August 2 is the day of the Airborne Forces. Voennoye Obozreniye together with Mosgortur and the Museum of Heroes of the Soviet Union and Russia have collected six facts about the Airborne Forces, which every paratrooper knows about
Uncle Vasya's troops
Sometimes the abbreviation of the Airborne Forces is jokingly deciphered as "Uncle Vasya's Troops" in honor of Vasily Fillipovich Margelov - Hero of the Soviet Union, the first commander of the Airborne Forces. He went down in the history of the Russian army as "paratrooper No. 1", although airborne units appeared in the Red Army in those days when the foreman of the machine-gun company Margelov was just starting his way to the commander's heights, and he made his first jump only at the age of 40 age.
The countdown of its history of the airborne troops dates back to August 2, 1930, when the first landing was carried out near Voronezh, in which 12 Red Army paratroopers participated.
Until 1946, the Airborne Forces were part of the Air Force of the Red Army, and from 1946 until the collapse of the Soviet Union they were the reserve of the Supreme High Command, structurally part of the Land Forces of the USSR.
Colonel General (later Army General) Margelov was the commander of the Airborne Forces in 1954-1959 and 1961-1979, and did a lot to ensure that the landing troops became a real elite of the USSR armed forces. It was under Margelov that the landing party received such external attributes that distinguish it, such as blue berets and vests.
Airborne emblem
The well-known emblem of the Airborne Forces with a large open parachute flanked by two planes appeared in 1955, when, on the initiative of Margelov, a competition for the best sketch was announced. Most of them were carried out by the paratroopers themselves, as a result, more than 10 thousand jobs were accumulated.
The winner was Zinaida Bocharova, the head of the drawing department of the headquarters of the Airborne Forces, a woman who devoted most of her life to the Airborne Forces.
She was born and raised in Moscow in the famous "Chkalovsky" house on the Garden Ring, where her neighbors were legendary aviators Valery Chkalov, Georgy Baidukov, Alexander Belyakov, composer Sergei Prokofiev, poet Samuil Marshak, artists Kukryniksy, violinist David Oistrakh.
Zinaida Bocharova graduated from the theater school with a degree in make-up artist, worked for some time in the theater, painted a lot, but her main creation was the landing emblem.
Striped vest
Since in the pre-war years the Airborne Forces were part of the Air Force, the personnel wore a flight uniform, caps with a blue band and blue buttonholes. During the Great Patriotic War, the paratroopers were transferred to a combined-arms uniform. The blue color of the lining returned to the Airborne Forces only in 1963 at the initiative of Margelov.
Vasily Filippovich himself wore a vest instead of a body shirt from the end of 1941, when he was appointed commander of the 1st Special Ski Regiment of sailors of the Red Banner Baltic Fleet. Fighting on land along with the Baltic, he repeatedly witnessed the courage of the sailors, who trumped their belonging to the navy. Winged expression "We are few, but we are in vests!" during the war it was known throughout the country.
It is not surprising that, having become the commander of the Airborne Forces, Margelov tried to instill in his paratroopers the understanding that the "winged infantry" is a special type of troops. The general did not forget about the role of the vest.
In the second half of the 1960s, Margelov conceived to make it an obligatory item of uniform for paratroopers, but at first the then Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, Admiral Gorshkov, seriously opposed this. The admiral believed that the vest should belong only to sailors - they were worn in the navy since the middle of the 19th century. In the end, we agreed on a compromise option, and to this day the "vests" of the Airborne Forces and the Navy differ in color - the paratrooper has a white and blue vest, and the sailor's - white and blue.
Officially, the vest entered the paratrooper's wardrobe only in 1969, but in fact by that time it had already been part of the tradition for a dozen years, according to which it was given to a recruit after the first jump. According to another tradition, graduates of the Ryazan Higher Airborne School, which in 1996 received the name of General of the Army Margelov, to this day wear a giant vest annually on the monument to Sergei Yesenin on the city embankment.
After the 1990s. The vests have also infiltrated other types of troops, and their palette has expanded significantly - the Presidential Regiment of the FSO of Russia received cornflower-blue stripes, the Coast Guard of the Border Guard Service - light green, the National Guard - maroon, the Ministry of Emergency Situations - orange.
Beret
This headdress, at the time of its appearance in the Red Army in 1936, was exclusively for women - dark blue berets were part of the summer uniforms of female military personnel, as well as students of military academies.
In the 1960s, the beret became part of the guise of elite soldiers and officers, and the first was the Marines, which received the black beret in 1963.
The beret appeared at the paratroopers in 1967 at the suggestion of a veteran of the "winged infantry", General Ivan Ivanovich Lisov, who was a friend and for a long time Margelov's deputy. The commander of the Airborne Forces supported Lisov's initiative and managed to push through the innovation in the Ministry of Defense.
Initially, three color options were considered - green (as a protective one), crimson (because in the armies of a number of countries, crimson or chestnut berets were adopted from the landing party) and blue (as a symbol of the sky). The first option was rejected immediately, the second was recommended as an element of the dress uniform, the third - for everyday wear.
For the first time, the paratroopers put on berets at the parade on November 7, 1967, and these were crimson berets. Then the vest made her debut. A year later, the Airborne Forces began to massively switch to sky-colored berets. Finally, by order No. 191 of the USSR Minister of Defense of July 26, 1969, the blue beret was approved as a ceremonial headdress for the Airborne Forces.
Later, the beret became part of the uniforms of tankers, border guards, servicemen of the internal troops and special forces, but the blue beret of a paratrooper and to this day stands alone in this row.
Rugby - the game of the Soviet landing
The Soviet "landing party" also had its own military sport. It is known that Margelov was skeptical about the inclusion of team ball games in the training program for paratroopers. Neither football, nor volleyball, nor basketball were suitable for this, in his opinion. But one day in 1977, when the commander of the Airborne Forces was in the Ferghana division, he came across an English film about rugby in the Officers' House there. History did not retain the name of the picture, but what he saw - and on the screen, tall, stocky athletes mutuzzi each other, trying to deliver a ball of an unusual shape to the goal through the palisade of the arms, legs and bodies of the enemy - the general liked. On the same day, he ordered to get some rugby balls and send them to the Airborne Forces.
So the sport of English gentlemen became the game of the Soviet paratroopers. In the apartment-museum of Margelov, a rugby ball with the autographs of the first national team of the Airborne Forces is still kept.
28 lines and parachute ring
“The life of a paratrooper hangs on 28 slings,” says one of the many aphorisms of the Airborne Forces. Most of the parachutes of the armed forces had such a number of lines, which after the Great Patriotic War received the letter "D" ("landing"), and in the slang of the paratroopers - the nickname "oak". The last in this series was the D-5, which appeared in the army in the 1970s. and remained in service until the late 1980s.
The D-5 was replaced by the next-generation D-6 parachute, which already had 30 lines. At the same time, they were still numerically numbered from 1 to 28, and two pairs received an additional letter designation. So the aphorism can be attributed to this modification.
Now in the Airborne Forces, the D-10 parachute is more often used. In addition to increasing controllability, modern parachutes significantly exceed the old ones in weight: if the D-1 weighed 17.5 kg, then the D-10 - no more than 11.7 kg.
Another paratrooper aphorism, "A paratrooper is three seconds an angel, three minutes is an eagle, and the rest of the time is a draft horse," talks about the stages of a parachute jump (free fall, descent under the canopy), as well as the preparation that precedes the jump. The jump itself is usually performed at an altitude of 800 to 1200 m.
The paratroopers love to say that they are "betrothed to heaven." This poetic metaphor comes from the fact that a parachute is inconceivable without a ring that opens the canopy. True, the parachute rings have long lost the shape of a perfect circle and are more like a parallelepiped with rounded corners.
