Document created: 29 December 03
Air University Review, July-August 1973

Achtung! Fliegertruppen!

Dr. Alfred Goldberg 

To the countless Belgians and Hollanders who watched with awe and anticipation that morning of 17 September 1944, the skies must have seemed filled with an endless stream of airplanes and gliders flowing steadily and majestically eastward. First came a thousand B-17 and B-24 bombers and escort fighters of the U.S. Eighth Air Force from Britain, to clear a corridor for the troop carrier aircraft through the thicket of German antiaircraft defenses in the Low Countries. Hundreds of British and American fighter planes followed immediately afterwards to sweep the areas selected for dropping the Allied paratroopers and landing the gliders filled with more troops and equipment. Finally came the troop carriers and gliders, escorted by hundreds of fighter planes, flying in splendid V-formations towards their destinations. In all, nearly 4700 transports, gliders, fighters, and bombers passed overhead within the space of a few hours. And beginning shortly after 1300 hours, some 20,000 American and British soldiers parachuted or landed by glider within one hour and twenty minutes in good order behind enemy lines. “In those first minutes it looked as if the down-coming masses would suffocate every single life on the ground,” wrote a German reporter who was there.*

*James A. Huston, Out of the Blue: U.S. Army Airborne Operations in World War II (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Studies, 1972, $10.00), xi and 327 pages.

Operation MARKET, the airborne invasion of Holland in September 1944, was the greatest airborne operation ever mounted. It is likely to remain unsurpassed in our time and maybe longer. Over a period of six days, almost 35,000 Allied soldiers—they constituted most of the First Allied Airborne Army—dropped or landed in the battle areas along a corridor linking Eindhoven, Nijmegen, and Arnhem in southern Holland. MARKET was the climactic airborne operation of World War II, representing the culmination of the enormous Anglo-American endeavor to master a new way of warfare. It was the best planned and most skillfully executed large-scale airborne operation of the war up to that point. Moreover, in many ways it was a “remarkable and spectacular success,” but not an unqualified one. The failure to secure the main objective of the mission, the vital bridges over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem, may well have prevented General Eisenhower from ending the war in Europe in 1944. Still, MARKET remains the historical high-water mark of airborne operations involving masses of paratroops and glider-landed forces.

During the course of World War II there were many other spectacular airborne assaults. All the major combatants mounted operations employing troops landed by parachute, glider and transport airplane. Although the Russians had been the first to develop regimental- and division- size airborne units during the 1930s, they did not achieve any important successes in airborne warfare between 1941 and 1945. The piecemeal commitment of forces in their major landings in the Vyazma and Kiev areas, the consequence of insufficient transport aircraft, minimized their contribution to the big battles.

The Germans achieved spectacular airborne successes during 1940 and 1941 in Norway, Belgium, Holland, and finally Crete—by far their greatest airborne assault of the war. It cannot help surprising us today, especially in the light of the enormous Allied airborne operations in 1943-45, how small were the airborne forces employed by the Germans to gain such remarkable successes. At least in part, the successes may be attributed to the exploitation of a high degree of surprise in most of the operations that seemed to shock and numb Norwegians, Belgians, and Dutch so much that they were incapable of effective response. A single parachute regiment in Norway in April 1940 provided the key to German success. A mere 4000 German parachutists jumped in Holland in May 1940 and gained control of vital points that helped open the way for the ground armor and infantry divisions that overwhelmed the Dutch defenses. A handful of gliderborne troops—fewer than a hundred in all—landed on top of the mighty Belgian border fortress of Eben Emael early in the morning of 10 May 1940 and seized this single most important anchor in the Belgian defense line. More than three years later—in September 1943—the Nazi adventurer Otto Skorzeny used gliders to put a few dozen men down on a mountaintop at Monte Corno in Italy to snatch Benito Mussolini from his Italian captors.

The largest and most spectacular German airborne assault of the war, the conquest of Crete in 1941, was also the turning point for the Germans: thereafter they never mounted a tactical paratroop attack of more than battalion size. The loss of 4000 men killed, most of them paratroopers, dampened German ardor for such assaults. Without the element of surprise and against good British, Australian, and New Zealand troops, the Germans could not win their usual quick and cheap victory. Hitler later told his paratroop commander, General Student: “Crete proves that the days of the paratroops are over.” Hitler seems to have believed at the time that the Allies also would draw the same conclusion from the costly attack on Crete and would not attempt the use of airborne forces on a large scale. He was wrong, for the Anglo-Americans regarded Crete as a remarkable demonstration of successful employment of airborne forces. Crete seemed to reinforce rather than diminish arguments within the U.S. Army and the British Army in favor of creating a large body of parachute and glider troops. Eventually, the United States formed and deployed five airborne divisions, each with a strength of approximately 8500 men, and the British formed two airborne divisions.

In addition to the MARKET operation, Anglo-American airborne forces mounted major assaults in Sicily in July 1943, Normandy in June 1944, and across the Rhine in March 1945. Smaller airborne landings occurred in North Africa in 1942 and in the Pacific: the Nadzab (New Guinea) operation in 1943, the dramatic long-range operations in Burma by Wingate’s Raiders in 1943 and 1944, and the highly successful parachute drop on Corregidor in February 1945.

It is only in recent years that we have been getting military history that shows us what lies behind the big battles and campaigns that are the payoffs. Combat is, of course, the culmination of the whole military process and is by far the most dramatic and compelling element in that process. But it is also the tip of an enormous iceberg, most of which is rarely exposed to the public eye because it lacks the sweep and the excitement of violent conflict.

James A. Huston, in his forthright presentation of the U.S. airborne effort in World War II, has attempted to strike a balance between combat airborne operations and the “rather more pedestrian matters of conception, organization, and training” which exercise such a vital and deterministic influence on the battle payoff. The book is, as he puts it in the Preface, “perhaps . . . more of a history text book for airborne operations than a sweeping narrative.” But if he has not presented a “sweeping narrative” (and the accounts of the airborne assaults are concise and well done), he has produced a study comprising the broadest contextual presentation on the creation of U.S. airborne forces in World War II.

The debates within the U.S. military establishment over the concepts, doctrines, organization, training, research, management, and plans for the employment of U.S. airborne forces, as presented by Huston, reveal the enormous complexities and difficulties encountered in giving birth to a new mode of warfare. It is important that we understand and appreciate what lies behind, or, perhaps more appropriate, what precedes, the actual employment of troops in combat. The mistakes and lack of vision of the organizers, trainers, and planners are inevitably visited on the troops who go into combat. The uncertainties, conflicting views and attitudes, thorny issues, and agonizing reappraisals which throughout the war beset the U.S. Army leaders and planners concerned with airborne troops—such men as Leslie J. McNair, Matthew B. Ridgway, Maxwell D. Taylor, Joseph M. Swing, James M. Gavin, William D. Old, William C. Lee—emerge from Huston’s account, lending it a tone of down-to-earth reality and a depth of perception that greatly enhance it.

Today’s practitioners of modeling and gaming in the national security community engage in analyses of current and future problems, seeking to establish a measure of merit by which their outcomes may be assessed. Such measures of merit have always been applied to the great events of history but often with little more success than the modelers of the future achieve. Still, we continue to analyze and speculate about what happened and what might have happened if ____. Thus, we are inevitably confronted with such questions as whether a particular effort was successful or justified. The airborne effort of World War II is no exception to this tantalizing game.

What contribution did U.S. airborne troops make to the overall victory in World War II? Might the resources devoted to the airborne forces have been used more effectively in other ways—e.g., for more ground or armored divisions or more bombers and fighters? Or should some of the resources that went into ground divisions and strategic bomber forces have gone into airborne divisions and troop carrier units? Such questions are, of course, unanswerable, since we can never be sure about what might have been. Nevertheless, they hold an eternal fascination for military professionals and amateurs alike, and many, including this reviewer, are not deterred by the need to resort to subjective arguments to support their opinions and judgments.

Although there was often contention and poor coordination within the Army in planning, organizing, training, and equipping the airborne forces, Huston seems to feel that the most important problem grew out of differences between the Army Ground Forces and the Army Air Forces; that the heart of the differences lay in the consistently low priorities accorded the troop carrier units, which were indispensable to the airborne effort in every phase and indeed served as a major limiting factor on the size and scope of the overall airborne force and its operations. The AAF developed no specialized aircraft for the mission; it did not assign its best pilots and communications men to troop carrier units; it did not provide self-sealing tanks for the troop carriers; it failed to coordinate training adequately with the airborne divisions; it diverted troop carrier aircraft to other missions, such as hauling cargo for the ground units and the combat air units; it sent troop carrier units to some theaters where no airborne units were present. Huston concedes that priorities obviously had a great deal to do with who got what and when, but he flirts with the question of whether the priorities were right. And his quarrel seems to be not so much with priorities within the ground forces as with priorities within the Army Air Forces and between the AAF and the AGF.

Huston says that General Henry H. Arnold, the commander of the AAF, was “an airborne enthusiast” but that of greater importance “he was more of a strategic bombardment enthusiast.” (p. 254) This is undeniably true. Huston suggests that a higher priority for the troop carriers might have been

just as effective as a policy which massed impressive totals in bomber sorties, hours flown, and tonnages of bombs dropped but which, though carrying the appearance of violent activity, had relatively little effect on enemy war-making capacity until the last months of the war. In addition to contributing a consequential strategic threat, a policy of holding out troop carriers might have permitted a perfection in airborne training and technique which would have rendered airborne operations considerably more effective in breaking the enemy will to resist than were many heavy bomber missions in achieving that result. (p. 254)

Huston is aware that the troop carriers were often hurried overseas to provide badly needed airlift of cargo and men within theaters and that when they were diverted from airborne operations it was usually to serve the needs of ground units rather than air units. The thrust of his thesis seems to be that there should have been more transport aircraft to meet both troop carrier and cargo airlift requirements and that the resources for the additional transport planes could have been gotten by reducing the programs for the strategic bomber forces. This is an argument on behalf of the airborne forces that was previously made by such distinguished writers as Walter Millis and J. F. C. Fuller in behalf of the tactical air forces and the ground forces in general at the expense of the strategic bombers. They too found the results of the strategic bombardment of Germany not to have justified the expenditure of men and treasure. It is an issue that is obviously not susceptible to definitive resolution, but this makes it all the more appealing.

The contribution of strategic bombardment to the defeat of Germany in World War II has been a bone of contention ever since the war, but rarely, if ever, has the bomber been looked at in the context of a trade-off with the troop carrier. And yet it is in this context that the bomber probably looks best, contrary to Huston’s view. Even among those who regard the strategic bombardment campaign against Germany’s industry and urban areas as a waste of resources, there is recognition that the campaign made a major and indispensable contribution to the success of the Allied armies in Western Europe, including the Normandy landings and all that followed, and therefore to the defeat of Germany. The strategic bombers and their escort fighters smashed the Luftwaffe and destroyed its fighter arm as a major opponent in the great air battles over Germany in the winter and spring of 1944, the four months preceding D-Day in Normandy. It was the deliberate interim objective of the Combined Bomber Offensive to neutralize or destroy the German Air Force, this as an indispensable prerequisite to the invasion of Western Europe and the strategic bombing of Germany. The official U.S. Army historian of the Normandy invasion has stated: “The German Air Force had been defeated by the Combined Bomber Offensive in the early months of 1944. This victory the Allies were sure of. This knowledge was the most important ingredient in the final decision to go ahead with OVERLORD.”¹

The absence of the Luftwaffe in any significant strength from the skies over the beaches of Normandy on 6 June 1944 was the surest indication of the success of the Allied air forces, particularly of the U.S. Eighth Air Force. Moreover, when the thousands of troop carriers and gliders in Operation MARKET flew over the Low Countries to Arnhem and Nijmegen in September 1944, they were little molested by German fighters because the Luftwaffe was too weak to attempt an effective response. And in subsequent airborne operations over Europe the Allied airborne forces could count on friendly skies. Most of the aircraft losses in European airborne operations in 1944-45 came from antiaircraft fire and crashes.

It is doubtful, probably unlikely, that the Luftwaffe could have been so severely diminished as a fighting force (the loss of its best pilots had the greatest effect) by any other means than the daylight strategic bombing campaign. The Germans had every reason and every intention to husband their fighter aircraft resources for use against the Allied invaders of Western Europe. Only the massive attacks on Germany itself could induce them to commit everything they had to the air battle before the invasion itself. It was Eisenhower’s opinion that “OVERLORD was going in with a very slim margin of ground superiority and that only the Allied supremacy in the air made it a sound operation of war.”² The history of OVERLORD, then, might well have been very different had a powerful German fighter force been present in the skies over Normandy on 6 June 1944. And the history of U.S. and Allied airborne operations in Europe would most certainly have been very different.

In current terminology, was the airborne effort cost-effective? The nub of the matter is whether the results of the use of airborne forces compensated for the much higher cost of creating and maintaining them. An airborne division cost as much to equip as an infantry division, which had about 75 percent more manpower. To this must be added the cost of the “airplanes and gliders required [together with their trained manpower], the extra resources and time for training, and the extra shipping space needed for overseas movement of airborne troop carrier units.” (p. 255) In all, an airborne division might well have cost two to three times as much per man as an infantry division. Huston concludes: “Whether or not the effect of airborne troops in specific operations and their effect on enemy dispositions as a force in being was worth the cost is a matter of judgment” (pp. 255-56) His omission of a final opinion or judgment on the question, after his thorough and detailed study of the airborne forces, is perhaps the best indication of what a stumper it is.

There were, of course, differing opinions as to whether the airborne forces had been worth the cost. Many of the severest critics and most persistent doubters were to be found in the Army. But the U.S. Army’s judgment after the war was that the effort had paid off, and the Army retained substantial airborne forces in its structure thereafter.

Two U.S. regimental-size airborne drops occurred during the Korean War. In the 1960s the Army adopted the airmobile concept, in which helicopters came to be substituted for troop carrier planes and parachutes in assault landings. The helicopter came to be the distinctive and important feature of the war in Vietnam, to the total exclusion of parachute troops. It seems possible that such paratroop forces as the Army retains in the future may be reserved for highly specialized long-range strategic operations. For the shorter-range tactical assault operations, the Army appears to have committed itself to the helicopter. When the history of airmobile operations in Vietnam is written, definitive answers for these difficult questions will likely be as hard to come by as for World War II airborne operations.

Arlington, Virginia

Notes

1. Gordon Harrison, Cross-Channel Attack, United States Army in World War II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951), p. 180.

2. Ibid., p. 272.

Contributor

Dr. Alfred Goldberg (Ph.D., John Hopkins University) is a senior staff member of the RAND Corporation, Washington, D.C. He was formerly Chief of the Current History Branch of the USAF Historical Division. He has lectured at the Universities of Maryland, Southern California, and UCLA. He was editor of A History of the U.S. Air Force, 1907-1957 and a coauthor of The Army Air Forces in World War II and has contributed to military and professional journals. In 1962-63 he was a Visiting Fellow at Kings College, London.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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