By his choice, and with the approval of the Board of Visitors and the General Assembly of South Carolina, General Mark W. Clark was buried on The Citadel campus. He was the second man to serve as President Emeritus of The Citadel and the only person to be buried on campus. The grave site General Clark selected is between Mark Clark Hall and Summerall Chapel, near the Carillon Tower.
General Clark was one of the top five American military commanders of World War II. (The other four were Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur and Omar Bradley.) Nicknamed the "American eagle" by Winston Churchill, Clark at the age of 46 was the youngest three-star general. In January 1943, he was designated commander of the Fifth Army and as such planned the successful amphibious invasion of Italy. He led the first army in history to fight all the way up the Italian boot from toe to top, a campaign that took 20 months and 30,000 Allied casualities. The force's ground, sea and air invasion of Salerno in September 1943 saw some of the fiercest fighting in the war. In June 1944 after taking Naples, the Fifth captured Rome- the first Axis to be liberated. Several months later, Clark was placed in command of the 15th Army Group. After a successful offensive launched by his men from mountain positions south of Bologna, Clark accepted the first large-scale surrender of any German field command in Europe. While serving simultaneously as commander in chief, Far East Command; commander in chief, United Nations Command; commanding general, United States Army forces, Far East; and governor of the Ryukyu Islands, Clark signed the Korean Armistice in 1953.
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