George Siggs remembers that every Tuesday a “fat little sergeant” would kick open the door to the barracks.

“Any volunteers for the paratroopers?” he’d ask. A buddy leaned over one day and said, “Come on, Siggs, let’s do it.”

Siggs remembers three feet of snow outside, the wind at the barracks door and a cold, wet first jump over the airfields a few weeks later. He was fresh out of basic training and on his way to Camp Shilo in Manitoba. It was February 1943.

Siggs was one in several waves of new recruits to the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion. For their training, they completed five jumps, logged 35- and 80-kilometre marches in full battle dress and regular 16-km runs in their combat boots.

The next year, the newly formed battalion would serve with the British Army’s 6th Airborne Division. Theirs was among the first Canadian units to engage the Germans in the early hours of D-Day, June 1944 as Allied forces stormed Nazi-occupied France.

In the 1945 push for Victory in Europe (VE) Day, the Canadian paratroops would play an instrumental role in one of the largest airborne operations of the Second World War – that was Operation Varsity, which saw them jump over the Rhine River into Nazi Germany and race the Russians for the port of Wismar on the Baltic Sea.

But in 1943, Siggs, barely 19 years old, still had to learn to jump out of a plane and parachute into battle.

Siggs remembers the training. Red light: stand up, hookup. Green light: go.

The troops leaned out the aircraft door at a 45 degree angle so the slipstream would turn them.

“You could always smell the gasoline. You jumped out. There was a rush of wind, the chute opened and nothing but silence.”

Some men in the paratroops figured they should “hang loose, like you’re dead” and maybe the snipers wouldn’t single them out. But in training Siggs and his paratroop buddies would holler back and forth to each other, guessing who would hit the ground first.

Siggs says the heights didn’t scare them.

“When you’re up in a plane, there’s no sensation of heights. It’s scarier to stand on the side of a building.”

IT FELT LIKE FALLING 90 MILES AN HOUR

In 1943, Denis La Boissiere had a tougher time making it into the paratroops.

He was too light, maybe less than 125 pounds. But when a sergeant saw him in a barracks boxing match in Nova Scotia he pulled the 18-year-old aside.

“I see you want to go into the paratroops. You’re still too light.”

“I still want to go,” La Boissiere said.

“Well, seeing as you like to fight, I’ll send you to Winnipeg and they can do what they want with you.”

So he was in. And it was an honour to volunteer, La Boissiere remembers. One airborne creed, laid out by the famous field marshall Bernard Montgomery said as much: “What manner of men are these who wear the maroon beret? They are, firstly, all volunteers and are toughened by hard physical training . . . They have ‘jumped’ from the air and by doing so have conquered fear.”

La Boissiere and his fellow paratroopers had reasons to be afraid, even if their creed characterized them as “aggressively optimistic.”

Strapped with sometimes 100 extra pounds – a three-inch mortar barrel, 10 bombs, extra ammunition, a 24-hour ration pack – it felt like plummeting for the ground at 90 miles per hour, he says.

In one training jump La Boissiere remembers feeling like he was falling too fast, even after the chute opened. He looked up, saw the sky showing through patches in the cloth. His feet just grazed a medic truck and he slammed into the ground.

He held up his chute and it was all torn up, “like a bad stocking.”

But his friend Monty Marsden saw much worse in battle the next year, when the Canadian paratroops jumped over the Rhine River into Germany.

He hit the ground, cut his chute and started running for cover, but a bullet hit him in the leg.

He took cover in a shell hole. A glider packed to the teeth with ammunition nearly took his head off. It crashed nearby and German fire hit the wreck. “It was like the 24th of May all over,” says Marsden, who was rescued by a British medic.

He spent the next six months in field hospitals.

All three men avoided a grim casualty rate.

“Ten per cent was the normal casualty rate (for soldiers in the Second World War),” says serving infantry officer and adjunct professor at Royal Military College, Dr. Bernd Horn. He’s also 1st Battalion historian and co-author of Paras Versus the Reich (Dundurn, 2003). “For paratroops (the casualty rate) was about 30 per cent – so you were three times more likely to get killed or injured in the paratroops.”

High-velocity jumps and tenuous landings contributed to those grim numbers, Horn says, as did the role of the paratrooper – an agent of confusion and offence behind enemy lines.

“(Paratroopers) dropped into enemy territory. They didn’t have the support they normally would. They didn’t have tanks . . . they could carry only what they could take on their backs. If the force didn’t link up in 48 to 72 hours, they would be in a desperate situation.”

JUMPING OVER THE RHINE

Sixty-six years after they trained to be paratroopers, Marsden, Siggs and La Boissiere gather at the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 118 in North Vancouver one early spring day in 2009. Showing their wings, they wear their battalion association dress uniform, maroon jackets and the signature maroon beret of the Canadian paratroops.

Edmonton filmmaker Dixon Christie has come through town in an ambitious cross-Canada tour to interview Canadian paratroops, from Siggs’, La Boissiere’s and Marsden’s 1st Battalion through seven decades of engagement.

“We need to capture this story and preserve it,” explains Christie.

Two of the veteran paratroopers from the 1st Canadian Battalion passed away recently, leaving La Boissiere as the only paratrooper at the North Van Legion, he says.

“There aren’t many of us left,” says Siggs.

Christie interviews them one at a time in tight close-up.

In their stories the Operation Varsity engagement over the Rhine River looms up large, like the onrushing patchwork of mortar-bombed fields might look to a paratrooper, chuting into action.

The paratroopers had to jump behind German lines to destroy German defensive positions and support the crossing of the river by a later wave of troops that would surge into Germany and continue the invasion.

George Siggs remembers sitting in the belly of the DC-3 plane, the engine thundering. Marsden was behind him in another plane, German fire rocking the fuselage.

He remembers thinking he’d be “better off” parachuting for cover.

“I was concerned, but I can honestly say I wasn’t afraid,” Siggs remembers.

He knew the training would kick in. He’d lean out of the plane, plunge forward, count, “one-thousand, two-thousand, three-thousand,” and the chute would pull like a brick wall. He’d play dead to avoid drawing sniper fire. Hit the ground. Grab his equipment. Cut the chute and get to the rendezvous point.

But when the chute pulled, he felt the 60-pound mortar barrel drag at his leg, tangled by the force of the slipstream. That was bad. Normally he’d lower the kit on a 14-foot rope and hit the ground lighter. But the rope was tangled, and he was set to land strapped with his gear. The impact would mangle his leg.

He pulled the rope up, bullets whizzing by his face, pulled the quick release, and hit the ground safely two seconds later.

Siggs made it to the rendezvous point. Meanwhile Marsden was wounded in that shell hole.

La Boissiere came through on foot with other ground troops, and the 1st Battalion raced for the Baltic Sea and VE Day.

It was the last jump of the war for the Canadian paratroopers.

WREATHS AT THE CENOTAPH

It’s a grey afternoon – October 2009 – in Lynn Valley.

Denis La Boissiere fills out his donation card for the Vancouver Poppy Fund. For more than three decades he has laid out a wreath for the 1st Battalion in Remembrance Day ceremonies including the Cenotaph in Vancouver’s Victory Square.

The Paratroopers Association awarded him twice for his outstanding service to paratroops veterans, according to plaques in his home. He keeps those with his Queens Medals – from 1952 and 2002, his Canadian Parachute badge, a milky, colour-touched photo of himself at 18, smiling in his maroon beret.

In recent years the 85-year-old finds it tough to stand in the cold at Victory Square on Remembrance Day. This Nov. 11 he’ll ask George Siggs to place his wreath for him. Their friend Monty Marsden will be visiting veterans in care facilities around Mission and Chilliwack.

They could have fought shoulder to shoulder, but the three didn’t meet until after the war, when they began attending reunions though their Battalion Association.

“If you knew someone who was a paratrooper, well, we were kind of a brotherhood,” explains Marsden. “It’s a family type thing. You could rely on the next person. They could rely on you. He could do anything for you and you could do anything for him. It’s a very close knit brotherhood.”

kmcmanus@northshoreoutlook.com