|
A Captain is a chieftain or head of a unit. The title comes from the Latin word
capitaneus that meant chieftain, which in turn came from an older Latin word
caput that meant head. It would seem that a Captain could head a unit of any size
but as armies evolved his post came to be at the head of a company, which by the
Sixteenth Century was usually 100 to 200 men. That seemed to be the number
one man could manage in battle. There appear to have been Captains leading
Italian soldiers in the Tenth Century. In the Eleventh or Twelfth Century, British
warships carried groups of soldiers commanded by Captains to do the fighting.
Captains were company commanders in the British, French and other armies for
centuries. They carried on that job in our Army and Marine Corps from 1775 to the
present. In the Air Force, some Captains command some squadrons, which are
about the equivalent of companies.
Army Captains got their rank insignia of two bars in about 1832 at the same time
the First Lieutenants got one bar. The bars were gold except for the Infantry
officers who wore silver bars until 1851. The two bars originated a few years
earlier when Captains and Lieutenants both wore plain epaulettes whose
differences were mostly in the size of the fringes. To help distinguish between the
two ranks, Captains wore two strips or "holders" of gold or silver lace across the
epaulette straps while Lieutenants wore one strip. In 1872 Captains changed to
silver bars. These were two separate bar embroidered onto shoulder straps or
epaulettes. The "railroad tracks" used by Captains today appeared when officers
started using metal pin-on rank insignia on their khaki or olive drab uniforms
during or shortly after the Spanish-American War.
|
|
