Recently reading the headlines about Band of Brothers coming from HBO tho Netflix and it got me thinking:
– how does the US military divide up it’s soldiers? (Eg regiment vs troop vs platoon vs squadron)
– are there different rules for each branch of the military?
– I’ve only ever heard of the 101st airborne division but not other ones… Was there a 100th division? 99th division, etc? Why is the 101st so famous?
In: 642
101st Airborne was created during WW2. The number was a chosen to convince the Axis powers the Allies had larger numbers of troops than they did in an effort to misdirect their forces.
There were 4 airborne divisions operating around D-day. 2 were British (1st and 6th) and 2 were American (82nd and 101st). In the run up to D-day the allies put enormous effort into convincing the Axis their forces were much bigger than they were in reality. The German army used sequential numbering starting from 1, so it was hoped that by skipping numbers the Germans would be fooled into thinking the Allied army was much bigger. The Allies also created radio traffic and even models to represent some of these fake divisions and arranged for a corpse with fake info to wash ashore somewhere the information would be fed to Hitler.
The same logic was used in other areas in WW2 – the British SAS only has one active duty regiment, the 22nd SAS. There is a reserve regiment (the 23rd) but no others. Even the name (Special Air Service) was a deliberate misdirection; when they were created they used jeeps to hit remote targets, not planes.
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