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Show U. S. First to Experiment With Use of Air Troops ; - Demonstration Arranged by General 'Billy' Mitchell at Kelly Field in 1928; j Officers 'Not Impressed.' j By BAUKHAGE News Analyst and Commentator. must capture or prepare air strips for this purpose. Allied airborne troops were used effectively at the landing in Sicily, where General Montgomery said they shortened the campaign by at least a week. They also proved of great value in New Guinea. The full extent of their performance per-formance in the invasion of Europe has yet to be revealed but we have General Eisenhower's own word as to their value and his praise has been unstinted. The chief function of the soldier of the air until recently has been the destruction of enemy communications communi-cations and installations such as ammunition and supply dumps, dynamiting bridges and wrecking railway junctions behind the lines. Now they are prepared to engage the enemy in large-scale operations which reached major proportions for the first time in France. Preceding Pre-ceding the Normandy landings, one of their jobs was to prevent destruction de-struction of certain points like bridges and other installations which the troops advancing from the beachhead wanted to make use of later. In this case, they had to take the bridges from the enemy defenders defend-ers and then hold them against counter attacks of the local ' reserves, re-serves, armed with tanks and field artillery, until their own advancing ground troops or air reinforcements arrived. Such action is possible because jeeps, one-ton trailers, howitzers, heavy and light calibre machine guns, mortars, mines, and other equipment including food, medical WNU Service, Union Trust Building Washington, D. C. When the story of the present war is written, the outstanding logistical novelty the feature which differs most from the methods employed in the movement of fighting units in previous wars will be the use of airborne troops. Already the airborne units have been revealed as vital factors in the invasion landings, where they have been used on a scale which dwarfs anything heretofore from the first widely publicized Russian experiments ex-periments in 1930 to the German air invasion of Crete or the remarkable achievements of smaller units in Burma. Since it is taken for granted that the United"6tates is going to carry the major burden in the later phases of the invasion, it is a matter of satisfaction to know that the idea of transporting troops by plane was first developed by the United States army. No one will be surprised that it was that stormy petrel of aviation, Gen. "Billy" Mitchell, whose wings beat so futilely against the" hidebound hide-bound brasshats of his day, who is credited with arranging the first demonstration of troop transportation transporta-tion by air. The report of his first fruitless demonstration is buried so deep in the war department files that I can only quote from lay sources con- cerning it. But it seems that in 1928 ten soldiers parachuted from a Martin Mar-tin bomber onto Kelly field in Texas. With .them went machine gun equipment. equip-ment. All landed safely and in three minutes after they hit the ground the machine gun was assembled. Officers who observed the "stunt" which is what it was then considered) con-sidered) were not impressed. That is, the American officers. Some Russians Rus-sians were present. They made notes, and some two years later their paratroopers were descending to earth to the "ohs" and "ahs" of American movie audiences. Germany observed but went to work in silence, with the results with which we were made painfully familiar from the days of the invasion in-vasion of Poland on. But "Billy" Mitchell's idea slumbered in the files and he did not live to see its renascence here four years ago. Nazi Refinements These facts have been forgotten by most people who probably think that the Rusian experiments were the first. The Germans picked up and improved the Russians' technique, tech-nique, working out their paratroop plans as a part of the developments of their then peerless Luftwaffe, whose threatening shadow moulded European diplomacy before the outbreak out-break of the war. supplies, water, and of course ammunition, am-munition, can be transported by the troop carrier command. The troops have food and ammunition sufficient suffi-cient for about three days sustenance suste-nance without replenishment. The pilots of the troop carriers are trained under most difficult conditions and must have an extra share of courage and intelligence. They fly slowly and about their only escape from the speedy fighters is to skim the hilltops, dodge the haystacks, hay-stacks, keep as low as possible in valleys or between obstacles like trees and buildings which serve as protection. Glider Pilot's Job Although the glider pilot has no engine to worry about, he must know meteorology, navigation, . aerial reconnaissance, photography, maintenance and radio communication. communica-tion. He must learn to land quickly and near trees or other obstacles where the troops can take cover; one means of making a quick landing land-ing is purposely to snag a wing on a tree trunk or the bottom of the plane on rocks. The men inside are protected by a steel framework. J.ne Orerman paratroopers demonstrated demon-strated their real value Us the blitz against the low countries. It was not until April of 1940 that the United States troop carrier command, com-mand, which carries troops in transports trans-ports and gliders, was organized. Now it is larger than the whole of our air force of three years ago. The airborne force, created a few weeks earlier, is now numbered in entire divisions, as we know from German reports, and includes tens of thousands of fighting men and technical personnel. The British paratroopers were used effectively as far back as 1942 and they made the first contact with German troops in North Africa in November of the same year. The U. S. airborne forces are made up of both paratroop and glider forces. They are separate from the troop carrier command which transports them, just as the foot soldier is distinct from the seaman sea-man who carries him from shore to shore. The paratroopers (a part of the airborne forces) alone serve frequently fre-quently as aerial commandos, seizing seiz-ing enemy airports of suitable terrain ter-rain where the troop transports or glider planes cannot yet land. The Paratroopers When operations require large numbers of men and more complicated compli-cated equipment, such as those performed per-formed back of the shore defenses and even much farther inland in France, paratroopers are supplemented supple-mented by the troops landed from transports and gliders. This frequently fre-quently means that the paratrooper And then when the pilot lands, all he has to do is fight his way back to his own lines with the rest of his one-time passengers. Like them, he has to know all the -commando knows. Some of the tales which have already al-ready gone into the growing saga of the airborne forces are marvelous. One is told of an adventure which took place early in the invasion of France. A glider, its towline cut, was suddenly sud-denly left in the dark of the moon. Some light is necessary for a landing, land-ing, of course. In the period when the moon was clouded, there was nothing for the pilot to do but to keep on descending. He did and landed unexpectedly but on very smooth terrain. The troopers quickly quick-ly debouched and sought cover as they are trained to do. But there was no cover. They found they were on the wide, flat roof of a building. They found an entrance through the roof and cautiously crept down the stairs. To their surprise, they discovered they were in a building full of German soldiers and which housed the German headquarters for that area. But the Americans were armed, and needless to say the Germans were somewhat surprised. sur-prised. They surrendered without much trouble. However, it is not always as easy as that and since it is an axiom of military history that for every new arm of offense, an arm of defense is developed, we may expect fresh obstacles to be created which these youngest sons of Mars will have to meet as they grow older. |
