Christmas has not been kind to the Screaming Eagles of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division. In December 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, the paratroopers of the 101st were under siege in Bastogne, Belgium, short of food and ammunition and encircled by German panzer units. In a Christmas Eve message to his men, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe asked rhetorically, "What's merry about all this? We're fighting, it's cold, we aren't home." Yet McAuliffe cheered up his troops, who held on valiantly until the German advance was blunted. The general's one-word reply to a Nazi ultimatum to surrender--"Nuts!"--made history of its own and epitomized the defiant spirit of one of the Army's finest units.
Last week, in another Christmas season, 245 men and three women of the 101st made noncombat history in a tragic way. They, along with eight civilian crew members, were killed in the worst military air disaster ever. Headed home for the holidays to Fort Campbell, Ky., after six months of multinational peacekeeping duties in the hot winds of the Sinai Peninsula, the troopers died in the bleak brush and deep chill of Newfoundland when their chartered DC-8 jet failed to sustain its takeoff from Gander International Airport. The blue- and-white plane rose less than 1,000 ft., then smashed, tail first, into a small hill, disintegrating in flames about a half-mile from the end of the runway.
The devastation was total. Only a twisted 20-ft. section of the plane's fuselage remained intact. The stricken craft left trees burning and strewn like pickup sticks in its wake. The DC-8's debris and the soldiers' personal effects were scattered in all directions. A boot remained upright. A knife hung from a web belt. A stuffed bear lay in the snow. Two tiny dresses meant for a trooper's daughter somehow escaped the flames.
All of the plane's 256 occupants died instantly. While most were in civilian clothes, some still wore their black jumping boots and the unit's American eagle emblem, selected at the division's creation in 1942 as befitting its military mission: "To crush its enemies by falling upon them like a thunderbolt from the skies." This time there seemed to be no enemy but misfortune, and the Eagles had become victims of their own fatal plunge.
Even before the Gander crash, 1985 ranked as the worst year for aviation fatalities. The total (excluding the Soviet Union, which does not report its air accidents): 1,948, far beyond the previous 1974 record of 1,299. The disaster was also the second to strike American troops assigned to peacekeeping roles in the fractious Middle East. On Oct. 23, 1983, a terrorist's suicidal truck-bomb attack on a Marine headquarters in Beirut killed 241 servicemen. Though a Lebanon-based terror group, Islamic Jihad, claimed it had caused the latest crash with a bomb, Canadian officials quickly discouraged speculation that sabotage may have been involved. Pentagon officials agreed with that early assessment.