The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Eisenhower went out of his way in 1943 to save Patton, though there were ample grounds for his relief. In addition to the slapping incidents, Patton had violated Marshall’s insistence on teamwork with the Allies in Sicily by shooting out ahead of his orders and launching a questionable drive through the western end of the island when the German foe was concentrated in the eastern end. Despite these blunders, Eisenhower hoped to sidestep Patton’s removal. He wrote a harsh letter to Patton instead, demanding that he apologize to his troops. Ike pocketed the contrite letter Patton wrote to him in response and also persuaded three reporters who knew about these incidents not to file stories about them. Just a few days later, Eisenhower was lobbying Marshall to promote Patton to the permanent rank of major general, which was approved. “George Patton continues to exhibit some of those unfortunate personal traits of which you and I have always known and which during this campaign caused me some most uncomfortable days,” he wrote to Marshall. “His habit of impulsive bawling out of subordinates, extending even to personal abuse of individuals, was noted in at least two specific cases. I have had to take the most drastic steps; and if he is not cured now, there is no hope for him. Personally, I believe that he is cured.”

  Months later, in November 1943, news of the slapping incidents leaked. In a war being fought in the name of democracy, it was devastating to have an American general behaving like a barroom bully. Eisenhower had recognized this when he ordered Patton to apologize to his enlisted men and to tell them that he “respected their positions as fighting soldiers of a democratic nation.”

  Despite Ike’s hopes, Patton was not cured. In the spring of 1944, with the slapping controversy barely past, Patton again made headlines, wisecracking at a public event in Knutsford, England, that it was “the evident destiny of the British and Americans to rule the world.” In the wake of that outburst and the headlines it provoked, Ike commented to Marshall of Patton that “apparently he is unable to use reasonably good sense in all those matters where senior commanders must appreciate the effect of their own actions upon public opinion.” Ike made it clear to Patton that he was on the thinnest of ice, informing his old friend, “I am thoroughly weary of your failure to control your tongue and have begun to doubt your all-round judgment, so essential in high military position.” He wrote to Marshall that “frankly I am exceedingly weary of his habit of getting everybody into hot water.”

  But again, Ike did not remove Patton, explaining to Marshall that he found his colleague “admittedly unbalanced but nevertheless aggressive,” and so useful to the cause. James Gavin, who knew Patton and served under him in Sicily, concluded that Eisenhower probably would have been justified in relieving Patton, “but he couldn’t spare him. Generalship in that high echelon is a rare commodity, and Georgie had it. Patton had it.”

  There also was an oddly personal element in Eisenhower’s handling of Patton. Ike seemed to take a certain pride in protecting the old cavalryman. Part of this was due to their long-standing friendship, and no doubt a sense of obligation. When the war began, it had been Patton who looked out for Eisenhower. As Ike’s colleague Wedemeyer reportedly said to Eisenhower during an argument about what to do with Patton, “Hell, get on to yourself, Ike—you didn’t make him, he made you.” Patton also told Eisenhower early in 1942, “You are about my oldest friend,” and a year later Eisenhower used the same phrase in return. But Gavin was correct: Most of all, Ike knew he needed Patton as a matter of military effectiveness.

  Ike’s appreciation of his old friend would always be far more limited than that of German officers, who reportedly saw Patton as one of the best overall Allied generals. “He is the most modern general and the best commander of armored and infantry combined,” a German prisoner of war, Lt. Col. Freiherr von Wangenheim, told his captors.

  Eisenhower’s final word on Patton would come more than two decades later, in his last memoir, At Ease. There he repeatedly praised Patton as “a master of fast and overwhelming pursuit” and “the finest leader in military pursuit that the United States Army has known.” It is a revealing superlative, at once lofty and limited. That is, he calls Patton the best, but at something that is described narrowly. He doesn’t call Patton the best general or the best combat leader, nor even the best at waging offensive warfare; he makes it clear that in his view Patton excelled at the single task of hounding a retreating enemy. Narrow as that mission is, it was precisely the job the American military faced in Europe in late 1944 and early 1945, and that is likely the primary reason Patton was never sent home in disgrace. On balance, Eisenhower was right to keep him. And the modern American military probably is worse for not having a few senior commanders with a dose of Patton’s dynamism and color in them.

  CHAPTER 4

  Mark Clark

  The man in the middle

  Like Patton, Lt. Gen. Mark Clark was close to Eisenhower, but he was far less effective on the battlefield. Clark was also a difficult man to like. “It makes my flesh creep to be with him,” Patton once wrote in his diary. Ten months later Patton noted that “anyone who serves under Clark is always in danger.” As the American commander in the secondary theater of Italy in 1943 and 1944, Clark fired two corps commanders—that is, generals overseeing groups of divisions. A strong case can be made that, if someone had to go, it was Clark who should have been relieved rather than his two subordinates. He was, perhaps, never quite bad enough to relieve but not quite good enough to admire.

  Patton was not always a reliable reporter, but his wariness of Clark was borne out in Italy in the fall of 1943 and the following winter. Following the Sicily campaign, American and British forces, on September 9, 1943, landed at Salerno, on the Italian mainland about thirty miles southeast of Naples. It was Clark’s first battle command of the war, and, by his own account, the assault was a “near disaster.” By the standards of the German army, the counterattack was not particularly fierce. Nonetheless, by September 12 it had driven Clark toward panic. He feared his men might be pushed back to the sea and contemplated ordering the destruction of the mountains of food, vehicles, gasoline, ammunition, and other supplies that had been landed on the beach.

  Others were less shaken. When Clark told Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton, the doughty commander of the 45th Division, that he was considering pulling out, Middleton gave him a stiffening response: “Mark, leave enough ammunition and supplies [for my division]. The Forty-fifth is staying.” Upon getting wind of Clark’s panicky thoughts, British Gen. Harold Alexander, his British superior, cracked his uniform pants with his swagger stick and said, “Never do, never do.” He ordered, “There will be no evacuation. Now we’ll proceed from there.” That put an end to Clark’s dalliance with withdrawal.

  But Clark needed to settle blame. He called Maj. Gen. Ernest “Mike” Dawley, commander of Clark’s VI Corps, who had set up a headquarters in a tobacco barn. Dawley told him that German forces had broken through his lines and were fanning out across the American rear, an extremely dangerous situation.

  “What are you going to do about it?” Clark asked.

  “Nothing,” replied Dawley, according to Clark’s account. “I have no reserves. All I have got is a prayer.”

  Clark was disturbed by that response, he wrote later, but put it aside for about a week, until the situation stabilized. Clark’s own memoir of World War II is one of the least informative to emerge from the war, tending to be more notable for its omissions than for its few revelations. His account of this incident is consistent with that pattern. He leaves out a key development: that his own superior, Alexander, said to him about Dawley, “I do not want to interfere with your business, but I have some ten years’ experience in this game of sizing up commanders. I can tell you definitely that you have a broken reed on your hands and I suggest you replace him immediately.”

  Eisenhower, who was Clark’s foremost supporter, was even blunter about Dawley’s character, asking during a battlefield visit,
“For God’s sake, Mike, how did you manage to get your troops so fucked up?” It is possible that Ike spoke so sharply in order to make it clear to others present that if anyone was to be blamed, it would not be Clark. Maj. Gen. Fred Walker, commander of the 36th Division, who earlier in his career had been a friend and mentor to Clark, believed that Dawley had “handled his job as well as or better than Clark handled his.” Eisenhower supported Clark’s decision to relieve Dawley and explained his thoughts to Marshall in a letter. “It seems that when the going is really tough he ceases to function as a commander,” Eisenhower wrote. He added that he wanted permission to demote the dismissed general. When Dawley returned to the United States, he went to see Marshall, with whom he had served in France in World War I. At first Marshall had some “misgivings” about the relief, according to Army historians’ notes of an interview with him, but Marshall “told Dawley that after listening to his story he had decided he should have been relieved sooner than he was.” Dawley had failed as a combat commander. But so had Clark.

  The best officers to serve under Clark came away with doubts about his ability to lead in combat. They noted especially that he lacked the ability to sense battlefield developments, an almost mysterious skill that is essential to generalship. “His concern for personal publicity was his greatest weakness,” wrote Lucian Truscott, one of the best American generals of World War II and an old polo pal of Patton’s. “I have sometimes thought it may have prevented him from acquiring that ‘feel of battle’ that marks all top-flight battle leaders.” Another high-profile general of World War II, James Gavin, came to a remarkably similar conclusion, telling Matthew Ridgway in a letter decades later, “I always had a feeling that . . . Mark Clark really didn’t have a true feel for what soldiers could and could not do and how much power it took to accomplish a mission.” To his opponents, the two corps under Clark’s command appeared to be experience “independent and almost unconnected leadership”—the scathing critique, by captured German intelligence officers, of Clark, who was, after all, the point of connection and coordination.

  Clark replaced Dawley as commander of VI Corps with Maj. Gen. John Lucas, who would fare no better. Lucas was an odd choice. He left the impression, wrote one historian, of being “a sensitive and compassionate man, with a faintly old-maidish quality.” His behavior in the first two months of 1944 resembled that of the tired, aging, pessimistic generals of World War I, the men Marshall had spent years trying to eliminate or, if they remained in the Army, to keep away from combat command. It is not clear how Lucas slipped through Marshall’s net, but it was likely because Marshall’s attention shifted away from Italy as planning for the D-Day landings intensified.

  In January 1944, the Allies tried to flank German resistance in southern Italy by leapfrogging up the Italian coast to Anzio, just south of Rome. Lucas confided in his diary that he had a deep ambivalence about the enterprise. After a conference with his superiors, he recorded that “I felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter.” The same month, he noted, “I will do what I am ordered to do but these ‘Battles of Little Big Horn’ aren’t much fun and a failure now would ruin Clark, kill many of my men, and certainly prolong the war.” This was not a good frame of mind in which to take on the Germans. Believing his force to be undermanned, Lucas operated cautiously. Despite achieving complete surprise and managing a virtually unopposed amphibious landing, Lucas chose not to push from the beach toward the inland hills, where he would have held the high ground. His view was that he might have been able to take the hills before him, but he would not have been able to hold them. Instead he began digging in and bringing in supplies. “The strain of a thing like this is a terrible burden,” Lucas wrote in his diary. “Who the hell wants to be a general.”

  Anzio proved to be an even worse mess than Salerno. It was a bloody stalemate that, Eisenhower later wrote, was as close as Allied forces would come in World War II to the “draining sore” of Gallipoli in the First World War. Marshall privately believed that the British forces at Anzio were worn out and demoralized, telling Army historians years later that they “simply had no punch.” This was, he added, a curious reversal from two years earlier in North Africa, where the British had been so contemptuous of the Americans. “But in Italy the situation was quite the other way,” he told the historians. “The American troops had learned, and the British divisions were exhausted; they had no fight left in them. The situation was now flowing the other way with American divisions improving and British deteriorating.”

  Clark’s approach in a crisis tended to be to blame everyone but himself. Confronted with the mess at Anzio, he remained true to form, advising Lucas to be cautious, then faulting him for taking that advice. At a meeting in late January 1944, with the attack bogged down, Clark denounced his division commanders for making poor planning decisions. Lucas stepped up and said that as corps commander Clark had approved those plans and that he should take the blame. Clark ignored Lucas and next attacked Col. William Darby and Maj. Gen. Lucian Truscott for their handling of a Ranger battalion that had been wiped out while trying to break through German lines. Truscott tartly responded that he had organized the original Ranger battalion and that he and Darby probably understood Ranger capabilities better than anyone else in the Army. “That ended the matter,” Truscott remembered.

  If Clark would not take responsibility for the failed assault, someone else would have to. On February 22, one month after the landing, Lucas received a message from Clark. “He arrives today with eight generals,” Lucas wrote in the last entry in his combat diary. “What the hell.” Clark was coming to dump him and replace him with Truscott.

  It was not clear that Lucas would have succeeded had he pushed inland, but his relief was seen by his peers as justified simply because he had not tried. However, there is no evidence that Clark encouraged him to move inland, and much evidence that Clark counseled against it. Perhaps reflecting some embarrassment at scapegoating Lucas, Clark made no mention of the firing in his own diary. “In one paragraph the commander of VI Corps had been John Lucas, in the next it is Lucian Truscott,” British historian Lloyd Clark noted archly. Gen. Clark later wrote that he fired Lucas at the behest of the British, but added that he agreed with the move. “My own feeling was that Johnny Lucas was ill—tired physically and mentally,” he wrote. Truscott would write that seeing his old friend Lucas ejected “was one of my saddest experiences of the war.”

  British Maj. Gen. Julian Thompson, author of one of the most illuminating modern studies of Lucas at Anzio, concluded that the firing of Lucas was unfair yet also the right thing to do. That is, he explained, given how fundamentally the Anzio operation was misconceived and manned, it was unlikely that another commander would have done much better. Yet, he continued, given Lucas’s uninspiring command style, “his removal was both necessary and timely, not for what had gone before, but for what was to come: three months of defensive battles, followed by hard fighting to break out.” Given all that, Thompson, who led a commando brigade in the Falklands War in the spring of 1982, still came to the conclusion that Anzio, while poorly conceived and executed as a tactical operation, was nonetheless a strategic success, because it forced the Germans to shift troops from France to central Italy. Five months later, when the Allies invaded northwestern France, this made a difference.

  Whatever Clark’s motivation, his removal of Lucas soon was justified by the results. Truscott quickly proved to be a far more dynamic commander than his predecessor. He got out and about, visited frontline units, and rebuilt British trust in American command. “Unlike Lucas, who had not often ventured out of his vaulted wine-cellar headquarters and who even on his infrequent visits to the troops had failed to project an image of confidence and optimism, Truscott produced the required emotional response,” wrote historian Martin Blumenson. Even so, it would take another three months for the Allies to drive the forty miles to Rome.

  Disliked and distrusted by subord
inates and superiors alike, the querulous Clark should have been removed from his position. But British officers were reluctant to move against him without American support, and American officers were wary of doing so because of Clark’s close relationship with Ike. Also, there was no obvious replacement available for Clark. “He thinks he is God Almighty,” one American general, Jacob Devers, told a British colleague. “He’s a headache to me and I would relieve him if I could, but I can’t.” Clark, the untouchable mediocrity, seems to represent a flaw in the Marshall system, in which politics and personal relationships combined to stymie moves that should have been made.

  The one general who seemed to like having Clark around was his foe in Italy, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who early on detected Clark’s aversion to risk and would use that understanding to his advantage for months. The irony of this was that, of the two generals who most enjoyed Ike’s protection, one was Patton, whom the Germans feared most of all the Americans facing them, and the other was Clark, whom they welcomed as their opposition.

  Unlike some generals, Clark has a reputation that has not improved with the passage of time. “Clark proved one of the more disappointing U.S. commanders of the war,” concluded Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, two leading American military historians, who found him “ambitious, ruthless with subordinates, profligate with the lives of his soldiers, unsympathetic to the difficulties of other Allied armies, and more impressed with style than substance.” It was a worrisome sign for the future of the U.S. Army that in a war in which dozens of generals were fired, Clark was not. There is much more of Clark than there is of Patton in today’s generals.