Uncle Bob

(See Cover)

After the Army transport had taxied to a halt on Atsugi airfield one day last week, the first man to climb down was a tall, loose-jointed officer with the three stars of a lieutenant general gleaming on his shirt collar. Said the General, grinning:

"This is the beachhead where I was supposed to land. General MacArthur gave me this area. I never expected to reach it in a plane without a shot being fired at me."

Lieut. General Robert Lawrence Eichelberger, 59, newly appointed commander of the Tokyo area, already had on hand his own crack 11th Airborne Division, commanded by Major General Joseph M. Swing, and some infantrymen of the 27th Division. This week tens of thousands more (including the dismounted ist Cavalry Division) landed from transports, swelling the body of troops toward the 500,000 or more who will land in weeks to come on the sacred soil. The occupation of Japan had begun.

Return Visit. Bob Eichelberger will set up his headquarters in bomb-smashed Tokyo. He had visited the Jap capital before, and on one occasion had started a picturesque yarn.

After World War I, as a temporary major and intelligence officer for Major General William S. Graves's expeditionary force en route to Siberia, he was one of a group entertained at a dinner by Jap officers. Eichelberger had seen no combat service in Europe, was short of medals. To keep him from being out-spangled by his Jap hosts, a brother officer insisted on lending him some campaign bars. The Japs were properly impressed.

They were impressed with more reason by the time Graves's expeditionary force was ready to go home. Eichelberger's restless inquisitiveness had landed him in many a tight spot.

His cool courage and a natural, bushwhacking ability to operate with small forces always pulled him out. For the easy, offhand job he did with a rifle in holding off a unit of Russian partisans which had attacked an American platoon, he won the Distinguished Service Cross.

Meanwhile his flair for finding out what was going on led him to the conclusion that the Kolchak regime, which the western Allies were then supporting, had no backing from the Russian people. Largely because of his finding, the Graves force was limited to guarding the railway, avoided a political blunder. A grateful War Department pinned the Distinguished Service Medal on Eichelberger's high-collared blouse.

Far East Friends. Major Eichelberger also observed closely his allies, the Japanese. Clearly they were on a mission of empire, stirring up trouble as an excuse to stay on Russian soil and establish title to some real estate.

Eichelberger, who as intelligence officer had many dealings with the Japs, blandly outwitted them, blocking them from taking over areas they wanted. For some Japanese reason, the Japs seemed to admire these efforts. At any rate, they decorated him with the Imperial Order of Meiji, the Order of the Sacred Treasure and the Order of the Rising Sun.

The Genial Friend. If any of the Japs then on duty in Siberia are still around Tokyo, they must know that old acquaintance will not help them now. Bob Eichelberger is a genial, dryly humorous extrovert with a consuming interest in people and an infinite capacity for liking them. But he is also a steel-hard soldier with a vast respect for unbending discipline and the same reverent regard for spit & polish that he got at the U.S. Military Academy almost 40 years ago. Tokyo's Japs can expect fair and efficient treatment. But no monkey business. And no favors.

The Long Trail. For General Eichelberger and his Eighth Army, Tokyo was the end of one of the bitterest, hardest fought trails of the Pacific War. For the General it began three years and 4,000 roundabout miles away, in the blood and mud of a wretched copra settlement called Buna on the north coast of New Guinea.

When Eichelberger and his staff of the I Corps* arrived in Australia to report to MacArthur, Australian troops were still being pushed south across the Owen Stanley Mountains. Little more than three months later, when I Corps staff got the call, the counteroffensive had begun, but the U.S. 32nd Infantry Division was stalled before Buna and something had to be done. Eichelberger's orders from MacArthur were: get them out of the mud and get them moving. One of Eichelberger's first acts was to relieve the commander, Major General Edwin F. Harding, a friend and West Point classmate ('09). Some of the 32nd's officers privately denounced Eichelberger as ruthless, Prussian. Other officers were removed; the staff work was jacked up.

Jungle Trouble. To inspire the 32nd, Eichelberger's method was to get up on the front himself--and his officers went with him, where riflemen could see them. Three brigadiers were wounded but Eichelberger, who insisted on wearing his general's stars within sight of the Japanese ("What's the use of being up here if the boys can't see who I am?'') came through without a scratch.

The 32nd's soldiers came to know him as a general who liked to shuck his shirt when the sun was hot, as a kidder who seldom seemed worried. But they also knew him as a rawhiding commander who knew no friends. He fired officers right & left. He also took heavy casualties.

A month after he took command, the division captured Buna and MacArthur had his foothold on the north coast. The men of the 32nd, who called their division cemetery ''Eichelberger Square." then went on to fight the coastal campaign and the battle of the Philippines. This week they had their greatest hour of triumph when General Yamashita walked into their lines.

After Buna, Eichelberger trained troops in Australia until he got back into action again at Hollandia, took the vital New Guinea port with deftness and speed. The Japs were hit where they weren't at Hollandia, but there were enough stray units around to infiltrate Eichelberger's command post by night.

On one such uneasy occasion Eichelberger's aide, Major Clyde Schuck, whispered from his foxhole, "General, are you all right?" Getting no answer, he repeated the question in an anxious shout. From Eichelberger's hideout near by came the rumble of the General's voice: "Clyde, my boy, I appreciate your interest, but when the little bastards are infiltrating, I'd just as soon you called me Bob."

Biak & Beyond. At Biak, Eichelberger was sent to rescue another bogged-down force, again superseded a classmate (Major General Horace H. Fuller), straightened out the situation with less trouble than he had had at Buna. It was a clever job of tactics--no frontal assaults, much fast-stepping, cleverly conceived flank movement, a swift securing of the three vital Biak airfields. For such imaginative tactics MacArthur made Eichelberger commander of the new Eighth Army.

MacArthur used the Eighth as his second team in the invasion of the Philippines. Under Eichelberger it mopped up on Leyte (where Eighth Army men killed 26,000 Japs). In the assault on Luzon its role was also secondary, but brilliant: a landing below Manila, climaxed by a razzle-dazzle airborne assault.

Then the Eighth went south to clean up what was left of the Philippines. In 44 days it made six major and 24 minor landings. Eichelberger was all over the place, sleeping among his soldiers on the ground -- once, so close to a Jap airfield that the racket of enemy airplane engines kept them awake most of the night. MacArthur wrote this commendation: "a model of what a light but aggressive com mand can accomplish in rapid exploitation."

The Lucky General. Eichelberger, never a man to blow his own horn, attributed his showing to his troops and to a lot of luck. His soldiers knew that he had a lot more than luck.

Eichelberger, who talks of military campaigns in football terms, does not believe in generals who buck the middle of the opponent's line; instead, he favors the end run, the cleverly concealed multiple pass, even on occasion a well-executed shoe string play. He minimizes his achievements in battle but brags unashamedly about what he did to raise the standard of the Military Academy's football team.

As a cadet, Eichelberger, son of an Urbana (Ohio) lawyer, seemed to have an easy time at studies: maybe it was because he had already put in two years at Ohio State. The Howitzer labeled him "divinely tall and most divinely fair" and his wife, whom he calls Miss Em, still quotes it, remembering the second lieutenant who proposed to her 34 years ago in the Canal zone the first evening he met her.

Out of Frustration. As a West Point cadet, Bob Eichelberger did not make the football team, won no letter. But he had wanted to. When he came back in 1940 as a major general and Superintendent of the Point, physical requirements for ad mission were so drawn that a tall candidate had to be underweight to get in. This anomaly was corrected. Eichelberger, who had come back with a fierce determination to make the Academy's football team the best ever, had his chance.

He snared Coach Earl ("Red") Blaik, who had left the Army, won fame as head coach at Dartmouth. Blaik became West Point's first civilian head coach. Eichelberger's faith in him was justified ; the pay off came last winter, when far out in the Pacific, an urgent radiogram told him Army had finished a season in which it easily beat all opponents.

Superintendent Eichelberger says less about other contributions to West Point. But the cadets he commissioned recall him as the ideal head man, full of discipline with good humor, given to stopping cadets for chats on the walks, endowed with the name-memory of a hotel clerk. Behind his back they (like his staff today) called him "Uncle Bob."

As General Eichelberger takes up residence within sight of Tokyo, he presumably still has the medals which were pinned on him by the Japanese 25 years ago. After Pearl Harbor, when it became the fashion for Americans to send Jap decorations to the Air Forces to "return to sender" along with bombs, Eichelberger was asked if he would contribute his.

"Hell, no," he said, "I'm going to take them back myself."

* "Eye Corps" to Pacific soldiers, who abhor the Roman numeral.

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