WHY THE PARAS PACKED SUCH A PUNCH
Red Devils Mark Urban Viking £25 ★★★★★
The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Italy and a handful of other European nations began experiments with the concept of airborne forces in the 1930s, but Britain was slow to catch up, and it wasn’t until 1940, following the evacuation from Dunkirk and with Winston Churchill installed as Prime Minister, that the British Army started to look at the idea. By this time, German paratroops had played a key role in Hitler’s invasions: they had been used successfully in Poland, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium too.
Germany’s airborne forces and the threat they posed as Britain braced itself for a Nazi invasion raised a lot of eyebrows, not least for the new Prime Minister.
As early as June 1940, with the sand of Dunkirk barely brushed off the survivors’ boots, Churchill had turned his mind towards how Britain could resume offensive operations. He suggested the formation of the Commandos (he called them ‘Leopards’) to start to take the fight back to the European mainland, and directed that the War Office should raise a ‘corps of at least 5,000’ parachutists to conduct the kind of operations that had evidently been so successful for the Germans.
But as Mark Urban’s excellent new history of the early years of the Parachute Regiment makes clear, after a promising start, things rarely went smoothly.
The first airborne operation attempted on the European mainland – the attack on a German radar installation at Bruneval in Normandy in February 1942 – was a small-scale affair led by Major
John Frost, commanding C Company of the 2nd Parachute Battalion. This was a significant success, with casualties that were relatively light by subsequent standards (two men were killed and six captured).
After Bruneval – which was a major propaganda coup for the British – everything became more complicated. Small-scale raids were all very well, but Churchill, and Lieutenant-General ‘Boy’ Browning, commander of the nascent airborne arm, had their eyes on much larger operations.
In November 1942, as the Battle of El Alamein was being won in Egypt, the British 1st Parachute Brigade, consisting of three parachute battalions, was on its way to Algeria by ship in order to take part in Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, intended to seize airfields and lines of communication ahead of advancing conventional forces moving towards Tunisia.
Torch was followed by the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, which involved paratroops and glider infantry from both the British 1st Airborne Division and the US 82nd Airborne Division. From 1944, the focus of Allied airborne operations switched to north-west Europe.
Airborne forces were key to the planning and execution of D-Day and figured importantly among the options for Allied commanders. In September 1944, airborne forces were used to attempt to seize a bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem, and in March 1945 were parachuted over the Rhine into Germany to speed the end of the war.
All of this is well known, but what makes Urban’s book stand out is the approach he has taken. He focuses on six soldiers, all of whom served at one time or another with the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment (as it was eventually called), and follows them on their odyssey through the war, using their letters and journals, the reminiscences of their friends and colleagues, and in some cases interviews they gave after the war.
Refreshingly, none of this is sugar-coated. The reality is that the men who served in this early incarnation of the Parachute Regiment were tough, highly trained and well motivated, but they were also human.
John Frost, who commanded 2 Para in North Africa, Sicily and at Arnhem, was an effective leader but prone to tactical errors and a prodigious whisky-drinker.
The splendidly named Geoffrey Pine-Coffin failed to impress in the early days of airborne forces and was removed from command, before redeeming himself later in the war.
‘Boy’ Browning, who was head of British Airborne Forces for much of the war, was regarded as out of touch and rather too interested in Guards-style spit and polish, as well as his own advancement.
Few of the operations launched by airborne forces in the Second World War proceeded as planned, and casualties were often horrendous by modern standards. Urban doesn’t shrink from exploring this.
The Germans abandoned large-scale airborne landings after their invasion of Crete in May 1941, and it’s hard to imagine anything similar taking place in contested airspace now, but Urban’s focus on the soldiers shows why modern armies continue to operate airborne forces.
Airborne soldiers are special: volunteers who are often better motivated than their conventional counterparts, adaptable and aggressive. That’s why they were sent into Arnhem in 1944 and into Kabul in 2021.
We are living in a mini-Golden Age of military history writing at present, and Red Devils is a worthy addition to the canon. It isn’t a book for the reader who wants to know about memos circulating in the War Office or to track every step that 2 Para took through the Tunisian desert, but if you want to get under the skin of the pioneers of airborne soldiering, this is it.
It is fast paced, well written and attentiongrabbing from start to finish, and I thoroughly recommend it.