Available now from Scott Evans
What Manner of Men Are These?
Born, Made or Selected?
Britain’s last battalion-sized combat parachute assault took place in 1956. The Parachute Regiment survived. Why?
A former Paratrooper investigates how the Regiment creates its soldiers, whether the belief that Paras are better survives serious examination, and why Britain kept them after the battlefield moved on from the role for which they had been created.
The Question Behind the Maroon Beret
Ask most former Paratroopers whether the Paras are better than ordinary infantry and the answer will rarely arrive wrapped in careful qualifications. Of course we are. That certainty is not a footnote to the Regiment’s story. It is one of the forces that shaped it.
What Manner of Men Are These? Born, Made or Selected? examines where that belief comes from and whether it can be supported by evidence. It begins with the men who volunteer, follows them through P Company and parachute training, and investigates what happens when individual pride becomes a shared identity: the conviction that you cannot stop because the men beside you will not stop either.
It then asks the harder question. If large-scale combat parachuting largely disappeared from British operations after Suez, why did the Parachute Regiment remain? The answer lies not merely in aircraft and silk, but in the kind of soldier Britain believed the selection process produced—and in what those soldiers did when they went to war without parachutes.
What the Book Investigates
Who Volunteers?
Self-selection, motivation and the kind of man drawn towards a public test of endurance.
What Does P Company Prove?
What the tests measure, what they do not, and how shared suffering turns selection into identity.
Are Paras Actually Better?
Operational performance, reputation and comparison with the Royal Marines, Gurkhas and conventional infantry.
Why Keep Them?
From Suez to the Falklands, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kabul: the Regiment’s purpose after the mass combat jump.
Written From Inside—Examined From Outside
Scott Evans served in 3 PARA. He believed the Regiment was better; part of him still does. This book does not pretend that background is irrelevant, but neither does it allow regimental loyalty to settle the argument.
The investigation draws on military history, official records, academic research, operational evidence and the testimony of those who served. It considers the Regiment’s finest performances alongside the occasions when aggression, certainty and institutional loyalty carried a cost. The purpose is not to dismantle the mythology for sport, nor to repeat it because a former Para is holding the pen. It is to discover what can be documented, what remains plausible and what has hardened into folklore.
Read the Research Behind the Book
Begin with the two questions at the heart of the investigation.
Available now
What Manner of Men Are These? Born, Made or Selected? is now available in paperback and eBook from Lulu. The signed collector’s hardback will follow.