Force
101st Airborne
The Screaming Eagles — from the Normandy drops and Bastogne to modern air assault.
The 101st Airborne Division — the Screaming Eagles — activated in 1942 with its first commander's promise that it had 'no history, but a rendezvous with destiny.' The promise was kept within two years: scattered by night over Normandy in the hours before D-Day, the division seized causeways and crossroads behind Utah Beach; in September it jumped into Holland for Market Garden and held 'Hell's Highway.'
Bastogne made it immortal. Trucked into the Ardennes in December 1944 to hold the crossroads town against the Bulge, surrounded and shelled through frozen weeks, the 101st answered the German surrender demand with General McAuliffe's one-word 'NUTS!' — the most famous reply in American military history — and held until relieved, though the division insists to this day it needed no rescue. Easy Company of the 506th, chronicled in 'Band of Brothers,' became the war's best-known rifle company.
The eagles traded parachutes for helicopters in Vietnam — Hamburger Hill among the costs — and the division became the Army's air assault force, its Screaming Eagle patch carried through the Gulf War's great left hook and twenty years of Iraq and Afghanistan. Jump wings or not, the M1 Garand-era standard endures: the division that arrives where the enemy least wants it.
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M1 Garand
The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle adopted as the standard arm of any major power, giving the American infantryman of the Second World War a decisive firepower edge over every bolt-action rival. Gas-operated, chambered in .30-06, and fed by an eight-round en-bloc clip, it fired as fast as a man could aim. Patton's verdict — 'the greatest battle implement ever devised' — has headed every account of the rifle since he wrote it in 1945.
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M24 Sniper Weapon System
The M24 Sniper Weapon System (SWS), based on the commercial Remington Model 700 action, is a bolt-action sniper rifle adopted by the United States Army in 1988 as its standard sniper rifle.