A Bastogne exhibit inside the Tennessee Wings of Liberty Museum at Fort Campbell. The museum’s World War II section follows the 101st Airborne Division from Normandy to Operation Market Garden, Bastogne and the final stages of the war in Europe. Credit: Ryan LaBee/Military.com
The D-Day exhibit inside Fort Campbell’s new Tennessee Wings of Liberty Museum does not begin on the beach. It begins behind it. Inside the museum that officially opened this month is the story of June 6, 1944, told by the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division who jumped into Normandy before dawn, landing behind Utah Beach to help open the way for the amphibious forces that followed. The framing is intentional. The museum is dedicated not only to Fort Campbell’s units; rather, to the history of “vertical envelopment,” or the Army’s term for striking from above—whether by parachute, helicopter or other aircraft.
That makes the museum’s opening especially timely around Memorial Day and as Focus Features prepares to release Pressure, a new D-Day drama arriving in U.S. theaters May 29. The film follows the tense 72 hours before the Normandy invasion, when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and British meteorologist James Stagg weighed weather, timing and the lives of thousands of troops waiting to cross the English Channel. At Fort Campbell, where Focus Features and the USO recently hosted a media visit tied to the film, the museum offered a ground-level reminder that D-Day was not just one story, one beach, or one kind of courage. It was about command decisions, weather forecasts, airborne drops, amphibious landings and the soldiers ordered to make all of it real.
