Those Who Dare - [Raiding Forces 01] Page 9

  “And your roster ... You have with you one army officer, one navy officer, twenty-two soldiers, four sailors, eight National Lifeboat Servicemen, and one slightly long-in-the-tooth Canadian squadron leader. Unorthodox to say the least, old chap. You are the advance party, I take it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Blast! I was hoping for more.”

  “More, sir?”

  “More trainees. The prime minister has decreed that five thousand parachutists will be raised this summer. To accomplish that, ah, shall we say ambitious task, the RAF has given me this excellent facility here at Ringway and six aging Mk III Whitley bombers converted to become parachute droppers. What the RAF did not give me were enough instructors, so we are being forced to cross-train instructors from the Army Physical Training Corps to teach our parachute school curriculum. All of which is completely irrelevant, of course, because we do not have five thousand volunteers to train.

  “Picked men are all the rage, but they have to be picked from somewhere, and the army really does not want us raiding its established regiments. Regimentals’ COs resent their best men volunteering out for what sounds like more glamorous duty.

  “To make matters worse, the men we are getting in from No. 2 Commando are beginning to become somewhat resentful. They volunteered to be Commandos, expecting to see immediate action raiding the French coast, only to learn that all they are doing for now is training or being used in guinea-pig demonstration jumps to recruit more volunteers for the Airborne Forces.”

  “I see,” Captain Randal said, wondering where, exactly, this interview was heading.

  “And so, Captain, I was hoping you would send us your entire unit.”

  “The exact strength of the Small-Scale Raiding Company is classified,” Captain Randal explained. “There’s going to be a party of eight Lovat Scouts assigned to us, arriving at the end of the week to start training in your next cycle. For your planning purposes, after that you should not expect many more people from the Small-Scale Raiding Company.”

  “Lovat Scouts, eh? The premier snipers in the army and some say the best stalkers in the world. You’ve an eclectic mix men of men, I must say.” The squadron leader nodded. “Well, then. Mad keen to be a parachutist, are you? You shall be jolly glad to jump out of those old Whitleys, I can assure you. Flap their wings like bats. Obsolete as dinosaurs. Do not ever land in one!”

  “I see,” Captain Randal said again, feeling slightly whipsawed.

  “Oh, and just for the record, I command the school,” Squadron Leader Strange continued, “and Major John Rock, Royal Engineers, is in charge of the military side of things. It is a bit of an awkward command structure. Not entirely sure why the RAF is responsible for training army parachutists. Our job is to stay in the air, not fall out of it, don’t you know. However, it all seems to work. Do they do that in the American Army, too—things that do not make sense?”

  “I’d have to say that, in my limited experience, yes, sir, they do.”

  “Thought so. Well, you are going to do ground week here at Ringway to prepare you for the physical and psychological reactions to the shock of parachuting. Then you progress to transition week to teach you how to operate all the specialist equipment and to familiarize yourself with the techniques incidental to jumping safely out of an aircraft in flight. And finally, you will progress to jump week, where you will make two jumps from a tethered balloon and five more from our beloved Whitleys.

  “The main thing for you to keep in mind, as a future commander of parachutists, is that special emphasis must always be placed on the exploitation of an opportunity through great fitness, intensive training, careful organization, and detailed planning. Always, you, the leader, must have an eye for the main chance. We strive to provide you with a foundation for that here at Ringway. Do you have any questions, Captain? No? Well, good luck and happy jumping.”

  As Captain Randal stood up to leave the room, the squadron leader added in a sincere tone, “Congratulations on your recent award of the Military Cross. Got your teeth into them early. Good show. I cannot fathom why an American would want to come over and join in our fight, considering the desperate straits we British presently find ourselves in. But speaking for myself, I am glad to have you here. If you should encounter any problem, any problem at all, come to me anytime. The strategic importance of airborne operations is enormous. Not to mention that jumping from a balloon or an airplane develops courage, the decisionmaking process, resourcefulness, and the ability not to lose one’s head in an emergency; it also tests will power and teaches men how to make quick decisions in case of complications.”

  No kidding, Captain Randal thought as he walked out the commandant’s door. I’m going to need every last one of those qualities just to have the guts to strap on the parachute.

  ~ * ~

  8

  GROUND WEEK

  TRAINING STARTED BRIGHT AND EARLY THE FOLLOWING MORNING. Actually, it started prior to bright and early; it was still dark and would be for quite a while.

  “Wake-up call, sir,” the orderly announced, flipping on the light switch in the room Captain John Randal and Lieutenant Terry Stone shared in Hardwick Hall.

  “Things always look darkest before pitch black,” the Life Guards officer groaned, rolling out of bed.

  The uniform of the day was navy blue physical training, shorts worn under gabardine trousers, jumping jackets, and boots. It was cold and damp when they assembled for training. The training cycle was designed for syndicates of sixty men. There were six Whitley Mk III parachute troop carrier aircraft, and ten men wearing parachutes were all that could be squeezed into a Whitley—it was not rocket science.

  Because the Small-Scale Raiding Company did not total sixty men, the empty slots were filled by men from No. 2 Commando under the command of Lieutenant Percy Stirling, 17/21 Lancers, who were just starting their parachute training. Both groups of men, Commandos and “Raiders,” as the Small-Scale Raiding Company men were beginning to be called, had been training hard and were confident they were in excellent physical condition.

  As Captain Randal and the others quickly learned, however, they had not reckoned on having Army Physical Training Corps personnel assigned as PT instructors.

  The instructor cadre jogged up to the formation of Commandos and Raiders in perfect cadence, moving like a team of well-disciplined robots. They were wearing skintight white tee shirts, and each instructor had wide shoulders and a tiny waist. The PT instructors looked as if they were on temporary duty assignment from Mount Olympus.

  The chief instructor was a ginger-haired sergeant named Roy “Mad Dog” Reupart, who had a way with words: “Welcome to hell,” he said in a conversational tone.

  Then he dropped down and knocked out fifty one-armed push-ups while the rest of the instructor cadre, standing at parade rest, counted them out in unison. It took a long time for the count to reach fifty. In midair, Sergeant Reupart switched arms and knocked out another fifty.

  As he watched the performance, Captain Randal reflected that one of the worst things that could ever happen to a trainee was to draw a PT instructor called Mad Dog.

  Standing beside him, Lieutenant Stone said, “Uh-oh.”

  “You men are here to learn how to jump from an aircraft in flight!” the chief instructor shouted as he leapt to his feet. “Now, am I going too fast for anyone?”

  No one breathed a word.

  “Outstanding. I can tell we are going to get along perfectly.”

  In fact, their relationship went straight downhill from there.

  To get their blood circulating Sergeant Reupart led them on a five-mile run. The men didn’t know it was going to be five miles, though; no one bothered to tell the troops how far they would be running, and from the shape the cadre was in, it could be fifty miles or five hundred.

  After the run came an hour of PT, with the instructor cadre all over them, screaming insults, driving them to go “Harder, faster, harder, move, move, move, go, go, go,
drop and give me twenty-five!” The only consolation was that the trainees got to use both arms for their push-ups.

  The PT was followed by an obstacle course, followed by another run, followed by climbing ropes, followed by another run, followed by a freezing-cold swim—fully clothed—in the pond, followed by more PT.

  There was a break for lunch and a change into dry clothes, and then it started all over again. Apparently, the idea was to find out who really wanted to be a parachutist. Captain Randal was fairly certain Mad Dog would be disappointed to learn the real answer to that question.

  There was a walk-run, a cross-country run, a one-mile dash, and a seemingly endless speed march. Then they did something called a “knees high” run. In between, there were countless push-ups for infractions, real and imagined.

  “How many days are in a training week?” Lieutenant Stone gasped during a break between bouts of push-ups.

  “Six, I think.”

  “We are all going to die, old stick.”

  They never walked anywhere; every move was on the double.

  The instructors were sticklers for proper military etiquette but that did not stop them from singling out the officers for special attention. “Get those bloody knees up, Captain! You look like you are going backward, sir. Drop and give me twenty-five! Are you in pain, sir?”

  The only trainees who caught more flak than the officers were the NCOs. Sergeant Major Maxwell Hicks paid the highest price of all. The privates would have enjoyed it had they realized what was happening, but they were being hammered too hard to notice.

  Next, it was on to the sawdust pit. The sawdust looked soft, but the students quickly found out it wasn’t. After an hour in the pit doing exercises, strong men were weeping in agony.

  Captain Randal swallowed what seemed like about half the sawdust in the pit, and the other half found its way down the back of his shirt. He was so weak from exhaustion by the end of the PT period that he was having a hard time crawling over the eight-inch-high sandbags surrounding the pit.

  “Give me twenty-five, sir! You look like a dying cockroach!” There was no escaping the eagle-eyed Sergeant Reupart. He was everywhere and had eyes in the back of his head.

  An hour seemed to last a day; a day seemed like a week; and the idea of surviving until the end of the week was a frame of reference so distant in the future as to be totally unfathomable.

  After the evening meal, a formation was held in the large gymnasium. A flight lieutenant named John Kilkenny stood at the front. He was from the RAF’s Fitness Branch—an entirely different terrorist organization from the Army Physical Training Corps—and he announced that he would be teaching them the single most important thing that they would learn in the entire three weeks of Parachute Training School: how to fall. As Captain Randal and his men soon found out, falling was an advanced art form.

  Flight Lieutenant Kilkenny had made a study of falling and had developed what he called the Five Points of Contact Resulting from a Parachute Landing Fall. He shortened it to “the parachute landing fall,” but the trainees came to know and love it simply as the “PLF.” First, he showed them film footage of German Fallschirmjäger in an actual combat jump. They were flinging themselves headfirst out of a Junkers-52 troop transport, arms outstretched like Superman. The Nazis looked as though they were literally raring to go get the enemy down below.

  The way the German RZ-1 parachute worked, there was a terrific opening crack and then the jumper hung down, limply bent at the waist, dangling from the rigging attached to a D-ring centered on his back. It looked very uncomfortable in the movie and made the German paratroopers appear slightly ridiculous and somewhat helpless: two descriptions Captain Randal suspected no one in the audience had ever before considered applying to German paratroopers. With no way to reach up to control their descent by manipulating their risers, the Nazi jumpers had to ride it in face first all the way.

  The German method called for the parachutist to make either a forward or a backward roll, though how they expected someone hanging down and bent in half with their arms almost touching their toes to make a backward roll was not clearly explained.

  Most of the Fallschirmjägers landed by making a bone-jarring, full-body slam into the ground face-first. Dust flew up, and some of them actually bounced once or twice. To the trainees watching the film, it looked as though the German landing really hurt. A few men just lay there, stunned, as their parachute canopies collapsed down around them before the camera cut away.

  “Have to be tough to be a German paratrooper,” Lieutenant Stone observed, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear and laugh nervously in response.

  “Men of steel,” agreed Lieutenant Kilkenny. “Let me point out: Steel will snap. Metal can develop fatigue. What you are watching is exactly how not to land after jumping from an aircraft in flight. I have made a study of the subject, and I have determined that it is better to be a man of rubber than a man of steel. That is precisely what I am going to teach you to be: rubber men.

  “You will be jumping the X-type parachute that deploys canopy last, providing the jumper with a soft opening rather than the back-breaking snap of the German chutes. Your harness is designed so you sit in it like a saddle and ride it down easy, feet first.”

  “Now you’re talking, old stick,” Lieutenant Stone called out, speaking for the cavalrymen in the audience.

  The movie projector came back on and showed British parachutists spilling out from under a Whitley Mk III, their X-type parachutes gently plopping open, and the jumpers riding to the ground sitting in the upright position. Every man in the room cheered. It did not require a trained eye to see the difference.

  “Now, utilizing the parachute landing fall I have developed, you will land on the balls of your feet, remembering to keep your feet and knees together; swivel; then roll onto your calf, thigh, buttocks, and small of the back, keeping your head down and chin tucked in on your chest. With your elbows touching together on your chest, the inside of the forearms covering and protecting your face—fists side by side together, touching the front rim of your jump helmet—you will roll over, limp as a dishrag, and land as light as a feather.”

  All the men cheered again, though it did seem like quite a lot to remember and execute. Especially considering that you had just jumped out of an airplane traveling at least one hundred miles per hour and you probably had less than twenty seconds, while descending, to decide what type of PLF you were going to attempt, to think about getting all the moves right and performing them in the proper sequence—all the while knowing that the instant the toes of your boots touched the ground on the drop zone, if you got it wrong, very bad things were going to happen to certain major bones in your body.

  The PLF was farther complicated by the fact that the speed of impact was about that of jumping off of a two-story building without a parachute. There probably would be other distractions taking place, when they did it for real—like people shooting at you.

  The film cut to the drop zone where the British parachutists were coming in for a landing, sitting in the saddle of the parachute harness and doing all the things that the flight lieutenant had described. They landed, more or less, like leaves falling gently from a giant oak tree to the ground. The Commandos and Raiders cheered loud and long.

  Flight Lieutenant Kilkenny did not mention to the group that quite a bit of footage taken at a number of different drops had been edited and creatively spliced together to present the many soft-as-a-feather landings the film showed. The PLF is one of the most difficult military skills any soldier will ever try to master, all things considered. But when it works, it is a thing of beauty.

  The next five days were a blur of running, practicing the PLF, pushups, practicing the PLF, sawdust pit PT, practicing the PLF, climbing ropes, and practicing the PLF. By the end of ground week the trainees were becoming reasonably proficient at running, doing PT in the sawdust pit, climbing ropes, and doing push-ups.

  Mastering the PLF was pro
ving to be a challenge.

  ~ * ~

  9

  SUNDAY

  SUNDAY WAS NOT A TRAINING DAY. BUT THE OFFICERS AND MEN of the Small-Scale Raiding Company were so beat up and dispirited by the ferociousness of the first week’s training, they were barely able to muster the energy to do much more than lie around their quarters. Religious services were only sparsely attended. No one went sightseeing.

  The good news was that not a single Raider had dropped out, which to Captain John Randal seemed like some kind of a miracle. To a man they were stunned at how demanding the training had been.

  The troops lay around their barracks, painting themselves and each other in the hard-to-reach places with orange Mercurochrome. They looked like orange zebras. Each and every one agreed it was, without doubt, a good thing that the British Airborne Forces had gone to all that trouble to develop the soft-as-a-feather, rubber-man landing technique. Imagine how brutal the first week would have been without it.