A Photographic History of Airborne Warfare, 1939–1945

A Photographic History of

AIRBORNE WARFARE

1939–1945

Men of the 509th PIR conduct final checks before a training jump.

A Photographic History of

AIRBORNE WARFARE

1939–1945

SIMON & JONATHAN FORTY

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by

P

EN

& S

WORD

M

ILITARY

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Copyright © Pen & Sword 2021

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ISBN 978-1-39901-114-3

eISBN 978-1-39901-115-0

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Acknowledgements

A big thank you to Richard Charlton Taylor, who provided material for the appendices, significant numbers of illustrations and a lot of information. The text includes a number of directly quoted or edited excerpts from a number of works which are identified in the text and covered in the Bibliography. Many of these came via the excellent online resources of the Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library (CARL) Digital Library. Please note that some of these excerpts are contemporary and produced based on intelligence available at the time: there will be some, understandable, inaccuracies.

There are a number of websites that proved invaluable for help with captions and information. In particular we’d like to reference the US Center of Military History for high quality histories and access to technical manuals.

Finally, thanks to Rupert Harding of Pen & Sword for being such an understanding editor and for pointing out a number of inaccuracies.

Jeep and Polsten 20mm AA gun off-loading from a Horsa glider.

Contents

Introduction

Chapter One Conception

Chapter Two Blitzkrieg

Chapter Three Crete: The Turning Point

Chapter Four The Allies

Chapter Five German Operations after Crete

Chapter Six Airborne Operations in the CBI and Pacific Theatres

Chapter Seven Russian Airborne Operations

Chapter Eight Paratroopers as Elite Ground Forces

Chapter Nine Cancelled Operations

Appendices

1. Parachutes

2. Aircraft

3. Gliders

4. Training

5. Personal Equipment

6. Containers

7. Communications

8. Mobility

9. Medical

10. Organisation

Abbreviations

Photo Credits

Bibliography

Heavily laden US paratroops board the aircraft that will take them behind enemy lines. Bulky parachutes mean that they can carry little equipment, most of which – including the unit’s heavy weapons – will have to be retrieved from containers dropped at the same time, a difficult proposition in the dark particularly in the bocage or when the Germans have flooded the area.

Introduction

Air warfare dominated World War 2. At sea the aircraft carrier became the indispensable capital ship and long-range aircraft helped destroy the U-boat menace. Over land, strategic bombing devastated industries and cities. Tactically, ground-attack aircraft spearheaded Blitzkrieg. Later, in the North African desert and after the invasion of France, Allied air supremacy ensured that every German troop movement was fraught with danger; every counter-attack a target for medium and fighter-bombers.

There was a cost: huge numbers of Allied airmen died during the strategic bombing campaign. The proliferation of Flak emplacements, development of the proximity fuse and improvements to radar and other technologies meant that air forces paid a high price, and nowhere was that more true than with airborne forces.

Before parachutes were commonplace their military use had been theorised. In the 1920s and 1930s those theories became fact, as first the Russians and then the Germans developed the airborne concept. In 1940 it was put into practice with devastating results: at Eben Emael in Belgium, a seemingly impregnable fortress fell to a small glider-borne force; important bridges were taken and held for the Panzer spearheads; in Denmark and Norway Fallschirmjäger (German paratroops) played a significant role in the surprise attacks; at the Corinth Canal in Greece another coup de main operation proved successful.

The problems came when commanders extrapolated the successes of small, highly trained teams into larger operations. Crete was the first of these. The Germans’ success in taking the island could not hide the appalling casualties suffered by the attacking airborne troops. Hitler was unnerved by this and never allowed his airborne commander, General Student, to revisit such an attack. The Fallschirmjäger would henceforth acquit themselves brilliantly as infantry but their attacks from the air would be limited to very minor operations.

The Allies, however, took another view: that Crete showed the potential for the vertical envelopment of a target. Quickly, they developed the equipment and trained the men and, from late 1942 onwards, used them in increasing numbers: North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, northwest Europe – huge aerial fleets were involved and an Allied Airborne Army was developed and played an important role in the final stages of the war.

Was it worth it? Did these airborne forces contribute significantly to Allied victory?

The answers to those questions depends, of course, on careful assessment, the balancing of the shock value of the arrival of troops behind enemy lines with the undoubted costs to men and materiel involved in getting them there and supporting them. In Sicily and Normandy, for example, large numbers of the airborne troops were dropped in the wrong place – in Sicily that often meant into the sea and almost certain death. Had the amphibious landings at Utah Beach been better opposed and less successful, the small bands of 82nd and 101st Division troops would have had an even more difficult job. The brilliant success of the British at Pegasus Bridge hides the fact that the British 6th Airborne Division achieved only limited objectives. Operation Market Garden was a bold concept that made big use of airborne troops. Delivery was excellent, but the operation failed, and many died or were made captive. The resupply operations at Arnhem led to heavy aircraft casualties. The final major set-piece operation of the war, Varsity, saw a successful outcome to which airborne troops contributed – but the delivery of British airlanding troops by glider was inconvenienced by smoke and AA fire.

In the end, the most effective use of the airborne forces was probably as elite infantry: Van der Heydte’s Fallschirmjäger performed heroically in the Netherlands and were a major reason for Allied failure; the US 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, then Eisenhower’s strategic reserve, were trucked into Bastogne and ahead of Peiper’s Leibstandarte spearhead and blunted the German surprise attack in the Ardennes.

This book examines the use of airborne forces in every theatre – including their limited use on the Eastern Front and in the Indian and the Pacific campaigns – quoting from contemporary documents to show the evolution of the concept and the analysis of its effectiveness. It doesn’t cover the clandestine operations by such organisations as SOE or the OSS. Extensive appendices examine airborne troops’ kit and training.

Australian paras practise. The Aussie 1st Parachute Battalion was raised in 1943 and disbanded in 1946 without having dropped in anger. The aircraft are ex-civil DC-2s of which ten were supplied to Australia in 1940–41 and some were used by the Parachute Training Unit. This photograph shows well the process (see also p173) whereby the static line pulls out the chute which then deploys.

The Russians may have developed the concept of airborne troops but they didn’t make great use of them during the war other than as infantry. This memorial in Cybinka, Poland, remembers Soviet paratroopers.

1 Conception

From the cauldron of WW1 many new methods of warfare emerged, one of the most radical being that which used the very air itself. The machines in which to conduct this form of combat began their speedy arc of development, from passive observer and spotter aircraft to active fighters and bombers, with the parachute eventually developed as a potential life-saving aid and means of safe escape. Using a static line design to activate, it was attached to the pilot with a harness and packed into a bag on which he sat, which was also anchored by a length of line to the aircraft, triggering the canopy to launch when taut. Only towards the war’s end was the possibility entertained that the parachute could be used aggressively to drop troops behind enemy lines, but no practical idea was developed to actually achieve it. Postwar the more settled victorious states turned primarily to the civil applications of air transport and the continued development towards a workable safety parachute system with which to leave a moving plane. Small advances occurred internationally and sometimes simultaneously through both inspired amateurs and emerging professionals of this new technology, and by the mid-1920s parachutes had evolved considerably. They were now worn with a main vented canopy folded into a soft pack which was fitted by a harness to the pilot’s back, with a smaller drogue chute packed on top that launched first to draw out the larger chute. They could be either static-line linked or free and unconnected to the aircraft with the wearer using a ripcord for manual deployment.

Beyond some research and experimentation, it was left mainly to the most troubled and totalitarian states of the time to explore the parachute’s military potential. Russia and Germany, having recently undergone military defeat and internal revolution, were fragile enough to be looking closely at any new military technology to empower and reassure their new regimes, and this eventually lead them to collaborate against the prevailing status quo of the western nations.

It was the Soviets who first conducted the most eclectic exploration of the airborne concept with their vision of ‘vertical envelopment’, part of their ‘deep battle’ theory emphasising manoeuvre warfare to attack the enemy from any or all directions simultaneously. Airborne forces were potentially perfect for this role as they could be transported long distances to deploy rapidly and take the enemy by surprise in his flanks or rear. To this end regular Soviet airborne troops – Vozdushno-desantnye voyska or VDV – were established at the beginning of the 1930s, along with the development of gliders and the modification of existing aircraft in which to transport and drop them. This was enabled in no small part thanks to Gleb Kotelnikov, an inventor fixated with parachute design whose ideas resonated with the growing popularity of parachuting as a sport and its potential application in other fields. In the mid-1920s Gelb came up with a working system that was soon adopted by the Soviet military and in the early 1930s he invented the brake or drag chute to slow aircraft as they touched down, enabling much smaller area landings. In the fervour and excitement of a growing industrial and revolutionary setting the Soviets began an intense phase of experimentation to work out their air-war ideas, using a variety of modified aircraft and gliders to deliver parachutists, heavy machine guns, artillery, T27 tankettes and an assortment of light vehicles.

The French Farman Goliath was designed to be a bomber in 1919 but the end of the war came before it saw action. It was sold as an airliner and bomber (here an F.68 in the Polish Air Force). The Poles also trained paratroopers from it. NAC

They began to evolve two main types of operation: the airdrop into enemy-held territory using parachute or glider and the airbridge, which required a captured airfield for continuous resupply of more conventional troops by air. The airdrop required the true daredevil air warrior – someone tough, resourceful and confident enough to fight behind enemy lines and crazy enough to jump out of aeroplanes in the first place. (All the paratroop units of the different nations began with completely voluntary recruitment appealing to this kind of fighter.) The airbridge required the development of an airborne landing detachment consisting of a rifle company, sapper, communications and light vehicle platoons, a heavy bomber squadron and a corps aviation detachment. By the mid-1930s the Soviets had a substantial and dynamically evolving airborne force of almost 10,000 men and this led to a showcase demonstration of future warfare that stunned foreign military observers, when in 1935, the first live airborne airdrop witnessed two full battalions of paratroopers with light field guns landing in under ten minutes to seize their objective. Exciting though this was to military theorists its aggressive implications ensured that it did not long survive an initial burst of interest, for the western states were tired of war and really only interested in defence.

A group jump of paratroopers from a height of 400m at Mokotów airport, Warsaw in 1933. NAC

Using Farman Goliaths or Tupolev TB-3 aircraft, the Russian VDV was established in 1932. The Russians developed the theories and practice of airborne operations but were unable to put their plans to good use during World War II following first Stalin’s purges and second, thr withering intensity of Unternehmen Barbarossa.

The British thought such an airborne attack force was at odds with the defensive requirements of empire, the lack of heavy equipment limiting it to the role of mere saboteurs. The French experimentation consisted of two parachute companies created in 1937 who would form the basis of their later airborne effort post-1943. Fascist Italy conducted early experiments in the late 1920s, culminating in the 1941 formation of a 5,000-man parachute division designated the 185th Parachute Division Folgore, whose destiny was to end up serving as ground troops. But for the Nazi regime in Germany, secretly rebuilding its armed forces and searching for new methods of warfare, the Soviet airborne demonstration was an epiphany and they immediately set about forming their own paratroop forces. Unfortunately for the VDV the demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 were a premature high watermark, for in a paranoid fit Stalin began a series of political and military purges against everyone he felt threatened by. The effect on the Soviet military was as devastating as any Blitzkrieg and would hamstring the Red Army for some years as those with any vision and ability were swiftly eliminated. The airborne forces were not disbanded, but more fast moving events were soon to skew their intended role.

Just as Heinz Guderian, the father of the Panzerwaffe, followed closely all armour developments worldwide to synthesise his new combat formula, so too did the soon-tobe father of the Fallschirmjäger, Kurt Student, with all matters aeronautical. Student was a veteran WW1 pilot assigned to military research who had spent time in the USSR observing both glider and parachute development. After witnessing the Soviet demonstration in 1935 he returned