Jump School: Where the Airborne Earned Their Wings

With the 75th anniversary of D-Day approaching fast, today's article will look at how the famous Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 506 PIR, 101st Airborne (and other  paratroopers) earned their wings.

Welcome to parachute infantry training

Though Easy Company was trained at Camp Toccoa near Currahee, Georgia, jump training there was shut down later in the war when an accident revealed that the airfield was too short for the safe use of transport planes. Afterwards, paratrooper training was conducted at Fort Benning, Georgia. Once a prospective paratrooper finished his 8- to 15-week basic training, he went on to the four-week jump school. The course was divided into weeks A, B, C and D. Week A was for weeding out the physically weak with at least 9 hours of daily exercise: day and night runs, rope climbing, pushups, tumbling exercises and hand-to-hand combat. Physical exhaustion, orders to always run everywhere and punishment meted out for the slightest infractions ensured that most washouts occurred either this week or the next.

Conquering Currahee: 3 miles up, 3 miles down

Week B retained the intensive physical training and added lessons on exiting a plane properly, positioning the body safely, steering during descent, avoiding injury on landing, and deciding when to use the main parachute on the trooper's back and when to resort to the reserve chute on the chest. Wooden C-47 models were used by sticks, teams of 18 paratroopers, to practice jumping out as quickly as possible, 2 jumps every second being the ultimate goal.

Airborne training as portrayed in “Band of Brothers”

Week C continued physical and jump training with the addition of two jump towers used to test the trainees' courage and acclimatize them to the psychological stress of the jump. The tallest tower was 250ft tall. A soldier would be placed in a harness, with parachute already attached, hoisted up, then let fall. Most candidates dealt with this easily, but the other tower, much smaller at a mere 30ft, turned out to be much more terrifying and was responsible for many washouts. Here, soldiers had to climb up on their own and jump without a parachute, relying instead on a security cable that was designed to slow them down for a safe landing, a task many applicants instinctively balked at. Week C also taught soldiers how to pack their own chutes, a lesson their lives literally depended on a few days later.

Jumping from the short tower without a parachute suspended by a cable.

The taller tower for parachute jumps

Looking down from the top of the tall tower during week C

Finally, week D put the trainees in planes and had them jump once per day, every day from Monday to Friday. For many, this was the first time they were on board a plane and now they had to jump out of it from a high altitude. Their lives depended on the lessons of the previous three weeks and if someone hadn't packed his chute properly, he was likely to plummet to his death,as it unfortunately occasionally happened. After every jump, they spent the evening exhausted, packing their parachutes for the following day's jump.

Training jump as depicted in Band of Brothers

Those who made it through the four weeks had their graduation ceremony on Saturday. They received their coveted silver wing badges and were henceforth allowed to “blouse” their trousers: to tuck its ends into their jump boots, when they were  off base.

WWII training video about the structure and parts of a parachute

Depending on their skills and previous job experience some of the paratroopers went into service companies within airborne battalions as cooks, clerks, drivers, mechanics, translators and the like. One special occupation, which required an extra 3 weeks of training, was parachute rigger. Originally, jump school taught not only jumping, but also how to load equipment on a plane and how to inspect, repair and pack chutes. However, as demand for new airborne graduates increased, training time was cut down, and only riggers were given advanced instruction on these topics, while “ordinary” airborne were limited to basic packing and maintenance, which, of course, still put them head and shoulders above most soldiers without such training. H/T to Robert in Cullman