On Point

Spring 2024

On Point Cover Spring 2024

On the Cover

General Gordon R. Sullivan meets with British Army officers during an official visit to the United Kingdom in Gene Snyder’s 1994 colored pencil on colored paper, General Sullivan at Windsor Castle, England. (Army Museum Enterprise Art Collection)

For an article on General Sullivan, go to page 6 of this issue of On Point

Inside this issue

Readers comment about On Point going digital and the 716th Military Police Battalion.

Since its beginning, the U.S. Army, like all other armies of the world, has relied on animals to perform a variety of tasks throughout its history. For many decades, horses and mules served as the primary means of transporting soldiers, artillery, and supplies, whether as cavalry mounts or as draft animals. 

General Gordon R. Sullivan was a man of action and a soldier devoted to serving his country. His life reflected the values of the American soldier, and he left a significant legacy with the U.S. Army after thirty-six years of service. 

The Beyond the Battle Museum, located in the new Adams County Historical Society building just north of historic downtown Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, gives anyone interested in Civil War, presidential, and local history another reason to visit Gettysburg.

The advent and development of distance education has provided accessible, affordable, and quality education to millions of Americans. Distance education can trace its roots to educators in the late 1700s publishing newspaper advertisements offering to teach shorthand through correspondence.

Fort Michie was a U.S. Army coast artillery post located on Great Gull Island, New York, from 1897 to 1948. Along with Fort H.G. Wright, Fort Mansfield, Fort Tyler, Fort Terry, and Camp Hero, it defended the eastern entrance to Long Island Sound as part of the Harbor Defenses of Long Island Sound, thus defending Connecticut’s ports and the north shore of Long Island, as well as the back entrance to New York City’s East River.

The 99th Infantry Battalion (Separate) was activated on 10 July 1942 at Camp Ripley, Minnesota. The original War Department order that created the 99th gave priority to Norwegian aliens for service in the 99th. Norwegian-speaking American soldiers “may, with their consent, be transferred to the battalion.”

The legacy that the 20th General Hospital left behind is one of men and women who provided exceptional medical care to the wounded (both Allied and enemy) in the austere environment of the China-Burma-India Theater and adds to a history of University of Pennsylvania medical personnel providing care to the nation’s soldiers that stretches from the American Revolution to today. 

“The Army has had two great trainers,” General Dwight D. Eisenhower once asserted. “Von Steuben, and Bruce Clarke.” 

Since its large-scale adoption by armies in Europe during the Early Modern Era, artillery—particularly field artillery—has often played a decisive role on the battlefield. 

This summer’s Stray Rounds includes brief articles about the Behind the Stars project, a POW/MIA burial, the endangered battlefields, and more,