Ralph Van Deman

Ralph Henry Van Deman (September 3, 1865 – January 22, 1952) was a United States Army officer, sometimes described as "the father of American military intelligence." He is in the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.

Van Deman was born in Delaware, Ohio, and graduated from Harvard in 1888. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant of infantry in 1891 after attending law school, and enrolling in medical school. He received his medical degree from the Miami Medical School in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1893.

Van Deman then entered the Army as a surgeon, before attending the Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth in early 1895. There he met Arthur L. Wagner who became head of the War Department's Military Information Division in 1896. In June 1897 Van Deman followed Wagner to Washington to work for MID.

During the Spanish–American War Van Deman collected information on the military capabilities of Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and had charge of the White House war map. At the end of hostilities he went to Cuba and Puerto Rico to collect cartographic data. He was reassigned to the Philippines in April 1899 as aide to Brigadier General Robert Patterson Hughes. After two years he was promoted to captain and was moved to the Bureau of Insurgent Records in Manila, which he helped transform into the Philippine Military Information Division. He organized a counter-intelligence group using locally recruited agents. (See Philippine–American War).

He returned to the U.S. in late 1902, where he served as aide to the Commanding General, California, and then commanded Company B, 22nd Infantry, based at Fairbault, Minnesota. In 1904 he was one of nine officers selected for the first class of the Army War College (Another was John J. Pershing.) After graduation in 1906, he and Captain Alexander Coxe were sent on a covert mission to China to reconnoiter and map lines of communication around Peking. He returned to Washington in 1907 to become the Chief of the Mapping Section in the Second Division of the new General Staff.

In 1908 he began service under Major General Arthur MacArthur Jr., (father of Douglas MacArthur).

(On October 26, 1909, his wife became the first American woman to fly from American soil, being piloted by Wilbur Wright). He returned to the Philippines in 1910. There he resumed his project to map Chinese railways, roads and rivers until Japanese protests led to his expulsion in 1912.

Back in the United States he taught cartography, then became Inspector-General with the 2nd Division. Now a major, he returned to the War College Division in July 1915. He found that there was a general apathy about intelligence-gathering, and the MID had been downgraded from the second division of the General Staff, and merged with the third division, ending its separate identity. Van Deman wrote a history of MID detailing its beginnings in 1885, its rise in 1903, and fall in subsequent years. He was convinced that the Army must have a coordinated intelligence organization if it were to avoid defeat in the near future, especially as it was now obvious that the U.S. would soon be involved in the war in Europe. Eventually Van Deman was able to get an audience with the Secretary of War to present his case. There he convinced the War Department to accept his idea of an intelligence department for U.S. forces. A crucial role was played by Colonel Claude Dansey of the British Security Service in proposing similar ideas to Colonel Edward M. House, a member of an American liaison mission to Britain and one of President Wilson's advisors.