William Campbell Langfitt
American general (1860–1934)
William Campbell Langfitt (10 August 1860 – 20 April 1934) was a major general in the United States Army. He was prominent as the chief of staff and chief engineer for the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.
Early life
Langfitt was born in Wellsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia). He attended Ohio State University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity, and graduated from the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New York, in 1883, ranked second in his class. Several of his classmates would go on to become general officers in their careers, such as Chase Wilmot Kennedy, George H. Cameron, Harry Clay Hale, George Windle Read, John William Heard, Ira Allen Haynes, Samson L. Faison, Omar Bundy, Robert D. Walsh, Lawrence Tyson, Charles Gould Morton, Tyree R. Rivers, John Wilson Ruckman, Isaac Littell and Clarence Ransom Edwards.
Assigned to the Engineer branch, Langfitt completed the Engineer School of Application at Fort Totten in 1885. From 1886 to 1888 Langfitt was on the staff of the Department of the Columbia. From 1888 to 1893 he served at the Port of Galveston, where he planned and oversaw completion of river and harbor improvement projects.
From 1893 to 1895, Langfitt worked on projects to improve navigation on the Ohio River. Langfitt was an instructor at the Engineer School from 1895 to 1898.
Spanish–American War
During the Spanish–American War, Langfitt was promoted to major with the 2nd United States Volunteer Engineer Regiment, and served in the Hawaiian Islands.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Campbell Langfitt” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.