Generals and Ghosts

by RICHARD E. DANIELSON

1

IT is a fair assumption that a man who has risen to lofty command in the military profession must be an extrovert or man of action rather than a follower of the arts or a student of humane letters. If he had spent his days and nights mooning around in a laborious search for the mot juste, he could hardly have found time to become an AdmiraI or a General. In the case of very elevated Brass the sword (obsolete) is mightier than the pen (obsolescent). Yet in the current spate of military memoirs gushing from the presses — Admiral King hasn’t published his as yet we find an exceptionally high standard of smooth prose. An occasional reversion to standard military gobbledygook̶ “the Corps was deactivated. ” “ in higher echelons,” “the Directive was implemented,” and the like— may be forgiven as expressions of the natural man breaking through the ghostly cerements in which he lies enswathed. But, just as the speeches of our Presidents are known to be the joint efforts of Tom, Dick, and Harry well, not perhaps Harry — and consequently one cannot justly blame anyone for them, so the autobiographies of our Generals are confusing to the conscientious reviewer. One never knows how much is Ghost or how much is General.

In the ease of the well-written and highly inter– esting Our Jungle Road to Tokyo by Lieut. General Robert L. Eichelberger (Viking, $4.50)‚ the author admits that his book is done “in collaboration with Milton MacKaye. And it from time to time shows signs of the professional, literary touch. Not that it smells of the lamp, but, and only occasionally, one gets a whiff of typewriter ribbon or hears the faint tinkle of a ghostly bell.

One doesn’t expect a General who finds his command desperately stuck in the mud of pestilential jungle swamps to reflect that “we were prisoners of geography.” And there is a hint of professional literary rather than military criticism in the words, “General Mac Arthur . . . affirmed in his own luxurious prose. . .” These and similar small instances are of little importance in so long and candid an exposition, but they are quoted to indicate the question lurking in the mind of the reader: how much is Eichelberger and how much is MacKaye?

Well, I am convinced that 99 1/2 per cent of the book is General Eichelberger’s and I am grateful to him for a clear, firsthand account of a series of difficult campaigns, begun in misery and ended in glory, campaigns too little known or understood by the American public. And I find wholly admirable the almost unconscious record of his own development and growth as greater and greater responsibilities were thrust upon him. Clearly he grew in stature as he rose in rank. With every task accomplished he acquired the confidence to undertake a heavier burden. At the end, Commander of the Eighth Army, in Mindanao and Luzon —and General MacArthur has said, “No army of this war has achieved greater glory and distinction than the Eighth” he handled his veteran troops with an audacity and a skill which marked him for all time as a really great commander.

At the out break of the war, General Eichelberger, a temporary Brigadier General, was Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point. He was also a thoroughly educated officer, with almost no combat experience. During World War I he had served in the abortive Siberian imbroglio, which was more a matter of attempting to circumvent the intrigues of our allies than it was a campaign. He learned a great deal there of political-military dirty work and he formed a definite opinion about the Japanese military mind. “It is a complicated story from which the British and French emerge with no particular credit. The Japanese High Command, however, managed to achieve for itself a record of complete perfidy, of the blackest and most heinous double-dealing.” As chief of military intelligence for part of China, Japan, and, I gather, Manchuria, he educated himself — unknowingly — for his future career. He continued in the intelligence section of the General Staff in Washington — Russia and the Far Fast were his assignments — and in 1925 at the age of thirty-nine attended the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. He stayed on four years at Leavenworth as an instructor and later adjutant general. And after that, he went to school again —at the Army War College in Washington. Then four years as adjutant general at West Point, after which he was appointed, in 1935, Secretary, General Staff in Washington, under Generals MacArthur and Malin Craig. In 1938, a colonel now, he transferred to the Infantry and took command of the 30th I.R. After two years of active peacetime training and maneuvering, he was given his star and appointed Superintendent of the Academy, and there he was until shortly after Pearl Harbor. At that time he was fifty-five years old. He asked for and obtained a division in training and expected to take his troops to North Africa. Instead he was suddenly informed that he was to leave immediately for Australia, taking with him the Staff of I Corps. He was to stay in the Pacific area for six years.

Australia— in a military sense — was a mess when our author arrived there. He didn’ like the way troops were being trained; the Australian and American officers and men were working at cross purposes; he didn’t really know whether he had a command or not; General Sutherland —MacArthur’s Chief of Staff — gave him the “brushoff” if looked like a fine case of snafu and frustration. Two regiments of the 32nd Division had been sent to capture Buna on the northeast coast of New Guinea. There they had bogged down. The Japanese were on dry ground with a good road running the length of their area. They had a formidable system of defenses and strong points. Around them in a perimeter of mud. swamp, and jungle, and with practically no means of communication, were the disease-ridden wrecks of the two American regiments. The Japanese might be reinforced at any moment — in which case they could annihilate the Americans, who had no means of escape. Morale was bad; elements among the troops had reached the point of sickness and despair where they couldn’t or wouldn’t fight. General MacArthur sent for Eichelberger. “Bob, he said, “I’m putting you in command at Buna. Believe Harding. . . . I want you to relieve all officers who won’t fight. Relieve regimental and battalion commanders; if necessary, put sergeants in charge of battalions and corporals in charge of companies — anyone who will light. Time is of the essence; the Japs may land reinforcements any night. . . . Bob, I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive.”

So, a Lieutenant General, fifty-six years old, with no combat record was sent to save a forlorn hope of two depleted regiments, to make sick men light, to overcome the most dreadful conditions that the tropics can contrive. He did it, first by removing the unfit, next by establishing rudimentary communications between different elements of his command, then by exposing himself to the same dangers as his front-line troops and actually leading them into battle. He inspired his feverish, sick men. It was a small but a “miserable, tortured campaign.” Losses were fantastic; three generals were casualties; the Stall was as vulnerable as the line. But the men who emerged were real men. Buna made General Eichelberger. At the end of it, hi’ was a combat commander of proven quality.

From that point he never turned back. There was the IIuon Peninsula, IIollandia (I Corps did this with Eichelberger as task force commander), which General Marshall described as “a model of strategic and tactical maneuver”; Biak with its dreadful caves and tunnels, and then command of the new Eighth Army; Leyte, Manila, Mindanao, the mountains of Luzon, and at last —the Japanese surrender.

It is a fascinating story, simply and manfully told, with many incidental excursions any one of which would make a book. Above all it is the record of a. man who in his first assignment to combat command must have been unsure of himself. Training and character told, and from then on he moved, almost with serenity, to control ever increasing tasks and responsibilities. Such a man his fellow soldiers and his countrymen delight to honor.

I read this book at the same time — alternating chapters — that I was reading Hemingway’s Accross the River and Into the Trees, and it amused me to think how Hemingway’s thoroughly phony “Wild Boar” Colonel Cantwell would have sworn and obscened and spat and had a heart attack at the thought of a Lieutenant General with no combat experience. He couldn’t take Patton or Montgomery or Eisenhower — they didn’t fight, The only good soldier was one who was full of holes. But to most of us, this book goes to prove that military education pays off and that not all generals have to fight their way up through all the grades to learn how to command in combat.

General Eichelberger is reticent in criticism of others. In that respect, perhaps, he leaves too much unsaid. At most his criticisms are gently implied. Sutherland, Krueger, and others were not always wholly polite or coÖperative. From the standpoint of the historian greater frankness would be desirable. But that’s not the way he wanted to write his hook, He bore no malice —why hurt anyone’s feelings or reputation? He had met plenty of enemies. It was time to be friends — even with the Japs.

2

GENERAL MARK W. CLARK’S book, Calculated Risk (Harper. $5.00), is something else again. Although he acknowledged “the expert advice and assistance of Joe Alex Morris” in the preparation of this book, no ghostly apparitions stalk its pages. It strikes one as 100 per cent Clark — as far as the text goes, whatever Mr. Morris may have done by way of deletions or arrangement. Certainly it is forthright, hard-hitting stuff, all the 2.50,000 words of it, with few of the grace notes and amenities of General Eichelberger’s chronicle. In a way it is a forensic or defensive book. General Clark never had a very good press; perhaps because he was too forceful and abrupt for the Fourth Estate; perhaps because, in his campaigns, he ran into grave difficulties and delays and, when he achieved ultimate success, his victory was obscured by the overwhelming public interest in the invasion of Normandy. Then, too, the strategy of the Italian Campaign — for which he was not responsible was always debatable; and its tactics, for which he was largely responsible, seemed expensive in lives and human misery and, for a long time, unproductive. Some of his own troops, after the war, urged an official investigation of his orders to attack on the Rapido front, an attack which they evidently regarded as a hopeless and useless sacrifice. All of this has created, I think, in the popular mind a quite false picture of General Clark as a commander and a man. This book, which should be widely read, will go far to correct such an impression.

A high-powered, high-tempered man — Eisenhower was always saying to him, “Keep your shirt on, Wayne” — afraid of nothing and no man, he was consistently given tough assignments. His superiors always seem to have had complete confidence in his ability to carry out these assignments and always gave him their full moral support even when they took his tools away from him in the middle of a job. The High Command appreciated his qualities to the flattering degree that he was generally given a maximum end to be achieved with a minimum of means.

The whole Mediterranean Campaign, he says, was a calculated risk. The North African Campaign was an extremely perilous military adventure. Aside from possible French and probable German resistance in North Africa, there was always the threat of Spanish or German attack via Spanish Morocco on our extended lines of communication, an attack which might well have been fatal. That risk, fortunately, broke well for our side and we achieved a considerable victory. The next steps were not so clear. Sicily was logical and the invasion of Southern Italy and the conquest of Foggia and other airfields. But an all-out invasion, up the long boot of Italy? Was that the best thing to do? Our Brass said yes. The British consistently preferred a Balkan campaign. But, whether from wishful thinking that the Germans would not light hard for Italy, or in the hope that they would do so and thus relieve pressure on other fronts, the Italian Campaign was decided upon and the Allied armies committed to it.

Montgomery commanded the Eighth Army in the East and Clark the Fifth Army in the West, and it was a long time before the twain did meet. Salerno, Anzio, Rapido, Cassino — these are grim names and often it Was a near thing between survival and disaster. At long last, with a hodgepodge, polyglot army — Americans, British, Indians, Poles, French, Brazilians, New Zealanders — Rome was captured, and the enemy, dispersed and demoralized, was in full retreat. Thereupon the High Command took some of his best American and all of his best French Colonial divisions away from him for the invasion of Southern France. You can make out with what you have, they told him. He could and did defeat the reinforced German Army in Italy and receive their surrender, but he could not do what both he and Juin begged to be allowed to do: to follow that defeated Army through the passes and into the Balkans and Austria. This decision of the High Command — to make no changes in strategy in spite of changed conditions — was, as hindsight indicated, perhaps the major error of the war. This was apparent at the time to General Clark and to General Juin, who commanded the French troops and whom Clark admired intensely — “there never was a finer soldier” — and they protested strongly. But in the end, of course, they bit the bullet and went their several ways in accordance with orders.

To me, this is a fascinating book. Clark was always in the inside of things. It was he who went to North Africa by submarine prior to the invasion and, in adventures which were both perilous and comic, sounded out the French officers who were friendly to the idea of invasion. It was he who was rough with Darlan and forced that opportunist to take a calculated risk in favor of the Allied invaders — thus resolving an impossible situation. Clark was no diplomat and no politician; he was a man of action and he got things done. Only at the last, when he was American High Commissioner in Austria, did he find in the Russians an immovable human obstacle. And, at that, he had the satisfaction of telling them quite clearly what he thought of their obstructiveness, their secrecy, their suspicion — and their looting. There was never very much doubt about his opinion on such men and things. I could not begin to do justice If) this book in the space allotted me. When I read it, I started to put slips at the pages which I thought should be noted in a review. And I found I had put them about every third page.

That is his story and, when they have read the book, nine readers out of ten will agree with him. Even the tenth will admit the courage, forthrightness, and transparent honesty of this great soldier. How lucky we were! Marshall, MacArthur, Eisenhower, Bradley, Clark, Eichelberger, Krueger — and so many more in the Army alone, the right men for the time and place! Can it happen again?