[4] Byroade graduated from West Point on June 12, 1937, ranked 56th in his class, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers.

[2] After graduation from Cornell, Byroade went to Langley Field, Virginia,[4] where he commanded a company of the newly reactivated 21st Engineer (Aviation) Regiment.

[7] After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, the battalion of the 21st Engineer (Aviation) Regiment that he commanded was sent to Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York, to develop it into a wartime air base.

[8] His engineer section initially consisted of two officers and two enlisted men, so it could do little more than supervise the progress of work on the airfields at Chabua, Mohanbari, Dinjan, and Sookerating that would support the aerial supply route to China over the Hump.

[11] In December 1943 Byroade became the project engineer of the newly-formed 5308th Air Service Area Command, which became responsible for airfield construction in China.

[12] He selected four sites around Chengdu where existing runways could be strengthened and lengthened to accommodate the B-29s, at Xinjin, Guanghan, Qionglai and Pengshan.

[7] Byroade returned to the United States in September 1944, where he became the deputy chief of the Asiatic Theater Section of the War Department General Staff in Washington, D.C.

[7] In December 1945, the wartime Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General of the Army George C. Marshall, was sent to China on a diplomatic mission to broker peace between the Nationalist Party of China and the Chinese Communist Party, and Marshall asked Byroade to act as his chief of staff.

[4] He eventually commanded 46 truce teams dispersed across China, but contracted typhoid fever and was evacuated to the United States in September 1946.

His appointment as a brigadier general in the Army of the United States was terminated on January 17, and he reverted to his substantive rank for first lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers.

In August he returned to duty with the War Department General Staff as chief of the International Affairs Group, and he was promoted to lieutenant colonel on July 15, 1948.

[18] Although he wished to remain in the Army, President Harry S. Truman persuaded him to resign his commission so he could be appointed Assistant Secretary of State for Middle East, South Asia, and Africa on April 10, 1952.

[19] That same year, he referred to Israel's Zionist ideology and its free admission of Jews through the Law of Return as "a legitimate matter of concern both to the Arabs and to the Western countries".

Emanuel Neumann, chairman of the executive of the Zionist Organization of America urged that he be removed from Cairo, claiming he had been an apologist for the Egyptian government.

After departing from Afghanistan on January 19, 1962, he served with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency until he was appointed ambassador to Burma on September 10, 1963.