William T. "Tom" Meredith is the father of today's US Air Force (AF) civil engineer (CE) forces. He led the development and fielding of Prime Base Emergency Engineer Force (BEEF) and Rapid Engineer Deployable, Heavy Operational Repair Squadron, Engineer (RED HORSE) units, which have provided heavy construction and comprehensive engineering support for every US contingency since Vietnam. Meredith was born in Halifax, Virginia, in 1919. He graduated from high school in Brandy, Virginia, in 1937, and attended the College of William and Mary on a sports scholarship. With World War II raging, he walked away from a professional baseball career and enlisted as a private in the US Army in 1941. Meredith was selected for the Corps of Engineers and assigned to the Haynes Mission in the China-Burma-India theater, where he partnered with British engineers to construct airfields throughout the theater. In November 1942, Meredith served as a guerrilla scout, leading a group of local tribesmen to provide terrain reconnaissance supporting the security of the Allies' critical northern Burmese supply routes. In March 1943, Meredith was escorting senior US leaders when they were ambushed and surrounded by Japanese forces. After evading capture and being re-supplied by airdrop for two weeks, Meredith engineered the group's escape, leading them 127 miles back to safety. In the midst of this incident, Meredith was awarded a battlefield commission, which he later transferred to the AF in 1949. There he served in various roles, including overseeing construction of US facilities in the United Kingdom and Scandinavia, garnering congressional approval for construction AF-wide and attending Air Command and Staff College and Air War College. In July 1961, Meredith began restructuring CE to provide direct combat support.
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