The Generals Read online

  That question haunted me on the flight home from Sicily to Washington, D.C.: Why do we treat our generals differently today, and what does that mean for the conduct of our wars—and for our nation? Trying to find the answer launched me on four years of research about American generalship from the beginning of World War II to the present. It eventually led me to the story of DePuy and the 90th Division, which in turn led me to write this book. What I found was a part of American military culture that has now been lost. During World War II, top officials expected some generals to fail in combat and were prepared to remove them when that happened. The personalities of these generals mattered enormously, and the chief of staff of the Army, George C. Marshall, devoted much effort to finding the right men for the jobs at hand. When some did not work out, they were removed quickly—but often given another chance in a different job.

  This is a story about a remarkable group of men, the Army general officers of the past three-quarters of a century, and the wars they fought. Each of these men was given powers we accord to few: responsibilities for saving lives and for taking lives; power over promotion and demotion; the responsibility to advise presidents on our most fundamental national issues; and—perhaps most valued by these Army general officers—the responsibility and the privilege of shaping their own institution by deciding how to train, select, and sometimes discard their peers.

  George Marshall. Dwight Eisenhower. Terry Allen. Douglas MacArthur. Matthew Ridgway. Maxwell Taylor. William Westmoreland. William DePuy. William “Ray” Peers. Colin Powell. Norman Schwarzkopf. Tommy Franks. Ricardo Sanchez. George Casey. David Petraeus. It is evident that each and every one of these men loved the Army—and, even more than with most institutions, derived their personal as well as professional identities from it. Despite being shaped by the institution, all of them remained recognizable individuals, some of them extraordinary. “Personality plays a tremendous part in war,” George Patton once observed, and that certainly is true of the modern American armed forces, Patton himself being a primary example.

  Generals are born, and generals are made. The promotion from colonel to brigadier (or one-star) general is one of the largest psychological leaps an officer can take. It is richly symbolic: The promoted officer removes from his or her collar the insignia of an Army branch (the crossed rifles of infantry, for example, or the tiny triple-turreted castle of engineers) and puts on a single star. As brigadier generals, the newly promoted officers are instructed in a special course—they no longer represent a part of the Army, but now are the stewards of the entire service. As members of the Army’s select few, they are expected to control and coordinate different branches, such as artillery, cavalry, and engineers—that is, to become generalists.

  It is difficult to speak with much authority about that process of promotion to brigadier general, which remains largely the realm of rumor and speculation. The deliberations of promotion boards remain the holy of U.S. military holies, more closely held than the secrets of the nation’s nuclear arsenal. But it is possible to look at who was selected, and what sorts of officers rose during different periods. It also is possible to look in detail at the training and education of general officers and at how different personalities struggled to change those processes in decadelong internal fights that did much to shape the future of the Army. From that examination we can see how the institutional choices of the past have shaped the conduct of our wars today.

  Most of all, we can study how generals performed in combat command. Different traits are required for different tasks. George Marshall had the military insight to know that at the top of the Allied military in Europe, overseeing the largest armed force in history, he would need an indefatigable team player with balanced judgment. He also had the skill to find the officer who could fit that bill, plucking Dwight Eisenhower from his post as executive officer of an infantry regiment to groom him for that unprecedented task, in which Ike eventually would wear five stars. Eisenhower, in turn, recognized that George Patton could excel in the battlefield task of pursuing the Germans across northwestern Europe. Had the two generals been reversed in their roles, as their relative seniority in service would have dictated, the history of World War II likely would be different.

  The qualities that are valued change, partly because the circumstances of war change, partly because tastes change. The Army at various times has screened out certain qualities and decided that other qualities are indispensable. For example, George Marshall and his senior subordinates valued aggressiveness and cooperation—but Marshall was more inclined, on balance, to favor the aggressive officer, such as Terry Allen, while the senior subordinates, especially Bradley and Eisenhower, increasingly wanted cooperative generals who could be part of a larger team. During the 1950s, the Army especially seemed to value conformists. In the late 1980s and the 1990s, Army leaders talked incessantly about “warfighters.” In fact, that turned out to be a misnomer, because they produced a generation of tacticians who knew how to fight battles but who apparently lacked the strategic ability to fight and conclude wars.

  Despite these changes, there are traits that all generals must possess. These are characteristics often found in the outlines of the Marshall system, the characteristics he prized. They are still visible in today’s generals. The same sorts of people—energetic, determined team players—tend to be chosen to lead the military, for what they do is essentially the same. Being a general usually involves being able to impose one’s will on a large organization engaged in the most stressful of human activities. It is almost always driven by the twofold ability first to anticipate problems and devise solutions and then to get people to execute the resulting plans.

  Yet the way in which the generals themselves are managed has fundamentally shifted since World War II. Marshall saw relief as a natural part of generalship. Firing, like hiring, was simply one of the basic tasks of the senior managers. It was inevitable when selecting human beings for extraordinarily complex and difficult jobs that some percentage would fail. But he did not see it, usually, as disgraceful. On his watch, relief usually was not a discharge from the service but a reassignment.

  The politics of relief are complex. In World War II, two senior generals who arguably might have been relieved were kept in place, at least partly for political reasons: Douglas MacArthur and Bernard Law Montgomery. Similarly, it would prove more difficult to relieve generals in small, unpopular wars. So in the latter part of the Korean War and in our wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, relief of generals by other generals became all but extinct. To a large degree, this has made the Marshall system far less effective: Without the accountability that the prospect of relief brings, the Marshallian approach to leadership did not work nearly as well, as we were to see in Vietnam and Iraq. So while in World War II the firing of a general was seen as a sign that the system was working as planned, now, in the rare instances when it does occur, it tends to be seen, especially inside the Army, as a sign that the system somehow has failed.

  The Army’s shift away from swift dismissal in our recent wars has gone all but unnoticed, and so major questions about our military have been neglected: How and why did we lose the long-standing practice of relieving generals for failure? Why has accountability declined? And is it connected to the decline in the operational competence of American generals? That is, how did we go from a tough-minded thinker like George Marshall, who made his reputation in part by speaking truth to power, to eminently pliable chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff such as Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman from 2001 to 2005, and his successor, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, who was chairman for two years after him?

  Answering these questions promises a way to better understand why our recent wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been so long and frustrating.

  • • •

  While touching on other services, this book focuses most on the handling of Army generals, mainly but not exclusively during wartime
. Moreover, in discussing World War II, this study disproportionately dwells on the U.S. Army in Europe, because it was the incubator of the postwar Army, the theater of combat service for the six Army chiefs who ran the service from 1945 to 1960, as well as for the generals who oversaw the Vietnam War.

  Of all the nation’s armed forces, the Army arguably is the dominant service, the one around which the national defense still is constructed. Over the past decade, for example, more Army troops have been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan than troops from the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps combined. In addition, there is less to say about the history of leadership in the other services. The Navy follows an entirely different, seafaring custom in handling commanders, and the Marines tend to act within that nautical tradition. The Air Force, having been established in 1947, is too young to have developed many distinct, long-lasting traditions. It had one period of being dominated by bomber pilots, then a second of being overseen by fighter pilots. Now it appears to be at the beginning of a new, indeterminate period, in which its current leader, Gen. Norton Schwartz, is a former C-130 Special Operations aircraft pilot, and it faces the proliferation of drone aircraft, remotely piloted vehicles that could radically change the Air Force’s young culture in unpredictable ways.

  When it moves beyond World War II, this book looks less at relief, because there was less of it going on, and instead focuses on how the Army tried to compensate for that lack in several ways, but primarily with additional supervision—often referred to by those under supervision as “micromanagement.” The second half of the book, covering the era when the Army all but stopped relieving generals, also shows the next step: When the military does not relieve senior generals, civilian officials will. The vicissitudes of the relationship between generals and their civilian overseers are a secondary theme of the book, because the quality of civil-military discourse is often a sign of whether a war is being conducted effectively, one of the few available leading indicators. When presidents and generals speak clearly to one another, in an atmosphere of candor and trust, wars tend to be fought more effectively than when officials mislead one another or simply do not deal among themselves in a straightforward manner that surfaces and examines differences and assumptions. The foremost example of this is the distrustful relationship that existed between Lyndon Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War.

  When, after the debacle of Vietnam, the Army began rebuilding, it had to rely more on two other critical tools of management: training and education. In the absence of relief as a tool, these became hugely important in shaping the United States Army, which is one of our nation’s largest, most interesting, and most important institutions. When we understand the Army, and especially the changes in its generals, we will better understand where we are as a nation and why we have fought our wars the way we have in the era of the American superpower, from Sicily and Normandy to Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul.

  PART I

  WORLD WAR II

  The Army of 1939 was a small, weak force of 197,000 men, “not even a third-rate military power,” as Gen. George Marshall later put it in an official Pentagon report. The Army had introduced a new semi-automatic rifle, the M1 Garand, but most soldiers still were issued the 1903 Springfield. Of the nine infantry divisions the Army had on paper, only three had divisional strengths, while six were actually weak brigades. By September 1944 the Army would number almost eight million and would have forty divisions in Europe and the Mediterranean and twenty-one in the Pacific.

  CHAPTER 1

  General George C. Marshall

  The leader

  It is not mentioned much nowadays that for the United States, World War II began with a series of dismissals across the top ranks of the military. Less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Adm. Husband Kimmel and Army Lt. Gen. Walter Short were jettisoned from their posts atop the American military establishment in the Pacific, along with Maj. Gen. Frederick Martin, Short’s air commander. Even less remembered is that Kimmel, who once had been an aide to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, held the post only because his predecessor, Adm. James Richardson, had been fired by the president a year earlier. The following year, the commander of one of the first Army divisions to fight the Japanese, the 32nd Division’s Maj. Gen. Edwin Harding, was relieved by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, along with many of his regimental and battalion commanders. When Lt. Gen. George Kenney arrived to take over the air operation in the Pacific in mid-1942, his first act was to remove five generals he deemed to be “deadwood,” along with forty colonels and lieutenant colonels. Adm. Harold Stark, the Navy’s top officer, was ousted from his post in March 1942. He was hardly alone: One-third of the Navy’s submarine captains were relieved during the first year of the war. On the North African front, where American soldiers first fought the Germans, the senior tactical commander of those forces, Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, was fired.

  The officer presiding over this dynamic and ruthless system of personnel management was Gen. George C. Marshall, who back in Washington was winnowing the ranks of the Army, forcing dozens of generals into retirement because he believed they were too old and lacking in energy to lead soldiers in combat.

  “I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt remarked to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower one day in Tunisia during World War II. FDR was correct. Though rarely memorialized by the public today, George Marshall not only was the senior American general of World War II; he was, effectively, the founding father of the modern American armed forces. Under him, the United States for the first time developed a superpower military, a status it has retained for the past seven decades. Far more than George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, or even Dwight Eisenhower, this “coolly impersonal” man (as his subordinate Albert Wedemeyer called him) shaped the military of his time so profoundly that his work lives on into the twenty-first century, sometimes evident in the way Army leaders have operated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, Marshall’s unusual and very American concept of what sort of person constitutes a good general still influences the promotions today’s leaders bestow on younger officers. It would be difficult to understand today’s Army without knowledge of Marshall’s career—and especially his powerful sense of duty and honor.

  Marshall formally became chief of staff of the U.S. Army on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. “Things look very disturbing in the world this morning,” he wrote in a thank-you note to George Patton’s wife. Such understatement reflected the man. It is not unfair to call Marshall colorless. He might have taken it as a compliment, as an implicit recognition that he did his duty even at the cost of personal advancement. He intentionally left no memoir of his service leading the military during the nation’s greatest war. There is no weapon or installation named for him, as there is a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and an Abrams tank. Indeed, in the snowy reaches of remote northern New York, there is even a Fort Drum, honoring Gen. Hugh Drum, the “stubborn, pompous, occasionally ignorant” officer who inexplicably had been Marshall’s leading rival for the Army’s top slot. There is no Fort Marshall.

  George Marshall was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. In 1901, he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, where he marched before Stonewall Jackson’s widow. He soon joined the Army, which then was recovering from its low ebb of the 1890s, the decade when the frontier officially closed and the last of the Indian wars ended. The Army expanded rapidly in the wake of the Spanish–American War of 1898, almost quadrupling in size to 100,000. As part of that growth, George Marshall received his commission. In this newly energized force, he stood out as a young officer. Marshall was temporarily posted to Fort Douglas, Utah—originally placed on a hillside overlooking Salt Lake City to keep an eye on Brigham Young’s nascent and hostile Mormon empire. One of his commanders there was Lt. Col. Johnson Hagoo
d. When asked in an evaluation form if he would like to have Marshall serve under him, Hagood, who himself would rise to major general, wrote in December 1916, “Yes, but I would prefer to serve under his command.”

  Marshall and the Great War

  The formative event of Marshall’s life would be World War I. Several years after that conflict began, the United States sent into it a constabulary military whose sole experience with large-scale industrial-era combat had been the Civil War, a conflict the Europeans—correctly or not—perceived as a generally amateurish domestic brawl. The U.S. Army was unprepared at the outset of the Great War and was not much better at its close, when, as historian Conrad Crane put it, “foreign leaders still considered the American Expeditionary Forces poorly organized and ignorant of modern warfare.”

  The United States declared war in April 1917, when the war had been under way for more than thirty months, and the first large groups of draftees reported for duty only in September of that year. The initial American casualties came in November, and it took many more months after that first foray to get large numbers of American troops into combat. The American buildup may have been key to the outcome of the war, because it encouraged the Allies to hold on, but the first solely American offensive was not launched until September 1918. The armistice was declared just eight weeks later. For the Army as a whole, the war was too brief a venture to be transformative, but it was a life-changing experience for some officers in the middle of it, notably George Marshall.