page 0/400 bomber stationed there was pressed into service to deliver a ton of assorted supplies and other items to an isolated RAF detachment. Perhaps more pertinently, the technique was also employed on the Western Front to keep front-line units supplied in the closing stages of the conflict. On 4 July 1918 No.9 Squadron RAF used twelve specially modified RE8 aircraft to deliver over 100,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition to elements of the 4th Australian Division. A signalling system using large cloth letters allowed the ground uni
ts to specify clipped rifle or belted machine-gun ammunition, which was delivered via forty-eight sorties over a six-hour period for the loss of two aircraft. Further drops that included added signal flares and rolls of barbed wire along with ammunition were carried out on 21-22 August and 1-2 October, and food was subsequently added to the list. RAF Nos. 82 and 218 Squadrons dropped a total of thirteen tons of individual rations to isolated Belgian and French units on 2 and 3 October and on 13 October No.35 Squadron flew seventeen sorties to deliver two tons of food to the starving population of Le Cateau.16
The advent of large multi-engine bomber aircraft like the Handley Page 0/400 during the First World War meant that, in conjunction with the pre-war development of the limp backpack parachute, the tools necessary for airborne warfare were in existence by 1918. The conflict also saw at least two examples of theorising on the matter. In October 1917 Winston Churchill published a paper covering a number of air-related matters, positing ‘flying columns’ of air-transported troops for deployment behind enemy lines.17 The second appeared a year later, when Colonel William Mitchell, a staff officer serving with the US 1st Army, came up with a novel concept for capturing the city of Metz. His scheme involved using Handley Page 0/400 bombers belonging to the British Independent Air Force to parachute 12,000 men from the US 1st Infantry Division behind German lines in ten-man increments. Mitchell’s proposal is routinely hailed as a ‘milestone in airborne history’,18 but such plaudits do not really stand up to scrutiny. It is unlikely that 12,000 parachutes were available or indeed even in existence at that time, while providing even basic parachute training for the troops and aircrew involved would have been a formidable and time-consuming task in itself. In addition, it is highly unlikely that the RAF would have been willing to risk its fledgling strategic bomber force in such a fanciful scheme for the British Army, never mind a foreign one. Given all this it would perhaps be more accurate to regard Mitchell’s idea, like Churchill’s, as a piece of pro-airpower hypothetical propaganda than a practical and implementable plan for an airborne operation.
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