82nd Airborne Division

• 1. Introduction

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  The 82nd Airborne Division, nicknamed All American, once sent 61 planes toward Haiti and never had to land a single paratrooper. In September 1994 those aircraft left Pope Air Force Base while diplomats were still talking in Port-au-Prince. Former president Jimmy Carter and retired general Colin Powell were at the table with Haiti's military leader, Raoul Cédras. According to Al Gore, word that the planes had taken off made Cédras and his colleagues suspicious, and the points they had refused to accept were quickly agreed. Cédras stepped down, and the invasion was called off. Gore later travelled to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to thank the paratroopers in person.

  A reputation strong enough to end a standoff has to be earned somewhere. This documentary asks where. How did a division of conscripts, carrying a nickname chosen in a contest, become the first airborne division in the history of the US Army? Why did two presidents keep it at home during one war, and why was it called into American cities during others? And what happened in the places where its record is troubled, rather than triumphant?

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• 2. Forty-Eight States

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  In April 1918, Major General Eben Swift picked two words to name his division: All American. Citizens of Atlanta had held a contest to name the new unit, and the nickname is credited to a submission from Vivienne Goodwyn. The choice fit the facts, because the division's ranks held soldiers from all 48 states of the Union.

  That mix was not how the division began. It was formally activated on the 25th of August 1917 at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and its first enlisted men were newly conscripted soldiers from Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. In October 1917 nearly all of them were sent away to fill gaps in the 30th, 31st and 81st Divisions. Replacements came mostly from camps in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Virginia and New York, so New England and the Mid-Atlantic states filled the empty places. In the spring, 5,000 more men arrived from camps as far apart as Iowa and Texas.

  The shoulder patch still carries the name. Two letters, AA, sit on a square badge in red and blue, the colors the Army uses for artillery and infantry. The insignia was approved in 1918. A white-on-blue Airborne tab was authorized above it on the 31st of August 1942.

  Brigadier General William P. Burnham trained the division and led it for most of the journey to Europe. Ships left Boston, New York City and Brooklyn in early April 1918, bound for Liverpool. By mid-May the men had gathered in England, and they crossed to Le Havre by way of Southampton. On the Somme, small groups of troops and officers went up to the front lines to learn their trade. On the 16th of June the division moved by rail into a French sector, and it held the Lorraine border region until the 11th of September.

  On the 12th of September 1918 the Saint-Mihiel offensive began, and the division was handed a holding mission on the right flank of the First Army. Its task was to block German forces from striking that flank. That freed the 163rd Brigade and the 327th Infantry Regiment to advance north-east. Meanwhile the 328th Infantry Regiment moved up the west side of the Moselle River, made contact with the 90th Division and entered the town of Norroy. Heavy artillery fire hurt the new soldiers badly, since they had never faced anything like it.

  On the 3rd of October, Major General George B. Duncan relieved Burnham and took command. Four days later the division attacked the northeastern edge of the Argonne Forest and took a position known as Hill 223. Its left flank captured the high ground northwest of Châtel-Chéhéry. On the 15th of October, fighting with fresh troops, the division broke through the Hindenburg line.

  The armistice of the 11th of November 1918 found the division in training areas around Bourmont. It had lost 995 killed and 7,082 wounded, a total of 8,077 casualties. It was demobilized at Camp Mills, New York, on the 27th of May 1919. The Army would bring the name back, though at first only as a reserve headquarters.

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• 3. The Experimental Force

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  At 1202-1/2 Main Street in Columbia, South Carolina, the reconstituted division's headquarters opened on the 23rd of September 1921. The National Defense Act of 1920 had placed the 82nd in the Organized Reserve, with Florida, Georgia and South Carolina as its home area. In 1923 the headquarters moved to the Post Office Building, where it stayed until World War II. Its units were scattered across the Southeast, from Tampa and Jacksonville in Florida to Spartanburg and Greenville in South Carolina.

  Camp McClellan, Alabama, was the division's designated mobilization station and the place where much of its yearly training happened. Infantry regiments took turns running the Citizens' Military Training Camps there. The division was thin on paper and thinner in practice. In the Fourth Corps Area and Third Army maneuvers of 1938-1940 and 1941, it did not take part as an organized unit because it lacked enlisted personnel and equipment. Its officers filled vacant slots in other units or worked as umpires.

  On the 25th of March 1942, the division was ordered into active service at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, under Major General Omar N. Bradley. Its officer and enlisted cadre came mostly from the 9th Infantry Division, and the enlisted men arrived from reception centers in the Midwest, South and Southwest. The period brought three officers together who would later steer the US Army for two decades: Matthew Ridgway, James M. Gavin and Maxwell D. Taylor.

  On the 15th of August 1942, with Ridgway now in command, the division became the 82nd Airborne Division. It was the first airborne division in US Army history, and the first of five to form during the war. The others were the 11th, 13th, 17th and 101st. The General Staff chose it after weighing several factors. It was neither a Regular Army nor a National Guard unit, its men had all finished basic training, and its base had good weather and flying facilities.

  The idea was not popular everywhere. Historian John B. Wilson wrote that many traditionalists in those components wanted nothing to do with such an experimental force. Gavin recalled that many states would likely have refused to convert their National Guard units, because airborne facilities cost extra to maintain.

  The division started with the 325th, 326th and 327th Infantry Regiments. The 327th soon left to help form the 101st Airborne Division, and the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment took its place. That left two glider regiments and one parachute regiment. In February 1943 the 326th went to the 13th Airborne Division, and the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment arrived. Its colonel, James M. Gavin, would one day command the whole division.

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• 4. Jumping Into Europe

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  On the 9th of July 1943, Colonel Gavin's 505th Parachute Regimental Combat Team dropped into Sicily. It was the first regimental-sized combat parachute assault the US Army had ever carried out. Ridgway had taken the division to North Africa in April, and Salerno followed on the 13th of September. The first American glider assault in combat did not come until D-Day.

  Other moments from Italy are less formal. Troopers reached the Italian mainland by landing craft at Maiori, Naples and Salerno. During the invasion, Ridgway treated Will Lang Jr. of TIME magazine as an honorary member of the division. In January 1944 the 504th, under Colonel Reuben Tucker, was temporarily detached to fight at Anzio. It took the nickname "Devils in Baggy Pants" from a line in a German officer's diary.

  Before Normandy, the division was rebuilt. The 504th stayed out so it could rest and absorb replacements after Italy. The new 507th and 508th Parachute Infantry Regiments joined the veteran 505th, and the 325th gained a third battalion from the 401st Glider Infantry Regiment. On the 5th and the 6th of June 1944, hundreds of transport planes and gliders carried the paratroopers into the largest airborne assault yet attempted. Only Operation Market Garden, later that year, would be bigger.

  First Lieutenant Robert P. Mathias, a platoon leader in the 508th, was the first US Army officer killed by German fire in the invasion. On the 7th of June the 325th arrived by glider to serve as division reserve. Private First Class Charles N. DeGlopper of the 325th earned the division's first Medal of Honor of the war. When the division left the line in early July, 5,245 troopers had been killed, wounded or missing, a casualty rate of 46 percent. Ridgway's report summed up the month this way: "33 days of action without relief, without replacements. Every mission accomplished. No ground gained was ever relinquished."

  Back in England, the 82nd joined the new XVIII Airborne Corps alongside the 17th and 101st Airborne Divisions. Ridgway took command of the corps, though he was not promoted to lieutenant general until 1945. He recommended Gavin, the assistant division commander, to succeed him. In October 1944 Gavin became a major general at age 37, the youngest man since the Civil War to command a US Army division.

  On the 17th of September 1944, the division made its fourth and last combat jump of the war, into the Netherlands for Operation Market Garden. The 504th had returned at full strength. The division captured its objectives between Grave and Nijmegen, but it missed an early chance to take the Nijmegen Bridge. British XXX Corps reached the city six hours ahead of schedule and found it had to fight for a bridge that should already have been secured.

  On the afternoon of Wednesday the 20th of September, the division made an opposed assault crossing of the Waal river. War correspondent Bill Downs, who watched it, wrote that the battle ranked in magnificence and courage with Guam, Tarawa and Omaha Beach. During the operation, 19-year-old Private John R. Towle of the 504th earned the division's second Medal of Honor, awarded after his death. Canadian troops eventually relieved the division, and it went into reserve in France.

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• 5. Bulge to Berlin

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  On the 16th of December 1944, German forces drove through the Ardennes Forest in a surprise offensive that became the Battle of the Bulge. The 82nd, in reserve, was sent to the northern face of the bulge near Elsenborn Ridge. On the 20th of December it was ordered to retake Cheneux, which Kampfgruppe Peiper had captured. On the 21st and 22nd it faced counterattacks from two Waffen SS divisions, the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte and the 9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen. Their efforts to relieve Peiper failed against stubborn American defense.

  On the 23rd of December the Germans attacked from the south and overran the 325th Glider Infantry at the Baraque-Fraiture crossroads, on the division's southern flank. The 2nd SS Panzer Division aimed to outflank the 82nd and perhaps open a corridor to the stranded Peiper. The attack came too late for that. By the 24th, the division had an official strength of 8,520 men and faced a combined force of 43,000 men and more than 1,200 armored vehicles and artillery pieces. For the first time in its combat history, it was forced to withdraw.

  On the 28th of December the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich was ordered south to meet General George Patton's forces near Bastogne. The 9th SS Panzer Division tried to break through the 508th and 504th positions, and failed. That failure ended the German offensive on the northern shoulder of the Bulge. On the 3rd of January 1945 the division counterattacked, overran the 62nd Volksgrenadier Division and the 9th SS Panzer positions, and captured 2,400 prisoners.

  The cost fell hardest on the attached 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion. Of the 826 men who went into the Ardennes, only 110 came out. The battalion had lost its charismatic leader, Lieutenant Colonel Joerg, and nearly all of its men were wounded, killed or frostbitten. It was never rebuilt, and the survivors were absorbed into other 82nd units.

  On the 2nd of May 1945, at Ludwigslust beyond the Elbe River, the division accepted the surrender of more than 150,000 men of Lieutenant General Kurt von Tippelskirch's 21st Army. Years later, in a 1975 interview with Gavin, General Omar Bradley recalled that Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery had told him German opposition was too strong to cross the Elbe. Gavin's division crossed with the British 6th Airborne Division, covered 36 miles in a day and captured more than 100,000 troops. Bradley said the news caused great laughter at his 12th Army Group headquarters.

  In August 1945 the division entered Berlin for occupation duty, replacing the 2nd Armored Division. Patton watched its honor guard and said that in all his years in the Army, the 82nd's was undoubtedly the best he had seen. The division picked up another nickname, America's Guard of Honor. The 78th Infantry Division relieved it in early November. The war ended before the division could take part in the planned invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall.

  The war's ledger for the division reads 9,073 battle casualties: 1,619 killed in action, 6,560 wounded, 279 missing and 615 taken prisoner. Its awards included 15 Distinguished Unit Citations and 898 Silver Stars. Four soldiers earned the Medal of Honor: Towle, DeGlopper, First Sergeant Leonard A. Funk Jr. and Private Joe Gandara, whose award was issued on the 18th of March 2014.

  The division sailed home on the RMS Queen Mary and reached the United States on the 3rd of January 1946. It staged at Camp Shanks, New York, to rehearse for a Victory Parade in New York City on the 12th of January.

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• 6. Strategic Reserve

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  On the 15th of November 1948, instead of being demobilized, the 82nd was designated a Regular Army division with a permanent home at Fort Bragg. When war came in Korea, neither President Truman nor President Eisenhower sent it. Both kept it in strategic reserve, ready in case of a Soviet ground attack anywhere in the world. Through the 1950s and 1960s its soldiers trained in every kind of environment, including Panama, the Far East and the continental United States.

  In 1957 the division adopted the pentomic organization, formally called Reorganization of the Airborne Division, to prepare for tactical nuclear war in Europe. Five battle groups, each with five rifle companies and a mortar battery, replaced three regiments of three battalions. The experiment did not work. In 1964 the division reorganized into three brigades of three battalions each.

  In April 1965, the 3rd Brigade spearheaded the division's invasion of the Dominican Republic in Operation Power Pack. Three years later, the same brigade was on its way to Chu Lai in Vietnam within 24 hours of receiving orders during the Tet Offensive. It fought around Huế and Phu Bai, then moved south to Saigon, the Mekong Delta, the Iron Triangle and the Cambodian border. It served nearly 22 months. Back home, the division formed a provisional 4th Brigade to fill the gap.

  The deployment was bitter. Author Shelby L. Stanton wrote that at the start of 1968, apart from the 82nd, only two under-strength Marine divisions and four skeletonized Army divisions remained in the United States. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, was desperate for manpower and wanted the whole division. The Department of the Army wanted to keep its last readily deployable reserve, so it sent one brigade. Men who had just come home from Vietnam found themselves sent back, and the protests were loud. The Army let each trooper choose between returning to Fort Bragg and staying. Of 3,650 paratroopers who deployed, 2,513 chose to return at once. The brigade became a light infantry unit, airborne in name only.

  The division was also used at home. On the 24th of July 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the military into Detroit, and at 1:10 in the morning 4,700 paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions arrived under Lieutenant General John L. Throckmorton. They patrolled with rifles, machine guns and tanks, worked east of Woodward Avenue and helped with refuse removal and finding missing people. The riot was declared over on the 27th of July. Two days later, Captain Randolph Smith of the 82nd shot and killed Ernest Roquemore, a 19-year-old Black man carrying a transistor radio, during a joint patrol with Detroit police.

  After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the 4th of April 1968, the division flew into Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. The first of 21 aircraft carrying the 1st Brigade landed at Andrews Air Force Base on the 6th of April. More than 2,000 82nd paratroopers were among 11,850 federal troops in the capital. They detained looters, cleared debris from main roads and helped sanitation, food-store and utility workers restore essential services. Orders to return home came on the 12th of April.

  The 1970s kept the division on alert. In 1970 paratroopers were on their way to Amman, Jordan, during Black September when the mission was aborted. In 1973 the division came to the Pine Ridge reservation during the Wounded Knee uprising, under Colonel Volney Warner in the field and General Alexander Haig at the Pentagon. It was alerted for a possible drop into Zaire in May 1978 and for a possible rescue of the American hostages in Iran in November 1979. Out of that period, the division formed the nucleus of the new Rapid Deployment Forces.

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• 7. Rapid Deployment

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  On the 25th of October 1983, the 82nd landed at Point Salines Airport in Grenada, hours after the 1st and 2nd Ranger Battalions had seized it by parachute. The first 82nd unit in was a task force of the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of the 325th Infantry. The first aircraft with 2-325th troopers touched down 17 hours after the notice to move. The operation exposed real problems. The new Battledress Uniforms were wrong for the tropics, ground forces could not easily talk to Navy and Air Force aircraft, and food and supplies were hampered by communication trouble between the services.

  In March 1988, a brigade task force made up of two battalions of the 504th Infantry and the 3rd Battalion of the 505th parachuted and air-landed into Honduras as part of Operation Golden Pheasant. It was billed as a training exercise, but the paratroopers were ready to fight. The Sandinistas withdrew to Nicaragua.

  On the 20th of December 1989, the division made its first combat jump since World War II, onto Torrijos International Airport in Panama. The aim of Operation Just Cause was to remove Manuel Noriega from power. The invasion began with a night jump and airfield seizures, followed by air assaults in Panama City and around the Gatun Locks. Targets included Punta Paitilla Airport and a Panamanian garrison and airfield at Rio Hato, where Noriega kept a residence. Fires started during the attack on La Comandancia, the Panamanian Defense Forces headquarters, destroyed most of the nearby, heavily populated El Chorrillo neighborhood. The operation involved 27,684 US troops and over 300 aircraft, and it was the first combat use of the AH-64 Apache, the HMMWV and the F-117A. The 82nd lost six of the 23 Americans killed, and the operation ended on the 31st of January 1990.

  Four days after Iraq invaded Kuwait on the 2nd of August 1990, the 4th Battalion of the 325th Infantry deployed as the division's first ready force. It went to Riyadh and Thummim, Saudi Arabia, where it guarded the royal family under an agreement with King Fahd. Other battalions began building defenses near al Jubail. Three National Guard truck companies from New Jersey, Alaska and Massachusetts joined the 2nd Brigade, and their five-ton trucks effectively motorized the 325th Infantry so it could keep pace with the French Division Daguet. On the 22nd of February 1991 at 8:00 in the morning, the 2-325th spearheaded the ground war, crossing the Iraqi border 24 hours ahead of other American-led forces. The division's band and military police company processed 2,721 prisoners.

  In August 1992, a task force went to South Florida after Hurricane Andrew. For more than 30 days, the troopers provided food, shelter and medical attention, as well as a feeling of security for people without power, doors, windows or roofs.

  On the 12th of December 1994, the 2nd Battalion of the 505th deployed to the Panama Canal area for Operations Safe Haven and Safe Passage, to restore order after Cuban refugees attacked Air Force personnel and a Marine while protesting their detention. Task Force Panther's engineers poured 78 concrete pads and built a deck system for the muddy camp. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd J. Austin III, later became US Secretary of Defense. The paratroopers endured a 92-degree Christmas Day and came home on the 14th of February 1995.

  Bosnia in late 1995 was a mission that never required a jump. Battalions prepared to support the 1st Armored Division, and stood down after its engineers bridged the Sava River without hostilities on the 31st of December. In September 1997, 500 paratroopers flew 8,000 miles on C-17 aircraft to jump into an airfield in Shimkent, Kazakhstan, for CENTRAZBAT '97, joined by forty soldiers from three Central Asian republics. Marine General John Sheehan was first out of the aircraft.

  In March 1999, a task force from the 2nd Battalion of the 505th deployed to Albania, along the Kosovo border, in support of NATO's air campaign. On the 1st of October 1999, the 1st Battalion of the 508th made a combat jump in Operation Rapid Guardian from just 500 feet, near Pristina.

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• 8. After September 2001

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  In October 2001, the division's 49th Public Affairs Detachment deployed to Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom, along with several individual soldiers. In June 2002, elements of the division headquarters and Task Force Panther, built around the 3rd Brigade, followed. In January 2003, Task Force Devil, built around the 1st Brigade, relieved Panther.

  In March 2003, the 2nd Brigade's 2nd Battalion of the 325th was attached to the 75th Ranger Regiment for a planned parachute assault on Saddam International Airport. The assault was cancelled. On the 21st of March, Company D crossed the Saudi border as part of Task Force Hunter to escort HIMARS rocket launchers against Iraqi artillery batteries. The brigade then worked in Samawah, Fallujah and Baghdad. Embedded journalist Karl Zinsmeister recorded the early days in his 2003 book Boots on the Ground. During the first deployment, 36 soldiers from the division were killed and about 400 were wounded, out of about 12,000 deployed.

  In April 2003, Human Rights Watch alleged that soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 325th Infantry fired indiscriminately into a crowd of Iraqi civilians protesting in Fallujah, killing and wounding many. The battalion suffered no casualties. A second Human Rights Watch report, in September 2005, said residents of Fallujah called the 1st Battalion, 504th Infantry "the Murderous Maniacs." It cited division officers and sergeants who said battalion members used physical and mental torture on detainees at Camp Mercury in 2003 and 2004, both to gather intelligence and to relieve stress. They estimated that about half the detainees were released because they had no part in the insurgency.

  A captain named Ian Fishback reported the abuse and was ignored by his superiors for 17 months. He then took his allegations anonymously to three senators: Bill Frist, John McCain and John Warner. Only after that did the Army open an investigation. The battalion's abuse of prisoners helped inspire the Detainee Treatment Act. When Fishback died in 2021, Senator Dick Durbin called him a military hero.

  December 2004 brought task forces from the 325th to Iraq to secure national elections, in which more than eight million Iraqis voted. The 2nd Brigade came home on Easter Sunday in 2005. In September 2005, after Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, about 5,000 paratroopers under Major General William B. Caldwell IV worked on search and rescue and security, operating from New Orleans International Airport.

  In January 2006 the division began changing from a division-based structure to one built around brigade combat teams. It created a 4th Brigade Combat Team and inactivated its Division Artillery, Signal Battalion, 307th Engineer Battalion and 313th Military Intelligence Battalion. In March 2006, the 3rd Battalion of the 82nd Aviation supported a special operations task force with Chinook and Black Hawk helicopters. On the 18th of February 2007, seven soldiers from that task force died in a helicopter crash.

  In January 2007, Major General David M. Rodriguez took the division headquarters to Bagram Air Base to command Combined Joint Task Force-82. The 4th Brigade Combat Team, under Colonel Martin P. Schweitzer, stayed in Khowst Province until April 2008. Meanwhile, the 2nd Brigade deployed to northern Baghdad on the 4th of January 2007, and the 1st Brigade went to southern Iraq in June. Since the 11th of September 2001, the division has lost 20 paratroopers in Afghanistan and 101 in Iraq. Today it is commanded from Fort Bragg by Major General Brandon Tegtmeier.

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