A Salute to UF ROTC Throughout the Years
Military service is a University of Florida tradition, one that dates to the early years of this university.
10 Surprising Facts About UF ROTC
So, you think you know the University of Florida inside and out? In honor of Veterans Day on Nov. 11, we salute Gators who have served in the Armed Forces with some bet-you-didn’t-know trivia about UF’s ROTC program.
Gen. James Van Fleet — namesake of UF’s historic ROTC classroom and training center, Van Fleet Hall — coached the Gators football team in the 1923 and 1924 seasons while also training cadets. President Harry Truman called Van Fleet, who was a veteran of World Wars I and II and the Korean War, “the greatest general we ever had.”
UF’s ROTC once had a polo club. During the World War I era when horses pulled artillery, there were caissons and horses kept in the campus Artillery Barn, where Van Fleet Hall and the O’Connell Center are now located. When not training, cadets used the horses to start a polo club.
In World War II, so many students dropped out of UF to enlist that enrollment fell to 740 in 1944 — down from 3,500 the prior year. By the time the war ended, 401 Gators had been killed, among them football players and campus leaders. It wasn’t the first time war interrupted studies. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, 274 students from UF’s 434 all-male enrollment enlisted.
The pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, was a Gator Col. Paul Tibbets attended UF for two years (1934-35) before transferring to the University of Cincinnati to study pre-med. The Enola Gay was named after his mother. Reflecting on the mission, Tibbets told a reporter in 2005: “We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.”
More than 10,000 Gators served in the Armed Forces in World War II. Eleven of them received the Distinguished Service Cross, the military’s second highest decoration for extraordinary heroism. In all, 250 UF alumni are known to have been awarded various medals — a large number of them Purple Hearts for combat injuries.
UF ROTC was once required for all male undergraduates … well, almost all. Foreign students, veterans and those with medical exemptions were excused. That changed in 1920 when seniors were allowed to skip it, too. Gradually, juniors and sophomores could also opt out. The 1969 freshmen class was the last one mandated to take ROTC.
The origins of women ROTC cadets at UF go back to 1894, when the university was still in Lake City and called Florida Agricultural College; in that time, some women students volunteered to drill alongside their male classmates. For a few years afterward, the college had a volunteer women’s company. Decades later, in the 1950s, UF created formal women-only ROTC units. Women cadets were finally integrated with their male ROTC counterparts in 1973.
Hats off to our lady Gators. Laura Witter (BSR ’77), one of the seven women who joined UF ROTC in August 1973, was named outstanding cadet the following year and again as a senior. In 1977, Bonnie (Provow) Chandler (BSE ’77) and Joyce Fletcher-Menard (BSHSE ’77) were commissioned into the Ordnance and Medical Services Corps.
In the all’s-fair-in-love-and-war category, America’s first known married cadets to be commissioned together are Gators. That 1978 privilege went to John (BA ’78) and Barbara (BA ’78) Jordan.
It’s not just in sports that Gators rock. UF is the two-time winner of the U.S. Army’s performance-based Warrior of the Pacific Award (1978 and 1981), given to the nation’s best detachment.
Published
October 20, 2021