Weapons Development in WWIII 1946 by Ranger Elite
Armored
Vehicle Airdrop Experiment
Military
Air Transport Service Command
Scott
Army Airfield, Illinois
Someone had the bright idea of
parachute-dropping a perfectly good armored vehicle out of a perfectly good
airplane. I think they got the idea from watching the Limeys dropping SAS
jeeps, slung from the underside of Handley-Paige Halifax bombers. Or, they
might have heard of Soviet experiments from the 1930's, where they dropped
small tankettes from low altitude, without parachutes. But it took an American
to perfect the system, to allow for heavier loads, dropped from the internal
load bay of a specially-designed cargo aircraft. This might work...
Everyone was buzzing over the scuttlebutt about
what happened at Muroc: A man traveled faster than the speed of sound. And
furthermore, the rumor was that he was the son of one of their own, their
former commanding general, Brigadier General Robert Olds, who died of chronic
illness back in 1943. But there was another project happening here. One that
involved the transport and air drop of combat vehicles, a feat never before
tried in this manner, under actual combat conditions. Off in the distance, a
flight of four new C-74C Globemaster transport aircraft are being loaded with
three M38A3 Wolfhound armored cars, fitted with turrets from the M24 Chaffee,
and a command jeep, into each aircraft.
The only difficulty they've had, thus far, was
loading the armored cars, which had been fitted with turrets that mounted a
long, high-velocity, 76mm main gun, the same gun installed on the Sherman
Firefly tank. This necessitated that the turrets be turned off-center, to
accommodate the loading of each armored car, up the long wheel ramps, and into
the cargo bays of the aircraft, onto their pallets. Each pallet was equipped
with five cargo parachutes, each parachute measuring 100 feet in diameter,
enough to slow a cargo pallet weighing a little over 10 tons, down to 15 feet
per second. Finally, the loading of all four aircraft was complete and they
began to taxi down the runway. They looked a little heavy rolling down the
tarmac...
Using most of the runway, each bird made it
airborne, and began to wheel around toward the drop zone, some 50 miles away,
in Illinois farmland. Each aircraft flew to an altitude of 30,000 feet before
opening their cargo bay doors, then, one by one, loadmasters clipped the
pallet's master static line clip to the ramp, and pushed each pallet out the
door. As soon as each pallet cleared the ramp, the static lines pulled the
rip-cords for the cargo pallets and deployed the parachutes. As the armored
cars and jeeps fell to earth, another aircraft, carrying the airborne-qualified
armored car crewmen, began dropping them on the drop zone. The airborne armored
car crews immediately found their vehicles and fired them up, and got them
going, in less than twenty minutes. The jumpmasters observing the experiment
were suitably impressed that the crews of an armored car platoon of 12 and
their 3 command jeeps were able to get their equipment and get them going, all
within 30 minutes of aircraft liftoff... But this was an experiment, obviously
improving on what the Brits and the Soviets had done before. We'll see how well
it'll work in actual combat conditions...
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