The 13,000

Ahead, as far as the eye could see, the black pavement of Fifth Avenue lay smooth and empty between the towers of Manhattan. Millions of people, jammed along the sidewalks, stood waiting to welcome the 82nd Airborne Division. In 42 side streets below massive, grey Washington Arch, 13,000 soldiers waited too.

The division's proud, rugged commander, tall, slender, 38-year-old Major General James ("Slim Jim") Gavin, marched out into the avenue. The 82nd's bayonet-tipped phalanxes moved out behind him, and the cold wind sent a contagious roar of applause rolling for miles through the great city.

The U.S. Army was parading again in victory.

The 82nd Airborne had come a long, hard way to Fifth Avenue and the honor of marching for all U.S. foot soldiers, living and dead, who had "walked through the mud" of World War II. They had jumped and fought from Casablanca to Berlin. Now, in the biggest U.S. victory parade, they marched as though they heard the bugles of Gettysburg and the Little Big Horn, of San Juan Hill and Chateau-Thierry, sounding with their bands.

For mile after mile the crowds cheered, whistled, sometimes wept. In mid-Manhattan blizzards of ticker tape and torn paper fluttered from the buildings. Paper streamers caught on bayonets and clung to uniforms, but not a soldier's hand was raised.

There was little music. For spaces of half an hour at a time there was only the scuffing cadence of polished boots, the applause, the window-rattling thunder of newly painted Sherman tanks, of 45-ton self-propelled 8-inch howitzers, of Long Toms, jeeps and ambulances.

When it was over, an odd jubilance seemed to possess the dissolving crowds, as though they had seen some greatness in themselves mirrored out in the street. At the reviewing stand Slim Jim Gavin, relaxing at last, touched thumb and forefinger lightly into a circle to tell what he thought of the men who had marched behind him.

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