r/AskHistorians • u/Gustomaximus • Jul 25 '16
Aerospace Is it true Russian WW2 soldiers were dropped from low flying planes without parachutes into snow?
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u/TexasJaeger Jul 25 '16
If I may ask. Where did you read about this?? I don't find it improbable that it happened considering their situation and ingenuity. I'd love to look into it if it is true!
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u/Gustomaximus Jul 25 '16 edited Jul 25 '16
There is a bunch of people mentioning it when I can across it somewhere and googled it. Try this Google search
Personally it feels like a wives tale or propaganda. But Stalin....so who knows.
Edit: Most legit looking source I found
And impressed I found something that /r/AskHistorians weren't all over already!
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u/TankArchives WWII Armoured Warfare Jul 25 '16
I can find no mention of a Yukov Airborne Operation in Russian or English sources.
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u/nsorlov Jul 25 '16 edited Jul 25 '16
The air dropping of Soviet paratroopers without parachutes can be considered part of the mythology of the war on the eastern front. It probably happened but there is no documentation of it occurring on any appreciable scale, likely being limited to individual acts of heroism and daredevilry by individuals and small groups, not the anecdotally rooted large scale drops that seem to migrate through the series of airborne operations undertaken by the Soviets be it Petsamo, Vyazma, the Dnieper or other smaller operations. If used at all the practice likely found more use in the delivery of agents and liaison officers to partisan groups where the visibility of a parachute was a liability but even then the use of parachutists was the norm.
While the Soviet Airborne Forces were constantly short of transport and airlift capability, there are few if any indications of shortages of parachutes. This lack of airlift capability, even with the advent of lend lease aircraft like the C-47 later in the war, lead to the failure of early war operations and was the key factor in limiting the scope and extent of Soviet airborne operations throughout the war. Early drops were characterized by poor accuracy and high dispersal, Glantz also mentions a high rate of inexperienced crews failing to drop their men entirely, further reducing the efficiency of the operations. The resulting high casualties during these early operations and the forces lack of effectiveness achieving the objectives assigned to them led to their relegation as an elite force in the high command reserve. Overall while often achieving initial success in individual operations, the Soviets realized they lacked the ability to sufficiently reinforce and coordinate the actions of large scale independent airborne forces in the German rear, leading to costly failures in manpower and equipment that were not commensurate with the results achieved by those forces. Far from a lack of parachutes, it was the operational experience of using paratroopers in the constrained conditions faced by the Red Army that lead it to abandon the large scale use of paratroopers and instead concentrate on their use as scouts and partisan liaison forces, as well as an elite infantry reserve.
The idea is pervasive though, even Steven Zaloga mentions the delivery of “some” soldiers from liason aircraft like the Po-2 during resupply operations to encircled Soviet troops involved in the Vyazma operation in February-March 1942 but the practice seems to be anecdotal at best. The liaison aircraft were normally used to deliver bales of supplies and would release them while skimming slowly over open fields, with a stall speed of less than 60 km/h the jump into the snow would likely have been akin to jumping out of the back of a truck moving at the equivalent speed with the impact being not dissimilar to that of many ski accidents experienced by an average downhill skier (olympic downhill skiers average 80+ km/h with peaks exceeding 120+ km/h). In conclusion it may very well have been undertaken by daredevils and brave individuals seeking to enter areas too dangerous to parachute into but its use as a conventional method of troop insertion on any scale seems to be simply mythological.
Zaloga, Steven J. and James Loop, Soviet Bloc Elite Forces Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 1985
Glantz, David M. “The Soviet Airborne Experience” Combat Studies Institute Research Survey No. 4 November 1984 http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/cgsc/carl/download/csipubs/glantz.pdf