jump from a side door. I doubt if I could ever have gone out of a floor exit, though thousands of earlier-trained parachutists did. With barely anywhere else to look out of the plane, that seemingly magnetic hole attracted everyone’s reluctant attention. “See that reservoir down there?” Flight Sgt. Kent bawled his question more as an instruction. We submitted “Yes!” in lying unison: we weren’t seeing anything ‘down there’ if we could help it. “When you come up for your jumps in the Hudson, the red light will come on just after we pass it. A few seconds after that the green light comes on and out you buggers go!”
I suppose our air experience lasted no more than 10 minutes. Thrilling as it was, I have never considered it served any useful purpose whatsoever, whereas using a Hudson might have given us some feeling about the approach to the dropping zone (DZ) and particularly about the slipstream. “Down there is Nazareth,” pointed out our instructor more in the tone of a tour guide. The dawning reality of spending Christmas in the land of the Bible had a sudden and emotional impact. There was plenty of beer sunk in Ramat David’s canteen that Christmas Eve. Thoughts of returning to that wretched, meagre camp at Nahariya, the next day, for God-knows-what sort of Christmas dinner, suggested that we should celebrate while we could.
25 December 1943 dawned startlingly beautiful, sunny and warm and remained so all day. Our much-maligned regiment really confounded all advance criticism by arranging to combine Christmas dinner arrangements with the SBS in their coveted mess hall, and in providing an excellent meal with all the trimmings – including booze. In truth, booze dominated the whole day so that the Army’s magnanimous decision to send BBC crooner Judy Shirley to sing to the troops came rather amiss, since her voice could not be heard over lecherous, ribald, unrestrained suggestions until even her personal safety seemed in some doubt before the officers conveyed her to the haven of their Mess. Much steam was let off in a 50-a-side rugby match, where the ball mattered much less than deliberate wallowing in the squelching mud which a week earlier we had been bickering and complaining about. When spectators joined in, or were hauled in, the melee got rather out of hand, with duckings in a swollen stream, provoking counter-duckings until it became a mass drunken brawl-game. The first signs had appeared of the collection of reprobates which was the RSR. In mitigation, I suppose that there had to be a modicum of reckless abandon in each of us or we would not have opted out of safe units.
Boxing Day was a ‘training-free’ day spent in anticipation of the parachute jump which was to come sometime soon. I have often been asked if I found sleep difficult on the night before my first parachute jump. I can honestly answer that I had no trouble whatsoever in sleeping soundly. Coolheaded courage? Not a bit of it. I slept well because I didn’t know I was jumping the next day. At 0430 on 27 December, the hut’s slumbering silence was broken by the premature reveille inflicted by the excited Flight Sergeant, announcing unexpected jump facilities due to a sudden reduction in the wind velocity. No breakfast, no shaving, just “get dressed and into that bloody truck outside.”
At the packing shed we drew our parachutes from the stores, fitted them on our backs, shortened a strap here, extended one there, and slotted their metal end-tabs into the quick release box near our bellybuttons. Each pack was then checked meticulously by Flight Sgt. Kent. We joked nervously about who’d got the Roman Candle one and about how silly we looked in our circular, canvas, rubber-filled, protective hats –which resembled a two-inch deep sponge cake wrapped around one’s head – with canvas sides meeting under the chin where there was a stud fastening. Daylight had appeared before we reached the aircraft, where there was some anxiety about the latest wind speed figures being marginally above the 15 miles per hour recommended maximum for non-operational jumps, but at last we were in the Hudson and receiving our final briefing from ‘Kenty’. We would go in slow-pairs; that is to say there would be five runs over the dropping zone, with No. 1 and No. 2 jumping at the first run. There would be no great emphasis on speedy exits for the first jump, the normal necessity for operational parachutists to land as closely together as possible being, for once only, ignored. When the red light flashed on at the door he would call “action stations, No. 1” and expect No. 1 to take up his trained, half-crouched position at the door with fingers lapped outside the door entrance, with which to eject himself with all his strength from the plane into the body-weight-supporting slipstream, immediately on his green light-prompted command of “Go!”
He would give the same commands for No. 2 whilst the green light was still on, so requiring close backing-up in the plane. He wanted clean exits: half-cock, shambling, testing the water, peeping walk outs would end in disaster, as the slipstream would catch hold of any loosely protruding limb and cause it to spin the body back against the fuselage and possibly, though God forbid, against the plane’s tail, where severe injury would be almost certain and entangling the parachute rigging lines an unthinkable possibility. Once floating under our air-filled canopy, we were to listen to the megaphone-amplified voice of the dropping zone officer, who would supplement our own observations about any corrections we might need to make to our landing.
As Kenty clipped the end of our static lines to the rigid metal rod in the plane, I understood better why military parachutists use the static line chute and not the self-operated ripcord (free fall) chutes. With so much to sweat over, it was sensible to be relieved of the critical operation of pulling a rip-cord. The static line, attached at one end to the rod strongpoint in the plane and at the other to the back panel of the parachute, would expose the chute to the atmosphere automatically, as falling body weight broke the graded series of strings which detached the back panel from the parachute pack. The military objective was perhaps even more important: a uniform length of time between exit and the opening of the chutes means closer contact as a unit on the ground.
The Hudson was airborne and soon cruising at the optimum jumping height of 1000 feet. The jokes had stopped, as much from the inability to think of any at such a time as from the dry mouths which would have found them difficult to relate anyway. I had been allotted the No.4 position in the stick – second to go in the second run. Preoccupied with my own personal crisis, I cannot remember much about the first two disappearing except for Kenty’s near maniacal “Go!” and his undisguised pleasure at their exits, as the Hudson banked for the circuit which would straighten out for my run. Two things had already surprised me. Firstly, the Hudson’s ‘door’ to which I have already referred, was not a door at all – it was an open doorway. The actual door was probably on a metal scrap heap somewhere, abandoned for the rest of the war as useless or simply in the way. The other remarkable thing was that our respected, fearless dispatcher was not wearing a parachute. He had stood in the doorway from take-off, looking like a bored bus conductor awaiting passengers, until standing aside for the first exits, giving us more palpitations for his safety than for our own. Worse than that, after 1 and 2’s departures he sat sideways in the doorway, his back pressing against one side. He then wedged himself with one foot against the other side for leverage as he proceeded with tug-of-war intensity to haul in the discarded static lines and back panels of the first two jumpers, against the possessiveness of the howling slipstream.
I didn’t need to look out for the reservoir. When the Hudson straightened up after its tightly banked circuit around the DZ, even Flight Sgt. Kent’s nod and smile towards No. 3 and myself were superfluous. I had remembered how the plane had cut back its airspeed just prior to the first pair’s exit and I recognised that rather alarming juddering as the pilot strove to achieve minimum airspeed. We sidled towards the door, someone called “good luck” from behind us, whilst Kenty’s last advice was “Go out like the first two and you’ll be fine.” The red light came on. “Action stations No. 3.” He was in position. I shuffled to where he had been standing. Green now!
“GO!” He vanished – and I filled the vacant aperture. “No. 4 GO!” I surged out into space, not consciously aware of carrying out any of my training instructions. For a second I was weightless, reclining horizontally on the intangible couch of the slipstream. Then, without any sensation of falling or of tugging or buffeting, I imagined that I might have been in Heaven itself for all the dramatically contrasting peace and serenity in which I found myself. Perhaps I was in Heaven? Had the Roman Candle been mine? The noise and vibration of
