101st Airborne Division
The 101st Airborne Division is a light infantry division of the United States Army that specializes in air assault operations. The 101st is designed to plan, coordinate, and execute brigade-sized air assault operations that can be conducted in one period of darkness, at distances up to 500 nautical miles, to seize key terrain and hold it for up to 14 days. In recent years, the 101st was active in foreign internal defense and counterterrorism operations in Iraq, in Afghanistan in 2015–2016, and in Syria, as part of Operation Inherent Resolve in 2018–2021.
Established in 1918, the 101st Division was first constituted as an airborne unit in 1942. During World War II, it gained renown for its role in Operation Overlord ; Operation Market Garden; the liberation of the Netherlands; and its action during the Battle of the Bulge around the city of Bastogne, Belgium. During the Vietnam War, the 101st Airborne Division fought in several major campaigns and battles, including the Battle of Hamburger Hill in 1969 and the Battle of Fire Support Base Ripcord in 1970. In mid-1968, the division was reorganized and redesignated as an airmobile division and in 1974, the division was again redesigned as an air assault division. The titles reflect the division's shift from airplanes to helicopters as the primary method of delivering troops into combat.
At the height of the war on terrorism, the 101st Airborne Division had over 200 aircraft. This shrank to just over 100 aircraft with the inactivation of the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade in 2015. In 2019, media reports suggested the Army was working to restore the 101st's aviation capabilities so it can return to lifting an entire brigade in one air assault.
The 101st's headquarters is at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Many members of the 101st are graduates of the U.S. Army Air Assault School, which is co-located with the division. The school is known as one of the Army's most difficult courses; only about half of those who begin it will graduate.
The Screaming Eagles were referred to as "the tip of the spear" by former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, and the most potent and tactically mobile of the U.S. Army's divisions by General Edward C. Meyer, then Chief of Staff of the Army.
History
World War I
On 23 July 1918, the War Department directed the organization of the 101st Division in the National Army at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, under the supervision of camp commander Brigadier General Roy Hoffman. Plans called for the division to include a headquarters, headquarters troop, the 201st Infantry Brigade, 202nd Infantry Brigade, 376th Machine Gun Battalion, 176th Field Artillery Brigade, 326th Engineers, 626th Field Signal Battalion, and 326th Train Headquarters and Military Police. It was intended that the 201st Infantry Brigade would be organized in France from the 58th and 59th Pioneer Infantry Regiments.The 27th Trench Mortar Battery was formed at Camp Bowie, Texas, in August 1918 and was assigned to the 176th Field Artillery Brigade, but never ended up joining. The organization of the division began in October and Colonel Patrick H. Mullay was named division chief of staff on 2 November, but organization never progressed beyond the formation of the division headquarters and preliminary preparations for the receipt of Selective Service men. After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the 101st Division was ordered demobilized on 30 November 1918, being completed on 11 December.
Interwar period
In 1921, pursuant to the National Defense Act of 1920, the 101st Division was reconstituted in the Organized Reserve, allotted to the Sixth Corps Area, and assigned to the XVI Corps, and further allotted to the state of Wisconsin. The division headquarters was organized on 10 September 1921 in Room 412 of the Federal Building in Milwaukee, moving in July 1922 to the Pereles Building, where it remained until activated for World War II. The designated mobilization and training station for the division was Camp Custer, Michigan, where much of the division's annual training activities occurred in the interwar years. The headquarters and staff usually trained with the staff of the 12th Infantry Brigade either at Camp Custer or Fort Sheridan, Illinois, while the infantry regiments trained primarily with the 2nd Infantry Regiment at Camp Custer. The special troops, artillery, engineers, aviation, medical, and quartermaster units trained at various posts in the Sixth and Seventh Corps Areas. In addition, division personnel also conducted the Citizens' Military Training Camps in the division's home area as an alternate form of annual training. The division's primary "feeder" schools for newly commissioned Reserve lieutenants were the University of Wisconsin, Ripon College, and St. Norbert College.Division personnel sometimes participated in the Sixth Corps Area and Second Army command post exercises with other Regular Army, National Guard, and Organized Reserve units, but the division did not participate as a unit in the various Sixth Corps Area maneuvers and the Second Army maneuvers of 1937, 1940, and 1941, because of a lack of enlisted personnel and equipment to use. Instead, the officers and a few enlisted reservists were assigned to Regular Army and National Guard units to fill vacant slots, and some officers were assigned duties as umpires or support personnel.
It was at this time that the "Screaming Eagle" mascot became associated with the division, as a successor to the traditions of the Wisconsin volunteer regiments of the American Civil War.
World War II and Cold War era
On 30 July 1942, the Army Ground Forces ordered the activation of two airborne divisions by 15 August 1942. The 82nd Division, an Organized Reserve division ordered into active military service in March 1942, was ordered to provide cadre to the 101st Division, the other division that was selected for the project, for all elements except parachute infantry. As part of the reorganization of the 101st Division as an airborne division, the unit was disbanded in the Organized Reserve on 15 August 1942 and reconstituted and reactivated in the Army of the United States. On 19 August 1942, its first commander, Major General William C. Lee, read out General Order Number 5:The 101st Airborne Division, which was activated on 16 August 1942, at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, has no history, but it has a rendezvous with destiny.
Due to the nature of our armament, and the tactics in which we shall perfect ourselves, we shall be called upon to carry out operations of far-reaching military importance and we shall habitually go into action when the need is immediate and extreme. Let me call your attention to the fact that our badge is the great American eagle. This is a fitting emblem for a division that will crush its enemies by falling upon them like a thunderbolt from the skies.
The history we shall make, the record of high achievement we hope to write in the annals of the American Army and the American people, depends wholly and completely on the men of this division. Each individual, each officer and each enlisted man, must therefore regard himself as a necessary part of a complex and powerful instrument for the overcoming of the enemies of the nation. Each, in his own job, must realize that he is not only a means, but an indispensable means for obtaining the goal of victory. It is, therefore, not too much to say that the future itself, in whose molding we expect to have our share, is in the hands of the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division.
Operation Overlord
The pathfinders of the 101st Airborne Division led the way on D-Day in the night drop before the invasion. They left from RAF North Witham, having trained there with the 82nd Airborne Division. These night drops caused a lot of trouble for the gliders. Many crashed and equipment and personnel were lost.The 101st Airborne Division's objectives were to secure the four causeway exits behind Utah Beach between Saint-Martin-de-Varreville and Pouppeville to ensure the exit route for the 4th Infantry Division from the beach later that morning. The other objectives included destroying a German coastal artillery battery at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, capturing buildings nearby at Mézières believed used as barracks and a command post for the artillery battery, capturing the Douve river lock at La Barquette, capturing two footbridges spanning the Douve at La Porte opposite Brévands, destroying the highway bridges over the Douve at Saint-Côme-du-Mont, and securing the Douve River valley. Their secondary mission was to protect the southern flank of VII Corps. They destroyed two bridges along the Carentan highway and a railroad bridge just west of it. They gained control of La Barquette locks, and established a bridgehead over the Douve which was located north-east of Carentan.
In the process, units also disrupted German communications, established roadblocks to hamper the movement of German reinforcements, established a defensive line between the beachhead and Valognes, cleared the area of the drop zones to the unit boundary at Les Forges, and linked up with the 82nd Airborne Division.
Drop Zone Able
The paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division jumped between 00:48 and 01:40 British Double Summer Time of 6 June. The first wave, inbound to Drop Zone A, was not surprised by the cloud bank and maintained formation, but navigating errors and a lack of Eureka signal caused the first error. Although the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment was dropped as a compact unit, it jumped on the wrong drop zone, while its commander, Lt. Col. Steve A. Chappuis, came down virtually alone on the correct drop zone. Chappuis and his paratrooper captured the coastal battery soon after assembling, and found that it had already been dismantled after an air raid.Most of the remainder of the 502nd dropped in a disorganized pattern around the impromptu drop zone set up by the pathfinders near the beach. The battalion commanders of the 1st and 3rd Battalions, Lt. Col. Patrick J. Cassidy and Lt. Col. Robert G. Cole, took charge of small groups and accomplished all of their D-Day missions. Cassidy's group took Saint Martin-de-Varreville by 06:30, sent a patrol under S/Sgt. Harrison C. Summers to seize the "XYZ" objective, a barracks at Mésières, and set up a thin line of defense from Foucarville to Beuzeville. Cole's group moved during the night from near Sainte-Mère-Église to the Varreville battery, then continued on and captured Exit 3 at 07:30. They held the position during the morning until relieved by troops moving inland from Utah Beach. Both commanders found Exit 4 covered by German artillery fire and Cassidy recommended to the 4th Infantry Division that it not use the exit.
The division's parachute artillery did not fare nearly as well. Its drop was one of the worst of the operation, losing all but one howitzer and dropping all but two of 54 loads four to to the north, where most ultimately became casualties.