Army Birthday June 14

The official birthday of the United States Army is June 14th, 1775.

The first forces were comprised of 22,000 militiamen who had already gathered outside of Boston, plus 5,000 more in New York. On June 15, 1775, the Continental Congress named George Washington of Virginia as commander-in-chief and voted to raise 10 more companies of riflemen from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia.

Washington officially took command at Boston on July 3, 1775. The original Congressional appropriation to fund the new Army was $2 million. It took another year – July 4, 1776 to be exact – for the Continental Army and the militia to become known collectively as the Army of the United States, instead of the Army of the United Colonies.

Today’s Army has a uniformed force of about 1 million with as many as 180,000 soldiers deployed in more than 140 countries at any given time.