The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The Marshall template, with its studied distance from politics, may have put a stake through the heart of the general as politician. Since Eisenhower, generals who have toyed with running for president have been humiliated in the primaries, emerging from the experience somehow diminished in the public eye. This has been true in both major American political parties, as evidenced by the fizzled presidential campaigns of Gen. Alexander Haig Jr. as a Republican in 1988 and of Gen. Wesley Clark as a Democrat in 2004. In 1968, retired Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay also ran for national office but had no chance of winning as the running mate on the independent ticket of Alabama’s former segregationist governor, George Wallace. At the state level, generals also have fared poorly. In 1962, Maj. Gen. Edwin Walker, having resigned from the Army after getting in trouble for indoctrinating his troops in the 24th Infantry Division with literature drawn from the John Birch Society, ran for governor of Texas but came in sixth and last in the Republican primary. (Early in 1963, he was slightly wounded in a sniper shooting by Lee Harvey Oswald, who according to the Warren Commission used the same rifle he would use later that year to kill President Kennedy.) In 1974, Gen. William Westmoreland lost in South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial primary. In 2011, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez entered the campaign for the Democratic nomination for senator from Texas but, after raising few funds, dropped out before the primary vote.

  The legacy of the Marshall system

  George Marshall set the template, and Dwight Eisenhower implemented it, but it may be Omar Bradley’s personality that emerged dominant in the postwar Army. Not long after the war ended, the first two men moved on, with Bradley succeeding Eisenhower as chief of staff of the Army in 1948 and then becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff a year later. This was a mixed blessing. Even if he was never quite the beloved “GI’s general” presented by wartime journalist Ernie Pyle, Bradley was an even-tempered man with a reputation for decency in his personal interactions. Yet during the war he had run an unhappy headquarters, one that during 1944–45 had developed a reputation for “irritable suspiciousness,” as the military historian Russell Weigley put it.

  Looking back from a perspective of several decades, Weigley judged Bradley to have been “merely competent.” In 1944–45, Bradley presided over a force enjoying extreme advantages. He had more men than his foe, and his force was largely a model of tactical efficiency, with trained and disciplined teamwork between the combat arms. The West Wall, or Siegfried Line, was breached by skilled attacks in which, Weigley noted, “forward observers would bring down artillery on a pillbox to clear the enemy from subsidiary positions; tanks would then blast entrances and apertures with armor-piercing ammunition; infantry would close in, at which point the Germans frequently surrendered.” Bradley enjoyed a twenty-to-one advantage in tanks. He had even more overwhelming air superiority, with some 13,000 Allied fighters and bombers flying against just 573 serviceable Luftwaffe aircraft.

  Despite his advantages, Bradley took months to force his surrounded, outnumbered foe to capitulate. Lt. Gen. Daniel Bolger, who has commanded the NATO transition forces in Afghanistan since 2011, wrote that the Army under Bradley had scored many successes, but also recorded

  a disturbing number of botched battles and, especially, missed chances. The hellish butchery in the Normandy bocage, the incomplete Falaise encirclement, the costly confusion before the West Wall in the autumn, the bloody fumbling about in the Huertgen Forest, the shocking initial surprise in the Ardennes and the eventual unwillingness to pinch off the forces in that German salient, the backing and filling in the face of the Remagen bridgehead opportunity—together form a distressing litany that spans the entire length of the campaign.

  For Eisenhower, the lesson of the war was that cooperation was more important than anything else. He emphasized this in the introduction to The True Glory, a joint British-American documentary about how the European war had been waged, of which he was essentially the producer. “Teamwork wins wars,” stated a visibly tired Ike, the skin under his eyes lined and sagging, with no sign of his customary grin. “I mean teamwork among nations, services, and men, all the way down the line, from the GI, and the Tommies, to us brass hats.” It was not merely a historical observation, because he made that statement after V-E Day but before the end of the Pacific War, which some military planners thought might continue for several more years.

  In the afterglow of victory, the potential pitfalls of this capable, somewhat corporate model of generalship were less noticed. The flaws, when they emerged, largely would be of the kind that George Patton saw in Bradley. “I wish he had a little daring,” Patton wrote in October 1944. The nature of American military leadership in 1944 and 1945, Weigley agreed, amounted to “unimaginative caution. American generalship by and large was competent but addicted to playing it safe.” As Martin Blumenson, a World War II veteran who became a specialist in the history of the European theater in that conflict, would put it, the record of American leadership in Europe “is essentially bland and plodding. The commanders were generally workmanlike rather than bold, prudent rather than daring.” James Gavin concluded that the war could have been ended months earlier, “at considerably less cost in blood and resources, if they were willing to take more chances.”

  It was a mixed legacy. Under the sort of leadership favored by Bradley, Bolger concluded, “one avoids losing, but one can also avoid winning by playing it safe.” That is an ominous sentence, given the risk-averse approach often taken by American generals in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq in subsequent decades and the record of stalemates and worse that they tended to produce.

  Perhaps those who rose highest in World War II were organization men. But for the most part they were members of a successful organization, with the failures among them weeded out instead of coddled and covered up. That would not be the case in our subsequent wars, in which it would be more difficult to know what victory looked like or even whether it was achievable.

  PART II

  THE KOREAN WAR

  By 1948 the Army was not even a skeleton of the force that so recently had played a major role in winning World War II. It had 555,000 soldiers and, worse, from those it could wring only two and one-third divisions deemed ready for combat. About half of its soldiers were engaged in occupying Germany and Japan as well as Austria, southern Korea, and Trieste, Italy. In Korea in 1950, the Army that had helped defeat the Nazis and the Empire of Japan would be swatted aside by the Korean People’s Army, which threatened to drive it into the sea.

  CHAPTER 9

  William Dean and Douglas MacArthur

  Two generals self-destruct

  T he Korean War began, in June 1950, with the destruction of two American generals—one on the battlefield, the other in top command. Now called by some the “forgotten war,” Korea also would bring two of history’s finest episodes of American military leadership, the first involving Marine Maj. Gen. O. P. Smith and the second, Army Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway.

  Few remember how disastrous that first phase of the Korean War was—more humiliating than the first rough months of World War II and in some ways even worse than the dismaying ending of the Vietnam War. Not once but twice, American forces were hurled southward down the peninsula, both times by Asian “peasant” armies (first North Korean and, six months later, Chinese) that often lacked heavy artillery pieces and modern tanks, let alone naval gunfire and logistical support. To a surprising degree, American troops were outmatched in that most basic and essential military element: combat leadership. What’s more, these setbacks came just five years after the global triumph of World War II.

  One of the first lessons of the Korean War was seeing just how much the American military had deteriorated in the interim. As a result of postwar changes in personnel policy as well as Truman Administration policies that shortchanged the U.S. military, the Army entered the Korean War “not prepared mentally, physically, or otherwise for war,” Clay Blair wr
ote, in one of the best histories of the conflict, with leadership that “at the army, corps, division, regiment and battalion levels was overaged, inexperienced, often incompetent, and not physically capable of coping with the rigorous climate of Korea.”

  By the time the war ended, in 1953, the Marshall approach to generalship had severely eroded. This was in part because removing senior officers in a small, unpopular war proved politically difficult. A wave of high-level reliefs early in the war provoked fear at the top of the Army that more such actions would lead Congress to ask uncomfortable questions. One must wonder about a system that seemingly was willing to accept the disastrous consequences of leaving unfit generals in command of American troops in order to avoid difficult inquiries from members of Congress.

  The destruction of General Dean

  The harrowing tale of Maj. Gen. William Dean, commander of the first division to be committed to combat in Korea, illustrates by extreme example the plight of American military leaders at the outset of the war. Korea had been a Japanese colony until the end of World War II, when Soviet forces occupied its north and American forces its south. In 1948, the country was divided into competing regimes. Two years later, when the Communist North invaded the South, Dean was leading the 24th Infantry Division, based in Japan. The first American in Japan to actually learn of the invasion was not Gen. Dean but a young lieutenant named Alexander Haig Jr., the future general and secretary of state, who happened to be the officer on duty at MacArthur’s headquarters, in Tokyo, on the quiet Sunday morning of June 25, 1950.

  Dean arrived in Korea on July 3 and was thrust into an impossible situation. North Korean forces were driving into the South, South Korean soldiers were fleeing across the front, and the roads were clogged with refugees. American forces hurried to the front, only to find that they were not just undertrained but actually overmatched in firepower. On the afternoon of July 7, Dean dismissed the colonel leading the 34th Infantry Regiment and handed the command over to his longtime friend Col. Robert Martin, “one man who could read my thoughts even before I said them out loud.” The next day, a North Korean tank rounded a corner and fired its 85-millimeter gun from twenty-five feet away, cutting Martin in half. American forces began pulling back quickly.

  Dean was a decent man, but in the following days he failed as a general. Instead of trying to bring some order to the retreat, as was his responsibility, he essentially demoted himself to a freelance squad leader, leading bazooka teams out to go after individual targets. At one point he became so frustrated that he banged away at a passing North Korean tank with his .45 pistol. He wound up lost and wandering in the hills for thirty-five days, begging food off peasants who stumbled across his hiding places, until finally he was captured, tired and demoralized. “You have to remember that all American generals are not as dumb as I am,” he told one of his North Korean interrogators. “You just happened to catch the dumbest.” Forbidden to stand or lie down by his captors for much of the time, he would sit with his back against a mud wall and replay in his mind again and again his short combat campaign. In his defense, he at least had been in the thick of things. Lt. Col. Harold Johnson, who later became Army chief of staff, wrote to his mother that during his first week of fighting in Korea, “I didn’t see any generals unless I went to the rear a couple of miles.” Johnson’s regimental commander visited his command post only once in the two months before Johnson was transferred to another position.

  Released in September 1953, Dean learned that he had been awarded the Medal of Honor. Unlike MacArthur in World War II, he had the integrity to express embarrassment over it. “There were heroes in Korea, but I was not one of them,” he wrote with painful honesty. “There were brilliant commanders, but I was a general captured because he took a wrong road.” As for the medal, he continued, “I come close to shame when I think about the men who did better jobs—some who died doing them—and did not get recognition. I wouldn’t have awarded myself a wooden star for what I did as a commander.”

  He was all but destroyed by the experience. Henry Emerson, a young officer who had hunted with Gen. Dean before the war, was shocked when, a few years after the war, he saw the man speak at the Infantry School at Fort Benning:

  I didn’t recognize him. He looked 50 years older, gaunt, and he started to talk, and it was immediately evident that he was crazy. I mean, it was just incoherent what he was saying. He read us a poem of what was about 20 verses that he had written, and it was called—you never forget something like this—Just a Little Sugar in the Mush. . . . It went on and on and on, and actually some of the guys next to me in the Advanced Class got to giggling. . . . So after it was over, they said General Dean would be glad to shake hands with anyone that served with him. Six or seven guys went up there, and I deliberately got last in the line and I got up to him and I saluted and shook his hand and said, “General Dean, I’m Hank Emerson, Commander from Kangnung and Outpost 24. We goose hunted together.” He looked at me like it didn’t register at all. He wasn’t drooling out of the mouth, but was right next to that. He didn’t know me from the man in the moon. I wanted to cry. I wanted to give him a hug. I didn’t know what to do.

  Not long after Dean was captured, his competent but cantankerous boss, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, came close to relief. Truman had sent Ridgway and Averell Harriman, then a presidential assistant, to meet with MacArthur. None of the three was satisfied with Walker’s performance as the overall ground commander in Korea, but no one wanted to bring it up. “Unknown to either Harriman or Ridgway, at this time MacArthur’s confidence in Walker, steadily undermined by Ned Almond, had eroded almost completely,” wrote Clay Blair, referring to Maj. Gen. Edward Almond, MacArthur’s favorite commander in Korea. MacArthur brought up the subject of removing Walker again in September, when he was riding high, not long after the Inchon landings on the west coast led to the recapture of the South Korean capital of Seoul. MacArthur wondered aloud to subordinate commanders whether a more forceful ground commander was needed.

  There were of course poor commanders in World War II, but it is hard to imagine them remaining in command as long as some did in Korea. Consider the case of Lt. Col. Melvin Blair, who, when his battalion of the 24th Infantry Regiment was hit hard, fled and watched from afar as his unit was cut up. He later accused his soldiers of running away. Blair was eventually relieved. He retired from the Army in 1954 but would make headlines in 1957 when he attempted an armed robbery of more than $40,000 from the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am Golf Championship. A year later, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five to twenty years but was paroled after serving fourteen months.

  MacArthur’s downfall

  The first year of the Korean War was also the last of Douglas MacArthur’s astonishing forty-four years as a senior military commander. Vain and mendacious, MacArthur was always an erratic general, but he was often at his worst at the beginnings of wars, when he tended to be slow to grasp the situation. In December 1941, even after being informed of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he failed to disperse American aircraft on the ground in the Philippines, where he was in command, resulting in the loss of almost all his advanced warplanes, which were P-40 fighters and B-17 bombers. Similarly, in June 1950, he badly underestimated North Korean capabilities. He compounded misunderstanding with imprudence in his handling of forces and arrogance in his dealings with his superiors in Washington. His defenders maintain that he had successfully overseen the occupation of Japan (although it is not clear that another general could not have done just as well) and then been almost alone in wanting to land troops at Inchon, on Korea’s west coast (though such a landing might have been less chancy and equally successful had it been carried out farther south on the coast, where it could have had the same effect of carrying the fight into the rear areas of overextended North Korean forces).

  By 1950 MacArthur was seventy years old, well past his prime. But if his physical powers were waning, his sense of s
elf-importance was as robust as ever. During World War II, he could be overbearing even with Marshall and President Roosevelt. Marshall would recount in Washington an exchange he’d had with MacArthur one day during World War II in which MacArthur referred to his staff, and Marshall responded, “General, you don’t have a staff, you have a court.” In the new war, MacArthur reported to men he hardly seemed to consider peers. The mystery of MacArthur in the Korean War is not that he was removed, but that it took so long to do so. Truman was not the first American president whose orders and policies MacArthur had crossed; he was the third, the first being Hoover, whose orders (according to Eisenhower) he had disregarded during the Bonus March, and the second being Roosevelt, whom he had attempted to intimidate soon after FDR took office.

  Also unlike in the earlier war, MacArthur held all the cards, militarily. The Americans enjoyed control of the air and the sea and possessed an array of land weapons the adversary lacked. The Americans had the ability to move armies quickly by land, sea, and air, while the North Korean army lacked almost all modern forms of support, as did the Chinese army, which would enter the war late in 1950. The Chinese force, for example, had few trucks, and about one doctor for every thirty-three thousand soldiers.