General James Gavin, Airborne Commander

James Maurice Gavin grew up in Mount Carmel, the son of working-class parents in the coal region, and enlisted in the Army at seventeen. He rose to become one of the most decorated and intellectually significant American generals of the twentieth century. In World War Two, Gavin commanded paratroopers of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division through some of the war's most demanding operations: the drops into Sicily, Salerno, Normandy, and Holland, and the Battle of the Bulge.

He was the youngest major general in the Army at the time. After the war, Gavin became a leading voice for adapting military strategy to the nuclear age, arguing against massive retaliation in favor of flexible conventional force. He retired in nineteen fifty-eight, served as Ambassador to France under President Kennedy from nineteen sixty-one to nineteen sixty-two, and spent his later years as an author and executive.

The kid from Mount Carmel became one of the Army's most original thinkers.