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THE PARAS
The Inside Story of Britain’s Toughest Regiment
JOHN PARKER
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Parachute Regiment Battle Honours
Introduction
Prologue
1 Warriors from the Skies
2 Get a Move on!
3 Into Action at Last
4 Lighting the Torch
5 The Longest Day
6 Arnhem: The Bridge Too Far
7 The Panzers Move in
8 ‘My Wife Will Kill Me!’
9 Shot in the Back
10 Upon Swift Horses (or Bikes)
11 The Suez Fiasco
12 Where’s the Fire?
13 The Troubles
14 Getting Personal
15 The Falklands Adventure
16 Dropped Right in It
17 March or Die!
18 Bloodstained Heroes?
19 Notes from a Small Ireland
20 Bloody Hot!
Epilogue: Do You Want to…?
Select Bibliography
Maps
Index
Copyright
As will be evident, this book does not take the form of a conventional military history. The story of the Parachute Regiment is told, as far as possible, through the recollections of those who took part in some of the most outstanding events and actions since the formation of Britain’s airborne forces. These memories include numerous vivid, outspoken and very personal accounts of courageous, controversial and ultimately tough times. It is, in effect, ‘the Paras on the Paras’, with some interventions and observations on the surrounding history by the author en route through this journey.
I am deeply indebted to a large number of people for their time, cooperation and effort in the process of gathering material for this book. All the recollections presented here are the result of more than 50 lengthy tape-recorded interviews with men of all ranks, from privates to knighted generals, and wives too. Some of the tapes were made personally with myself or my colleague Alastair McQueen, who assisted as a researcher, while many others were provided by the Sound Archive of the Imperial War Museum; and in this way I have obtained memories of almost every major campaign in which the Paras have been involved. Sadly, several of those whose words are used are no longer with us. A debt of gratitude is also due to Rosemary Tudge and her colleagues in the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive, who went to very great lengths to meet my aspirations and deadlines.
Parachute Regiment Battle Honours
Bruneval, Normandy, France (27 February 1942)
Soudia, Oudna, Tunisia (29 October 1942)
Djebel Azzag, Djebel Alliliga, El Hadjeba, Tamera, Tunisia (1943)
Djebel Dahra, Kef el Debna, North Africa (1942–3)
Primosole Bridge, Sicily (13 July 1943)
Sicily (1943)
Taranto, Orsogna, Italy (1943–4)
Normandy landings (6 June 1944)
Pegasus Bridge, Merville battery, Bréville, Normandy, France (12 June 1944)
Dives crossing, La Touques crossing, southern France (15 August 1944)
Arnhem (17 September 1944)
Ourthe, Rhine, eastern France (24 March 1945)
north-west Europe (1942, 1944–5)
Athens (12 October 1944)
Greece (1944–5)
Goose Green, Mount Longdon, Wireless Ridge, Falkland Islands (14 June 1982)
Formed at the personal insistence of Winston Churchill in Britain’s darkest hours of World War II, the then Prime Minister demanded a force of 5,000 to take the war to the Germans and they went on to cover themselves with glory. Eventually, more than 100,000 men were enlisted into the para battalions, dropping into virtually every major campaign of the conflict in perilous conditions in which the chances of survival were slim. They rapidly built a reputation for deeply penetrating enemy lines, parachuting en masse and later with airborne forces to bring in their own heavy metal. They were men who got their first, notably in the capture of Sicily and the D-Day landings. Their 6th Airborne Division led the glider-borne raid and capture of Pegasus bridge in Normandy in the dead of night on June 6, 1944, immortalised in the film The Longest Day. And, perhaps most famously of all, they were given the desperate task of capturing The Bridge Too Far, at Arnhem, a catastrophic military misjudgement which cost the lives of thousands of their brethren.
Although down-sized after the war, and through later defence cuts, the Paras have never been out of action since they were formed. In the savage ‘wars of peace’ in the second half of the 20th Century, during Britain’s exit from her colonial empire, they were immediately back in the front-line of major conflicts and firefights. They led the British army into Palestine in the 1950s and 60s, they were heavily committed to the disastrous attack on Suez, fought Greek terrorists in Cyprus, Communist guerrillas in Malaya, Borneo and Aden, and in more modern times fought the toughest of all battles in the Falklands War in 1982. The Parachute Regiment has also been on continuous duty in Northern Ireland since the troubles began in 1969, suffering a large number of casualties. They became particular targets of the IRA after their involvement in the appalling tragedy of Bloody Sunday, about which controversy rages to this day.
Their role has changed with the times, more as interventionists in conflagrations far and wide but they remain every military commander’s first choice as the lead contingent with skills, honed in World War II and modernised to meet today’s needs, that are as vital as ever. They are learned in the toughest of all military training regimes in the British Army. One of their favourite catch-phrases is ‘Train hard, fight easy’ and they do it their own way. Their own training company is led by officers who become expert in rooting out recruits who either do not have the physical or mental stamina to survive battle conditions or whom conversely show too much bravado. They need to be as hard as iron, but cowboys, dare-devils and risk takers are no use to anyone in a critically honed unit of men. They are young men who, despite the image, are not supermen, and that is no better demonstrated than in the recollections of a young officer recalling later in these pages a firefight during the Falklands war:
‘We got up on to the mountain and amongst the enemy before they knew we were there. Even so, the ferocity of their response set us back on our heels. I had 39 men in my platoon, five were killed and eight wounded straight away. People were not shouting “Bang! Your dead.” People were falling down for real. That was the shock… the reality of it. The bullets were flying and they were real; they