In this paper the response of an Euler-Bernoulli viscoelastic beam to impulsive excitation is obtained using Volterra's model for the stress-strain relationship. In order to achieve a better approximation of actual materials a series of parallel connections of one or more basic models must be used. However, the analytic solutions to most problems then become very difficult. Therefore an alternative approach is to formulate such a problem in terms of the hereditary integral as proposed by Vito Volterra [1].