World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY (West): Precise Puncher

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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-LÔat 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 Dday.

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 cer tain: 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 (see map). 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-LÔ. 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 prewar 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-LÔ 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.