LITMIR.BIZ

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parachute and airborne companies, many of which were used on specialist operations in the Far East and Burma. One group of 750 volunteer officers and men was selected from infantry regiments in India in 1941 to form what was then called the 151st Parachute Battalion. They trained in extraordinarily primitive conditions, using cotton parachutes and, equipped with a handful of antiquated aircraft, they took quite a few casualties in training. Although temporarily trapped by the war in India, they moved with the Indian Army contingents to the Middle East in 1941, picked up additional recruits and became the 156th Parachute Battalion. This was eventually incorporated into the 1st Airborne Division as part of the 4th Parachute Brigade, commanded by Brigadier (later General Sir) John Hackett. It was a battalion largely composed of tough regular soldiers who had not seen England for years, veterans of Indian Army campaigns on the North-West Frontier and desert campaigns in the early part of the present war. Many were on the point of returning to England at the time war was declared, having been abroad for seven or eight years, and so never got home. One company commander, through a succession of circumstances, was away for 13 years before he returned to see his family.

      Even the Gurkhas, who were never the best of fliers, took up parachuting. There is a famous story which alleges that when a Gurkha battalion was first asked to provide volunteers for an airborne unit, the Gurkha officer, having listened quietly to his British counterpart giving a short talk on the need for their assistance, went into a huddle with his riflemen and came back to ask apologetically: ‘Would it be possible to drop the men from a lower height so as to reduce the risk of injury?’ He had missed a vital part of the talk, and it was then hastily explained that each one of the men would be equipped with a parachute and taught how to use it. They all breathed a sigh of relief. The story may have been true, sometime, somewhere in the jungles of Burma, but one similar incident actually happened, at Imphal in May 1942. The Gurkhas, who had already suffered heavy losses during the Allied retreat from Burma in the face of a massive invasion by the Japanese, were asked to volunteer for parachute duty for raids in preparation for a new offensive. Shown a short silent film, the Gurkhas were fascinated, until a caption in Gurkhali came on the screen that sparked loud murmurs and worried looks. If they did their job well, this informed them, 95 per cent of them would be dead before they hit the ground. The captions had been wrongly placed: this one should have appeared with the film that demonstrated how to repel a Japanese parachute attack. When the mistake was explained, they roared with laughter. To a man, they volunteered for parachute duty and went on to make some courageous airborne attacks as part of the 14th Army’s return to Burma, as well as in Malaya and Borneo after the war. There was, however, another side to this story, as many would later discover: Japanese and German infantrymen were no doubt being shown similar movies about how to kill parachute troops as they floated down to earth and no one, whatever side he was on, could think too deeply about it or he would never have set foot outside the aircraft that was carrying him and his fellow soldiers to the DZ.

      Humorous stories abounded among the Paras, leading a regimental chaplain to suggest that the laughter was, if studied closely, of the nervous variety and simply a cover by tough guys to mask the reality of a deadly serious business. It was frequently argued by the Paras that, compared with infantrymen, their chances of being hit by enemy fire were several times greater because:

      (a) the aircraft carrying you into battle may be shot down or the powerless glider may hit an unforeseen landscape (as often happened) before it got there;

      (b) even if you make it through the ack-ack fire, the parachute might not open properly and you will crash to earth and never get up again;

      (c) even if the parachute functions properly, you might break your neck, or a least a leg, landing on rough terrain, be speared through the heart by a broken tree branch or electrocuted by uncharted high-power cables (not uncommon);

      (d) you might be shot coming down or possibly eaten by wild animals on landing if the pilot has dropped you in the wrong place.

      All of which might occur even before the Paras went into battle. But, with a couple of daring, spectacular and costly operations behind them, British airborne forces still being put through their paces over the English countryside were finally called upon to take part in a major campaign in the autumn of 1942. They were judged to be ready and able for what was to become the classic role of the Paras, jumping into the battle zones ahead of the herd, capturing key positions and ‘unlocking the door’ as the ground forces moved forward. The Parachute Regiment, working in conjunction with the other airborne elements, now had a clearly defined operational objective. What was more, the big new transport gliders were coming on stream.

      In two years the regiment had grown from nothing to a well-trained, well-briefed force whose first major test had yet to come. In the autumn of 1942, this lay dead ahead. There were still problems: a lack of recruits of the right calibre and a serious shortage of transport. Powered aircraft assigned to airborne troops still tended to be of the wing-and-a-prayer variety. The RAF, heavily committed in all the war theatres, struggled to provide even those needed for the airborne operations pencilled in for the coming months.

      The situation was eased somewhat by the arrival of the USAAF’s No. 60 Group, who brought with them the newer American Dakotas. Though these were not perfect for British Paras’ needs, they were welcomed – initially at least – because paratroops could make their exit through a door instead of through a hole in the floor of their own converted bombers. Nevertheless, this very facility caused problems and deaths in early jumps. British Paras, who used different parachutes from those of the Americans, were forced to retrain to use the Dakotas after a tragedy during the first trial drop of 250 men on 9 October 1942. Four men were strangled when their canopies snagged the aircraft’s tail wheel. The static line on the British X-Type parachute was too short for use on the Dakota, and after some trial-and-error tactics, pilots found that raising the tail of the aircraft made the soldiers’ exits less prone to accident.

      Most of these problems were overcome by the end of October, as indeed they had to be. The rush was on and the 1st Parachute Brigade was already on standby for ‘the big one’ – immediate mobilization – ready to move out at any moment for operations for which they had had no real time to prepare. In addition they had to borrow men and equipment from the 2nd Parachute Brigade and other units of the 1st Airborne Division to get them up to strength and in good order. Many had guessed that they were on their way to the North African coast as 1000 guns of General Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army thundered into action against the Germans’ Afrika Korps at El Alamein on 30 October. One week later the second phase in the Allies’ reclamation of the region, Operation Torch, would be ready to start. For the invasion of North Africa, the largest-ever number of Allied ships and aircraft had been assembled. The Paras had been invited to the party, although they were few in number compared with the overall strength of the landings, which consisted of some 65,000 men in 670 ships, 1000 landing craft and a planned build-up to around 1700 aircraft to attack a 900-mile front. The command team included men soon to become famous, among them America’s Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Major General George Patton and, on the British side, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, hero of Matapan and many a Malta convoy, and Vice-Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who had masterminded the miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk.

      The Operation Torch battle plan called for the landing around Casablanca, in Morocco, of 25,000 US troops who, with 250 tanks, had sailed directly from their home ports in America. Another 18,500 men with 180 tanks sailed from Britain via Gibraltar to land around Oran, in Algeria, and it was intended that these two forces would combine to form the 5th Army. A joint US force of 20,000 men would simultaneously secure the Algerian capital, Algiers, and, as the 1st Army, this would move swiftly to capture four key ports of Bône and Philippeville in Algeria and Bizerta and Tunis in Tunisia.

      On an operation of that scale there were bound to be problems, and the Paras seemed to encounter quite a few of them. First, there were not enough aircraft to convey them, alongside their partners the 503rd US Parachute Infantry, to their eventual destination on the North African coast and to inland DZs. The payload of the Dakotas had to be reduced to accommodate extra fuel tanks. Two battalions, the 1st and 2nd, along with the 3rd Battalion’s Headquarters Company, two companies and the mortar platoon, were rushed to Greenock on 29 October to join a convoy of ships en route

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