MacArthur’s presidential campaign that year fizzled, but he didn’t learn his lesson. When Ike dined with MacArthur in Tokyo in 1946, the two felt each other out about presidential ambitions. Eisenhower said he did not wish to become involved in politics and invoked the principles of Gen. Marshall, according to an account he gave to Joseph Alsop, a prominent journalist of the time. Alsop continued: “General Eisenhower broke off his recital to me, turned the color of a boiled beet from sheer remembered rage, and said: ‘Joe, do you know what that man said to me then?’ . . . He leaned over, patted me on the knee, and he had the nerve to say, ‘That’s all right, Ike. You go on like that and you’ll get it sure.’” MacArthur ultimately issued a statement that he would not campaign for the office, but as a good citizen would not shrink from “accepting any public duty to which I might be called by the American people.” That call did not come in 1948. MacArthur kept his hopes alive for 1952.
Handling MacArthur as he did may have been the right move for FDR in World War II, but by doing so, Roosevelt planted a political minefield for his successor. Eventually MacArthur would have to be dealt with, but that would be left to Harry Truman, a less artful man than FDR. In 1951, MacArthur’s persistent dabbling in politics and his refusal to follow orders would lead to the most dramatic relief of a general in the history of the U.S. military. MacArthur’s legacy would be limited in the military realm—he was an influence on William Westmoreland and had little impact after that—but it would be poisonous in American politics, warping President Johnson’s discourse with his generals about the conduct of the Vietnam War.
In the Army, MacArthur eventually would become a negative example, an illustration of what future Army leaders would seek to avoid. If today’s Army remains wary of the daring, dramatic, outsize personality, the record of MacArthur (and, to a lesser degree, of Patton) is a big part of the cause. The new model for American generalship would be a quite different, and blander, figure. He was quietly helping the Allies win the European war.
CHAPTER 8
William Simpson
The Marshall system and the new model American general
If MacArthur (and, among the Allies, Montgomery) presented to Marshall and Eisenhower the antithesis of the sort of generalship they desired, the Battle of the Bulge, during the snowy final two weeks of 1944, gave them the very model of what they wanted. Ironically, the general who personified that model is forgotten today, even inside the Army. But the values he embodied would be those of the U.S. Army for decades.
The Bulge, the major German counteroffensive in response to the Allied invasion of northwestern Europe in mid-1944, was one of the most important battles of Western Europe in World War II. Eisenhower wrote in very Marshallian tones that
in battles of this kind it is more than ever necessary that responsible commanders exhibit the firmness, the calmness, the optimism that can pierce through the web of conflicting reports, doubts and uncertainty and by taking advantage of every enemy weakness win through to victory.
Eisenhower did not say so, but the senior commander who best fit that description was not the blustery Patton or the panicky Hodges but William Hood Simpson, a lanky six-foot-four, egg-bald Texan. The son of a Confederate cavalryman, Simpson was a man of quiet, competent, determined optimism, the very model of the modern Army general. Early in the Battle of the Bulge, he was shown a captured plan for the German offensive. He studied it for a bit, then drily commented, “Well, I think from what we have here I don’t feel too much alarmed. We’re going to have to do some hard fighting, but I think eventually we’ll stop this thing.” During this battle, on his own initiative and with little fanfare, he offered and sent five full divisions to the assistance of Hodges in just six days. During the Bulge, notes historian J. D. Morelock, “Simpson actually got more Ninth Army units into combat than did the Third Army [of Patton]—and faster as well.”
Like Patton, Simpson was smart, adaptive, and aggressive. But unlike his better-known peer, Simpson was a team player, plainspoken and self-effacing. He knew how to lay low, having spent fourteen years as a major between the wars. He also knew how to fight, having battled the Moros in the Philippines, Pancho Villa’s band in Mexico, and the Germans in World Wars I and II.
He handled his staff well. His corps commanders enjoyed working for him. Simpson was “pleasant, very personal, understanding, and cooperative,” recalled Alvan Gillem, one of his generals and the grandson of a Civil War general of the same name—who, though born in Tennessee, had fought for the Union. Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon recalled being pleased to have his 2nd Armored Division assigned to Simpson’s Ninth Army: “Simpson, though little known outside military circles, was one of the truly great leaders of the European theater, a real general’s general. . . . He was a pleasure to fight under.” Simpson liked to have his subordinate commanders publicly accept the surrenders of German generals, giving them the credit and the appearances in newspaper photographs. “Even-tempered and composed, he refrained from interrupting and allowed the briefer to complete his presentation before questions were asked,” wrote Army Lt. Col. Thomas Stone. The smoothness of Simpson’s operation was felt many echelons below that level. Bernard Leu, who had served as a sergeant in the 75th Infantry Division, recalled that once his division joined Simpson’s army, it received orders early enough to allow it to plan, which had not happened when the division was part of two other armies.
But what is most striking about Simpson may be that, in a doctoral dissertation and a book largely about him and the Ninth Army, there was almost nothing to relate about him—no stormy meetings, few revealing anecdotes, almost no memorable phrases. There is just an efficient, low-key headquarters operating under an undemonstrative, steady leader. “Simpson could think ahead of time, and he didn’t talk too much, either; that’s what I liked about him,” recalled Gen. Jacob Devers.
Midway through the Battle of the Bulge, Simpson dispatched a note to Eisenhower reporting that his Ninth Army was working smoothly and cheerfully with Montgomery. “Our chins are up,” he stated. Privately, Simpson found Montgomery “a very pompous guy” who was overly cautious and could have done great damage to the Germans had he committed three available British divisions to pinching off the northeastern corner of the Bulge. But during the war he kept that to himself. Simpson was exactly what Marshall and Eisenhower had been looking for: an optimistic team player with a small ego and a great ability to work with others. In that sense, the forgotten Simpson personified the ideal of generalship that Army leaders would pursue in the postwar years, and indeed for decades to follow. It was not a bad model, but it contained some hidden dangers.
Eisenhower recognized Simpson’s strength and was warmer in summing up this general than perhaps any other individual officer he discussed in his memoirs:
If Simpson ever made a mistake as an army commander, it never came to my attention. After the war I learned that he had for some years suffered from a serious stomach disorder, but this I never would have suspected during hostilities. Alert, intelligent and professionally capable, he was the type of leader that American soldiers deserve. In view of his brilliant service, it was unfortunate that shortly after the war ill-health forced his retirement before he was promoted to four-star grade, which he had so clearly earned.
Bradley also liked Simpson’s style, praising his command as “uncommonly normal”—a Bradley-esque phrase if there ever was one. Yet for all that praise, notes historian John English, Simpson has since become “the most forgotten American field army commander of the Western Front” in World War II. Marshall might take that as a compliment, and Simpson probably would, too.
In hands less skilled than Marshall’s, the system that produced generals such as Simpson also could result in bland, uninspired, risk-averse leaders. This would be especially true when such leaders were no longer spurred by the prospect of being fired for failure or inaction.
The effectiveness of th
e Marshall system
After the war, Gen. James Gavin, among others, was critical of the wave of reliefs carried out in the Army in 1944–45, arguing that so many division commanders had been fired that the U.S. Army began to lack plausible candidates for those jobs. Eisenhower, he said, “had to get results. He had to be tough. And he ran out of good commanders, finally, in my opinion.” Gavin was not entirely against firing commanders. For example, on June 7, 1944, when he ordered a battalion to attack along a causeway across the Merderet River, the commander told him “that he did not feel well.” So, continues Gavin without skipping a beat, “he was relieved of command and another officer put in charge of the battalion.” Yet Gavin was especially critical of firing commanders who were leading green units into combat. “Summarily relieving those who do not appear to measure up in the first shock of battle is not only a luxury we cannot afford—it is very damaging to the Army as a whole.”
Gavin made a good point, especially about the removal of new commanders leading untested units. Nor was he alone: Martin Blumenson, one of the Army’s best official historians, concluded in 1971 that most World War II reliefs were “unwarranted if not altogether unjustified.” He believed that commanders were handled more professionally in the wars in Korea and Vietnam. Blumenson does not pause to address a key difference: The Army was victorious in World War II, but the first of the wars he cites with such approval was a stalemate and the second was a loss—though, of course, those two outcomes hardly can be laid at the feet of the military alone, or even primarily.
What Gavin and Blumenson especially did not seem to weigh in their criticisms was the opportunity cost of not ousting failing officers. In the short run, as Eisenhower noted, a relief sometimes will improve morale. And in the longer run, the removals permitted a new generation of officers—Gavin among the most prominent of them—to emerge in World War II. There clearly was unfairness in some of the removals, notably that of Terry Allen, but it did not seem to damage the effectiveness of the concerned division, the 1st Infantry. In other cases, such as the replacement of the 3rd Armored Division’s Leroy Watson by Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose or of the VI Corps’s Lucas by Truscott, there clearly was an improvement in the quality of command. It was only in later wars, when generals were not removed, that the many costs of not relieving would become more evident.
A better question was whether Marshall, Bradley, and Eisenhower, consciously or not, were intolerant of nonconformists, especially among those from branches other than the infantry. Cavalrymen and their descendants in armored units certainly seemed to think so. Ernest Harmon, who commanded the 1st, 2nd, and (briefly) 3rd Armored Divisions during the war, criticized Hodges’s First Army as “a typical infantryman’s operation: slow, cautious and without much zip.” American command was dominated by the infantry branch, home of Marshall, Eisenhower, and Bradley. Some 59 percent of the Army’s four-star generals during World War II came out of the infantry and not the other combat arms—artillery, cavalry, armor, and engineering.
The enemy noticed the sluggish tendencies of its British and American opponents, with one German general commenting that “in contrast to the Eastern theater of operations, in the West it was possible to still straighten out seemingly impossible situations because the opposing armies there . . . despite their enormous material superiority, were limited by slow and methodical modes of combat.” At some invisible point, an insistence on teamwork can combine with cautiousness to produce a plodding force—especially if it lacks among its leaders some people with the passion of a Patton or the drive of a Terry Allen.
The manner in which Eisenhower chose to announce the end of the war is strikingly consistent with Marshall’s expectations of a general. After the German surrender, Eisenhower’s headquarters staff began to compose a wordy message of victory. Eisenhower rejected their lofty prose and instead issued a message simply stating, “The mission of this Allied Force was fulfilled at 0241 local time, May 7, 1945.” It was so plain as to be eloquent—or, to use an Army term of the time, it was “’nuff said.”
The war’s ending also stripped Patton of his shield of combat effectiveness. The next time Patton shot his mouth off, Eisenhower no longer needed him to pursue Germans, and whatever their friendship had meant, Eisenhower removed him from command of the Third Army in October 1945.
The politics of the Marshall system
During World War II, the relief of commanders was also intentionally a political act, making a statement to both insiders and outsiders about the nature and responsibilities of the U.S. military. It was, as FDR once remarked, “a New Deal war.” To Marshall’s eye, being willing to remove an officer signaled to the American people that the Army’s leaders cared more about the hordes of enlisted soldiers than about the relatively small officer corps. Despite his aristocratic demeanor, this was a democratic point he would make to members of Congress who inquired about the fates of generals they liked but whom Marshall had found wanting. In 1943, when queried by Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia about why Col. Robert E. M. Goolrick, commander of Keesler Field in Biloxi, Mississippi, had not been given a shot at generalship, Marshall responded with an explanation of his approach to picking men for top slots. “The only basis upon which we can proceed is that of efficiency without regard to the personalities involved,” he wrote.
We have to be continually on guard against too much emphasis being placed on the honor attached to the rank of general and too little to the choice of leaders who enjoy the confidence of the men in the ranks and who have the skill and physical endurance to bring this war to a successful conclusion without needless sacrifice of American lives. Every contact with the enemy has emphasized anew the importance of dominant and skillful leadership. All other considerations are of minor importance.
Looking out for the common soldier was not an insignificant consideration in a war being fought for democracy, a point Marshall made repeatedly in his biennial reports on the state of the military. In his 1941 report, discussing his prewar housecleaning of aging officers, Marshall explained, “In all these matters the interests of the soldier and the nation, rather than that of the individual officer, have governed.” In the next report, he justified selecting enlisted men to become officers as consistent with “democratic theory.” And indeed, that became practice. Two-thirds of the Army’s combat officers in World War II were promoted from the ranks. Marshall, in his final wartime report, composed between V-E and V-J days, would begin by stating that “never was the strength of American democracy so evident.”
Likewise, when the draft was being designed, Marshall told its planners that it had to be constructed in such a way that it would be supported by the American people. “Those of us who had spent our lives on Wall Street were mainly concerned with solving problems,” recalled Paul Nitze, who had been brought to Washington to work on the Selective Service Act of 1940.
We rarely found it necessary to give much thought to how our actions might impinge on our democratic system. Marshall educated us. Draft selections and deferments were a case in point of how problem-solving had to deal with much more than mere numbers and mechanics. Marshall’s point was that men should be selected or granted deferments on a basis that was not only fair and equitable in fact, but that was seen to be so as well.
Once those men were drafted, Marshall insisted that the need to fight the war be explained to them. Disappointed with the pamphlets that were designed for this purpose, Marshall asked Frank Capra, a leading Hollywood director of the time, to make a series of films to educate Army recruits, titled Why We Fight.
Marshall did all this not just to have an effective fighting force but also to protect the future of the U.S. Army. He believed that the antimilitarism he had seen in American society in the 1920s and ’30s was spurred in part by the harshness with which officers had treated American soldiers during World War I. “They were embittered in a way that they never forgot,” he said. So he was determined that
, as much as possible, the Army would give decent, rational treatment to these temporary soldiers, or, as he called them, “future citizens.” As a lieutenant colonel in China after World War I, Marshall had instructed an officer who was berating a soldier that “you must remember that man is an American citizen just the same as you are.” During World War II, this consciousness was reflected in a variety of ways, but it was perhaps captured best in the cartoons of Bill Mauldin, which often mocked the pretensions of officers. (“Beautiful view,” one says to another as they gaze at an Alpine sunset. “Is there one for the enlisted men?”) Mauldin’s work was first carried in the newspaper of the 45th Division, commanded by Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton, who defended the free-spirited cartoonist because he believed it boosted morale and also attracted readers to the division newspaper, which he used to kill unhelpful rumors. When Middleton’s commander, George Patton, told Middleton to “get rid of Mauldin and his cartoons,” Middleton parried by asking for that order in writing. Patton dropped the subject, Middleton recalled.
It is worth considering whether Marshall’s insistence on grooming a certain type of general might have had a less direct political effect: that of encouraging the decline in American life of the caudillo, the “man on a white horse” tendency of military leaders to move from the armed forces into political life. There was a strong tradition of elevating a general to the presidency in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, beginning with George Washington. All told, thirteen Americans with notable military records have become president: Washington, Eisenhower, Grant, Andrew Jackson, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and the first President Bush. The first nine in that list actually held a general’s rank. In addition, another four generals were losing candidates for president. But since Benjamin Harrison, who for a few months at the end of the Civil War was a brigadier in the Army of the Cumberland and who won the White House in 1888, only one general has been elected to the presidency, and that last general to become president was the least coup-prone of officers: Eisenhower, Marshall’s protégé.
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