Wedemeyer, Albert Coady

▪ United States general and statesman

born July 9, 1897, Omaha, Neb., U.S.

died Dec. 17, 1989, Ft. Belvoir, Va.

      American military leader who was the principal author of the 1941 Victory Program, a comprehensive war plan devised for the U.S. entry into World War II.

      After graduating from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (1919), Wedemeyer was assigned to Tientsin, China, where he studied Mandarin Chinese. He excelled at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (1934–36), and was chosen to attend the German War College in Berlin (1936–38), about which he wrote a report on the German military mind and machine. In 1941 he joined the War Plans Division of the War Department General Staff and by 1942 he had become a brigadier general and a protégé of General George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army during World War II.

      Wedemeyer drafted the “Germany first” strategy, formulated much of the Allied strategy for the Mediterranean theatre, and helped plan the successful Allied invasion of Normandy in France (June 6, 1944). After serving as deputy commander under Admiral Lord Mountbatten (1943), the British head of the Southeast Asia Command, he was appointed chief of staff to General Chiang Kai-shek and commander of U.S. forces in China (1944–46). His 1947 report of the situation in China and Korea, which warned of an imminent Communist triumph in China unless greater U.S. support was given to the Nationalists, was deemed so sensitive that its publication was suppressed for two years. Three years after his 1951 retirement, Wedemeyer was promoted to the permanent rank of general. He wrote the autobiography Wedemeyer Reports! (1958).

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