With the tasks of facilitating military movement by the construction of roads, bridges, and bases, and of protecting troops or territory through fortification, military engineering has been part of warfare since ancient times. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has supervised most of the construction for the U.S. Army and, after 1947, for the U.S. Air Force (the navy has its own construction agencies). It has also had important, if sometimes controversial, civil works responsibilities.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers originated on 16 June 1775, when Gen. George Washington appointed Col. Richard Gridley as the first chief engineer of the Continental army. Later, Gridley was succeeded by several French officers, most notably Gen. Louis du Portail (American spelling Duportail) in 1777. A Corps of Engineers was established by Congress as a component of the Continental army in 1779.
The engineers' fortifications played an important role in many Revolutionary War battles, such as the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Battles of Saratoga, and the engineers' siegecraft, including sapper and mining operations, contributed to the victory at the Battle of Yorktown. Like most of the Continental army, they were mustered out after the war. A combined Corps of Artillerists and Engineers was created in 1794, but it was short‐lived.
In 1802, recognizing the need for a national engineering capability, civil as well as military, Congress, supported by President Thomas Jefferson, established the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. For more than a quarter century, West Point remained the only engineering school in the country. Congress also established the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which dates its continuous origin from 1802, and stationed the Corps at West Point. Until 1866, the academy superintendent was a military engineer.
The nation repeatedly called upon the Army Engineers to perform civil works as well as military engineering projects. During the nineteenth century, the Corps supervised construction of extensive coastal fortifications and built lighthouses, piers, and jetties, as well as mapping navigation channels. After the Supreme Court's Gibbons v. Ogden decision that federal authority over interstate commerce included river navigation, the General Survey Act of 1824 led to the Corps of Engineers' assignment to survey routes for roads and canals. Another act the same year authorized the Corps to dredge and make other navigation improvements on the nation's waterways. This was the origin of the Corps' responsibilities in river and harbor improvements, and it eventually led to the Corps' reorganization into a series of local district and regional division offices, all under the Office of the Chief of Engineers. A Corps of Topographical Engineers, a separate unit in 1838–63, helped explore, survey, and map many regions of the West.
During the Mexican War and Civil War, in addition to supplying many important commanders such as Robert E. Lee, George McClellan, and George Gordon Meade, the Corps of Engineers played important roles in mapping, road and bridge construction, fortifications, and siegecraft. The 2,170‐foot pontoon bridge built across the James River in June 1864 was the longest floating bridge erected before World War II.
Army Engineers continued the construction and modernization of coastal fortifications in the second half of the nineteenth century on the Pacific Coast and on the overseas territories acquired in the Spanish‐American War. They also continued river and harbor improvements. One of the Army engineers, George W. Goethals, supervised the construction of the Panama Canal. In World War I, the Quartermaster Corps constructed training cantonments in the United States while the Corps of Engineers built bridges, roads, railroads, and buildings for the American Expeditionary Forces in France.
In the 1930s disastrous floods led Congress, through a series of measures culminating in the Flood Control Act of 1936, to declare flood control a function of the federal government and to authorize the Corps of Engineers to build levees, dams, and reservoirs to supervise such projects on the Mississippi, Missouri, and other rivers. The Flood Control Act of 1944, authorized the Corps to construct multipurpose dams that provided flood control, irrigation, navigation, water supply, hydroelectric power, and recreational areas.
During World War II, the Corps of Engineers was given responsibility for all U.S. Army and Army Air Forces construction, as the Quartermaster Corps concentrated on its other responsibilities. In the United States and around the world, army engineers built airfields, roads, bridges, ports, petroleum pipelines, military camps and cantonments, warehouses, hospitals, and dozens of other facilities, including the Pentagon, the world's largest office building, completed in 1942. Among the most acclaimed of the combat engineers' achievements were the Alcan Highway to Alaska, the Ledo and Burma Roads through the mountains and jungles of Asia, and the clearing of mines and underwater obstacles from the beaches before the invasion of Normandy. The Manhattan District of the Corps of Engineers supervised the Manhattan Project, the construction of the atomic bomb.
During the Cold War, the Corps of Engineers engaged in a major construction program as part of the military buildup of the early 1950s, erecting U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force bases in the United States and throughout the world, from the deserts of North Africa to the permafrost of the arctic. To protect the United States, the Corps erected extensive radar early warning systems across northern Canada, and NIKE and other antiaircraft missile sites in the United States. In the missile age, the Corps constructed ICBM silos, ballistic missile early warning systems (BMEWs), and part of the NASA facilities at Cape Kennedy.
During the Korean War, combat engineers destroyed bridges over the Naktong River and built fortifications that helped stop the North Korean assault at the Pusan perimeter. In the Vietnam War, army engineers built military bases and roads in Southeast Asia. To cut through the jungle in support of U.S. “search and destroy” missions, the engineers also introduced the Rome plow, a military tractor equipped with a protective cab and a special tree‐cutting blade.
The Corps of Engineers engaged in varied civil works, including construction of Veterans Administration hospitals, post offices, and bulk mail facilities. The Corps' dam construction and other flood control work came under attack, particularly in the 1960s and 1980s, when critics accused it of being overly responsive to “pork barrel” projects of the Congress. Paradoxically, when the federal government responded to the environmental movement in the 1970s, the executive branch turned first for protection of the nation's wetlands and waterways from pollution to the Corps of Engineers, whose regulatory authority under the 1899 Rivers and Harbors Act was expanded under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972.
The change in public attitudes of the 1980s, however, led to the Water Resources Act of 1986, which signified a major change in water resources planning. The new direction was toward shifting responsibility away from the federal government, which indicated a diminished civil works role for the Corps of Engineers. But the military role of the Corps continued, as seen in its construction of army and air force facilities in the buildup of the 1980s, the Corps' roles in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf War in 1990–91, and its erection of military facilities for peacekeeping operations in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia and Kosovo throughout the 1990s.
[See also Academies, Service: U.S. Military Academy; Bases, Military: Development of; Engineering, Military.]
Bibliography
- Forest G. R. Hill, Rails and Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early Transportation, 1957.
- Blanche D. Coll, et al., The Corps of Engineers: Troops and Equipment, in Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army in World War II: The Technical Services, 1958.
- William H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803–1863, 1959.
- Karl C. Dod, The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Japan, in Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army in World War II: The Technical Services, 1966.
- Lenore Fine and Jesse Remington, The Corps of Engineers: Constructions in the United States in Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army in World War II, 1972.
- Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, 1985.
- Martin Reuss and Charles Hendricks, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: A Brief History, 1997
