British paratroopers of 2 PARA disembark an RAF A400M during Exercise Wessex Storm. The Paras remain the British Army's rapid response spearhead. (Ministry of Defence, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Parachute Regiment: How the Paras Became Britain's Elite Airborne Infantry

They are the soldiers in the maroon berets, the ones who drop from the sky into the middle of a fight. For more than 80 years the Parachute Regiment, known to everyone in Britain simply as the Paras, has been the British Army's spearhead: the infantry called on when the mission needs men on the ground fast, and when there is no margin for failure.

From a daring raid on a German radar station in 1942 to the desperate fighting around Goose Green in 1982 and the long campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the regiment's history reads like a catalogue of the British Army's hardest wars. This is how an improvised wartime experiment became one of the most famous fighting units in the world.

Born from a wartime gamble

Britain had no paratroopers when the Second World War began. Watching German airborne troops play a starring role in the Battle of France, Winston Churchill directed the War Office on 22 June 1940 to investigate creating a corps of 5,000 parachute troops. It was an idea built on envy and urgency.

No. 2 Commando was selected for the first parachute training, and a Parachute Training School was established at Ringway, near Manchester. On 21 November 1940 the unit was redesignated the 11th Special Air Service Battalion, and the hard business of learning to fall out of the sky began. Recruits went through a twelve-day course that started with jumps from a converted barrage balloon and finished with five descents from aircraft. Those who passed earned the maroon beret and their parachute wings.

The first British airborne operation, Operation Colossus, followed on 10 February 1941, when paratroopers dropped onto the Tragino aqueduct in southern Italy. It was a small affair, but it proved the concept. The regiment itself was formally created on 1 August 1942, and by the end of the war it would grow to 17 battalions, with three more serving alongside the British Indian Army.

First blood: Bruneval and the Red Devils

The operation that put the new force on the map was the raid on Bruneval. On the night of 27-28 February 1942, C Company of the 2nd Parachute Battalion, commanded by Major John Frost, parachuted into occupied France and seized key components of a German Wurzburg radar, a prize of enormous value to Britain's scientists. The raid was a complete success and convinced the War Office that airborne forces were worth the investment.

When the 1st Parachute Brigade was sent to North Africa, it fought with the ferocity that would define the regiment. In the brutal fighting around places like Oudna and Tamera in Tunisia, the German troops facing them gave them a nickname that stuck: the Red Devils. The maroon beret, chosen for the force by Major-General Frederick Browning, had become a symbol the enemy recognised and feared.

Sicily, Normandy and Arnhem

The Paras took part in six major parachute assault operations during the war, in North Africa, Italy, Greece, France, the Netherlands and Germany, often landing ahead of every other Allied soldier. They fought at Primosole Bridge in Sicily and in the grinding campaign up Italy. In Greece, they earned the battle honour Athens.

On D-Day, 6 June 1944, the 6th Airborne Division went into Normandy in the hours before the seaborne landings. The 9th Parachute Battalion, under Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, assaulted the Merville Battery in a ferocious close-quarter fight. The same division's glider-borne infantry, men of the 2nd Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry under Major John Howard, captured the Pegasus Bridge intact, the coup de main that stopped German armour reaching the invasion beaches.

Then came Arnhem, the battle that entered legend. In September 1944 the 1st Airborne Division, commanded by Major-General Roy Urquhart, dropped into the Netherlands as part of Operation Market Garden, with orders to seize the bridges over the Rhine. John Frost's 2nd Parachute Battalion fought its way to the northern end of the Arnhem road bridge and held it for four days against overwhelming German forces, while the rest of the division was gradually encircled.

It was a defeat, but one fought with such stubborn courage that the memory of it still defines the regiment. Of roughly 10,000 men who went into Arnhem, around 1,200 were killed and more than 6,500 were taken prisoner. A bridge too far, in Cornelius Ryan's phrase, but the Paras had shown the world what they were.

The war ended with Operation Varsity in March 1945, the Rhine crossing, the largest single-day airborne drop in history, with the 6th Airborne Division dropping alongside the US 17th Airborne Division into Germany itself.

From Suez to the Falklands

Peace brought cuts. The regiment was reduced to three regular battalions, and by the 1950s the Paras were a brigade-sized force again. But they stayed busy. In November 1956, during the Suez crisis, 3 Para jumped onto the El Gamil airfield in Egypt, the last time British troops made a combat parachute drop.

The following decades took them to Cyprus, Borneo and Aden, where 3 Para fought in the Radfan mountains, and to repeated tours in Northern Ireland. That record includes a dark chapter: on 30 January 1972, soldiers of the 1st Battalion opened fire during a protest march in Derry, killing 13 civilians that day, with a fourteenth man later dying of his wounds. The Saville Inquiry, which reported in 2010, concluded the shootings were unjustified.

Then, in 1982, came the war that restored the regiment's wartime reputation. When Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, 2 and 3 Para were sent south with the task force. At Goose Green on 28-29 May, 2 Para fought a brutal day-long battle against dug-in Argentine positions, losing its commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel H. Jones, who was killed leading an attack on an enemy position. Jones was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. At Mount Longdon, Sergeant Ian McKay of 3 Para won a second posthumous Victoria Cross in another savage night action, and 2 Para took Wireless Ridge in the final days before the Argentine surrender. Goose Green, Mount Longdon and Wireless Ridge are now among the regiment's most prized battle honours.

The modern Paras: Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond

The Paras never stood still for long. They served in the Balkans and Kosovo in the 1990s, were among the first into Sierra Leone in 2000, and went to Iraq in 2003, where they earned the battle honour Al Basra. In Afghanistan they fought some of the hardest battles of the entire campaign: 3 Para's 2006 tour in Helmand, 2 Para in 2008, and 3 Para again in 2010-11, all of them testing the regiment's reputation for aggressive, close-quarter fighting.

Today the regiment has three regular battalions and a reserve battalion. The 1st Battalion provides the infantry core of the Special Forces Support Group, under the command of the Director Special Forces. The 2nd and 3rd Battalions are the parachute infantry of 16 Air Assault Brigade Combat Team, the Army's rapid response formation, based with much of the brigade at Merville Barracks in Colchester. The 4th Battalion is the Army Reserve battalion, feeding trained paratroopers into the regular force when needed.

Getting in is still famously hard. Recruits must pass P Company, the pre-parachute selection course at Catterick, a gruelling series of physical tests designed to weed out anyone who might fold under pressure, before they even start parachute training. Those who make it earn the maroon beret, the Pegasus cap badge showing Bellerophon riding the winged horse, and the motto Utrinque Paratus: ready for anything.

Alongside the five regiments of Foot Guards, the Paras are the only British infantry regiment that has not been amalgamated with another unit since the Second World War, a mark of how jealously the Army guards what the regiment stands for.

Why the Paras still matter

The British Army describes the Paras as the spearhead of the UK's rapid intervention strategy, trained to deploy by parachute, helicopter or on foot at very short notice, anywhere in the world. In an age of long-range missiles and drones, the idea of dropping light infantry into hostile ground can look old-fashioned. The regiment's answer is that no technology removes the need for disciplined infantry willing to close with the enemy, and that airborne forces give the government options no other unit can: speed, shock and a political signal that Britain means business.

Whether the next fight is a humanitarian evacuation, a NATO reinforcement or another war like Helmand, the plan is the same as it was in 1940. Get there first, hit hard, and hold on until the rest arrive. That is what the Red Devils were made for.

Related

• Last British Troops Leave Iraq as Decade-Long Anti-IS Mission Ends (the Paras served in Iraq in 2003, earning the battle honour Al Basra)
• The Victoria Cross: How Britain's Highest Gallantry Award Came to Be (H. Jones and Ian McKay won posthumous VCs with the Paras in the Falklands)
• Three Tankers Struck by Unknown Projectiles in Strait of Hormuz, UKMTO Reports (Britain's continuing global military posture and the rapid-response role)

Sources

• British Army, official Parachute Regiment page, army.mod.uk
• Parachute Regiment (United Kingdom), Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org (formation, campaigns, battle honours; cross-checked against cited regimental and Army sources)
• GlobalSecurity.org, Parachute Regiment, globalsecurity.org (formation and post-war structure)
• British Army Units 1945 On, Parachute Regiment chronology, british-army-units1945on.co.uk (post-1945 postings and formations)