 United States Army present picture. An official report produced for the armed forces and the American people. Now to show you part of the big picture, here is Sergeant Stuart Queen. This is an enlarged replica of the United States Army's Fourth Infantry Division patch, or the Fighting Fourth, as it is proudly known. As you can see, the insignia is in the form of four ivy leaves in a diamond. The number four, when written in Roman numerals, appears as ivy or ivy. So the fourth division has often been called the ivy division. In World War I, the German soldiers who encountered them referred to the fourth as those fighters who wore the ivy leaves. In this issue of the big picture, we turn our attention to the fourth division. Historically, the fourth has a magnificent record in two world wars. And its current role is even more vital. The fourth is now part of STRAC, the Strategic Army Corps. The fourth is based at Fort Lewis in Western Washington State. But as a STRAC unit, it is ready to move if called upon to any part of the globe, the entire division, or any of its component parts. STRAC is the United States Army's answer to brush fire trouble spots, to the need for quenching such fires before they spread. The nucleus of the Strategic Army Corps consists of three crack divisions, 82nd airborne, 101st airborne, and the fourth infantry. To create and maintain a crack outfit takes long and intensive training, modern weapons, a deeply felt sense of purpose, good leaders and men. The men of the fourth, many of them volunteers, know that they may be called upon for crucial duty without warning. They take their responsibility seriously. For then, rigorous training is a way of life. Due to the nature of STRAC's mission, the soldiers of this division must be ready to cope with any situation. Amphibious assault, mountain fighting, desert warfare, jungle operations, they must be ready for anything and ready now. As an element of STRAC, they have been called the best trained, best informed, and most effective soldiers anywhere in the world. Because speed is essential to STRAC's mission, the emphasis is on mobility. They are ground soldiers who know the utility of air. They are drilled to get there first with the most. These soldiers give the answer to talk that this generation of Americans is growing soft. These qualities that make up a crack outfit, there is usually one other, tradition. Since its beginning, the IV division has always been asked to do the hardest jobs. The division was formed at Camp Green, North Carolina in December of 1917. Six months later, the IV men were over there in France. They were part of the counterweight that would swing the pendulum in the long, indecisive conflict to its final decision. In Midsomer, they moved to the front to forge history. The Tau Thierry in the Argonne Forest. In 69 days of combat, the IV took 120th of all battle casualties of the AEF. It met and helped to defeat 16 German divisions and received battle honors for five campaigns. Then the IV marched off for seven months of occupation duty. In the 20 months of its existence, the division left an imprint of valor that would not be forgotten. With the ashes of World War I, the Nazis vowed to build a third Reich to last 1,000 years. These were the Carpenters. With stunning speed, the Nazi machine overran Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, when no one knew where the Nazi tide would crest. The unit that would first puncture the Nazi homeland was reactivated at Fort Benning, Georgia, ahead for the fourth lay months, years of reorganization and training. The division, like the nation, had to prepare to meet a new kind of threat. To fight a new kind of war, this was the beginning. In July 1942, the division was pulled out of the mammoth Carolina maneuvers and alerted for overseas. Instead, the men were sent to more training. At Camp Gordon-Johnston on Florida's Gulf Coast, they received painstaking instruction in a new technique, amphibious assault. By now, other American outfits had fought in North Africa, in Sicily. Mussolini had fallen, Italy surrendered, and still the fourth trained on friendly beaches. These men could not know that the gap was closing between them and a day not yet on their calendars, an hour not on the clocks, D-Day, H-Hour. After final preparation and staging in England, the fourth division learned what all the training was for. The greatest invasion armada in history was to storm Fortress Europe. The fourth was one of two American spearheads. Ultimately, the total effort of a combat machine is concentrated at the cutting edge. The spearhead must be so hard that it will not blunt, so resilient that it will not crack, and it must endure. To paraphrase a famous statement of the time, much had been given to the fourth division in preparation, now much would be asked. The time is D-Day, June 6, 1944, H-Hour. For the third rite, the hour is late. Division's eighth regiment put the first troops ashore at Utah Beach. It was a model landing at Utah, achieving immediate success at minimum cost in casualties. Pushed inland quickly, one immediate objective was to reach isolated 82nd Airborne paratroopers who controlled a beachhead artery at San Mary Glees, six miles away. By the end of the second day, the fourth had carried out its first critical assignment. We had a beachhead. Now we needed a port. The division's assignment, expand the beachhead and secure the vital port of Cherbourg. Oh, it was bitter going. Bounds fell despite tenacious and costly enemy resistance. The week in June, the fourth was in Cherbourg. While it cleaned out the last Nazi pockets, engineers at once began restoring the port city. It was essential. General Patton's swift striking Third Army had to be brought in through here and assembled. The fourth was assigned to pave the way for the buildup, to clear the Quotentin Peninsula. The assignment had a built-in obstacle course. Hedge rows, they were called. They divided farm plots about every 100 yards. Frenchmen built them, Germans used them, Americans had to take them. Last week in July, the Nazis were out of the peninsula and the Third Army was in it, waiting to break out. The hole was to be made somewhere along the Sandlow line with a powerful assault by the First Army. The fourth division was one of the spearheads. The breakout operation began with a saturation aerial bombardment. An IV regiment moved out at H-hour. This was seven weeks, four and a half hours after the landing in Normandy. Until this moment, Allied gains had been limited and expensive. Now we were going for all of France. The enemy knew what was at stake and fought fanatically. But by the end of a week, his line was fractured and the Third Army began rolling south. The fourth's 22nd regiment received a presidential citation for opening up the Nazi lines. At the same time, strategic Vélodieu fell to the division. The drive was picking up momentum now. We were picking up more information about the recently departed Nazis, demolishing the Nazi defense system. One final stronghold remained for the fourth, Saint-Pois. Even as this spearhead division passed through towns, the GIs saw the transformation taking place. Signs went quickly. They were no longer needed. The Germans were gone. They weren't coming back. On Swastika. Up, tricolor. After one desperate counterattack, Nazi resistance faded and the way was open all the way to Paris. With the Second French Armored Division, the fourth was ordered to liberate the city. For these visitors, the heady experience of transforming captive Paris to Gay Paris. The fourth's 12th regiment entered Paris at midnight. By noon, it had reached the heart of the city and the hearts of its people. On trouble with spearheads, they don't linger for victory parades. They move on. From Paris, the advance was breathtaking. 50 miles and more some days across northern France and Belgium. All the while, everyone wondered, just how tough is the vaunted Siegfried line? A fourth division patrol was the first allied unit to set foot on Nazi Germany. The time is September 11th. The next day, the division crossed the frontier in force and soon had bucked into the Siegfried line. However, it developed that the full strength of the First Army was needed. November the fourth was sent into the Hurtgen Forest. For veterans of the beachhead and hedge rows, this was a new kind of crucible. The Hurtgen was a maze of ridgels, Nazi defense lines and booby traps. After 19 days, the division came out on the other side. The way was open to the ruin, the Rhineland, Germany's vitals. Bone weary, the ivy men were sent to quiet Luxembourg, just in time to catch the southern thrust of the Nazis' great Ardennes-Bulge offensive. The German onslaught slammed into four isolated companies of the 12th Regiment. Beyond them was a treasure house of supplies and the roads to France. But the Nazi division never did get beyond them. Then it became a matter of shrinking the bulge. After the Nazis' last desperate bid crumbled, the fourth joined in the final assault on Germany. Its advance turned into a pursuit. It pierced across the Rhine to Würzburg and Rhettgen. Then it struck southeast to the Danube. Then on to Munich. The tip of the spearhead was six miles from the Austrian border on V.E. Day. The division was sent back for a brief homecoming. Brief because it was needed in the Pacific. But Japan surrendered before the division could be redeployed. The men of the fourth were able to turn to another pursuit of happiness in peace. But the picture of peace was eroded by disquieting events such as the Berlin blockade. The Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. Civil war in Greece. Communist-inspired turmoil in other parts of Europe. NATO was created to strengthen Western Europe and save the faltering peace. The reactivated fourth was the first division dispatched from the States. NATO's first Supreme Commander visited the fourth in West Germany. Once again the toughening process began. Through a series of training maneuvers, the division learned its role in an integrated Allied force with a new mission. For five years the fourth remained stationed at Europe's political meridian dividing east and west. After reassignment to Fort Lewis, the division was among the first streamlined as a pentomic unit. When Strach was formed in 1958, the fourth was selected. Today the IAV division keeps ready for any emergency through tests such as Exercise L-Coin. In this exercise, the fourth must brush its armored men and supplies from Fort Lewis to Central Washington State in order to halt an aggressor force cutting down through Canada. Transports bring in men and equipment. Working closely with the Air Force is inherent in the Strach operation. According to a well-prepared timetable, flying boxcars follow through with supplies for the newly arrived infantrymen. They waste no time in uncreating the precious supplies for what's always in shortest supply is time. Defense lines are paid out with barbed wire, dispersion is characteristic of a Strach division. The Army has a word for these units, austere, their lean paired down to fighting trim. After skillfully adapting to the desert terrain, the IAV men are spread out, waiting and able to take on the aggressor forces. In Exercise Rocky Shoals, the versatile fourth executes the mission of an amphibious assault force. From the flooded well deck of a landing ship dock, armored landing craft that operate on ground as well as water speed toward the beach. For this exercise, the division move down to the Central California coast. Well-protected attackers get additional help from a mask of smoke. The fourth is one of the Army's most finely trained units in amphibious operations. Then the fourth demonstrates its ability to accomplish the mission. The repertoire of Strach 4th Firepower today includes an array of impressive weapons, 81 millimeter mortar, 106 millimeter recoilless rifle, honest John Rocket, late model tanks, and self-propelled artillery. As General Omar Bradley has said, men without weapons are helpless, but weapons without men are nothing. It is the caliber of its men, as well as its weapons, that makes the fourth both a crack and a Strach unit today at the forefront of America's defenses. It is able to move through the air, over water or land, to bring enormous power to bear at any global trouble spot. As a Strach unit, it is the embodiment of the new concept of a force tailored to meet anything from the brush-fire threat to all-out nuclear war. In this history of the famous fourth, a succession of men who have defended the integrity of their country and who stand ready to preserve the peace anywhere in the world.