A General's Life

...A GENERAL'S LIFE: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY GENERAL OF THE ARMY OMAR N. BRADLEY Omar N. Bradley and Glay Blair/ Simon and Schuster/ $19.95 Eliot A. Cohen Slim's fascinating Defeat into Victory, for example) it contains no reflections on the nature of war or leadership...

...For one thing, only in the 1960s did the U.S...

...The men were then formed up and marched to preassigned tents, "where, they found their equipment on a cot with bedding...

...As a result of these talks, I had the staff set up a short-range firing course in the woods with partially concealed cans for targets...

...For all that, Blair seems to have done a yeoman job of archival work, including study of all of Bradley's papers...

...I might add that it is not a bad way to learn your profession thoroughly...

...I should add, however, that the book consists solely of narrative, which might make it hard going for nonspecialists...

...Montgomery: "During lunch I was civil but cool, having nothing to say to this arrogant egomaniac who had publicly demeaned me and attempted to destroy my usefulness as a commander...

...Bradley ruthlessly relieved incompetents, including men for whom he felt personal affection...

...In their view General Bradley revealed himself a man more self-centered and less forgiving than they had hoped...

...They reported finding bitter sniping at former colleagues instead of modest introspection...

...Those flaws held the potential for danger, even disaster...

...For another, only after World War II did the Army move to training with popup targets at short ranges...

...There is much else in this fascinating memoir-the uses and perils of the Ultra intercepts of German communications...

...There is little reason to think that his rendition of Bradley's autobiography is substantially different, in style or in substance, from what Bradley himself thought...

...A sound tactician who did not believe in wasting human life to achieve glory (hence his anger at Patton in Sicily), but nonetheless capable of daring conceptions-the massive use of airborne forces at D-Day, the breakout battle in Normandy in August 1944, the encirclement of the Ruhr at the very end of the war...

...Patton: "Patton was a superb field general and leader-perhaps our very TJest-but a man with many human and professional flaws...

...His initial memoirs, A Soldier's Story published in 1951, were also ghost-written...

...Brass bands welcomed the troop trains to their training site...

...Despite vehement disagreements with many in the British high command he has high praise for Alan Brooke, the little known but brilliant Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Lord Tedder, Eisenhower's deputy commander and an air strategist of some renown...

...Omar Bradley has been eclipsed in Much was expected of General Omar N. Bradley's posthumous memoirs, but, according to some reviewers, not much was delivered...

...In that powerful if misleading film Bradley (played by Karl Maiden) appears only as a genial duffer, a faithful follower of Patton in North Africa and Sicily and then Patton's commander in Europe, where his main function seems to be to tell Patton that he cannot have any more gasoline...

...On the other hand, Bradley writes generously of many of his colleagues...

...In order to strengthen morale Bradley played up the 82nd's famous history in World War I. He invited Sergeant Alvin York (who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor for singlehandedly wiping out a German machine gun nest and capturing 132 men in 1918) to speak to the unit...

...Nonetheless, one cap learn much about Bradley-and about the nature of military leadership at the highest level-from a careful reading of the book...

...Pernicious, because if either the public or the military conceives of Patton as the apotheosis of a military leader we will find ourselves in the hands of men fundamentally unsuited - for the myriad political, operational, and logistical requirements of modern war...

...and above all his role in the firing of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War...

...a resolute defense of all of his major decisions instead of a generous admission of mistakes committed (particularly in the matter of closing the Falaise gap in the summer of 1944, when tens of thousands of German troops escaped an Allied trap...

...Indeed, this part of the book, describing his years as Army Chief of Staff and later Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, may be of greater importance to historians than the section on World War II, already covered in some detail in A Soldier's Story...

...By comparison with the Army of the 1920s and 1930s, in which he grew up, the Army of the 1980s is wealthy and numerous- harder working, too...

...A courteous and pleasant man (Ernie Pyle recorded his astonishment at Bradley's ''Thank you" to private soldiers who pulled to the side to let his car pass) but a terribly firm one...

...Indeed, one of the first points to note in analyzing General Bradley is that, unlike a number of his contemporaries (Eisenhower and Montgomery in particular), he had little facility for narrative writing, and even less interest in it...

...It is an officer corps which could benefit from having Bradley as a model rather than Pattern, to remind itself that competence does not require bluster, that courtesy and gentility need not detract from firmness, that integrity remains the foundation of leadership...

...Junior officers in the American military often idolize Pat-ton as the American military archetype, even though many of them probably know no more about Bradley than appeared in the movie Patton (for which Bradley provided some background material from his World War II memoirs...

...Bradley records the long afternoons spent in out-of-the-way posts reading military history and working out tactical problems, all of which helped prepare him for the unforeseeable challenges and stresses of high command...

...As with many great men the key to Bradley's character can be found in his behavior before he rose to prominence...

...Bradley writes: I conceived the notion-radical at the time-that we would do everything within our ability to make the draftees feel they were coming to a 'home' where people really eared about their welfare...

...I was in fact officially a teacher for thirteen of my first twenty-three years of commissioned service...

...Other generals who attract his regard include General J. Lawton ("Lightning Joe") Collins, James Van Fleet, and Matthew Ridgway, all of them, like Bradley, hard-working professionals: men about whom it might be difficult to make gripping movies, but the kind of men who win wars...

...In reviewing Bradley's life we must resist the temptation to say that the American military no longer produces such men...

...Indeed, his ambivalent feelings toward Eisenhower in his later years seem to stem in large part from his fury at Eisenhower's willingness to embrace Marshall's personal detractors during the 1952 presidential campaign...

...This may seem a petty incident, but it was not...

...Ill-founded, because (as we learn from.,4 General's Life and other sources) Patton was an unstable, even hysterical, man as prone to error as to strategic insight...

...Bradley's account of the unification debate in the late 1940s (centering on the roles of the three services and the future of the new Department of Defense...

...This postwar romanticization of Patton at the expense of Bradley is both ill-founded and pernicious...

...I use "quasi" because the book was actually written not by Bradley but by Clay Blair, an author well versed in the history of World War II...

...When Bradley took it over, it was an undifferentiated mass of 16,000 overweight and out of shape draftees, led by a freshly minted cadre of less than 2,000 officers and men stripped from other regular units...

...Bradley, on the other hand, represents the kind of general Americans should hope to find in wartime...

...Yet one may wonder whether the poverty and leisure of the interwar Army did not help to shape the character and capabilities of men like Bradley, Ridgway, Collins, McNair (the director of the Army's training program), Stilwell, and Van Fleet...

...He spent most of his early years teaching, either at West Point, ROTC, or at the Infantry School at Fort Benning...

...It was a radical departure from the standard static long-distance firing range...

...Needless to say, the visit was a striking psychological success...

...It was this kind of attention to the details of his business that made Bradley a professional in the fullest sense...

...Characteristically, however, Bradley (who had not served overseas during World War I, and had thought his career ruined thereby) made further use of York's visit, quizzing the World War I hero about his exploits in France...

...In one instance he demoted to colonel and shipped back to the United States a major general, an old friend who in an unguarded moment let slip that D-Day would occur before 15 June 1944...

...York, of course, was well known as a country-raised marksman, and yet: One important fact emerged from these talks: most of his effective shooting had been done at very short range-twenty-five to fifty yards...

...At that time he commanded the newly raised 82nd division, later to become the 82nd Airborne Division, one of the most famous and expert of American infantry units...

...Indeed, many contemporaries commented on Bradley's schoolmasterly qualities: patience, comprehensive knowledge, and a capacity to extract effort from subordinates without bullying or mollycoddling them...

...Unlike some generals' memoirs (Field Marshal Sir William the popular mind, or at least in the mind of anyone who did not live through World War II, by other military leaders, most notably George S. Patton...

...The leisure encouraged some, by no means all, and not even most, to study their profession carefully...

...But remember, his asperity is retrospective...

...Army finally field a weapon (the M-16 rifle) that took into account something Bradley had learned before the war, namely, that most infantry engagements take place at very short ranges...

...at the time he maintained a self-control so tight as to be astonishing...

...a brilliant leader when pursuing or exploiting a breakthrough, but not an all-around general...

...Throughout there is a sense that the more Bradley read after the war from the posthumous papers of his colleagues the less he liked them...

...Although he makes a strenuous effort to be fair to his friends, particularly Eisenhower, he is unsparing in his judgments: Eisenhower: "Ike was a political general of rare and valuable gifts, but as his African record clearly demonstrates, he did not know how to manage a battlefield...

...The chief business of armies-that which occupies or ought to occupy nine tenths of their time, whether in peace or war-is training, and a good military trainer must first be a good teacher...

...This judgment, unfortunately, exaggerates some undeniable failings and wholly misses a number of strengths of this quasi-autobiogra-phy...

...he also had a number of lengthy interviews with the General...

...A hot meal waited in the mess tent...

...Blair was brought in in 1979, when General Bradley was 86 years old, but too late...

...Among the Americans he displays what can only be termed reverence for George C. Marshall, the Army Chief of Staff...

...This is not to say we intended to coddle the recruits...

...The men had to traverse this wooded course, spot the cans and shoot quickly...

...The paucity of resources available to them encouraged an ingenuity and in-noyativeness in training which would stand them in good stead when the time came to train millions of draftees in two or three short years and then lead them into battle...

...In fact, we intended to be tough as hell on them, but in an intelligent, humane, understanding way...

...York, incidentally, nonplussed Bradley by telling him "in his candid hill-country way that I would not get very far in this world because I was 'too nice.' " Like many others, York mistook Bradley's quiet courtesy for softness, but a reading of Bradley's accounts of his fellow generals corrects this impression...

...We even instituted rush cleaning and laundry so that the draftees could refurbish travel-stained uniforms...

...Bradley died before the World War II section was complete...

...We really don't know, simply because no war since Korea has presented the kind of challenges to which Bradley responded...

...By contrast, the Army of today contains an officer corps of extremely hardworking men and women-an officer corps with virtually no leisure for independent professional study, an officer corps whose members' marriages suffer and often break down because of long hours and lengthy absences from home, an officer corps which often pursues its advanced education in areas only marginally related to the art of war...

...Consider Bradley's conduct during the winter and spring of 1942...

...What other two-star general would have thought to question an aging and low-ranking hero about his experiences, and then act on his answers...

...Thereafter Bradley instituted a rugged program of physical training, including calisthenics and obstacle courses in which everyone-even Bradley-had to participate...