Death From Above - How Paratroopers Evolved From a WW1 Pipe Dream To A Key Part of Combined-Arms Assault

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Paratroopers are about the most peculiar breed of human beings I have ever witnessed. They treat their service as if it were some kind of cult, plastering their emblem on almost everything they own, making themselves up to look like insane fanatics with haircuts to ungentlemanly lengths, worshiping their units almost as if they were a God, and making weird animal noises like a band of savages... [but] generally speaking, the United States Paratroopers I’ve come in contact with are the most professional soldiers and the finest men I have ever had the pleasure to meet.”

This unattributed quote sums up the unique role that paratroopers have played in the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries. With the invention of the airplane, military strategists imaged troops clinging to the wings of Wright Bros. flyers and landing in enemy trenches. Such plans never came to fruition, but technical advances made it possible to drops thousands of soldiers with reasonable safety and accuracy. During WW2, Nazi Germany's paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) had incredible success in Norway and the Netherlands and even rescued Benito Mussolini in a commando mission. Over 22,000 of them were dropped on Crete. Allied paratroopers famously landed in France on the eve of D-Day, making Operation Overlord a possibility.

In this episode, we look at the origins of paratrooping, its function in war, and how it was part of the evolution of military strategy in the 20 century, in which different combat arms were integrated to achieve complementary effects.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Knock, knock, who's there? It's the land of same day. What?
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0:15.1	Music
0:27.1	History is in just a bunch of names and dates and facts.
0:30.4	It's the collection of all the stories throughout human history that explained how and why we got here.
0:35.8	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast, where we look at the forgotten, neglected, strange,
0:40.8	and even counterfactual stories that made our world what it is.
0:45.0	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:47.8	Germany's Luftwaffe had risen to incredible heights by 1941.
1:00.6	It pummeled Western Europe, pushed Great Britain to the closest point of surrender it would have in the entire war,
1:07.1	and laid whole cities and wastes.
1:09.6	The Luftwaffe was led by Hermen Koring, a World War I flynase and a narcissist,
1:14.4	who managed to perfectly complement the veramacht in the beginning of the war.
1:19.0	One of the keys to its success was the revolutionary parachute light infantry or the Fallschirmjäger.
1:26.5	It sees key objectives in Scandinavian and the low countries in the spring of 1940,
1:32.0	and helps speed the advance of Germany's tank forces.
1:35.3	While at the same time, dive bombers caused the surrender of stevern nations with their bombing of European cities that defied Hitler.
1:42.3	But in the same year in 1941, the fortunes of the Luftwaffe soured after Britain successfully evacuated Dunkirk and France,
1:49.2	and its soldiers weren't captured, and the ensuing battle of Britain.
	...

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