General William Morris Hoge (January 13, 1894 – October 29, 1979) was a United States Army officer who fought in World War I, World War II and the Korean War, with a military career spanning nearly forty years. Early life and military career William M. Hoge was born on the campus of Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri, where his father William McGuffey Hoge served as principal. In 1905, the family moved to Lexington, Missouri, where his father bought an ownership interest and served as principal and superintendent at Wentworth Military Academy. After graduating from Wentworth in 1911 and taking a postgrad year in New York, he received an appointment to the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, New York. He graduated in June 1916, then was commissioned into the Engineer Branch of the United States Army. His fellow graduates were men such as Horace L. McBride, Stanley Eric Reinhart, Fay B. Prickett, Calvin DeWitt Jr., Dwight Johns, Wilhelm D. Styer and Robert Neyland. Hoge commanded a company of the 7th Engineer Regiment at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas from 1917 to 1918, during World War I. During World War I, Hoge received the Distinguished Service Cross personally from General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, for heroic action under fire as a battalion commander during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. During the interwar years, Hoge graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from the United States Army Command and General Staff College. World War II Hoge directed one of the great engineering feats of World War II, the construction of the 1,519-mile (2,450 km) ALCAN Highway in nine months. Later, in Europe, he commanded the Provisional Engineer Special Brigade Group attached directly to V Corps (United States) in the assault on Omaha Beach. One of his key men who worked under him from Alaska to England, Colonel Benjamin B. Talley, directed the planning-specifics of the invasion, using maps, air studies, even tourist photos and postcards culled from the British people to learn the topography, and designate which units would assault which sectors of the two United States beaches. Talley went ashore at Omaha in the third wave to direct Engineer operations and immediately begin to receive men by the thousands and supplies by the ton over the beach from the Communications Zone, the supply and service-forces arm of the European Theater of Operations.