Close to Gods on Earth War’s aftermath is rarely easy for warriors. Patton had written his wife that ‘the best end for an officer is the last bullet of the war.’ By Walter R. Borneman
http://www.wsj.com/articles/close-to-gods-on-earth-1448573624
Reminiscing after World War II, former chief of staff Gen. George C. Marshall remarked: “With Chennault in China and MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific, I sure had a combination of temperament.” If Marshall had also recalled the European Theater, he doubtless would have included George Patton among the exasperating commanders he had to manage.
Winston Groom is a best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction, including accounts of the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Vicksburg and, most recently, “The Aviators,” a look at the trio of Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle and Charles Lindbergh during the early years of flight. In “The Generals,” he sets his sights on Patton, MacArthur and Marshall. “Their stories are linked as closely as any other set of generals in history,” he writes, “and when they died they passed into legend.”
One strength of Mr. Groom’s effort is the portrait he draws of these men in their formative years. He is a good storyteller, and after a chapter devoted to the ancestors and early years of each, he weaves together their exploits on the Western Front in World War I. There are gripping tales of Patton urging tanks forward and MacArthur assuring his superiors that he will take an enemy position or his name will head the casualty list. Marshall, meanwhile, was learning the intricacies of operational planning, initially with the 1st Infantry Division and later with Gen. John J. Pershing’s headquarters in France. Pershing, commanding the American Expeditionary Forces, had close ties to all three men, including romantic interests in Patton’s sister and the heiress Louise Cromwell Brooks, MacArthur’s future first wife.
Between the wars, all three men had moments of success as well as despair. MacArthur served a high-profile tenure as superintendent of West Point. Patton, frustrated by a lack of promotion, drank too much and had an affair with a niece. Mr. Groom gives a particularly insightful description of Marshall developing as a leader while serving as assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga. Among his students were the future generals Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway and Walter Bedell Smith.
ENLARGE The Generals
By Winston Groom
National Geographic, 510 pages, $30
World War II begins halfway through the book. Marshall became Army chief of staff the day Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. MacArthur was recalled to active duty in the Philippines six months before Pearl Harbor. Patton honed the tactics of a still neophyte armored force and waited expectantly to enter the fray. By the time the fighting was do-or-die in 1942, MacArthur had trumpeted a return to the Philippines, and Patton had attacked in North Africa.
Both MacArthur and Patton defied their superiors in ways that would likely have sunk other careers, but Marshall handled them firmly and deftly. “Few people fully realize,” Mr. Groom writes, “the efforts he expended trying to rein in the likes of Patton and MacArthur, both of whom often behaved as though they were a thing unto themselves.” Yet “The Generals” is hardly a warts-and-all account. Mr. Groom is effusive in his praise—for example, calling MacArthur “one of the most remarkable and gifted officers ever to grace the United States Army”—and he readily admits that the book is not intended as “full-blown biography.” Rather, he writes, “it is nice being able to ‘cherry-pick’ ” his stories.
Such cherry-picking occasionally results in oversimplifications and gaps in chronology. Mr. Groom underplays MacArthur’s failure to stock Bataan with provisions and instead claims that his “tenacious defense . . . upset the Japanese timetable for military conquest of the Southwest Pacific.” Patton’s story progresses through the soldier-slapping incidents of 1943 before Mr. Groom backtracks to pick up MacArthur on Corregidor early in 1942.
In culling his stories, Mr. Groom relies heavily on bedrock biographies: “Patton: The Man Behind the Legend” by Martin Blumenson and that author’s compilation “The Patton Papers”; Forrest Pogue’s four-volume “George C. Marshall”; and the three-volume “The Years of MacArthur” by D. Clayton James. There is also material from personal memoirs and interviews. That said, historians will wish that Mr. Groom had been more thorough in his documentation: The sources for many quotes and details are not readily at hand.
There are also some errors. MacArthur’s air force gets credit for the 1943 shooting down of Adm. Yamamoto, the head of the Japanese navy, when that action was taken by P-38s from Adm. Halsey’s South Pacific command. Somehow, Mr. Groom transports Marshall and Army Air Forces chief of staff Hap Arnold to the Japanese surrender ceremony on the battleship Missouri. Neither was there.
War’s aftermath, Mr. Groom notes, is rarely easy for hardened warriors. Marshall didn’t get a full day’s retirement before Harry Truman dispatched him to China, where he found it far more difficult to effect results than he had as the head of millions of men and women under arms. MacArthur executed a high-stakes gamble at Inchon to reverse the Korean War but then ran afoul of a basic tenet of American constitutional government: The military is subordinate to civilian control. Patton had written his wife that “the best end for an officer is the last bullet of the war.” He died just before Christmas 1945 from injuries suffered in an auto accident.
One thing that is difficult to argue with is Mr. Groom’s assertion that, during war, generals “become as close to gods on earth as we are ever likely to see.”
Mr. Borneman is the author of “The Admirals: Nimitz, Halsey, Leahy, and King—The Five-Star Admirals Who Won the War at Sea.”
Comments are closed.
