2nd Armored Division in Europe 1955 US Army; The Big Picture TV-326

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'THE BIG PICTURE cameras will tell the story of two young Army privates who have recently been sent from their training camps in the U.S. to join the 2nd Armored, a division in Europe.'

Originally a public domain film from the National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Armored_Division_(United_States)

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The 2nd Armored Division ("Hell on Wheels") was an armored division of the United States Army. The division played an important role during World War II in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and the liberation of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands and the invasion of Germany. During the Cold War, the division was primarily based at Fort Hood, Texas, and had a reinforced brigade forward stationed in Garlsedt, West Germany. After participation in the Persian Gulf War, the division was inactivated in 1995...

Cold War and Vietnam service

After a brief period of occupation duty, the division returned to Fort Hood, Texas, in 1946 to retrain and rebuild. The 2nd Armored Division returned to West Germany to serve as part of 7th Army from 1951 to 1957, when it got back to III Corps, Fort Hood.

While stationed in Germany in 1952 with the 7th Army, the 2nd Armored Division was based at Stutttgart-Vaihingen under the command of General Williston Palmer. During this time, Palmer enlisted the help of a young Corporal Samuel Adler from within his ranks to organize the Seventh Army Symphony Orchestra. During the course of the next decade, the orchestra remained based with the 2nd Armored Division and the Seventh Army while supporting America's cultural diplomacy initiatives throughout Europe during the height of the Cold War.

The 1/50 Infantry; 2/1 Cavalry; 1/40 Field Artillery; and 1/92 Field Artillery fought in the war in Vietnam, but not the Division as a whole. The division included the "Fort Hood Three", a group of three enlisted men who refused to ship out when ordered to deploy to Vietnam in 1966.

The majority of the division would spend much of the next 35 years based at Fort Hood and the division remained on active service during the Cold War. Its primary mission was to prepare to conduct heavy armored combat against Warsaw Pact forces in defense of NATO. The division formed a key component of the U.S. military's plan to move 'ten divisions in ten days" to Europe in the event of a Soviet threat to NATO. The division practiced this task numerous times during Exercise Reforger from 1967 to 1988. To build and maintain combat skills, the division's maneuver brigades deployed almost annually to the National Training Center to face an opposing force modeling Soviet military weapons and tactics.

However, with the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military began to draw down its combat units. The 2nd Armored Division was scheduled for inactivation in the spring of 1990...