However, this line of reasoning and philosophical bent clearly indicated a wholesale lack of understanding of airborne warfare. The airborne battlefield was substantially different—much more demanding and unrelenting. Without question, it required warriors of a special ilk. Paratroopers needed to be carefully selected, meet special psychological requirements and possess a physical stamina beyond that of the average soldier. Their training was markedly more difficult, if not grueling. Only intrepid, resilient, self-reliant individuals could survive the devil’s cauldron that was the airborne battlefield.

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Clearly, any soldier who engages in combat faces a formidable challenge. However, the distinct airborne battlefield presented specific ordeals the normal soldier did not face. First, paratroopers are remarkably vulnerable during deploy­ment to the objective. The aerial armada in flight consists of large lumbering transport aircraft, as well as airplanes towing gliders. These were inherently slow, inviting targets to both anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters. Controlling the entire “air corridor” was crucial and demanded air supremacy or, at a minimum, local air superiority along the entire route.

Moreover, the flight was often physically taxing. Airplanes bucked and lurched, tossed about in the wash of preceding aircraft, and the pilots’ attempts at avoiding flak created additional stress for the airborne soldiers. Research has shown that airsickness due to turbulent flying conditions in itself creates fatigue. The paratrooper might be exhausted on landing from the battering in the air, compounded by anxiety and tension, and from carrying equipment that might weigh a hundred pounds or more.

The next challenge lay in the accuracy of the drop itself. Even if the aircraft reached their destination, pilots found it difficult to drop the paratroopers on target. Simple navigation errors created problems, as did high winds and poor weather. Poorly trained and inexpe­rienced aircrews often could not maintain formation and released their paratroopers at too high an altitude or too great a speed. For example, during Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Allied pilots were supposed to drop their charges from six hundred feet from C-47 Dakota aircraft. Pilots were also to slow down their airplanes almost to stalling speed, which was one hundred miles per hour. Instead, the paratroopers were flung out at fifteen hundred feet while aircraft raced along at nearly their top speed of two hundred miles per hour. Added to navigational problems and heavy winds, the pilots’ failure to maintain the proper dropping posture resulted in 3,405 American paratroopers being scattered over a sixty-mile swath of southeast Sicily.

On the same botched drop, Colonel James Gavin, a regimental commander in the 82nd Airborne Division, found himself in enemy territory for the first few hours of the landing with a force of only nineteen of his soldiers. He later estimated that only 12 percent, or about 425 of the 3,405 men, actually landed somewhere in front of the beachhead as planned.

Twenty-four hours after his drop, Colonel Reuben Tucker, the regimental commander, could account for only a quarter of the two thousand men who had left Africa. Similarly, during the same operation, only twenty-seven of an intended force of two hundred British paratroopers (or 14 percent) landed near enough to their objective to join the fight for the Ponte Grande.

Almost a year later in Normandy, of the sixty-six hundred men of the American 101st Airborne Division that dropped in the early hours of D-Day, thirty-five hundred were still missing by the end of the day. As a further example, on August 15, 1944, five thousand Allied paratroopers of the 1st Airborne Task Force dropped in the area of Le Muy, in southern France, as part of Operation Dragoon. Approximately 60 percent of the American paratroopers and 40 percent of the British landed too far from their drop zones for it to be considered a successful drop.

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