Page 96 - The Chief Culprit
P. 96
13
Soviet Airborne Assault Troops
and Their Mission
In the battles to come, we shall operate on the territory of the enemy. at is prescribed by
our rules.
—C A. I. R, E
C C P,
irborne assault troops are designed for action in sudden, decisive offensive operations.
“ e use of paratroops is pointless unless they are part of an offensive operation,” said
A one military newspaper in 1940. e Field Rules of the Red Army for 1936 (PU-36)
1
states: use of airborne assault troops can only be made in the course of offensive operations
and only in conjunction with regular troops advancing against the enemy.
2
e Soviet Union was the first nation in the world in which airborne assault troops
were created. ey were created in 1930, before Hitler came to power in Germany. Only two
other nations developed airborne troops before World War II: Germany, in 1936, and Italy.
By the beginning of the war Hitler had four thousand parachutists and Italy had trained seven
hundred parachutists.
Stalin took the lead in developing airborne warfare. “By the end of 1933 the Red Army
had one air assault brigade, four mobile paratroops units, twenty-nine separate battalions,
and several companies that altogether numbered about ten thousand men.”
3
At the beginning of the war, the Soviet Union had more than one million trained para-
chutists, according to the official Communist Party newspaper, Pravda, on August 18, 1940.
In light of declassified documents it is clear that this was a deliberate underestimation of the
real number, which arguably was closer to two million parachutists. Never before had the
world seen such large-scale preparations for offensive war. To calm fears of Soviet aggression,
Pravda lowered the number of Russian paratroopers to one million.
In the 1930s, the Soviet Union went through a true parachute craze. In less than two
years (from April 1934 until February 1936), 427,000 parachutists were trained in Ukraine
alone. Not a single city park was without a parachute tower, and a parachutist’s badge became
4
a necessary symbol of manhood for all young men. However, it was not easy to earn it. e
73
