I don’t think he meant it just as a figure of speech either.
On that subject - I found this little gem that reminded me about the Russians:
In the early twentieth century, parachute silk was rare in the Soviet Union, so the military conducted dubious experiments with air-dropping soldiers into deep snow without parachutes. In 1930, the Grokhovskiy Special Design Bureau experimented with dropping “air buses” full of troops: the bicycle-wheeled G-45 onto land, and the amphibious “hydro bus” into water. When the hydro bus disintegrated on landing, the chief designer and his assistant were strapped into the G-45 for a test drop; they survived, but the project was cancelled (Zaloga 1984:192).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_tank