Word: 101st
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...wide array of facts to support its conclusions. It contended, for example, that the Air Force is so short of spare parts that F-16 squadrons are assigned extra fighter-bombers (cost: $24 million each) solely for the purpose of cannibalizing their equipment. The Army's highly touted 101st Airborne Division, based in Fort Campbell, Ky., had an astonishing personnel turnover rate of 16.6% a month. Of the 190 F-14 fighters in the Navy's Atlantic Fleet equipped with the Phoenix air-to-air missile, 32 were recently either in maintenance or storage. The report quotes...
Some men were dropped miles from their landing sites, some were dropped far out at sea, some were dropped so low that their parachutes never opened. Private Donald Burgett recalled that they "made a sound like large, ripe pumpkins being thrown down against the ground." The 101st's commander, Major General Maxwell Taylor, was dropped at 500 ft. and said later, "God must have opened the chute...
Sometimes a single man could overcome absurd odds. Staff Sergeant Harrison Summers of the 101st was ordered to take 15 men and attack a German artillery barracks known only as WXYZ, actually a cluster of stone farm buildings. When the 15 showed signs of reluctance, Summers somewhat recklessly decided to goad them by leading the charge himself. He kicked in a door and sprayed the room with his submachine gun. Four Germans fell dead, and the rest ran out a back door. None of Summers' men had followed him, so he alone charged the second building; the Germans fled...
Roger Lantagne, a medic with the 101st Airborne, married a Frenchwoman when the war ended and retired nine years ago to Enghien-les-Bains outside Paris after more than three decades of military service in Korea, Viet Nam and Europe. Lantagne, a native of Lewiston, Me., remembers that he was tending German and American wounded in a village church not far from Utah Beach when the village was recaptured by the Germans. "A high-ranking German, accompanied by troops with automatic weapons, suddenly burst into the church. They looked at us, at the bloodstained pews and the German wounded, then...
...night of June 5, American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division boarded C-47s at Greenham Common and embarked on their fateful flight to Normandy. Today the airbase there is the scene of bitter protests by the British peace movement against the stationing of U.S. nuclear missiles. "Oh, how short our memories are!" exclaimed the writer of a recent letter to a local weekly, taking angry issue with the protesters...