Word: jump
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...velvety darkness before dawn, fresh winds blew across dozens of airfields in France and England. By the thousands, sleepy-eyed, yawning warriors climbed into their big-pocketed jump suits and pulled on high combat boots. For the airborne troops it was another fateful morning of: "Well, here we go again!" This time they were going beyond the Rhine...
...commander of the newly activated 101st Airborne, the Army chose Major General William Carey Lee, unquestioned father of U.S. airborne doctrine. In the training program from the start, Lee had been the first general to jump with his troops, the first chief of the Airborne Command. General Lee trained the 101st, took it to England, whetted it to a razor edge for the Normandy invasion. Then, to the heartbreak of his officers and men, he was compelled to give up the command because of illness, and return...
...started methodically, reading all there was to read on his new subject-which did not take long. Then he applied himself to the fundamentals of parachuting and gliding. His first jump came off without incident; his first glider ride characteristically ended in a rousing wreck, from which he jumped clear, ending up bruised in body and dignity, but professionally impressed with the way the ungainly box kite could put down a whole squad, jeep or gun in one place...
...time after Sicily the Army was about ready to scrap the airborne divisions; even some of its most progressive commanders feared that a division was too unwieldy a unit to jump and glide. Ridgway and the other airborne men had to summon all their powers of tact and persuasion. In the end they prevailed, and the divisions survived to undergo the test of D-day in Normandy...
Died. Technical Sergeant Torger Tokle, 25, towheaded, Norwegian-born ski-jump champion of the Western Hemisphere (289 feet), ex-Brooklyn carpenter; from German shell-fragment wounds; near Monte Torraccio, Italy, as his loth Mountain Infantry Division made a four-mile advance...