The Five-Star G.I.’s General

Omar Nelson Bradley: 1893-1981

In 1943 Major General Omar Bradley arrived at the Tunisian front to serve as field adviser to his onetime West Point classmate Dwight Eisenhower. Bradley at 50 was a career officer who had never seen a day of action on the battlefield.

Yet during the next two years, he was to lead American soldiers through some of the bloodiest fighting of World War II—the final defeat of the Germans’ Afrika Korps, the invasion of Sicily, and, as commander of the U.S. First Army, the historic Normandy invasion. In 1945, after the Allies’ near defeat at the Battle of the Bulge, Bradley led the sweep across the Rhine and the meeting of U.S. and Soviet troops at the Elbe. He was by then commander of the Twelfth Army Group, a mass of 1.3 million troops that formed the largest American force ever united under one man’s command.

In the memories of those who served under him, Omar Nelson Bradley always remained “the G.I.’s general.” He was a tireless infantry leader who seemed to be everywhere at once. Dressed in a grimy old trench coat, his fatigues stuffed into his boots, “Brad” would frequently abandon his desk at headquarters for flights to the front in a Piper Cub. There, he insisted on inspecting everything from forward outposts to latrines. Though not noted for eloquence, he enjoyed addressing the troops in his flat Missouri twang, and he gave them plain talk. “Fellows like me have been in this business a long time,” he told a unit being trained for the D-day invasion.

“And you know we wouldn’t be arranging this unless we were fairly sure it would work.”

It did work, of course, largely because Bradley was—in sharp contrast to flamboyant General George S. Patton Jr.—a methodical, textbook commander who shunned flashy or risky tactics. Instead, he trusted meticulous preparation for slow, cautious assaults that held a solid chance of success. When a fellow officer, Major General William B. Kean Jr., expressed a mild worry about the awesome task of planning for the Normandy invasion, Bradley replied: “But, Bill, who in the Army knows more about it than we do?”

The son of a schoolteacher and a seamstress from central Missouri, Bradley found the prospect of going to college too expensive after graduating from high school. Instead, he took the advice of his Sunday school superintendent and applied for admission to West Point. He graduated in 1915, 44th in a class of 164; among his classmates were 30 officers—including Ike—who served as generals in World War II.

Bradley held 28 different Army posts while working his way up through a series of teaching, training and administrative assignments. After the war, his fellow Missourian Harry Truman nominated Bradley as the first postwar head of the Veterans Administration and then, in 1949, as first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that position, Bradley was awarded the fifth star, accorded to a General of the Army, a title held by only four other men since the Civil War: George Marshall, Douglas MacArthur, Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold and Eisenhower.

After two terms as head of the Joint Chiefs, Bradley later joined the Bulova Watch Co. and served as its chairman from 1958 until stepping down in 1973. The old soldier spent his last four years at Fort Bliss in Texas, where he sometimes lectured on leadership. In accepting West Point’s highest honor, the Sylvanus Thayer Award, in 1973, Bradley reflected on the low prestige of the military after the Viet Nam War. “The profession of arms is often a lonely profession. It is misunderstood by many. My wife has called me a warrior who hates war. I am sure that is true of all of us.”

By act of Congress, five-star generals cannot retire, and thus Bradley served 69 years on active duty—longer than any other soldier in U.S. history. Although largely confined to a wheelchair by arthritis in recent years, he served as grand marshal of Ronald Reagan’s Inauguration parade last January. Bradley flew to Manhattan last week to attend a dinner in his honor given by the New York chapter of the Association of the United States Army. Shortly after the ceremonies were completed, the G.I.’s general died, of cardiac arrest, at the age of 88.