within the Wehrmacht and by their opponents with a certain amount of awe as highly trained special forces – an elite of shock troops that offered tactical flexibility in attack.
While the Allies quickly latched on to the successes of the German airborne forces, less analysis was given to their shortcomings. On 10 May 1940, at the start of the attack on France and the Low Countries, the Luftwaffe had lost a staggering 353 aircraft, most of which were delivering the airborne spearhead; this was the worst single day of losses for the Luftwaffe in the entire war to date, but was never much considered by Allied planners. Nor was the fact that a battalion of paratroopers was destroyed at Dombas in Norway in April 1940 by the Norwegian army, who were not widely recognized as being especially well equipped or well trained at the time. Nor was much attention paid to the fact that, for the most part, German airborne operations had been against low-quality troops, or that half the force of paratroopers sent to the assault on Crete had been lost over the island, despite the Germans’ subsequent victory there.
The British, with Churchill as one of the loudest advocates, had quickly put plans together to create an airborne brigade of five thousand men; that had soon swollen to double the size. In October 1941, the 1st Airborne Division had been created and more recently, in April 1943, a second division, the 6th, was also formed. In the United States, the first airborne formation had been the 501st Parachute Infantry Unit; in March 1942 the 82nd Airborne Division had been formed, followed in August the same year by the 101st, and in May 1943 by two more airborne divisions. Both the British and American armies were also developing glider-borne and parachute units concurrently. A huge amount of time, effort, money and training had gone into creating forces that so far had not really been tested in battle. Airborne troops had been dropped as part of the Allied invasion of north-west Africa, but that had been a total fiasco, while a British paratrooper operation to capture an enemy airfield in Tunisia had also achieved absolutely nothing except the loss of a few good men and a very long and risky walk back to friendly lines. In terms of glider operations, there had been just one, by the British, into Norway in November 1942. All the men aboard had been killed, or captured and subsequently executed.
Much discussion had taken place over exactly how these rapidly growing airborne forces should be used for HUSKY. In the early plans, the British and Americans were to land one after the other, which had meant all transport aircraft would be available to lift airborne troops for both. That all changed once the final plan had been accepted, at which point a certain amount of frantic jockeying for position had taken place. General Ridgway, concerned his airborne forces might have to play second fiddle to the British because of a shortage of transport aircraft, went straight to Patton, who, as he had hoped, demanded and was given a paratroop jump ahead of the seaborne assault.
Ridgway’s concerns had been understandable. The British, who had taken the top spots in command of all three services for HUSKY, had also, from early May, secured the senior airborne command too. This was given to Major-General Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, dapper, dashing, and married to the best-selling novelist Daphne du Maurier. Browning had been commander of the British 1st Airborne Division, but had since been bumped up to become Airborne Advisor to Allied Forces Headquarters; for all Alexander’s incredible experience, airborne operations were entirely new to him and almost as new to Eisenhower too. Clearly, airborne forces were a growing element in Allied plans, and there was also an implicit understanding they would be used to spearhead the cross-Channel invasion the following year too, so Browning’s role was an important one.
The trouble was, no one had much idea about how airborne operations should best be used. Young, ambitious commanders were inevitably drawn to the new airborne forces precisely because they were new, at the cutting edge of war. There had also been an understanding from the outset that airborne troops were special – an elite force. All these men were volunteers, not conscripts thrown together. They trained harder, were physically fitter and, crucially, were highly motivated, which meant they were far more likely to be able to use their initiative, an essential attribute that particularly marked out the better troops from the rank and file. Unlike the vast majority of soldiers fighting in the Allied armies, who simply longed to keep their heads down and get through, airborne soldiers wanted to be fine soldiers. They wanted to be the best, and generally speaking thought of themselves in such terms. Their commanders understood this attitude, and the prestige and accolades that would potentially follow from it. Ambition was not a fault; but it did mean there was a level of competitiveness among the airborne forces that was, perhaps, more prominent than in other parts of the armed services, pitting one regiment against another, paratroopers against glider-borne troops, British versus American. Ridgway’s concern had been that with Browning, a Brit, as the new senior airborne advisor, it would be the British 1st Airborne, rather than the US 82nd Airborne, who would get first dibs at the precious C-47 fleet.
As it happened, however, he need not have worried, because Boy Browning’s replacement at 1st Airborne was the newly promoted Major-General George ‘Hoppy’ Hopkinson, a man of enormous charm and voracious ambition, but less for paratroopers than for glider-borne operations. Before taking command of 1st Airborne, Hopkinson had been commander of the 1st Airlanding Brigade, and to say he was messianic about glider operations would be an understatement. Hopkinson had always been a man in a hurry. Twice he had resigned from the army because of a lack of opportunity and because the rate of peacetime advancement had been too slow. He liked being in charge and leading new units – such as the specialist GHQ unit, codenamed ‘Phantom’, that was supposed to be the British Expeditionary Force commander Lord Gort’s eyes and ears on the ground back in 1940. After Dunkirk, Hopkinson lobbied hard to be allowed to develop Phantom into a permanent unit; he got his way and it became the GHQ Liaison Regiment, although after the invasion scare had evaporated, Hopkinson himself lost command. Then came another opportunity with the development of airborne forces and in particular, for him, of gliders. Relentless ambition and a gift of the gab unquestionably helped him move swiftly into the top job at 1st Airborne in early May 1943, and with this promotion he was determined to become the champion of glider-borne forces. The trouble was, so tunnel-visioned had he become in his enthusiasm that he had failed to realize his force was not remotely ready for deployment.
By this point, Britain had been at war long enough to have sorted much of the wheat from the chaff when it came to generalship. The Americans, too, after North Africa, were starting to work out who was good and who needed sending home. The airborne forces were still so new, however, and those making the decisions on fresh appointments had their eyes on so many other matters besides, that it was not hard for an individual like Hopkinson, who talked a fantastic game, to get a divisional command in an untested arm. The same factors explained why he was able to convince those who might have known better – had they really thought about it rationally – that it was a good idea to send very badly trained glider pilots across a huge expanse of sea, at night, in gliders they were not used to operating, to land very close to the sea on ground that was both rocky and contained a lot of stone walls.
It’s clear that from the moment Hopkinson was appointed commander of 1st Airborne he did all he could to avoid being in a room with Browning, because the latter, when still commanding the division, had strongly advocated using paratroopers on the night of the invasion to capture a key bridge south of Syracuse, the Ponte Grande, and then storm the city itself. Instead, rather as Ridgway had done with Patton, Hopkinson managed to secure a face-to-face audience with Montgomery and persuade him instead to use glider-borne troops both for this key objective and then to attack a second bridge further north, at Augusta, the following night. Paratroopers, he cautioned, would not be able to drop with the concentrated accuracy needed; what’s more, only with gliders could the invaders achieve the kind of tactical surprise needed to capture a bridge intact before the enemy realized what was happening and blew it up first. Paratroopers would be better used for a later objective, the Primosole Bridge, which led into the Plain of Catania – by which time the cat, of course, would be already out of the bag.
He might have had a point had there been plenty of the right gliders available, along with lots of highly skilled and trained pilots, and had he himself any experience of mounting such an operation. But not a single one of those criteria had been met. As it happened, the Glider Pilot Regiment had a new commander in Lieutenant-Colonel George Chatterton – the previous CO having been lost in the ill-fated Norway venture the previous November.