82nd Airborne in Greenland Arctic Night 1956 US Army The Big Picture TV-337

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'Exercise Arctic Night was designed to provide training in extreme cold weather for paratroopers of the famed 82nd Airborne Division: "THE BIG PICTURE" to tell of "Artic Night;" Army's TV series now in sixth year -- Official weekly TV program of the Department of the Army, THE BIG PICTURE will release its first program of the '56 - '57 season this week. Keynote of the sixth consecutive season for this series, will be "Arctic Night," a film documentary made in icy Greenland. "Exercise Arctic Night" was designed to provide training in extreme cold weather for paratroopers of the famed 82nd Airborne Division. Seven hundred man hit the silk and dropped onto the frozen ice of a bay near Greenland's Thule Air Base. The jump made history for the Airborne Infantry; it was the largest, and, in fact, the first tactical drop ever made this far north. One of the scenes in the program depicts a road sign which reads: "North Pole -- 80 miles. An Army Signal Corps camera team of three sturdy volunteers braved temperatures of more than 40 degrees below zero to bring back the story for the TV audience. Host-narrator of the program, Master Sergeant Stu Queen, whose normal habitat is some 3,000 miles (and 70 degrees warmer) south of the North Pole, joined the Airborne Unit at their home, Fort Bragg, N.C. and flew with them to report the story. Queen opens the program from Bragg, will be seen in the air with the troopers and, finally, wades through the drifts of the far north, for another firsthand THE BIG PICTURE account. "Exercise Arctic Night" was filmed with the cooperation of the Royal Danish Government, on whose Greenland territory the drop was performed. THE BIG PICTURE is the most widely distributed documentary program in TV today. Seen on over 350 stations weekly, the show is produced by the Army Pictorial Center, New York, for the Army TV Office in Washington, which distributes it.'

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/82nd_Airborne_Division

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

The 82nd Airborne Division is an airborne infantry division of the United States Army, specializing in parachute assault operations into denied areas with a U.S. Department of Defense requirement to "respond to crisis contingencies anywhere in the world within 18 hours." Based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the 82nd Airborne Division is part of the XVIII Airborne Corps. The 82nd Airborne Division is the U.S. Army's most strategically mobile division. Some journalists have reported that the 82nd Airborne is the best trained light infantry division in the world. More recently, the 82nd Airborne has been conducting operations in Iraq, advising and assisting Iraqi Security Forces.

The All American division was constituted, originally as the 82nd Division, in the National Army on 5 August 1917, shortly after the American entry into World War I. It was organized on 25 August 1917, at Camp Gordon, Georgia and later served with distinction on the Western Front in the final months of World War I. Since its initial members came from all 48 states, the division acquired the nickname All-American, which is the basis for its famed "AA" shoulder patch. The division later served in World War II where, in August 1942, it was reconstituted as the first airborne division of the U.S. Army and fought in numerous campaigns during the war.

Famous soldiers of the division include: Sergeant Alvin C. York; General James M. Gavin; General of the Army Omar Bradley; Senator Strom Thurmond (325th Glider Infantry Regiment in World War II); Senator Jack Reed; R&B singer Lou Rawls; actor William Windom; country music singer Craig Morgan; Renown Independent Baptist Minister Jack Hyles; former Syracuse University football coach Ben Schwartzwalder; fashion critic/choreographer Bruce Darnell; The Honorable Patrick Murphy (Under Secretary of the Army); Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards; General "Henry" Hugh Shelton (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001); and Colonel Chris Gibson, former commander of the 2d Battalion, 325th Infantry Regiment, and later commander of the division's 2d Brigade Combat Team, now a New York Congressman...