Category Archives: Military

Sybil Ludington was an American Revolutionary War heroine. On April 26, 1777, at age 16, she made an all-night horseback ride to alert militia forces in the towns of Putnam County, New York, and Danbury, Connecticut, of the approach of British forces. She rode twice as far as Paul Revere did, by herself, over bad roads, and in an area known to be inhabited by outlaws.

Mary Agnes Hallaren was an American soldier and the third director of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) at the time when it became a part of the United States Army. As the director of the WAC, she was the first woman to officially join the U.S. Army. When she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, which later became the WAC, in 1942, a recruiter reportedly asked the five-foot-tall Hallaren how someone her size could help the military. She responded, “You don’t have to be six feet tall to have a brain that works.” As a captain, she commanded the first women’s battalion to go overseas in 1943. She served as director of the WAC personnel attached to the 8th and 9th Air Forces, and by 1945, she commanded all WAC personnel in the European theater as a lieutenant colonel.
On 7 May 1947, Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson promoted Hallaren to full colonel and appointed her director of the WAC. On June 12, 1948, when the WAC was officially integrated into the Army, she became the first woman to serve as a regular Army officer (there had been female members of the Army Medical Corps since 1947).
During her tenure, she led the effort to gain Regular Army and Reserve status for WACs; directed the processes for assimilating WACs into the regular and reserve components between 1948 and 1950; supervised the revival of WAC recruiting and the opening of the WAC Training Center; and led the Corps through most of the Korean War. After leaving the position, she served on active duty for seven more years before retiring in 1960 at age 53. She was awarded the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star and the Army Commendation Medal. She then served in the United States Department of Labor as director of the Women in Community Service division. She retired in 1978 but continued to serve in an advisory capacity. In the 1990s, she was a leading advocate for the Women In Military Service For America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, which was dedicated in 1997.

A Viking burial site was found in Solør, Norway in the year 1900. It is dated to the 10th century and contained the remains of a young woman, 18 – 20 years old and no more than 1.55 metres high. as befitting a warrior, she was buried with a two-edged sword, an axe, a spear, five arrowheads, a shield, the skeleton of a horse with bridle and other tools. In 2019, British scientists used the skeleton, which is preserved in Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History, to create a facial reconstruction of what she would have looked like. The remains showed that she had suffered a head injury consistent with a sword wound; the skull was found to have a dent in it serious enough to have damaged the bone.