AIRBORNE OPERATIONS IN THE MEDITERRANEAN

When the Allies first began plans in early 1942 for the invasion of North Africa, they made no assignments for airborne troops. Eventually, the need to ensure air superiority over the invasion beaches became a priority, leading to a decision to insert paratroops at two airfields in western Algeria. The task went to troopers of the 2d Battalion, 503d Parachute Infantry. The mission required a fifteen hundred-mile flight from England to North Africa—the longest continuous sortie by any airborne forces in World War II.

Haste in planning the operation exposed a number of serious problems in its execution. Many of the C–47 pilots were recent recruits from commercial airlines, unfamiliar with the geography of the mission and also untrained in the niceties of flying in formation during the night.Many navigators arrived to join crews only a few days before the mission’s scheduled departure. Thirty-nine airplanes left their English bases after nightfall on November 7. Despite the unfamiliar strain of formation flying at night and through fog, thirty-two of the transports still held a ragged position in the formation at sunrise. One diverted to Gibraltar because of engine trouble, and several others delivered their troops to French and Spanish Morocco, where they were interned. The remaining transports arrived over the target area, where most elected to land in a dry lake bed miles away from the airfield objectives, and the remaining paratroops jumped into terrain between the two airfields, leaving them in a poor tactical position. U.S. motorized units arrived at the airfields before any paratroopers had advanced to their objectives. All in all, the first real combat exercise for U.S. paratroopers did not transpire as intended.

During September 1943, U.S. Army and Air Force officers discussed different plans for airborne operations at Salerno, on Italy’s western coast, as well as possible air landings at Rome. Despite some detailed planning for several possibilities, nothing materialized because of the serious logistical problems in reinforcing airborne troops far behind enemy lines and the inability of Italian authorities to guarantee assistance for landing at Italian airfields near Rome, where German forces remained strong.

Eventually, an emergency request from Gen. Mark Clark, who needed reinforcements after the Salerno landings, led to action. Over successive nights, AAF transports dropped two infantry regiments and two engineering companies at Paestum, a coastal town south of Salerno. Brig. Gen. James M. Gavin, who led this mission, felt that the sudden presence of U.S. troops, far from where the Germans expected them, played a key role in stabilizing the right flank of Clark’s offensive. The second operation, at the mountain town of Avellino, a motor-road hub twenty miles north of the Salerno beaches, did not go nearly as well. A total of 640 troopers jumped, and about 500 eventually reached Allied lines. High mountains surrounding the town made it difficult to spot, and only a few pilots identified the proper drop zone. The troops became scattered over one hundred square miles. Gavin stated that “it is doubtful that [the operation] had any decisive bearing on the outcome of the Battle of Salerno.” The isolated paratroopers proved no more than a military nuisance to German commanders. 

By the summer of 1944, after nearly two years of training and combat experience in North Africa, American strategists approached airborne operations much more confidently. For example, for the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, U.S. commanders assigned a reinforced 505th Parachute Infantry of the 82d Airborne Division. Their objective was the high ground inland from the invasion beaches where Allied occupation would insulate the southwestern Sicilian coast from enemy counterattack. A British airborne brigade planned a glider attack behind the southeastern coast in order to capture a crucial bridge, the Ponte Grande near Syracuse, and to knock out coastal batteries facing the British invasion sector.

For each of the Allied units, confidence was misplaced. The British force of 144 tow airplanes with gliders ran into gale-force winds that scattered the units. Only twelve gliders finally landed near their objectives; amidst confusion about their release point, nearly half the glider force was cut free too soon and crash-landed in the sea, drowning some 250 soldiers. The survivors somehow managed to neutralize the coastal battery and aided friendly ground forces in taking the bridge. The U.S. paratroop forces were also scattered by similar gale-force winds, and transport pilots became confused as haze, dust, and smoke from the preliminary bombardment obscured vital checkpoints. Airplanes arrived over Sicily from every direction, and 4,440 paratroopers who made the jump were scattered across the countryside. In small groups, the troopers made their way toward the sound of artillery fire along the invasion beaches and actually helped divert an Italian counterattack until advancing U.S. troops arrived. On the second day, officers decided to send in 2,000 paratroopers as reinforcements, timing the mission shortly after midnight. Despite warnings to Allied shipping and antiaircraft batteries now ashore, nervous gunners opened fire on the low-flying C–47s. They shot down two dozen airplanes, three dozen more received heavy damage, and an estimated two hundred casualties resulted from the confusion.

In the process of conducting these missions, the AAF had learned harsh lessons about preliminary planning, logistics, and launching reasonably large formations of paratroop-laden transport aircraft. The service had yet to come to terms with the realities of chaotic events such as adverse winds and poor visibility over target areas, to say nothing of trigger-happy Allied gun crews. Still, paratroopers on the ground maintained an admirable level of fighting spirit and demonstrated an ability to recover and assault their objective. Such lessons could be applied to much larger and more intricate offensives in the Mediterranean and western Europe, backed by greater numbers of transports and more experienced pilots and staff officers.

The hard experiences of Africa, Italy, and Sicily definitely held a cumulative value. Hundreds of small technical problems had been resolved. A core of officers acquired invaluable experience in planning airborne as saults and arranging appropriate logistical support for parachute troops on the ground. Uncertainties about how to use airborne troops gave way to realistic doctrine. “Clearly,” Gavin wrote later, “they must be employed in mass and not in small packets.” Moving from formations of a few dozen transports, Gavin and his cohorts were now ready to undertake actions requiring hundreds of aircraft and tens of thousands of troops. The next phase of airborne operations lay in western Europe.