National Affairs: The Screaming Eagles

At sundown, after a daylong display of its skills, the newly formed division fell in on the Fort Campbell, Ky. parade ground. There last week it watched its commander, Bastogne Veteran Major General Thomas L. Sherburne Jr., receive from Army Secretary Wilber M. Brucker and Army Chief of Staff Maxwell D. Taylor the blue-and-red standards of the famous “Screaming Eagles”—the 101st Airborne Division of World War II. In front of the reviewing stand perched a bald eagle, hastily acquired from a South Carolina zoo. Unused to the rocket blast and the plane roar, it had battered itself against its cage all day. Now, as the troops massed, the bands blared, and the colors were handed over, it rested hooded and bound on its perch, its right wing trailing downward. Not once did it scream.

Like its mascot, the reborn 101st Division has not yet realized in fact its symbolic potential. But the ingredients are there. When fully trained, equipped and tested, it may provide the Army with the answers it desperately seeks for survival and victory on the atomic battlefield.

New Twists. In Pentagon thinking, the new need is for a lean, fully airborne, highly flexible but fully coordinated unit—capable of rapierlike attack, swift dispersal, and bludgeon riposte under any conditions. On paper, the new 101st seems to fit the bill. With a complement of 11,486 men, it is approximately one-third smaller than its two older sisters (the 82nd at Fort Bragg, the 11th at Augsburg, Germany). But it is in its mobility and organization that the 101st provides its novelties.

Unlike the conventional triangular division, with its top-heavy headquarters units and its sizable “land-tail” (heavy weapon units, regimental tank companies, etc.), all of the new division and its specially designed, lightweight equipment can be airlifted. At its heart will be five self-supporting battle groups, each 1,580 men strong, and each containing a 155-man 105-millimeter mortar group and a small (220) headquarters outfit. The groups, broken down into five battle companies each, will be backed up in combat by an atom-armed 140-man Honest John rocket detachment, by a 500-man 105-howitzer group, plus engineers, signal and supply people.

To ensure quick communications between its rapidly dispersable outfits, the division will be supplied with 100 Army light planes and helicopters, and provided with an airborne television system and many a new transportation device—among them the “mechanical mule,” a vehicle 27 inches high and weighing only 760 lbs., and the “flying platform,” a one-man helicopter in which the pilot stands on a ledge over the rotor blades and guides the machine by hand levers.

Missing Line. In the show last week the men of the 101st—many of them veterans of the World War II outfit—turned out with a roar to show off their skills. The high point of the day was the firing of an Honest John rocket, which set off a simulated atomic blast. The rocket launcher, however, was borrowed; a fact which symptomized one of the joist’s current ills. It has yet to get much of its equipment.

More important, although the 101st was designed for airlifting, there are still general doubts about where its transport planes are coming from. Last May Air Force General Otto P. Weyland, boss of the Tactical Air Command, told a Senate investigating subcommittee that under present capabilities, the Air Force could not move a combat-loaded division from the U.S. to the Far East in less than “a week or ten days.” The implication: the transports needed to move the 101st in trigger-quick time may simply not be available.

But among Eaglemen last week there was little doubt about the eventual bright outcome. Said one sergeant: “We’re new, see? We don’t inherit anybody else’s mistakes. We’re gonna write the book. That’s good.”