Although Col. Albert E. Truby (MC) authored a paper in 1922 conceptualizing airplane ambulances that would undoubtably take medical officers to the site of crashes and bringing casualties from the crashes back to hospitals in the future, it isn’t easy to identify some elusive point in time and say with exactness and without hesitation, “This is where pararescue started prior to the Second World War.
However, there are events, individuals, and organizations that transformed ideas into feasible and viable capabilities. Unfortunately, as most written histories focus on the arrival of an aerial rescue service there are omissions on the development milestones leading to the establishing the USAF enlisted occupation specialty in 1947. A specialty that emerged from specialized volunteer enlisted medical duty assignments that increasingly required training, experience, and abilities that prevented drawing enlisted medics and flight surgeons with the least training and preparation for such duties.
It’s the U.S. Forest Service’s Aerial Fire Control Experimental Project in 1935 that began experiments to determine the feasibility of parachuting into rough mountainous terrain. These efforts were thwarted until 1939 due to factors of belief such activities were too risky and the nature of parachute design and technology prior to 1940.
Consequently 1939 is considered the birth of Smoke Jumping. However, the first actual fire jumps were made on 12 July 1940 by Rufus Robinson of Kooskia, Idaho, and Earl Cooley of Hamilton, Montana, on Martin Creek in the Nezperce National Forest. Three days later the first successful “rescue jump” is made by Smokejumper Chester N. Derry to an airplane crash in the Bitterroot Forest.
It’s also during 1940 that the Army Air Forces sends flight surgeon, Captain Leo Paul Martin, through Smokejumper training in order to parachute for rescue operations. He may have been the first physician trained to do so prior to the 7 December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Although there is no record of him making an actual fire or rescue jump his training marks the initial milestone in rescue jumping.< He perished in a plane crash on 25 October 1942.
The documented training of Captain Leo Paul Martin is the breakthrough event of physicians being trained as parachuting physicians (para-docs) and enlisted medics being trained as parachuting medics (para-medics) in order to parachute to rescue survivors of aircraft forced landings and crashes in remote inaccessible locations along the various long range air ferry routes (Alaska-Siberia-1941, South Atlantic-1941, North Atlantic-1942, the Hump which was initially known as the India China Ferry-April 1942, Middle Atlantic-1943).
It’s not until 1939 that the U.S. Forest Service began directing significant efforts to determine the feasibility and viability of using smokejumpers. It’s during 1939 that census was achieved and the conclusion reached that smokejumpers could land safely in all kinds of timbered, rugged and mountainous terrain at elevations ranging from sea level to 6,800 feet above sea level.