Introduction
The Military Police Corps achieved permanent status in the U.S. Army on 26 September 1941, yet its traditions of duty, service, and security date back to the Revolutionary War. Over the last two centuries the military police—or provost marshals as they were called during much of their history—evolved from a group of miscellaneous units and men organized on a temporary basis in time of national emergency to perform a limited range of law and order responsibilities into today's highly organized and trained combat support force. During the 1980s military police units carried out many of the wide-ranging duties they have assumed in the Army, such as fighting in Grenada; guarding the summer Olympics in Seoul, Korea; helping to quell civil disturbances in the Virgin Islands in the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo; and playing an essential role in Just Cause, the Army's operation in Panama in 1989–1990. Based on a tradition of service that stretches back more than two hundred years, military police have come to be recognized as an important element of the Army in both peace and war.
The Military Police Corps traces its beginnings to the formation of a provost unit, the Marechaussee Corps, in the Continental Army.[1] Authorized by Congress on 27 May 1778 with a name borrowed from the French term for provost troops, the special unit was assigned by General George Washington to perform those necessary police functions required in camp and in the field. The first American military police unit was organized along the lines of a regular Continental Army company with 1 captain, 4 lieutenants, 1 clerk, 1 quartermaster sergeant, 2 trumpeters, 2 sergeants, 5 corporals, 43 provosts, and 4 executioners. Reflecting the unit's special requirements for speed and equipment, the corps was mounted and accoutered as light dragoons.
Washington appointed Bartholomew Von Heer provost marshal of the Continental Army and commander of the Marechaussee Corps with the rank of captain. Von Heer and his men were expected to patrol the camp and its vicinity in order to detain fugitives and arrest rioters and thieves. During combat the unit was to patrol behind the Army's so-called second line where it would secure the rear by rounding up stragglers and preventing desertions. It also assumed what in later times would be called the "early warning" responsibility, that is, keeping watch against enemy attack from the rear. The Marechaussee Corps also supervised relations with the sutlers, the merchants who supplied the Army, and assumed general responsibility for the collection, security, and movement of prisoners of war. A second, larger military police force, this one organized in 1779 by the Commonwealth of Virginia, administered the prisoner-of-war compound established at Charlottesville to secure the British and German soldiers captured at Saratoga. Although the existence of both units was short-lived—the prisoner guards were disbanded in
- ↑ The following discussion of the military police in the American Revolution is based on Robert K. Wright, Jr., The Continental Army (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1983) , pp. 134, 137, and 161. See also The Corps of Military Police, unpublished study prepared by the Organizational History and Honors Branch (OHB), Center of Military History (CMH), in 1953, and Military Police Corps Regimental History (Fort McClellan, Ala.: U.S. Military Police School, 1987), p. 3, for some of the undocumented information that follows in this introduction.
