Generals of the Army
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36. Daso, Hap Arnold, 107.
37. Ibid., 111.
38. Coffey, Hap, 119.
39. Daso, Hap Arnold, 112.
40. Ibid., 113.
41. Coffey, Hap, 126.
42. Daso, Hap Arnold, 113; Coffey, Hap, 126.
43. Daso, Hap Arnold, 114.
44. Arnold, Global Mission, 122–23.
45. Coffey, Hap, 128.
46. Arnold, Global Mission, 123; Coffey, Hap, 128.
47. Arnold, Global Mission, 125.
48. Coffey, Hap, 133.
49. Ibid.
50. Daso, Hap Arnold, 118.
51. Ibid., 116.
52. Coffey, Hap, 136.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 137.
57. Ibid.
58. Arnold, Global Mission, 131.
59. Coffey, Hap, 137.
60. Ibid., 140.
61. Daso, Hap Arnold, 126.
62. Ibid., 129, 271–72.
63. Coffey, Hap, 148–49; Daso, Hap Arnold, 129.
64. Arnold, Global Mission, 146; Coffey, Hap, 159.
65. Coffey, Hap, 159.
66. Daso, Hap Arnold, 138.
67. Ibid.
68. Coffey, Hap, 184–85.
69. Arnold, Global Mission, 179.
70. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 6, Men and Planes (1955; repr., Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), xi; Coffey, Hap, 184.
71. Craven and Cate, Army Air Forces in World War II, 6:xii.
72. Arnold, Global Mission, 179.
73. Office of Statistical Control, Army Air Forces Statistical Digest: World War II (Washington, D.C.: Office of Statistical Control, 1945), corrections page.
74. Coffey, Hap, 196.
75. Daso, Hap Arnold, 161.
76. Coffey, Hap, 211.
77. Arnold, Global Mission, 186; Coffey Hap, 211.
78. Coffey, Hap, 212.
79. Ibid., 218.
80. Ibid., 220.
81. Daso, Hap Arnold, 171.
82. Coffey, Hap, 232.
83. Ibid., 346.
84. Ibid., 258.
85. Ibid., 247.
86. Coffey, Hap, 223; Daso, Hap Arnold, 170.
87. Coffey, Hap, 283.
88. Ibid., 279.
89. Richard G. Davis, Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe (Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1993), 103.
90. Coffey, Hap, 316; Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 150–51.
91. Arnold, Global Mission, 411; Daso, Hap Arnold, 299.
92. Arnold, Global Mission, 411; Daso, Hap Arnold, 299–300.
93. Arnold, Global Mission, 412; Coffey, Hap, 299.
94. Coffey, Hap, 300.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., 305.
97. Ibid., 309.
98. Daso, Hap Arnold, 183.
99. Coffey, Hap, 312.
100. Daso, Hap Arnold, 183.
101. Richard G. Davis, Bombing the European Axis Powers: A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive, 1939–1945 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 2006), 158–59, 182–83.
102. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 2, Europe—Torch to Pointblank, August 1942 to December 1943 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 708.
103. Coffey, Hap, 321.
104. Ibid., 328–29; Davis, Bombing the European Axis Powers, 209–11.
105. Davis, Bombing the European Axis Powers, 209.
106. Daso, Hap Arnold, 230.
107. H. Arnold to C. Spaatz, January 24, 1944, box 14, General Carl Spaatz Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; emphasis in original.
108. Conrad Crane, Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 33.
109. Coffey, Hap, 331.
110. Ibid.
111. Daso, Hap Arnold, 199; Coffey, Hap, 343–44.
112. Coffey, Hap, 348–49.
113. Curtis LeMay and Bill Yenne, Superfortress (New York: Berkley Books, 1988), 23.
114. Curtis LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), 338.
115. Alvin Coox, “Strategic Bombing in the Pacific 1942–1945,” in Case Studies in Strategic Bombardment, ed. R. Cargill Hall (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998), 321.
116. Daso, Hap Arnold, 199.
117. Coffey, Hap, 359; Daso, Hap Arnold, 199.
118. Coffey, Hap, 361.
119. Daso, Hap Arnold, 204.
120. Ibid., 206.
121. Arnold, Global Mission, 560.
122. Office of Statistical Control, Army Air Forces Statistical Digest: World War II, 112.
123. Craven and Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, 6:xix, xvii.
124. Ibid., xxv.
125. Arnold, Global Mission, 596.
126. Ibid., 597.
127. Coffey, Hap, 376.
128. Arnold, Global Mission, 608.
129. Daso, Hap Arnold, 214.
130. Arnold, Global Mission, 608–9.
131. Coffey, Hap, 379.
References
Arnold, H. H. Global Mission. New York: Harper and Row, 1949.
Coffey, Thomas. Hap: The Story of the U.S. Air Force and the Man Who Built It, General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold. New York: Viking Press, 1982.
Coox, Alvin D. “Strategic Bombing in the Pacific 1942–1945.” In Case Studies in Strategic Bombardment. Edited by R. Cargill Hall. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998.
Crane, Conrad. Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategy in World War II. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993.
Craven, Wesley Frank, and James Lea Cate. The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 2, Europe—Torch to Pointblank, August 1942 to December 1943. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949.
———. The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 6, Men and Planes. 1955. Reprint, Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983.
Daso, Dik. Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.
———. “The Origins of Airpower: Hap Arnold’s Early Career in Aviation Technology, 1903–1935.” Airpower Journal (Winter 1996): 70–92.
Davis, Richard G. Bombing the European Axis Powers: A Historical Digest of the Combined Bomber Offensive, 1939–1945. Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 2006.
———. Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe. Washington, D.C.: Center for Air Force History, 1993.
General Carl Spaatz Papers. Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
LeMay, Curtis, and Bill Yenne. Superfortress. New York: Berkley Books, 1988.
LeMay, Curtis, with MacKinlay Kantor. Mission with LeMay: My Story. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965.
Office of Statistical Control, Army Air Forces Statistical Digest: World War II. Washington, D.C.: Office of Statistical Control, 1945.
Sherry, Michael. The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
6
Omar Nelson Bradley
Joseph R. Fischer
Omar Nelson Bradley became the last general to reach five-star rank, doing so well after the completion of World War II and a year after the creation of the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In many ways he was also the most unusual of those to attain this exalted rank. There was nothing of the showmanship that MacArthur brought to the rank. Nor was there the charm that Dwight D. Eisenhower used to weave and hold together a coalition of wartime partners. The war correspondent Ernie Pyle described Bradley to the American public as looking like a schoolteacher whose face, even in the worst of times, wore a sense of c
omposure that reassured those around him.
During the war years there was little flashy in his dress to mark him. He often preferred to wear none of the various decorations he had earned in his career, or, if he did wear a decoration, a lone Bronze Star marked his solidarity with his soldiers. And he was painfully aware of the burden his soldiers bore. In his autobiography he noted, “Those who are left to fight, fight on, evading death but knowing with each day of evasion they have exhausted one more chance for survival. Sooner or later, unless victory comes, the chase must end in the litter or in the grave.”1 Pyle noted that Bradley’s simple style and sparing of lives brought him the nearly universal love and respect of his men.
When World War II came to an end, Bradley had commanded from division through Army group level, the latter, Twelfth Army Group, being the largest grouping of U.S. soldiers ever fielded. He had worked to bring the Army from its prewar doldrums to the proficiency it possessed at war’s end, shaping its leadership as well as its approach to war along the way. It would be a road that would take him from stateside posts to the debacle of the Kasserine Pass, to Sicily, then to France, and finally to the heart of the Nazi Reich and victory.
Little in the early years of Bradley’s life suggested his future achievements. He had been born in a log cabin to John Smith Bradley and Sara Elizabeth Hubbard Bradley in Clark, Missouri, on February 12, 1893. His father farmed and taught school. Omar spent his youth hunting and, when he had a chance, playing baseball. There having been little in the way of finances to see him through college, he had taken a job with the Wabash Railroad. When his Sunday school superintendent suggested he apply for admission to West Point as an inexpensive route to an education, he did so. The entrance examinations would prove a challenge. Bradley’s problem was that he had been away from school for a year. His skills in geography, geometry, algebra, and English, the subjects assessed in the examination, had diminished in that time. He hit the books in preparation, and when he took the test, his scores were sufficient to earn him selection as an alternate. When the primary candidate found himself unable to attend, second place became good enough.
Bradley’s years at West Point were uneventful. He played on the school’s baseball and football teams, attended to his studies, and graduated 44th of 165 in the class of 1915. He was commissioned a second lieutenant of Infantry, and his first assignment was to the 14th Infantry Regiment at Fort George Wright, outside Spokane, Washington. Perhaps the high point of this assignment was his marriage in June 1916 to Mary Quayle, a woman from his hometown of Moberly, Missouri, whom he had met and courted during his two months of “graduation leave” the previous year. His early postings to various Army posts both stateside and overseas (Hawaii) were not particularly noteworthy, except that they included various teaching assignments at West Point and at Fort Benning, Georgia, something Bradley credited with shaping his approach to leadership.
Through no fault of his own, he missed combat in World War I and feared that the whims of the personnel system might well have limited his career. In 1920 the Army assigned him back to West Point as a mathematics instructor. In 1924 he attended the Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, receiving permanent promotion to the rank of major at the end of the course. From Benning he received assignment to the 27th Infantry Regiment in Hawaii, where he first encountered George S. Patton Jr. His performance caught the attention of his superior officers, which led to his receiving selection to Fort Leavenworth’s revamped Command and General Staff College, the Army’s premier school for officers it believed capable of senior-level commands. The course had been based on the Prussian Kriegsakademie, focusing heavily on history as well as operational planning built around 124 map problems and numerous terrain walks. Most of the exercises were at division, corps, and army level. The point of the exercises was to have the student make a decision and then defend it.2 Bradley found the Leavenworth experience somewhat disappointing, however, noting that the lectures were “trite, predictable, and often unrealistic.” Nonetheless, he conceded that it created a corps of officers with a common operational language, something that would prove invaluable when war came again.3
Bradley’s next assignment, this time as an instructor at the Infantry School, brought him to the attention of George C. Marshall, the school’s assistant commandant.4 Marshall had directed the rewriting of the school’s curriculum. He had been a proponent of John Pershing’s view that warfare needed to be mobile, rather than something akin to the slugfest of the Western Front’s trenches. Building largely on this vision, Marshall fashioned the training around the management of the chaos combat created. The curriculum aimed at preparing officers for command two levels above their current grade, a goal that reflected the reality of officer combat mortality. Bradley found himself assigned as an instructor in the Tactics Department, teaching battalion-level operations. A year later Marshall made Bradley chief of the Weapons Section, a key position he held until reassignment across post in support of a new program.
In the spring of 1933 the United States was suffering through the depths of the Great Depression. With nearly 25 percent of the workforce unemployed and much of the rest underemployed, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation’s newly elected president, instituted a work program known as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The CCC was designed to employ out-of-work young men in various conservation programs, such as planting trees, building dams, and cutting firebreaks in national forests, and the Army received the job of organizing and directing the project. The Army reassigned Bradley to the CCC base camp at Benning, where he assumed command of six companies of men, nearly all African American, from Georgia and Alabama.5 The Army’s performance in support of the CCC program proved one of the high points of the interwar years and helped immeasurably in the War Department budget battles of the early 1930s.
By the fall of 1933 Bradley found himself a student again, this time at the Army War College at what was then Fort Humphreys (following World War II it was renamed Fort McNair), Washington, D.C. From there Bradley went on to another instructor assignment, in the Tactics Department at West Point, an assignment very much to Bradley’s liking. From West Point it was back to Washington, D.C.
With war clouds threatening Europe, Bradley found himself assigned first to the Army G-1, where he worked on mobilization issues. Then, in 1939, Marshall, now Army chief of staff, pulled Bradley to his own office.6 These two assignments exposed Bradley to a wider variety of problems, not the least of which was that of mobilizing the National Guard. He strongly questioned the National Guard system as it existed, arguing that state-level politics ensured that most Guard units were officered by well-connected but militarily incompetent officers. He noted that frequently company-grade officers were too old for their duties and often physically unfit to perform them.7
The coming year found him reassigned, obedient to Marshall’s wishes, to the Infantry School at Benning, but this time as its commandant. Here Bradley put his own stamp on the nation’s Army. Marshall had given Bradley the task of creating an officer-commissioning program in anticipation of national mobilization. The Army’s enlisted ranks would provide most of the pool from which officer candidates would come. Bradley’s creation became known as the Officer Candidate School (OCS) and served as the model for other branches. It was built loosely on the cadet experience at West Point; candidates were up at 0600, in classes from 0730 to 1745, permitted two hours of study time in the evening, and in bed by lights-out at 2200. “The Benning method,” as Bradley’s teaching pedagogy came to be called, was simple: demonstrate the skill desired, explain it, then have the cadet do it. By the end of World War II, fully 75 percent (more than 45,000) of the Army’s company-level officers were OCS graduates.8
Bradley’s contributions to training the prewar Army at Benning did not stop with the OCS. He understood, particularly in light of the German Army’s swift victories over Poland in 1939 and France in 1940, the growing importance of armor on the modern battlefield. Marshall had
established two armored units, 1st Armored Division based at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and 2nd Armored Division at Benning. Bradley did everything in his power to support the development of the division and of the doctrinal development of armored warfare. He became an early proponent of airborne operations, noting Germany’s successful use of paratroopers in the Netherlands and later in Crete. Though Bradley did not initiate airborne training at Benning, he did oversee its growth.9
With the early successes of Axis armies in Europe and Asia, the necessity for a larger military became apparent. Marshall, realizing this fact, next assigned Bradley to command of the 82nd Infantry Division, one of three Organized Reserve divisions (the others being the 77th and 85th) activated after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Upon taking the assignment, Bradley quickly came to realize that his initial assessment of the preparedness of the Guard was equally true of the Army Reserves.
Bradley began by instituting a rigorous training program. The most pressing weakness of the 82nd was the terrible physical condition of many of its members. Nearly a third of his enlisted personnel failed to pass minimum fitness standards. To address this, Bradley instituted an obstacle course, insisting that everyone, including himself, run it. On one of his runs through the course, Bradley’s hands slipped from a rope swing, and he plunged into a pit of sewage. Colonel Matthew B. Ridgway, one of the regimental commanders and the division’s future commanding general, noted that seeing their commanding general splashing his way out of the foul muck brought both respect and smiles from the enlisted men present.
Another of Bradley’s training innovations included changing the way the 82nd did marksmanship training. Sergeant Alvin York, the division’s most famous World War I veteran, accepted an invitation from Bradley to visit. York remarked that most of his wartime shooting had been at distances of not more than fifty yards. As a result, Bradley added a marksmanship range in which soldiers engaged small targets, often nothing larger than cans, from various positions at no greater distance than fifty yards.10
The 82nd showed marked improvement under Bradley’s leadership, to the extent that Marshall thought his subordinate’s talents better used commanding a National Guard division undergoing mobilization.11 Marshall assigned Bradley to command Pennsylvania’s 28th Infantry Division. The 28th had been used as a replacement unit, its regiments stripped of men to fill other, more nearly ready units. Bradley became the division’s third division commander in six months. He stopped the hemorrhaging of personnel, replaced the leadership as necessary, and then started the division along the path already followed by the 82nd. Both the 82nd and the 28th established superb reputations in the European theater.