The Triple Nickels: Smoke Jumpers of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion

Smoke jumping in the Pacific Northwest has a long and storied history.

The US Forest Service began experimenting with dropping trained fire fighters from the air in the fall of 1939. These first parachute drops were around the slopes and forests of Chelan National Forest, in central Washington, and out of Missoula, Montana the following year. The majority of these first smokejumpers were experienced firefighters and volunteers. In 1940, the first year of operations, just 15 trained smokejumpers were on duty to fight fires across three states.

By 1941, the number of smokejumpers had been slightly increased to 25, with the Service establishing two smokejumper areas for their operations: Region One, out of NineMile Camp on Seeley Lake, which covered Montana and northern Idaho; and Region Six, for fires in Washington and Oregon. By 1945, there were five established smokejumper bases, including the North Cascades base in Winthrop, Washington.

America’s entry into the war had seriously depleted the number of trained smokejumpers: only five returned in the summer of 1942. Both qualified men and parachutes (canopies made of silk) were in short supply and needed replacement for those lost to the war effort.

By 1943, the US Forest Service had added 60 new smoke jumper candidates who were officially with the Civilian Public Service (CPS), with many of these conscientious objectors to the war. Most of the fires encountered were from natural causes, like lightning strikes in remote areas and fueled by dry, combustible timber in the summer months of the fire season.

However, this was not the only fire threat facing the Pacific Northwest.

In a bold offensive move, the Imperial Japanese Army began a series of coordinated attacks against the west coast using balloons that carried both incendiary devices, and explosive mortar shells, with the goal of inflicting both forest fires inside the interior of the United States, and casualties on the ground. Starting on November 3, 1944, approximately 9,000 such balloons were launched from the Japanese island of Hokkaido during the war. These attacks were kept a secret from the American public, after one of the balloons resulted in the death of six people. At least 28 such balloons landed in Washington State, with the first on February 12, 1945, outside of Spokane. All told, there were 342 recorded incidents of balloon strikes throughout the US, Alaska, and Canada.

To help counter these aerial incursions, the US Forest Service coordinated air drops of supplies to spotters looking for these balloons, throughout isolated regions of wilderness in Regions One and Six. Yet more was deemed to be needed, to combat the threat of manmade wildfires from above.

In early 1945, a solution was devised by the US Army, code-named “Operation Firefly.” A total of 300 paratroopers from the 555^th Parachute Infantry Battalion were tasked with protecting the Pacific Northwest to thwart any fires caused by Japanese balloons set adrift. They became part of the 9^th Services Command, in Pendleton, Oregon. Half of the unit remained in Pendleton, while the other half were assigned to Chieko, CA.

The paratroopers who served in the 555^th were black, an elite parachute force that was originally part of the 92^nd Infantry, known as the “Buffalo Soldiers” division of the US Army. The men of the 555^th were called the “Triple Nickels” owing to the numerical designation of their unit, expressed as a combination of three, five-cent “Buffalo Nickels” joined into a triangle. Their official Battalion patch insignia was a snarling Black Panther crouched on a deployed parachute canopy. These soldiers were among the first black paratroopers trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, in the winter of 1943-1944.

The service record of the 555^th PIB assigned to smokejumper duties in the Pacific Northwest was distinguished: in the last year of the war, the group accomplished 1,200 jumps and helped extinguish 36 forest fires. By fate, none of these fires were directly caused by the Imperial Japanese Army’s offensive balloon campaign. Regardless, these men all served with honor on an active home front as a protection force.

While the 555^th protected the homeland from wildfire devastation, it was an effort not without cost. Paratrooper Malvin Brown lost his life as a result of a jump and fall after his chute tangled in a tree, on August 6, 1945. The end of the war soon followed, with Brown the lone fatality of the command during Operation Firefly.

In December 1947, the Triple Nickels were disbanded as a unit, with its paratroopers assigned to other US Army units. Their contribution to firefighting in the Pacific Northwest – and smoke jumping as a vocation – remains to this day.

For more about the history of the smokejumper program, please see the video Smokejumpers: Firefighters from the Sky, produced by the National Smokejumper Association, 2000.