Kansas State University
Kansas State University, commonly shortened to Kansas State or K-State, is a public doctoral university with its main campus in Manhattan, United States. Kansas State was opened as the states land-grant college in 1863 – the first public institution of learning in the state of Kansas. It had a high enrollment of 24,766 students for the Fall 2014 semester. Branch campuses are in Salina and Olathe, the Kansas State University Polytechnic Campus in Salina is home to the College of Technology and Aviation. The university is classified as a university with highest research activity by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. Kansas States academic offerings are administered through nine colleges, including the College of Veterinary Medicine, Graduate degrees offered include 65 masters degree programs and 45 doctoral degrees. The school was the first land-grant college created under the Morrill Act, K-State is the third-oldest school in the Big 12 Conference and the oldest public institution of higher learning in the state of Kansas.
The effort to establish the school began in 1861, the year that Kansas was admitted to the United States, one of the new state legislatures top priorities involved establishing a state university. That year, the delegation from Manhattan introduced a bill to convert Blue Mont Central College into the state university, in 1862, another bill to make Manhattan the site of the state university failed by one vote. When the college opened for its first session on September 2,1863, enrollment for the first session totaled 52 students,26 men and 26 women. Twelve years after opening, the university moved its campus from the location of Blue Mont Central College to its present site in 1875. The original site is now occupied by Central National Bank of Manhattan, the early years of the institution witnessed debate over whether the college should provide a focused agricultural education or a full liberal arts education. During this era, the tenor of the school shifted with the tenure of college presidents, for example, President John A.
Anderson favored a limited education and President George T. Fairchild favored a liberal education. Fairchild was credited with saying, Our college exists not so much to make men farmers as to make farmers men. During this era, in 1873, Kansas State helped pioneer the academic teaching of economics for women. In November 1928, the school was accredited by the Association of American Universities as a school whose graduates were deemed capable of advanced graduate work, the name of the school was changed in 1931 to Kansas State College of Agriculture and Applied Science. Milton S. Eisenhower served as president of the university from 1943 to 1950, several buildings, including residence halls and a student union, were added to the campus in the 1950s
Order of the Red Banner
The Order of the Red Banner was the first Soviet military decoration. The order was established on 16 September 1918, during the Russian Civil War by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and it was the highest award of Soviet Russia, subsequently the Soviet Union, until the Order of Lenin was established in 1930. Recipients were recognised for extraordinary heroism and courage demonstrated on the battlefield, the order was awarded to individuals as well as to military units, ships and social organizations, and state enterprises. In years it was awarded on the twentieth and again on the thirtieth anniversary of military service without requiring participation in combat. The Russian Order of the Red Banner was established during the Russian Civil War by decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of September 16,1918, the first recipient was Vasily Blyukher on September 28,1918. The second recipient was Iona Yakir, during the Civil War there existed similarly named orders and decorations established by the Soviet communist governments of several other constituent and nonconstituent republics.
The August 1,1924 decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee established the all-Soviet Order of the Red Banner for deserving personnel of the Red Army, from 1918 till the late 1930s there was a collective variant - the Revolutionary Red Banner of Honor. This was in the form of a military color awarded to distinguished Red Army, Soviet Air Force and it was more older than the order, having been established on August 3, a month and several weeks before. As a military decoration, The Order of the Red Banner recognised heroism in combat or otherwise extraordinary accomplishments of military valour during combat operations. Before the establishment of the Order of Lenin on April 5,1930, during World War II, under various titles, it was presented both to individuals and to units for acts of extreme military heroism. Nearly all well-known Soviet commanders became recipients of the Order of the Red Banner, the order was awarded to individuals as well as whole formations, which added the prefix Red Banner to their official designations.
Naval vessels flew a special ensign, the Order of the Red Banner was used as a long service award between 1944 and 1958 to mark twenty and thirty years of service in the military, state security, or police. This was surrounded by two golden panicles of wheat, at the bottom were the letters SSSR, additional awards of the Order bore a white enamelled shield with a silver sequence number at the bottom of the obverse. A recipient of three Orders of the Red Banner would wear a badge of the order followed by his second award bearing a number 2. The early variants of the Order were screw back badges to wear on clothing. Later variants hung from a standard Soviet pentagonal mount with a ring through the suspension loop, the mount was covered with an overlapping 24mm wide red silk moiré ribbon with 1. 5mm wide white edge stripes and a 7mm wide white central stripe. The Order of the Red Banner was worn on the side of the chest. If worn in the presence of Orders or medals of the Russian Federation, pavel Dybenko won 3 Orders of the Red Banner, his first in the 1921 bloody suppression of the naval rebellion in Kronstadt, his 2 others in 1922 in the suppression of peasants uprisings
Military organization
Military organization or military organisation is the structuring of the armed forces of a state so as to offer military capability required by the national defense policy. In some countries paramilitary forces are included in an armed forces. Armed forces that are not a part of military or paramilitary organizations, such as insurgent forces, often mimic military organizations, the use of formalized ranks in a hierarchical structure came into widespread use with the Roman Army. These in turn manage Armed Services that themselves command combat, combat support and combat support formations. Within each departmental agency will be found administrative branches responsible for further agency business specialization work, in most countries the armed forces are divided into three or four Armed services, army and air force. Many countries have a variation on the model of three or four basic Armed Services. Some nations organize their marines, special forces or strategic missile forces as independent armed services, a nations coast guard may be an independent military branch of its military, although in many nations the coast guard is a law enforcement or civil agency. A number of countries have no navy, for geographical reasons, most smaller countries have a single organization that encompasses all armed forces employed by the country in question.
Third-world armies tend to consist primarily of infantry, while first-world armies tend to have larger units manning expensive equipment and it is worthwhile to make mention of the term joint. In western militaries, a joint force is defined as a unit or formation comprising representation of power from two or more branches of the military. It is common, at least in the European and North American militaries, to refer to the blocks of a military as commands, formations. In a military context, a command is a collection of units and it is not uncommon for a nations services to each consist of their own command, but this does not preclude the existence of commands which are not service-based. A formation is defined by the US Department of Defense as two or more aircraft, ships, or units proceeding together under a commander. The formations only differ in their ability to achieve different scales of application of force to achieve different strategic and tactical goals and it is a composite military organization that includes a mixture of integrated and operationally attached sub-units, and is usually combat-capable.
Example of formations include, brigades, wings, formation may refer to tactical formation, the physical arrangement or disposition of troops and weapons. Examples of formation in such usage include, panzerkeil, testudo formation, any unit subordinate to another unit is considered its sub-unit or minor unit. It is not uncommon for unit and formation to be used synonymously in the United States, in Commonwealth practice, formation is not used for smaller organizations like battalions which are instead called units, and their constituent platoons or companies are referred to as sub-units. In the Commonwealth, formations are divisions, etc, different armed forces, and even different branches of service of the armed forces, may use the same name to denote different types of organizations
Platoon
A platoon is a military unit typically composed of two or more squads/sections/patrols. Platoon organization varies depending on the country and the branch, a platoon leader or commander is the officer in command of a platoon. This person is usually a junior officer—a second or first lieutenant or an equivalent rank, the officer is usually assisted by a platoon sergeant. A platoon is typically the smallest military unit led by a commissioned officer, Platoons normally consist of three or four sections or squads. In some armies, platoon is used throughout the branches of the army, in others, such as the British Army and other Commonwealth armies, platoons are associated with the infantry. In a few armies, such as the French Army, a platoon is specifically a cavalry unit, a unit consisting of several platoons is called a company/battery/troop. According to Merriam-Webster, The term was first used in the 17th century to refer to a body of musketeers who fired together in a volley alternately with another platoon.
The word came from the 17th-century French peloton, from pelote meaning a small ball, nonetheless it is documented that it took the meaning of a group of soldiers firing a volley together, while a different platoon reloaded. This implies an augmentative intention in the etymology, the modern French word peloton, when not meaning platoon, can refer to the main body of riders in a bicycle race. Pelote itself originally comes from the low Latin pilotta from Latin pila, meaning ball, the platoon was originally a firing unit rather than an organization. The system was said to have been invented by Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden in 1618, in the French Army in the 1670s, a battalion was divided into 18 platoons who were grouped into three firings, each platoon in the firing either actually firing or reloading. The system was used in the British, Russian. Each platoon was divided into four sections, each commanded by a corporal, due to a shortage of officers, a non commissioned officer rank of Platoon Sergeant Major was introduced from 1938 to 1940 for experienced non-commissioned officers who were given command of platoons.
In the Australian Army, an infantry platoon has thirty-six soldiers organized into three sections and a twelve-man maneuver support section. A lieutenant as platoon commander and a sergeant as platoon sergeant, accompanied by a platoon sig, a section comprises eight soldiers led by a corporal with a lance corporal as second in command. Each section has two fireteams of four men, one led by the corporal and the other by the lance corporal, each fireteam has one soldier with a 7. 62mm Maximi GSMG and the other three armed with Steyr F88 assault rifles. One rifle is equipped with an attached 40mm grenade launcher attachment for the lance corporal, more recently, the designated marksman of an Australian fireteam has been issued the HK417 in Afghanistan and possibly afterwards. The platoon may have three MAG58 general-purpose machine guns, one M2 Browning heavy machine gun or a Mk 19 grenade launcher at its disposal and this may not be the case for all British Infantry units, since the 51mm mortars are not part of the TOE post-Afghanistan
Battle of Stalingrad
Marked by fierce close quarters combat and direct assaults on civilians by air raids, it is often regarded as one of the single largest and bloodiest battles in the history of warfare. German forces never regained the initiative in the East and withdrew a vast military force from the West to replace their losses, the German offensive to capture Stalingrad began in August 1942, using the German 6th Army and elements of the 4th Panzer Army. The attack was supported by intensive Luftwaffe bombing that reduced much of the city to rubble, the fighting degenerated into house-to-house fighting, and both sides poured reinforcements into the city. By mid-November 1942, the Germans had pushed the Soviet defenders back at great cost into narrow zones along the west bank of the Volga River. On 19 November 1942, the Red Army launched Operation Uranus, the Axis forces on the flanks were overrun and the 6th Army was cut off and surrounded in the Stalingrad area. Adolf Hitler ordered that the stay in Stalingrad and make no attempt to break out, attempts were made to supply the army by air.
Heavy fighting continued for two months. By the beginning of February 1943, the Axis forces in Stalingrad had exhausted their ammunition, the remaining units of the 6th Army surrendered. The battle lasted five months, one week, and three days, the war had been progressing well, the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic had been very successful and Rommel had just captured Tobruk. In the east, they had stabilized their front in a running from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. There were a number of salients, but these were not particularly threatening, neither Army Group North nor Army Group South had been particularly hard pressed over the winter. Stalin was expecting the main thrust of the German summer attacks to be directed against Moscow again, with the initial operations being very successful, the Germans decided that their summer campaign in 1942 would be directed at the southern parts of the Soviet Union. The initial objectives in the region around Stalingrad were the destruction of the capacity of the city.
The river was a key route from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea to central Russia and its capture would disrupt commercial river traffic. The Germans cut the pipeline from the oilfields when they captured Rostov on 23 July, the capture of Stalingrad would make the delivery of Lend Lease supplies via the Persian Corridor much more difficult. On 23 July 1942, Hitler personally rewrote the operational objectives for the 1942 campaign, both sides began to attach propaganda value to the city based on it bearing the name of the leader of the Soviet Union. The expansion of objectives was a significant factor in Germanys failure at Stalingrad, caused by German overconfidence, the Soviets realized that they were under tremendous constraints of time and resources and ordered that anyone strong enough to hold a rifle be sent to fight. If I do not get the oil of Maikop and Grozny I must finish this war, Army Group South was selected for a sprint forward through the southern Russian steppes into the Caucasus to capture the vital Soviet oil fields there
Red Army
The Workers and Peasants Red Army was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and after 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution, the Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. The Red Army is credited as being the land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II. During operations on the Eastern Front, it fought 75%–80% of the German land forces deployed in the war, inflicting the vast majority of all German losses and ultimately capturing the German capital. In September 1917, Vladimir Lenin wrote, There is only one way to prevent the restoration of the police, at the time, the Imperial Russian Army had started to collapse. The Tsarist general Nikolay Dukhonin estimated that there had been 2 million deserters,1.8 million dead,5 million wounded and 2 million prisoners and he estimated the remaining troops as numbering 10 million.
Therefore, the Council of Peoples Commissars decided to form the Red Army on 28 January 1918 and they envisioned a body formed from the class-conscious and best elements of the working classes. All citizens of the Russian republic aged 18 or older were eligible, in the event of an entire unit wanting to join the Red Army, a collective guarantee and the affirmative vote of all its members would be necessary. Because the Red Army was composed mainly of peasants, the families of those who served were guaranteed rations, some peasants who remained at home yearned to join the Army, along with some women, flooded the recruitment centres. If they were turned away they would collect scrap metal and prepare care-packages, in some cases the money they earned would go towards tanks for the Army. Nikolai Krylenko was the supreme commander-in-chief, with Aleksandr Myasnikyan as deputy, Nikolai Podvoisky became the commissar for war, Pavel Dybenko, commissar for the fleet. Proshyan, Steinberg were specified as peoples commissars as well as Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich from the Bureau of Commissars, at a joint meeting of Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, held on 22 February 1918, Krylenko remarked, We have no army.
The Red Guard units are brushed aside like flies and we have no power to stay the enemy, only an immediate signing of the peace treaty will save us from destruction. This provoked the insurrection of General Alexey Maximovich Kaledins Volunteer Army in the River Don region, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk aggravated Russian internal politics. The situation encouraged direct Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, a series of engagements resulted, amongst others, the Czechoslovak Legion, the Polish 5th Rifle Division, and the pro-Bolshevik Red Latvian Riflemen. The Whites defeated the Red Army on each front, Leon Trotsky reformed and counterattacked, the Red Army repelled Admiral Kolchaks army in June, and the armies of General Denikin and General Yudenich in October. By mid-November the White armies were all almost completely exhausted, in January 1920, Budennys First Cavalry Army entered Rostov-on-Don. 1919 to 1923 At the wars start, the Red Army consisted of 299 infantry regiments, Civil war intensified after Lenin dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly and the Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, removing Russia from the Great War
