Airborne A Combat History of American Airborne Forces

Lieutenant William T. Ryder crouched in the open cargo door of a C-33 transport aircraft flying at an altitude of about 1,500 feet over an open field just to the south of Fort Benning's Lawson airfield. It was 3 August 1940, a calm, warm summer day. Lieutenant Ryder was strapped into a T-4, a twenty-eight-foot backpack parachute whose rip cord was attached by a static line to an overhead anchor cable that ran the length of the cargo compartment of the plane. On his chest, attached to his main harness, was a smaller twenty-two-foot parachute in a rectangular canvas pack. This was his reserve, which, if his main chute failed to open properly, he could activate by pulling a handle sticking out of the right-hand side of the parachute. He wore an Army Air Corps one-piece twill coverall, what looked like a soft, old-fashioned football helmet strapped under his chin, and shin-high, laced brown boots with straps across the instep. Kneeling beside Lieutenant Ryder on the floor of the plane was W. O. Harry "Tug" Wilson, the Army Air Corps' most experienced jumper, a parachute expert who, with a team of four other Air Corps riggers and trainers, had been working with Lieutenant Ryder and his Parachute Test Platoon for the previous two months. Wilson leaned far out of the plane's door, his face rippling in the 110-mile-an- hour wind, looking for the "go point," red panels on the forward edge of the drop zone (DZ). As the plane neared the drop zone, the pilot throttled back to the jump speed of about ninety miles per hour and flew directly above the go point. Wilson tapped the lieutenant's left leg sharply, and Ryder thrust himself out the door, an exhila- rating event he had been thinking constantly about during the preceding few months. Just below the plane, two seconds later, as his static line pulled the parachute silk out of his backpack, Ryder felt the welcome jolt of the parachute's opening shock (common to the T-4 and its successor, the T-5, widely used throughout World War II). He floated down, landed safely with his feet apart to the width of his hips, and did a front roll--standard landing procedure in those days. Bill Ryder had just made U.S. Army airborne history by being the army's first paratrooper and leading the army's first parachute unit, the Parachute Test Platoon, on its first jump. General Ryder wrote years later: although Tug was jumpmaster, I wanted to be at the door with him as each man made his first jump. This would not only give me a chance to observe closely each man's reactions and performance, but somehow it seemed proper and fitting to do so. Accordingly, it was arranged that after I'd jumped, the plane would land and pick me up so that I could be with each jumper as planned . . . the plane landed, and I re-embarked to join the first jump unit. As we climbed and circled for the next jumper, I conveyed to the men as best I could, the elation, satisfaction and confidence I'd experienced from my jump. As we headed towards Lawson, I joined Tug by the door and, with eager anticipation, awaited the historic occasion of the first enlisted man's qualifying "parachutist" jump. The man who would become the U.S. Army's first enlisted paratrooper earned that distinction by a fluke. In the Parachute Test Platoon's barracks the night before the initial jump, the forty-eight men of the platoon (nine more than the standard thirty-nine-man infantry platoon of 1940, to compensate for expected casualties and dropouts) drew numbers from a steel helmet to determine who would become the army's first enlisted paratrooper. "Tug called the man to the door," General Ryder wrote: He stood up and moved quietly to join us. Properly he hooked up, checked equipment, and calmly crouched in the doFlanagan, E. M., Jr. is the author of 'Airborne A Combat History of American Airborne Forces', published 2003 under ISBN 9780891416883 and ISBN 0891416889.