Order of Leopold (Belgium)
The Order of Leopold is one of the three current Belgian national honorary orders of knighthood. It is named in honour of its founder, it consists of a maritime and a civil division. The maritime division is only awarded to personnel of the merchant navy, the military division to military personnel; the decoration is awarded by Royal order. When Belgium became independent of the Netherlands, there was an urgent need to create a national honour system that could serve as a diplomatic gift; the national congress provided this exclusive right to the sovereign, this military honour system was written in Article 76. The first King of the Belgians, Leopold I of Belgium, used his constitutional right in a larger way than foreseen: not only military merit, but every service in honour of the Kingdom. Two years after the independence, the young King founded the dynastic Order of Leopold; the king approved the colour and grades both civil and military, the official motto L’Union fait la Force/Eendracht maakt Macht.
In 1832 Felix de Merode had a design approved by the Chambers for civil merit. This system was adapted from other European countries. More specific, the Order of Leopold is based on the French honour tradition with 5 classes. On the 11th of June 1832 the law was promulgated, the exact colours were defined; the devise was presented in the 3rd article: L'union fait la Force. The Belgian court used the Grand Cordon as a valuable diplomatic gift; however in the 2nd half of the 19th century, the court used it as a dynastic order to bestow on family members during major family celebrations. The founder gave his French family Grand Cordons as wedding gifts. During weddings the Belgian court sent large numbers of crosses to its court. For the wedding of Rudolf and Stephanie the father of the bride sent 20 Grand Cordons to the Austrian Court. In return the Belgian court received decorations; the order was bestowed by King Leopold II on Prince Karl Anton of Hohenzollern and Ernst Gunther, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein as a personal marriage gift.
In 1878 the King named several diplomatic dignitaries Grand Cordon in honour of his silver wedding celebration, among them Vannutelli. In 1900 the occasion of the wedding of Prince Albert was used to send 15 Grand Cordons to the Bavarian Court. Among the recipients were Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria and his two sons, Princes Ludwig and Arnulf, Duke Louis of Bavaria and the father of the bride Karl Theodor, Duke in Bavaria; the brother of the new Princess, Duke Ludwig Wilhelm was still a minor at the time of the wedding, Minister de Favereau opposed this wedding gift for an adolescent. However, the young prince, aged 14, received the gift by royal decree. People who fought in the Belgian revolution became members in great numbers. In 1838 the King lost his right to create members, this was from on the responsibility of the foreign office. In 1836 Meyerbeer was made knight of the Order, by royal Command. At the end of his reign the major political elite were members of the order. King Leopold II bestowed the order upon notable Belgian artists and clergy.
His successors continued to bestow the Order. Rafael Merry del Val, John Browning, James Blyth, 1st Baron Blyth, Brand Whitlock, Charles Lindbergh, George S. Patton, Bernard Montgomery, Dwight Eisenhower, Wesley Clark, Charles de Gaulle, Mstislav Rostropovich, Count Kiyoura Keigo, Count Jacques Rogge, Prince Fulco Ruffo di Calabria and Prince Emmanuel de Merode. At the end of World War I, the order became internationally recognised for its famous members. In 1919 King Albert granted all Lieutenant-Generals of the Belgian Army the Grand Cordon in Brussels; the King bestowed the Major Generals with the Grand Cordon, amongst the recipients some important generals like Alphonse Jacques de Dixmude, knight Antonin de Selliers de Moranville and Baron Édouard Michel du Faing d'Aigremont. Foreign recipients include admiral Hugh Rodman and Vice Admiral William Sowden Sims One of the rare Ladies in the order was Countess Renée de Merode; the order can be bestowed post-mortem. People can lose the order, for example.
After the Second World War, the Order of Leopold was bestowed on the several officers of foreign militaries who had helped to liberate Belgium from the occupation of German forces. Most illustrious was the grand Cordons with Palms given by the King to Sir Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1945; the medal was granted to Karel Bossart in 1962, Josip Broz Tito in 1970. Today membership can only be granted by decree of His Majesty King Philippe of Belgium and is reserved to the most important Belgian nationals and to some distinguished foreign persons who contributed in one way to the Belgian military, the Belgian civil society or the Belgian State. Annually, there are two major days when the king grants membership, on April 15 and on November 15. During state visits
Legion of Honour
The Legion of Honour is the highest French order of merit for military and civil merits, established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte and retained by all French governments and régimes. The order's motto is Honneur et Patrie, its seat is the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur next to the Musée d'Orsay, on the left bank of the Seine in Paris; the order is divided into five degrees of increasing distinction: Chevalier, Commandeur, Grand officier, Grand-croix. During the French Revolution, all of the French orders of chivalry were abolished, replaced with Weapons of Honour, it was the wish of Napoleon Bonaparte, the First Consul, to create a reward to commend civilians and soldiers. From this wish was instituted a Légion d'honneur, a body of men, not an order of chivalry, for Napoleon believed that France wanted a recognition of merit rather than a new system of nobility. However, the Légion d'honneur did use the organization of the old French orders of chivalry, for example the Ordre de Saint-Louis; the insignia of the Légion d'honneur bear a resemblance to those of the Ordre de Saint-Louis, which used a red ribbon.
Napoleon created this award to ensure political loyalty. The organization would be used as a façade to give political favours and concessions; the Légion d'honneur was loosely patterned after a Roman legion, with legionaries, commanders, regional "cohorts" and a grand council. The highest rank was not a Grand Cross but a Grand aigle, a rank that wore the insignia common to a Grand Cross; the members were paid, the highest of them generously: 5,000 francs to a grand officier, 2,000 francs to a commandeur, 1,000 francs to an officier, 250 francs to a légionnaire. Napoleon famously declared, "You call these baubles, well, it is with baubles that men are led... Do you think that you would be able to make men fight by reasoning? Never; that is good only for the scholar in his study. The soldier needs glory, rewards." This has been quoted as "It is with such baubles that men are led." The order was the first modern order of merit. Under the monarchy, such orders were limited to Roman Catholics, all knights had to be noblemen.
The military decorations were the perks of the officers. The Légion d'honneur, was open to men of all ranks and professions—only merit or bravery counted; the new legionnaire had to be sworn into the Légion d'honneur. It is noteworthy that all previous orders were crosses or shared a clear Christian background, whereas the Légion d'honneur is a secular institution; the badge of the Légion d'honneur has five arms. In a decree issued on the 10 Pluviôse XIII, a grand decoration was instituted; this decoration, a cross on a large sash and a silver star with an eagle, symbol of the Napoleonic Empire, became known as the Grand aigle, in 1814 as the Grand cordon. After Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French in 1804 and established the Napoleonic nobility in 1808, award of the Légion d'honneur gave right to the title of "Knight of the Empire"; the title was made hereditary after three generations of grantees. Napoleon had dispensed 15 golden collars of the Légion d'honneur among his family and his senior ministers.
This collar was abolished in 1815. Although research is made difficult by the loss of the archives, it is known that three women who fought with the army were decorated with the order: Virginie Ghesquière, Marie-Jeanne Schelling and a nun, Sister Anne Biget; the Légion d'honneur was visible in the French Empire. The Emperor always wore it and the fashion of the time allowed for decorations to be worn most of the time; the king of Sweden therefore declined the order. Napoleon's own decorations were captured by the Prussians and were displayed in the Zeughaus in Berlin until 1945. Today, they are in Moscow. Louis XVIII changed the appearance of the order. To have done so would have angered the 35,000 to 38,000 members; the images of Napoleon and his eagle were removed and replaced by the image of King Henry IV, the popular first king of the Bourbon line. Three Bourbon fleurs-de-lys replaced the eagle on the reverse of the order. A king's crown replaced the imperial crown. In 1816, the grand cordons were renamed grand crosses and the legionnaires became knights.
The king decreed. The Légion d'honneur became the second-ranking order of knighthood of the French monarchy, after the Order of the Holy Spirit. Following the overthrow of the Bourbons in favour of King Louis Philippe I of the House of Orléans, the Bourbon monarchy's orders were once again abolished and the Légion d'honneur was restored in 1830 as the paramount decoration of the French nation; the insignia were drastically altered. In 1847, there were 47,000 members, yet another revolution in Paris brought a new design to the Légion d'honneur. A nephew of the founder, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, was elected president and he restored the image of his uncle on the crosses of the order. In 1852, the first recorded woman, Angélique Duchemin, an old revolutionary of the 1789 uprising against the absolute monarchy, was admitted into the order. On 2 December 1851, President Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte staged a coup d'état with the help of the armed forces, he made himself Emperor of the French one year on 2 December 1852, after a successful plebiscite.
An Imperial crown was added. During Napoleon III's reign, the first American was admitted
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery is a United States military cemetery in Arlington County, across the Potomac River from Washington, D. C. in whose 624 acres the dead of the nation's conflicts have been buried, beginning with the Civil War, as well as reinterred dead from earlier wars. The United States Department of the Army, a component of the United States Department of Defense, controls the cemetery; the national cemetery was established during the Civil War on the grounds of Arlington House, the estate of Confederate general Robert E Lee's wife Mary Anna Custis Lee. The Cemetery, along with Arlington House, Memorial Drive, the Hemicycle, the Arlington Memorial Bridge, form the Arlington National Cemetery Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in April 2014. George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington and adopted son of George Washington, acquired the land that now is Arlington National Cemetery in 1802, began construction of Arlington House, named after the village of Arlington, England, where his family was from.
The estate passed to Custis' daughter, Mary Anna, who had married United States Army officer Robert E. Lee. Custis' will gave a "life inheritance" to Mary Lee, allowing her to live at and run Arlington Estate for the rest of her life but not enabling her to sell any portion of it. Upon her death, the Arlington estate passed to George Washington Custis Lee; when Virginia seceded from the Union after the start of the American Civil War at Fort Sumter, Robert E. Lee resigned his commission on April 20, 1861, took command of the armed forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia becoming commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. On May 7, troops of the Virginia militia occupied Arlington House. With Confederate forces occupying Arlington's high ground, the capital of the Union was left in an untenable military position. Although unwilling to leave Arlington House, Mary Lee believed her estate would soon be recaptured by federal soldiers. So she buried many of her family treasures on the grounds and left for her sister's estate at Ravensworth in Fairfax County, Virginia, on May 14.
On May 3, General Winfield Scott ordered Brigadier General Irvin McDowell to clear Arlington and the city of Alexandria, Virginia, of all troops not loyal to the United States. McDowell occupied Arlington without opposition on May 24. At the outbreak of the Civil War, most military personnel who died in battle near Washington, D. C. were buried at the United States Soldiers' Cemetery in Washington, D. C. or Alexandria Cemetery in Alexandria, but by late 1863 both were nearly full. On July 16, 1862, Congress passed legislation authorizing the U. S. federal government to purchase land for national cemeteries for military dead, put the U. S. Army Quartermaster General in charge of this program. In May 1864, Union forces suffered large numbers of dead in the Battle of the Wilderness. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered that an examination of eligible sites be made for the establishment for a large new national military cemetery. Within weeks, his staff reported; the property was high and free from floods, it had a view of the District of Columbia, it was aesthetically pleasing.
It was the home of the leader of the armed forces of the Confederate States of America, denying Robert E. Lee use of his home after the war was a valuable political consideration; the first military burial at Arlington, for William Henry Christman, was made on May 13, 1864, close to what is now the northeast gate in Section 27. However, Meigs did not formally authorize establishment of burials until June 15, 1864. Arlington did not desegregate its burial practices until President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948; the government acquired Arlington at a tax sale in 1864 for $26,800, equal to $429,313 today. Mrs. Lee had not appeared in person but rather had sent an agent, attempting to pay the $92.07 in property taxes assessed on the estate in a timely manner. The government turned away her agent. In 1874, Custis Lee, heir under his grandfather's will passing the estate in trust to his mother, sued the United States claiming ownership of Arlington. On December 9, 1882, the U.
S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Lee's favor in United States v. Lee, deciding that Arlington had been confiscated without due process. After that decision, Congress returned the estate to him, on March 3, 1883, Custis Lee sold it back to the government for $150,000 at a signing ceremony with Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln; the land became a military reservation. President Herbert Hoover conducted the first national Memorial Day ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery, on May 30, 1929. Beginning in 1863, the federal government used the southern portion of the land now occupied by the cemetery as a settlement for freed slaves, giving the name of "Freedman's Village" to the land; the government constructed rental houses that 1,100 to 3,000 freed slaves occupied while farming 1,100 acres of the estate and receiving schooling and occupational training during the Civil War and after War ended. However, after the land became part of a military reservation, the government asked the Villagers to leave.
When some remained, John A. Commerford, the Superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery, asked the Army's Quartermaster General in 1887 to close the Village on the grounds that people living in the Village had been taking trees at night from the cemetery for use as firew
Confederate States Army
The Confederate States Army was the military land force of the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, fighting against the United States forces. On February 28, 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress established a provisional volunteer army and gave control over military operations and authority for mustering state forces and volunteers to the newly chosen Confederate president, Jefferson Davis. Davis was a graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, colonel of a volunteer regiment during the Mexican–American War, he had been a United States Senator from Mississippi and U. S. Secretary of War under President Franklin Pierce. On March 1, 1861, on behalf of the Confederate government, Davis assumed control of the military situation at Charleston, South Carolina, where South Carolina state militia besieged Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, held by a small U. S. Army garrison. By March 1861, the Provisional Confederate Congress expanded the provisional forces and established a more permanent Confederate States Army.
An accurate count of the total number of individuals who served in the Confederate Army is not possible due to incomplete and destroyed Confederate records. This does not include an unknown number of slaves who were pressed into performing various tasks for the army, such as construction of fortifications and defenses or driving wagons. Since these figures include estimates of the total number of individual soldiers who served at any time during the war, they do not represent the size of the army at any given date; these numbers do not include men. Although most of the soldiers who fought in the American Civil War were volunteers, both sides by 1862 resorted to conscription as a means to force men to register and to volunteer. In the absence of exact records, estimates of the percentage of Confederate soldiers who were draftees are about double the 6 percent of United States soldiers who were conscripts. Confederate casualty figures are incomplete and unreliable; the best estimates of the number of deaths of Confederate soldiers are about 94,000 killed or mortally wounded in battle, 164,000 deaths from disease and between 26,000 and 31,000 deaths in United States prison camps.
One estimate of Confederate wounded, considered incomplete, is 194,026. These numbers do not include men who died from other causes such as accidents, which would add several thousand to the death toll; the main Confederate armies, the Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee and the remnants of the Army of Tennessee and various other units under General Joseph E. Johnston, surrendered to the U. S. on April 9, 1865, April 18, 1865. Other Confederate forces surrendered between April 16, 1865 and June 28, 1865. By the end of the war, more than 100,000 Confederate soldiers had deserted, some estimates put the number as high as one third of Confederate soldiers; the Confederacy's government dissolved when it fled Richmond in April and exerted no control of the remaining armies. By the time Abraham Lincoln took office as President of the United States on March 4, 1861, the seven seceding slave states had formed the Confederate States; the Confederacy seized federal property, including nearly all U.
S. Army forts, within its borders. Lincoln was determined to hold the forts remaining under U. S. control when he took office Fort Sumter in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. By the time Lincoln was sworn in as president, the Provisional Confederate Congress had authorized the organization of a large Provisional Army of the Confederate States. Under orders from Confederate President Jefferson Davis, C. S. troops under the command of General P. G. T. Beauregard bombarded Fort Sumter on April 12–13, 1861, forcing its capitulation on April 14; the United States demanded war. It rallied behind Lincoln's call on April 15, for all the states to send troops to recapture the forts from the secessionists, to put down the rebellion and to preserve the United States intact. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy. Both the United States and the Confederate States began in earnest to raise large volunteer, armies with the objectives of putting down the rebellion and preserving the Union, on the one hand, or of establishing independence from the United States, on the other.
The Confederate Congress provided for a Confederate army patterned after the United States Army. It was to consist of a large provisional force to exist only in time of war and a small permanent regular army; the provisional, volunteer army was established by an act of the Provisional Confederate Congress passed on February 28, 1861, one week before the act which established the permanent regular army organization, passed on March 6. Although the two forces were to exist concurrently little was done to organize the Confederate regular army; the Provisional Army of the Confederate States began organizing on April 27. All regular and conscripted men preferred to enter this organization since officers could achieve a higher rank in the Provisional Army than they could in the Regular Army. If the war had ended for them, the Confederates intended that the PACS would be disbanded, leaving only the ACSA; the Army of the Confederate States of America was the regular army and was authorized to include 15,015 men, including 744 officers, but this level was never achieved.
The men serving in the highest rank as Confederate States generals, such as Samuel Cooper and Robert E. Lee, were enrolled in the ACSA to ensure that they outranked all
American Expeditionary Forces
The American Expeditionary Forces was a formation of the United States Army on the Western Front of World War I. The AEF was established on July 1917, in France under the command of Gen. John J. Pershing, it fought alongside French Army, British Army, Canadian Army, Australian Army units against the German Empire. A minority of the AEF troops fought alongside Italian Army units in that same year against the Austro-Hungarian Army; the AEF helped the French Army on the Western Front during the Aisne Offensive in the summer of 1918, fought its major actions in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in the latter part of 1918. President Woodrow Wilson planned to give command of the AEF to Gen. Frederick Funston, but after Funston's sudden death, Wilson appointed Major General John J. Pershing in May 1917, Pershing remained in command for the entire war. Pershing insisted; as a result, few troops arrived before January 1918. In addition, Pershing insisted that the American force would not be used to fill gaps in the French and British armies, he resisted European efforts to have U.
S. troops deployed as individual replacements in decimated Allied units. This approach was not always well received by the western Allied leaders who distrusted the potential of an army lacking experience in large-scale warfare. In addition, the British Empire tried to bargain with its spare shipping to make the United States put its soldiers into British ranks. By June 1917, only 14,000 American soldiers had arrived in France, the AEF had only a minor participation at the front through late October 1917, but by May 1918 over one million American troops were stationed in France, though only half of them made it to the front lines. Since the transport ships needed to bring American troops to Europe were scarce at the beginning, the U. S. Army pressed into service passenger liners, seized German ships, borrowed Allied ships to transport American soldiers from ports in New York City, New Jersey, Virginia; the mobilization effort taxed the American military to the limit and required new organizational strategies and command structures to transport great numbers of troops and supplies and efficiently.
The French harbors of Bordeaux, La Pallice, Saint Nazaire, Brest became the entry points into the French railway system that brought the American troops and their supplies to the Western Front. American engineers in France built 82 new ship berths, nearly 1,000 miles of additional standard-gauge tracks, over 100,000 miles of telephone and telegraph lines; the first American troops, who were called "Doughboys", landed in Europe in June 1917. However the AEF did not participate at the front until October 21, 1917, when the 1st Division fired the first American shell of the war toward German lines, although they participated only on a small scale. A group of regular soldiers and the first American division to arrive in France, entered the trenches near Nancy, France, in Lorraine; the AEF used British equipment. Appreciated were the French canon de 75 modèle 1897, the canon de 155 C modèle 1917 Schneider, the canon de 155mm GPF. American aviation units received the SPAD XIII and Nieuport 28 fighters, the U.
S. Army tank corps used French Renault FT light tanks. Pershing established facilities in France to train new arrivals with their new weapons. By the end of 1917, four divisions were deployed in a large training area near Verdun: the 1st Division, a regular army formation. S. Marines; the fifth division, the 41st Division, was converted into a depot division near Tours. Supporting the two million soldiers across the Atlantic Ocean was a massive logistical enterprise, yet the U. S. Army's logistical skills had atrophied during the decades following the Civil War. In order to be successful, the Americans needed to create a coherent support structure with little institutional knowledge. After a rough start, the AEF developed support network appropriate for the huge size of the American force, it rested upon the Services of Supply in the rear areas, with ports, depots, maintenance facilities, clothing repair shops, replacement depots, ice plants, a wide variety of other activities. The Services of Supply initiated support techniques that would last well into the Cold War including forward maintenance, field cooking, graves registration, host nation support, motor transport, morale services.
The work of the logisticians enabled the success of the AEF and contributed to the emergence of the American Army as a modern fighting force. African Americans were made up 13 percent of the draftees. By the end of the war, over 350,000 African-Americans had served in AEF units on the Western Front. However, they were assigned to segregated units commanded by white officers. One fifth of the black soldiers sent to France saw combat, compared to two-thirds of the whites, they were three percent of AEF combat forces, under two percent of battlefield fatalities. "The mass of the colored drafted men cannot be used for combatant troops", said a General Staff report in 1918, it recommended that "these colored drafted men be organized in reserve labor battalions." They handled unskilled labor tasks as stevedores in the Atlantic ports and common laborers at the camps and in the Services of the Rear in Fr
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is a United States Air Force base and census-designated place just east of Dayton, Ohio, in Greene and Montgomery counties. It includes both Wright and Patterson Fields, which were Wilbur Wright Field and Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot. Patterson Field is 10 miles northeast of Dayton; the host unit at Wright-Patterson AFB is the 88th Air Base Wing, assigned to the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center and Air Force Materiel Command. The 88 ABW operates the airfield, maintains all infrastructure and provides security, medical, personnel, finance, air traffic control, weather forecasting, public affairs and chaplain services for more than 60 associate units; the base's origins begin with the establishment of Wilbur Wright Field on 22 May and McCook Field in November 1917, both established by the Army Air Service as World War I installations. McCook was used for aviation experiments. Wright was used as a flying field. McCook's functions were transferred to Wright Field when it was closed in October 1927.
Wright-Patterson AFB was established in 1948 as a merger of Wright Fields. In 1995, negotiations to end the Bosnian War were held at the base, resulting in the Dayton Agreement that ended the war; the 88th Air Base Wing is commanded by Col. John M. Devillier Its Command Chief Master Sergeant is Chief Master Sergeant John M. Mazza; the base had a total of 27,406 military and contract employees in 2010. The Greene County portion of the base is a census-designated place, with a resident population of 1,821 at the 2010 census. Wright-Patterson AFB is "one of the largest, most diverse, organizationally complex bases in the Air Force" with a long history of flight tests spanning from the Wright Brothers into the Space Age, it is the headquarters of the Air Force Materiel Command, one of the major commands of the Air Force. "Wright-Patt" is the location of a major USAF Medical Center, the Air Force Institute of Technology, the National Museum of the United States Air Force known as the U. S. Air Force Museum.
It is the home base of the 445th Airlift Wing of the Air Force Reserve Command, an Air Mobility Command-gained unit which flies the C-17 Globemaster heavy airlifter. Wright-Patterson is the headquarters of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Wright-Patterson is the host of the annual United States Air Force Marathon which occurs the weekend closest to the Air Force's anniversary. 88th Air Base WingThe 88 ABW consists of more than 5,000 officers, enlisted Air Force and contractor employees responsible for three primary mission areas: operating the installation. The Wing reports to the Aeronautical Systems Center, a major development and acquisition product center of Air Force Materiel Command, it consists of the following organizations: 88th Civil Engineer Squadron 88th Communications Group 88th Medical Group – Wright-Patterson Medical Center 88th Mission Support Group 88th Comptroller Squadron 88th Security Forces Squadron 88th Air Base Wing Staff AgenciesTenant unitsAir Force Materiel Command Air Force Life Cycle Management Center 77th Aeronautical Systems Wing 303d Aeronautical Systems Wing 312th Aeronautical Systems Wing 326th Aeronautical Systems Wing 478th Aeronautical Systems Wing 516th Aeronautical Systems Wing Air Force Security Assistance Center Air Force Research Laboratory known as Wright Labs Air Force Institute of Technology National Air and Space Intelligence Center National Museum of the U.
S. Air Force 445th Airlift Wing 554th Electronic Systems Group Prehistoric Indian mounds of the Adena culture at Wright-Patterson are along P Street and, at the Wright Brothers Memorial, a hilltop mound group. Aircraft operations on land now part of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base began in 1904–1905 when Wilbur and Orville Wright used an 84-acre plot of Huffman Prairie for experimental test flights with the Wright Flyer III, their flight exhibition company and the Wright Company School of Aviation returned 1910–1916 to use the flying field. World War I transfers of land that became WPAFB include 2,075-acre along the Mad River leased to the Army by the Miami Conservancy District, the adjacent 40 acres purchased by the Army from the District for the Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot, a 254-acre complex for McCook Field just north of downtown Dayton between Keowee Street and the Great Miami River. In 1918, Wilbur Wright Field agreed to let McCook Field use hangar and shop space as well as its enlisted mechanics to assemble and maintain airplanes and engines.
After World War I, 347 German aircraft were brought to the United States—some were incorporated into the Army Aeronautical Museum. The training school at Wilbur Wright Field was discontinued. Wilbur Wright Field and the depot merged; the Patterson family formed the Dayton Air Service Committee, Inc which held a campaign that raised $425,000 in two days and purchased 4,520.47 acres northeast of Dayton, including Wilbur Wright Field and the Huffman Prairie Flying Field. In 1924, the Comm
Brigadier general
Brigadier general or Brigade general is a senior rank in the armed forces. It is the lowest ranking general officer in some countries sitting between the ranks of colonel and major general; when appointed to a field command, a brigadier general is in command of a brigade consisting of around 4,000 troops. In some countries a brigadier general is informally designated as a one-star general. In some countries, this rank is given the name of brigadier, equivalent to brigadier general in the armies of nations that use the rank, although the rank is not regarded as a general officer; the rank can be traced back to the militaries of Europe where a brigadier general, or a brigadier, would command a brigade in the field. The rank name général de brigade, was first used in the French revolutionary armies. In the first quarter of the 20th century and Commonwealth armies used the rank of brigadier general as a temporary appointment, or as an honorary appointment on retirement; some armies, such as Taiwan and Japan, use major general as the equivalent of brigadier general.
Some of these armies use the rank of colonel general to make four general-officer ranks. Mexico uses the ranks of General de brigada; this gallery displays Air Force brigadier general insignia if they are different from the Army brigadier general insignia. Note that in many Commonwealth countries, the equivalent air force rank is Air Commodore; the rank of brigadier general is used in the Argentine Air Force. Unlike other armed forces of the World, the rank of brigadier general is the highest rank in the Air Force; this is due to the use of the rank of brigadier and its derivatives to designate all general officers in the Air Force: brigadier. The rank of brigadier general is reserved for the Chief General Staff of the Air Force, as well as the Chief of the Joint General Staff if he should be an Air Force officer; the Argentine Army does not use the rank of brigadier-general, instead using brigade general which in turn is the lowest general officer before Divisional General and Lieutenant General.
In the Australian Imperial Force during World War I, the rank of brigadier general was always temporary and held only while the officer was posted to a particular task the command of a brigade. When posted elsewhere, the rank would be relinquished and the former rank resumed; this policy prevented an accumulation of high-ranking general officers brought about by the high turnover of brigade commanders. Brigadier general was used as an honorary rank on retirement; the rank insignia was like that of the current major general, but without the star/pip - example. As in the United Kingdom, the rank was replaced by brigadier. Hence, prior to 1922, a "brigadier general" was a "general officer". Prior to 2001, the Bangladesh Army rank was known as brigadier, in conformity with the rank structure of the Commonwealth Nations. In 2001 the Bangladesh Army introduced the rank of brigadier general, however "the grade stayed equivalent to brigadier", although classified as a "one-star rank", a brigadier general is not considered to be a general officer – the lowest ranking general officer is Major General.
Brigadier general is equivalent to commodore of the Bangladesh Navy and air commodore of the Bangladesh Air Force. It is still more popularly called brigadier; the Belgian Army uses the rank of général de brigadegeneraal. However, in this small military there are no permanent promotions to this rank, it is only awarded as a temporary promotion to a full colonel who assumes a post requiring the rank, notably in an international context. General de brigada is the lowest rank amongst general officers of the Brazilian Army – i.e. like in most British Commonwealth counties, the lowest general officer rank is a two-star rank, a General de Brigada wears a two-star insignia. Hence, it is equivalent to the major general rank of many counties. In the Brazilian Air Force, all of the senior ranks include "Brigadeiro" – the two-star rank is Brigadeiro, the three-star rank is Major-Brigadeiro and the four-star rank is Tenente-Brigadeiro-do-Ar; the rank of brigadier general is known in Burma as bo hmu gyoke and is the deputy commander of one of Burma's Regional Military Commands, commander of the light infantry division or Military Operation Commands.
In civil service, a brigadier general holds the office of deputy minister or director general of certain ministries. In the Canadian Forces, the rank of brigadier-general is a rank for members who wear army or air force uniform, equal to a commodore for those in navy uniform. A brigadier-general is the lowest rank of general officer. A brigadier-general is senior to a colonel or naval captain, junior to a major-general or rear admiral; the rank title brigadier-general is still used notwithstanding that brigades in the army are now commanded by colonels. Until the late
United States of America
United States Army
Major General
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