The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment. John Parker
most of whom had never even been up in an aircraft, let alone jumped out of one. Experienced soldiers they may have been, but everything they encountered from now on was new. Their first experience of flying was in clapped-out old bombers that rattled and banged as they trundled down the runway, which did not fill them with confidence. Only four days after their arrival at Ringway, the trainees were given a live demonstration of parachuting by the parachute jump instructors, or PJIs as they were later known. By August 1940, 290 trainees had progressed to regular training jumps from aircraft and, in little more than a month, completed almost 1000 jumps between them. Given the shortage of reliable equipment and aircraft, the speed of training and the number of jumps undertaken, the failure rate was low: 30 refusals, 13 injured, two deaths when parachutes failed to open properly and 13 trainees deemed unsuitable for the course and given an RTU (an order to ‘return to unit’).
One of the initial problems the trainees confronted was the bulkiness of their padded clothing and so, after early experiments, they began using normal fighting uniform together with the parachutist’s smock. Another development was the ditching of standard parachutes, used for bail-outs, and the subsequent use of the X-Type ‘statichute’, which opened automatically and provided a limited degree of control in descent. There were also extensive trials on the amount of equipment that a parachutist could carry – problems long ago resolved by the Germans, who indeed were already moving on to advanced training for massive and spectacular parachute operations that would shock the world. The small-time bunch who were intended to match the German paratroops were now being put through their paces on a wing and a prayer at an airfield in the north of England.
At the end of the first six months 488 men had completed parachute training at Ringway and the unit was renamed 11th Special Air Service Battalion and divided into a parachute wing and a glider wing, both managed by Headquarters Company. Even so, Winston Churchill was not happy: only 500 – must do better, was his reaction. There was also some discontent among the trainees. It had been an adrenalin-pumping few months, and by the turn of the year they were so primed for action that the lack of it – given their awareness of the war raging across Europe and in North Africa and the increasing intensity of the Germans’ bombing blitz on London and, now, provincial cities – caused many of them to become impatient with incessant training for raids that never seemed to come off. Desperate to make a contribution to the effort, they began applying to return to their original regiments. Their fears were, to some extent, allayed around the beginning of the new year by rumours that plans were being laid to drop the first-ever British troops into action by parachute; it appeared that a task had been found for them to satisfy the increasing impatience of the Prime Minister.
Applications for RTUs declined and when, in January 1941, volunteers were called for as planning was being finalized for the first paratroop operation, every officer and man of the 500 in the battalion stepped forward. In fact, only seven officers and 31 other ranks were required for this trial operation, a sabotage project in southern Italy for which the group would be codenamed X-Troop. It was hardly a full-blown para attack, but more like the burgeoning special operations conducted by various groups to insert raiders into enemy territory by air or sea to disrupt Italian and German land forces and blow up vital installations, bridges and railway lines. Such missions were to come thick and fast in the wake of Winston Churchill’s call to ‘set Europe ablaze’ following the formation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in July 1940 after Italy came into the war. SOE’s establishment was followed by the rapid growth of the empire known as Combined Operations, which eventually burgeoned even further under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten (following his appointment in 1941) into a vast, if controversial, panoply of small, medium and substantial inter-service raiding operations, some of which were spectacular failures and led to heavy losses. As airborne tactics blossomed, parachute and glider-borne units would play an increasing and costly role.
In this period many of the now famous raiding groups and virtual private armies emerged, each with the same objective but with a very different modus operandi. The first, and certainly the most successful in those early days, was the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), founded in the summer of 1940 by Major (later Colonel) R. A. Bagnold at the behest of General Sir Archibald Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces in North Africa. This would be manned initially by New Zealanders. Over the next five years the LRDG conducted more than 200 operations behind enemy lines – more than any other Special Forces group. Then there was Lieutenant Colonel Bob Laycock’s commando group known as Layforce, Major Roger Courtney’s Special Boat Service, Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling’s 1st Special Air Service and Major H. G. ‘Blondie’ Hasler’s Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment, which spawned the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ – to name but a few such groups. All shared one aim: to hit the Axis troops behind their lines, which called for the insertion of daring young men deep into enemy territory to cause as much mayhem as possible.
Many of the early operations of these special forces groups were swashbuckling in style and met with varying degrees of success – or failure, sometimes to the point of fiasco. Months of trial and error and not a few casualties forced war managers to press for more subtle ways to carry out clandestine work against the enemy. There were many who thought special forces and their fanciful operations were a waste of time and manpower. Sending out small groups of men to blow up railway lines or pillboxes, killing a few enemy soldiers and as often as not losing half, sometimes all, of their own team in the process – for what? Enemy morale was barely touched and damage to installations quickly repaired. There were much more cost-effective ways, it was argued, to use ships and aircraft and highly trained men. Even so, there were many good results and quite a few heroes.
The risks involved in special operations were invariably heavy and extremely evident. The fact that a good proportion of the men might not return was generally not mentioned, although there was always that plaintiff cry at the end of the briefings on all of these operations: ‘How do we get home?’ The escape route back to base was usually meticulously worked out, but in effect rarely ran to plan, and as the war progressed, hundreds of men sent covertly behind the lines were captured, shot up in firefights or executed.
In those early months after Churchill’s call for special operations – when few of the above-named groups were fully operational – the eyes of the top brass fell upon the new parachute formation, although its original remit was certainly not as a supplier of small-party raiders. Churchill wanted the parachute troops to serve as a major airborne invasion group. But the slowness of the build-up in strength and the dire lack of equipment had meant that the formation of an effective parachute force had in fact been disappointingly inept – a point already made by the troops themselves.
At last, however, there was to be some action – even it was for only a few of the men – and in January 1941 those selected began intensive training for their first live drop. The timing was vital. They were to contribute to a wider plan to attempt, by whatever means possible, to disrupt the flow of supplies and reinforcements to Mussolini’s vast armies amassed against the Allies in North Africa. The Long Range Desert Group was already doing its bit in the great Libyan Desert. Two-man teams of the Special Boat Service, launched in canoes from submarines, were to operate around the coasts. And a select group of the Special Air Service Battalion was to strike on the Italian mainland. It was very much a journey into the unknown, experimental in every respect.
The objective of the airborne unit in what was to be known as Operation Colossus was a major aqueduct in southern Italy. As part of a pipeline, this carried fresh-water supplies all the way down to the towns of Bari and Brindisi on the Adriatic coast at the very heel of the Italian boot and to Taranto on the sheltered Gulf of Taranto. These ports were the main embarkation and supply centres for the Italian campaigns in North Africa and Albania and they relied for their water on the pipeline running through the Apennines. The target aqueduct lay around 50 miles inland, at Tragino near Monte Vulture, and an airborne raid was the only option for the attack. The mission had the makings of a severe test not only of the men selected but also of the RAF’s ability to put them down in a specified position in hostile surroundings, at night over countryside that had few landmarks to guide the pilots. It would be judged a success if the aqueduct was blown up; the secondary elements, such as the men achieving their goal with a minimum of casualties and going on to a successful RV (rendezvous) with the recovery craft, would provide