Be that as it may, Churchill and Mitchell’s theorising did accurately predict the pattern of future airborne development, for although aircraft with sufficient payload were available by 1918 and the backpack parachute was refined into a reliable, mass-produced item by American entrepreneur Leslie Irvin the following year, the two pieces of technology were not immediately linked. In fact, airborne development followed two parallel tracks through the interwar period and beyond: the delivery of troops from the air and transporting troops by air, with the latter coming first. During the 2nd Nicaraguan War of 1925-29 for example, the United States Marine Corp moved a total of 21,148 men in and out of isolated outposts by air, and routinely used aircraft for supply and casualty evacuation. This lead was followed by the US Army, which moved field artillery units across the Panama Canal Zone by air in the early 1930s, and air-landed a small infantry force during manoeuvres in Delaware in 1932.19 The Soviets were carrying out similar experiments at the same time, beginning with a reinforced-company size exercise in 1929. A similar-sized ‘motorised landing detachment’ formed in the Leningrad Military District in March 1931 was expanded to brigade size in December 1932, and additional units of varying size were established in other Military Districts from March 1933.20 The Germans also got in on the act; between July and September 1936 the Luftwaffe airlifted 9,000 Nationalist troops from Morocco to the Spanish mainland with all their equipment, heavy weapons, ammunition and other supplies.21
The pioneers in this area were the British, however, who rapidly adopted the technique during operations in the Empire. On 21 September 1920 two Handley Page 0/400s lifted a dismantled mountain gun, its crew and ammunition from Heliopolis to Almaza in Egypt and the crew brought the gun into action within seven minutes of the aircraft touching down. The entry of the specially designed Vickers Vernon into service at the end of the following year permitted complete units to be moved in a single lift. Two companies of Sikh troops were carried from Kingerban to Kirkuk in Iraq to quell civil disorder in February 1923, followed by a company from the Inniskilling Fusiliers in response to a renewed outbreak in May 1924. Such lifts became a regular feature of British imperial policing thereafter for emergency and more routine deployments, and not just in Iraq. In India, the idea of using aircraft to carry out the Chitral Relief, a six-monthly exchange of garrisons on the North-West Frontier that usually involved over a month of marching for the units involved, was first raised in 1927; by 1938 the shuttling of complete infantry companies was commonplace and the 1940 Relief was carried out entirely by air. In the Middle East a detachment from the South Wales Borderers was lifted from Egypt to Jerusalem in August 1929, and a company from the King’s Regiment became the first troops to be airlifted across the open sea after being despatched to Cyprus from Palestine, again in response to an outbreak of civil disorder. The largest single British airlift of the interwar period commenced in 1932 when twenty-five Vickers Victorias carried the 526-strong 1st Battalion Northamptonshire Regiment over 800 miles from Egypt to Iraq. The lift took thirty-six separate sorties spaced over the six-day period between 22 and 27 June, and was repeated more leisurely in reverse between 18 July and 12 August. By the end of the 1930s large-scale operations were being orchestrated and supplied by air as a matter of routine. During the Waziristan Campaign, for example, a total of 5,700 troops and 400 tons of supplies were moved by air in the seven-month period between November 1936 and May 1938.22
The British also made extensive use of aircraft for tasks other than troop movement in the Empire. Parachutes were routinely employed for supply drops from at least as early as 1923, when items including 1,000 pairs of boots and 3,000 pairs of socks were dropped to troops operating in Kurdistan.23 However, while it was undeniably useful, the process could also be both wasteful and hazardous for the recipients. An eyewitness to one drop reported that items were scattered haphazardly across the area, with an unfortunate mule being felled and a tent demolished by a sack of horseshoes; the drop was cancelled when a group of officers narrowly missed being flattened like the mule.24 Despite such hiccups the technique became increasingly common. The 1930 Chitral Relief was supplied solely by air for two days, with rations and forage for 1,400 men and their animals totalling six tons being dropped at pre-arranged points, and troops operating in the Khaisora Valley in Waziristan were supplied exclusively by air between October 1936 and January 1937 after heavy rains made road transport impossible.25
Aircraft were also used to evacuate battle casualties and victims of accidents and disease. The RAF contribution to the Somaliland campaign in January 1920 included a DH9 light bomber modified as an air ambulance and somewhat worryingly nicknamed ‘The Hearse’ due to the shape of its modified fuselage. In the early 1920s the Air Ministry procured three Vickers Vimy Commercial transports specially modified with loading doors in the nose and stretcher rails; the first example, which was written off in an accident before becoming operational, was also equipped with a toilet, oxygen equipment, cooling fans and even an electric kettle.26 These appear to have been employed alongside standard Vickers Vernon transports to lift 255 casualties over 200 miles from Girde Telleh in Kurdistan to Baghdad via Kirkuk in May 1923 following an outbreak of dysentery, saving the sick a six-day journey by mule.27 In April 1929 a regular medical air shuttle to Port Said was set up for serious cases requiring sea evacuation to Britain, a service later extended to include the port of Jaffa. Across the Middle East an average of 120 casualties a year were airlifted to hospitals in Egypt, Iraq and Palestine in the decade after 1925. The service was extended to India in May 1935 in the wake of the Quetta earthquake. RAF aircraft evacuated 136 casualties to Karachi, Lahore and Risalpur for treatment, and delivered an Army medical unit, 12,750 pounds of medical supplies and food and 4,300 pounds of clothing into the earthquake zone over a twenty-one-day period. By the end of the 1930s India had overtaken the Middle East in the medical evacuation stakes and 2,600 patients had been carried a total of 320,000 miles. In an allied task, aircraft were also involved in the evacuation of government officials and civilians from threatened areas. Sixty-seven evacuees were lifted from Sulaimaniya in Iraq in September 1922, and an uprising in the Afghan capital Kabul in November 1928 prompted the evacuation of the British and other legations; 586 civilians and 24,000 pounds of luggage were flown to safety in India over an eight-week period leading up to February 1929 in the face of severe winter conditions.28
The use of aircraft in a variety of transport roles was thus a regular and routine feature of British imperial policing up to the late 1930s and beyond. Despite this, the British did not take what appears to be the next logical step and create a parachute-deployable force, and there were a number of perfectly valid reasons for the omission. Not least of these was that funding was barely sufficient to maintain existing commitments for much of the interwar period as the government sought to limit military expenditure to the bare minimum necessary for national safety from before the end of hostilities in 1918; the Army, for example, had its budget cut every year between 1919 and 1932.29 Inter-service rivalry was inevitably sharpened by the resultant struggle for resources, and this in turn militated against the co-operation between the Air Ministry and War Office necessary to set up a parachute force. Neither organisation was willing to cede control over any contribution to such a project, not least because it risked provoking additional funding cuts on the grounds of supposed duplication, and the effects of this were exacerbated by the Air Ministry’s desire to safeguard its newly won independent status. The RAF had only become an independent service in April 1918 via the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and Royal Naval Air Service, and tended to regard both the War Office and Admiralty as ‘wicked uncles’ just waiting for an opportunity to reclaim their lost assets.30 Over and above all this however, there was a more straightforward explanation, which was that there was no place for parachute delivery of troops within the framework of British imperial policing as practised in the interwar period. Insertion by parachute would have b
een an inappropriate method for urban insurrection, and the relatively low numbers of troops and aircraft available made the technique of limited utility in the wider Empire. In short, the British did not establish a parachute force before 1940 because there was no perceived need and the technique offered no real advantage over conventional airlift.
Be that as it may, the necessary equipment was available had the British decided to form such a force. Even biplane transport aircraft like the Vickers Victoria, Vernon and Valentia were perfectly capable of dropping parachute troops, and later models such as the Bristol Bombay and Handley Page Harrow compared favourably with the machines employed for the task by other nations in the 1940s. Indeed, they were far better suited than the obsolete Armstrong Whitworth Whitley and Albemarle that the Air Ministry succeeded in saddling British Airborne Forces with after 1940.31 Suitable parachutes were also available, albeit off the shelf from a foreign supplier. In April 1919 Major E. L. Hoffman of the US Air Service invited parachute designers and manufacturers to demonstrate their wares at McCook Field in Ohio, with the aim of selecting a standard model for use by the US military aviators. Among the attendees was a former film stuntman and parachute manufacturer from Buffalo, New York named Leslie ‘Sky High’ Irvin; the nickname referred to his experience as a parachutist, which went back to his early teenage years before the First World War. Irvin had developed Charles Broadwick’s idea by attaching the parachute pack to the back of a webbing harness rather than a jacket. He had also modified the opening mechanism by adding a small, spring-activated pilot parachute to the main canopy, and had discarded the static line in favour of a chest-mounted ripcord to initiate the opening sequence; this allowed the parachutist to choose when to open the canopy. The demonstration jump Irvin made at McCook Field on 28 April 1919 was thus the first free-fall parachute descent in history, and he made the most of the occasion by not deploying his canopy until the last moment. Major Hoffman and the assembled military board members were suitably impressed. Irvin left Ohio a few days later bearing a US Government contract for 300,000 parachutes, and the parachute as it is generally known today had arrived.32
The first to exploit this new technology for deploying troops were the Italians, presumably as part of the Fascist preoccupation with modernity and harnessing cutting-edge technology. In 1927 they set up the world’s first formal military parachute training course at Cinisello airfield near Milan, catering for 250 students, and on 6 November that year nine course graduates carried out the world’s first collective military parachute drop, complete with weapons and equipment. Matters slowed somewhat thereafter, possibly due to death of the commander of the new force, a Generale Guidoni, in a parachuting accident the following year, although the Italians did form a number of parachute units by the end of the 1930s, some of which were deployed to the Italian colonies in North Africa.33 However, the real parachute pioneers in the interwar period were the Soviets. Like the British, the latter also employed aircraft in the imperial policing role, primarily against Moslem Basmachi tribesmen in the remote reaches of their Central Asian territories.34 The Soviets went further by adding a tactical combat role to their activities, which required the aircrew to land and engage the enemy, using automatic weapons to offset their lack of numbers. This practice went back to at least May 1928, when the 8th Independent Reconnaissance Aviation Detachment conducted an ‘air-landing assault’ in the Turkestan Military District, one of three such operations carried out that year.35 A similar operation was credited with breaking a Basmachi siege on the town of Garm in Tadzhikistan in 1929.36
The Soviets were quick to appreciate the advantages that the parachute might offer for such operations. Tests were carried out in 1930, with experimental drops to identify ways of minimising dispersal and speeding up post-jump re-organisation at Voronezh in August, followed by a successful raid on a divisional headquarters by a small parachute detachment during exercises in September. This success led to further experiments in the Leningrad Military District in 1931, and the creation of a forty-six-strong ‘parachute echelon’ to spearhead the ‘motorised landing detachment’ stationed near Leningrad from March 1931. The parachute echelon was expanded to battalion size when the landing detachment was enlarged to a brigade in December 1932 and within two years or so had attained brigade if not divisional status in its own right. Practical developments were paralleled by theoretical work on the employment of the new force, starting with a paper on the initial development in the Leningrad Military District in the late 1920s collated by future Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had overseen the tests and may have been inspired by the operations against the Basmachi.
Tukhachevsky’s lead was taken up by the Chief of Staff of the Red Army’s aviation wing, General A. N. Lapchinsky, and Chief of Airborne Service of the Red Army Air Force staff, I. E. Tatarchenko. By 1932 a properly formulated set of guidelines for the employment of parachute- and air-landed troops had been drawn up, entitled ‘Technical, Organisational, and Operational Questions of Air Assault Forces’. This recommended employing airborne units to threaten enemy flanks, disrupt their communications and seize key terrain features in support of conventional ground forces. Multiple and widely spaced landings, possibly using darkness and/or poor weather to enhance surprise, were recommended, spearheaded by small parties of parachutists tasked to locate suitable landing sites. These pathfinders would then call in larger parachute units to secure the landing sites and protect them from enemy interference while the main body was air-landed with its vehicles and heavy weapons. Once everything was on the ground the whole force would then co-ordinate its activities with friendly mechanised forces. These guidelines were incorporated into the Soviet’s new doctrine of Deep Battle, as laid out in the Red Army’s 1936 Field Service Regulations; Article 7 of the latter defined parachute troops as an ‘effective means [of] disorganizing the command and rear services of the enemy. In coordination with forces attacking along the front, parachute landing units can go a long way toward producing a complete rout of the enemy on a given axis’.37
The influence of this doctrine was clear in the large-scale manoeuvres held by the Soviets in front of assorted foreign observers in the mid-1930s. The 1935 manoeuvres in the Kiev Military District featured a mechanised corps attack spearheaded by a simultaneous drop by 1,188 paratroops to secure crossing over the River Dnieper and landing areas beyond the river. A further 1,765 troops were then flown in, along with artillery and armoured vehicles including light tanks, followed by a further 2,500 men within a forty-minute period. The manoeuvres held in the Moscow Military District in September the following year had an even larger airborne component. 2,200 paratroops were dropped to secure river crossings and disrupt the ‘enemy’ rear areas. An hour later a further 3,000 parachute troops seized an airfield twenty-five miles away, which was then used to ferry in an entire infantry division.38 Thereafter, the technique was employed operationally. The Soviet force deployed to repel the Imperial Japanese Army from Mongolian territory along the Khalkin Gol in the summer of 1939 included the 212th Airborne Brigade and all the requisite ancillary units and equipment, although the speed of the Japanese collapse rendered airborne operations superfluous and the Brigade fought in the ground role instead. In June the following year the 201st, 204th and 214th Airborne Brigades spearheaded the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia, carrying out a number of jumps including two full brigade drops and securing the cities of Bolgrad, Izmael and Kagul in advance of ground forces.39
Although there were shortages of equipment and aircraft, by June 1941 the Red Army’s Airborne Force had been expanded to five complete corps, an independent brigade and a host of smaller units, whose role was laid out in Article 28 of the 1941 Field Service Regulations. Basic parachute training was not a problem, owing to State-sponsored civilian sport parachuting under the auspices of the Komsomol and Osoaviakhim,40 which provided training towers and other facilities in every major town in the Soviet Union.41 The scale and success of this initiative
was considerable; according to one contemporary source 2,000,000 individuals had undergone parachute training of some kind by 1939.42 In the event, many parachute units were thrown into the fight against the German invasion in the ground role, although a number of small-scale diversionary parachute operations were carried out, beginning with a company-size attack on German motor transport near Gorki on 14 July 1941. Several parachute brigades were involved in drops to screen Moscow in the period December 1941-January 1942, and large-scale operations in support of ground offensives were carried out in the regions of Viaz’ma in January and February 1942, near Demiansk between February and April in 1942, and in the crossing of the Dnieper in September 1943. Although little known in the West, these were comparable in size and scope with Western airborne operations.
The Soviets made no secret of their airborne activities during the 1930s, quite the contrary. They invited numerous foreign military observers to attend their exercises, and a film of the 1935 manoeuvres in the Kiev Military District was screened at the Soviet Embassy in London before a specially invited audience at the beginning of 1936; similar footage was subsequently included in newsreels shown in cinemas worldwide.43 This may have prompted the French to form two parachute companies and a squadron of troop-carrying aircraft in 1936, which carried out experimental work before being disbanded in 1939.44 More directly, the Soviets set up and staffed a parachute training school at La Rosas for use by Spanish Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War. Personnel trained at the school planned an attack on the German Condor Legion base at Barbastro in April 1938, but a shortage of suitable aircraft led to the scheme being abandoned.45
Arnhem Page 3