504^th Parachute Infantry Regiment

The 504th Parachute Infantry fought the 82nd Airborne Division's longest independent combat path. In Sicily, its 3rd Battalion dropped with the 505th near Ponte Olivo on 9 July 1943, while the rest of the regiment followed in a costly Gela-area drop on 11 July, scattered by navigation errors and German and Allied antiaircraft fire. At Salerno the regiment parachuted into the threatened beachhead south of the Sele-Calore crisis, assembled quickly, and moved into the line under 36th Division control. It then attacked toward Altavilla, helping blunt the last German effort to destroy the beachhead.

Unlike most of the division, the 504th stayed in Italy. It fought north of Naples, on the Winter Line at Hill 687, and at Anzio, where it landed in January 1944 and held hard positions along the Mussolini Canal. The regiment missed Normandy but rejoined the division in England before Operation Market-Garden. On 17 September 1944 it seized the Maas bridge at Grave and the Heumen bridge over the Maas-Waal Canal, opening the main route for the British ground column. Three days later, two battalions made the assault-boat crossing of the Waal under heavy fire, secured the north bank, and helped take the Nijmegen rail and highway bridges.

In the Ardennes the 504th moved from Werbomont toward La Gleize and Trois Ponts, fought at Cheneux against Kampfgruppe Peiper's bridgehead, and helped close the southern side of the pocket north of the Ambleve. After later Ardennes, Roer, Rhine, and Elbe operations, the regiment ended the war driving toward Forst Carrenzien as the German Twenty-first Army surrendered to the 82nd. Its unusual path kept it in Italy while much of the division prepared for Normandy, then brought it back for Holland and the final campaign in Germany.