Wedemeyer, Albert Coady, 1897-1989

General Albert Coady Wedemeyer (July 9, 1897 – December 17, 1989) was a United States Army commander. 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 culminted with the invasion of France by Allied Forces in June 1944.

He remained with the War Deprtment until 1943 when he was assigned to be Chief of Staff for Lord Mountbatten, the British Admiral who was Commander in Chief of the Allies' Southeast Asia Command. He later became Commander of all U.S. Forces in China, then racked by Civil War. In his report, which he later charged that President Harry Truman had suppressed, he called for U.S. military intervention in China. He was then assigned to the Pentagon for a period of time but after submitting his China Report he was named 6th Army Commanding General in San Francisco. Considering this a dead-end position, he submitted his retirement in 1951. He 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.

Wedemeyer died on December 17, 1989 at the age of 92 at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.