Читать книгу The Paras - The Inside Story of Britain's Toughest Regiment - John Parker - Страница 10

Even in this age of high-speed air travel, nerves jangle for most mortals at the very thought of boarding a plane, let alone jumping out of it when it is in the clouds with only a flimsy canopy to stop one’s body crashing back to earth with potentially fatal consequences. The idea had been around long enough, from Greek mythology to Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of a man dangling from a hollow pyramid. So let us go back in time for a few moments to recall the origins of the Paras.

As early as 1783, statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin, then the American minister in Paris, had some sort of vision of airborne armies being dropped into battle after hearing news of the first manned flight in a hydrogen balloon by the Frenchmen Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles and Nicolas Robert on 1 December of that year. They took off from fields on the outskirts of Paris, rose about 600 metres and drifted more than 40 kilometres from the city. These early developments in balloon travel immediately began to attract the attention of forward-thinking military men and others fearful of invaders from the skies. Within the year a French balloonist, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and an American doctor, John Jeffries, made the first balloon flight across the English Channel. They took off from Dover and landed near Calais two hours later. Blanchard also made the first balloon voyage in the United States in 1793 and before the end of the decade another Frenchman, André-Jacques Garnerin, made the first parachute jump from a balloon over Paris, using a canopy with rigid spokes. Those early experiments of jumping from balloons would remain a pertinent, if precarious, part of the training of the pioneers of modern parachuting from the early days of the Second World War, serving as a prelude to actually diving out of aircraft. Colonel Alan Wooldridge remembers his own experiences in the 1950s:

My first jump from a tethered balloon was an absolute horror – four trainees in a cage suspended beneath it rose into the air to a height of around 800 feet. It was deathly quiet. When it reached the tethered height, the Parachute Jump Instructor would oversee each man as he jumped out. The guy in charge of us liked a joke – just as I went, he yelled, ‘Come back!’ But then the parachute opened and down I floated to a safe landing. It was a frightening initiation. Balloon jumps were the worst part of our training.

These jumps were universally hated by the men who took up this challenge, not least because the stomach-churning experience could be worse going up than it was coming down. The silent balloon made its slow rise, often swaying wildly even in gentle air currents, until the rookie recruits, usually a ‘stick’ of four men suspended in a cage slung below it, reached the jumping height. They were usually already feeling sick to the stomach when it was their turn to exit the cage through an aperture in the floor, to tumble an initial 120 feet in freefall before the canopy opened and then having to manage the downward spiral with instructions being hollered through a megaphone by another instructor on the ground. What they had just experienced was a frightening test of courage that had been around since the eighteenth century.

In the late eighteenth century the French had begun a serious study of using balloons to drop troops, and by 1794 they were employing tethered balloons in warfare, as observation platforms to report the location and movement of enemy soldiers, although not to transport troops. During the American Civil War (1861–5) an American balloonist named Thaddeus Lowe formed and directed the first-ever balloon corps in the Union Army, while the North used observation balloons to direct artillery fire and to report Confederate troop movements. France returned to the thought of using balloons to drop troops during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, its military scientists producing many drawings of large balloons carrying baskets laden with troops who could be airlifted into the war zones. Once again the plan never came to fruition, although when the German armies laid siege to Paris the French remained in contact with the outside world by launching more than 60 balloons carrying almost nine tonnes of mail.

The event provided a signpost for another age and from then on futuristic writers, prophets of doom and adventurous military thinkers were all predicting the possibility of airborne soldiers, although exactly how these troops would descend from the heavens was at the time unknown. For years it seemed that at best parachuting would remain a carnival attraction, used by balloonists to thrill the crowds as they dived out of their tethered craft, using canopies which would be pulled open by ropes attached to the balloon’s basket. The arrival of powered flight in 1903 provided a fresh impetus, and in 1912 the first true parachute jump from an aircraft, a Benoist biplane, was made over Jefferson Army Barracks in Missouri by Albert Berry of the US Army. He used a parachute housed in a container slung beneath the aircraft, precariously reached by crawling between the wheel struts before jumping. Intrepid fairground parachutist Charles Broadwick took the experiment a stage further in 1913 when he demonstrated his own invention, a parachute folded in a pack worn on his back, which was opened by a line attached to the aircraft when he jumped out.

By the time of the First World War (1914–18) both the Germans and the Allies had air forces and were experimenting with various forms of parachutes. Given impetus by a proliferation in the use of observation balloons, the concept of parachuting from plane or balloon taxed the minds of both sides. Initially, however, the use of parachutes was confined to their role as a lifesaver. Balloon crews were suicidally vulnerable to gunners from the ground and needed a fast route to earth when attacked before the hydrogen gas in the capsule above them exploded in a mass of flames.

Parachutes were slung around the balloon in canisters and when the crew felt they were in imminent danger of being shot down they clipped them to a harness around their bodies and jumped. In the latter stages of the war the French and the Russians pioneered the use of parachutes for purposes other than saving lives, dropping agents behind enemy lines or supplies to beleaguered troops. The British and the Americans were slow to exploit the use of parachutes and even their pilots were not issued with them until September 1918 because it was felt that they would encourage cowardice in the face of enemy attacks by allowing men to jump from their aircraft rather than staying on board to fight.

The British and the Americans both formed experimental parachute groups after the war, but there was little enthusiasm for the idea and much of the early progress was made in the USSR, which benefited from technology brought by German ‘advisers’ who were prohibited under the Treaty of Versailles from developing their military capabilities in their own country. In 1931 the Soviets gave an impressive demonstration to German observers of a parachute drop by the 1st Parachute Landing Unit, based at Stalingrad. Within four years the USSR had raised and trained 30 battalions of paratroops organized into three divisions, and these were so impressive that a demonstration of their skydiving skills was staged for an audience of military men from throughout Europe.

General Archibald Wavell, then with the British Army’s General Staff (and later Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific), was among those present at the demonstration. It was a real eye-opener. The airborne manoeuvres included a mass drop by 1500 Soviet parachutists. ‘If I had not witnessed it, I would not have believed such an operation possible,’ Wavell wrote on his return, full of enthusiasm. But in 1930s Britain, where warnings of Germany’s expanding military might well have been largely unheeded, Wavell’s suggestion that the British Army should begin training an airborne force also fell on deaf ears. No one took the slightest notice, save perhaps for Winston Churchill, who was at the time in his wilderness years and listened to by few in high office.

Also present at the Soviet demonstration in 1935 was Hermann Goering, who had just been appointed head of the Luftwaffe. He returned to Germany determined to press ahead with the formation of his own airborne regiment, the 1st Fallschirmjäger, in complete contravention of the tattered remains of the Treaty of Versailles. Its importance in the burgeoning German military machine would be made apparent to all by his insistence that it should have the honour of bearing his own name in its formation title. As British military intelligence and MI6 would soon report, Soviet airborne skills had reached impressive levels and Goering’s new outfit was in training by January 1936, with its first battalion of 600 men commanded by an air force major, Bruno Bräuer. The German Army also formed its own airborne unit in that same year and a parachute school was founded at Stendal, west of Berlin. The British took no action – an attitude that was to cost them dear in the early stages of the Second World War.

By then the Luftwaffe had established Germany’s first parachute division, consisting of highly skilled, élite troops trained to perfection and later to be admired by their eventual British counterparts. Poland and France also formed parachute units and members who escaped before the German occupation of those two countries were to make a significant contribution to Allied parachute operations when these came into use. Meanwhile Goering’s Air Ministry had pressed ahead with its demands for round-the-clock production of aircraft and gliders, and as war edged closer it became clear that airborne troops were to become an integral part of the early advances across western Europe and Scandinavia.

In Germany there were two distinct training patterns, one preferred by the Luftwaffe and the other by the Army; both were later copied by the British. The Luftwaffe planned to train clandestine operatives to parachute into enemy territory in small numbers, ranging from individuals to around a dozen men, trained as spies, fifth columnists, saboteurs and general troublemakers. The Army’s methodology was quite different: it would drop large numbers of crack troops ahead of the main ground force to seize key objectives and so smooth the arrival of the armoured divisions. German military planners accepted that both proposals were brilliant additions to the overall concept of the Blitzkrieg, or lightning war, which they would soon launch against most of the rest of Europe. Goering continued to recognize the importance of an airborne approach, insisting in early 1939 that all of Germany’s airborne troops and paratroop forces should come under the auspices of the Luftwaffe. The extent of the country’s parachute capability was kept largely under wraps until the time came to unleash it.

The moment was not far off. By the end of the year the Nazis had two full parachute regiments under Luftwaffe control, kitted out in their blue-grey uniforms, and one Army infantry division trained in the techniques of airlandings. The Nazi invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 marked the end of the phoney war. It was the prelude to spectacular German airborne raids across western Europe. As German warships appeared off the Norwegian coast, the airborne invasion began inland. Within 48 hours the Germans had landed seven divisions and captured all the main ports, while the airborne troops secured their positions at Oslo airport and Norway’s other major airports. In fact, the weather had halted planned parachute drops at Oslo airport and infantry troops were landed in a succession of Junkers 52s to take possession. However, five companies of paratroops did drop at other key airports. The Germans established a firm hold on the southern half of Norway, and their control became complete when, less than a month later, the British and French withdrew their forces from the country in response to surprise attacks by the Nazis across western Europe, again spearheaded by airborne troops.

At dawn on 10 May German troops were carried forward in 42 gliders towed into the air by Ju 52s from Cologne and released into silent flight over Holland and Belgium to seize vital airports and bridges. Meanwhile, along a 150-mile front, 28 German divisions were assembled to move into action. Thus the Blitzkrieg, launched without warning, came to the Low Countries, and the British Expeditionary Force began its desperate retreat to the coast. The British nation went into shock, not least its military analysts when, in the aftermath of the huge operation, they pieced together the elements of the German invasion strategy: the lightning speed of the Panzer divisions which overran Dutch and Belgian defences, backed up by the fearsome accuracy of the airborne artillery provided by the Ju 87 Stukas and the devastating – and totally unexpected – arrival of airborne and parachute troops.

The latter had a particularly unsettling effect on the British public for many months afterwards, when, during the mounting fear of a German invasion of Britain, the nation was gripped by a kind of ‘para fever’. The arrival of troops from the skies or the clandestine landing of fifth columnists, spies and saboteurs (probably dressed as nuns) was expected daily.

Alongside the humiliation and anguish resulting from the vast number of casualties suffered by the British Expeditionary Force, there was a salutary lesson for the British war planners: airborne troops were essential to meet the type of warfare the Germans were planning, although there were quite a few detractors from this view, not least among the upper echelons of the Royal Air Force. A hasty conference was summoned at the Air Ministry, but nothing happened apart from an announcement that ‘it has been decided to establish a parachute training centre’. Major John Rock of the Royal Engineers was placed in charge of the ‘organization of British Airborne Forces’. His instructions were vague and equipment scant and ill-suited to the job. ‘It was impossible,’ Major Rock would say later, ‘to get any information as to policy or task.’ The attitude of the Air Ministry was nothing short of obstructive and it remained so until Winston Churchill, who replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister on the day of the German invasion of Belgium and Holland, took a hand.

On 22 June 1940, the day the French formally capitulated and therefore the threat of invasion of Britain heightened, Churchill issued a clear instruction in a note to General Sir Hastings Ismay, head of his Defence Office:

We ought to have a corps of at least 5000 parachute troops including a proportion of Australians, New Zealanders and Canadians together with some trustworthy people from Norway and France… I hear something is being done already to form such a corps but only, I believe, on a very small scale. Advantage must be taken of the summer to train these forces who can nonetheless play their part meanwhile as shock troops in home defences… let me have a note from the War Office on this subject.

The Central Landing School, sited at Ringway Airport on the outskirts of Manchester, which formally if tentatively came into being on 21 June 1940 as part of the Air Ministry’s reaction to the German invasion of western Europe, now became the focus of great activity. John Rock was joined by Wing Commander Louis Strange, Wing Commander Sir Nigel Norman and Squadron Leader Maurice Newnham, and the boost from Churchill provided the necessary support for a strong offensive force at a time when thoughts were generally directed towards the defence of the British Isles. This very fact caused dissent from some, in both RAF and the Army, for their shared priority at that moment was the defence of Britain rather than the creation of a new offensive force. There was already a mad scramble going on for more aircraft and decent equipment to meet existing needs, let alone engage in some new and alien form of warfare in which the British had no previous experience whatsoever.

The first recruits for the first-ever British parachute units were all volunteers from the Commandos and specifically from the newly formed 2 Commando, which was given a new base at Knutsford, in Cheshire, so as to be close to the Ringway parachute school. B and C troop arrived on 9 July and the number of men who had parachute experience could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with some to spare. They faced a rapid programme of training, and were placed in the hands of a joint team of parachute instructors made up of 14 men from the RAF (under Flight Sergeant Bill Brereton) and nine from the Army Physical Training centre under Regimental Sergeant Major Mansie. They faced the mammoth task for which the words ‘silk purse’ and ‘sow’s ear’ rush to mind. It was virgin territory – no equipment, no training modules, no pre-plane jump apparatus of any kind; just a few hundred parachutes and six very old and already obsolete Whitley Mk III bombers.

Enthusiastic staff at Ringway worked around the clock to cobble together some sort of training programme and organize parachute simulation gear to get the project off the ground. They had just six months to achieve what had taken the Germans six years; an impossible task. Nor were the top brass and their underlings at the Air Ministry falling over themselves to help – despite Churchill’s personal intervention.

Those entrusted with the nation’s defence also went through much the same deliberations as the Germans as to who was in charge – the RAF or the Army – given that the paratroops were strictly a fighting unit while the aircraft and school itself were operated by the RAF. It took several months to work out the lines of demarcation, the duties of the training personnel and which of the two services was responsible for what. A compromise was reached, with the RAF taking charge of parachute training and all matters concerned with the aircraft, while the Army kept a secure hold on the training for and planning of airborne warfare.

The lines of responsibility were only part of the problem in this race to equip and train an effective force of fighting men whose method of deployment was totally unlike anything previously undertaken in the British armed forces. The fledgling group had neither aircraft nor supplies of good, reliable parachutes, and because of the newness of it all, they were totally lacking in real-time experience. Even the instructors were deficient in that area, their knowledge having been gleaned from post-war training in the use of parachutes for survival when bailing out of a crippled aircraft.

Few instructors had trained for – or even witnessed – the procedures for depositing a heavily armed, battle-ready military unit on the ground. Whereas the Germans had been close at hand for the Soviet parachute trials in the early 1930s, every department of the British unit had to be constructed from the ground up. The order of the day was the wartime philosophy of make do and mend that dogged so many areas of Britain’s military capability. Bits of old aircraft were propped up in hangars for practising aircraft drills. A DIY parachute tower was built and sandbags were used as a counterweight to simulate speed of descent, but it was a slow process because each man had to be weighed separately.

The old Whitley bombers, boneshakers of the first order, were barely suitable for the task, and the basic requirement of finding the best way to drop parachute soldiers from them took many hours of trial and error, and not a few injuries. At first the rear gun turrets were removed to provide a jumping platform. Recruits stood on this and one of the instructors pulled the ripcord and the slipstream took hold and opened the chute. It was a very unsatisfactory and unsafe method, because the men tumbled wildly in descent. Then the instructors tried cutting a hole in the floor of the aircraft, but this was not much of an improvement because unless the recruits made an impeccable exit, they were likely to bash their head and face against the rear edge of the hole. Later a third method of exiting, through a door cut in the fuselage, was tried.

The hastily prepared training programme, geared to producing a skilled unit of men brought to the peak of physical fitness in the shortest possible time, was nothing short of a baptism of fire for the volunteers, most of whom had never even been up in an aircraft, let alone jumped out of one. Experienced soldiers they may have been, but everything they encountered from now on was new. Their first experience of flying was in clapped-out old bombers that rattled and banged as they trundled down the runway, which did not fill them with confidence. Only four days after their arrival at Ringway, the trainees were given a live demonstration of parachuting by the parachute jump instructors, or PJIs as they were later known. By August 1940, 290 trainees had progressed to regular training jumps from aircraft and, in little more than a month, completed almost 1000 jumps between them. Given the shortage of reliable equipment and aircraft, the speed of training and the number of jumps undertaken, the failure rate was low: 30 refusals, 13 injured, two deaths when parachutes failed to open properly and 13 trainees deemed unsuitable for the course and given an RTU (an order to ‘return to unit’).

One of the initial problems the trainees confronted was the bulkiness of their padded clothing and so, after early experiments, they began using normal fighting uniform together with the parachutist’s smock. Another development was the ditching of standard parachutes, used for bail-outs, and the subsequent use of the X-Type ‘statichute’, which opened automatically and provided a limited degree of control in descent. There were also extensive trials on the amount of equipment that a parachutist could carry – problems long ago resolved by the Germans, who indeed were already moving on to advanced training for massive and spectacular parachute operations that would shock the world. The small-time bunch who were intended to match the German paratroops were now being put through their paces on a wing and a prayer at an airfield in the north of England.

At the end of the first six months 488 men had completed parachute training at Ringway and the unit was renamed 11th Special Air Service Battalion and divided into a parachute wing and a glider wing, both managed by Headquarters Company. Even so, Winston Churchill was not happy: only 500 – must do better, was his reaction. There was also some discontent among the trainees. It had been an adrenalin-pumping few months, and by the turn of the year they were so primed for action that the lack of it – given their awareness of the war raging across Europe and in North Africa and the increasing intensity of the Germans’ bombing blitz on London and, now, provincial cities – caused many of them to become impatient with incessant training for raids that never seemed to come off. Desperate to make a contribution to the effort, they began applying to return to their original regiments. Their fears were, to some extent, allayed around the beginning of the new year by rumours that plans were being laid to drop the first-ever British troops into action by parachute; it appeared that a task had been found for them to satisfy the increasing impatience of the Prime Minister.

Applications for RTUs declined and when, in January 1941, volunteers were called for as planning was being finalized for the first paratroop operation, every officer and man of the 500 in the battalion stepped forward. In fact, only seven officers and 31 other ranks were required for this trial operation, a sabotage project in southern Italy for which the group would be codenamed X-Troop. It was hardly a full-blown para attack, but more like the burgeoning special operations conducted by various groups to insert raiders into enemy territory by air or sea to disrupt Italian and German land forces and blow up vital installations, bridges and railway lines. Such missions were to come thick and fast in the wake of Winston Churchill’s call to ‘set Europe ablaze’ following the formation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in July 1940 after Italy came into the war. SOE’s establishment was followed by the rapid growth of the empire known as Combined Operations, which eventually burgeoned even further under the command of Lord Louis Mountbatten (following his appointment in 1941) into a vast, if controversial, panoply of small, medium and substantial inter-service raiding operations, some of which were spectacular failures and led to heavy losses. As airborne tactics blossomed, parachute and glider-borne units would play an increasing and costly role.

In this period many of the now famous raiding groups and virtual private armies emerged, each with the same objective but with a very different modus operandi. The first, and certainly the most successful in those early days, was the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG), founded in the summer of 1940 by Major (later Colonel) R. A. Bagnold at the behest of General Sir Archibald Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief of Allied Forces in North Africa. This would be manned initially by New Zealanders. Over the next five years the LRDG conducted more than 200 operations behind enemy lines – more than any other Special Forces group. Then there was Lieutenant Colonel Bob Laycock’s commando group known as Layforce, Major Roger Courtney’s Special Boat Service, Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling’s 1st Special Air Service and Major H. G. ‘Blondie’ Hasler’s Royal Marines Boom Patrol Detachment, which spawned the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ – to name but a few such groups. All shared one aim: to hit the Axis troops behind their lines, which called for the insertion of daring young men deep into enemy territory to cause as much mayhem as possible.

Many of the early operations of these special forces groups were swashbuckling in style and met with varying degrees of success – or failure, sometimes to the point of fiasco. Months of trial and error and not a few casualties forced war managers to press for more subtle ways to carry out clandestine work against the enemy. There were many who thought special forces and their fanciful operations were a waste of time and manpower. Sending out small groups of men to blow up railway lines or pillboxes, killing a few enemy soldiers and as often as not losing half, sometimes all, of their own team in the process – for what? Enemy morale was barely touched and damage to installations quickly repaired. There were much more cost-effective ways, it was argued, to use ships and aircraft and highly trained men. Even so, there were many good results and quite a few heroes.

The risks involved in special operations were invariably heavy and extremely evident. The fact that a good proportion of the men might not return was generally not mentioned, although there was always that plaintiff cry at the end of the briefings on all of these operations: ‘How do we get home?’ The escape route back to base was usually meticulously worked out, but in effect rarely ran to plan, and as the war progressed, hundreds of men sent covertly behind the lines were captured, shot up in firefights or executed.

In those early months after Churchill’s call for special operations – when few of the above-named groups were fully operational – the eyes of the top brass fell upon the new parachute formation, although its original remit was certainly not as a supplier of small-party raiders. Churchill wanted the parachute troops to serve as a major airborne invasion group. But the slowness of the build-up in strength and the dire lack of equipment had meant that the formation of an effective parachute force had in fact been disappointingly inept – a point already made by the troops themselves.

At last, however, there was to be some action – even it was for only a few of the men – and in January 1941 those selected began intensive training for their first live drop. The timing was vital. They were to contribute to a wider plan to attempt, by whatever means possible, to disrupt the flow of supplies and reinforcements to Mussolini’s vast armies amassed against the Allies in North Africa. The Long Range Desert Group was already doing its bit in the great Libyan Desert. Two-man teams of the Special Boat Service, launched in canoes from submarines, were to operate around the coasts. And a select group of the Special Air Service Battalion was to strike on the Italian mainland. It was very much a journey into the unknown, experimental in every respect.

The objective of the airborne unit in what was to be known as Operation Colossus was a major aqueduct in southern Italy. As part of a pipeline, this carried fresh-water supplies all the way down to the towns of Bari and Brindisi on the Adriatic coast at the very heel of the Italian boot and to Taranto on the sheltered Gulf of Taranto. These ports were the main embarkation and supply centres for the Italian campaigns in North Africa and Albania and they relied for their water on the pipeline running through the Apennines. The target aqueduct lay around 50 miles inland, at Tragino near Monte Vulture, and an airborne raid was the only option for the attack. The mission had the makings of a severe test not only of the men selected but also of the RAF’s ability to put them down in a specified position in hostile surroundings, at night over countryside that had few landmarks to guide the pilots. It would be judged a success if the aqueduct was blown up; the secondary elements, such as the men achieving their goal with a minimum of casualties and going on to a successful RV (rendezvous) with the recovery craft, would provide essential information for future reference. In this instance recovery was to be made by a submarine, HMS/M Triumph, which would be waiting for them off the west coast of Italy.

X-Troop was hand-picked: seven officers and 31 other ranks under the command of Major Trevor ‘Tag’ Pritchard, whose parent regiment was the Royal Welch Fusiliers, with Captain G. F. K. Daly of the Royal Engineers in charge of demolitions. Three Italian-speakers, including a civilian named Fortunato Picchi, were attached to the troop, to help get them out of any trouble they might encounter on the long march from the attack site to the coast. Training and work-ups for the operation continued through to 6 February 1941. The planners hoped they had covered every eventuality, having constructed a full-scale mock-up of the part of the aqueduct to be attacked. Aerial reconnaissance photographs and maps of the region were studied; routes from target to RV were worked out in fine detail; and one of the planners, Lieutenant Anthony Deane-Drummond of the Royal Signals, flew out to Malta to make the final preparations for X-Troop’s onward journey to Italy.

On 7 February the group was transferred to Malta in eight Whitley bombers from 91 Squadron, six of which were to be used to put the men on to their DZ (dropping zone), while two were designated to make diversionary bombing raids on railway yards at Foggia at the time of the attack on the aqueduct. Once the mission was completed, X-Troop would split into groups and make their way to the coast, guided by the River Sele to its mouth in the Gulf of Salerno. There they would rendezvous with the Triumph, which was to gather them up and speed them back across the Mediterranean to Malta. It was an ambitious first raid that had more to do with testing the effectiveness of such operations than the safe return of the men. Nor could it be said that the operation, if successful, would be anything more than a bee sting to the Italians. No great military advantages would be won.

At dusk on the night of 10 February, Operation Colossus was launched from Malta under clear skies and perfect visibility. The eight Whitleys took off for their night flight and aimed to reach the DZ at around 21.30 hours. Two of the aircraft carried bombs to drop on the railway yards at Foggia. The remaining six carried sticks of six or seven men who would be dropped with canisters containing their weapons, food, equipment and explosives at given sites around the target. The first Whitley reached the aqueduct at 21.42 and zoomed in low to drop the troops and their equipment within 250 yards of it. By 21.50 the next four aircraft had dropped their men within 400 yards of the target, but release mechanisms on two of the Whitleys had iced up, with the result that the canisters of weapons and equipment failed to drop immediately and only one was recovered by the force on the ground. The Whitley which was carrying Captain Daly and five sappers missed the DZ entirely and put the men out over the wrong valley, 20 miles away.

The remainder of the force, now with only 800 pounds of explosive, less than half that needed for the mission, had to pare down their original plan to blow up the main supports of the aqueduct, built of tough reinforced concrete, and instead set their charges around a smaller pier and bridge. Despite this setback, the charges blew out the pier and a huge chunk of the aqueduct came down with it, causing water to pour through the gaping sides. X-Troop had done its work. Now all that remained was to get the hell out of it and make their way back to the Gulf of Salerno by the night of 15–16 February, across rough, mountainous terrain.

They split into three groups, commanded by Major Pritchard, Captain C. G. Lea of the Lancashire Fusiliers and 2nd Lieutenant G. Jowett of the Highland Light Infantry. The plan, as always with clandestine missions, was to lie up by day and travel at night. Sometimes the soldiers were lucky, sometimes not. In this case they were not. Each of the three groups was spotted and captured on the first night of their return journey, 12 February. Captain Daly and his sappers, having missed the target, fared better. They travelled for three nights and got within 20 miles of the coast before they were surrounded by Italian troops. Their interpreter Fortunato Picchi tried to talk his way out of the situation with the prearranged cover story that they were German troops on a special operation. He almost managed it, until the Italians insisted on seeing his papers. Daly and his men were taken prisoner. Picchi was tortured under interrogation but apparently gave nothing away. He was court-martialled and executed by firing squad. And so, by the end of the third day, the entire X-Troop had been captured. They were transferred to prisoner-of-war camps, from which several eventually escaped and made their way to England and back into service. It was only then that they discovered the devastating irony: that even if they had reached the Gulf of Salerno, the Triumph would not have been there to collect them

By a cruel quirk of fate, one of the returning Whitley bombers had suffered engine failure and was forced to ditch over the very area of the rendezvous at the mouth of the River Sele. Since his radio message to Malta may have been picked up by the Italians, it was decided that it would be too risky to expose the submarine to possible detection and the rendezvous was cancelled. The men of X-Troop would have been left high and dry to make their own way home as best they could.

And so ended the first-ever parachute mission into enemy territory, costly in terms of manpower and of little value because the water supplies to the three key Italian ports were soon repaired. Nevertheless, lessons were learned and morale boosted and it became the forerunner of and model for many operations by land, sea and air that followed in its wake. Winston Churchill was reportedly not impressed. This was not why the paratroops were brought together. Where was his corps of 5000 men? And where were the gliders to carry them and their machines? The Prime Minister was getting rather angry.