When America entered World War I, Georgia entered a new era in which the military began to loom large in our state. In 1917, Georgia already had five major federal military installations: Fort McPherson, south of Atlanta; Fort Oglethorpe near the Tennessee border; Augusta’s arsenal and Camp Hancock, and Fort Screven on Tybee Island. The […]
Columbus was one of the South’s most important manufacturing centers before the Civil War. Georgia’s third largest city lay out of the U.S. Army’s path until Easter Sunday, 1865, a week after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. U.S. General James Wilson and his cavalry—13,500 strong—launched a night attack that captured the city and more than […]
The Nazis brought World War II to Georgia, when a German U-boat sank three ships off the coast in 1942. The state seemed an unlikely target; it had a short coastline, shallow waters, and numerous military bases nearby. But it also had prime targets that were poorly protected. Antisubmarine patrols were uncoordinated, and many coastal […]
A U.S. Army fort in Columbus is named for a man who waged war against the U.S. Army. Henry Benning, born in Columbia County, was one of Georgia’s most outspoken disunionists. During the sectional crisis of the 1850s, Benning defended slavery. He ran for Congress on a Southern rights platform and lost. But he found […]
He captured the highest-ranking Union officer taken prisoner during the Civil War. Alfred Iverson, Jr., was born in 1829 in Clinton, Georgia, in Jones County. He was just 17 when he joined his father’s volunteer cavalry regiment in the Mexican War. Like so many, when his native state seceded, Iverson traded stars and stripes for […]
Fannin County in north Georgia is named for Georgian James Fannin, who fought in the Texas independence movement. Having attended West Point, Fannin was commissioned a colonel in the Texas Regular Army and raised the Georgia Battalion, primarily volunteers from Macon and Columbus. In 1836 at the Spanish fort at Goliad, on the banks of […]
A man born a slave in Georgia was the first African-American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Henry Ossian Flipper was born in Thomasville in 1856. After the Civil War, Henry graduated from West Point in 1877 and joined the famed Buffalo Soldiers, the 10th Cavalry Regiment. At Fort Davis in […]
He was a Revolutionary leader involved in the most famous duel in Georgia history. Lachlan McIntosh was born in Scotland in 1727 and came to Georgia with a group of Highland Scots to defend the colony’s southern border. He grew up in the Scots settlement of Darien and became a prosperous rice planter. During the […]
It suffered the highest casualty rate of any American forces in World War II. The Eighth Air Force was organized in Savannah in January 1942 as part of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Its mission was straightforward, but easier said than flown: bombing heavily defended strategic and military targets in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. The […]
He was the other signer from Georgia of the U.S. Constitution. William Few was born in 1748 in Maryland and moved to Richmond County near Augusta in the 1770s. Few was an active Patriot during the American Revolution. He served in the military, in the state legislature, and as a delegate to the 1777 Georgia […]
