1st Parachute Transport Regiment

The youngest of the airborne formations, the 1st Parachute Train Regiment was created from the merger of the Air Delivery Regiment of Metz and the Airborne Mobile Operational Base of Toulouse. In this new configuration, it upholds the traditions of air delivery, those of the air supply companies and the airborne bases of Indochina, which bore the heavy responsibility of ensuring the survival of hundreds of isolated posts in the rice paddies and the limestone hills of the upper Tonkin region, of maintaining the umbilical link with the entrenched camps of Na-San and the Plain of Jars, and which went to the very end of their duty at Diên Biên Phu. These units reappear in North Africa, where their organisation and efficiency, shaped by the Indochinese experience, provoked astonishment and admiration among the British troops engaged alongside the French in the Suez expedition. Back in France, these units formed the Air Delivery Regiment, which primarily supported the FFA and the 1st Army on the Central Europe theatre, and the Mobile Operational Base known to all paratroopers by its abbreviation BOMAP. Oriented more specifically towards external operations, it was synonymous with wide open spaces and adventure on every continent. The restructuring and professionalisation of the French Army led, in 1999, to the creation of the 1st Parachute Train Regiment, a unit belonging to the prestigious 11th Parachute Brigade, adapted to the current format of force projection and intervention missions of the French Army. On every operational theatre — in Africa, Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Central Asia, and in the DOM-TOM — the men of the Parachute Train carry out support and projection missions in the third dimension and are present
« Par le ciel, partout, pour tous ».