Newspaper Article

Gen. H.H. Howze, 89, Dies; Proposed Copters as Cavalry

Goldstein, Richard

1998

Overview

Gen. Hamilton H. Howze, who began his military career in the horse cavalry, served in tanks during World War II and then helped change how the Army fights by developing helicopter-warfare tactics used in the Vietnam War and beyond, died on Dec. 8 in Fort Worth. He was 89. General Howze would not have surprised anyone if he had been devoted to the old Army ways. His great-grandfather, Hamilton Smith Hawkins, was an Army doctor who died in the Mexican War. His father, Maj. Gen. Robert Lee Howze, won the Medal of Honor fighting the Sioux and presided over the 1925 court-martial that found Gen. Billy Mitchell, the crusader for air power, guilty of insubordination. But the son was hardly shackled by tradition. In 1962, General Howze presided over a military panel, the Howze Board, that issued a landmark report. It proposed that aircraft, mainly helicopters, carry soldiers into battle, resupply them, rain firepower upon the enemy and remove the wounded.

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: Deaths / Hamilton H. Howze / Howze, Hamilton H / Military