The First Sky Soldiers – Meet History’s Earliest Airborne Units

“During the years between the World Wars, armies around the world began organizing their own specially designated paratroop units.”

FEW HAVE PROBABLY heard of Gleb Kotelnikov — the genius behind the first modern backpack parachute.

In 1911, the 39-year-old Russian actor-turned-inventor set out to create a more perfect chute after watching a stunt pilot fall to his death from an airplane aerobatic display near St. Petersburg. Traumatized by the spectacle, Kotelnikov devoted himself to designing the life-saving devices. In fact, much of his work would go on to inform the future development of the technology.

While parachutes had been conceived as far back as the 15^th Century, with one model being successfully tested in 1617, these original iterations were developed long before the advent of the airplane. Such designs would later prove inadequate when deployed by a wearer who was travelling at high speeds when jumping. Even 19^th Century parachutes were useless in such instances. Kotelnikov’s invention changed all that — his backpack parachute could deploy successfully even the when the user pulled the ripcord after leaping from a moving cockpit.

Within three years of his breakthrough, parachutes like his would prove to be invaluable for pilots, as well as balloon and zeppelin crews.

Parachute Troopers?

And it soon became evident that parachutes would be useful for more than just saving pilots. During the First World War, some military visionaries saw them as a way of also breaking the bloody deadlock of trench warfare.

As early as 1917, Winston Churchill reportedly proposed forming entire regiments of infantry that could be dropped by aircraft behind enemy lines, thus ending the stalemate on the Western Front.

He wasn’t the only one with the idea. In fact, the head of the U.S. Army Air Service in the First World War, Billy Mitchell, planned to equip elements of the American 1^st Infantry Division with parachutes and drop them from converted bombers near Metz, France as part of a larger offensive against the German lines. The war ended before the scheme could be carried out. Planners envisioned whole armies of ‘sky soldiers’ being carried aloft by dozens or even hundreds of biplanes. When the target area was reached, the soldiers would simply slide off the wings at which point their chutes would deploy and they’d drift to the ground ready for battle.

The operation, which would have been the first airborne assault in history was slated for February of 1919. The war ended before the plan could be put into action.

The First Airborne Drop

During the years between the World Wars, armies around the world began organizing their own specially designated paratroop units. In the 1930s, Russia invested itself heavily in the concept.

By 1933, the Soviets undertook the first large-scale airborne infantry operation in history — the peacetime trial involved 62 paratroopers.

Three years later, the Red Army staged a much larger exercise with more than 1,000 men. Moscow even experimented with dropping armoured units from transport planes (sometimes without parachutes).

Other countries watched the proceedings with curiosity. During the 1930s, Japan, Germany and Italy followed Russia’s lead and pioneered their own airborne forces. The U.S., France and Great Britain followed suit. As the danger of war grew, one thing became certain: If a conflict did break out between the major powers, paratroopers would be in the thick of the action.

The First Combat Jumps

Germany would lead the world in dropping infantry into combat. History’s first wartime jumps came during the 1940 invasions of Norway and Denmark.

On April 9 of that year, German Fallschirmjäger troops leapt from Junkers Ju-52 transport planes onto the Aalborg Airport in Denmark. Others seized nearby bridges. Subsequent missions saw German paratroops capture a fort on the Danish island of Masnedo as well as the Storstrom Bridge, which links Masnedo with another island. More German airborne assaults would follow in the invasion of Norway. The Fallschirmjäger faced its first opposed drop while assaulting the Sola airfield at Stavanger.

German paratroopers would later play key roles in the invasions of France and Holland, and were earmarked for the aborted assault on Great Britain as well.

Heavy casualties suffered in the massive 1941 airborne operation on Crete convinced Hitler to abandon similar gambits in the future. Fallschirmjäger troops would fight the rest of the war as elite light infantry.

But Germany wasn’t the only Axis power to deploy paratroops in the war.

In January of 1942, Japan dropped marine paratroopers, known as Rikusentai, on the Dutch defenders of Indonesia at the Battle of Manado. Other jumps would follow in the Japanese invasion of Timor, as well as the fight for Sumatra in February 1942.

While Germany suspended large-scale airborne operations in 1941, Japanese army paratroopers, known as the Teishin Shudan, made an assault late in the war against some American airfields in the Philippines. On Dec. 6, 1944, 750 Japanese commandos attacked U.S. bases on Leyte. Although more than half were killed by anti-aircraft fire while still aboard their transports, approximately 300 managed to survive the drop, only to be cut down by U.S. troops, but not before inflicting considerable damage on the American base.

Another early airborne operation occurred in the 1941 war between Peru and Ecuador. The little-known regional conflict was entirely isolated from the larger Second World War. On July 27, a unit of Peruvian paratroopers descended onto an Ecuadorian port city. It was the first airborne assault in the Western Hemisphere.

First Allied Drops

The Soviets were the first Allied power to undertake a wartime parachute drop.

More than 7,000 Soviet paratroopers from the 4^th Airborne Corps hit the silk on Feb. 23, 1942 near the Axis-occupied city of Vyazma. Part of the wider Rzhev-Vyazma Operation, the mission was a failure.

Four days later, the British 1^st Airborne Division had its first taste of combat during Operation Biting. On Feb. 27, about 120 airborne commandos landed at Bruneval, France to capture German radar equipment. The plan called for the troops to be inserted by parachute and then picked up by warships waiting off the coast. The raiders suffered two dead and six wounded, but managed to escape with the top-secret hardware. Although only a minor triumph, it was the perfect tonic for the war-weary British public and demonstrated how effective paratroops could be in any future invasion of France.

By year’s end, the 509^th Parachute Infantry Regiment would complete America’s first ever combat mission in history during Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of western North Africa. The mission was ambitious to say the least. It involved more than 500 paratroopers being airlifted in 39 C-47s more than 1,600 miles from the U.K. to target areas in Algeria. Only 10 of the planes made it to the drop zone – a pair of Axis airfields. Some of the planes got separated from the formation and were forced to divert to Gibraltar, others accidentally scattered paratroops over miles of empty desert. A handful of aircraft force-landed on a dry lake bed, their paratroopers having to march overland to their objective. It was an inauspicious start for America’s parachute infantry. A week later, a smaller, yet more successful drop was conducted along the Tunisian border.

Just two years later, an unprecedented 20,000 Allied airborne and glider troops were parachuted into France on D-Day. Three months after that, the British, Americans and Polish dropped a staggering 41,000 paratroopers into Holland.

On March 24, 1945 the Allies conduced Operation Varsity over Germany. It was the largest single airborne drop in history, with 16,000 troops jumping into a single landing zone.

Post War Paradrops

While the advent of the helicopter diminished the need for parachute drops, several have still been undertaken, even in the 21^st Century. MilitaryHistoryNow.com has the full story here. Here are the highlights.

• American paratroopers made jumps in Korea and Vietnam (although in the case of the latter, only one operation was launched in 1967: Operation Junction City)
• The Israelis, British and French would conduct drops during the Suez War of 1956.
• Both Indian and Pakistani paratroopers were dropped in the 1965 and 1971 wars, while the Indian army conducted an airborne assault in the Kashmir in 1984.
• In 1989, the American 82^nd Airborne made its first combat jump since World War Two when assaulting the Omar Torrijos Airport in Panama during Operation Just Cause.
• Twelve years later, U.S. Army Rangers parachuted onto an airstrip at Kandahar, Afghanistan just five weeks after the 9/11 attacks. It didn’t go well.
• In 2003, the American 173^rd Airborne Brigade jumped into Northern Iraq and seized an airbase.
• In 2009, Pakistani airborne troops were dropped onto a Taliban positions near the Afghan border.
• As recently as January, 2013, 250 French paratroopers took part in an airborne assault of Timbuktu, Mali.