Brigadier General William T. Meredith Retired USAF

<p>William T. Tom Meredith is the father of today's US Air Force (AF) civil engineer (CE) forces. He led the development and fielding of Prime Base Emergency Engineer Force (BEEF) and Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineer (RED HORSE) units which have provided heavy construction and comprehensive engineering support for every US contingency since Vietnam. Meredith was born in Halifax Virginia in 1919. He graduated from high school in Brandy Virginia in 1937 and attended the College of William and Mary on a sports scholarship. With World War II raging he walked away from a professional baseball career and enlisted as a private in the US Army in 1941. Meredith was selected for the Corps of Engineers and assigned to the Haynes Mission in the China-Burma-India theater where he partnered with British engineers to construct airfields throughout the theater. In November 1942 Meredith served as a guerrilla scout leading a group of local tribesmen to provide terrain reconnaissance supporting the security of the Allies' critical northern Burmese supply routes. In March 1943 Meredith was escorting senior US leaders when they were ambushed and surrounded by Japanese forces. After evading capture and being re-supplied by airdrop for two weeks Meredith engineered the group's escape leading them 127 miles back to safety. In the midst of this incident Meredith was awarded a battlefield commission which he later transferred to the AF in 1949. There he served in various roles including overseeing construction of US facilities in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia garnering congressional approval for construction AF-wide and attending Air Command and Staff College and Air War College. In July 1961 Meredith began restructuring CE to provide direct combat support.</p><p>This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore you will see the original copyright references library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world) and other notations in the work.</p><p>This work is in the public domain in the United States of America and possibly other nations. Within the United States you may freely copy and distribute this work as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.</p><p>As a reproduction of a historical artifact this work may contain missing or blurred pages poor pictures errant marks etc. Scholars believe and we concur that this work is important enough to be preserved reproduced and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.</p><br>