Background
He was born on November 18, 1890 in Brookneal, Virginia, United States, the son of George Washington Pick, a civil engineer for the Southern Railway, and Annie Crouch.
He was born on November 18, 1890 in Brookneal, Virginia, United States, the son of George Washington Pick, a civil engineer for the Southern Railway, and Annie Crouch.
After graduating from high school in nearby Rustburg, he entered Virginia Polytechnic Institute, from which he received the B. S. in 1914. Later he was graduated from the Engineer School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in 1924, from the Army War College in Washington, in 1939.
After studies he was a civil engineer with the Southern Railway. American entry into World War I permanently changed Pick's career.
After completing officers' training in August 1917, he received a commission as a first lieutenant in the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers. In March 1918 he went to France as a company commander in the Twenty-third Engineers and took part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Pick was discharged in September 1919, then applied for a commission in the Regular Army. He was accepted as a second lieutenant in the Engineers on July 1, 1920, and was promoted to captain on the same date.
In 1920 he was assigned to the Third Engineers in the Philippines. Until 1923 he commanded a company of Philippine Scouts in Rizal Province, Luzon; he also organized the first native engineer regiment, the Fourteenth Engineers. Pick then returned to the United States.
He served as professor of military science and tactics at Alabama Polytechnic Institute in 1924-1925 in Auburn, Alabama. Pick served in the New Orleans Engineer District from 1925 to 1928, completing his tour as district engineer. During the Mississippi River flood of 1927, he was engineer assistant on the relief commission headed by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover.
In 1928 he organized the ROTC unit at Texas A & M College. After heading the unit for four years, Pick served at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as a student officer and then as an instructor until 1938. He was assigned to Cincinnati as executive officer to the Ohio River division engineer.
After the United States entered World War II, Pick was promoted to colonel. In April 1942 he was sent to Omaha, Nebraska, as Missouri River division engineer. Pick first gained national prominence for his flood-control activities and proposals. He directed the fight against the devastating Missouri River floods of 1943. Subsequently, at the request of Congress, he prepared a comprehensive water resources program for the Missouri River Basin. Pick proposed that the Corps of Engineers build a series of downstream levees and nearly two dozen major upstream multipurpose dams and storage reservoirs. These would provide not only flood control but also hydroelectric power, improved navigation, and water supply. But the Bureau of Reclamation, which also had extensive experience in flood control and irrigation, countered with its own plan. The result was a compromise that included elements of both proposals and recommended 105 reservoirs in all.
Meanwhile, Pick had been assigned in October 1943 as commander of Advanced Section of the Army Service Forces in the China-Burma-India Theater of Operations. There he became famous as the builder of the Ledo Road, which ran from Ledo, Assam, India, to the old Burma Road. When Pick took over, only forty-two miles of the project had been built in the previous year, and construction had bogged down under monsoon rains and tropical disease. Directing a force of nearly 90, 000, including American and Chinese soldiers and Indian and Burmese laborers, Pick established sanitary measures and rigid discipline to ensure use of quinacrine to combat malaria, and began round-the-clock construction. Keeping his crews on the heels of the combat troops, he pushed the road ahead at an average rate of a mile a day. Promoted to brigadier general in February 1944, Pick led the first convoy to go to China over the completed highway in January 1945.
After the war Pick served for two months in the Office of the Chief of Engineers, then resumed his post as Missouri River division engineer from 1945 to 1949. Under his direction, development of the Pick-Sloan Plan began. Within the next decade many of its projects were completed. During the winter of 1948-1949, Pick oversaw Operation Snowbound, an airlift relief program that aided blizzard-trapped residents of the Plains states.
He was chief of army engineers during the Korean War and of the massive construction of American bases around the world that accompanied that conflict. He was promoted to major general in 1949 and to lieutenant general in 1951.
Pick retired in 1953. After settling in Auburn, Alabama, he became director of industrial development for the state. He was also named chairman of the board of John J. Harte Company, an Atlanta architectural and engineering firm, and vice-chairman of the Georgia-Pacific Plywood Company.
He died in Washington.
Lewis Andrew Pick was well-known as a co-author of the Pick-Sloan Plan for controlling the water resources of the Missouri River Basin. He also oversaw construction of the Ledo Road in British Raj India and Burma. His driving force enabled the difficult task to be completed in two and a half years. His men nicknamed the road "Pick's Pike". Pick was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster. Pick City, North Dakota was founded in 1946 and named for him.
Pick was a man of relentless energy and indomitable will, but also was imaginative, pleasant-mannered, and soft-spoken. He rose through the military hierarchy despite the lack of a West Point background.
On December 15, 1925, he married Alice Cary; they had one son.
