National Affairs: Snowdrop

The mercury stood at two below zero one morning last week at Pine Camp, the U.S. Army’s 107,000-acre training area in northern New York. Three feet of snow blanketed the terrain, dotted with scrub pines. At H-hour, 11:30 a.m., 15 potbellied Fairchild Packets roared overhead, a scant 800 feet over the snow.

Then parachutes, white, red, green, blue and yellow, blossomed beneath the planes and the air was filled with men, guns and gear. For the next two days the paratroopers established an “airhead” against a theoretical enemy who had theoretically overrun the northeast.

It was the biggest oversnow airborne maneuver in Army history, the climax of “Exercise Snowdrop,” latest in the Army’s continuing research into the best way of fighting an Arctic war (others: Task Forces Frigid, Frost, Williwaw in Alaska, Wisconsin and the Aleutians). The jump was made by 500 men of the 505th Airborne Battalion Combat Team, a unit of the Army’s famed 82nd Airborne Division.

Observers wondered whether the Army was any better set to fight a cold war than it had been before. Movement was slow. Clothing, equipment, chutes and arms made 300-lb. sloths of average-sized men. The heaviest artillery dropped was 75-mm. cannon, and it was set up too slowly by numbed fingers. Firepower would have to be heavier, said the experts, and it would have to be parachuted down in one piece.

The exercise had its comic aspects. One load of supplies was dropped wide of its mark. When the local citizenry started to make off with it, the 505th’s commander, Lieut. Colonel Robert Wienecke, hopped into a helicopter and went after them. He hovered ten feet in the air over one man who was dragging a bundle to his car, rose in his seat and trumpeted: “Go put that back.” The “liberator” obeyed.

There was nothing comic, however, about the conclusions reached by qualified observers. New York Times Military Analyst Hanson Baldwin found that, while the exercise proved the feasibility of limited, small-scale operations over snow-covered terrain, large-scale transpolar military expeditions would be “virtually impossible.” Wrote he: “The difficulties of mass airborne operations in subzero weather are so major that they may never be solved.” Mars, like a brass monkey, could not stand intense cold.