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.

by David Finnerty

Military instruction at UF is a long tradition. Cadets in 1915, when this photo was snapped, were required to take two years of training. When Congress passed a 1916 act establishing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corp, UF was one of 16 schools nationwide to create an inaugural unit, and ROTC soon became a four-year requirement.

In the last days of World War I, Jackson McDonald (BS ’24) enrolled at UF to study engineering and immediately began ROTC training in October 1918. A member of the Gator Marching Band, McDonald ended up switching to education and returning to his hometown, Stuart, to be a high school teacher.

In the 1920s when UF was a men-only school, all students were required to be in ROTC. After completing their training, cadets could apply to become military officers or continue with their academic studies. Here, in front of the old Theta Chi fraternity house, are some of those cadets.

Men and horses have long faced combat together. During the early years of UF’s ROTC program, cadets and their ponies trained on the campus grounds that would later become the O’Connell Center.

In what would be a major military violation today, cadet Albert Spiller (BSME ’39) jokingly aims a rifle at a cutout heart held by three women in this 1930s-era photo. Spiller, the ROTC National Rifle Champion in 1939, went on to serve in the U.S. Army for 20 years.

Military balls and other formal command ceremonies were festive rituals for cadets and their dates in the 1940s. Here, ROTC students in their dress uniforms escort women during a campus celebration.

It wasn’t all fieldwork for cadets. In this 1943 photo, cadets take a class in meteorology. The more traditional training included dress parades, artillery drills, calisthenics and marksmanship.

The Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union brought tension to UF ROTC cadets in the 1950s. Wars in Korea and Vietnam were framed as fights to stop the spread of communism and slow Soviet influence, and many Gators were called to active duty immediately after graduation.

Sophisticated missiles and other advanced weapons added a new challenge to ROTC training in 1956, when this photo was taken. That decade, formal women’s ROTC units were formed at UF for the first time. It would be another 20 years before the Department of Defense and the university would abolish gender-specific units.

Pilot training was part of the curriculum for some UF cadets in 1956. In coming years as the Armed Forces reorganized into three unique branch — Army, Navy and Air Force — UF ROTC would follow suit and add individual Navy and Air Force units to its original Army outfit. (Marines are an arm of the Navy.) Today, UF is one of the few universities with all three of those branches represented.

Angel Flight cadets marched on the university’s ROTC battalion’s campus drill field, where the O’Connell Center parking lot is now. Angel Flight was the university’s Women in the Air Force (WAF) component of Air Force ROTC. The Air Force’s WAF program ended in 1976.

Despite women and men having separate units in the 1950s and ’60s, most cadets trained on the same weapons. When UF ROTC finally became coeducational, women soon proved they were equal to their male classmates. In 1974, Laura Witter (BSR ’77) was named that year’s outstanding cadet.

By the 1990s when this photo was taken, UF had one of the nation’s most established programs. Today, more than 250 Gators are in UF’s ROTC units — Army (89), Navy (60) and Air Force (108).

Cadets showed their pride in being part of the AFROTC Billy Mitchell Drill Team with a 2004 mural on the 34th Street Wall, next to campus. Established in 1951, UF’s BMDT placed in the Top 5 in annual national competition in 2012 (No. 3) and 2013 (No. 4). Mitchell is regarded as the father of the U.S. Air Force.

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