In November 1956, men of 3 PARA jumped onto El Gamil airfield during the Suez Crisis. It was the last British battalion-sized combat parachute assault.
But the Paras survived.
Nearly seventy years later, British soldiers are still volunteering for P Company, carrying logs, milling one another and staggering beneath a weighted stretcher to earn the right to wear the maroon beret. The Parachute Regiment still maintains its airborne identity, even though the kind of mass parachute operation it was created to conduct has largely disappeared from British warfare.
That leaves an obvious question:
Why did Britain keep the Parachute Regiment?
It is the question at the centre of the book I am now researching, provisionally titled What Manner of Men Are These?
Testing What We Believed
This will not be another complete chronological history of the Paras. Those histories already exist, and several are very good. Nor do I want to produce a collection of familiar battle stories in which the Reg inevitably emerges as harder, faster and better than everyone else.
I served in the Parachute Regiment, and I believed we were better. To be honest, part of me still does.
But belief is not evidence.
The book will examine how that belief is created, whether it survives serious comparison and whether it helps explain the continued place of the Paras in the British Army. It will begin with the men who volunteer, follow them through P Company and parachute training, and investigate 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 will also ask the less comfortable questions.
Are Paratroopers demonstrably better soldiers, or are they selected and trained for particular qualities? Better at what—and compared with whom? Does the aggression encouraged by the Reg always produce battlefield effectiveness, or can the same culture become a liability? How much of its reputation rests on measurable performance, and how much has been inherited through stories about Arnhem, Goose Green and Afghanistan?
Paras Without Parachutes
Most importantly, what practical purpose did the Paras serve once large-scale combat parachuting was no longer a realistic part of most British operations?
Part of the answer may lie in what happened after Suez. The Paras continued to be sent wherever Britain needed infantry who could move quickly, operate under pressure and accept a high degree of risk. From the Falklands and Sierra Leone to Iraq and Afghanistan, they repeatedly fought without arriving by parachute.
The aircraft and silk became less important than the kind of soldier the selection process was intended to produce.
That is the argument—but it is not yet the verdict.
I want to test the mythology rather than merely repeat it. That means looking beyond regimental histories and veterans’ memories to official records, academic research, operational evidence and comparisons with formations such as the Royal Marines, the Gurkhas and conventional infantry. It also means separating what can be documented from what is plausible and what has become folklore through years of retelling.
The title comes from Field Marshal Montgomery’s famous description of the men who wore the maroon beret. The book will take his question seriously:
What manner of men are these?
Not what manner of men do they claim to be. Not what does the recruiting poster say. What does the evidence show—and was that enough to preserve the Paras after the battlefield moved on from the role for which they had been created?
That is the book I have started writing. Over the coming months, I will share some of the research, arguments and discoveries behind it here.