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"World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY
(West):
Precise Puncher"
The battle to smash through the Siegfried Line to the Rhine
had begun. This week General "Ike" Eisenhower's top
heavyweight - the biggest and most powerful of his armies in
Europe - still slugged forward in the heaviest part of the job.
Lieut. General Courtney Hicks Hodges' U.S. First Army pounded
unremittingly at the crouching enemy, in a tremendous burst of
infighting against the Germans' main forces in the West Wall,
trying for a knockout before winter.
In the heartening days after the breakthrough at Saint-Lo, the
breaking of the Siegfried Line might not be too hard a task.
But experienced generals like leathery Courtney Hodges knew differently.
By now even the lowliest of his slugging G.I.s, up against the
enemy among his earthworks, his forests, his staggered rows of
pillbox forts, knew that the job was probably one of the toughest
since D-Day.
The First's fighting men knew too well what had turned the chance
for apparent quick victory into this week's slugging match around
Aachen. For one thing, bad weather, as it often had before, tied
down the potent hand of Allied air power. But more importantly
it was the thinning of the supply stream as the Allied armies
moved farther from their coastal bases.
The First Army had felt that pinch, which the Germans cleverly
aggravated by hanging on to France's best ports until the bitter
end. For weeks the First's artillery had had to hoard its shells.
For one three-day period, General Hodges' headquarters mess had
had no food but captured German rations.
By this week it was apparent that the supply situation had been
redressed. Probably it did not yet have the bountiful perfection
to which U.S. soldiers have be come accustomed. But one thing
was certain: General Hodges would not be moving as he was unless
he could move with certainty. Above all other things, Courtney
Hodges was a believer in making sure before he went ahead.
The Cautious Way
The First put in five days & nights of steady hammering
before it got its first break. It took bitter punishment - the
enemy was also good at infighting, and Courtney Hodges had to
be cautious. But Hodges' men delivered hard, damaging blows,
inching forward, never easing the pressure, always looking for
an opening to hit where it would hurt most.
By this week the Germans' hard crust had been definitely broken
where Hodges' smashes north of Aachen had sunk in past Ubach
and Beggendorf. The crust south and east of Aachen (which was
in peril of encirclement) showed signs of breaking in the Hürtgen
forest area.
But even if that breakthrough is achieved, the First will not
yet have an other Saint-Lo. The West Wall break will have to
be vastly widened before tanks can be rocketed through to burst
out toward Cologne and Dusseldorf, Ike Eisenhower may have to
achieve other breaks or fight around the northern flank on to
the north German plain before he can break his tanks loose. For
the time, Hodges' First was in the best position to bring about
that situation. But only history would tell whether the First's
drive in the Aachen sector would be written down as a diversion
or the main and decisive effort.
Whatever the broad strategical plan, Courtney Hodges' First had
a key job to do - and a rugged one. The First was virtually a
hand-picked army. The picker: Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley.
Courtney Hodges was a hand-picked commander. The picker: Chief
of Staff General George Catlett Marshall.
Omar Bradley had put the First together in Britain, months ahead
of the invasion. It was formed around several divisions that
had fought in Tunisia and Sicily. Last March tall, lean, 57-year-old
General Hodges, one of the Army's top military scholars, had
been sent over from the U.S. to train the First Army. Bradley
had made him his deputy commander, piled on him much of the administrative
work, the job of welding the army's units into teams.
The Typical Way
Outside the close-knit fraternity of pre-war U.S. Army officers,
Hodges was an unknown when the war began. Even after his success
in France, the U.S. public knew him only as a name. For glamor
and color he was no "Georgie" Patton. He had had no
adventures like Mark Clark's daring submarine trip to Algeria
before the invasion of North Africa in November 1942. Hodges
had given the public no such vicarious feeling of the rich panoply
of Army life as had the pictures and deeds of bemedaled, able
Douglas MacArthur.
The U.S. Army has no one distinct type of successful commander
- as such various men as MacArthur, Patton and Clark go to show.
But it has got a kind of general whom soldiers often call typical
professionals, or soldiers' soldiers. This type includes scores
of men devoted entirely to the profession of arms - the pure
scientists of war. The public seldom hears of them in peace,
never intimately knows them. Out of this mold have come two men
as top commanders in World War II, much alike in temperament,
who have had much to do with each other and with the success
of U.S. arms in Europe. They are Omar Bradley and Courtney Hodges.
To civilians, such hard-working specialists of organization,
engineers of training and tactics, often seem not only alien
but colorless. Except for their closest friends, even their fellow
soldiers know them mostly by their official actions. But, from
the days of Washington through Sherman and Pershing to George
Catlett Marshall, the Army and the country have profited from
their devotion to the art of war.
The characteristics of this type fall into a general pattern:
hard physical fitness, an inborn love of the soldier's life,
adherence to the military tradition of restrained behavior, a
fatherly attitude toward their troops, a deep respect for the
profession's leaders.
Reserved, capable, courteous General Hodges fits perfectly into
this pattern. His family background was in the general tradition.
His great-grandfather was one of three brothers who came to Virginia
from England and fought with Washington against the mother country.
Four of his uncles fought on the Confederate side in the Civil
War (his father was too young).
The Hard Way
Georgia-born (at Perry, in the peach belt), Courtney Hodges
was a good shot at ten. At twelve (the Spanish-American War period)
he organized his school chums into two companies, drilled and
maneuvered them in mock battles. At 17, after a year at North
Georgia College, he went to West Point.
At the stern school on the Hudson the pattern was almost broken.
In his first year Cadet Hodges was "found": he flunked
in geometry, and had to leave the Academy. But Courtney Hodges
was going to be a soldier, and an officer, if he could contrive
it. A year later, he laid down his job in a grocery store in
Perry and enlisted as a private soldier. It was up the ladder
from there on - corporal and then sergeant in the 17th Infantry,
and then a chance for a commission. Sergeant Hodges had turned
into a hard, determined student. He won the competitive examination
for a second lieutenancy and was commissioned the year after
his old West Point classmates.
Hodges went into World War I as a captain, came out with a fine
record and a temporary lieutenant colonelcy. In the Meuse-Argonne
offensive he had won the Distinguished Service Cross by leading
his infantrymen in a crossing of the Meuse, by hanging on and
protecting his cut-off position while others got across. His
tenacity under fire turned a scouting mission into his brigade's
offensive spearhead.
He had served in the Rhineland occupation (in the same area that
his First Army's maps now cover). He returned to a ten-year tour
of troop duty, of instruction in the Army's schools, of teaching
from the textbooks. For 14 years Major Courtney Hodges had no
promotions. Like many another professional soldier, he learned
again that in peace the soldiers' rewards are small and few.
But it was his life. He read, studied, worked with characteristic
precision at field and garrison duties.
He took a course in the Field Artillery School (which was paying
off last week on the Siegfried Line). He was the first non-West
Pointer to instruct in infantry tactics at the Military Academy,
where his example of perseverance was cited to discouraged cadets.
He got an early lesson in air-power potentials when he instructed
Langley Field officers in infantry tactics (and the experiences
came in handy when he laid the groundwork for the first U.S.
airborne units in 1940).
The Army Way
Hodges was all Army. Its influences dominated his one hobby-shooting
and hunting. He became one of the crack shots of the service,
captained rifle teams, became a skeet champion. On his leaves
he packed off to hunt big game-caribou and moose in Canada, elephants
and tigers in Indo-China.
His marriage, at 40, was Army: he met tall, blue-eyed Mrs. Mildred
Lee Buckner, widow of an Army flight surgeon, at a Langley Field
dinner dance. She loves Army life. Hodges taught her to shoot
and hunt (she is among the country's top women skeet shots).
Mrs. Hodges lives in Atlanta, wishes the General had time to
write more often, tell a little more about himself when he does.
Hodges had been an officer 20 years when he got the break that
was to make him a three-star general in World War II. Most of
the top Army commanders today are men who, at one time or another,
have impressed George Marshall, who is a hard man to impress.
In 1929 (when the Army was at one of its lowest points in men
and money) George Marshall was a lieutenant colonel, the assistant
commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Ga. Two majors
impressed him there: plain, lanky Omar Bradley and ramrod-straight,
studious Courtney Hodges. The three got on.
Hodges crossed the path of another man of destiny in 1936, when
he was assigned to the Philippines as General Douglas MacArthur's
plans and operations officer. On MacArthur's staff was Lieut.
Colonel Dwight Eisenhower, rated one of the brightest of the
Army's brighter young men. Eisenhower, too, made a note of Hodges
as a man who knew how to get things done.
In 1938, when almost everybody in the Army knew that war was
surely coming, Hodges (then a colonel) was back in the U.S. and
in the Infantry School job which George Marshall had held. Hodges
bore down on one doctrine: the young men there were not to be
thought of merely as lieutenants taking a prescribed course;
they were to be battalion and regimental commanders in the coming
war. The Infantry School course became one of the Army's finest.
The Marshall Way
In early 1941, George Marshall picked Courtney Hodges as Chief
of Infantry. The man who could not make West Point's grade became
a major general. Hodges had proved to Marshall that his Army-trained
mind was not stereotyped, that he was quick to grasp ideas, thorough
in getting them into execution. As Infantry Chief, Hodges was
concerned with training and new weapons. His knowledge of guns
began to pay dividends. Hodges' insistence that an infantryman
should have a weapon to stop a tank was an early influence in
fostering the mortar-type bazooka. Other Hodges-fostered items:
the jeep, the new-type helmet, the rapid-firing carbine.
Marshall was impressed by Hodges' work as a trainer and desk
general, but he needed top field commanders. He gave Hodges one
more test: command of the Third Army. The 1943 Louisiana maneuvers
clinched the case and Marshall's conviction of Hodges' abilities:
"unbeatable in the kind of command that requires deliberate
method, close-knit organization, the kind of mind that nothing
can distract." Hodges went to England and to battle.
The First Army was Bradley's pride & joy after D-Day (it
is still his favorite). But Bradley had a bigger job cut out
for him: combined command of the First and of General Patton's
armor-heavy Third, whenever the Third could be broken loose out
of Normandy. Hodges was on hand to run the First.
The shift from Bradley's to Hodges' command was made in mid-battle,
without the grating of a gear. The battle plan for the Saint-Lo
breakout was Bradley's, but from there on the tactical decisions
were up to Hodges. When Hodges took over, the First had two complicated
plans to work out: 1) to slug in and carve a corridor for Patton's
tanks to slip through, then hold the German counterattacks and
keep the corridor open; 2) using its own armor, to swing a right
hook to form the first trap for the German Seventh Army (TIME,
Aug. 28). Hodges ran off these plans without raising his voice
and with rare recourse to his spare vocabulary of profanity.
The First's smart exploitation of its part of the battle was
proof enough that Courtney Hodges was the versatile, complete
tactician: he could stand and slug, or dash and slash.
The Hodges Way
This week, back in its slugging stride, the First looked to
Hodges for something new in his bag of tactics. In his trailer
(built-in bunk, washstand, two chairs, a desk) he went about
the business of battle much as he had gone about the business
of training.
The Hodges headquarters is businesslike, brisk but quiet. The
General is no spit & polish stickler but, a thorough precisionist;
he insists on detailed planning. If there has been a mistake,
he wants it thoroughly aired when he meets his staff at 0900
each morning. He addresses his officers by their first names,
but his staffers call him "General."
After the meeting the General sets out in his jeep to visit his
corps commanders, to detail plans, to check on battle performance.
The commanders know that the General is no martinet, but they
also know that he can be ruthless in putting the ax to any command
if it fails to meet his combat standards (Hodges has sacked several
generals and colonels, some of them his close friends).
On his tours about the front the General stops often to talk
with the G.I.s. He is always the General, but the G.I.s respect
him, as they do Omar Bradley, for a sincere, sympathetic interest
in the common soldier. They remember that Hodges was one himself,
and honor him for the fact.
The Precise Way
At lunchtime Hodges usually pulls his jeep to a roadside and
digs into a can of K rations - he does not like to cause a flurry
of deference to his stars by taking lunch at some command post.
But, back at his headquarters, the General insists that the staff
officers who dine with him appear in spic & span uniforms.
When he enters the mess his officers hop to attention and hold
it until he nods them at ease. He dresses immaculately, but detests
flashy uniforms, refers to service and decorations ribbons as
"brag rags." But he wears his own on formal occasions,
because that is proper military behavior.
Like Bradley, Hodges is slow-speaking, painstaking, quick in
decision, exacting in demands on his subordinates, but warm in
personal relationships with them. His soldiers know him, as they
know Bradley, as a just, hardworking, dependable leader who will
not waste lives, who wants to get the war over quickly.
On the First Army's command team this week was the responsibility
for answering the question: will the war in the West end this
year or drag drearily into next spring? To romanticists the appropriate
man to deliver the successful answer might seem the legendary
general of the Jeb Stuart type. But there were no romantic trappings
about make-certain Courtney Hodges. His only tradition was precise,
professional proficiency. It suited soldiers.
END.
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