Parachute Troops Bring War from the Skies

This article was published in The War Illustrated on 24 May 1940.

In the opening days of "total war" on the Western Front the Nazis made great use of their parachute troops.  Some account of these well armed desperadoes, who created much confusion and havoc behind the lines in Holland, is given here.

From just before dawn on May 10 the sky above the Low Countries was often filled with black blobs dangling from silvery parachutes dropping slowly into woods and fields far behind the zone of the fiercest fighting.

News of their approach kept the Dutch radio fully occupied.  "Waves of German parachutists are coming over," said Hilversum; "keep a sharp look out for them"; and from Brussels there came similar warnings.  Dropped from flights of three to five machines, the parachutists descended close to the principal strategic centres and the most vital aerodromes - to mention but a few, near Delft, only 13 miles from The Hague; at Waalhaven, Rotterdam's principal airport, where they joined hands with German troops who had been landed from transports and flying boats;  Dordrecht; Gouda, near Amsterdam; and Hooge Zwaluwe, where what only a short time before would have been regarded as fantastic project - the seizure of the Dutch sovereign and the Netherlands Government.

Armed with machine guns or mortars and pistols, and equipped with steel helmets, gas masks, binoculars, portable wireless sets, explosives, tents, and folding bicycles - these airborne arsenals silently dropped to earth, and if their advent had been undetected, crept away through the grass or trees on their nefarious missions.  Some kept a sharp lookout for Dutch military movements and at once used their wireless sets to transmit the information they had gathered to their headquarters behind the German lines, or conveyed it to the dwelling of a traitorous Dutch Nazi or German spy.  Some set about the blowing up of bridges and railways and the destruction of telegraph lines, while other with machine guns strove to prevent the demolition by the Dutch of their dykes and bridgeheads.

Such work calls for military qualities of a high order, and these Nazi storm troops of 1940 pattern were picked men, resolute to do or die in their allotted tasks.  It is true that the Dutch reported the discovery of the corpses of several parachutists who had obviously been shot in the back - presumably by their officers in the 'plane when they had displayed an undue reluctance to take the drop into space. These must have been exceptions, however, judging from the amount of damage which the parachutists were able to effect.  Quite apart from this material havoc there was what may be described as their "nuisance value" and their influence on the morale of a people even so phlegmatically resolute as the Dutch.

In many cases, it was alleged, the parachutists were disguised in Dutch uniforms or in the uniforms of the British or French troops.  Moreover, there were well authenticated reports of them having landed dressed as clergymen, peasants , and even as women and girls.  So disguised, their passage through the countryside may well have been facilitated, so that they were enabled to approach their objectives without arousing suspicion.

Such a breach of military usage was indignantly denounced by the Dutch Government, and some at least f the disguised soldiers were shot out of hand as spies.  The German official news agency replied by threatening "immediate and most violent reprisals" for any such "ill treatment" of their parachutists.  The parachute pilots it asserted were part of the German regular army, and "their special uniform is not camouflaged and cannot be mistaken either for the uniform of foreign armies or civilian clothes."  For every parachutist so "ill treated" they would shoot ten prisoners.  "The young German army is proud of its parachute pilots."

Not only in Holland did the parachutists present a constant threat, but in Belgium and even in little Luxemburg - which, indeed, was captured in the course of a few hours by parachute troops.  While the Dutch and Belgian soldiers, aided y their French and British allies, were valiantly resisting the Nazi hordes in the battle zone along the Eastern frontier, for scores of miles behind them in the very heart of the countries they were defending, the parachute troops of the enemy were doing their utmost to stab the defenders in the back.