Paratroopers were first used in combat on April 9, 1940, when German forces dropped into Denmark and Norway during the opening hours of World War II’s Scandinavian campaign. But the idea and the training behind airborne troops stretch back much further. The Soviet Union conducted large-scale parachute exercises throughout the 1930s, and the concept of soldiers descending from the sky was imagined as early as 1784.
Benjamin Franklin’s 1784 Prediction
More than 150 years before a paratrooper ever jumped into battle, Benjamin Franklin described the concept with striking accuracy. In a January 1784 letter to the Dutch scientist Jan Ingenhousz, Franklin mused about the military implications of hot air balloons, which had just been demonstrated in France. “Five Thousand Balloons capable of raising two Men each, would not cost more than Five Ships of the Line,” he wrote. “Where is the Prince who can afford so to cover his Country with Troops for its Defense, as that Ten Thousand Men descending from the Clouds, might not in many Places do an infinite deal of Mischief, before a Force could be brought together to repel them?” It was a remarkably prescient vision, though the technology to make it real wouldn’t arrive for another century and a half.
The Soviet Union Built the Blueprint
The modern paratrooper concept was born in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Soviet military planners saw airborne forces as the natural extension of their doctrine of deep battle, striking far behind enemy lines to disrupt communications and block retreats. They moved from theory to practice faster than any other nation.
In September 1934, during military maneuvers near Minsk, the Soviets dropped 732 men in two separate operations. A 129-man force seized a highway and river crossing, while a larger group of 603 parachuted in to block enemy reserves in coordination with a mechanized brigade on the ground. These were not stunt jumps. They were rehearsals for real combined-arms warfare.
The scale grew rapidly. In September 1935, exercises in the Kiev Military District involved two parachute regiments totaling 1,188 men, supported by nearly 1,800 additional troops flown in by transport aircraft. The parachute force flew 280 kilometers to their drop zone. By September 1936, the Soviets staged a massive demonstration near Moscow where more than 5,000 airborne troops jumped, after which an entire rifle division was airlifted to the secured airfield. Foreign military observers, including representatives from Britain, France, and Germany, watched these exercises closely. What they saw changed how every major army thought about warfare.
Germany Puts Paratroopers Into Combat
Germany’s Fallschirmjäger became the first paratroopers to see actual combat. On April 9, 1940, German airborne forces jumped into Denmark and Norway as part of Operation Weserübung, seizing key airfields in the opening minutes of the invasion. This marked the first time in history that paratroopers were used in a real military operation.
Just one month later came the operation that made the world take notice. On May 10, 1940, German glider and airborne troops attacked Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium, one of the most heavily fortified positions in Europe. The assault on the fort itself was carried out by just 86 engineers in gliders, not paratroopers in the traditional sense, but it was part of a broader airborne operation. By 7:30 that morning, 62 Germans stood on top of a fortress defended by 700 Belgian soldiers. The garrison held out for 36 hours before surrendering. Simultaneously, other glider teams of 80 to 100 soldiers each seized three critical bridges over the Albert Canal. The entire operation involved a force drawn from a division that had grown to 4,000 airborne troops and 12,000 glider soldiers supported by 1,000 transport aircraft.
The Allies Catch Up
The United States entered airborne development just months after Germany’s first combat drops. On August 16, 1940, volunteer soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Test Platoon performed the first official American military parachute jump. That date is now commemorated annually as National Airborne Day. Training infrastructure followed quickly. Fort Benning, Georgia, constructed its iconic 250-foot jump towers in 1941 and 1942, modeled after amusement park towers from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Those towers remain in use today.
Britain’s airborne program launched into operations even sooner after its founding. On February 10, 1941, 38 British paratroopers conducted Operation Colossus, the first British airborne mission of the war. The target was a freshwater aqueduct near Calitri in southern Italy. The raiding party, designated X Troop and commanded by Major T.A.G. Pritchard of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, consisted of just seven officers and 31 other ranks. The operation was small and ultimately had limited strategic impact, but it proved the British could put paratroopers on a target deep in enemy territory.
Japan Joins the Airborne War
Japan conducted its first combat parachute drop on January 11, 1942, during the Battle of Manado in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). The 1st Yokosuka Special Naval Landing Force dropped 334 paratroopers from 28 bombers that had launched from Davao in the Philippines. The operation did not go smoothly. During the approach over northern Celebes, Japanese floatplanes covering the naval invasion force mistakenly attacked the transport flight, shooting down one aircraft and killing all 12 paratroopers aboard. Zero fighters from the carrier Zuiho had to escort the remaining planes to prevent further friendly fire. The drop over Langoan airfield began at 9:52 a.m. and was completed by 10:20.
The Technology That Made It Possible
The key piece of equipment behind all of this was the static line parachute. Early parachute designs, sometimes called “attached” or “static” types, used a cord fixed to the aircraft that automatically pulled open the parachute pack as the jumper fell away from the plane. This meant soldiers didn’t need to do anything except jump. The system could deploy dozens of parachutes reliably in rapid sequence, which made mass drops practical.
Separately, Floyd Smith, an American pilot, developed the first manually operated rip cord parachute in 1918, filing a patent for what he called the “Floyd Smith Aerial Life Pack.” His design was intended to save pilots rather than deliver soldiers, but the two lines of development, static line for mass deployment and rip cord for individual control, would eventually merge into the versatile parachute systems used by airborne forces through the rest of the 20th century.
By 1942, every major power in the war had an active airborne program. What had been a Soviet experiment in the early 1930s became, within a single decade, a standard feature of modern warfare. The massive Allied airborne operations that followed, in Sicily, Normandy, Arnhem, and across the Rhine, built on foundations laid during those first tentative jumps over Minsk and the Norwegian fjords.