Air Assault

Air mobility has been a key concept in offensive operations since the 1930s. Initial approaches to air mobility focused on parachutists and the use of military gliders . During World War II many assaults were done by military gliders. The World War Two era German Fallschirmjäger , Brandenburgers , and the 22nd Air Landing Division glider borne paras laid the foundation for modern day air assault operations.

S. Army quickly adopted this concept of offensive operations initially utilizing wooden gliders before the development of helicopters. Following the war, faster aircraft led to the abandonment of the flimsy wooden gliders with the then new helicopters taking their place. Four YR-4B helicopters saw limited service in the China Burma India theatre with the 1st Air Commando Group In 1943 the Germans conducted the Gran Sasso raid which implemented many aspects of the air assault concept.

Another example was the German Brandenburgers ' glider borne operation at Ypenburg during World War Two. S. Marine General Roy S. Geiger observed the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll and instantly recognized that atomic bombs could render amphibious landings difficult because of the dense concentrations of troops, ships and material at beachheads.

During this time, The Commandant of the Marine Corps , Alexander Vandegrift , convened a special board known as the Hogaboom Board . This board recommended that the USMC develop transport helicopters in order to allow a diffused attack on enemy shores. It also recommended that the USMC form an experimental helicopter squadron. HMX-1 was commissioned in 1947 with Sikorsky HO3S-1s .

In 1948 the Marine Corps Schools came out with Amphibious Operations—Employment of Helicopters (Tentative) , or Phib-31 , which was the first US manual for helicopter airmobile operations. The Marines used the term vertical envelopment instead of air mobility or air assault. HMX-1 performed its first vertical envelopment from the deck of an aircraft carrier in an exercise in 1949. American forces later used helicopters for support and transport to great effect during the Korean War showing that the helicopter could be a versatile and powerful military tool.

First helicopter air assaults The first helicopter airlift and helicopter sling load mission was conducted on September 13, 1951, during the Korean War . " In total seven HRS-1 Marine helicopters made 28 flights that delivered 8,550 kg (18,848 pounds) of supplies and evacuated 74 seriously wounded men. On November 5, 1956, the Royal Marines ' 45 Commando performed the world's first combat helicopter insertion with air assault during an amphibious landing as part of Operation Musketeer , in Suez , Egypt . 14s off HMS Ocean ' s embarked Joint Experimental Helicopter Unit (JEHU) ( Royal Air Force ).

The plan was to use the helicopters to drop No. 45 Commando at Raswa, to the south of Port Said, in order to secure two vital bridges. Last-minute concerns about their vulnerability to ground fire meant that they were replaced in this role by French paratroops who conducted a daring low-level drop on 5 November, securing one of the two bridges intact. Instead No.

45 Commando was landed the following day, disembarking close to the seafront in the aftermath of the seaborne landing that had secured the area. This first-ever operational use of helicopters to land troops during an amphibious assault proved successful. With their carriers lying nine miles offshore, the marines were landed far more quickly than could have been achieved using landing craft, and without the need to get their boots wet. However ...

they landed the marines in much the same place that old style landing craft would have put them. S. Marine Corps Base. One of the ships utilized for this exercise was the USS Thetis Bay .

This exercise was the culmination of the Marines' developing strategy of vertical envelopment rather than amphibious assaults on heavily defended beaches. The maneuvers were well-covered by the media of the time, including LIFE Magazine. The Marine Corps subsequently adopted this method as standard operating procedure after proving that helicopters could be used to transport very large numbers of troops and large amounts of supplies in a timely fashion. Operation Deep Water was a 1957 NATO naval exercise held in the Mediterranean Sea that involved the first units of the United States Marine Corps to participate in a helicopter-borne vertical envelopment operation during an overseas deployment.

S. Army's 1st Cavalry Division conducted the first large scale air assault operation in combat during the Battle of Ia Drang .