Army & Navy: Three Brothers, Three Stars

The Army’s newest high-ranking brother act won its third star last week. At 33, Colonel Edward Julius (“Ted”) Timberlake of the Air Forces was promoted to Brigadier General, thus became the youngest general officer since the Civil War.*

Ted Timberlake is one of the Army’s hardest-hitting bomber commanders, a crack pilot and specialist in B-24s. His brother, burly Brigadier General Patrick Timberlake, 43, formerly chief of the U.S. Ninth Air Force’s Bomber Command in the Middle East, is now one of the Ninth’s top planners. Their eldest brother, Brigadier General Edward Wrenne (“Ed”) Timberlake, perversely became an expert in shooting planes down, and now commands the anti-aircraft defenses of Washington.

The Timberlake Cadets. From 1914, when Ed entered the U.S. Military Academy, until 1931, when Ted was graduated, West Point was never without a Timberlake cadet.

There were four brothers then, Army men by predestination. Their father, Colonel Edward J. Timberlake, was a ramrod-straight soldier, Class of ’93, who played for West Point in the first Army-Navy football game in 1890. On duty at West Point from 1919 to 1929, he proudly watched an unbroken succession of his sons passing through.

Ted, the baby of the family, was also the poorest student, finished 393rd in a class of 403.

“Anyway,” he cracked, “I beat ten men and was well ahead of the Class of 1932.”

After graduation two brothers chose the Coast Artillery, two the Air Corps. J. Coleman Timberlake died in 1938. But his three brothers are carrying on the family tradition in notable style.

Pat’s Example. As the 5-ft.-10-in. “runt” in a family of six-footers, Ted Timberlake took plenty of lumps growing up. Pat was his special idol in athletics. Because Pat had been a javelin thrower, Ted manfully tossed the steel-tipped spear around. Pat had been a star blocking back. Ted played one season, lost another with injuries, wound up warming the bench.

Not until after the war came along did Ted get a chance to outshine his older brothers. Then he blossomed as commander of “Ted’s Traveling Circus,” a hard-riding Liberator bomber outfit that moves fast and far, taking on tough special jobs all the way from England to the Middle East.

Pat’s Reward. The circus made one trip to Africa, later flew down again to join Pat’s Ninth Air Force Bomber Command for the spectacular Ploesti oil refineries raid, the long-range thrust at Wiener-Neustadt. Ted personally led the Liberators on the Wiener-Neustadt show. When they returned to the African base, General Pat was there to greet him with a bottle of whisky for the victory toast.

Ted’s Poop. Slangy and informal, Ted has a deceptively casual attitude toward “poop” (planning and paper work). When training in the desert for the Ploesti raid Colonel Ted used old five-gallon oilcans for filing cabinets. One day he startled the office staff by striding in with three cans, dropping them on the floor with a vast clatter, and saying simply, “There’s the poop.”

Yet his operational planning is careful and accurate and he is in fact one of the Air Forces’ great tacticians. When preparing for a raid or holding a planning conference he likes to spread maps on the floor and crawl over them to line up his objectives and make them clear to his crews. Last week when his promotion was announced, Ted was off in the blue somewhere. It seemed a reasonable, if unofficial, guess that the “poop” had been gathered together again, and the circus was again on its travels.

* Among Civil War youngster Generals: Jackson, 37; Stuart, 28; Pickett, 37;Custer, 23; Forrest, 41; Sheridan, 31. At Appomattox, Grant was 42, Lee, 58.