The Only Army Older Than the Nation it Serves

My Favorite Government Institution Is 238 Years Old Today

Established by resolution of the Continental Congress on June 14, 1775:

Resolved, That six companies of expert rifflemen, be immediately raised in Pensylvania, two in Maryland, and two in Virginia; that each company consist of a captain, three lieutenants, four serjeants, four corporals, a drummer or trumpeter, and sixty-eight privates.

That each company, as soon as compleated, shall march and join the army near Boston, to be there employed as light infantry, under the command of the chief Officer in that army.

My hat is off to all the "brave, healthy, able bodied, and well disposed" young men and women who have enlisted "for the defense of the Liberties and Independence of the United States" since that day.

The U.S. Army: Surprising Enemies Since 1775

Today is the 235th anniversary of the U.S. Army, my favorite government institution.

When Brigadier General Hugh Percy gave his account of commanding the British retreat after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, he said:

“For my part, I never believed, I will confess, that they would have attacked the King’s troops.”

I always liked that sentence. The U.S. Army already has a motto - "This We'll Defend" - but, if it didn't, "Audacious Since 1775" would make a good one.

Doing Bad Things to Bad People Since 1775

June 14, 2009, is the 234th birthday of the United States Army, my favorite government institution.

June 14, 1775, was the day the Continental Congress authorized an "American Continental Army" to be composed of units drawn from the united colonies. There had been regional or provincial militias in America before that date, but the force authorized on June 14th was the first to be raised as Continentals. That makes the U.S. Army the only army to precede the birth of the nation it serves, so far as I know. It was thirteen months later that the Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Films of D-Day Practice Landings Located

The Daily Mail has a story today (here) about the discovery of 38 reels of film that depict parts of Exercise Tiger, the 1944 D-Day practice landings in Southwest England. During the exercise, 946 U.S. soldiers and sailors were killed when German torpedo boats attacked a convoy of landing ships.

Secret footage of U.S. soldiers training alongside British troops for D-Day in South-West England have been unearthed from a dusty archive and seen for the first time in 65 years.

The 38 reels - lasting ten minutes each - show a variety of images including tanks rolling across beaches and soldiers wading through waves. In another sequence, troops are lined up in make-shift landing barges.

Here's a link to one of the films, which shows troops deploying out of a simulated Higgins Boat landing craft (photo above).

Exercise Tiger was one of a number of pre-invasion exercises that took place in April and May of 1944. It took place at Devon's Slapton Beach, which was selected for its similarity to the portion of Normandy's coastline that was assigned to the U.S. Army's 4th Infantry Division in the D-Day invasion and designated "Utah" Beach. The disaster that took place during the exercise was not exactly covered up, but it certainly was officially minimized, due to both official embarrassment and pre-invasion security concerns. The residents of coastal Devon had been relocated inland as a wartime measure so there were really no civilian witnesses, and the casualty statistics from Tiger were not released until August 1944 along with the casualties of the actual D-Day landings themselves. There was little official interest in the whole sad episode after the war was over.

There's a good book about the incident (The Forgotten Dead) by the late Ken Small, which describes both the exercise itself and the author's process of discovering and memorializing what had happened at Slapton Beach, a process that began when he became curious about the large number of American military artifacts and personal belongings that he kept finding on and around the beach.