The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment. John Parker
Norway in April 1940 marked the end of the phoney war. It was the prelude to spectacular German airborne raids across western Europe. As German warships appeared off the Norwegian coast, the airborne invasion began inland. Within 48 hours the Germans had landed seven divisions and captured all the main ports, while the airborne troops secured their positions at Oslo airport and Norway’s other major airports. In fact, the weather had halted planned parachute drops at Oslo airport and infantry troops were landed in a succession of Junkers 52s to take possession. However, five companies of paratroops did drop at other key airports. The Germans established a firm hold on the southern half of Norway, and their control became complete when, less than a month later, the British and French withdrew their forces from the country in response to surprise attacks by the Nazis across western Europe, again spearheaded by airborne troops.
At dawn on 10 May German troops were carried forward in 42 gliders towed into the air by Ju 52s from Cologne and released into silent flight over Holland and Belgium to seize vital airports and bridges. Meanwhile, along a 150-mile front, 28 German divisions were assembled to move into action. Thus the Blitzkrieg, launched without warning, came to the Low Countries, and the British Expeditionary Force began its desperate retreat to the coast. The British nation went into shock, not least its military analysts when, in the aftermath of the huge operation, they pieced together the elements of the German invasion strategy: the lightning speed of the Panzer divisions which overran Dutch and Belgian defences, backed up by the fearsome accuracy of the airborne artillery provided by the Ju 87 Stukas and the devastating – and totally unexpected – arrival of airborne and parachute troops.
The latter had a particularly unsettling effect on the British public for many months afterwards, when, during the mounting fear of a German invasion of Britain, the nation was gripped by a kind of ‘para fever’. The arrival of troops from the skies or the clandestine landing of fifth columnists, spies and saboteurs (probably dressed as nuns) was expected daily.
Alongside the humiliation and anguish resulting from the vast number of casualties suffered by the British Expeditionary Force, there was a salutary lesson for the British war planners: airborne troops were essential to meet the type of warfare the Germans were planning, although there were quite a few detractors from this view, not least among the upper echelons of the Royal Air Force. A hasty conference was summoned at the Air Ministry, but nothing happened apart from an announcement that ‘it has been decided to establish a parachute training centre’. Major John Rock of the Royal Engineers was placed in charge of the ‘organization of British Airborne Forces’. His instructions were vague and equipment scant and ill-suited to the job. ‘It was impossible,’ Major Rock would say later, ‘to get any information as to policy or task.’ The attitude of the Air Ministry was nothing short of obstructive and it remained so until Winston Churchill, who replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on the day of the German invasion of Belgium and Holland, took a hand.
On 22 June 1940, the day the French formally capitulated and therefore the threat of invasion of Britain heightened, Churchill issued a clear instruction in a note to General Sir Hastings Ismay, head of his Defence Office:
We ought to have a corps of at least 5000 parachute troops including a proportion of Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians together with some trustworthy people from Norway and France… I hear something is being done already to form such a corps but only, I believe, on a very small scale. Advantage must be taken of the summer to train these forces who can nonetheless play their part meanwhile as shock troops in home defences… let me have a note from the War Office on this subject.
The Central Landing School, sited at Ringway Airport on the outskirts of Manchester, which formally if tentatively came into being on 21 June 1940 as part of the Air Ministry’s reaction to the German invasion of western Europe, now became the focus of great activity. John Rock was joined by Wing Commander Louis Strange, Wing Commander Sir Nigel Norman and Squadron Leader Maurice Newnham, and the boost from Churchill provided the necessary support for a strong offensive force at a time when thoughts were generally directed towards the defence of the British Isles. This very fact caused dissent from some, in both RAF and the Army, for their shared priority at that moment was the defence of Britain rather than the creation of a new offensive force. There was already a mad scramble going on for more aircraft and decent equipment to meet existing needs, let alone engage in some new and alien form of warfare in which the British had no previous experience whatsoever.
The first recruits for the first-ever British parachute units were all volunteers from the Commandos and specifically from the newly formed 2 Commando, which was given a new base at Knutsford, in Cheshire, so as to be close to the Ringway parachute school. B and C troop arrived on 9 July and the number of men who had parachute experience could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with some to spare. They faced a rapid programme of training, and were placed in the hands of a joint team of parachute instructors made up of 14 men from the RAF (under Flight Sergeant Bill Brereton) and nine from the Army Physical Training centre under Regimental Sergeant Major Mansie. They faced the mammoth task for which the words ‘silk purse’ and ‘sow’s ear’ rush to mind. It was virgin territory – no equipment, no training modules, no pre-plane jump apparatus of any kind; just a few hundred parachutes and six very old and already obsolete Whitley Mk III bombers.
Enthusiastic staff at Ringway worked around the clock to cobble together some sort of training programme and organize parachute simulation gear to get the project off the ground. They had just six months to achieve what had taken the Germans six years; an impossible task. Nor were the top brass and their underlings at the Air Ministry falling over themselves to help – despite Churchill’s personal intervention.
Those entrusted with the nation’s defence also went through much the same deliberations as the Germans as to who was in charge – the RAF or the Army – given that the paratroops were strictly a fighting unit while the aircraft and school itself were operated by the RAF. It took several months to work out the lines of demarcation, the duties of the training personnel and which of the two services was responsible for what. A compromise was reached, with the RAF taking charge of parachute training and all matters concerned with the aircraft, while the Army kept a secure hold on the training for and planning of airborne warfare.
The lines of responsibility were only part of the problem in this race to equip and train an effective force of fighting men whose method of deployment was totally unlike anything previously undertaken in the British armed forces. The fledgling group had neither aircraft nor supplies of good, reliable parachutes, and because of the newness of it all, they were totally lacking in real-time experience. Even the instructors were deficient in that area, their knowledge having been gleaned from post-war training in the use of parachutes for survival when bailing out of a crippled aircraft.
Few instructors had trained for – or even witnessed – the procedures for depositing a heavily armed, battle-ready military unit on the ground. Whereas the Germans had been close at hand for the Soviet parachute trials in the early 1930s, every department of the British unit had to be constructed from the ground up. The order of the day was the wartime philosophy of make do and mend that dogged so many areas of Britain’s military capability. Bits of old aircraft were propped up in hangars for practising aircraft drills. A DIY parachute tower was built and sandbags were used as a counterweight to simulate speed of descent, but it was a slow process because each man had to be weighed separately.
The old Whitley bombers, boneshakers of the first order, were barely suitable for the task, and the basic requirement of finding the best way to drop parachute soldiers from them took many hours of trial and error, and not a few injuries. At first the rear gun turrets were removed to provide a jumping platform. Recruits stood on this and one of the instructors pulled the ripcord and the slipstream took hold and opened the chute. It was a very unsatisfactory and unsafe method, because the men tumbled wildly in descent. Then the instructors tried cutting a hole in the floor of the aircraft, but this was not much of an improvement because unless the recruits made an impeccable exit, they were likely to bash their head and face against the rear edge of the hole. Later a third method of exiting, through a door cut in the fuselage, was tried.
The hastily prepared training programme, geared to producing a skilled unit of men brought to the peak of physical fitness in the shortest