Page:John Banks Wilson - Maneuver and Firepower (1998).djvu/251

 AN INTERLUDE OF PEACE (the field artillery batteries had four rather than six gun crews), or by companies (the engineer battalion had three instead of four line companies and there was no divisional replacement company). Strengths in the Guard units ranged between 5,000 and 10,500 men of all ranks. The divisions of the Organized Reserve Corps remained either Class B or Class C units.

The development of the postwar airborne division took almost two years longer than infantry and armored divisions. On 16 August 1946 Army Ground Forces forwarded to the General Staff an outline for an airborne division. It was an infantry division with the addition of a pathfinder platoon and a parachute maintenance company. The division had approximately 19,000 jump-qualified officers and enlisted men and two sets of equipment, one for air assault and the other for sustained combat. Eisenhower rejected the proposal because the unit could not be air-transported. He directed Army Ground Forces to prepare an organization that could be moved by existing aircraft. Eisenhower also rejected the resulting proposal, but a third idea developed by the Organizational and Training Division of the General Staff won acceptance. The staff proposed an airborne division with two categories of units, organic elements that could be airlifted and attached ground units that were to link up with them. To make the unit air-transportable, the staff eliminated heavy mortars and tanks from infantry regiments and restricted the number of howitzers in field artillery batteries to four. The attached units included two heavy tank battalions, a 155-mm. howitzer battalion, a reconnaissance company, a medium maintenance company, and a quartermaster company, which totaled 2,580 officers and enlisted men. Those units along with the division's organic elements, which numbered 16,470, made the division's size approximately the same as the Army Ground Forces proposa1.

With the proposed airborne division attempting to meet two competing needs, strategic mobility and tactical sustainment, the General Staff decided to test it. The 82d Airborne Division (less one regimental combat team at Fort Benning) adopted the new structure on 1 January 1948. After the test, Army Field Forces (AFF), the successor of Army Ground Forces, recommended organizing the airborne division in the same manner as an infantry division. As organized for the test, the airborne division was not air-transportable. The Army Staff, nevertheless, still sought a large airborne unit for strategic mobility. Therefore, on 4 May 1949 the new Chief of Staff, General Omar Bradley, directed that the attached combat elements be made organic to the division and that only 11,000 of its 17,500 men be airborne qualified. The Department of the Army published new tables (Chart 25) mirroring these decisions on 1 April 1950. Reorganization of Regular Army and Organized Reserve Corps airborne divisions followed shortly thereafter.

While the Army developed and reorganized its postwar divisions, it continued to maintain and redeploy its existing forces to meet changing international