Doughboy's General

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As The Day drew near, crushing responsibility settled back upon the handful of top commanders. For the Germans, it fell most heavily on two field marshals, able hoodlum Erwin Rommel and able Junker Gerd von Rundstedt. They were hard at work on their checkup of garrisons, driving their staffs to perfect the plans for the 50-odd divisions they will have in the West on Dday.

The initiative would not be theirs. When the Allies came, they would almost certainly land at many points, almost certainly make a selection later of the softest spots to develop their thrust inland. Some of the German troops would fight it out on the shore.

Many more, disposed along northwest Europe's splendid network of highways and strategic railroads would be shot into action as the battle developed into a full-out push at the heart of the Reich. If the invasion was to be stopped, Rommel and Rundstedt would have to make a quick, accurate diagnosis of Eisenhower's intentions, then commit their forces without delay in a great gamble for victory.

For the Allies, the crushing load pressed most heavily on sunny General Dwight David Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, his brilliant, pipe-smoking deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, on airmen like Britain's Leigh-Mallory and the U.S.'s "Tooey" Spaatz, on seamen like Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsey and U.S. Rear Admiral Alan Kirk. And a special weight pressed on two of their top subordinates: Cromwellian General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, and Lincolnesque Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley, A.U.S.

The worries of Generals Montgomery and Bradley were of a special kind. They command the Empire and U.S. ground forces. It is their infantry, supported by tanks and artillery, which in the final analysis must execute the plans.

Field Trip. On a mild April Monday, as he had done each week of spring, General Bradley left his London headquarters to visit his troops in the field. Promptly at 8:15, having breakfasted on Lend-Lease powdered eggs, he stepped out of the officers' mess and into a waiting Cadillac. Sergeant Alex Stout, a black-haired young man who used to jeep the General around Sicily, sent the long black car purring southward.

At the edge of the city, and on through the Hampshire fields, the General watched the almost endless convoys of trucks and guns. Occasionally he studied a notebook, checking over the names of the officers he was to meet, down to the commanders of battalions and companies.

Suddenly he looked up, drawled to his aide: "There's a couple of pheasant--in that field over there." His aide, Captain Lewis D. Bridge, peering at the brownish specks 300 yards away, could recall with good reason that his boss was a famous hunter, one of the Army's finest riflemen and skeet shooters.

General Bradley looked the part of an outdoorsman. His G.I. trousers were stuffed into high paratroop boots. Under his old, stained trench coat he wore an issue combat jacket. His shirt, tie and field cap with its three stars were all issue. His tall (just over six feet), lanky, comfortably sprawling figure was anything but dashing. But his dark grey eyes, flashing from under heavy black brows in a homely, bony face ranged wide, missed nothing.

Bradley's Role. This general was not an Eisenhower, churning over broad strategical plans, cooperation with the Air Forces, with the Navy, full of the complications of politics to come in France, charged by the U.S. with the final decisions on what will happen over there. The general in the trench coat was the man the doughboys look to, a living, official symbol of the principle, proved again in this mechanized war, that it is the doughboy who must finally take the ground.

Bradley himself is a classic infantryman, fit and athletic, patient and persistent, fascinated and skilled with weapons, a lover of life in the field. He has never had the airman's flash, nor known the manic-depressive alternation of combat to the death in one hour, the ease of the officers' club the next. Nor is this general full of the slide-rule, fire-table, grid-coordinator calculation of the artilleryman, al though his mind is essentially mathematical, and he has studied and practiced war as scientifically as a man can.

Omar Bradley is a plain, homely, steady man with brains and character, born to and trained for the fulfillment of the doughboy's grim, hard-working role in war. No one in the U.S. armed forces knows bet ter than he that Invasion Day is the foot soldiers' day.

The Rare Commander. Doughboys who served under him in Africa and Sicily speedily recognized him as a commander who played his hand with rare skill and imagination, and took his objectives on the dot without wasting life.

Even the lowliest G.I.s are likely to know his background -- that he was a Missouri country boy, a West Pointer; the product of a completely typical career of Army assignments.

Bradley is universally popular among officers and men; his total lack of self-advertising or ostentation, his plainness and human touch have seemingly protected him from the envies and enmities that may gather around the best officers when they go up very fast. (Bradley's rise was spectacular even in the fast-expanding U.S. Army; his permanent rank is still lieutenant colonel.)

Pershing's Country. Omar Bradley was born on Feb. 12, 1893, in Clark, Mo., a hamlet 55 miles from John J. Pershing's birthplace at Laclede. His father, a jovial, underpaid ($40 a month) schoolteacher, gave his gangling, solemn son his love of hunting and fishing, trained the boy to be an expert shot, and reaped the reward of a blameless life by dying of pneumonia at 41, when Omar was 13.

The family moved to Moberly, Mo., where Omar grew up and went to high school. He was a skinny, lank-haired, jug-eared youngster, the kind of pupil who could always answer a question correctly, but never volunteered. The high-school graduation yearbook, pinning one-word descriptions like "handsome," "popular," "brilliant" on everyone else, pinned "calculative" on Omar.

His Sunday School superintendent suggested West Point as the best educational bet for a poor boy. Omar got an alternate appointment, entered the U.S. Military Academy with the class of 1915.

That class is noted for two things: 1) its crack baseball team; 2) its U.S. generals in World War II. Omar Bradley played in the outfield, batted .383 and is still remembered at the Point for his great throwing arm. He was also the first member of the class to pin on a general officer's stars (when he took command at Fort Benning as a brigadier general in February 1941).

The baseball team alone turned out eight generals. The class itself has provided more than 30--about half of its members still on the active list. Other Bradley classmates include General Eisenhower; Lieut. General Joseph T. McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff; Major General Charles W. Ryder, Commander of the 34th In fantry Division in Italy; General George E. Stratemeyer, Air Force commander in the China-Burma-India theater.

"A Classmate of Mine." Cadet Omar Bradley graduated No. 44 in the class of 164 men; Eisenhower, who roomed across the hall, was 61. Serious, shy Omar had only 19 demerits for his course, stood sixth in conduct; brilliant, gregarious Ike had 100, stood 125th.

Late in 1916, after serving a tour of duty along the Mexican border, young Lieut. Bradley married his high-school classmate, slender, pretty Mary Elizabeth Quayle, daughter of his Moberly Sunday School teacher. Mrs. Bradley, who insists that she loved all their Army posts--even Brookings, S.D.-- is now living at West Point. Their only daughter, Elizabeth, is to be married in June to Cadet Henry Shaw Beukema, son of Colonel Herman Beukema, the Academy's famed geopolitical lecturer (and another 1915 classmate).

The Well-Worn Groove. Though World War I brought Omar Bradley temporary promotion to major, he saw no service outside the U.S. After the war Bradley casually predicted that there would be another in 20 years or so, and began getting ready for it. His career followed the well-worn groove of the professional soldier in peacetime: teaching courses and taking them ; service with troops in Hawaii; courses at the Command and General Staff School, at the Army War College.

In 1929 his work at Fort Benning caught the attention of able young Lieut. Colonel George Catlett Marshall; twelve years later General Marshall picked Omar Bradley to convert the Infantry School at the fort from a peaceful little unit of 300 to 400 students into a roaring mass-production center capable of handling 14,000 officer candidates at a time. Bradley did the job without raising his voice. Later he took over and trained the 82nd and 28th Divisions for combat. In February 1943, when things were not going too well in Tunisia, General Marshall sent Omar Bradley over.

Diagnosis and Cure. General Bradley went to Africa a book soldier, who had spent 20 years studying and teaching without ever hearing a shot fired in anger. He got his first combat command a year ago, taking over the U.S. II Corps from fiery, explosive Lieut. General George Patton, who went up to an Army command. The situation was not happy. U.S. forces had been spread around in penny packets under the overall strategy of British Army commanders; the tactical results had been something less than good.

Omar Bradley stuck out his stubborn chin and insisted that his corps be used as a unified force. He got as his objectives Bizerte and Ferryville, at the northwestern end of the line. In a masterly series of night movements he shifted the entire corps (about 100,000 men) over 200 miles of narrow mountain roads to the new position, then attacked on schedule.

Through the Mousetrap. Over the forbidding, roadless mountains he worked his men in a delicate sequence of flankings and infiltrations, sending forces the hard way along the ridges instead of through the inviting valleys and defiles. His prize performance was in a valley, "the Mousetrap," leading through rugged hills to Mateur, the key to Bizerte.

The Germans held the hills around it, and were dug into the floor of the valley with antitank guns. Bradley had his infantry clean up the hilltops on the sides and even to the north before he allowed the squatting tanks of his 1st Armored Division to start their engines and punch ahead for Mateur.

Then his infantry pulled off a startling maneuver. The 1st Infantry Division abandoned the right flank, followed the armored division into Mateur, then fanned out to become the left flank. The 34th Division, which had held the left flank, crossed behind the 1st and took up new positions on the right. Bradley had worked this out because the 1st was weary from fighting through the mountains, and the 34th was fresher.

"I never saw that one in the books," he admitted mildly, "but it seemed to make sense--and it worked."

North to Sicily. Bradley was full of such sense-making, tank-sparing, man-saving tricks, in Tunisia and later in Sicily. There the Seventh Army, of which his II Corps formed the backbone, performed with vast efficiency. General Patton, the Army commander, naturally got the public credit, but war correspondents found all the doughboys talking about Bradley.

Two weeks after the Sicilian victory, General Bradley was bouncing out in a jeep to watch Eighth Army troops begin the crossing of the Strait of Messina onto the Italian mainland. He never saw that show. Headquarters sent a plane to intercept him and hurry him back. He had orders for England and the biggest job of his career.

North to England. Once settled in London, Omar Bradley went to work with a double staff, one group to plan the invasion, the other to plot the larger operations that will follow on the Continent. Whenever he could, the General traveled out to see for himself. Men on duty at the airfields would see Bradley arrive in a jeep, jump into the back seat of a Piper Cub and fly away, munching half of the pilot's cheese sandwich.

By spring the plans were well enough advanced to let the General start his program of field inspections. Arriving at a divisional bivouac area, in his first two hours Bradley covered perhaps 20 miles by car and jeep, another three or four miles on foot. He watched men in full battle kit running over obstacle courses, noted that one man was too slow and suggested he be shifted to back-line duty.

At mortar practice he reminded a sergeant to keep low. A lieutenant lecturing troops on the automatic rifle got a little lecture for himself on keeping his explanations clear. Bradley checked on the hospital, took a look at a latrine.

By afternoon of the second day General Bradley had seen--and had been seen by--nearly every man in the division's three infantry regiments and their supporting artillery, engineers and service troops. He had watched them working, had shaken hands with dozens of young officers and called them by name.

Final Instructions. Just before he left, he made a short speech to all the officers of the division. It was such a speech, as the one in which he was quoted as saying: "This stuff about tremendous losses [in the invasion] is tommyrot." But that comment was no gush of rash optimism; in context it was a simple statement of Bradley's faith in the fighting qualities of U.S. infantrymen.

He did not tell these officers that their task would be easy. He did tell them that their country was giving them the best of weapons, planning, air and naval support. But he told them that life and victory would lie in their own hands. They must be fit, know their weapons, use their skill and wits. They must have confidence in themselves; then their men would have confidence in them.

Omar Bradley, who is no orator, ended with a plain promise that had the ring of more than oratory: "I will see you on the beaches."

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