be taken to the ship’s brig of USS Wasp (LHD-1), already waiting off the coast of Haiti. Cedras was noted for being a smart man, and the reputation of that lead unit, the 82nd, probably was enough to tell him which option held the most pleasant possibilities. In Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf, the 82nd had led the way for American force of arms. In fact, the commitment of the 82nd is usually a sign that the United States is really serious about its commitment to a particular situation. So Cedras left into his self-imposed exile, and the 82nd returned home, to get ready for the next time. They had won Haiti on their reputation alone.
What kind of unit has such power to deter the intentions of dictator or strongman? This is the question that we will attempt to answer as we get to know the 82nd Airborne Division and its supporting units in this chapter. In doing so, I hope that you will come to understand, as I do, why America needs at least one unit like the 82nd. To go, when necessary, where diplomacy and reason have failed and only a show of force will do. But perhaps even more importantly, to make those who oppose the will of the U.S. and our allies think twice before they act. Because in its own way, the 82nd Airborne Division is as much a deterrent force as a thermonuclear warhead on a ballistic missile or an H-bomb dropped from a stealth bomber.
The All-Americans: A Tradition of Battle
You do not forge a reputation overnight; it take years of effort and lots of hard experience. This has been the road for the troopers of the 82nd: hard and bloody. Nevertheless, theirs is a reputation that has been earned the hard way, and it is good enough to scare people into
The dream of assaulting an enemy strong point “from the clouds”—that is to say, of using the air as a vertical extension of the battlefield — is probably as old as mankind. We are all familiar with the ancient legend of Daedalus, who fashioned a pair of wings so he could launch himself into the air to reach Sicily; nor is it hard to imagine some prehistoric cave dweller watching a bird of prey descend upon an unsuspecting rodent, and wishing he could duplicate that nifty stunt the next time his tribe raided those loutish Neanderthals across the glacier. Unfortunately for our primitive tactician, it would take a hundred centuries of technological advances — specifically, the more or less concurrent development of the warplane and the free-fall parachute during World War I — for his dream to become a reality.
As I related in the first chapter, it was Colonel Billy Mitchell, the colorful head of air operations for the American Expeditionary forces in World War I, who led the way with creative airborne thinking in the latter days of war. The close of the war not only suspended his innovative operations, but also put the idea of developing a permanent air infantry in suspension for a generation — here in the United States, that is.
Europe was a different story though. By 1930 Russia had introduced parachute units into its army and honed their jump techniques in extensive training exercises. In 1935 and 1936 the Red Army conducted a series of spectacular and widely publicized airborne maneuvers, in one demonstration awing an invited audience of European diplomats and military observers by dropping more than five thousand men — a brigade-sized group — in a single simulated air assault. This so impressed the heads of the embryonic German Luftwaffe that they quickly opened a military jump school outside Berlin and began training an elite paratrooper, or Fallschirmjaeger, corps.
Around the same time, the French and Italian armies began experimenting with their own airborne units as well. Of all the major nations that would fight the Second World War in Europe, only the Americans and British lagged behind in developing parachute infantry units. However, their efforts were jolted into high gear by Hitler’s Blitzkrieg conquests of Norway and Holland in the spring of 1940, in which his paratroop corps was a critical element. By the following year, German parachute and air-landing units were able to take the entire island of Crete from Commonwealth forces with almost no assistance.
This is where Bill Lee, who I described in the third chapter, came into play. Lee had been gently but persistently been nudging the War Department to initiate its own airborne program. He had seen combat in France during World War I, and while serving as a military attache in Germany, had observed the early demonstrations of its Fallshirmjaeger units firsthand. After he returned to the States, Lee served as an instructor at Fort Benning, and then was transferred to the Chief of Infantry’s office in Washington. There he finally convinced his superiors to establish an all-volunteer test platoon of paratroopers. Equipped by the Air Corps and earning flying pay of thirty dollars per month (the average enlisted man made half that), they would be stationed at Lee’s old home base, Fort Benning.
The small cadre of jumpers was so tremendously successful that — again with some arm-twisting from Lee — it was expanded to battalion size by the fall of 1940 and christened the 501st Parachute Infantry Battalion. As the conflict in Europe escalated and America began to mobilize for possible involvement, Lee was given authorization to create three more paratroop battalions, the 502nd, 503rd and 504th, which rapidly grew into six regiments after Pearl Harbor. In June of 1942, now-Brigadier General Lee returned from a trip to England with word that the British Army was manning and readying an airborne division for action, and strongly recommended that the United States do the same. Shortly afterward, not one, but two existing regular infantry divisions would be reshaped into airborne divisions — the 101 st and the 82nd. In keeping with the concept that paratroop units were best employed as a quick-strike assault force, these would be stripped-down divisions of 8,300 men each, not quite half the size of a normal “leg” infantry division. They would be made up of three infantry regiments (initially two glider and one parachute, a mix that would soon be reversed) in addition to antiaircraft, antitank, artillery, and other support units.
Command of the 101st went to Bill Lee, the irrepressible prime mover behind the airborne program. Though the 101 st had seen little action in the Great War, and was not yet fully reactivated, it had, in Lee’s own words, “no history, but a rendezvous with destiny.” The 82nd, by contrast, was already something of a military legend, having been involved in some of the roughest combat in the First World War. The 82nd Infantry Division had spent more time on the front lines than any other American division during the Great War. Known as the “All-American” Division because its fighting men were drawn from all states of the Union, the 82nd had given our country one of its most renowned war heroes, Sergeant Alvin C. York. This pacifist Tennessee gunslinger had received the Medal of Honor for single-handedly defeating an entire German battalion, and was portrayed by Gary Cooper in the famous film
By the first chill of autumn, the 82nd had been shifted over from Camp Claiborne to Fort Bragg, near Fayetteville, North Carolina, where it remains based to the present day. Fort Bragg was marginally more hospitable than the unit’s previous home, and located near Pope Field, where its assigned air transport unit, the 52nd Troop Carrier Wing, was based. After a rough adjustment period during which the exacting Ridgway fixed a number of organizational problems and shuffled a number of key personnel, advanced jump training got underway for the fully assembled division. Over the next several months two parachute infantry regiments, the 504th and, shortly afterward, the younger 505th, were moved from Fort Benning in Georgia to Fort Bragg. Command of the 504th went to Lieutenant Colonel Reuben H. Tucker, while Colonel (later General) James M. Gavin, Bill Lee’s former plans and training officer, was made CO of the 505th.
Like Ridgway, these men would become famous for their dynamic personalities and heroic exploits during the war. In fact, the independent, steel-backboned, Brooklyn-born “Jumpin’ Jim” Gavin would instill such a powerful esprit de corps in his troops that they would have a tough time integrating with the rest of the 82nd. The 505th had a reputation for being as rowdily arrogant as they were courageous and superbly trained. Though an intense rivalry would develop between their units, Tucker and Gavin shared the conviction that a good commanding officer had to place himself at the center of the action with his men. Both did exactly that time and again as the war ground on, beginning with the 82nd’s chaotic trial by fire during the invasion of Sicily in June 1943, code-named Operation Husky.
After a great deal of wrangling among high-level planners, many of whom were enormously skeptical of the
