Smokejumpers: The Elite Corps

When a procedure becomes routine, however novel it may have been when first tried, inquiring minds seek new ways to utilize it. Thus, the first airdrop maneuvers, begun in 1925 to deliver food and equipment without parachute to fire fighters of the U.S. Forest Service, had by 1934 developed into experiments in dropping water and chemical bombs to help extinguish forest fires.

This, in turn, led to experiments in parachuting men to fires. David P. Godwin, assistant chief of the Division of Fire Control for the Pacific Northwest Region, who conducted these experiments in 1939, is believed to have been inspired by accounts of German and Russian military personnel who had engaged in mass jumps. His hope was that the parachuting method would reduce the travel time of fire fighters so that fires could be put out while still small.

Godwin later recalled that the first men to jump were professional parachute jumpers. These were quickly followed by two local men of "smoke chaser" experience who had never seen a parachute before. During the two months of experimental work, 58 live jumps were made from altitudes of 1,700 ft. to 7,000 ft. No one was injured in landing, although the men were dropped into mountain meadows and onto slopes and ridges, landing in fir trees as high as 135 ft., in thick stands of pine, and in tall dead snags.

By 1940, the first operational smokejumper crew was organized at the Intercity Airport near Winthrop, Washington. Nine jumps were made that year to going fires at an average cost per fire of $247; the estimated cost if ground crews had been employed would have been $3,500. One of four U.S. Army officers who visited the operation, Major William Cary Lee, later used the Forest Service techniques when he organized the first U.S. paratrooper training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Until 1942 smokejumping activities attracted large numbers of young men for training, but later, when many of them joined the armed forces, most of the manpower was provided by conscientious objectors.

By the end of the 1944 fire season, during which 120 jumpers had fought nearly a hundred fires, the operation had become routine. The Forest Service had successfully developed a technique of fire control that was unique in American forestry and, indeed, in world forestry. It was also adopted by the Department of the Interior for the protection of national parks, public domain lands, especially in Alaska, and tribal forests under the jurisdiction of the Indian Service.

Helicopters then appeared on the scene, their function being to retrieve smokejumpers from remote places and return them to airfields or other points of convenient access. And in 1956 a new technique was introduced. A group of northern California pilots with a fleet of seven biplanes dropped 150,000 gallons of water and fire retardant on 25 fires in the state. During 1959 the fleet, which had grown to more than 100 planes, was able to drop 4 million gallons of retardant chemicals on fires in the western states and Alaska.

Improvement and expansion in the use of fixed-wing airplanes and helicopters continued so that at the end of 1967 the Forest Service had set new records in all phases of air attack on fires. From the first tentative experiments with aerial forest patrol in 1925, aircraft of all kinds had become indispensable working tools of foresters in the United States and Canada. From detection and control of fire, their use had been adapted to detection and control of insect and disease infestation, to mapping and inventorying timber volume, and finally to balloon logging.