The services we come from
Our lodge takes its number from 1775, the year the first American services were raised. This is a short history of the armed forces and of each branch in which our brethren have served.
The Armed Forces
The armed forces of the United States are older than the nation. In 1775, a year before independence was declared, the Continental Congress raised an army, a navy and a corps of marines to fight the Revolution.
The Constitution of 1789 placed them under civilian control, with the President as Commander in Chief and Congress holding the power to raise and fund them. A War Department was created that year and a separate Department of the Navy in 1798.
For a century and a half the land and sea services answered to separate departments. The National Security Act of 1947 brought them under one roof and created an independent Air Force; the new establishment was renamed the Department of Defense in 1949. Conscription ended in 1973, and the force has been all-volunteer since.
Today there are six armed services. Five sit within the Department of Defense. The Coast Guard serves under the Department of Homeland Security and can be transferred to the Navy in time of war.
Army
The Army dates from 14 June 1775, when the Continental Congress adopted the New England militia besieging Boston and authorized companies of riflemen. George Washington was appointed its commander the following day.
Almost entirely disbanded after the Revolution, it was rebuilt from a single regiment raised in 1784. That regiment's lineage continues in the 3rd U.S. Infantry, The Old Guard, the oldest active infantry unit in the Army, which stands watch at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The Army fought the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, and swelled to more than two million men in Union service during the Civil War. It sent the American Expeditionary Forces to France in 1917 and grew to more than eight million soldiers in the Second World War, fighting from North Africa to Normandy and across the Pacific.
Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan followed. It remains the largest of the services.
Marine Corps
On 10 November 1775 the Continental Congress resolved that two battalions of Marines be raised. Tradition places the first recruiting at Tun Tavern in Philadelphia, and Marines everywhere keep the date as their birthday.
Disbanded after the Revolution, the Corps was re-established by Congress on 11 July 1798. Marine Barracks Washington, at 8th and I Streets a short distance from the Capitol, was founded in 1801 and is the oldest active post in the Corps.
The opening lines of the Marines' Hymn recall two early campaigns: the march on Derna in 1805, during the war with the Barbary states, and the storming of Chapultepec in Mexico in 1847. Belleau Wood in 1918, the island campaigns of the Pacific ending at Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945, and the Chosin Reservoir in 1950 fixed its reputation.
The Marine Corps is a separate service within the Department of the Navy.
Navy
The Navy counts its birthday as 13 October 1775, when the Continental Congress voted to fit out two armed vessels to intercept British supply ships.
The Continental Navy was sold off after the war. Attacks on American merchantmen led Congress to pass the Naval Act of 1794, which ordered six frigates. One of them, USS Constitution, was launched in 1797 and is still in commission at Boston, the oldest commissioned warship afloat.
Ironclads and river gunboats changed naval warfare during the Civil War. The Great White Fleet circled the globe from 1907 to 1909 to announce a new sea power. In the Second World War the Navy fought a two-ocean war; the carrier battle at Midway in June 1942 turned the Pacific campaign.
USS Nautilus, commissioned in 1954, was the first nuclear-powered submarine. The fleet today is built around aircraft carriers, submarines and the sailors who man them.
Air Force
Military aviation in the United States began on 1 August 1907, when the Army Signal Corps formed an Aeronautical Division of one officer and two enlisted men.
It grew into the Air Service during the First World War, the Army Air Corps in 1926 and the Army Air Forces in 1941. By 1944 the Army Air Forces had more than two million members and were flying strategic bombing campaigns over Europe and Japan.
The National Security Act made the Air Force an independent service on 18 September 1947. Within a year it was sustaining West Berlin by air through the Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1949.
Through the Cold War it held two legs of the nuclear deterrent, bombers and land-based missiles, and it has provided air superiority, airlift and reconnaissance in every conflict since.
Space Force
The Space Force is the newest service, established on 20 December 2019. It was formed from Air Force Space Command, which had been created in 1982, and sits within the Department of the Air Force much as the Marine Corps sits within the Department of the Navy.
Its roots run back to the missile and satellite programs of the 1950s. Its members are called Guardians.
The service operates the Global Positioning System, missile-warning and communications satellites, and the launch ranges at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. Every other service depends on what it keeps in orbit.
Coast Guard
On 4 August 1790 Congress, at the urging of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, authorized ten cutters to enforce the customs laws. With the Continental Navy disbanded, this Revenue-Marine was for several years the only armed force the new nation had afloat.
In 1915 the Revenue Cutter Service merged with the Life-Saving Service to form the Coast Guard. The Lighthouse Service joined it in 1939.
Coast Guardsmen have served in every major American war, manning landing craft at Normandy and across the Pacific. In peace the service carries out search and rescue, maritime law enforcement and the upkeep of aids to navigation.
It moved from the Treasury to the Department of Transportation in 1967 and to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003. Its motto is Semper Paratus, Always Ready.
Under other flags
Freemasonry has travelled with soldiers and sailors of many nations, and military lodges have met wherever regiments were posted. Brethren who served in the armed forces of other countries sit in our lodge beside those who served in these six. The uniform differs; the obligation of service does not.