Featured Image: Visit Clarksville
Detouring to Clarksville is one of my favorite ways to spend a Saturday, trading my typical routine for the city’s charming downtown, excellent food, and antique shopping. But now I have a new reason to come: there’s a military history experience that I’d stack up against any in the country.
The Tennessee Wings of Liberty Museum is now open.
My interest in military history goes back to a high school course where we studied Band of Brothers and the story of Easy Company in depth. In the years since, I’ve worked through just about every film and book I can find on Desert Storm and the post-9/11 conflicts, so I was very eager to see what this museum had in store. I walked in expecting to “ooh” and “ahh” at some artifacts, and I walked out having climbed inside a helicopter from the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
At 51,000 square feet on a 33-acre campus, Wings of Liberty is four times the size of Fort Campbell’s old Pratt Museum and the second-largest museum in the entire U.S. Army system. It honors the units that have called the post home, chief among them are three of the Army’s most storied: the 101st Airborne Division, the 5th Special Forces Group, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Their histories run straight through the biggest moments of the last 80 years, from the beaches of Normandy to a particular compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
The Screaming Eagles
As any Band of Brothers fan knows, the 101st Airborne Division earned its reputation on June 6, 1944, when paratroopers jumped into the darkness behind Utah Beach hours before the first landing craft hit Normandy. Six months later, they were surrounded and outnumbered at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
The Screaming Eagles closed out the war in Europe by seizing Berchtesgaden, the Bavarian mountain town where Hitler and the Nazi elite kept their retreats. That history is archived at Wings of Liberty, where actual memorabilia from the Eagle’s Nest sits among the World War II displays.
The Green Berets
The 5th Special Forces Group made its name in Vietnam, where Green Berets lived among and trained local forces far from any conventional front line. Right after 9/1, on October 19, 2001, a 12-man team known as ODA 595 slipped into northern Afghanistan and, with no other way across the terrain, went to war on horseback alongside the Northern Alliance.
The Night Stalkers
The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flies the missions no one else can, at night, low, and unseen, earning them the name Night Stalkers and the motto “Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.”
They flew the Black Hawks over Mogadishu in 1993, the mission the world came to know as Black Hawk Down. And in May 2011, Night Stalker crews carried Navy SEALs into Abbottabad, Pakistan, for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
Today, one of the Chinook helicopters from that operation sits inside the museum and has become a flight-simulator experience.
From D-Day to Drones
The exhibits move chronologically throughout the museum, from Normandy through Vietnam, Desert Storm, and the Global War on Terrorism. The history is told through multimedia displays, life-size scene reenactments, preserved military uniforms from the Army and their opponents, and displays that chronicle not only the conflict, but what was happening in the world and in Clarksville at the time.
It’s all capped by military aircraft hanging overhead, starting with World War II planes and ending with massive drones.
You’ll find the museum at 400 Wings of Liberty Way just outside the Fort Campbell gates. Admission is free and open to all.
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| This article is presented in partnership with Visit Clarksville, a Modern South Founding Partner.
