Fort Benning was the primary training center for the new US parachute troops, and it is the place where it all started in 1940 with the parachute test platoon. So, its newspaper is a potential trove of information about the training period.

In 2021, I found old issues of the newspaper still available online, although they have apparently moved to another address by now: https://www.benning.army.mil/Library/Bayonet/Index.html. These are immense PDFs and it took me a long time to go through them and filter out all paratrooper related content.

The first issue of those still available is from September 17, 1942. The Bayonet paper looked like this and maintained pretty much the same layout until the end of the war:

As you can see, in the first issue we can already find an interesting paratrooper related article, 26 Canadians Awarded Wings.

This tells us that Canadians also trained parachutists in the US, not only in Great Britain, but also that this was probably only the case for this particular group of 26. It says they returned to Canada to form the nucleus of the Canadian First Parachute Battalion.

The same issue also reports 505^th Parachute Troops To Present Colors Initial Time. Since its activation, this was the first presentation of the colors at a regimental review ceremony, under command of Lieutenant Colonel James M. Gavin.

I have made a selection of clippings of only the paratrooper related articles, but only for 1942-1943, and the file is very heavy.

1944-1945 also looks very promising, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. It’s hard to read from the screen and too many pages to just print everything.

Click here to access all wartime issues of the Fort Benning Bayonet newspaper