The second member of Ike’s official “family” was his orderly, Private First Class Michael J. “Mickey” McKeogh—who responded to a help-wanted notice Mamie had posted on the Fort Sam Houston bulletin board. A young draftee from Corona on Long Island, Mickey had worked as a bellhop at New York’s posh Plaza hotel for seven years and was wise beyond his years in the ways of the world. His parents were Irish immigrants, and his father had risen to the rank of sergeant in the New York Police Department before his death in 1935. An orderly’s job, Mickey thought, was “right down his alley,” and like Lee he remained with Ike throughout the war.41
In World War II, General Walter Krueger commanded Sixth Army in the Pacific. (illustration credit 7.2)
Mickey was loyal beyond the call of duty. In December 1943, Eisenhower decided to make a quick visit to the Tunisian front, and instructed Mickey (by then a sergeant) to bring an overnight bag for him to the airfield. “Flying conditions were deplorable,” Ike recalled, and he told Mickey there was no need for him to make the flight. Mickey insisted on going. “Sir,” he said, “my mother wrote me that my job in this war was to take care of you. ‘If General Eisenhower doesn’t come back from this war, don’t you dare come back.’ ”42
Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, Eisenhower’s new commander, was an amalgam of Fox Conner and Kenyon Joyce—a military intellectual who relished leading troops in the field. Universally regarded as “a soldier’s soldier,” Krueger was a combat infantryman at heart. He was also widely respected as one of the Army’s best educated and most perceptive officers, had taught at both the Army and the Navy war colleges, spoke three foreign languages, and as a young officer had translated into English the leading German military texts of the period.43
Born into a military family in Prussia, Krueger was nine years older than Ike and at the top of his game. His widowed mother had immigrated to St. Louis when Krueger was eight years old. He enlisted in the Army at seventeen, served with distinction in Cuba, and fought in the Philippine insurrection, with Pershing in Mexico, and in the tank corps during World War I. Although he still spoke with a trace of a German accent, he would be the first officer in American history to rise through the ranks from private soldier to four-star general—a rank he achieved commanding Sixth Army in the Pacific. Eisenhower wrote in retrospect that few officers were physically tougher or more active. “Relentlessly driving himself, he had little need of driving others—they were quick to follow his example.”44
Krueger was also self-effacing and shunned the limelight. His stern Prussian presence was often intimidating, yet he possessed a robust sense of humor. When he was commanding the 6th Infantry Regiment at Jefferson Barracks in 1933, his adjutant scribbled a covering note to a stack of court-martial proceedings stating that “a crime wave” appeared to have broken out in Missouri. Krueger wrote back, “Captain Wheatley, I do not expect to get all the virtues of mankind for thirty dollars a month.”45
Krueger’s concern for his troops was legendary. Once, during a rainstorm on Leyte in 1945, Krueger found the sentry guarding his command post wet to the skin, cold, and shivering. He ordered the soldier inside and told him to towel off and change into one of Krueger’s dry uniforms. When a subordinate asked why, Krueger said, “Son, I’ve walked many an hour on sentry duty—wet and cold. I know how he felt out there.”46
The relationship between a commanding general and his chief of staff is a crucial ingredient in military success. The commanding general must have confidence that his chief of staff will translate his decisions into action, and the chief of staff must not burden the commander with excessive detail.g The borderline between their responsibilities is fluid and will always depend on the personalities involved. Eisenhower and Joyce worked seamlessly together, and Ike and Krueger proved to be an even better fit. Krueger had commanded every unit in the Army from a rifle squad during the Spanish-American War to a division, a corps, and now a field army. He was equally experienced at the highest staff level, having been the Army’s chief of operations (G-3) from 1936 to 1938. More than most of his contemporaries, he knew the requirements of modern war, had studied German military developments relentlessly, and possessed the gift of an experienced commander to motivate men to action.
Eisenhower’s high-level staff experience proved a perfect complement. “Luckily I’ve spent most of my life in large headquarters, so am not overpowered by the mass of detail,” he wrote George Moseley. Ike’s approachable nature bridged another gap for Krueger. “Everyone comes [into my office] to discuss his troubles,” he told Moseley. “I’m often astonished how much better they seem to work after they have had a chance to recite their woes.”47
And there were plenty of woes to go around. Aside from the Army’s overall expansion, General Marshall had laid on a string of large-scale maneuvers at the division, corps, and field army level to test the nation’s military preparedness. Worse perhaps, the summer of 1941 was a bleak one for the Allies. German panzer divisions pressed eastward toward Leningrad, Moscow, and Kiev; Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps stood at the Egyptian border; the Battle of the Atlantic was going badly; and the situation in the Pacific continued to deteriorate. On July 23, Japanese forces completed their occupation of Indochina, acquiring the use of eight strategic airfields and the naval bases at Saigon and Cam Rahn Bay. Three days later President Roosevelt froze all Japanese assets in the United States, ordered the Philippine Army placed under U.S. command, and recalled Douglas MacArthur to active duty as the overall commander of American forces in the Far East.48
“Last night’s paper carried the news of General MacArthur’s appointment to command all Philippine Forces,” Eisenhower wrote his old friend Wade Haislip, who was now the Army’s assistant chief of staff for personnel (G-1) in Washington.
In many ways I was a thorn in his side. I hope and believe he’ll never ever consider submitting my name as one of his prospective assistants. However, no one can ever tell which way he is going to jump, and it would not surprise me in the slightest to learn that he had turned in my name to the Department. In any such unlikely event I want you to argue and prove that I’m positively indispensable here.
I worked for him long enough! I put in four hard years out there, to say nothing of the War Department tour. If General MacArthur keeps [Richard K.] Sutherland, he’ll never mention my name, because my opinion of that buckaroo went lower and lower the longer I knew him.
Ike asked Haislip to confirm the paperwork pertaining to his position at Third Army. “In the meantime, don’t send me back to guguland, no matter how wonderful the possibilities may appear to be.… P.S. I’m not a Filipino.”49 h
The great Louisiana maneuvers of 1941 were the largest ever conducted on American soil. In the end, nearly five hundred thousand men participated—almost half of the Army’s combat strength. “I want the mistakes made down in Louisiana, not over in Europe,” General Marshall told doubting members of Congress.50 Marshall had witnessed firsthand how ill-prepared American officers had been in World War I, how unfamiliar they were with commanding large troop formations in combat, how lacking the coordination had been between different branches and services, and how amateurish U.S. efforts had been initially. Large-scale maneuvers, Marshall believed, were a “combat college for troop leading,” and he was determined to bring the Army to readiness as quickly as possible. Among other things, the maneuvers were designed to test new equipment and doctrine, to perfect techniques of supply and support, and above all to give commanders experience in handling large bodies of troops under simulated battle conditions. It was a means, Marshall believed, to identify younger officers capable of increased responsibility, and to eliminate commanders who were manifestly unfit.51
The United States was a latecomer to full-blown army maneuvers. As early as the era of Frederick the Great the nations of Europe regularly assembled their armies for large-scale maneuvers, not to train individual soldiers (who, for the most part, were regulars and already highly trained), but to familiarize
division, corps, and army commanders and their staffs with the techniques of command and control. After the Franco-Prussian War, the maneuvers became annual events. The Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Hapsburg throne, happened to visit Sarajevo in August 1914 while observing the summer maneuvers of the Austrian Army nearby.
During the interwar years the United States experimented with summer encampments for National Guard and reserve divisions, but the emphasis was on individual instruction rather than realistic simulation of major engagements.52 General Marshall ordered the first round of corps and army maneuvers in the summer of 1940. In 1941, he escalated the exercise to culminate in the clash of two field armies, pitting one against the other in the pine barrens and bayous of Louisiana. Second Army, commanded by General Ben Lear, would take on General Krueger’s Third Army in an area that stretched from Shreveport south to Lake Charles, and from Jasper, Texas, east to the Mississippi River—some thirty thousand square miles that for two weeks would become home to 472,000 troops—the densest concentration of military force in United States history.53
The clash of armies was preceded by maneuvers at the corps level. Krueger and Eisenhower left Fort Sam Houston for Lake Charles on August 11, 1941. Corps maneuvers commenced on the seventeenth. “All the oldtimers here say that we are going into a God-awful spot, to live with mud, malaria, mosquitoes and misery,” Eisenhower wrote Gerow in Washington. “But I like to go to the field, so I’m not much concerned about it.”54
The battle between the Second and Third armies kicked off at 0500 hours on September 15, 1941. Lear’s Second (Red) Army, some eight divisions, including the nation’s only two armored divisions, was arrayed east of the Red River. Its instructions were to cross the river and destroy the Third (Blue) Army, which was assembled in the vicinity of Lake Charles. Krueger’s instructions were essentially the opposite. Blue Army (ten divisions but no armor) was to advance toward the Red River, destroy the invading army, and push into enemy territory.
From the beginning, Lear mishandled his forces, particularly his armor. An old horse cavalryman (Lear had won a bronze medal as a member of the United States’ three-day-event team at the 1912 Olympics), he used his tanks as infantry support, was slow getting his troops across the Red River, and was unprepared for the speed with which Krueger moved forward. On the third day of battle, the greater part of Second Army was still east of the river and had not made contact with the enemy. Krueger, on the other hand, had advanced with nine divisions (three corps) on line, wheeled right, and rolled over the units of Second Army that had crossed the river. “We’re attacking all along the line,” Ike wrote General Joyce.55
Krueger exercised fingertip control of his troops, shifting divisions to exploit gaps in Second Army’s front. Lear’s armor was rendered impotent, partially because of the antitank weapons Krueger brought to bear, but even more because of Second Army’s failure to use them aggressively. After four days of battle, with Lear’s forces nearly surrounded, the umpires brought the first phase of the exercise to a halt.
Phase two began a week later, with the roles reversed. George Patton’s 2nd Armored Division was transferred to Third Army, and Krueger was ordered to advance on Shreveport and capture it. Lear was told to defend the city. Krueger now enjoyed numerical superiority, but Lear had the advantage of fighting on the defensive. He did not have to defeat Third Army, but simply prevent it from taking Shreveport within the five days that had been allotted.
Just as the exercise was about to begin, the tail end of a category two hurricane hit the maneuver area. The eye of the storm—with winds exceeding one hundred miles per hour—passed over Houston, Texas, and poor weather persisted throughout the following week. “The Army got a good drenching,” Ike wrote Gerow on September 25, 1941. “Yet when the problem started at noon yesterday, everybody was full of vim and ready to go. I do not know how long this problem will last, but I can assure you that in Armies of about a quarter of a million you don’t do things in a hurry.”56
Krueger’s Blue Army pressed north, again three corps on line, his right flank anchored on the Red River, his left flank on the Sabine, and Shreveport one hundred miles away. This time Lear’s caution worked to Second Army’s advantage. He fell back in an orderly manner and declined to give battle, while his engineers blew every bridge and culvert in Krueger’s path. High water slowed Third Army’s advance to a crawl. On the third day, still more than sixty miles from Shreveport, and still not having made contact with Lear’s main force, Krueger launched his armor, cavalry, and mounted infantry on a three-hundred-mile end run around Second Army’s flank. Spearheaded by Patton’s 2nd Armored Division, the troops from the Blue Army crossed the Sabine into Texas and headed north. Patton covered two hundred miles in twenty-four hours, recrossed the Sabine above Shreveport the following day, and was driving virtually unopposed on the city from the north.i “Had it been real war,” wrote Hanson Baldwin for The New York Times, “Lear’s force would have been annihilated.”57 Third Army’s main force was still twenty-five miles south of Shreveport, but with Patton already on the city’s northern outskirts, General Leslie McNair, the chief umpire, terminated the exercise.58
Krueger outgeneraled Lear throughout both phases of the Louisiana maneuvers. His grasp of the strategic requirements, and the command and control he exercised over Third Army, were nearly flawless. The aggressive, offensive-style defense that he waged in phase one, and the use of his armor and mobile forces to flank Lear out of his position in phase two, ran counter to the received wisdom of conventional Army thinking. Eisenhower’s role has been exaggerated. He performed ably as Third Army’s chief of staff, but command responsibility rested with Krueger. To credit Ike with Third Army’s success, as many commentators have done, is like crediting Walter Bedell Smith (Eisenhower’s highly efficient chief of staff) with D-Day, or Erich von Manstein rather than von Rundstedt with the 1940 German breakthrough in the Ardennes.
In his memoirs, Ike acknowledged that the credit belonged to Krueger.59 His son John agreed. “Why Dad got so much credit for Third Army’s performance … I do not understand, because he was not the commanding general. But Krueger had a tendency to take a back seat, and I guess Dad had more visibility. Dad was not one that tried to shove himself in front … but he received much of the credit anyway.”60 In retrospect, that is not difficult to understand. Partially it is a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After Ike achieved fame as supreme commander in Europe, it was natural for writers and biographers to embellish his accomplishments in Louisiana. Also, while Krueger exercised hands-on command of Third Army, it fell to Eisenhower to conduct the twice-daily briefings for the press. To the journalists covering the maneuvers, Ike became the face of Third Army. Newsmen such as Hanson Baldwin, Richard C. Hottelet, and Eric Sevareid remembered Eisenhower and had no hesitation about touting his talent.
Insofar as doctrine is concerned, the maneuvers were a mixed bag. Traditionalists continued to believe that firepower trumped mobility, while armor advocates pointed to Patton’s whirlwind flanking movement as the future way of battle.61 In terms of logistics and supply, the maneuvers helped put in place the wartime coordination that distinguished the United States Army in every theater. Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy Lutes, who handled the supply effort of Third Army, became the Army’s chief of distribution during World War II and was ultimately promoted to lieutenant general. Lutes ensured that American forces always had more of everything than they might possibly need.62 The major accomplishment of the great Louisiana maneuvers, aside from the experience it provided for high command, was in the field of personnel. Of the forty-two division, corps, and army commanders who took part in the exercise, thirty-one were relieved or shunted aside.63 On the positive side, officers who performed well—Patton, Omar Bradley, Terry Allen, William H. Simpson, Eisenhower, and Lutes—were tapped for greater responsibility.
The final critique of the maneuver was conducted by Mark Clark, the deputy chief umpire. As he spoke he was h
anded a telegram from the War Department listing the names submitted by President Roosevelt to the Senate for promotion to general officer. “I scanned the list,” said Clark, “and Eisenhower was number three. I read out the names, but when I came to Ike’s name I deliberately skipped it. I tell you, you could hear a pin drop.” Clark dismissed the audience, and Eisenhower was obviously crestfallen. As the officers filed from the room, Clark called them to order once more. “I forgot one name—Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Amid the general laughter, Clark recalls that Ike broke into a broad smile. “I’ll get you for this, you sonofabitch.”64
Mamie remembers that Ike’s promotion to general was the greatest thrill of their married life.65 Back at Fort Sam Houston, with Mamie and her parents present, Krueger pinned the single stars of a brigadier general on Eisenhower’s epaulets. Ike had reached a goal he never expected to attain.66 “The nicest part of all,” he wrote to a friend, “is to be assured by friends that the War Department was not too d—— dumb in making the selection.”67
Eisenhower said later that the Louisiana maneuvers
provided me with lessons and experience that I appreciated more and more as subsequent months rolled by.… October and November were as busy as the months preceding the maneuvers. Measures to correct defects revealed in Louisiana were begun at unit level; in many cases the return movement offered an immediate opportunity. Some officers had of necessity to be relieved from command; controversies and rumors, following on this step, required quick action to prevent injury to morale.68
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 19