General Albert C. Wedemeyer  

Chief of Staff, Southeast Asia Command (SEAC), 1943-1945
Commander, China Theater of Operations (CTO), 1945
  Born 1897, Albert Coady Wedemeyer was a 1919 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he was a temporary Lieutenant Colonel at the outbreak of World War II in December 1941.  His first major assignment had come earlier in the year when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the War Department to develop tactics to win the war that he believed the U.S. was destined to enter.  He was the only U.S. officer to graduate from the German Army General Staff College and used what he learned there to draw up what became known as the Victory Program, which advocated the defeat of the German armies on the European continent.  After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the U.S. declared war on both Germany and Japan, a modified version of his plan was adopted by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.  This culminated with the invasion of France by Allied Forces on D-Day, June 6, 1944.  He remained with the War Deprtment until 1943 when he was assigned to be Chief of Staff for British Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Commander in Chief of the Southeast Asia Command.  He later replaced General Stilwell as Commander of all U.S. Forces in China, then racked by Civil War.  In a report he called for U.S. military intervention in China.  He submitted his retirement in 1951 and was promoted to Full General in 1954 by an Act of Congress.  He published his memoirs, Wedemeyer Reports in 1958.  He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan in 1985.  He died on December 17, 1989 at the age of 92 at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

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