The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Many of these mistakes were made in 1942 as Marshall and Eisenhower settled into their roles atop the U.S. military in a global war. Eisenhower’s letters to Marshall that year have little of the confidence and certainty he would show by the end of the war, when he would address Marshall almost as a peer. In late 1942, after the Operation Torch landings in North Africa and the difficulties over Eisenhower’s awkward political embrace of Adm. François Darlan, who had collaborated with the Nazis, followed by the shock of fighting the Germans in Tunisia, Eisenhower even wondered whether he might be replaced. This was probably the most vulnerable point he experienced during the entire war. “At any moment, it is possible that a necessity might arise for my relief and consequent demotion,” he told his son. “If so, you are not to worry about it. . . . If it becomes expedient to reduce me, I would be the first to recommend it.”

  Marshall and Ike also were shaky—and perhaps not completely candid with each other—in one of their first major personnel decisions, the selection of a frontline American commander for the Torch campaign in Africa. When Marshall suggested Lloyd Fredendall to Eisenhower as the field commander, Ike expressed a bit of doubt. “He was not one of those in whom I had instinctive confidence,” he wrote, somewhat too delicately, to the Army chief. Yet Fredendall was Marshall’s top pick, as of course Eisenhower had been. By December 1942 Eisenhower had warmed to Fredendall, telling Harry Butcher, the Navy reservist who was Eisenhower’s personal aide and confidant during the war, that he considered him and Patton his two most competent subordinate commanders. “Patton I think comes closest to meeting every requirement made on a commander,” he dictated to Butcher. “Just after him I would at present rate Fredendall, although I do not believe the latter has the imagination in foreseeing and preparing for possible jobs of the future that Patton possesses.” On February 4, 1943, Eisenhower even recommended that Fredendall be promoted to lieutenant general, along with two other men. That day he also sent a letter to Fredendall urging him to make sure his subordinate commanders were not staying too close to their command posts. “Generals are expendable just as is any other item in an army,” he advised.

  So it was all the more shocking to Ike a few days later when he visited Fredendall at his headquarters to see how the corps commander was situated. “It was a long way from the battle front,” some seventy miles in the rear, he later wrote, in “a deep and almost inaccessible ravine.” Two hundred Army engineers who should have been helping vulnerable combat units dig in and establish defensive positions instead were tunneling into hillsides to provide secure quarters for Fredendall’s staff. Eisenhower’s contempt for Fredendall’s overcautiousness was clear in a line from his memoirs: “It was the only time, during the war, that I ever saw a divisional or higher headquarters so concerned over its own safety that it dug itself underground shelters.” This comment is especially striking in the context of the book in which it appears. Aside from that sentence, Eisenhower is unfailingly courteous in discussing his former subordinates.

  Motoring on to the front, Ike was shaken by the lackadaisical attitude of American troops facing the Germans. He inspected frontline troops who had been in Tunisia’s Faid Pass for two days and was astonished to see that they had not set out a minefield or otherwise prepared their defenses. He told them to do so at first light and left at 3 A.M. Two hours later, before the sun rose, the entire unit was captured by attacking Germans. That event, he noted, was the beginning of the humiliating battle that came to be known as Kasserine Pass, the worst defeat of American ground forces in Europe or Africa during World War II. In about a week, Allied losses, most of them American, amounted to three hundred killed, three thousand wounded, and nearly four thousand missing, most of them taken prisoner. Some two hundred tanks also were lost. “The proud and cocky Americans today stand humiliated by one of the greatest defeats in our history,” Ike’s aide Butcher recorded in his diary. “This is particularly embarrassing to us with the British.” One of the few bright spots at Kasserine was the performance of a 9th Infantry Division artillery battalion, commanded by one Lt. Col. William Westmoreland, that wheeled into place and opened fire in time to blunt a German armored attack.

  Eisenhower emerged from the Kasserine episode sobered, with relief on his mind. “Our people from the very highest to the very lowest have learned that this is not a child’s game,” he wrote in a chastened letter to Marshall. American troops emerged from the fighting, he said after the war, “bedraggled . . . tired . . . down.” The defeat at Kasserine Pass was especially painful to Eisenhower because it added to a string of Allied losses—Dunkirk, Bataan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Surabaya, and Tobruk—that he termed in his memoirs “the black reminders.”

  Eisenhower decided to make some changes. On February 24, as the Kasserine fight was ending, he wrote to his old friend Leonard “Gee” Gerow, then commanding the 29th Division, about the need to “ruthlessly” weed out “the lazy, the slothful, the indifferent or the complacent. Get rid of them. . . . For God’s sake don’t keep anybody around that you say to yourself, ‘He may get by’—He won’t. Throw him out.” His first major personnel move was to fire Brig. Eric Mockler-Ferryman, his G-2, or intelligence chief. This was a controversial choice, because Mockler-Ferryman was British. Indeed, Ike’s intelligence officer had to be British, because the Allies were relying on the U.K.’s “Ultra” intercepts of secret German communications. The firing came at a time when there was already much muttering among the British about the poor quality of the Americans’ training and leadership. Gen. Montgomery commented in his diary that the American forces were “complete amateurs”—a harsh but not entirely unfair assessment of the undertrained, ill-equipped units he observed. Lt. Gen. Sir John Crocker, the British commander in the area, wrote in a letter to his wife, “Believe me, the British have nothing to learn from them.” Crocker shared his views with reporters, criticizing the American 34th Infantry Division, a National Guard unit that had been federalized in February 1941. This was noticed by the Americans: “The s.o.b. publicly called our troops cowards,” Patton wrote in his diary. British officers might have rightly wondered whether Ike would be as tough on his American subordinates as he had been on his British staffer.

  Eisenhower told Marshall that he was thinking of relieving Fredendall, having detected in him a “peculiar apathy.” He already had received internal reports that during a battle in late February, Fredendall had been found asleep at eleven in the morning two days in a row. The same day, he was told that, contrary to what he had believed, the British were not impressed with Fredendall and were especially unhappy with the quality of planning done by his staff. Eisenhower added a postscript to the letter. “My own real worry,” he wrote, “is his apparent inability to develop a team.” That word meant so much to Marshall. The report of Allied concern might have been the deciding factor. If the British did not want Fredendall either, it was not only easy but necessary to move him out. Two days later, Eisenhower removed Fredendall, and by March 11 the ousted general was headed back to the United States, where he was given a meaningless promotion and the oblivion of a training command.

  Eisenhower turned over Fredendall’s command to Patton and gave him two clear orders. The first came from knowing Patton well. Don’t be personally reckless, he told his old friend. The second was a lesson Eisenhower himself was mulling. He told Patton “to be cold-blooded about removal of inefficient officers. If a man fails, send him back to General Ike and let him worry about it.” When Ike met the British intelligence officer who would replace the one he had fired, he instructed him that “if I thought anyone was not making the grade or was creating difficulties I was fully empowered to sack him on the spot. ‘Hire and fire’ was the slogan.”

  Patton made an impression on the frontline troops. It was hard not to notice him. Lt. Col. Westmoreland, leading his artillery battalion, was struck that “Patton would parade around with his boots, yellow britches, his Ike jacket, two pearl-handled rev
olvers, and a shiny helmet with three stars all over it. His jeep looked like a motorized Christmas tree sprinkled with stars.” Another rising officer, Col. James Polk, would describe Patton later in the war as resembling “a Wild West cowboy ready to go fox hunting.”

  The night he succeeded Fredendall, Patton noted in his diary, “I think Fredendall is either a little nuts or badly scared.” It was a devastating epitaph for a career. Patton also cast a skeptical eye on one of his division commanders, Orlando Ward, writing not long after taking command that “Ward lacks force. . . . The division has lost its nerve and is jumpy.” On the other side of the Atlantic, Gen. Marshall had gotten wind of Ward’s naysaying, prompting him to write a letter to the general, who had served under him in the high-profile position of secretary of the Army’s general staff, warning that he was giving “the impression of a degree of pessimism which was disturbing to me. . . . Naturally I am deeply interested in you and your career, but I am much more interested, through necessity, in the development of the fighting spirit in our Army.” But Patton did not act against Ward until he heard from British Gen. Harold Alexander, who wrote to him, “In my opinion General Ward is not the best man to command the American First Armoured Division.” It was the final blow. In his memoirs, Eisenhower presents the removals of Fredendall and Ward as necessary for improving the morale of American forces: After the Kasserine defeat, “the troops had to be picked up quickly.”

  Like Gen. Chaney, who had preceded Ike in London, Ward was sent back to the United States. But unlike Chaney, Ward was permitted to see Marshall, perhaps because Marshall had a message for him: Stop talking about how the Germans are more effective than the Allies. Ward was forgiven his indiscretion, in part because he had been speaking the truth but probably also because he had been relatively close to Marshall before the war, often walking home with him after work along Washington, D.C.’s Connecticut Avenue. Ward was sent to train troops in Texas and then made commandant of the artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. By the end of the war he was commanding another combat division in Europe, the 20th Armored. After the war he briefly commanded V Corps.

  Ernest Harmon was instructed by Patton to head east and replace Ward as commander of the 2nd Armored. “Fine,” he said. “Do you want me to attack or defend?”

  Patton replied in a typically brusque fashion, according to Harmon’s account. “What have you come for, asking me a lot of goddamned stupid questions?”

  “I didn’t think it was stupid,” Harmon said, holding his ground—always important in dealing with Patton. “I simply asked a very fundamental question: whether I am to attack or defend.” Patton wouldn’t tell him, so he decided on his own to attack, which was almost always the right attitude in World War II.

  The victory in Tunisia, site of ancient Carthage, in May 1943 was the first win for the Allies in the west. It carried additional meaning for Eisenhower, who as a boy had read extensively about the heroes of the worlds of ancient Rome and Greece, and especially about the Carthaginians. “Among all the figures of antiquity, Hannibal was my favorite,” he remembered. Meditating on his triumph in Tunis, Eisenhower came to a conclusion that may seem odd in today’s context:

  Immediate and continuous loyalty to the concept of unity and to allied commanders is basic to victory. The instant such commanders lose the confidence of either government or of the majority of their principal subordinates, they must be relieved.

  He seems to be saying here, between the lines, that Fredendall and Ward were sacrificed for the larger goal of preserving Allied unity. Driving home the point, Eisenhower added, “This was the great Allied lesson of Tunisia.” In other words, in coalition warfare, generals must be relieved not just when they lose the confidence of their own leaders, but before that, if they lose the backing of allied leaders.

  • • •

  Not long after the firings of Fredendall and Ward, Gen. Marshall released his second report on the state of the U.S. military, the first issued since the United States had entered the war. In an appendix, he used the opportunity to discuss what he looked for in a general:

  . . . men who have measured up to the highest standards of military skill, who have demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of modern standards of warfare and who possess the physical stamina, moral courage, strength of character and flexibility of mind necessary to carry the burdens which modern combat conditions impose.

  This description, which came after the initial wave of reliefs—Short in the Pacific, Fredendall in Africa, and senior officers on the Army General Staff at the Pentagon—was similar to the list he had drawn up after World War I, except that here Marshall had added “flexibility of mind” as a requirement. The setbacks of 1941 through early 1943 had refined his formula for managing generals. They would adapt and succeed—or be replaced. But they would not be micromanaged, at least not by Marshall and Eisenhower. As Ike put it, “if results obtained by the field commander become unsatisfactory the proper procedure is not to advise, admonish, and harass him, but to replace him by another commander.”

  The risk of relief is the price senior officers pay in order not to be oversupervised. This is somewhat counterintuitive—nothing is more intrusive than removing a commander—but subsequent history indicates that it makes sense. In the 1950s and 1960s, as the U.S. Army started turning away from the practice of relief, meddling by superiors would increase notably. The tradition would die altogether in the Vietnam War—where, not coincidentally, one of the enduring images of the conflict would be that of lieutenants and captains looking up to see their battalion, brigade, and even division commanders hovering above them in helicopters.

  CHAPTER 3

  George Patton

  The specialist

  T he Marshall template for generalship was not a rigid mold. It made room for exceptions, especially at higher levels of command. Marshall would put up with George Patton and some other outliers because their combat effectiveness made them irreplaceable.

  Even now, more than six decades after his death, Patton remains one of our most remarkable generals. “You have no balance at all,” Marshall’s wife once scolded the young Patton, correctly, years before World War II. Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon, one of his peers, wrote that he was “strange, brilliant, moody.” The blustery Patton behaved in ways that would have gotten other officers relieved, but he was kept on because he was seen, accurately, as a man of unusual flaws and exceptional strengths. Marshall concluded that Patton was both a buffoon and a natural and skillful fighter. Ike cast himself as Patton’s defender, writing to Marshall early in the war that “General Patton has . . . approached all his work in a very businesslike, sane but enthusiastic attitude.” It is hardly usual to go out of one’s way to reassure a superior that a subordinate is “sane.”

  The closest Patton came to disgrace was in mid-1943, as the Sicily campaign wound down, when he mistreated two hospitalized privates, one of them recovering from battle fatigue (what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). On August 3, 1943, Patton walked into the tent of the 15th Evacuation Hospital and asked Pvt. Charles Kuhl of the 1st Infantry Division what his ailment was. “I guess I can’t take it,” responded Kuhl. Then, according to a report filed at the time by Lt. Col. Perrin Long, a Medical Corps officer, “The General immediately flared up, cursed the soldier, called him all types of a coward, then slapped him across the face with his gloves and finally grabbed the soldier by the scruff of his neck and kicked him out of the tent. The soldier was immediately picked up by corpsmen and taken to a ward tent.” Kuhl ultimately was diagnosed as suffering from chronic dysentery and malaria. It was a display of extreme indiscipline by an officer who was expected to set an example. It also was flatly un-American.

  On August 10, Patton subjected Pvt. Paul Bennett to similar harsh treatment. Bennett actually had been evacuated against his wishes and had asked to return to his artillery unit, even though he was “huddled and s
hivering.” Patton asked him what he was suffering from. “It’s my nerves,” Bennett said.

  “Your nerves, hell, you are just a goddamned coward,” Patton shouted. He then slapped Bennett and said, “Shut up the goddamned crying. I won’t have these brave men here who have been shot at seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying.” He then slapped him again, Long recounted, so hard that the private’s helmet liner was knocked into the next tent. Patton ordered a hospital officer to discharge Bennett back to the front. “You’re going to fight,” he told Bennett. “If you don’t, I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose.” Patton then reached for his pistol and said, “I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamned whimpering coward.”

  There was little question about the facts of the matter. Patton had proudly recorded both incidents in his diary, writing of Pvt. Bennett that “I may have saved his soul, if he had one.”

  Patton’s obtuseness about striking soldiers might be better understood if we recall that both he and Eisenhower had observed the exploits of Douglas MacArthur. Both men had been present in July 1932 when MacArthur, then the Army chief of staff, presided over something far harsher than a slap: the teargassing and routing of “Bonus Marchers,” Depression-stricken World War I veterans who came to Washington by the thousands to demonstrate in favor of early payment of a cash bonus not due until 1945. MacArthur exceeded or perhaps ignored his orders, not only clearing out the marchers but burning their encampment, not far from the U.S. Capitol. MacArthur would contend that “not more than one in ten” was a veteran, and those who were tended to be “hard-core” Communists, drunks, and criminals. For his part, Eisenhower said that he had advised MacArthur against getting involved. He also said that when he informed MacArthur at the time that orders had arrived from President Hoover instructing MacArthur not to cross the Anacostia River to the marchers’ camp, MacArthur responded, “I don’t want to hear them and I don’t want to see them,” and then crossed over the bridge.