With the dates of July 4th, 1776 becoming known as Independence Day.

And August 2nd, 1776, the signing date of the Declaration of Independence.

But before all of that could happen, the 13 colonies had to create an army to succeed in their rebellion against the British monarchy.

So on June 14th, 1775, the Continental Army was founded.

250 years later, the United States of America is here to celebrate that historic moment.

Hello, I am Terry Wilson, the director of Development and marketing at W Shaped, and I want to thank you for tuning in as we take the time to highlight the United States Army in this anthology.

Over the 40 plus years, the W wqpt has been on the air.

It has been very important to us to share the history of our military, as well as the personal stories of veterans and those currently serving.

We had only to explore our own archives to rediscover this meaningful content, including interviews conducted during our Embracing our Military initiative.

As such, some portions may include history and stories from other branches of the military.

Wqpt would like to thank everyone who has allowed us to share their stories.

We appreciate your service and your sacrifice, and we are honored to help your voices be heard.

We do recognize that some veterans who have shared their stories with Wqpt here are no longer with us, and we have chosen to include their segments to keep their history alive.

in any anniversary, your birthday is a big deal because it gives you the time to to look back.

And and so in 250 is a milestone.

And when you start looking back at all the way back to the Continental Army and George Washington and, and how it's morphed through time and how it's met the nation's needs has been really, really special.

And the the Army has a song, you know, that we sing all the time.

But one of the great lines about it, it says in the in the Army goes rolling along and I think, I think that is something for me.

You think how long it's been rolling along in support of the United States, I think is just amazing.

And 250 just gives us an opportunity to look back, to see how long it's been and what they've done.

The great things soldiers, sailors, airmen and marine have done for the country and then a chance to look forward to what's next.

I'm retired Army officer, lieutenant colonel, U.S. Army, and, my service spanned, a number of years.

I came in the Army right after the Vietnam War as just as it was ending.

And then, I was in that period of time, sort of a transitional time between Vietnam and Desert Storm.

I think I when I was a kid, I played, you know, Army, like a lot of kids or worked on a lot of military models.

And, so I think looking back, I know it was meant to be.

It was a good fit for me.

And I'm very thankful again that I was able to have that opportunity to serve our country and to serve others.

Alan Ross, retired United States Army I was a military policeman.

I worked in security, especially in Germany.

I worked on the roads and we took care of traffic control.

We also assisted combat units in training.

My father is a Holocaust survivor, so it was especially poignant for me to be in Germany and to, read up on the history and talk to the old soldiers.

I think for most of us, if we served our time, whether it's three years, four years or 20 years, we're in the military and we do a good job and we leave.

We don't necessarily become heroes.

We don't win the Medal of Honor, but we are proud of what we do, and we try to instill a sense of patriotism and a love of country in those around us.

Oh.

Oh.

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Five.

30.

16.1 million Americans served in the U.S. military during World War Two.

As of the census in 2000, 5.7 million World War Two American veterans were still alive.

Here now are some of the stories of the war from local veterans.

Oh, we were sitting at a tavern down in Albany having a glass of beer.

Decided that what we wanted to do.

So we just walked across the street to a gentleman by the name of, old Earl olds was his name.

And he was the one that, took all the information.

And, of course, he set it to the White Side County, board at that time, Selective Service Board.

And within a matter of a few days, we got that, their, letter in the mail.

Your friends and neighbors have selected you.

You're scared every minute of every minute of the day.

Never even.

Even though you.

Well, I was in a Nazi tank platoon and headquarters company, so.

Seriously, I was, as somebody said in one of my other platoon, said they were up close enough to get in on some of the excitement, but back far enough to be pretty safe.

But that didn't that that that was no, no matter you were scared every minute of the day that you could always hear the artillery in the background.

You know, somebody was getting it somewhere.

My brother and I decided to go into the Navy on July 4th or 1940, because their dad was a bank officer and Wall Street and said we were going into World War two over three or whatever it was, and we might as well go in and get trained to be officers.

And we went in.

The Navy didn't have any of boat.

We went in was they had picked number one through nine.

So we were in on the very beginning of the program, and by the end of the war, they had 750 all around and all around the world.

It's always seemed like you you were never going to go home because it always.

There or there's always guards there.

And they always had guns on in here.

You know, we saw a few shot and, things like that that bother you and.

Yeah, you see that, You can't fool around in love.

We were protecting those ships, cargo ships going over.

And there's usually four or deep and and, maybe from here to that house over a part and 65 of them for only five of us.

And I was the only Coast Guard on the only Coast Guard ship in that crew.

The rest of them was big Navy destroyer.

Destroyer.

Up ahead and in the bowels was, you see us one side or the other and two on the back.

Gerald Kaluza of Clinton has kept these items that belonged to captured German soldiers for a long time.

He was among the troops sent to replace those killed and wounded in one of the bloodiest battles in World War Two.

The battle of the bulge.

All right.

We went over on a ship, from, England to France in the middle of the night.

We landed the boat.

We didn't have.

We had guns, but we had no ammunition.

No.

And the Germans actually infiltrated us.

There was shooting during the night, but, I don't know if everybody got hit or not.

That I don't know.

The issue of this ammunition.

Well, we got to the staging area then, and, there was a couple that, Well, they got shot in the foot.

No other one got shot in the hand on purpose, of course.

They were supposed to have ended up in the jail at present.

I don't know, but they shot themselves.

Well, I never got that desperate, that's for sure.

Nelson Larrabee was also sent to replenish troop strength.

We were clean up.

We were clean up and, didn't come too close to a lot of, fighting, defensive or aggressive.

The only thing I really remember in fighting was one day we took off up a hill so pale, you know, and there was a bunker up at the top of it, and the Germans were firing at us, and Hiram, great big Indian, weighed over 200 pounds.

And he just jumped out of my half track and took the 50 caliber machine gun within yards of.

Ammunition falling behind.

He just took a log and he wiped out the whole bunker.

A soldier who had been wounded several times told Galicia he would know when he was going to be wounded.

You were scared all the time anyway, over there, but you were more scared.

It was it.

You just knew you had to feel it.

Something was going to happen, but you didn't know how bad you're like, I said, what are you going to get killed or wounded?

It was just a bad feeling that you had.

I was on the side of this mountain, and the Germans were shells with more.

And the mortar shell that lit, I don't know how it closed, but it was very close.

And the shrapnel.

What?

Clear through my steel helmet later into my head.

And then, the other piece came down through, cut my eyelid and, through my nose and left a big hole there in my nose, which healed up later by itself.

One of the German prisoners he was guarding helped to stop the bleeding.

They could have killed it.

Killed me, no question.

But I think this was when they were, defeated at best old.

They knew that the war was they were done because that was the second stab they made at it.

And, they got defeated both times at Bastogne.

So, that was impressive.

So they were I just wanted to be alive to as far as that goes, they were human, the same as everybody else.

William Shaw was only 17 when he received his orders from the army, which sent him to the University of Kansas to begin studying basic engineering.

The agreement was that when in the quarter in which you reached your 18th birthday, they would send you the troops.

Well, fortunately for my college career, I didn't reach the age of 18 until November the 9th, and that was the day after the second quarter started.

So I got two quarters in at the University of Kansas.

He was inducted in February of 1944.

We sat around Camp Dodge waiting for them to decide what they were going to do with us, because we were we had been an Army specialized training, which is that yellow patch there.

And they wanted to, decided they needed engineer, infantrymen more than they needed engineers.

And they finally decided to send us to Camp Blanding, Florida, where I was a, took basic training and radio, as as a radio man.

But when basic training was over 17 weeks, they assigned me to the 65th Division camp Shelby, Mississippi, and went into the headquarters company office and 6260 first Infantry, first Battalion.

And the first sergeant said, well, he says they got some empty bunks down there and anti-tank.

And so.

That was as close as I came to doing any coming.

And so we trained I trained in and a tank until we went overseas.

We were on line at the Siegfried Line for, oh, maybe a month.

And then they'd broken through the line and we took off to, sent to the Rhineland across the Rhine at mines and went up to, central Germany.

And then they decided that we weren't going to go to Berlin.

I guess you headed south.

What?

It went through, one skirmish after another until we got to a town in Austria called ends, which is, who, by the way, a town close by was one called Minsk, which is?

And they're right at the corner of the, the junction of the Indus River and the Danube.

And we were there for several months.

Hugo Ehlers was popular among his fellow troops in the South Pacific.

He was a mail clerk.

It would come and there would be many weeks, probably delayed, but, well, it would get to me.

I would get it sorted out and for the company and get it up to the.

And then we have a mail call every day and make everybody happy.

He liked his job too.

That kept me from getting shot.

When LST 325 docked in Peoria in the summer of 2007, people waited in line to tour it.

The tank landing ship was the brainchild of Winston Churchill, who saw a need for a ship that could deliver tanks and troops directly to the beachhead.

Roald Zvornik and Don Chapman were in the navy, George White in the Marines.

All three were on board LSTs.

They also worked on restoring LST 325, which had been loaned to the Greek Navy.

Chapman spent months in Greece, making it seaworthy, and was part of the crew that brought it back to the U.S. he was in the Philippines in the war.

We were mostly.

Hauling material and troops.

We hold a lot of Australian troops and we'd get them, like in New Guinea or down in there, a Lambda and bring them up to where the invasion had been, and maybe we'd be there a day or two days after the initial landing.

And far as an action goes, we we did.

We were in some problems.

In fact, my ship shot down, Jeff, Betty and, Otherwise, it was pretty routine.

George White, however, had a close call, so I went from Saipan to Okinawa for the invasion there.

And, the invasion, I wasn't aware of it at the time, but, we had not.

We were faking a landing so we would attract all of their fire.

And that's what happened.

We attracted their kamikaze planes, and one of them got my ship.

And so, I, we all jumped.

Of course, the plane had two 500 pound bombs, but they didn't go off because they had to be detonated by hand.

And our Coast Guard crew had shot this pilot dead before he could trigger the mechanism.

Otherwise I wouldn't be here.

Zvornik was in the Philippines, Guam and Japan.

So we hauled troops around just like minded to.

We had troops and supplies around here and there and everywhere and, we made, the one landing there.

We was expecting opposition at, Palawan Island at port au Prince.

In fact, the Japanese had a, prisoner of war camp there and American prisoner of war camp.

And we and we would have walked on water to to get those guys back.

And after the preliminary work of two, two battlecruisers come by on the island and blasted the the crap out of it.

And, then the, dive bombers come by and they they bombed and they strafed and then the rocket, small rocket ships went under a rocket at the beaches.

And then we unloaded our troops and and our small boats and, they went in.

And then when it was pretty secure, after a couple of hours, we pulled our ship into the harbor area there.

And Tokyo Rose, who was a, propaganda lady there.

She played the latest American tunes.

She always knew where everybody was at all time.

And she was telling us that the Japanese fleet head of had been the harbor there, and maybe shooting us like ducks in a shooting gallery.

Well, we knew it was wrong anyway.

You know, he brought home a number of souvenirs, but nothing like what other military personnel took Japanese in those days.

Had a lot of gold teeth.

And, the troops, we had a border.

I've seen necklaces of someone had teeth all the way down to the belt line and stuff, because after the shot, the guy who knew had no use for his teeth.

So they took a rifle.

But the teeth out with their fingers and made a necklace out of them.

Jack Searles and his brother Bob spent their summers racing sailboats off the new Jersey coast.

That experience paid off when they joined the Navy and were assigned to, as they were hoping for, P.T.

boats.

We went into Guadalcanal and they have to go out to Canal, who took a squadron to the, to English Channel and invasion of Normandy, and I took a squadron up to Okinawa.

In other words, we were we were never off the parties, but as far as I was concerned, they gave me orders two years before the end of the war that I was going to be the first to invade the Japanese Inland Sea.

And I had, no ordinary squadron or had 12 boats.

I had 15, 550 officers and 550 men.

He witnessed more than his share of fighting about every other than I go out a canal against the Japanese fleet.

I don't know what I actually knew on, destroyers, battleships, firing at us for, about 2 or 3 hours, and we're fine.

And, every other night for 3 or 4 months.

If you'd been through what I'd been through and hadn't lost one of your men, I think you'd looked upon it fondly.

Then finally, especially when you saw all these other boats being blown up right next to you.

Those officers men were coming back.

So I lost a lot of friends that way.

But I didn't lose any from my squadron.

There were lighter moments after Robert Montgomery was under Searle's command, I showed them how to play bridge, shoot pool.

And by the time my brother and I took all the money we could from him, he stopped.

He stopped playing those two games.

The retired naval commander recalled his two tours of duty in the Pacific in his book, named after the small island in the Solomon Islands, which had been occupied by the Japanese after its capture by U.S. forces, the island hosted a fleet of PT boats for a year, including Jack Kennedy's 109.

The war hit close to home for Richard Dubuc.

He wanted to join the Navy, but was assigned to the Coast Guard when they found out he was a musician.

An ear for music helps interpret sonar signals they had to have.

People could recognize from the, tone note that was sent out from our ship for, to discover a submarine.

And if it reflected back and it above or below that or that tone that went out from our, sonar.

Sonar equipment.

Dubuc was on board the USS Moberly, and I was the only Coast Guard on the only Coast Guard ship that through the rest of them was a big Navy destroyer.

Destroyer?

Up ahead and in the bowels was, you see, us one side or the other and two on the back.

And I and I swear that, our that we performed so well and our shakedown crew at Bermuda that the German intelligence got word of that because we were practicing on a captured Italian submarine.

The Moberly was returning to the United States, bound for Boston, when it received word that a freighter had been torpedoed by a German submarine off the Rhode Island coast.

And then then they moved down from the coast there to, not not Boston.

But before you get to Boston, there and, they, they got picked up by sonar and sonar dropped the Navy.

They, they, they dropped hedgehogs and depth charges, but, but they didn't get the submarine because the submarine was out in deeper water.

And when we came up Long Island Sound, and we were ordered to stay back there and see if we couldn't locate, the submarine, the crew, the German subs sent items out of the torpedo tubes to make it appear the sub had sunk, life raft and and, part of a chart.

Table chart.

Wooden one and, the captains had du Berg says the captain of the Moberly finally decided to sink the sub if it was the last thing they did, and he called it a sonar officer and said, proceed with a hit with a hedgehog attack and a depth charge attack.

And and our in our sonar officer turned down and looked at me and he said, do work.

He said, did you hear that?

And I said, yeah, well counts.

And have him repeat that and see what he's, he's, he's trying to talk, talk about and when he got the captain who was down below, he the captain says proceed as I do.

Man du Berg says that was the end of the submarine.

But they felt the impact to our ship went dead right over the top of that submarine or a little past it.

It actually, it actually cut down the engines and the power and and it true people all over on the ship and some of them even in at had some bad problems with their body after that because it threw them against the bulkheads.

And it was funny.

It didn't sink our ship.

It was the last U-boat sunk in World War two.

Just two more combat missions to go.

And doi O'Keefe, a radio operator on a B-24, could go home.

But the 29th mission on September 27th of 1944 put all plans of going home on hold when his plane came under heavy attack.

Had the living crap shot out of you had people, shoo shoo shoo.

The, you know, airplanes and the bombers were flying and the fighter planes had come in and, you seen those in the movies and and shoot them to shoot you out or shoot you out.

So you couldn't fly anymore.

He parachuted to safety and managed to avoid being captured for a few hours, even hopping a freight train he thought might be headed to France.

But he was caught and sent to Stalag Loof to for a P.O.W.

camp in Poland.

You know, they had a place where you could take a shower, and that's all it was, were a group of men, and everybody were in these room.

And you took a shower in there.

On February 7th of 1945, the camp was evacuated in the face of Russian advance.

The POW and their German guards began marching out of Poland.

It was the worst winter in Europe in years, with over a foot of snow, food and shelter was scarce, O'Keefe says.

As time wore on, some of the German soldiers walked off, presumably for home.

Then we started marching ourselves back.

Back towards, our own.

Our own companies.

Every people, and then when they got in into that way, we knew we were close enough that we probably would get out of there.

And that's why they ended up happening.

We got away in them, but they was there.

They were halfway, gave tours.

Have we gone?

On the morning of April 26th, the German soldiers who remained surrendered to the American POWs.

Later that day, the group encountered a scouting jeep with two American infantrymen.

Doyle O'Keefe had been a prisoner of war for 221 days.

The war was fought back home in the United States as well.

Tom Douglas, the second, has a wealth of memorabilia from his days as a pilot for the Navy, ferrying planes from manufacturing plants to wherever the military needed them.

He had been a senior at the University of Iowa and wanted to be a Navy pilot, but he was rejected for being underweight, so he ate as much as he could, put on the needed weight and was accepted.

It's a matter of of, Of doing something in the in the Navy.

His favorite plane was the Culver cadet.

It's it's a kind of a hot rod with this.

This plane was made to shoot it and then knock down.

The planes were used to train anti-aircraft gunners operated by remote control during such missions.

Civilians did their part two on the Rock Island arsenal.

The shops were manufacturing weapons 24 hours a day because they their economy needed a maverick.

Guys, they were so pressed, that they asked the employees to give up their lunch hours and employees, many of them, lots of stores, employees sitting there at their lathe, eating a sandwich while the machine is turning so that they don't, not so that nothing shuts down, and nothing goes away because they're very rare.

Even before Pearl Harbor, they're aware they're giving weapons to the Great Britain.

But after Pearl Harbor, even more so this is we've got to do this right now.

The man behind the man behind the.

The employees considered themselves soldiers of industry.

The arsenal was awarded two pennants or awards for excellence by the man behind the man behind the gun.

Our thinking was different.

It was a duty that we had.

No, I don't know if they figure that's a duty or just, something that the government brings out.

I don't know, but it was a duty.

We were protecting our, country, and, we did it because, we wanted to, up to a point.

Not because we really had to.

If you wanted to dodge the draft, I suppose we probably could have somewhere along the line.

But we didn't feel that way.

I you grew up from the.

Smart 17 year old to a mature 22 year old.

By the time I got home.

The attack that the Japanese pulled on us was so deliberate and so surprising that we were just alarmed.

We couldn't understand as a people what they were doing.

And and, almost to a person, everybody was behind the war effort and, and they, didn't delight in the rationing, the food rationing, the gasoline rationing, the dire rationing and all that.

But we took it as a matter of life, and.

I was always, as I say, in a little safer position.

And so, reminder, I didn't have a lot of bad reminders to, to think about.

So I've never minded talking about it.

My perspective was that we were doing something we had to do.

Hitler was one very evil person.

And, we needed to he needed to be stopped.

And we did it.

My name is Andrew Gates.

I served in the United States Marine Corps, separate as a as a sergeant.

I served in, an engineer battalion out of Okinawa, Japan.

We deployed to the Pacific region, for training, which is a pre-deployment training, for eventually going to Iraq.

I spent seven months in Iraq with a shovel and a cement truck.

Just repairing supply routes, between places like Fallujah, Ramadi, al Assad, al Takata.

Since 2012, I've been the coordinator of veterans recruitment services for Saint Ambrose University in Davenport.

I've been able to move forward for my service and, assist other veterans with their education.

My name is Barney Young, and I've the, pilot for the United States Army Air Corps for so long.

And then over August and I finished my last set, I said, hey, young, you know, we got an airplane going back to, the States.

You want to take it back?

Well, absolutely.

You know, so we took off from, Karachi, India, and drive out to.

I've been able to Cairo, Egypt.

Then we wanted to go across the North Atlantic.

So I had to go down to Frankfurt after a good car and want to come up to Egypt.

And South America was there for IATA and they said, sure is says, we got we got an airplane all ready to go back to Chicago.

I said, hey, Will you give me a train ticket?

I am Jackie Inman, the Rock Island Center director for the USO of Illinois.

We have our USO program, which is called camp R&R, and we have a lodge up in Wisconsin and through the summer months, we offer a time for families to reconnect, especially after a deployment.

They are they enjoy a week up there.

Everything's paid for.

They can enjoy boating and fishing and and horseback riding.

We had two couples actually, that I know personally, that, were having difficulties.

One with a child, you know, dealing with anger from, the parent being gone.

And they were able to take advantage of camp R&R and they are doing extremely well.

And so that's a huge, huge, milestone for them.

John Third is parent of, Corporal Chris Otis, United States Marine Corps.

Chris was in oh 311.

For those who don't speak military jargon here, that means he's, Rifleman grunt, for the Marine Corps.

He was infantry.

One night, my wife says, by the way, Chris wants to talk to you.

Oh, yeah?

About what?

And suddenly he broke it to me that, by the way, I joined the Marine Corps Infantry, and, I've got to go, as a parent, very proud and at the same token, very scared.

He had two deployments, in active battle zones.

The last one was the worst in Afghanistan.

And, so that from a parent's perspective, is, is, is difficult, but your, your, your, your proud but, nervous.

I am Marvin Strom, PFC Army and career report guard duty in the wintertime and it was three degrees below zero.

My brother was in a World War two there, one there and more.

Welcome back in the Korean War.

You know it.

It's just like the Korean War.

They didn't care.

It was forgotten war.

They aren't afraid of a fabulous thing.

They take it.

They take you to all the monuments and the most important, the greatest singers.

And I mean, it's brilliant.

Tremendous experience is when you come back and land and all the people are there shouting, you know, you know, welcome back.

And.

Oh yeah, I never thought that could happen.

You know, my name is Mitch Chapman.

I served in Afghanistan in 2008 as a specialist in the Illinois Army National Guard, as an infantryman.

After I got off active duty, I decided to get my bachelor's degree in operations management, and I graduated five years to the day I got injured, so that meant a lot.

Currently, I am a contract specialist, Rock Island National Army Contracting Command, writing contracts with the government, and I think the service has really helped me prepare for real life.

Help me take charge of situation and they're stressful.

Stand up and take charge in case something's going wrong.

You know you're going to execute and get the mission completely done.

And it's also giving me the, at the give me the ability to give back to the community by, being able to do Jason's walks and helping other vets get squared away that need resources and need to talk, just need to hang out with the veteran, just need to talk to somebody.

One on my I am Joshua Ryan Brown, sergeant in the United States Army Reserve.

I was actually, in on active duty from 2005 to 2010.

And then I rejoined the reserves while I've, been going to Augustana.

My father was a 30 year marine.

A lot of the things he instilled in me growing up, really pay dividends in the military.

And then now, I got, you know, I got off active duty.

Then I, went to college to hopefully become a dentist.

And I saw that the reserves really some, supplemented that, offering me a dental assistant job through the reserves as a child growing up, going to the Rock Island Arsenal as frequently as I did, I just remember a lot of family activities.

There weren't a lot of soldiers there.

So it was atypical from other bases that I have seen and heard of.

But being on the Arsenal, you had the opportunity to experience so many of the amazing things that the Arsenal has to offer.

My grandfather was a World War Two veteran and was part of the liberation of the Philippine Islands.

I have several of his Purple Hearts.

It was always a big part of my life and a big part of my heart.

I learned through and and through other experiences that you don't have to be a soldier to serve your country by putting the military program in action.

That was something that I knew I could do to help in a real way.

name is Stephen, the Blake.

I'm originally from down in Tennessee.

I was stationed in the 101st Airborne Division for 23 of my 31 years.

I'm proud of the people that I've served with.

I feel blessed that I was honored with getting to serve with them.

You know, that's the main thing about being a leader in the military.

You have to humble yourself and realize that that you're serving with them.

They all raised their hand, stepped up and said, pick me, send me.

I will go there facing that danger.

And they're carrying that legacy forward.

And I'm going to tell you, that's probably the most important part of serving in the military.

30.

Yeah.

So, you know, we're celebrating 250 years of the U.S. Army.

You know, we're celebrating 250 years of this nation.

And I think the two are so intimately tied.

You know, as you talk about us breaking away from Great Britain, the American Revolution, none of that could have happened without the U.S. Army.

And so it really is inherently tied to to the history of us, the history of this country.

And, and brings it all the way up to today.

It's not just celebrating 250 years ago, it's celebrating 250 years of the U.S. Army and its role for our nation in shaping, shaping what we are shaping our values, shaping everything about what our nation is.

Through more than 140 years ago, an obscure Midwestern poet read an original work to president Grant and thousands of spectators on Memorial Day.

Then his contribution all but vanished.

J.P. Irvine, a former newspaperman, lived with his wife, Harriet, in Washington, where he worked at the Bureau of Pensions.

He had lost a daughter in a carriage accident and his brother David, who was killed in the Civil War.

Battle of Nashville, December 1864.

But on May 30th, 1873, the Kirkwood, Illinois native addressed as many as 20,000 people crowding the grounds at Arlington Cemetery.

The idea of a day to honor our war dead, known as Decorations Day, was only five years old.

John Logan, the commander of an influential veterans group called the Grand Army of the Republic and Kindred Spirits, suggested members decorate the graves of their fallen comrades with flowers every May.

The idea quickly turned into a national celebration of those who had served.

How did the Arlington event organizers chose someone as unknown as Irvine remains unclear.

But on this day, President Ulysses S Grant and his wife Julia headlined the ceremonies.

Other notable attendees included Frederick Douglass and the secretaries of the Departments of State, War, and Treasury.

Vendors on the grounds sold lemonade and ice water as the masses listened in speeches and songs.

The crowd gathered at the two year old tomb of the Unknown Soldier, draped with garlands of evergreen, just for the event.

In the heat and humidity of a sunny day, Irvine delivered 112 lines and the valiant are here.

And the week and the strong, the known and unknown and the army is.

The address gave Irvine some fame and helped his work into the pages of national magazines.

The family returned to rural Illinois in 1875, and Irvine's poetic record diminishes to near silence.

Unknown stands as one of Irvine's most ambitious efforts, and certainly his most noteworthy.

Yet he didn't include the piece in his only book, The Green Leaf and the gray, published in 1891.

He died a year later, but with unknown rediscovered.

The poet and a piece of local and national history lives on.

The Battle of Credit Island was part of the fight for control of the Upper Mississippi during the War of 1812, a conflict between the United States and the United Kingdom, which ended in 1815.

On September 4th and fifth, 1814, American forces led by Major Zachary Taylor, who would go on to become president of the United States, fought British soldiers under the direction of Lieutenant Duncan Graham and as many as 1200 Native Americans, including Chief Blackhawk.

It began on the afternoon of September 4th, when strong winds forced the American troops to encamp at Willow Island, now known as Pelican Island, with their eight gunboats and 334 troops.

It was an uneventful night, but as the sun came up on September 5th, a number of Native Americans had crossed the shallow water to Willow Island from nearby Credit Island, where an American sentry was shot and killed.

Though the American troops had fought and cleared the Native Americans from the island, the British troops moved their artillery to a higher elevation in order to attack with the first shot of British cannon fire.

Credit Island became the site of one of the westernmost and last battles of the War of 1812, where the British barrage continued for nearly an hour before Taylor ordered a retreat down river.

His boats, badly riddled with cannon fire and with 11 men badly wounded, three mortally.

In his written report, Major Taylor said I was compelled to drop down about three miles before a proper place presented itself for landing, as, but few of the boats had anchors sufficient to stop them in the river.

Here I halted for the purpose of having the wounded attended, and some of the boats repaired, as some of them had been injured by the enemy's artillery.

This was the third and final American expedition up the Mississippi River that year, each ending in defeat.

Three months later, on December 24th.

The Peace of Ghent ended the war.

At the end of the war, a trading post was established on the island, offering credit to the local tribes to be repaid during hunting and harvest seasons.

After the War of 1812 ended, the United States determined to cement its hold on the upper Mississippi River by creating a series of forts.

Rock Island had been identified as a desirable place for a fort by Zebulon Pike in 1805, due to its location on the rock.

Other than rapids and its proximity to the SAC and Meskwaki tribes.

Black Hawk supported the British in the War of 1812 made that recommendation appear even more powerful.

Brigadier General Thomas Smith arrived at Rock Island in early May 1816, and chose the western tip of the island as the spot for construction of the fort.

From this spot, U.S. troops could control the river, protect American fur traders and settlers, and keep open a line of communication and commerce to other posts further upriver.

For Armstrong was the beginning of the Quad Cities area, provide security for settlers on both sides of the river, and later was the administrative center for the Black Hawk War of 1832.

The fort was abandoned after 1836 as the frontier moved further west.

tell me the role of the GMT.

So the Joint Manufacturing Technology Center is basically one of the arsenals in the organic industrial base.

The Army has 23 different, depots, arsenals and ammo plants.

We're one of three arsenals.

So there's Pine Bluff Arsenal, there's Watervliet Arsenal, and then there's the Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center.

And we're a vertically integrated metal manufacturing facility, with the Army Center of Excellence for Advanced Manufacturing as well.

It is a vital part of Arsenal Island.

As a matter of fact, when you think of Arsenal Island, you do really think of the Joint Manufacturing and Technology Center.

Absolutely.

And and that was kind of the genesis of the whole island.

You know, there's other commands that are here now, and they're all extremely important commands that have a real impact on the nation.

But the heart of the island has always been the manufacturing capabilities.

And back when they had the Brac eliminations, there was almost the fear of leaving Arsenal Island at one point.

It has really prospered in the last few years.

Yeah, it's been great.

I think we've recognized as a military the capabilities, and we've pushed a little bit harder in those capabilities.

The Advanced Manufacturing Center of Excellence has gotten a lot of attention.

So we're on the cutting edge of a lot of technology.

Which is which is definitely helped, but that's, still a relatively small part of a really large metal manufacturing capability.

We have everything from, you know, building the gun turrets for the m1A1 that you could see here at Rock island's museum that we brought in, all the way up to armor, and everything down to as small as a firing pin or a spring.

We can do it all across that because On 1st October 1903, Chief of Ordnance General William Crosier sent notice that 15 boxes of ordnance material being shipped to Rock Island Arsenal for the purpose of creating a military museum.

The collection was called for research and for the interest of the general public.

The boxes were soon augmented by the Army display of the 1904 Saint Louis World's Fair, and later two copies of every small one of them produced.

The arsenal were also preserved.

Museum, opened in 1905, is now the second oldest army museum in operation.

Last year there were concerns the museum would close, but now appears the museum will remain open.

But the museum is best known for its small arms collection of more than 1200 weapons.

Its bigger mission is to interpret the people, processes and products of the arsenal, as well as local history such as Fort Armstrong, the Black Hawk War bridges, and the Confederate prison camp.

Looking at the future, the plan is now to invest significant funds to update the museum exhibit space.

This may lead to some weapons not being on display, but the museum will continue to tell the story of Wartime Arsenal and our local area.

Yeah.

So I've grown up, around history my whole life.

My father actually worked in Army Museum, so I grew up in them.

And it really instilled in me a sense that museums exist, and this museum exists to tell a story to make, to really make America history.

Our local history, part of your everyday life.

One thing I really enjoy about my job here is when I have school kids come in.

I love having school kids come in.

Because what I'm able to do is I'm able to take their, their textbook, which is all full of dates and places and names and make it relevant to make it personal to them.

And I think that's what what I find my civic spark is, is making history relevant again, making making it meaningful to people so that they can reflect and they can learn from it.

I got into the military kind of on a dare, you know what I'm saying?

And with nothing really better to do when I was 18.

And that's why I always counsel people is, whatever reason you came in, there's a reason that's going to cause you to continue to serve.

You know, my reason to come in, that light's not going to last, you know, very long.

And so, I did have an opportunity to attend, United States Military Academy and, and over the course of training and being able to do it, I fell in love with the idea of serving soldiers.

And that that passion has that was ignited there at the Academy is lasted, like I said, 35 years.

And so, when you're in the service of soldiers, I think, I think that becomes its own, its own benefit because you can see the growth and you can see your impact.

But in, in sometimes you'll forget the you don't forget the idea that you're supporting and defending the Constitution, United States, and then you're preparing to fight and win our nation's wars.

But it's the Brotherhood, sisterhood of being part of this organization of people that have volunteered selfless service, like minded individuals.

It's just it's just a passion.

We are honored to celebrate 250 years of our United States Army with you.

We would also like to note that the Marines and the Navy will be celebrating their own 250th anniversary later this year.

We thank you for watching and hope you have enjoyed this Wqpt anthology.