75 years ago today, 23,400 Allied paratroopers stepped out of aircraft into the skies over Normandy, France to join the nearly 133,000 Allied troops storming the beaches. The Allied invasion of Europe, Operation Overlord, had begun; within a year of D-Day, the Nazis would be defeated and the war in Europe would be over. But the airborne troops who parachuted into France on D-Day might not have been equipped for the task if a woman in Connecticut hadn't made her own jump two years earlier.
Adeline Gray, at just 24 years old, already had stories to tell. She had spent the years before World War Two as a barnstorming pilot and a a stunt parachutist -- possibly the only woman in the U.S.who could claim that title in the 1930s. She also ran a parachuting school. In 1942, she worked for the Pioneer Parachute Company as a parachute rigger and tester, responsible for inspecting and packing parachutes. Lives were in Gray's hands, and she understood that better than most.
Gray's employer had recently joined forces with a chemical company called DuPont to work on an important research project for the war effort. Most parachutes in the early 1940s were made of silk, which had turned out to be lighter and stronger than cotton. But in 1941, the U.S. found itself at war with its only silk supplier, Japan. The war cut off a booming trade in silk; the Japanese industry told $70 million worth of material a year to the U.S. just for stockings, never mind parachutes. In 1942, six months into a world war, the U.S. desperately needed material for parachutes -- not just for a paratroopers, but to give pilots and air crews a fighting chance of survival if the enemy shot them down.
DuPont's chemists had invented a newfangled synthetic fiber called nylon, and the company thought it might work well for parachutes. Nylon was strong, light, and didn't tend to mildew, which made it a good fit for military use. But it was a completely new kind of material, developed in the company's labs in 1931 and only sold to stocking manufacturers since 1938. By 1942, DuPont, Pioneer, and a silk manufacturer called Cheney Brothers Company had designed a parachute and tested it by dropping weights out of airplanes, but it wouldn't be ready to enter military service until it had been tested by a real live human parachutist.
Adeline Gray volunteered. On June 6, 1942, she calmly stepped out of a plane over Brainard Field near Hartford, Connecticut, trusting her life to a not-entirely-proven parachute made from a material mostly used for women's stockings. She landed flawlessly in front of 50 senior military officers. The parachute worked, and the U.S. military had a replacement for Japanese silk.
Before the war, DuPont sold about 90% of its nylon fibers to stocking manufacturers; by the end of 1942, the U.S. military was buying up nearly all the nylon the company could produce. Most of it went into parachutes or cords to reinforce tires on military vehicles, but it also found its way into flak jackets and glider tow ropes (like the nearly 2600 deployed in Operation Market Garden in September 1944) and aircraft fuel tanks, as well as more mundane but essentially uses like shoelaces, mosquito nets, and hammocks.
And exactly two years later, on June 6, 1944, nylon parachutes helped drop Allied paratroopers onto the soil of France. It's likely that most of those men had never heard of Adeline Gray, but her courage and competence -- and the hard work of many other civilians and military support personnel -- had helped get them there. Now the fate of the world was up to them.
