7 Surprising Facts About the United States Army

In 1775, as American colonists’ discontent rumbled toward revolution, Yale University undergraduate and inventor David Bushnell approached Connecticut Governor Jonathan Trumbull. The enterprising student had been fiddling with the feasibility of underwater demolition and wanted to share his plans for a one-man submersible able to affix an explosive charge to the hull of an enemy ship. Trumbull notified Continental Army Commander in Chief George Washington, who funded the project.

The result was Turtle, a claustrophobic egg-shaped, oak-hulled, pedal- and crank-powered submersible less than 10 feet tall and 3 feet in diameter. On September 7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee piloted Turtle across New York Harbor, aiming to sink the British flagship HMS Eagle by attaching a time bomb to its underside. While that attempt and subsequent missions failed, and the British sank Turtle, Bushnell’s concept sparked a transformation in naval warfare.

The U.S. Army’s flirtation with a Camel Corps in the mid 19th century seemed improbably exotic at first. But after America acquired a vast swath of arid southwest territory from Mexico in 1848, the idea of employing pack animals well adapted to challenging desert conditions began to sound more promising.

In 1855, Congress appropriated $30,000 ($1.1 million in today’s dollars) for the project and sent Major Henry C. Wayne on camel shopping trips to the Mediterranean. Over the next two years, he offloaded 70 camels at Indianola, Texas, and marched them inland for field trials as pack animals.

In treks as far west as California the camels performed admirably, each carrying up to 600 pounds and forgoing water for days on end. One even shrugged off a rattlesnake bite. But Army brass never fully embraced the idea, the Civil War intervened and the camels were sold.

The United States is inarguably a nation of immigrants, many of whom have borne arms for their adopted nation from the Revolutionary War to present. During the Civil War, recent émigrés comprised a full quarter of the Union Army rank-and-file (and 5 percent of the Confederate Army). Most Civil War-era foreign recruits hailed from Germany and Ireland, with others arriving from England, Canada, France, Switzerland, Italy, Poland, China, Hungary, and even the Philippines and Japan. They had come to America seeking greater opportunity, escaping religious or political persecution, or simply looking for work to feed their families.

But even as the war left employers clamoring to fill open positions, “many immigrants left paying jobs to fight for the Union,” writes Don H. Doyle, emeritus professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War. The Army presented ready employment, an impetus to assimilate and a chance to demonstrate one’s allegiance at a time when foreigners faced widespread discrimination. Having fought or fled forces of oppression at home, many were animated by the Union cause.

In the early years of the republic, more soldiers died of disease than all other causes. So it comes as little surprise that Army medical staff spearheaded disease research. Among the most celebrated researchers was Major Walter Reed (1851–1902), the physician credited with proving that yellow fever is transmitted by a species of mosquito—not through poor sanitation or direct transmission, as once believed. Coming amid the Spanish American War, when yellow fever decimated the Army ranks, his findings saved the lives of countless soldiers and civilians and birthed the field of epidemiology, which studies the distribution and spread of disease. Research by Army physicians has also transformed the fields of emergency medicine and prosthetics—a legacy too often borne of tragedy.

Picture General Douglas MacArthur returning to the Philippines wearing his iconic Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses—as inseparable from the man as his corncob pipe and peaked cap. Those shades were the brainchild of one Colonel John A. Macready, an Army Air Corps aviator and veteran of both world wars. In 1929, desperate to find an alternative to problematic pilots’ goggles, Macready asked medical equipment manufacturer Bausch & Lomb to create sunglasses that would reduce glare (which caused widespread headaches and nausea among pilots) and thwart fogging at altitude. Rolled out in 1936 with the unsexy appellation “Anti-Glare,” the shades went on to popular acclaim as Ray-Ban Aviators, whose sales continue to blind the competition.

Though the oldest of the six U.S. military branches, the Army was the last of the original five to choose an official song. Not until 1908 did 1st Lieutenant (later Brigadier General) Edmund L. Gruber, serving with a horse-drawn artillery unit in the Philippines, jot down the lyrics to what he dubbed “The Caisson Song.” (Caissons were horse-drawn carts used to carry artillery ammunition.) A decade later, famed composer John Philip Sousa crafted music for Gruber’s lyrics, retitled “The Field Artillery March.” Finally, on Veterans Day 1956, Army Secretary Wilber Brucker designated “The Caisson Song” as the official tune, with revised lyrics and the title “The Army Keeps Rolling Along.” (You know you’re humming it as you read this!)

Home to America’s northernmost military base (Pituffik Space Base), Greenland has long been integral to national security. Indeed, in 1959 the Army built Camp Century, in Greenland’s far northwestern wilderness—ostensibly as a research outpost. Beneath the ice, however, the top-secret Project Iceworm was underway, with plans to deploy several hundred nuclear missile launch sites in a network of carved-out tunnels. But in 1967, the Army abandoned the base and project as impractical due to the constantly shifting ice sheet. In 2024, surprised NASA researchers rediscovered the base while testing radar technology.