82nd Airborne Division
The invasion of Normandy was one of the most audacious military campaigns in history. Nearly three million Allied personnel would participate in or support the Normandy operations. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
What was it like to be a WW2 paratrooper, parachuting into Normandy in the opening minutes of June 6, 1944—D-Day? Read more
82nd Airborne Division
During World War II, the use of airborne forces to “vertically envelop” the enemy went from an untested theory to a major part of offensive tactics, first for Germany and then the Allies. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
Background: In this, the third and final installment of a three-part series excerpted from The Lions of Carentan, the 2011 book by a respected German military historian, Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 (FJR 6) has been pushed out of Ste.-Mère-église, Read more
82nd Airborne Division
Background: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6, under the command of Major Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, had the fortune (or misfortune) to be stationed in Normandy at the time of the Allied invasion of France on June 6, 1944. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
Background: Fallschirmjäger Regiment 6 was organized in February 1943, under the command of Major Egon Liebach. It was part of the 2nd Fallschirmjäger Division and was stationed in France, where it trained in parachute and glider operations. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
“In the years to come everyone will remember Arnhem, but no one will remember that two American divisions fought their hearts out in the Dutch canal country,” wrote U.S. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
Shortly after midnight on Monday, June 5, 1944, the dark skies over the coast of northern France were filled with thunder. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
Some 16 million Americans served during World War II, and tens of thousands of sons of the State of Louisiana served in every branch of the U.S. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
On September 17, 1944, a massive but hastily planned airborne invasion of the Netherlands was launched. Codenamed Market-Garden, the operation called for three Allied airborne divisions (British 1st and American 82nd and 101st) to land along a narrow corridor reaching from advanced positions along the Dutch-Belgian border to a bridgehead on the northern bank of the Rhine River at Arnhem. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
By mid-August 1944, roughly one month before the now-famous Operation Market Garden, the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division had been fighting off and on for over a year. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
At the beginning of 1945, Nazi Germany was on the ropes. Being pounded by the Allies from both east and west, it was believed that Hitler’s Third Reich was near collapse. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
In the first installment, a large German force made a surprise counteroffensive against American positons along the Belgian-German border—an operation that became known in the West as “the Battle of the Bulge.” Read more
82nd Airborne Division
BACKSTORY: Unternehmen Wacht-am-Rhein (Operation Watch on the Rhine), better known in the West as the Battle of the Bulge, had its beginnings following the failed assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life by Colonel Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg and a group of other high-level plotters who felt that their Führer was not only leading Germany to defeat but also its doom, and thus had to be eliminated. Read more
82nd Airborne Division
The very nature of war means that some participants will be killed and others will be wounded, and some estimate the deaths in WWII to be around 85 million. Read more
