Five small airborne battle groups in place of three regiments: that was the shape the 101st Airborne Division took when it came back to the Army’s active rolls at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Official reactivation ceremonies on Sept. 21, 1956, marked the division’s return to active duty as the Army’s first nuclear-capable Pentomic division. Twelve years later, in Vietnam, the Screaming Eagles gave up the parachute as their way into battle and switched to helicopters.
The division had been inactivated on Nov. 30, 1945, after a World War II record that ran from the Normandy jump on June 6, 1944, through Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands and the defense of Bastogne. Its 1956 return put that lineage into a force structure designed for a different kind of war.
The 101st’s own history, “Welcome to the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault),” published on army.mil on April 2, 2014, by the division’s public affairs office, records the moment: “Official reactivation ceremonies, held on September 21, 1956, marked the 101st Airborne Division’s return to active duty,” the reactivated division serving “as the Army’s first nuclear capable, Pentomic Division.”
Five battle groups for a nuclear battlefield
The Pentomic idea came from the top of the Army. In an Aug. 14, 2020, army.mil article by Stephanie Ingersoll, John O’Brien, Pratt Museum director and author of “A History of Fort Campbell,” tied the design to Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the Army chief of staff who had led the 101st in World War II, and his effort “to reorganize the Army to fight on a nuclear battlefield.”
O’Brien contrasted the change with the old layout of “the traditional three regiments, two up, one back.” In its place, he said, “the new organization for a pentomic division was five little airborne battle groups” that “could be spread out greatly on the battlefield.”
The arrangement did not last. “The division had nuclear weapons from 1957 to 1964 when the Army decided the Pentomic Army wasn’t working as hoped,” O’Brien said in the same article.
Vietnam and the August 1968 change
The division went to Vietnam in stages. Per the division’s 2014 history, “On July 29th, 1965, the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division was ordered to the Republic of Vietnam,” while “the remainder of the Division remained at Fort Campbell until ordered to Vietnam in late-1967.”
The conversion came in combat. “In August 1968, the Screaming Eagles shed their parachutes in favor of helicopter-borne operations,” the division history says. O’Brien described the same moment in 2020: “the division had to change its organization in the middle of combat in August of 1968 in Vietnam.”
The model for the change already existed. According to O’Brien, the Army had tested how to integrate helicopters into an infantry division, and “the 1st Air Cavalry Division commanded by Major Gen. Harry W.O. Kinnard was the pilot division.”
A month as the 101st Air Cavalry Division
The name briefly followed the helicopters. “Because of that transition, the 101st Airborne Division was renamed the 101st Air Cavalry Division,” O’Brien said. He described the division commander, Maj. Gen. Melvin Zais, as “a proud, proud paratrooper” who pressed the Army’s chief of staff to restore the old name, and said the effort took about a month: “It took him a month but he fought with the chief of staff of the Army.”
The Airborne name stayed, and the division’s new way of fighting was written into it six years later. The 2014 history says “the Division was re-designated as the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) on October 4th, 1974.”
That designation is the one the division carries in its own history, the line that runs from the 1956 reactivation at Fort Campbell through the switch to helicopters in August 1968 to the Air Assault title of Oct. 4, 1974.
Top image: A smoke grenade marks a landing zone for a UH-1D carrying the commander of the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, during Operation Cook in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam, on Sept. 6, 1967. Image Credit: SP5 Robert C. Lafoon, U.S. Army / National Archives — Public domain / Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Combat Rated editors prior to publication.