As a result, Bradley's efforts in , produced two fully trained and prepared combat divisions. In February , Bradley was assigned command of X Corps, but before taking the position was ordered to North Africa by Eisenhower to troubleshoot problems with American troops in the wake of the defeat at Kasserine Pass.
Arriving, Bradley recommended that Patton be given command of the U. II Corps. This was done and the authoritarian commander soon restored the unit's discipline.
Becoming Patton's deputy, Bradley worked to improve the fighting qualities of the corps as the campaign progressed. As a result of his efforts, he ascended to command of II Corps in April , when Patton departed to aid in planning the invasion of Sicily.
For the remainder of the North African Campaign, Bradley ably led the corps and restored its confidence. During the campaign in Sicily, Bradley was "discovered" by journalist Ernie Pyle and promoted as the "G.
General" for his unprepossessing nature and affinity for wearing a common soldier's uniform in the field. In the wake of the success in the Mediterranean, Bradley was selected by Eisenhower to lead the first American army to land in France and to be prepared to subsequently take over a full army group. Returning to the United States, he established his headquarters at Governor's Island, NY and began assembling staff to assist him in his new role as commander of the First U.
A believer in employing airborne forces to limit German access to the coast, he lobbied for the use of the 82nd and st Airborne Divisions in the operation. As commander of the U. Troubled by the stiff resistance at Omaha, he briefly considered evacuating troops from the beach and sending the follow-on waves to Utah.
This proved unnecessary and three days later he shifted his headquarters ashore. As early attempts to push deeper inland failed, he planned Operation Cobra with the goal of breaking out of the beachhead near St.
Commencing in late July, the operation saw a liberal use of air power before ground forces smashed through the German lines and began a dash across France. In December, Bradley's front absorbed the brunt of the German offensive during the Battle of the Bulge.
After stopping the German assault, his men played a key role in pushing the enemy back, with Patton's Third Army making an unprecedented turn north to relieve the st Airborne at Bastogne. During the fighting, he was angered when Eisenhower temporarily assigned First Army to Montgomery for logistical reasons. Promoted to general in March , Bradley led 12th Army Group, now four armies strong, through the final offensives of the war and successfully captured a bridge over the Rhine at Remagen.
In a final push, his troops formed the southern arm of a massive pincer movement which captured , German troops in the Ruhr, before meeting up with Soviet forces at the Elbe River. With the surrender of Germany in May , Bradley was eager for a command in the Pacific. This was not forthcoming as General Douglas MacArthur was not in need of another army group commander. On August 15, President Harry S.
Truman appointed Bradley to the head of the Veterans Administration. Patton, Jr. The premier school for professional soldiers, Leavenworth was the eye of the needle through which any officer who hoped for success in the Army had to pass. Bradley was somewhat critical of the predictable and unimaginative instruction he received there, as he was of the hoary "school solutions" the faculty presented. Still, he judged that his year in Kansas stimulated his thinking about tactical problems and, voicing a conclusion shared by many of his peers, believed the real importance of the Command and General Staff School was that it gave his entire generation of officers a common tactical language and technique for problem solving.
More important than Leavenworth, however, was Bradley's next assignment as an instructor at the Infantry School in The assistant commandant was George C. Marshall, who was determined to streamline and simplify tactical command procedures.
Under Marshall's guidance, instructors encouraged student officers to think. Bradley judged that no one had ever had a more profound influence on him, either personally or professionally, than Marshall. Once having given a man a job, Marshall did not interfere, as long as the officer performed as he expected. Impressed with the results of Marshall's methods, Bradley adopted an identical hands-off style of command.
Bradley's four-year Infantry School assignment also brought another intangible benefit. During this tour Bradley associated with a hand-picked company of "Marshall men," some of whom, including Forrest Harding, he had known before. Lawton Collins, were to hold important assignments in a very few years. Marshall's personal teaching, in part through the informal seminars he conducted for his staff, and the stimulating company of a group of officers devoted to the study of their profession rounded out Bradley's tactical education.
Crucial to Bradley's future in the Army was the fact that he had made a favorable impression on Marshall. At West Point he trained cadets-including William C. Westmoreland, Creighton W. Abrams, Jr. Throckmorton, and Andrew J. Goodpaster, Jr.
Bradley was promoted to lieutenant colonel in When he left West Point in the summer of for duty on the War Department General Staff, he had spent some sixteen years in Army schools as student and teacher.
After a brief period in the G-1, the Army staff's manpower and personnel office, Bradley became assistant secretary of the General Staff in the Office of the Army Chief of Staff. At times inundated by the flood of paper, he and Orlando Ward, later assisted by Bedell Smith, filtered the mass of information directed at the Chief of Staff, framing problem areas and recommending solutions.
In February , as the Army was expanding in anticipation of war with the Axis Powers, Marshall promoted Bradley from lieutenant. At Fort Benning Bradley supported the formation and training of tank forces, especially the new 2d Armored Division, then commanded by George S. He also promoted the growth and development of the new airborne forces, which would play a critical role in the coming war.
His most important contribution to the Army, however, was the development of an officer candidate school OCS model that would serve as a prototype for similar schools across the Army. When war came, the OCS system would turn out the thousands of lieutenants needed to lead the platoons of an Army that eventually fielded eighty-nine divisions. Marshall had bigger challenges in mind for Bradley as the Army prepared for combat. The unit had compiled a distinguished combat record in World War I, but it had been reactivated with draftees leavened by only a small Regular Army cadre.
The new commander saw to it that incoming drafts of soldiers were welcomed with military bands; when they were marched directly to their cantonments, they found uniforms, equipment, and a hot meal waiting for them. Such practices did much to boost the morale of often bewildered inductees. Disturbed by the poor physical condition of the new soldiers, Bradley instituted a rigorous physical training program to supplement a tough military training schedule.
He also invited Alvin York, Medal of Honor winner and the most famous alumnus of the division, to visit his troops. Based on York's remark that most of his own combat shooting had been done at very short range, Bradley adjusted the division's marksmanship program to include a combat course in firing at targets only twenty-five to fifty meters away.
Bradley looked forward to taking the 82d Division to Europe or the Pacific, but barely four months later he received orders. Bradley turned over the 82d to Matthew Ridgway and went to Camp Livingston, Louisiana, to address the problems of the Keystone Division. Among the first steps he took was the reassignment of junior officers who were over age and unable to cope with field conditions; roughly 20 percent of all National Guard first lieutenants in were forty or older.
The more senior officers who lacked the knowledge or skills for battalion and regimental command also found themselves transferred.
He also reassigned officers and sergeants within the division to eliminate the "home-townism" peculiar to s National Guard units, a system that hampered proper discipline. But the worst problems of the 28th Division were not of its own making. The division had been repeatedly levied for officers and noncommissioned officers; over 1, had gone to OCS or aviation training since the division was mobilized. Bradley put a stop to this drain in manpower and obtained new drafts from OCS to replace the losses.
He then began a systematic training program that included the intense physical conditioning he had found necessary in the 82d. He also led the division through increasingly more complex tactical exercises at the battalion and regimental level, culminating in amphibious assault training on the Florida coast. Long experience gained from Army schools and from training recruits in World War I had much to do with Bradley's ability to turn the 82d and 28th into well-trained combat divisions.
But he also clearly understood that citizen-soldiers were not professionals and that the Army could not treat them as such. He adopted George Marshall's view that doctrine had to be simplified for execution by soldiers and leaders who had no previous military experience.
Indeed, his successes in owed much to an understanding of the discipline and training needs of citizen-soldiers that derived from Marshall's guidance at the Infantry School a decade earlier.
In February General Marshall, having previously remarked that Bradley had been requested for corps command five or six times, ordered him to Austin, Texas, to take over X Corps. Before Bradley assumed that command, however, the orders were countermanded and he found himself en route to North Africa to work for his classmate Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he had occasionally seen but with whom he had not served since graduation from West Point.
Bradley arrived in North Africa in the aftermath of the Kasserine Pass debacle. He found a much-chastened Eisenhower worrying about the failure of American units to perform well against their more experienced. German opponents. The local British commander had been especially harsh in assessing the initial combat performance of the Americans.
Bradley's assignment was to serve as Eisenhower's eyes and ears, reporting on the situation on the Tunisian front and the means that might be used to correct the problems that were by then evident to everyone. One of his first important decisions was to advise Eisenhower to relieve Maj. Lloyd Fredendall from command of II Corps, whose troops had demonstrated a particularly poor performance at Kasserine.
Eisenhower had been reluctant to take such drastic action despite the recommendations of key subordinates, but he finally acted after consulting with Bradley.
When Eisenhower assigned George Patton to replace Fredendall, he also asked Bradley to become the corps deputy commanding general. Bradley then succeeded to command of the corps on 15 April when Patton left to continue his interrupted planning for landings on Sicily.
Although Patton had restored discipline and confidence to II Corps, it still lacked the prowess of British units. Bradley's task throughout the remainder of the North African campaign was to convince both his men and the British that the American soldier was as good as any and that American leaders were as tactically adept as their Allied and Axis counterparts. During the final battles of April and May he achieved his goal. The II Corps attacked northward toward Bizerte, avoiding obvious routes of approach and using infantry to attack German defenders on the high ground before bringing up the armor.
The 34th Infantry Division, maligned by the British as a unit with poor fighting qualities, fought the crucial battle and dislodged the Germans from strong defensive positions astride Hill , the highest terrain in the corps sector. With tanks in the assault role, the 34th Division infantry cleared the obstacle, allowing Bradley to send the 1st Armored Division through to victory. The fighting in North Africa was over, and the U.
Army, as Bradley put it, had "learned to crawl, to walk-then run. Capture of Sicily would, the Allied leaders hoped, knock Italy out of the war and clear the central Mediterranean of Axis forces. It might also divert German forces from the Eastern Front, thereby partially satisfying Josef Stalin's continuing demands that the western Allies open a second front against the Germans.
The Germans and Italians were not surprised by the landings, however, and hard fighting began the second day and characterized the remainder of the day campaign.
By 16 August , British and American forces held Sicily. The conquest of Sicily ultimately persuaded Italy to withdraw from the war, but the Allied operation was less than a complete success. Advancing from the south of Sicily along two axes of approach in a classic pincer converging on the port of Messina, the Allies allowed the German units to escape across the narrow straits to the Italian mainland. Bickering between American and British commanders also continued.
On the positive side, American troops had learned a lot more about fighting. They had conducted their first opposed amphibious landings and airborne assaults, brought four new divisions successfully into battle, and taken a field army into war for the first time.
It was during the fighting in Sicily that war correspondent Ernie Pyle "discovered" Bradley and established his reputation as the "soldier's general. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker.
All rights reserved. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Educated at West Point, George S. Patton began his military career leading cavalry troops against Mexican forces and became the first officer assigned to the new U. Promoted through the ranks over the next several decades, he Hitler capitalized on economic woes, popular discontent and political infighting to take absolute power in Germany beginning in A larger-than-life, controversial figure, Shrewd at He is most famous for leading a daring bombing raid over Tokyo in , Hirohito was emperor of Japan from until his death in On September 18, , Bradley was promoted to General of the Army.
Confirmed by the Senate, Bradley was appointed to the rank effective September 22, , becoming only the fourth five-star U. Army General. Volcanic activity beneath Iwo Jima, site of a defining World War II battle, is pushing sunken naval vessels to the surface. He describes what life Twenty-nine of the forty-four men who have served as our nation's commander-in-chief have military backgrounds themselves Armistice Day remembrances have been observed worldwide after the coronavirus pandemic wiped out ceremonies last year to mark Think you're a Top Gun at aircraft identification?
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