The 17th Airborne Division, "The Golden Talons", was an airborne infantry division of the United States Army during World War II, commanded by Major General William M. Miley.
Activated in April 1943, the division took part in the Knollwood Maneuver and other exercises that helped ensure that the U.S. Army would retain airborne divisions. It arrived in Britain in August 1944, having missed the Allies' first two large-scale airborne operations: Operation Husky and Operation Neptune.
In Britain, the 17th came under the command of Maj. Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway's XVIII Airborne Corps, a part of Maj. Gen. Lewis H. Brereton's First Allied Airborne Army. It was not chosen to participate in Operation Market Garden, the airborne landings in the Netherlands, as Allied planners believed it had arrived too late and could not be "trained up" in time. After Market Garden, the division was shipped to France and then Belgium to fight in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge. The 17th gained its first Medal of Honor during its time fighting in the Ardennes, and was then withdrawn to Luxembourg to prepare for an assault over the River Rhine. In March 1945, the division participated in its only airborne operation, dropping alongside the British 6th Airborne Division as a part of Operation Varsity, during which it gained three more Medals of Honor. The division advanced through Northern Germany until the end of World War II, when it briefly undertook occupation duties in Germany before shipping back to the United States. It was inactivated in September 1945, although it was briefly reactivated as a training division between 1948 and 1949.
Formation
The German Armed Forces pioneered the use of large-scale airborne formations, first during the invasion of Norway and Denmark and later that year during the assaults on the Netherlands and Belgium in 1940 and later in the Battle of Crete in 1941. The Allied governments were aware of the success of these operations (but not of the heavy German casualties incurred, particularly during the assault on the Netherlands and the invasion of Crete) and decided to form their own airborne formations. This decision would eventually lead to the creation of five American and two British airborne divisions, as well as many smaller units. The 17th Airborne Division was activated on 15 April 1943 at Camp Mackall in North Carolina, under the command of the newly promoted Major General William Miley, a veteran of World War I. The division was originally composed of the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment, activated on 11 January 1943 at Fort Benning, the 193rd Glider Infantry Regiment, and the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment. The official dedication ceremony for the unit took place on 1 May 1943, with thousands of civilian and military spectators, including Major General Elbridge Chapman, overall commander of Airborne Command and of all American airborne forces during World War II.
thumb|left|[[William M. Miley|William Miley, seen here as a brigadier general, commanded the 17th Airborne Division for the entirety of its activation.]]Once activated, the division remained in the United States for training and exercises. As the division, like all airborne units, was intended to be an elite formation, the training regime was extremely arduous. There were and towers built from which prospective airborne troops would jump off of to simulate landing by parachute, lengthy forced marches and practice jumps from transport aircraft; to pause in the doorway of an aircraft during a practice jump resulted in an automatic failure for the candidate. The resultant failure rate was accordingly high, but there was never a shortage of candidates, especially for the American divisions, as the rate of pay was much higher than that of an ordinary infantryman. The Commanding General (CG) of the U.S. 11th Airborne Division, Major General Joseph May Swing, had been temporarily assigned to act as airborne advisor to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean, for the invasion of Sicily, and had observed the airborne assault, which went badly. The U.S. 82nd Airborne Division had been deployed by both parachute and glider and had suffered high casualties, leading to a perception that it had failed to achieve many of its objectives.
Swing Board
General Eisenhower had reviewed the airborne role in Operation Husky, and had concluded that large-scale formations were too difficult to control in combat to be practical. Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, commander of Army Ground Forces, had similar misgivings: once an airborne supporter, he had been greatly disappointed by their performance in North Africa and, more recently, Sicily. However, other high-ranking officers believed otherwise, notably the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall. He persuaded Eisenhower to set up a review board and to withhold judgement on the effectiveness of divisional-sized airborne forces until a large-scale maneuver could be tried in December. When Swing returned to the United States to resume command of the 11th Airborne Division in mid-September 1943, he had an additional role. McNair ordered him to form a committee–the Swing Board–composed of U.S. Army Air Forces, parachute and glider infantry, and artillery officers to arrange a large-scale maneuver that would effectively decide the fate of the divisional-sized airborne force. The maneuver would also provide both divisions with further airborne training, as had occurred several months previously in a large-scale maneuver undertaken by the 82nd and the 101st Airborne Divisions.