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<em>Mark Wayne Clark</em>, General, United States Army, Retired, was born in Madison Barracks, New York, 1 May 1896. He was graduated from the United States Military Academy and commissioned a second lieutenant of Infantry in April 1917. He was promoted to first lieutenant 15 May 1917, and to captain 5 August 1917.</p>
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Soon after he was promoted to captain, General Clark joined the 11th Infantry of the 5th Division in France, where he was wounded in action in the Vosges mountains. He was assigned next to General Staff Headquarters, First American Army, and participated in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives and later served with the Third Army in Belgium and Germany.</p>
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After his return to the United States in 1919, General Clark was given various assignments including a Chautauqua circuit tour for the Adjutant General of the Army in 1921. He was assigned to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War from 1921 to 1924 and was graduated from the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1925. He then served three years at the Presidio of San Francisco with the 30th Infantry and from 1929 to 1933 was an instructor of the Indiana National Guard.</p>
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General Clark was graduated from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1935. He then served for a year as Deputy Chief of Staff for the Civilian Conservation Corps, VII Corps Area, at Omaha, Nebraska before entering the Army War College. Upon graduation in 1937, he was assigned to Fort Lewis, Washington.</p>
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In March 1940, General Clark became an instructor at the Army War College. The following August he was named Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations of the General Headquarters, US Army. In January 1942, he became Deputy Chief of Staff of the Army Ground Forces; and in May 1942, was named Chief of Staff of that organization.</p>
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In June 1942, General Clark was assigned as Commanding General of the II Corps in England. The following month he was named Commander of the Army Ground Forces in the European Theater of Operations and in October 1942 became Deputy Commander in Chief of the Allied Forces in the North African theater.</p>
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In those capacities, General Clark laid the groundwork for a vast organizational, housing, and training program in the British Isles and played a leading part in planning the invasion of North Africa. In October 1942, shortly before the actual invasion, he made a dramatic and hazardous, but highly successful, trip by plane and submarine from London to French North Africa for a secret rendezvous with a group of French officers to arrange details of the proposed landings.</p>
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As Deputy Commander in Chief of the Anglo-American invasion forces, he flew from Gibraltar to Algiers on the day following the landings, 9 November 1942. He immediately took into protective custody Admiral Jean Francois Darlan, cabinet minister in the German-dominated French government at Vichy and Commander in Chief of all French forces, who was in Algiers visiting an ill son.</p>
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General Clark induced Admiral Darlan to repudiate the Vichy regime and order all French forces in northwest and west Africa to cease resistance to the Americans and British. This order, and the collaboration between the Anglo-American and French forces which followed, greatly facilitated the conquest of North Africa by the Allied powers.</p>
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In January 1943, General Clark was designated Commanding General of the Fifth Army, the first American army to be activated in the European theater. With his headquarters in Oujda, North Africa, General Clark spent the next seven months directing the training of the American and French troops which composed the Fifth Army. He established infantry and amphibious bases on African soil and coordinated activities of ground, sea, and air forces in planning the successful amphibious invasion of Italy on 9 September 1943.</p>
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General Clark’s Fifth Army captured Naples on 1 October. On 22 January 1944, more elements of the Fifth Army were landed in a flanking movement at the seaside resorts of Anzio and Nettuno about 30 miles south of Rome. Here a strong beachhead 20 miles long and eight miles deep was established, making possible a junction with the troops advancing from the south. After weeks of bitter fighting, the American Fifth and British Eighth Armies, on 11 May 1944, launched a new offensive, forcing a German withdrawal, and on 4 June the Fifth Army captured Rome, the first Axis capital to be taken from the enemy. Two weeks later the Fifth Army had advanced 100 miles.</p>
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Early in December 1944, General Clark was placed in command of the 15th Army Group, consisting of the Fifth (US) and Eighth (British) Armies, and comprising all fighting forces in Italy. He held that command until the close of hostilities in Europe.</p>
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On 9 April 1945, the 15th Army Group launched an offensive from the mountain positions south of Bologna that broke through into the Po valley and terminated in May 1945 when, at Brenner Pass, Colonel General Von Vietinghoff, German Commander-in-Chief, Southwest, formally surrendered the 230,000 German troops in Italy and in the Austrian provinces of Tyrol, Verarlberg, Salzburg, and parts of Carinthia and Styria. This was the first large-scale surrender of any German field command in Europe and terminated the war in Italy four days ahead of the end of hostilities in Western Europe.</p>
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In June 1945, General Clark was appointed Commander in Chief of the US Occupation Forces in Austria and US High Commissioner for Austria.</p>
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As US High Commissioner in Austria, General Clark was the US member of the Allied Commission for Austria, made up of representatives of the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France, and serving as the supreme administrative authority in that country. In that capacity, he rendered distinguished service in helping feed the people, restore and maintain order in Austria, weed Nazi elements from public office, and prepare the country for independent, democratic self-government. In 1947, he was deputy to the US Secretary of State and sat in London and Moscow with the Council of Foreign Ministers negotiating a treaty for Austria.</p>
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On 19 June 1947, General Clark assumed command of the Sixth Army, with headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco, California. He was appointed Chief of Army Field Forces at Fort Monroe, Virginia in September 1949. On 30 April 1952, he was appointed Commander in Chief, Far East Command and assumed office on 12 May 1952, serving simultaneously as Commander in Chief, United Nations Command; Commanding General, US Army Forces, Far East; and Governor of the Ryukyu Islands. On 27 July 1953, General Clark signed a military armistice agreement between the United Nations Command and the military commanders of the North Korean Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteers at Munsan-ni, Korea.</p>
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General Clark on 7 October 1953 relinquished his posts in the Far East. He emplaned that day for the US and retirement from the military service, at his own request, on 31 October in Washington, DC.</p>
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General Clark was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters, the Navy Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal with “V” for valor, and the Purple Heart. He received many foreign decorations and honorary degrees.</p>
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General Clark accepted the presidency of The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina, in Charleston on 23 October 1953. He assumed office on 1 March 1954 and was inaugurated on 19 March 1954. In the summer of 1954, Herbert Hoover appointed him chairman of the task force to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence organizations of the United States government. The report of this committee was submitted in May 1955.</p>
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On 30 June 1965, General Clark retired from the presidency of The Citadel at his own request, and on 1 July 1965, he became president emeritus of the college.</p>
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General Clark was married to Maurine Doran, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. M. A. Doran of Muncie, Indiana, 17 May 1924. Mrs. Clark died 5 October 1966. Their son is Major William Doran Clark USA (retired), and their daughter Patricia Ann (Mrs. Gordon H. Oosting) died 27 November 1962. General Clark married Mrs. Mary Millard Applegate on 17 October 1967.</p>
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