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Miley, William M. (Bud), MG.
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Last Address Starkville, Mississippi
Date of Passing Sep 28, 1997
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William M. Miley
Major General William Miles (Bud) Miley (26 December 1897 - 28 September 1997) was a United States Army major general and a professor of military science.
William M. Miley was born at Fort Mason, in California, to Lt. Col. John D. Miley (for whom Fort Miley Military Reservation was named) and Sara Miley. His family had a long history of military service, with three generations before him serving in the United States Army. Two great-grandfathers, his grandfather, his father, his great-uncle, his uncle and his son all graduated from West Point.
Miley himself attended West Point, where he earned a national intercollegiate championship in gymnastics (in the tumbling, rings, and parallel bars events), and graduated in 1918. Immediately after graduation he served in the First Division in France (during World War I).
Following World War I, Miley held a series of assignments, including as a professor of military science at what was then Mississippi State College, in Starkville, Mississippi. It was during this time that he met and married his wife, Julie Sudduth. Other assignments included serving as Athletic Director at West Point, and infantry assignments in Panama, the Philippines, and at Fort Sam Houston.
In 1940, Miley (then holding the rank of Major) was ordered to organize and command the United States Army's first parachute unit, the 501st Parachute Battalion.
After his promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, he was ordered to organize and command the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment. Shortly afterward he was appointed Assistant Division Commander of the 82nd Airborne Division at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, serving under General Matthew Ridgway.
In 1943, Miley organized the activation of the 17th Airborne Division at Camp Mackall in North Carolina. He was the sole commander of the 17th during the war, leading the Division through such actions as the Battle of the Bulge and Operation Varsity. The Division was deactivated in 1945, but reactivated briefly in 1948 as a training unit.
After the war, Miley was appointed to command the 11th Airborne Division while it occupied Japan, and after its return to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. He had several later assignments, including serving as Director of the Joint Airborne Troop Board, Commander of United States Army Alaska, under the Alaskan Command. He also served as Chief of Staff of the former Continental Army Command (which became The United States Army Forces Command in 1973). He retired from the military in 1955, with a rank of major general.
Following his retirement from the military, Miley worked for Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, until his retirement in 1976, at which time he returned to Starkville, Mississippi. He had the distinction of being the last living division commander of World War II. He died in Starkville in 1997.
He received the Silver Star, 2 Bronze Stars and 2 Distinguished Service Medals for his service in World Wars I and II. He has had a section of Mississippi Highway 389 (where it runs through Starkville) named the "Major General William 'Bud' Miley Highway".
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September 28, 1997
William Miley, 99, a Paratroop Pioneer, Dies
By ROBERT MCG. THOMAS JR.
William M. Miley, the acrobatic officer who transformed ground troops into the Army's first parachute combat unit in 1940, then led the famous jump across the Rhine that helped sound the Geronimo death knell for Nazi Germany in 1945, died on Wednesday at his home in Starkville, Miss. He was 99.
The last surviving division commander from World War II, he was known as the father of Army paratroopers.
A lot of American Army troops have jumped from a lot of planes since Major Miley organized the 501st Parachute Battalion at Fort Benning, Ga., in October 1940, and from the design of their jumpsuits (many pockets) to the way they carry their rifles (in a side bag), they all owe something to those trailblazing days.
Various armies had experimented with the use of paratroopers as early as the 1920's, but it was not until German troops parachuted into the Netherlands and Crete in May and June of 1940 that the American Army realized that Gen. Billy Mitchell and Winston Churchill had been onto something when they campaigned unsuccessfully for parachute forces in World War I.
Within a month the Army created the provisional Parachute Test Platoon, a high-spirited band of 48 men, who three months later became the nucleus of the 501st.
Major Miley, a 1918 West Point graduate who had spent 14 years as a lieutenant in the 1920's and 1930's, was not a member of the 1940 test platoon and had never jumped from a plane. But he was the obvious choice to organize and command the airborne battalion.
A champion college gymnast who had been a high rings star of the First Division Circus that toured the country after World War I, he was the Fort Benning athletic officer.
Making his first jump, he became a pioneering commander of a unit of pioneers. Among those under his command were Capt. William T. Ryder, who had led the test platoon as a first lieutenant; Sgt. Aubrey Eberhardt, the first to shout ''Geronimo!'' as he bailed out (he'd seen the movie ''Geronimo,'' the night before), and Sgt. John Swetish, inventor of the 34-foot training tower that became a staple of World War II newsreels.
In addition to working out the myriad details of training, equipment and tactics that became standard paratroop procedure, Major Miley made personal contributions.
Refusing, for example, to let an enlisted man risk making a test jump with an especially heavy pack, he insisted on making the jump himself. He broke his shoulder.
Major Miley also initiated one of the most stirring of airborne traditions. Although most combat commanders stayed at the rear of a battle with their maps and radios, he realized that a paratroop commander had to get to the ground before he could dig out his maps and start giving orders.
Thus he was the first man out of the first plane when the 17th Airborne Division dropped into Germany on March 24, 1945.
By then he had become the first major, the first lieutenant colonel, the first colonel and the first general officer to jump from a plane, always ahead of his troops.
After Pearl Harbor, he took the 501st to Panama to guard the canal, the first overseas duty for a paratroop unit. Later, he organized the first paratroop regiment, the 503d.
Too junior to command a division, as a brigadier general he became assistant commander of the 82d Airborne Division under Gen. Matthew Ridgeway when it and and the 101st Airborne Division were carved out of the old 82d Infantry Division in June 1942.
A year later, as a major general, he organized the new 17th Airborne Division, which provided ground support for the embattled 101st at the Battle of the Bulge in late 1944 before making its famous jump across the Rhine the next March.
Although heartbroken that the 17th was deactivated immediately after the war, General Miley, whose brother, father, grandfather and two great-grandfathers were West Point graduates, soldiered on. Among other things, he ran the Airborne School he had virtually created at Fort Benning; commanded the 11th Airborne Division in occupied Japan; served as first chairman of the Joint Airborne Troop Board at Fort Bragg, N.C., and commanded Army forces in Alaska.
After his retirement in 1955, General Miley, a native of Fort Mason, Calif., who grew up in Washington after his father died while on duty in the Philippines in 1899, spent 11 years as a Merrill Lynch broker in Washington before retiring to Starkville, where he had met his wife, Julia Sudduth, while teaching military science at what is now Mississippi State University in the 1920's.
General Miley, whose wife died in 1995, is survived by two sons, John of Mooresville, N.C., William Jr. of Starkville; 6 grandchildren, and 11 great-grandchildren.
World War I/Meuse-Argonne Campaign
From Month/Year
September / 1918
To Month/Year
November / 1918
Description Meuse-Argonne, 26 September - 11 November 1918. At the end of August Marshal Foch had submitted plane to the national commanders for a final offensive along the entire Western Front, with the objective of driving the enemy out of France before winter and ending the war in the spring of 1919. The basis for his optimism was the success of Allied attacks all along the front in August. Furthermore, he pointed out, the Allies already had active operations in progress between the Moselle and Meuse, the Oise and Aisne, and on the Somme and Lys Rivers. Foch acknowledged that the Germans could stave off immediate defeat by an orderly evacuation combined with destruction of materiel and communications. Therefore the overall aim of the fall offensive would be to prevent a step-by-step enemy retirement. As Foch anticipated, the Germans eventually contributed to the success of his strategy. Their High Command could not bring itself to sacrifice the huge stores collected behind the front lines, and so delayed the withdrawal of its armies.
Foch's great offensive, planned to begin in the last week of September, called for a gigantic pincers movement with the objective of capturing Aulnoye and Mézières, the two key junctions in the lateral rail system behind the German front. Lose of either of these junctions would hamper seriously the German withdrawal. Despite grumbling from the English that they lacked the necessary manpower, a chiefly British army was assigned the teak of driving toward Aulnoye. The A.E.F. was designated for the southern arm of the pincers, the thrust on Mézières. Simultaneously the Belgian-French-British army group in Flanders would drive toward Ghent, and the French armies in the Oise-Aisne region would exert pressure all along their front to lend support to the pincers attack.
Pershing decided to strike his heaviest blow in a zone about 20 miles wide between the Heights of the Meuse on the east and the western edge of the high, rough, and densely wooded Argonne Forest. This is difficult terrain, broken by a central north-south ridge that dominates the valleys of the Meuse and Aire Rivers. Three heavily fortified places-Montfaucon, Cunel, and Barricourt-as well as numerous strong points barred the way to penetration of the elaborate German defenses in depth that extended behind the entire front. This fortified system consisted of three main defense lines backed up by a fourth line less well-constructed. Pershing hoped to launch an attack with enough momentum to drive through these lines into the open area beyond, where his troops could then strike at the exposed German flanks and, in a coordinated drive with the French Fourth Army coming up on the left, could cut the Sedan- Mézières railroad.
The task of assembling troops in the concentration area between Verdun and the Argonne was complicated by the fact that many American unite were currently engaged in the St. Mihiel battle. Some 600,000 Americans had to be moved into the Argonne sector while 220,000 French moved out. Responsibility for solving this tricky logistical problem fell to Col. George C. Marshall, Assistant Chief of Staff, G-3 (Operations), First Army. In the ten-day period after St. Mihiel the necessary troop movements were accomplished, but many untried divisions had to be placed in the vanguard of the attacking forces.
On the 20-mile Meuse-Argonne front where the main American attack w to be made, Pershing disposed three corps side by side, each with three divisions in line and one in corps reserve. In the center was the V Corps (from right to left the 79th, 37th, and 91st Divisions with the 32d in reserve), which would strike the decisive blow. On the right was the III Corps (from right to left the 33d, 80th, and 4th Divisions with the 3d in reserve), which would move up the west aide of the Meuse. On the left was the I Corps (from right to left the 35th, 28th, and 77th Divisions with the 92d in reserve), which would advance parallel to the French Fourth Army on its left. Eastward across the Meuse the American front extended in direct line some 60 miles; this sector was held by two French Corps (IV and II Colonial) and the American IV Corps in the St. Mihiel sector. Pershing had available to support his offensive nearly 4000 guns, two-thirds manned by American artillerymen; 190 light French tanks, mostly with American personnel; and some 820 aircraft, 600 of them flown by Americans.
The Meuse-Argonne Offensive falls into three phases. During the initial phase (26 September-3-October) the First Army advanced through most of the southern Meuse-Argonne region, captured enemy strong points, seized the first two German defense lines, and then stalled before the third line. Failure of tank support, a difficult supply situation, and the inexperience of American troops all contributed to checking its advance.
In the second phase (4-31 October) the First Army, after the inexperienced divisions had been replaced by veteran units, slowly ground its way through the third German line. The enemy was forced to throw in reserves, drawn from other parts of the front, thus aiding the Allied advances elsewhere. In the face of a stubborn defense, American gains were limited and casualties were severe, especially as a result of the newly devised enemy tactic of attacking frontline troops with airplanes. First Army air unite retaliated with bombing raids which broke up German preparations for counterattacks. By the end of October the enemy had been cleared from the Argonne and First Army troops were through the German main positions. Two notable incidents of this phase of the campaign were the fight of the "Lost Battalion" of the 77th Division (2-7 October), and the feat of Corp. (later Sgt.) Alvin C. York, who single-handedly killed 15 Germans and captured 132 on 8 October.
In mid-October the organization of the Second Army was completed, at Toul in the St. Mihiel sector, to provide means for better control of the lengthening American front and solutions of the diverse tactical problems that it presented. Pershing assumed command of the new army group thus formed.
Before the third and final phase (1-11 November) of the offensive got under way, many of the exhausted divisions of the First Army were replaced, roads were built or repaired, supply was improved, and most Allied units serving with the A.E.F. were withdrawn. On 1 November First Army units began the assault of the now strengthened German fourth line of defense. Penetration was rapid and spectacular. The V Corps in the center advanced about six miles the first day, compelling the German units west of the Meuse to withdraw hurriedly. On 4 November the III Corps forced a crossing of the Meuse and advanced northeast toward Montmédy. Elements of the V Corps occupied the heights opposite Sedan on 7 November, thus finally accomplishing the First Army's chief mission-denial of the Sedan- Mézières railroad to the Germans. Marshal Foch, at this juncture, shifted the First Army left boundary eastward so that the French Fourth Army might capture Sedan, which had fallen to the Prussians in 1870. American units were closing up along the Mouse and, east of the river, were advancing toward Montmédy, Briny, and Metz, when hostilities ended on 11 November.
General Pershing authorized the results of the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, the greatest battle in American history up to that time, in his Final Report: "Between September 26 and November 11, 22 American and 4 French divisions, on the front extending from southeast of Verdun to the Argonne Forest, had engaged and decisively beaten 47 different German divisions, representing 25 percent of the enemy's entire divisional strength on the western front.
The First Army suffered a loss of about 117,000 in killed and wounded. It captured 26,000 prisoners, 847 cannon, 3,000 machineguns, and large quantities of material." More than 1,200,000 Americans had taken part in the 47-day campaign.
