THE 82nd AIRBORNE DIVISION

Beautiful sight, isn't it? You've got to look to the skies to see something pretty in war. Isn't much of it in ground fighting. Of course, this scene wouldn't be so pretty with flak in the skies tearing up planes, chewing up parachutes and troopers. Only this is a practice jump. New kids in the post-war 82nd Airborne. Fancy new planes and equipment. Those have changed. For the better, I guess. But one thing hasn't. One thing they can't improve. That's a fighting heart. The will to win. These kids have to have it. So did we when we joined the outfit in 1942. They called it the All-American Division. Because it came from all the states. And made troopers of all kinds of guys. Or maybe it was All-American because we were winners all the time. It was a champion outfit, all right. Back in World War I, the 82nd Infantry Division had shown its stuff when it launched an attack to relieve the famous Lost Battalion. And produced the greatest hero of that war. Sergeant Alvin York. And a great hero of World War II. General Jonathan Wainwright. He was a major then. So these rookies have a fighting tradition to follow. Next, you give them top-flight generals. Omar Bradley, who took over in March 1942 and taught us how to fight on the ground. Matt Ridgway, who came after him in June and showed us how to fight from the air. Yeah, they gave us the best in leaders. And we had a rough time keeping up with them. They trained us. Brother, how they trained us. With running and jumping and climbing and crawling calisthenics rifle range shoot school glider loading practice jumps crash landing. We took it for weeks and months. "Training is continuous," the brass said. Continuous? Hell, it lasted from Fort Benning to North Africa, from Louisiana to the Sahara. We were trained fine. Hard, mean, and mad. When they told us we were the best damn fighting outfit in the world, we believed it. All we had to do was to prove it. Well, we did. At Sicily. In July 1943. The boys who keep the record will tell you now that the Sicily jump was a warm-up. It wasn't like the big ones that came later. In a way, that's true. But don't tell it to the guys in the chute. To them, the Gela jump was a cockeyed roughhouse. As soon as you get out of that pretty silk parachute, you fight like the dope that you are. You slug it out with your gun and your feet. You find it's still a walking war. Especially when you do 150 miles in 6 days. Not strolling down a country lane, either. But pushing back an enemy who was awfully unhappy about giving up even a foot of ground. One lousy little foot. It was a rough initiation. But we'd proved airborne attacks would work. What's more, we'd saved the Allied beachhead. So they threw us in to save another. Jerry was trying to bust up our bridgehead at Salerno in September 1943. We dropped in to argue with him. Found hell on Earth. Artillery fire poured in on us like beer from a bucket. They cut us off. Not for long. We plugged the cracks in our line and started to beat our way toward Naples. We led the way in on October 1st. They told us that officially we occupied Naples for 6 weeks. That's funny. Somehow during those 6 weeks of occupation, we sure did a lot of fighting. We crossed the Volturno River and took Isernia. Colli Macchia Foronelli Cerro Rocchetta Venafro One Italian town after another. Like a Danny Kaye song. There were mountains. And there was mud. Usually both. Of all the propaganda I ever heard, the line that got me sore was the one about Bella Italia. Beautiful Italy. How the hell could mud mud mud be beautiful? Instead of planes, we had mules. And glad to have them, too. The hills made moving supplies tough. And moving the wounded downright murderous. No one had it any tougher than the medics. We spearheaded the Fifth Army's advance till it joined the British Eighth at Mount Sammucro. Then the division was shipped back to the British Isles. Except for one combat team that was sent to a famous beach resort in January of 1944. It was a famous beach resort, all right. Anzio. Only you had no privacy. That beachhead was so small, Jerry could see everything we were doing. And drop a shell anywhere he wanted. See what I mean? It wasn't our style to sit still. We sent out raiding parties to annoy the crowd. But mostly it was trench warfare. Keeping Jerry from pushing us off the beach. It was kind of monotonous. Never too monotonous. The guys from Anzio caught up with the rest of the outfit at Leicester. Those were pleasant days. A chance to relax a little, even though we were getting ready for a new mission. Lots of replacements came in. We gave them so much jump training, they yelled Geronimo when they stepped off the sidewalk. The glider boys kept hustling in and out of their big box kites like well-trained subway sardines. We had a feeling about our next operation. It had the word B I G, big, plastered all over it. Sicily and Salerno had been man-sized fights, all right. But they'd been just preliminary bouts. This one coming up was the main event. When we heard the field orders, we knew we'd guessed right. We were going into France. Into Normandy. Before D-Day. On the night of June 5th. Us and our kid cousin, the 101st. And the British 6th Airborne. Nothing before or after could be more important than this. For the first time, it hit us hard. We were making history. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. Everything moved swiftly and quietly that night. Especially our thoughts. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no We were dropping into the backyard of Hitler's West Wall. Our mission was to keep the Germans from knocking out our troops who were coming in on Utah Beach. It was a big order to think about. But there wasn't much time for thinking when we hit the ground. The jump had scattered our men from hell to breakfast. And we're outnumbered four to one, even after our glidermen joined us. It was a tight spot. But we'd asked for it. That's why we were troopers. We started off by grabbing Sainte-Mère-Église, key point in the German defenses, and the first town in France to be liberated. It was apple blossom time in Normandy, but the only posies Jerry was throwing was mortar and machine gun fire. We had to bleed for every orchard, every field, every hedgerow. For 33 days we fought without relief and without reinforcement. But, we held the Krauts off the beaches and chopped up two of his divisions. We got chopped up some ourselves. Of the 13,000 men of the 82nd who went into Normandy, only 5,000 were left on their feet when they evacuated us July 14th. But, the beachhead was secure. Four divisions were ashore and more were coming, many more. We had done our job. How well we had done it was told by the top man himself. It is to the airborne forces that immeasurable credit for the subsequent success of the Western operation belongs. Back in England, we went into the reserve and relaxed. If you call parading relaxed. Meanwhile, the American and British troops were pouring out of our bridgehead like water from a broken main. By the second week of September they had flooded across all of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and were seeping under Germany's front door on the Siegfried Line, washing up Jerry by the hundreds of thousands. They were beginning to wonder whether those brown hordes were going to roll right over Berlin before we had a chance to jump in. But, we stopped worrying when General Jim Gavin, who followed General Ridgway as boss of the outfit, began to bear down on training. We were getting into the act once more. Only it wasn't Berlin, not yet. The 82nd, the 101st, and the British 1st Airborne were going to drop into Holland. The idea was to use it as a jump-off position for a quick drive to Berlin. We knew how important it was from the way they fixed us up with plenty of everything. We took off September 17th. It was a big show, all right. I guess colossal would really be the word for it. The Air Force had blasted Jerry ack-ack positions for weeks. The weather was with them. Our pilots were right on course. The drops went fine. The glider landings were almost perfect, almost. The Dutch pitched in and helped where they could, even though they suffered, too. There was no mistaking that they were glad to see us. The first few days were easy, easier than anything we had tried. Groesbeek, Grave, Mook were ours for the taking. The Air Corps boys kept us fixed up on supplies pretty well, and the British Guards Armoured Division came rolling along to back us up with the heavy stuff. We were getting along fine till we reached Nijmegen and the big bridge across the lower Rhine. Jerry figured that bridge was pretty important, so he dug in and fought the way Jerry can when he gets his back up. For 3 days we fought to clear the bridge of snipers and secure the other side. It was a dog-eat-dog fight that took the best we had in blood and guts. But, on the fourth day, British armor rolled across the bridge. The Krauts tried hard to get it back. They must have been nuts. No one was taking that bridge away from us. In December, they sent those of us who were left back to France for a rest and to train the rookies. It looked like a good deal until this guy decided to get in the act. For a change, von Rundstedt was doing the attacking, not only attacking, but putting everything he had into it. He was moving in on First Army headquarters and threatening to cut off four American divisions. So, off we went, without winter equipment, overshoes, or shoe packs. In less than 24 hours, the 82nd was moving into position 150 miles away on the northern shoulder of the bulge. Yeah, pretty pictures the snow made, Christmas card stuff. There wasn't much goodwill lying around. It was dirty, bloody, gut-tearing fight. And the cold was worse than the bullets. Sometimes we kept moving ahead because we'd freeze if we stood still. Every medic was a hero in that white hell. There were plenty of heroes, fancy ones. Did you ever hear of Cheneux, where a battalion of our boys ran into a regiment of the crack 1st SS Panzer Division? They had everything, artillery, tanks, self-propelled guns, half-tracks, and flak wagons. We? All we had rifles, bazookas, grenades, and guts. So, we attacked. A battalion against a regiment, doughboys against armor. We won, of course. The Nazi drive was played out. It was our turn. In January 1945, we cracked the Siegfried Line just to start the new year right. Then somebody remembered we were due for a rest. In April we came back to the Cologne area and smashed across the Rhine at Hitdorf in a raid that won a presidential citation. All the Allied Armies were tearing across Germany like Sunday drivers. When we crossed the Elbe at Bleckede, we could see the finish line at last. But, on May 3rd at Ludwigslust, we won the super jackpot in Hein field, 145,000 live ones of the German 21st Army handed to us wrapped in cellophane by their commanding officer, General von Tippelskirch. No wonder our adding machines broke down. Imagine, a division of 15,000 troopers taking in an army, a whole army that had everything, from armor to uh everything. They really scraped both ends of the barrel to keep the war going. But, there was no fight left in these Joes. The Nazi bully had hollered uncle. Well, the war was over. From fighting, we switched to parading. General Eisenhower chose us as the American Honor Guard for Berlin. Yeah, we were a snappy-looking bunch, but we never marched better than we did that day in January 1946 in New York City when General Jim gave us We were a proud and happy bunch, and with reason. Seven campaigns, seven river crossings, four combat jumps, and two glider landings. The folks were proud of us for all that, and proud of us for a bigger reason. The voices that cheered us from the sidewalks of New York were voices that came from all over the country. City voices, country voices, southern voices, western voices, New England voices, American voices. They knew our boys had come from every state, every walk of life, every religion. They knew we had proved to them and to the world that no matter what small differences there were between us, we would march together when we were threatened, that there would always be an all-American division to fight for the American way of life.