Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe

ALSO BY JONATHAN W. JORDAN

Lone Star Navy: Texas, the Fight for the Gulf of Mexico, and the Shaping of the American West

AS EDITOR

To the People of Texas: An Appeal in Vindication of His Conduct of the Navy by Commodore Edwin Ward Moore

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Jordan, Jonathan W., 1967–

Brothers, rivals, victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, and the partnership that drove the Allied conquest in Europe/Jonathan W. Jordan. p. cm.

eISBN: 978-1-101-47524-9

1. World War, 1939–1945—Campaigns—Europe. 2. United States Army—History—World War, 1939–1945. 3. Eisenhower, Dwight D. (Dwight David), 1890–1969. 4. Patton, George S. (George Smith), 1885–1945. 5. Bradley, Omar Nelson, 1893–1981. 6. Generals—United States—Biography. I. Title.

D756.J67 2011

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

ONE - A HANGOVER OF WAR

TWO - DIFFERENT PATHS

THREE - MARSHALL’S MEN

FOUR - STRIKING THE MATCH

FIVE - TRACKS IN THE DESERT

SIX - A LONG-LOST BROTHER

SEVEN - FORGING THE PARTNERSHIP

EIGHT - MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

NINE - LOOKING NORTH

TEN - UNDER FIRE

ELEVEN - CRACKS IN THE WALL

TWELVE - AVALANCHE

THIRTEEN - KNIGHT, BISHOP, ROOK

FOURTEEN - ENGLAND

FIFTEEN - FIX BAYONETS

SIXTEEN - PASSWORD: MICKEY MOUSE

SEVENTEEN - SLOW MARCH

EIGHTEEN - OPEN FOR BUSINESS

NINETEEN - WE MAY END THIS IN TEN DAYS

TWENTY - P.O.L.

TWENTY-ONE - TO THE RHINE

TWENTY-TWO - A FOREST, A CROSSROADS, AND A RIVER

TWENTY-THREE - TO THE RHINE (AGAIN)

TWENTY-FOUR - THE THOUSAND-YEAR REICH

TWENTY-FIVE - CLOSING THE SHOP

EPILOGUE

PHOTOGRAPHS

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

GLOSSARY OF SELECTED ALLIED CODE NAMES

ENDNOTE ABBREVIATIONS

ENDNOTES

PHOTO INSERT CREDITS

INDEX

To Austin, Emily, and Rachel

INTRODUCTION

THIS IS THE STORY OF THREE MEN sent to tear down an empire.

It is a story of war and politics told through the eyes of three extraordinary soldiers, eyes tinted with biases, strengths, foibles, and wisdom collected over a half century of American life. It is a story of a rich man from southern California, a poor man from the Missouri backwoods, and a middle-class man from middle-class Kansas. It is the tale of three conflicting personalities that blended together to form one of the greatest command teams ever fielded, and it is the story of a decades-old friendship that would be tragically scorched by the fires of war.

This account of the campaign to liberate Europe is drawn from the words, observations, and writings of Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton, as well as those of the many aides, staffers, superiors, secretaries, stenographers, celebrities, chauffeurs, and orderlies who walked with them through their great struggle. Because it is told through the prisms of three individuals—rather than the omniscient perspective of a twenty-first-century narrator perched atop a mountain of history books—this is in no way a complete story of that great conflict, nor is it an altogether objective one. The documented thoughts of Patton and Bradley are riddled with contradictions, as the esteem in which the trio of soldiers held one another ebbed and flowed with the conflicting tides of politics, war, and personality.

Popular images of the three protagonists—a scowling Blood and Guts Patton, the unassuming GI’s General, Omar Bradley, and the endearing, grinning photograph affixed to the slogan I LIKE IKE—are comfortably accurate in some ways. Yet they are astonishingly untrue in others. For example, Eisenhower’s explosive profanity was, word for word, at times nearly a match for Patton’s (though much less given to studied eloquence), while Bradley’s legendary calm demeanor, his associates would find, clothed a thin, troubled skin. Patton’s capacity for erudition and groveling before his superiors, meanwhile, was as pronounced as Bradley’s penchant for backbiting and ruthlessness.

Patton was fond of saying, Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. The Allied struggle against fascism bears out Patton’s theorum. The Second World War’s tumultuous events—TORCH and OVERLORD, Kasserine and the Bulge, Sicily and the Rhineland—are but reflections of the many warriors who planned and fought on those fields; warriors who brought to the battlefield their own talents, fears, flaws, and desires. The secret to the Allied victory was the patriotic and well-intentioned interplay of a cadre of talented, headstrong men who fought, deceived, schemed, bullied, and accommodated one another. It is thus the personal, sometimes dark story of three of the war’s great battle captains, recounted in their trailers, offices, and private conversations, that this book lures into the sunlight.

Because the men depicted here were, by any honest measure, a mixture of the good and the bad America offered the world in the mid–twentieth century, readers looking for an unyielding march toward greatness, or the validation or destruction of cherished public icons, will find little consistent support among the words and deeds of the three generals. They could be brilliant and selfless, and they could be shortsighted and petty. What follows, for better and worse, is a story more ambiguous, yet more resonant to the modern soul vexed with genuine troubles, insecurities, strengths, and contradictions. It is a story of the ancient struggles between friendship and duty, between ambition and sacrifice. Of brotherhood, of rivalry, and, in the end, of victory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NEARLY EVERY PERSON INTIMATELY ASSOCIATED with Generals Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton during the Second World War has passed away, and the wartime record of those three legendary men has effectively become a closed, if sometimes elusive, set. This narrative draws from thousands of pages of diaries, letters to family and friends, reports, cables, oral histories, memoirs, transcripts, maps, photographs, sound recordings, and film footage of players in this drama. Those sources could not have been accessed and blended without the generous help of many scholars, historians, and specialists. In researching this book, I have become deeply indebted to the generous staffs of the Eisenhower Library, the Library of Congress, the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, the George C. Marshall Foundation Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Patton Museum, the United States Military Academy Library, the Ohio University Library, the Cobb County Public Library, and Emory University’s Woodruff Library. To those I express my heartfelt thanks. Additionally, to Brent Howard, Jerry Morelock, John S. D. Eisenhower, Kate Jordan, Dan Crosswell, Allegra Jordan, Hal Elrod, Jim Hornfischer, Sally Jordan, Cindy Pope-Koch, Thad Wilson, LTC Andrew Ring, John Tent, and dozens of bloggers and history forum participants, I must express my deep gratitude for their generous editorial, scholarly, logistical, and commonsense help.

"The only thing worse than fighting a war with allies

is fighting a war without them."

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

PROLOGUE

DECEMBER 1944

AS THE INCISORS OF THE NAZI JAWS bit deep into the American front, a bleary-eyed Dwight Eisenhower stared at the tangle of red grease-pencil lines snaking across his smudged maps. He winced. The tall, bald general whom every man in uniform saluted was painfully aware of what those advancing red lines represented: regiments cracking, support units overrun, supplies captured, men cut down along a fifty-mile swath.

His men. Americans.

He had pored over situation maps and casualty reports for two days, and Ike Eisenhower saw in bright, vivid colors the truth he feared his lieutenants failed to grasp: that Hitler’s latest surge through the Ardennes Forest was no feint, no spoiling attack, no prelude to something else, somewhere else. It was the real show, and damned if his generals were ready for it.¹

The great German offensive, the one no one thought possible, rolled out the day Eisenhower received his fifth star. The violent surge now threatened the lives of some eighty thousand GIs who stood in the steamroller’s path. American lines began to crumble, troops scurried west, and for the first moment in a very long time, the conclusion of the war seemed in doubt. And in the midst of this growing rout, one beleaguered general from Abilene, Kansas, felt the anxious gaze of four governments reaching all the way to his headquarters outside Paris.²

The vise that gripped Ike’s stomach was nothing new. Over the past two and a half years his smooth, genial face had tightened into a pale mask, a mask etched by fatigue, depression, and anxiety. The drifting cigarette smoke parted whenever he paced, which was often. His famous grin—that resilient, human feature that had charmed politicians, journalists, and generals across three continents—looked more like a stretched facade as each hour brought fresh tidings of disaster in the Ardennes.

As he studied his maps, Ike knew the problem lay, at least in part, with his field commanders. The men were fighting like wildcats, but his field generals were stunned, reeling, almost punch-drunk from the force of Hitler’s armored thrust. If something were to be done, Ike thought, he would have to shake his lieutenants out of their stupor, regroup their forces, and get them moving east again. So on the night of December 18, he summoned his senior commanders to a conference at Twelfth Army Group headquarters at the French city of Verdun.³

The Supreme Commander left his headquarters on the morning of December 19, brown mud and gray slush spewing behind the tires of his armored Cadillac as he mulled the god-awful mess in which his army found itself. Preceded by jeeps crammed with stony-faced MPs, Eisenhower’s entourage motored down the ancient road to Verdun, the main headquarters of his senior American army group commander. The convoy passed under the old stone arch that guarded the city’s entrance and wound its way through Verdun’s narrow streets. Soon the Caddy’s wheels splashed to a muddy stop alongside an old stone barracks on the northeast edge of town.⁴

Ushered in by the commander’s orderlies, Eisenhower climbed the creaking steps into a cold, dilapidated meeting room that was as colorless as his frozen cheeks. Inside the room, amid the worn wooden table, the maps, the chairs, the papers and briefcases, he surveyed his generals.

Waiting in this collision of boardroom and crypt was Lieutenant General Omar Nelson Bradley. The tall, dark-eyed Missourian wore a grimace atop his plain but neatly pressed uniform, a dense shell jacket buttoned against the elements as he waited quietly near the center of the room.

Three years younger than his West Point classmate, General Bradley stood stiffly, his tight jaw clenched, his round, steel-rimmed glasses clouding in the frosty air. His expression gave more the appearance of a senior cadet on inspection than the general who commanded the largest army ever fielded by his nation. This hadn’t been a meeting Bradley had wanted to host; as commander of the pivotal Twelfth Army Group, it was his front being riddled by Hitler’s panzers. We had been caught flat-footed, he later admitted, and he was looking for a way out of the yawning disaster.⁵

Until recently, Bradley had been remarkably successful. He had methodically, often deftly, led the Americans from Normandy’s beaches to the German frontier with few checks and no outright defeats. His armies were almost to the Rhine River, and his superiors—both the military species and the political, pie-in-the-sky type—had been bandying talk of winning the war by Christmas, or at the very least by the early weeks of 1945. Pressure was mounting on Bradley to punch his way into the Fatherland, but with Hitler’s sword jabbing into his side, Bradley found himself groping for a way to parry the blow and resume his advance.

While Eisenhower and Bradley hovered near the room’s sole source of heat—a lukewarm potbellied stove—the impromptu headquarters began filling with drab-looking gentlemen in trench coats and field jackets. In addition to Bradley and his staff, Ike had summoned his air marshal, his senior intelligence officer, the commander of the adjoining Sixth Army Group, the commander of British ground forces, and several subordinate commanders. Around this small galaxy swirled the usual supporting cast—anonymous aides, deputies, senior staffers, all shuffling across the planked floors at the beck of their masters, rifling paper, studies, and maps, quietly conferring with one another before the meeting began.

Shortly before eleven o’clock, into the hum of discussion strode the commander of Bradley’s Third Army, Lieutenant General George S. Patton Jr., his tall brown cavalryman’s boots thudding on the floor as he entered the room. He removed his trademark steel-pot helmet to reveal a shock of fine white hair and a leathery face sagging around prominent cheekbones as his breath escaped in small white puffs.

Patton’s long stride and slight, cocky smile set him apart from the tired, cynical men who lined the table. He fished out a fat cigar from his coat pocket, elbows bent wide as he cupped smoke and match before his face. He puffed away, oblivious to the cold, his blue-gray eyes shooting across the room with the defiant confidence of a man who holds a simple, violent solution to a delicate problem that has perplexed delicate men.

With all players in attendance, Eisenhower stood up and took the floor. The present situation, he began in his sharp Midwestern twang, is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will only be cheerful faces at this conference table.⁶

Nobody budged until a high, nasal voice broke the silence.

Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ’em up and chew ’em up!

It was vintage Patton. Muted laughter rumbled around the room. Forced, nervous laughter, but laughter nonetheless. It was a start, at least, for a meeting that was in bad need of a start.

That’s fine, George, Eisenhower answered, a bit testily, but the enemy must never be allowed to cross the Meuse.

His basic point established, Ike turned to the question of how they would push back two huge panzer armies. The generals already had tentative proposals to plug the bleeding ulcer in the Allied line. Once the attackers were contained at the tip of the bulge, they decided, three divisions from Patton’s Third Army, plus another three on loan from Bradley, would hit the enemy hard from the south, smashing the Nazi columns in the flank and, God willing, their rear.

Supreme Allied Headquarters was full of smart planners, and they had come up with a smart plan. But for their smart plan to work, they needed someone to bring striking power—hard, deliberate, violent striking power—onto the battlefield. And they needed someone who believed the plan would work. So they had sent for Patton.

Turning to his old friend, Eisenhower announced his decision. George, I want you to command this move—under Brad’s supervision, of course—making a strong counterattack with at least six divisions. When can you start?

As soon as you’re finished with me.

When can you attack?

On December twenty-second, with three divisions.⁷

December 22. Three days.

A few deputies chuckled. Generals leaned back in their chairs, arms folded, eyes narrowed. Boots shuffled under the table. Bradley said nothing.

No army could do that, as everyone knew. Patton would have to pull thousands of soldiers out of a hostile line, turn every man ninety degrees, secure their flanks against attack, then find roads, transfer stockpiles, designate jump-off points, print new maps, and move thousands of frozen, grumbling GIs and their vehicles, guns, pots, pans, food, and telephone wires over a hundred miles of ice and slush. Patton’s blunt promise, they knew, was more showboating from a man whose showboating had already alienated most of Eisenhower’s better generals—not least of all Patton’s former understudy, General Bradley.⁸

Ike snapped back in a tone Patton had heard many times before. Don’t be fatuous, George, he said. If you try to go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready and you’ll go piecemeal. Ike told Patton he wanted a one-day delay in the attack, to make sure his men were ready to launch a coordinated offensive.⁹

Patton said nothing. Through painful experience, he had learned to keep his mouth shut at times like this—times when that sharp, preemptive Eisenhower voice told him there would be no discussion.

But inside, Patton knew he was right. He had spent days studying the enemy’s position along the northern frontier, and before leaving his headquarters at Nancy, he had instructed his staff to prepare three plans, one of which included an all-out drive through Luxembourg. One call to headquarters—one code word—would send three divisions and a cavalry regiment up the snow-choked roads and into the exposed German flank.¹⁰

Having set Patton on a proper timetable, Ike brightened visibly. For the rest of the conference, Patton’s restless confidence slowly buoyed the American high command from its bog of pessimism. The room began to warm as the feisty old tanker leaned across Bradley’s map, plucking the cigar from his mouth and jabbing it toward the vulnerable German bulge as he outlined his plan of attack.

The Kraut’s stuck his head in a meat grinder, he said with a wicked grin, twisting his fist in the air. And this time I’ve got hold of the handle.¹¹

After fleshing out the plan, the three old soldiers left the ancient barracks, not thinking at that moment about how their partnership, forged in war and peace, had carried them to the U.S. Army’s finest hour. They didn’t dwell on the old arguments, the plans, ambitions, and fears of Africa, Sicily, England, and France. They were fighting a desperate battle that they aimed to turn into an American victory. The rejuvenated five-star general and two of his oldest friends were about to climb into the engineer’s cockpit and drive a huge, roaring freight train through the front door of the Third Reich.

But as they stepped toward the frosty December air, Eisenhower, a twinkle in his eye, turned to Patton and remarked, Funny thing, George, every time I get a new star I get attacked.

The old cavalryman shot back a toothy smile.

And every time you get attacked, Ike, I pull you out.¹²

ONE

A HANGOVER OF WAR

Ike, this war may happen just about twenty years from now. This is what we’ll do. I’ll be Jackson, you’ll be Lee. I don’t want to do the heavy thinking; you do that and I’ll get loose among our # %&% $ # enemies.

—George to Ike, 1920

THE BALDING LIEUTENANT COLONEL IN THE RUMPLED SHIRT saw little enough to smile about. As the oak leaves began to turn and the lazy autumn wind stirred, he shuffled along the dusty lanes and rambling wooden barracks that framed Camp Meade, Maryland, home to the once-mighty U.S. Tank Corps. A corps going through the slow, deliberate motions of peacetime army routine.

The year before, Camp Meade had been a beehive of activity: doughboys marching in columns, belching tanks churning up mud on the driving courses, staccato cracks from the rifle range, the din of a thousand conversations in the crowded chow halls. Even the warm, if all too elusive, presence of the Hello Girls working the Army’s tangled telephone lines.

But now, he thought, the place looked empty. Forgotten. Just like his career.

Eighteen months earlier, an enthusiastic twenty-seven-year-old named Dwight David Eisenhower had been running a bustling enterprise christened Camp Colt, a Pennsylvania proving ground for American tankers training to fight the Kaiser in Europe. Back then, Ike Eisenhower had been fired up, desperate to get into combat before war’s end. He had even offered to take a demotion to major if that would get him a ticket overseas.

But the Army wasn’t interested. It liked Ike, like most everyone else did, but it wanted Ike training men, not leading them. The Army kept him stateside, and when the shooting stopped in France, Ike and his big Liberty tanks sat on the shelf at Camp Meade, riding out the anticlimax of the War to End All Wars.

Sitting in his nondescript wooden office in the fall of 1919, Eisenhower could calculate with precision the day his fortunes sank: November 11, 1918. The day everything about the Army changed. Salutes went limp, informality crept into enlisted men’s greetings, and everyone, it seemed, just wanted to get home. The men had done their duty, the war was over, and they were savoring thoughts of lives free of salutes, reveille, drill instructors, and pointless marches.

But not Eisenhower. He was a career officer in a sour time to be a career officer—a time when his biggest job was to send his men back to their homes.

No human enterprise goes flat so instantly as an Army training camp when war ends, Ike dolefully remarked long after the last train of bright-faced draftees pulled away. As for my professional career, he added, the prospects were none too bright. I saw myself in the years ahead putting on weight in a meaningless chair-bound assignment, shuffling papers and filling out forms. If not depressed, I was mad, disappointed, and resented the fact that the war had passed me by.¹

The only break in the monotony of that lackluster fall was the arrival of a hard-charging Californian named George Patton, a colonel who had been assigned command of a light tank outfit temporarily in Ike’s care. Tall and spotless in his tailored jacket, riding breeches, and mirror-polished boots, Colonel Patton looked like he had stepped off the cover of an officer’s field manual. He carried his six-foot, one-inch frame as if the world were one great parade square. He dressed with the precision of an honor guardsman, and his blue-gray eyes squinted over a practiced scowl as he barked out commands in a high-tenored, almost feminine voice.²

The two officers could hardly have been more different. George Smith Patton Jr. was an eclectic mix of socialite patrician and profane horse soldier, a field officer whose family wealth allowed him to maintain a lifestyle even a general’s pay couldn’t support. Ike, two inches shorter and five years Patton’s junior, was an instinctively likable infantryman whose meager salary made it hard for his family to make ends meet. Patton, who had descended from Confederate and Revolutionary War heroes, believed that greatness could be bred, much like speed in racehorses or strength in bulls. Ike, whose Kansas and Pennsylvania forebears, as far as he knew, had never been more than modestly successful, could point to nothing in his lineage that would mark him for the history books.

Both men had quick, powerful tempers and cursed violently, but Eisenhower’s rough edges were softened by an easygoing charm and an infectious grin—the wide, full smile toothpaste companies pay big money to put on advertisements—while the strutting, cursing Colonel Patton remained onstage to anyone outside his inner circle of friends. Even their marriage partners were a study in contrasts; Beatrice Ayer Patton, the fiery, athletic, cultured Boston heiress, grew up in a world of New England privilege that Ike’s wife, the shrewd, plain Mamie Doud Eisenhower, could never understand or, for that matter, care much about.³

One personal connection they shared, a source of pride to both officers, was their alma mater. Patton had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1909, and a lanky Cadet Eisenhower had come through those same hallowed halls a half dozen years later.

But after graduation, the two men’s careers were night and day. Working his way onto the Army’s fast track, Colonel Patton had chased Pancho Villa with Pershing, carried the Army’s torch in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, redesigned the cavalry’s saber, established the Tank Corps, fought in France, and returned from Europe with a bullet wound, four battle stars, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Distinguished Service Medal, and the Croix de Guerre. Eisenhower, whose athletic career had been cut short by a knee injury, had little to show for his fifteen years in uniform beyond a fine record as a small-time football coach and a local reputation as a solid administrator. During the war, his service was all stateside and all humble, most of it near the Gettysburg battlefield where one of George’s Confederate ancestors had been killed by a Union bullet. Instead of leading men into combat, Eisenhower had spent the Great War teaching others to fight under battle captains. Men like Colonel Patton.⁴

For all his accomplishments, George Patton arrived at Camp Meade in the midst of a blue funk. Beneath his woolen tunic and flint-hard skin, George struggled with a depression that had slugged him on his thirty-third birthday, November 11, 1918. The day the guns, to his dismay, fell silent.

Months of tactical training, and years of sharpening his mind and body—everything he had worked for—had come together in just two precious days of fighting. Then Colonel Patton’s war ended, courtesy of a single, damnable Mauser bullet on the opening day of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. By the time Patton had recovered from Fate’s kick in the ass (or, more precisely, a shot through his upper thigh, which emerged from his buttocks), the thing had ended. The Great War. The war everyone had been waiting for. The adventure George had pursued all his young life.

Amidst a peace that brought broad smiles to those around him, George Patton found himself adrift in a frustrating, empty existence where the things he held dear didn’t seem to matter to anyone. War had expanded his horizons, shaped his spirit, shown him her power and majesty. But after a brief, delicious taste of smoke and fury, he was rudely dumped back into a petty world of small men. Men of peace. The men of Camp Meade, 1919.

Patton’s youngest daughter later described the land into which this disciple of Mars had returned:

[H]e was in considerable pain at the time; worried about the future in the tank corps of his creation; and having a hangover from the war, which is a very real thing. A man goes from the command of thousands of men where his judgement means victory or defeat, life or death, to the shrinking command of a handful of men, and the narrowing horizons of peacetime duty with not enough money and not enough troops, and the tender trap of home and family—and, it is a let-down. I guess things didn’t come up to Georgie’s expectations. . . .⁵

As flavorless as life had become for the two young officers, within weeks of their first meeting they managed to rekindle a fire in each other, a fire based on evolving military theory. What bound the two unlikely friends together, they discovered, was a veneration of the tank, the steel horse they conceived to be the saber’s slicing edge on the modern battlefield. As Ike summed up their early relationship, From the beginning [George] and I got along famously. . . . Both of us were students of current military doctrine. Part of our passion was our belief in tanks—a belief derided at the time by others.⁶

Army doctrine, based on the prevailing practice in Europe, held that a tank’s job was to support the infantry by providing cover, smashing through barbed wire and directing close fire support. A tank need not go much faster than five miles per hour, since its function was tied to the foot soldier who crouched, ducked and stumbled through No-Man’s-Land. The two young officers envisioned a new, independent role for tanks in which they would be free to drive deep into the enemy’s rear areas.

It was only a theoretical pursuit, and the two men’s fervor would remain academic until the next big war erupted—if it ever did. But in a peacetime army, the two tankers relished their role as the young, up-and-coming intellectuals. Unpersuaded by the Wilsonian crowd that war was a relic of man’s unenlightened past, they spent their evenings on porches and around heating stoves debating how tanks might create breakthroughs in imaginary battles, spinning hypotheticals and arguing solutions late into the night.⁷

Their passion for the armored breakthrough—a confluence of imagination and optimism many of their superiors lacked—forged a friendship between George and Ike that would shape their lives in ways they couldn’t begin to imagine in the fall of 1919. But the one thing they both saw clearly was the coming of another war, someday, somewhere. As Ike remembered it, George was not only a believer, he was a flaming apostle. In idle conversations and in the studies we jointly undertook, he never said ‘if’ war might break out, it always was ‘when.’ As we worked, talked and studied together we became close friends.⁸

As they drew close, the two friends discovered other interests that stoked their kinship. Though Ike could never dream of joining Patton in polo, a wealthy man’s sport (and one that required healthy knees), he and George, both hitting their early thirties, loved casual riding and shooting, and they craved any small-time adventure they could gin up in the pastoral Camp Meade setting.⁹

Sometimes their itch for a little excitement produced odd larks for two otherwise responsible officers. Learning that unarmed travelers on the road leading to camp were being preyed upon by highwaymen, the two officers climbed into Patton’s touring car and drove up and down the darkened road at night, hoping to draw out banditos on whom they would turn the tables with a half dozen pistols.¹⁰

Another sunny afternoon found the two officers on the machine gun range, happily blazing away with a .30-caliber Browning to determine how long they could fire the weapon before its barrel overheated and its accuracy dropped off. Patton, delighted to be the trigger man, obligingly fired several long bursts while Ike, field glasses pressed to his squinting eyes, watched the bullets arc downrange.

After George ran through part of a long ammunition belt, Ike suggested they take a break and check their targets. But they had not stepped far downrange when they heard the old Browning behind them bark. Then again. And again. The steaming gun was cooking, sending bullets flying past them with insistent pops, each of which reheated the gun.

George, that gun’s so hot it’s just going to keep on shooting! Ike yelled as both men dashed for cover. Sprinting clear of the buzzing .30-caliber rounds, Ike and George scampered back to the gun like two lanky characters scurrying across a Norman Rockwell canvas. Patton grabbed the ammunition belt and gave it a hard twist, and the jammed weapon fell silent.

The two officers, looking sheepishly at each other, decided not to push their luck any more that day.¹¹

Another time, the two self-appointed tank technicians conducted an experiment to learn whether a heavy Liberty tank could tow three light Renault tanks using steel cables. As the grunting Liberty strained forward, the cable stretched, twisted, and finally snapped, sending the frayed end slashing like a rapier just inches from both men’s heads. Realizing that we were certainly not more than five or six inches from sudden death, Ike later recalled, We were too startled at the moment to realize what had happened, but then we looked at each other. I’m sure I was just as pale as George.

That night over dinner a reflective George compared their close encounter with the cable to his near-death experience in the Meuse-Argonne.

Ike, were you as scared as I was? he asked.

Ike nodded. I was afraid to bring the subject up.¹²

The bandit patrol, the cooked Browning, and the tank cable incidents, though quixotic, were honest parts of Ike and George as the 1920s opened. Ike had grown up a Kansas schoolyard scrapper, while George, in a more studied way, had sought out danger, especially where civilized weapons were employed. As the two men goaded each other into odd little adventures—mental and physical tests in a game of us against the world—each impressed the other as a man’s man: tough, disciplined, ready to fight. In the bucolic days of the peacetime Army, these whimsical adventures provided a taste of the excitement George and Ike had missed during the war. They also tempered the iron in their friendship.

At Camp Meade, the Patton and Eisenhower families lived next door to each other in two abandoned barracks that the Army had permitted them to convert into officer quarters. It took a lot of work to turn an oversize wooden bunkhouse into something approaching a decent family home, but the Patton-Eisenhower barracks renovation project became another brick in their relationship. They hired off-duty enlisted men to knock out walls, rerouted plumbing, and sectioned off each building for three bedrooms, allowing the two families to accommodate the two Patton daughters, Ike’s baby boy, and guests. They repainted walls, they hung curtains, and before long, the old, rambling shacks took on a comfortable, even inviting appearance. As a homey touch, Ike and Mamie planted flowers and vegetables outside their quarters; as Ike recalled, I had put in too many years coaxing corn and tomatoes and green grass out of the Kansas soil ever to give it up. As their homes took shape, the two families grew close; Ike’s two-year-old son, Doud Dwight, nicknamed Icky, spent many hours at the Patton household playing with George’s daughters, Bea and Ruth Ellen, who idolized the charming Mamie and doted on her little boy.¹³

As was the custom among Old Army officers, George and Ike kept active social lives. Patton’s high standing within the War Department occasionally drew visitors from Washington and other parts, and George and Beatrice frequently entertained guests over lavish dinners at which Ike and Mamie were regular faces. Ike and George also played poker with their brother officers. Ike, a cardsharp, usually took the lion’s share of the pot at George’s expense, but George never complained. Patton could afford to lose, and as a gambler, he never tried very hard when the stakes were merely money. He was hoarding his luck for bigger stakes.¹⁴

While Ike and George were becoming fast friends, their robust personalities occasionally threw off sparks. Ike remembered that the two had heated, sometimes almost screaming, arguments over matters that more often than not were doctrinal and academic rather than personal or material. One rocking-chair topic on which they would never agree, for instance, was the unanswerable question of the most vital condition to military victory. George, a romantic at heart, argued vehemently that battlefield leadership trumped all other factors. His heroes—Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Stonewall Jackson—had triumphed over incredible odds through audacity, boldness, and conspicuous leadership, the kind of showmanship that puts fire into the ranks and keeps rational men advancing into steel and fire. From his childhood study of history to his battlefield experience in France, everything Patton knew insisted that leadership wins battles. And battles decide wars.¹⁵

Ike, a Midwesterner who hailed from a land of interdependent farming and mercantile communities, felt that personal leadership was just one of several ingredients that influence a battle’s outcome. While personal leadership was important, he thought George too willing to denigrate the mundane—logistics and alliances, for instance—in favor of the warrior-king’s more picturesque role of plunging into battle, broadsword swinging. Men-at-arms had to be organized, fed, and supplied with effective weapons to be useful on the battlefield, he argued. Ike agreed with Voltaire that God is on the side of bigger battalions, but he believed a general at the head of a starving mob would lose his war, no matter how inspiring his personal deportment might be. This philosophy was an integral part of Ike Eisenhower, the product of his upbringing in turn-of-the-century Kansas as much as his formal studies.

In late 1920, the Patton-Eisenhower collaboration reached its peak as each wrote scholarly articles predicting that tanks would play an independent role in future conflicts. In May 1920, Colonel Patton published an article in the highly respected Infantry Journal entitled Tanks in Future Wars, in which he debunked the Army’s prevailing doctrine that the sole place of the tank was to support the infantry. The tank corps grafted onto infantry, cavalry, artillery, or engineers will be like a third leg to a duck, he wrote, worthless for control, for combat impotent.

Later that year Ike, also writing for the Infantry Journal, proposed that American tanks be fitted with heavier guns. He predicted that in future wars, tanks would use their mobility and firepower to crush the enemy from the flanks. As Ike would recall late in life, their theories were the beginnings of a comprehensive tank doctrine that in George Patton’s case would make him a legend. Naturally, as enthusiasts, we tried to win converts. This wasn’t easy but George and I had the enthusiasm of zealots.¹⁶

In arguing for the supremacy of armor over infantry, Eisenhower and Patton were not indulging in mere refinement. Their ideas, if put into practice, would take the tank out of its supporting role and place it on center stage in the next war, giving the snorting, ornery beasts the shock role once held by the armored knights of the Middle Ages. They were advocating revolution, pure and simple, and they were proselytizing in the infantry, the most conservative branch of the nation’s most conservative institution.

This sort of talk was anathema to the infantry overlord, Major General Charles Farnsworth, who could not believe any responsible officer would willingly advocate an armored force as something other than fire support for the foot soldier. Farnsworth abruptly summoned Eisenhower to Washington, and in a short but icy interview, the Chief of Infantry threatened to break Ike’s career if he wrote any further on the subject.¹⁷

A chastened Ike conceded the point—outwardly, at least. He recanted his heresy and penned an unpublished essay that concluded, tanks can never take over the mission of the infantry, no matter to what degree developed. But inside, this military Galileo was still a believer. Whatever hidebound old generals like Farnsworth might say, Ike knew tanks would change the way nations fought wars.¹⁸

Patton, for his part, never lacked for shrill enthusiasm, but in the rigid confines of a shrinking army, shrill enthusiasm didn’t count for much, and at this stage in his life, he knew enough to stop bucking the system. He and Ike might hack with all their might at the roots and branches of the infantry first doctrine, but in the end the tree stood: tall, solid, and unbent.¹⁹

The injunction from Washington’s khaki cardinals was a blow to the Patton-Eisenhower crusade, but as with most persecutions, the disciples simply circled their wagons and stuck quietly to their beliefs. They cursed and joked about brain atrophy among the top brass, and they filled their days riding, studying, and debating wars of the future, without openly trying to convert the unsaved.²⁰

Months of debate, practice, drill, and theory—as well as poker, persecution, and the occasional odd adventure—cemented a friendship that would last nearly a lifetime. Life was stimulating and enjoyable, and the two talented officers had many a good year ahead of them in the Tank Corps, so they thought. But in 1920 the War Department folded the Tank Corps into the infantry branch under a law reorganizing the peacetime Army. George’s heart led him back to the cavalry, his first love, while Ike, an infantryman by training, remained with the tanks. Separated into different branches, the two friends, both reduced to their permanent ranks, would see little of each other over the next two decades. But, as is common in Army life, they kept the fire of their friendship stoked with infrequent but heartfelt correspondence.²¹

By the time George and Ike parted ways in October of 1920, each man had developed a vague understanding of his place in the next big war, which they saw as the inevitable result of the Treaty of Versailles. George, the senior man, did not want to run the whole show; that involved too much staff work, too much paperwork, not enough battlefield leadership. No, he would let Ike handle the planning. In the next war, Patton would lead flesh-and-blood men to victory on horseback—or, perhaps, in a tank. As Ike recalled:

In all his speculative ramblings George always saw himself as commander of highly mobile troops. Initially he likened himself to Ashby, the brilliant cavalry leader under Stonewall Jackson. But he soon raised his sights. Ike, he’d say, This war may happen just about twenty years from now. This is what we’ll do. I’ll be Jackson, you’ll be Lee. I don’t want to do the heavy thinking; you do that and I’ll get loose among our #%&%$# enemies. This thought was repeated time and time again.²²

George’s brash words may have been the bemused ramblings of two buddies drinking beer on the front porch. But a small yet supremely convinced voice told George and Ike they would do something together, something big. As Ike summed up those heady days, In our outlook on the future we were always partners; in those days it never occurred to either that we might, in war, become separated from each other.²³

Separation, and her ugly handmaiden, disappointment, were facts of Army life. Major Bradley had learned that lesson the hard way.

The dark-eyed Missourian had left West Point in July 1915 with the accoutrements of a newly minted officer: a .45 Colt pistol, a broad-brimmed campaign hat, a marginally useful sword, and a pair of six-power field glasses. For the succeeding two years, Omar Nelson Bradley had crisscrossed the country from New York to Washington State, leading one company of infantrymen after another, never firing a shot in anger.²⁴

The major with the taut grimace and lean athletic frame should have been commanding a battalion in Europe. There certainly was enough fighting to go around, and he had enough training and field experience under his belt to rightfully expect a combat command. But things never seemed to work out for Omar. War with Mexico came and went, and Brad was stranded on the sidelines. War in Europe spilled across the Atlantic, and the Army, in its unbounded wisdom, shunted Brad off to the 14th Infantry Regiment, a luckless outfit scattered across dull garrison posts from Alaska to Montana.²⁵

The 14th was a dead-end assignment, and Brad’s efforts to transfer to a fighting command came to nothing. The only battlefield he would see during the World War was near the Anaconda copper mines of central Montana, where the enemy consisted of strikers and labor agitators instead of spike-helmeted Germans. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1918, union men of the Industrial Workers of the World attempted a riot in nearby Butte. Hundreds of roughnecks armed with brass knuckles and knives marched down Main Street, and Brad ordered his ninety-one-man company out, bayonets fixed, ready to cut down anyone foolish enough to charge their lines. The look of determination on Bradley’s doughboys cooled the passions of the strikers, and the IWW left the town alone.²⁶

That was it. Four American divisions were fighting German storm troopers in France, and Brad was playing small-town sheriff in Montana. He might as well have remained in the poverty-stricken backwoods of southern Missouri he had left as a teenager.

It was an anxious time for the square-jawed left fielder, for like Ike Eisenhower, his old Academy classmate, the thing Brad feared most was to be left behind. The Great War was fast becoming what he feared most. To add to his misery, the childhood sweetheart who became his bride, Mary Quayle Bradley, delivered their first child, a son, on the day he faced the rioting miners. Stillborn. The loss of what would be his only son was a bitter blow to a man whose family had seen hard times. This particular wound would sting for the rest of Brad’s days.²⁷

The melancholy major endured six more dreary months of administrative duty before the first serious rumor of action reached his company, and in late 1918 the 14th Regiment was ordered to assemble at Camp Dodge, near Des Moines, Iowa. The order was just the news Brad longed to hear—splendid news, for it portended a quick trip to Europe. It meant fighting in France, leading men into battle. Finally, Brad thought, after years of drilling dull-witted enlisted men, processing Army paperwork, and maintaining order in one godforsaken outpost after the next, Bradley’s stoicism would be rewarded, and perhaps soon.²⁸

But the world changed again as Brad and Mary strolled down the streets of Des Moines one afternoon. Whistles began to blow. Church bells rang. A seismic wave rolled over the city. Streets began filling with people smiling, waving, spreading the good news.

Armistice! The Kaiser had abdicated. The war was over! ²⁹

The war was over.

The phrase had an oddly hollow ring to a fighting man left at home. To a crack shot with a rifle who never got to pull a trigger in battle.

Over.

While Brad could never admit that he wished the war had lasted six months longer—he was, like everyone else, relieved to see the casualty lists come to an end—he was miserable about missing his big chance at success. I was glad the war had stopped, he wrote later, but I was now absolutely convinced that, having missed the war, I was professionally ruined. I could only look forward to a career lifetime of dull routine assignments and would be lucky to retire after thirty years as a lieutenant colonel.³⁰

Facing down club-wielding strikers and busting drunken enlisted men wasn’t much to call a wartime experience, and Brad had the bittersweet pleasure of welcoming home classmates returning from France with medals, high rank, and riveting tales of fighting under the legendary Black Jack Pershing.

He could not hope to compete with peers who had seen the face of battle, friends whose places in the Army’s grand history were secure. Apart from a meager salary and a temporary major’s rank that would probably tumble to lieutenant once Congress demobilized the Army, the country boy from Moberly, Missouri, had nothing to show for the last five years of his life. Staring at an empty horizon, Brad shelved his hopes for adventure.

But even in peacetime, the Army still offered a regular paycheck—something his family never saw when he was a child—and Bradley had invested nine years of his life into a military career. So he considered trying his hand at military academics. Teaching was in his blood, after all—his father had been a rural schoolmaster—and in his late twenties, Brad was warming up to classroom instruction, the kind of pedagogy he and Cadet Eisenhower had blithely ignored when they roamed the yards of West Point, focusing on their athletic careers. Perhaps, Brad thought, he could make his mark as an instructor in infantry theory, or maybe even teach at his alma mater. Almost anything, he decided, was better than sweating out another hot summer in Arizona or Texas, marking a long, plodding march to retirement.

So as the 1920s opened to a nation grateful to be at peace, Omar Bradley readjusted his sights and scrounged around for new, less ambitious opportunities. With few attractive options and a young family to support, he was quietly determined to make the best of whatever the Army would give him.

Two decades later, Brad, Ike, and George would be running toward the same endless horizon, wondering how it would all end.

TWO

DIFFERENT PATHS

It slowly dawned on me that my failure to get to France had not ruined me professionally after all.

—Bradley

THE LONG SEASON THAT SPANNED between demobilization and the war’s outbreak hardened George Patton. He dropped from his wartime rank of colonel down to his permanent rank, captain, and as he climbed the wobbly rungs of the peacetime army from 1920 to 1939, he whiled away the decades as a gentleman soldier—sailing, playing polo, socializing, writing, speaking, and pondering the shape of future wars. He did exceptionally well at the cavalry’s Advanced Officer’s School at Fort Riley, Kansas, and he graduated with honors from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth.¹

After Patton was transferred to overseas duty with the Hawaiian Division in 1925, he was appointed the division’s G-3, or chief operations officer. There, his martinet instincts, never dormant for long, returned with a vengeance. In his official reports, he criticized junior officers like Major Henry Hap Arnold. He also committed harsh opinions of his superiors to writing—a questionable practice in any profession, and one doubly hazardous in a peacetime army. The ill wind Patton stirred blew back upon him, earning George what amounted to a demotion by his division commander for being too outspoken.²

Too outspoken. It was a chronic problem that had plagued George since his West Point days. As a lowly second corporal during his second year, he had so enthusiastically bawled out plebes with his high-pitched voice that his antics earned him the nickname Quill—a disparaging term for an upperclassman who delights in reporting lower classmen for demerits. Smarting from the reaction, George complained to his father,

[I] am not very popular not because there is any thing the matter except that I am Too damed military. That is I am better than they are. Now no one is more unjust than he who feels himself an inferior but dam them and let them keep on some day I will show and make them feel how infernally inferior they are.³

But Patton’s too damed military approach at West Point had backfired when he was ingloriously demoted to sixth corporal, and the reputation as a martinet dogged him through the years. He alienated his colleagues in Hawaii, and in 1928 his commanding officer summed up the emerging consensus on George Patton: This man would be invaluable in time of war but is a disturbing element in time of peace.⁴

The only action Patton saw during the interwar years was as President Hoover’s cavalry commander during the Bonus March, in the summer of 1932. The marchers, homeless Great War veterans and a smattering of left-wing agitators, had set up shantytowns in the nation’s capital, where they demanded early payment of bonuses Congress had approved at the war’s end. On July 28, as the demonstrators sweated out their sixth week in their sprawling camp, Secretary of War Patrick J. Hurley ordered his swaggering Army Chief of Staff, General Douglas MacArthur, to ensure the security of the capital. MacArthur summoned local troops to repel the insurrection, and one of the first units to arrive was Patton’s 3rd Cavalry Regiment from nearby Fort Myer. Brandishing drawn sabers and equipped with gas masks and carbines, the horsemen galloped off to clean out an offending Hooverville just across the Anacostia River.⁵

MacArthur’s combined-arms attack easily drove off the unarmed demonstrators. But Patton’s cavalry horses, so nimble on Fort Myer’s parade grounds, found cantering difficult among Washington’s littered sidewalks and stairwells. The jumbled horse soldiers drew catcalls, curses, and projectiles from bitter demonstrators. Although the regiment drove back the protestors, Patton’s lone combat victory seems to have been roughing up a veteran who was badgering MacArthur.⁶

In riding to the rescue of the Hoover Administration, George saw himself as the republic’s hussar in a modern-day reenactment of Napoleon’s famed whiff of grapeshot foray against the Paris mob. George later denounced the Bonus March assault as a most distasteful form of service, but he insisted, as did MacArthur, that the ranks of protestors were filled with disgruntled vagrants and Bolshevik agitators.⁷

As the thirties dragged on and middle age claimed him, George watched in desperation as his career stagnated. His stomach began to protrude over his jodhpurs, his thinning blond hair faded to white, and his ruddy skin began to sag under his high cheekbones. His profanity and patrician manner stirred up bad blood among his subordinates, and he had at least one public run-in with his division commander. As he shuffled from one dull peacetime post to the next, George sank into a debilitating mix of depression and erratic behavior, his melancholy dulled only momentarily by dinners, costume parties, polo matches, and society balls. He saw himself fading into irrelevance, a late-summer firefly whose nearly invisible existence was punctuated by sporadic glimmers of light—followed by long pauses in an impenetrable darkness.⁸

In 1935, George turned fifty, and he began showing advanced signs of a midlife crisis. While he had always consumed liquor in moderation—he admitted during his West Point years, I can’t ‘hit the booze’ in the way a future second Lieut of Cavalry should—in his life’s autumn he began drinking recklessly at social functions. His inebriation, a symptom rather than a cause, inflicted pain on his devoted wife, Beatrice, and their family. To hasten his downward spiral, he commenced an affair with Jean Gordon, a twenty-one-year-old friend of his daughter’s and a half-niece by marriage. Not surprisingly, the tryst nearly undid his marriage, and it inflicted lasting pain upon Beatrice and his children.⁹

The dominant theme of George’s tailspin was his abiding fear that his life would end before he had fulfilled his destiny—a destiny, he believed, to command legions in a great, climactic battle. He began to panic as he realized the greater part of his life had passed without the Ragnarok he craved. As George once recalled, one of his personal heroes, Britain’s Sir Edmund Allenby, had remarked, for every Napoleon, Alexander, and Jesus Christ that made roles of history, there were several born. Only the lucky ones made it to the summit. Allenby, George said, felt that in every age and time, men were born ready to serve their country and their god, but sometimes were not needed; you had to be in the right place at the right time—you had to be lucky.¹⁰

George lived in dread of becoming one of those unlucky souls.

For Dwight Eisenhower, the long spell following the Great War was punctuated by deep, piercing pain. A few months after George left Camp Meade in October 1920, scarlet fever carried away Ike’s firstborn, Icky. Ike sought shelter from the cloud of grief by immersing himself in work, and he struggled to shut out the picture of a smiling, laughing toddler who had brightened his world. His withdrawal into an office cocoon only strained his relationship with Mamie, and the long hours he spent wrestling with black, oppressive thoughts drove him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.¹¹

The sting of Icky’s death would never abate, could never be blunted, but an opportunity to leave Camp Meade masked some of Ike’s heartache. Over dinner with the Pattons earlier in the year, George had introduced Ike to Brigadier General Fox Conner, an old friend of Patton’s who was close to General Pershing.

Conner had graduated from West Point two decades ahead of Eisenhower, and the Mississippi native had emerged as one of the Army’s leading thinkers. In a relaxed front-porch conversation with the two young officers, Conner asked George and Ike to tell him about their tank theories. For the rest of the day, the eager young officers showed Conner around their post, and the general was impressed with the efficiency of the tank brigades and the men who ran them. Ike and General Connor, taking an instant liking to each other, parted as friends.¹²

In early 1921, Ike received a call from General Conner, who asked him to come to the Panama Canal Zone as the executive officer of the 20th Infantry Brigade, an overseas field command of mostly Puerto Rican recruits. Ike was thrilled to hold a position of real responsibility among fighting men, and from the day he arrived at Camp Gaillard, he commenced a two-year apprenticeship that would change his life.¹³

Mosquitoes and tropical diseases presented the chief enemies, so the former Marine post in the middle of the Panamanian isthmus was hardly a taxing one. Ike and Conner spent their free hours together riding horses, sitting around campfires, and discussing strategy and tactics. Conner introduced Ike to Plato, Tacitus, Nietzsche, the memoirs of Grant and Sherman, and Clausewitz’s philosophical On War, the dense nineteenth-century text that a youthful Patton had once described as hard reading as any thing can well be and is as full of notes of equal abstruceness as a dog is of flees. Conner was a brilliant teacher, and he fired up in his pupil an intellectual spark that had been slow to emerge—the spark of a serious, enthusiastic interest in the profession of arms. The transformation was short and remarkable: Ike became less superficial, less parochial, and more focused on the military’s relationship to society’s economic, political, and industrial pursuits.¹⁴

Ike’s newfound passion swept him out of a deep depression and changed the way he viewed his profession. Under Conner’s tutelage, Ike began learning grand strategy, not just tactics. The big picture, not just maneuver. War, not just the sum of its battles. He soaked up Conner’s teachings, and when the Army transferred him home, he left Panama convinced that America would one day integrate its armies into a larger allied command structure.¹⁵

It should have been predictable to the Army’s battalions of psychologists that Ike Eisenhower would develop into a three-dimensional thinker more easily than most of his uniformed peers. Growing up a middle-class family of six boys in Abilene, Kansas, a classic small American town, Ike was comfortable jostling his way around loud, unruly crowds. On the streets, in backyard lots, and on the playing fields of his youth, Ike had learned the value of allies—allies like his older brothers, Arthur and Edgar—yet he cultivated the kind of self-reliance that enables a scrawny, tow-headed boy to stand up to a big brother or the neighborhood bully. Ike’s Midwestern roots and his passion for social pursuits, such as poker, golf, and dinners, primed him for jobs that blended the personal with the technical, assignments where an animating human touch was needed to