As early as 1917, Winston Churchill supposedly proposed forming entire regiments of infantry that could be dropped by aircraft behind enemy lines, thus ending the harrowing stalemate on the Western Front. He wasn’t the only one with the idea. In fact, the head of the U.S. Army Air Service in the First World War, Billy Mitchell, planned to equip elements of the American 1st Infantry Division with parachutes and drop them from converted bombers near Metz, France as part of a larger offensive against the German lines. Planners envisioned that these ‘sky soldiers’ would be carried aloft on the wings of dozens, even hundreds of aircraft. When the target area was reached, the soldiers would simply slide off the wings at which point their chutes would deploy and they’d drift to the ground ready for battle. The operation, which would have been the first airborne assault in history was slated for February of 1919. The war ended before the plan could be put into action.