I always like reading about airborne paratroopers. Their World War 2 exploits make for amazing tales as we know from Band of Brothers for instance. This book shows how the men who make up the elite corp of paratroopers paved the way for their units in the Cold War. I would highly recommend this for Cold War buffs, military historians, and airborne aficionados.

The Airborne Mafia is a study of the officers and leaders of the U.S. Army who received paratrooper training and their effects on the doctrine and development of the Army as a whole. This follows other books on different groups of military leadership who had some unifying aspect, hence the idea of organized crime, a semi-secret society with its own unique goals, traditions, and rituals, participating within the context of the larger society in which it operates.

It is cleanly written and sourced well, though some of that gets beyond my usual range for verification by dive. The core thesis is that the paratroop ethos, due to the tactical restrictions of the technology (i.e. if you jump from a plane, you end up where you end up), emphasized an omni-disciplinary attitude, interested in fast response with small grouped forces. And the idea is usually born out. This plays out even after sending in infantry by parachute becomes (moderately) technologically obsolete, but the emphasis of mobility via the air (rotorcraft in particular) becomes an increasingly larger part of general doctrine to the point of functional invisibility. The book closes with stories from the closure of Enduring Freedom/Freedom's Sentinel that show the contemporary relevance of the troops, the technology, and the theory.

What is absent is context. This may be a me-problem, or perhaps it is a me-fixation, but the concept of the 'mafia' within organizations, particularly in a government and quasi-government context, is worth study. And while I have seen several books about the different groups, they all tend to present the different factions in the same sort mold of the unorthodox insiders. Like reading early Christian texts, you often have to piece together what someone else was saying based on attacks upon them.

But the contextual problem exists on macro and micro levels. What is described as unique about the Airborne ethos seems not very unique, not if I remember my Thucydides, nor is there much in the way of conterfactuals outside of the general diminishing of the Army as a service branch. In what could have been an existential crisis in the sense of the atomic aspect of the Cold War challenging the use of the status quo of standing armies, the leadership found ways to argue for its continued utility. Linking what was done to the history of those leaders is persuasive, but reservedly so. And it has a sort of unpersuasive quality in terms of some of the wackadoodle sorts of things that these people proposed. Near the end of the book, the author expresses more criticism about the choices, but I feel like any look at some of the points of doctrine misses the forest when there are things like complaints over not invading Vietnam during the First Indochina war.

All this is not a fault of the book. Its topic is exactly what it says on the tin. But as I presume something of a generalist readership to my audience, this is less of a quirky revisionist history and more an extremely cool niche history, contextualizing other broader histories.

My thanks to the author, Robert F. Williams, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Cornell University Press, for making the ARC available to me.

The Airborne Mafia by Robert F. Williams was obtained directly from the publisher and I chose to review it. I was a career long member of The Airborne Mafia, having attended the US Army Airborne school in 1986. I then proudly wore the elite Airborne wings through the next 23 years of service, serving with the 82nd Airborne during Operation Enduring Freedom. This book is a history of the Airborne Corps as seen by most in the Band of Brothers TV series. This book gives the reader the origin, the development, and eventual impact of the small but very effective elite bunch of volunteers as they shape the US military, not just the Army. If you, or someone you buy gifts for is interested in jumping out of perfectly good airplanes with the intent of inflicting mass violence on the enemy, or just interested in military histoory, certainly give this book a read.

4 Stars

I really enjoyed learning about this event in World War 2, it was well researched and worked overall with what I was hoping for. Robert F. Williams did a great job in writing this and showing the research being done in this period of time.