Major historical events overshadow everything else, and many exciting and remarkable details disappear. In this regard, we are considering one of them, namely the training by Italy of a contingent of Libyan paratroopers.
The event took place before the Second World War, when the Italian ruler of Libya, Italo Balbo, decided to train a detachment of Libyans into paratroopers and use them, especially in the face of the British army stationed in Egypt.
The parachute school in Libya was established on March 22, 1938, and its Libyan graduates were called “Askar al-Sama”, and the Italians called them “black devils”, and they were under the direction of Lieutenant Colonel Goffredo Tonini.
Two days after this move, the first battalion of paratroopers under the command of Major Enrico Dondini was formed in the Italian armed forces, called “Fante dellaria”.
Established at a military airport adjacent to Tripoli Airport, all the members of this school were Libyans, and its graduates, who formed the Airborne Infantry Battalion, became part of the first paratroopers of the Italian army.
The first practical training of these pioneer Libyan paratroopers took place in 1938 in the Green Mountain region in eastern Libya, after they were trained in Tripoli under the supervision of Italian officers and non-commissioned officers, and 800 Libyan paratroopers participated in them. this airdrop.
The landing of the Libyan paratroopers took place after only four weeks of preparation, with all members of the battalion being landed using 24 Savoia Marchetti SM-81 aircraft, and the night landing was carried out later as an experiment that no similar military unit had. ever tried.
First Libyan paratrooper killed in drill revealed
Italian sources report that while the exercise was technically successful, in those first weeks it resulted in the deaths of 15 Libyan paratroopers and one Italian officer, Lieutenant Instructor Giuseppe Pestelli, as well as the injury of 72 other Libyan trainees.
The first casualty of trained Libyan paratroopers was Mohammed bin Ali Ogashi, and more than twenty Libyan Askar al-Sama paratroopers were killed in landing exercises conducted before the outbreak of World War II.
Continuing the preparations for the landing, the Italian army greatly improved skydiving from aircraft, and parachute jumping techniques were also developed, and a specific aviation pattern was adopted for aircraft to avoid paratroopers colliding with other aircraft during flight. jumping.
This unit of Libyan paratroopers, trained in anticipation of any war with the British Army in Egypt, was not used in combat as paratroopers against the Allies, unlike their Italian officers and non-commissioned officers in the “air infantry”, and these Libyan paratroopers were used on the ground in the fighting on the border with Egypt in 1941, many of them were killed, and the rest were captured in December 1942 after the victory of the British under the leadership of Montgomery over Italian and German troops at the Battle of El Alamein.
Source: RT
