82d Airborne

Army Combat Gear
ACU Gear	Oakley Combat Boots	Under Armour Tactical

The Psychological Warfare Center was established at Fort Bragg on April 10, 1952. Its mission was to conduct individual training and to supervise unit training in psychological warfare and Special Forces operations.

The 10th Special Forces Group, the Army’s first unconventional warfare unit, was activated on June 20, 1952, here at Fort Bragg.

Also in 1952, Fort Bragg established its own airfield. Air traffic around post had increased to the point where Pope Field was overtaxed. The 406th Engineer Brigade was called upon to construct the airfield. The field was formally named in 1955 for Warrant Officer Herbert W. Simmons, Jr.

Womack Army Hospital was constructed at the post during the 1957-58 period. The new hospital consisted of 500 beds with an expansion capability to 1,000. The hospital was named after a medical corpsman from North Carolina who gave his life in the Korean Conflict to protect the lives of wounded soldiers in his care.

Additional construction at the post during the 1950s included an entirely new division-sized barracks area, two drive-in restaurants, a bank, an NCO club for the 82d Airborne, four new elementary schools, two football stadiums, and several swimming pools. Capehart type construction during the mid-1950s added many more housing units to the post and it became possible to close up the converted barracks quarters.

All American All the Way
The 82nd Airborne Division — dubbed the All-Americans during WWI, when Sgt. Alvin York was among its soldiers — parachuted into history on July, 9, 1943, as the opening salvo in Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily. This book, the first to tell the full story of the 82nd — America’s first airborne division to see combat, and the only American parachute division still active today — follows these all-Americans from their first perilous drop to their victory parade up 5th Avenue in January 1946.

Not since 1948 has a comprehensive effort as All American been done. Phil Nordyke on his first jump has joined the ranks of Rappaport and Norwood, Breuer, Ryan, Koskimaki, Anderson and Bando. He has brought forth a work that both the public at large and historians will find engrossing and entertaining. Future generations will look at this work of scholarship as the starting point for any research into the 82nd's WW 2 story. I found it a most enjoyable read and very hard to put down. I hope that Mr Nordyke will engage us with more about the 82nd in the near future.

Descending from the Clouds
Wurst, a rifleman, spent the most of World War II in the European Theater of Operations as a squad leader or platoon sergeant in Company F, 505. He made three of the four regimental combat jumps, dropping into Italy, Normandy, and Holland. Highlights include his baptism of fire in Italy during the Battle of Arnone; the jump on D-Day and the liberation of Ste. Me're Eglise (for which he was awarded a Purple Heart); a grueling month of combat in the hedgerows of Normandy (a second Purple Heart); the ferocious battle with the SS for the highway bridge at Nijmegen, Holland (Silver Star); and survival in the Ardennes, where he found himself as point man on his twentieth birthday, in a long, bitter march toward the shoulder of the Bulge.

Wurst's narrative, set against a carefully researched historical background, offers a unique view of the heat of battle as experienced by a noncommissioned officer in the 82nd Airborne Division. Initial chapters chronicle his training before mobilization, when he lied about his age (15) to the National Guard in Erie, Pennsylvania, and his later experience in a heavy weapons company of the 112th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division. In 1941, Wurst was on a truck returning from First Army maneuvers in the Carolinas to Indiantown Gap Military Reservation when he heard the news of the attack at Pearl Harbor. He recounts life at Camps Livingston and Beauregard in Louisiana, and at the newly formed Parachute School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was stationed in the infamous "Frying Pan" area.

Descending from the Clouds portrays the passage from innocence to experience. Wurst begins as a 135-pound kid marching down his hometown streets in the National Guard, wearing the remnants of a World War I uniform and pulling by hand a water-cooled .30-caliber machine-gun mounted on a wooden cart. Five years later, he is a hardened platoon sergeant, leading his troopers through the frozen killing fields of "Death Valley" in Germany's Huertgen Forest.

His story is the story of the coming of age of the American military: fewer than twenty men per company who started with the 505 in the Frying Pan returned home.

Boots on the Ground
This account of one reporter's month with the 82nd Airborne Division is both a conservative polemic and a vivid portrait of American infantrymen in action. Zinsmeister, who was embedded with the army as a correspondent for The National Review, makes no bones about his unabashed support for the war, and for the American military in general. (He tells readers that he's always taught his own children "to think of military jet noise as 'the sound of freedom.'") The prospect of spending time rubbing shoulders with soldiers in the trenches clearly delights him even before he touches down on Iraqi soil. There is humor in the Zinsmeister's account of bartering for gear in Kuwait's "Body Armor Bazaar," and he provides useful insights into how many of the non-combat operations are actually performed by private civilian contractors. One of the best moments in the book movingly recounts how an Iraqi doctor worked with American soldiers to try to save a wounded boy, yet still refused to tell Zinsmeister his name for fear that his cooperation would draw reprisals later on. The author also gives heartening evidence of the genuine care taken by the troops to avoid civilian casualties. (Less agreeable is his evidence that guerrilla warfare was in full cry even before the formal end of the war.) But readers interested in this information should be prepared to wade through pages and pages of splenetic rants against the anti-war movement and Zinsmeister's fellow journalists, whom he dubs "left-wing, cynical, wise guy Ivy League types." Such flaws, unfortunately, are not entirely redeemed by the book's outstanding array of color photographs.

I'm squad leader assigned to Company D 3-325. I was there all the the way from Camp Champion, through the prep for the jump in the airport and the last minute scrub. My Anti-Armor platoon was attached to A troop 1-17 Cav for the move to Talil and to A 2-325 for the push into Samawah proper. I was shot through the left hand while we were trying to seize the bridges over the Euphrates.  This book does my men a great justice. I kept a journal out there and this book mirrors my experiences. I'm extremely thankful that our story has been told, and heard. All the men who were there and who still patrol Baghdad are MY heroes. I've never served with a finer group of paratroopers than my platoon. This book serves as a journal for all the men of 2nd Brigade.