Defeat Into Victory: Battling Japan in Burma and India, 1942-1945

by William Slim

Next morning I assembled Snelling and one or two of his leading air-supply staff officers and explained the position. If we could not get proper parachutes of silk or other special cloth we must make them of what we could get. I believed it possible to make a serviceable supply-dropping parachute from either paper or jute. There are great paper nulls in Calcutta; all the jute in the world is grown in Bengal and most of it manufactured there. I despatched officers forthwith to Calcutta to explore possibilities. The paper parachute, although I still believe it quite practicable, we could not obtain, because the manufacturers could not produce the kind of paper required in the time. With jute we were more fortunate. My assignment officer visited some of the leaders of the British jute industry in Calcutta, told them our difficulty, and asked their help. He warned them that to save time I had sent him direct and that my need was my only authority. I hoped they would be paid, but when or how I could not guarantee. The answer of these Calcutta business men was, ‘Never mind about that! If the Fourteenth Army want parachutes they shall have them!’ And have them we did. Within ten days we were experimenting with various types of ‘parajutes’ as we called them. Some fell with a sickening thud; others had a high percentage of failure. By trial and error we arrived at the most efficient shape and weave for the cloth. In a month we had a parajute that was eighty-five per cent as efficie...