 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 black in the skies tearing up planes, chewing up parachutes and troopers. Only this is a practice jump. New kids in the post-war 82nd Air Force, 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 produce 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 leadership. And we had a rough time keeping up with them. They trained us. The brother how they trained us was run and jump and climb and fall. 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. 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 jumped with a warm-up. They like the big ones that came later. In a way, that's true. But don't tell it to the guys in the shoot. To them, the Gila jump was a car-guide rough-house. As soon as you get out of that pretty self-parachute, you fight like the dope what you are. You slug it out with your gun and your feet. You find it's still a walking, especially when you do 150 miles in six 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 was one lousy little force. 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. Bound hell on Earth. Artillery fire poured in on us like beer from a bucket. It got 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 six weeks. That's funny. Somehow during those six weeks of occupation, we sure did a lot of fighting. We crossed the Valturno River and took Isernia, Pauli, Machia, Poronelli, Chattel, Roqueta, Venafro, one Italian town after another, like a Danny K. Saw. 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 many. We spearheaded the 5th Army's advance till it joined the British 8th at Mount Samutro. Then the division was shipped back to the British Isle. Except for one combat team that was sent to a famous speech resort in January of 1944. It was a famous speech resort, all right? And you. 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 set out raiding parties to annoy the crowds. 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, with 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 cart 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 Solano had been man-sized fights, all right, but they'd been just preliminary bound, just when coming up as 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 to lie down in green last year. Everything moved swiftly and quietly that night. Especially our thoughts. 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 breath, 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 true. We started off by grabbing Samarit Glees, key point in the German defenses, and the first town in France to be liberated. It was Afroblossom time in Norman, 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 cross 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 belonged. Back in England, we went into the reserve and relaxed. If you call parade and relax. Meanwhile, the American and British troops were pouring out of our bridgeheads like water from a broken main. By the second week of September, they had flooded across all of France, Belgium and Luxembourg. And we're seeping under Germany's front door on the secret line. Washing up Jerry by the hundreds of thousands. We were beginning to wonder whether those brown hogs 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 Ackack's positions for weeks. The weather was withered. Our pilots were right on course. The drops went fine. Lighter landing 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 it. The first few days were easy. Easier than anything we had tried. Gross paint, grout, moat were ours for the taking. The Air Corps boys kept us fixed up on supply pretty well. And the British Guards Armored Division came rolling along to back us up with a heavy stuff. We were getting along fine. Until we reached Nijmegen, 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 three 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 gut. But on the fourth day, British Armor rolled across the bridge. The crowds 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 they trained the rookies. It looked like a good deal. Until this guy decided to get into the act. For a change, Van 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, over shoes or shoe packs. In less than 24 hours, the 82nd was moving into position, 150 miles away. On the northern shoulder of the boat. Yeah, pretty picture the snow made. Christmas card stuff. There wasn't much goodwill lying around. It was dirty, bloody, gut-taring 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 fight, hell. There were plenty of heroes. A fancy one. Did you ever hear of Shenu? Where a battalion of our boys ran into a regiment of the Crack First SS Panzer Division? They had everything. Artillery. Tanks, self-propelled guns, half-cracks and black wagons. We, ah, we had rifles, bazookas, grenades, and guns. So, we attacked. A battalion against a regiment. Go feet against arms. We won, of course. The Nazi drive was played out. It was our turn. In January 1945, we cracked the secret line just to start the new year right. Then somebody remembered we were due for arrest. In April, we came back to the Cologne area and smashed across the Rhine at Hitthorpe in a raid that won a presidential citation. All the Allied armies were carrying across Germany like Sunday drivers. When we crossed the Elbe at Glecky, we could see the finish line at last. But on May 3rd, at Ludwig Fluss, we won the super jackpot in Heine. 445,000 livelins of the German 21st Army handed to us wrapped in cellophane by their commanding officer, General von Tippelskirch. No wonder our adding machine broke down. Imagine a division of 15,000 troopers taking in an army. A whole army that had everything. From armor to 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 parade. 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 in 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. Copyright © BF-WATCH TV 2021