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Aviation History
1947
1947 - 1344.PDF
i66 FLIGHT Prelude to Glory welcome, not because of the silly instructions that were circulated telling everyone to be nice to the Americans, but because they were good chaps and we liked them. One evening as we were driving out to the Roebuck Inn at Mobberley for dinner we passed Rostherne Mere and I casually pointed it out 4s the place where we made our water jumps. As I did so my mind flashed back to the aim Parachute Battalion which I had seen in Manchester some months previously. In the picture several American army parachutists dropped into a river and appeared to make a pretty clumsy business of trying to get out of their harnesses. I recounted the story with what I deemed to be a suitable inflection of amused scorn and was surprised to find that it produced a perfect hoot of laughter from our friends. Ryder then explained that he and his party were the parachutists in the picture, having been lent to the film company with the object of introducing propa- ganda that would be of value in stimulating the recruit- *ment of volunteers. The American parachute harness was a far less efficient arrangement than ours and it was in fact extremely difficult to extricate oneself from it when in the water. It was often said that the chance of survival for American aircrews who baled out over the sea was con- siderably less than our own because of this inferior design. Insulated Officialdom At Ringway we were intensely interested to know what other countries had done and'1 were doing in regard to military parachuting so that we might have a yardstick by which to measure our own results. Unfortunately information of this kind had to percolate through such a sieve of Air Ministry Directorates, Commands and Groups that it very seldom reached the unit to which it would have been of real value. Groups, and occasionally Wings, were normally the lowest formations to which staff ofiicers, as such, were accredited. These insulated officers not infre- quently conceived it their function to exercise a restrictive control over the units they were intended to assist. The doling out of driblets of information and instru<34||n which were essential to keep a unit working, «wthout lltting it know too much about policj^r the purpose of its own efforts, appeared to be regarded as the, correct method for preserving the prescience of* "higher authority." This practice was particularly galling for a School engaged upon an entirely new subject for which no textbooks or prece- dents existed. Consequently the news that an invitation had been re- ceived for a reciprocal visit by a party from the P.T.S. to American Airborne Establishments was warmly welcomed. Kilkenny, as chief instructor, was to lead the PM|f aQd take with him the School's medical and parachulpTnain- tenance officers and two senior N.C.O. instructors. They soon realized that the inscription ^mt the doot aptly and accurately summarized tro'jntention upon which the Fort Benning curricukun was based/ The methods for producing parachute soldiers were completely different from ours and were only practicable because of the abundant man-power upon which to draw. The American conception of a paratroop saw the glorifi- cation of personal physical achievement, and this idea was fostered by the use of much bombastic and " tough guy " propaganda. This ran in conjunction with an eliminating period of training which was clearly intended to ensure the survival of only the very fit. The percentage of failures, which were colourfully described as " wash-outs," was extremely high, but the net result was the production of a force of supermen imbued with very high morale and fighting qoalitiet. ' - The natui* of the training was less concerned with the teaching of parachuting tedasiqtie than with the building up of the pupil's ambition to, achi<r<-** fk<« mveted dis- tinction of qualifying as a parattoov ads was partly engendered by the relatively sowii cuiKuuwna;«ad«r which parachuting was carried out. Coscfttiaas, too, which WILL »T OPEN 7 Every parachutist experiences this dreadful thought Hugh Murphy, a P.T.S. instructor, jumped with a cine camera focused above his head. The views fringing this page show the canopy in various stages of develop- ment. In the centre is a descent from a flight of Royal Air Force Dakotas.
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