History
It was first activated in January 1943, commanded by Lieutenant General Walter Krueger. Under the code name Alamo Force, it assumed control of the majority of US Army units involved in Operation Cartwheel, the campaign to isolate and neutralize the Japanese base at Rabaul in New Britain. Following the completion of Cartwheel, Sixth Army joined Australian Army and other US forces on the north coast of New Guinea. Similar in conception to the island hopping operations of the central Pacific, the object of the attacks was to land, establish a garrison and airfield which could support the next strike, and then move on.
In September 1944, Sixth Army was released from operations in New Guinea by the US Eighth Army. On 20 October 1944, X Corps and XXIV Corps, under Sixth Army, invaded Leyte in the Philippines. By December, Leyte was secured, and the Sixth Army was relieved again by Eighth Army to prepare for the invasion of Luzon. As a prelude to that invasion, the island of Mindoro was invaded by the Western Visayan Task Force comprising the 19th and 503rd Regimental Combat Teams. Sixth Army took part in the Invasion of Lingayen Gulf on 9 January 1945 with the subordinate units of I and XIV Corps. Sixth Army units fought south until they met up those of Eighth Army advancing from around Manila. Sixth Army then continued to clear the north of Luzon until the end of the war. Sixth Army was to have provided the ground forces for the first phase of the invasion of Japan, but the surrender changed that.
The American soldiers under the U.S. Sixth Army was sending operations in the Philippines from October 1944 to August 1945 and adding supported by all ongoing Filipino soldiers under the Philippine Commonwealth Army and Philippine Constabulary units and recognized guerrilla units was they enemy against the Imperial Japanese troops under by General Tomoyuki Yamashita.
Occupation duty then followed for a short while until Sixth Army returned to the United States, headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco. Sixth Army then took responsibility for training of Army forces from part of the continental United States, until it was inactivated as part of force reductions in June 1995.
Read more about this topic: Sixth United States Army
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Like their personal lives, women’s history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)