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Spanish moss drooped from the big trees in the gloomy forest; where the country was open, sluggish streams meandered through marshes. Stolid, patient Lieut. General Walter Krueger was expecting an attack. He got it. His opponent’s armor knifed into the center of Krueger’s positions. It looked bad for Krueger’s army. But when the armor tried to exploit its advantage, Krueger capitalized on the water-broken terrain, threw in his air force and destroyed the armor. With air power and airborne infantry, he cut the foe’s communications. Then he turned his cavalry loose: both hay-burners and gas-burners ripped into the enemy’s rear. The battle was over. Krueger had won.
But that was not war: it was only preparation for war, as Krueger’s Third Army stood off the armored thrusts of Lieut. General Ben Lear’s Second in the Louisiana swamp country (September 1941). How good a preparation it had been was apparent last week. Again, Krueger was fighting in marshes and forests. But now on Luzon, main island of the Philippines, the initiative was his. The weight of armor was his. Superiority in manpower (at least locally) was his. Superiority in firepower was emphatically his. In the air and on the surrounding sea the enemy was utterly outclassed.
Only 54 miles ahead was Manila. There, in the old officers’ club more than 40 years ago, a second lieutenant of engineers and a second lieutenant of infantry had first met: West Point’s distinguished graduate Douglas MacArthur and Cincinnati Technical High School’s Walter Krueger.
Slower & Surer. G.I.s of the Sixth Army, fighting south from Lingayen toward the captive capital of the Philippines, hoped to give Manila to MacArthur and Krueger as a joint birthday present this week. (On Jan. 26 MacArthur will be 65, Krueger 64.) But the G.I.s probably were in too much of a hurry. Methodical, plodding Krueger was in a hurry, but not too much. He did not believe in capturing territory in haste, only to lose it at the enemy’s leisure. Strategically, he was out on the end of a limb—a tenuous supply line, 950 miles long, from Leyte. That was on the orders of his superior officer, MacArthur. How the Sixth Army would be supplied and maintained there was the responsibility of other men than Krueger. But within the designated area of operations how far & how fast the Sixth Army went was Krueger’s responsibility.
As the Japanese continued to fade away from the south and west of his beachhead, offering major resistance only in the northeast, Krueger had good reason to be satisfied. Said he: “Of course I would have preferred to come to grips with the enemy. But you can’t figure out what, when, how or why the Japanese act as they do, and I’m not worrying about it.”
It was not in Krueger’s nature to worry; 46 years in the army had increased, if that were possible, his innate stolidity. Worry, he once said, is a feminine trait; then he added, with one of those unexpected smiles which deepen the parenthetic lines about his mouth and the crow’s-feet beside his eyes, “When the chips are down, women are usually less nervous than men.”
Might-Have-Been. Krueger was born to military tradition older than the U.S. But for the early death of his father, a Prussian colonel, he might today be commanding an army under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. His widowed mother brought her children, including eight-year-old Walter, from Flatow in Prussia to the U.S. to be near an uncle in St. Louis. After she remarried, the family settled in Madison, Ind. Walter’s adolescent ambition was to be a naval officer; his mother would not let him apply for appointment to Annapolis. “She was afraid for me on the water,” he explains now, at the far side of the world’s greatest ocean.
After the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, Krueger and his fellow high-school students went over to Fort Thomas, Ky. to watch the 6th Infantry drill. The military bug bit them. On June 17, Walter Krueger enlisted; he reached Santiago, Cuba a few weeks after the Battle of San Juan Hill. Mustered out of the volunteers in February 1899, he still was not dedicated to the military life. By now he wanted to be a civil engineer. But many of his comrades were re-enlisting for service in the Philippines. After four months, Krueger was back in the army as a private. Soon he was on his way to fight Emilio Aguinaldo’s Insurrectos.
Sergeant’s Surprise. With Company M of the 12th Infantry, Private Krueger took part in a 25-mile advance from Angeles to Tarlac, Aguinaldo’s capital. But Aguinaldo had fled, and the 12th pursued him vainly all the way through Luzon’s central plain to Dagupan on Lingayen Gulf. To the Madison Courier Krueger wrote excellent descriptions of the campaign, explaining: “Undoubtedly you see a good deal written about . . . the Philippines, but I thought, although many professors may have their theories about these islands, ‘a fool here knows more than six wise men at home.’ ”
One day he was asked to take the examination for a commission. In his own words: “I demurred. I still had no idea of making the army a career. But I figured that as long as I was in I might as well get the best, however little that might be.” He thought he had “flunked gloriously”: but on July 1, 1901, Sergeant Krueger received his commission as a second lieutenant. Then he began to live & breathe army. He read every military textbook he could find: strategy, tactics, infantry operations, cavalry, artillery, the techniques of river crossings.
As he later told a gathering of West Pointers: “I owe West Point a great debt of gratitude. The realization that its graduates had much that I did not has spurred me to acquire what I lacked. . . . West Point has probably done more for me than it has for many of you.” Both his sons owe their debt direct to West Point: Colonel James Norvell Krueger (’26), recently returned from Northern Ireland, and Colonel Walter Krueger Jr. (’31), at Camp Bowie, Tex.
Make and Remake. After an interval in the U.S., and a promotion to first lieutenant, Krueger was back in the Philippines in 1908. The long-nosed, serious-faced young man with the dark hair parted dead center, brushed due east & west, was made a topographical inspector. As head of a mapping party, he rode and tramped up & down, back & forth across the central plain of Luzon. Few men today are more familiar with its military features than Walter Krueger. With the Japanese in possession, Luzon’s familiar map requires some changes. Walter Krueger is the man to make them.
In the years that have passed, he has worked at one endless job: to make himself a better professional soldier. By comparison with a MacArthur or a Patton, he is colorless. To reporters he has snapped: “I don’t want any legends built up around me. I’m just doing what they’re paying me for.” The record of his tours of duty is as unglamorous as it is long; in World War I, though he got to France, he saw no action. In one thing he takes pride: he has commanded, in relentless progression, a squad, a platoon, a company, a regiment, a brigade, a division, a corps and an army. He dislikes the lofty impersonality forced on him by his present duty—”Hell, I’d rather have a regiment.” Now, he says, “I don’t do much except think a lot, scold a little, pat a man on the back now & then—and try to keep a perspective.”
Nothing but the Best. The only legends which have grown up around Krueger have their origin in his directness and outward severity. He is as much a stickler for military form as though he were in the Prussian army. His jeep driver in the combat area must wear proper battle dress, carry full equipment. An officer must execute every order fully and on time, and report on his mission, in proper form. Never having needed an alibi himself, Krueger will take none from others. His inspections are searching, and reflect his deep regard for those vital instruments of war, the combat infantryman’s feet and stomach. There is no excuse, he holds, for poorly cooked chow, and many a G.I. who had heard of Krueger as a tough, tyrannical ogre has been better fed after a Krueger visit to the company mess. If he sees a G.I. limping, Krueger wants to know why. If the trouble is a misfit shoe, the man’s officer is rebuked for not having seen to it that his men were properly outfitted.
To Krueger, this solicitude has nothing to do with tenderheartedness; it is sound military practice. Says he: “Don’t make me out to be a kindly old man, because I’m not.” He would rather be thought of as a mean old soldier.
Island by Island. MacArthur was not asking for any kindly old man when, in February 1943, he requested the War Department to send Krueger to Australia to head the Sixth Army. Headquarters in a Brisbane hotel was too plush for Krueger: he moved to a camp 16 miles out of town and lived in a hut. Later he was to live in many a hut, from Milne Bay to Good-enough Island, New Britain, Hollandia and Leyte.
At 64, and back on Luzon, Krueger can outwalk men many years his junior. His 175 pounds fit well on his 5 ft. 10 in. frame, with no paunch. His grey hair is parted right of center now, and cropped close except where he has a mole over the right ear. He smokes incessantly (cigarets and a brier pipe). Only for reading does he need spectacles; he uses an old fashioned, steel-rimmed model.
Krueger’s temperament complements MacArthur’s perfectly. In many outward matters they are vastly different, but in one essential they are notably alike. As
Krueger says of his chief : he has the most important quality of keeping the enemy in his sights and going after him with singleness of purpose.
For the campaign whose history Krueger is writing across the map of Luzon, the strategy is MacArthur’s; the tactics, Krueger’s. Says the latter: “MacArthur, and he alone, decides what landings are to be made, how much we’ve got in men, shipping and supplies. When that’s decided, I take over.” Initial planning for the liberation of Luzon was done at Brisbane last July. On Nov. 15, when the end of the Leyte campaign was not yet in sight, and Krueger was still commanding an army in bitter combat with a reinforced foe, the Luzon show was laid on. Krueger took both jobs in his measured stride.
What Not to Do. His staff, under chubby Brigadier General George H. Decker, smoothly set up the operation. Krueger concerned himself only with the larger aspects of the job — the “imponderables.” Says he: “Don’t ask me about details — my staff attends to them.” There are lots of times, he admits, “when I don’t know what to do — but I know what not to do.”
Despite his deliberate refusal to worry, Krueger is concerned about history’s verdict on his campaigns, especially the long, bloody struggle on Leyte: “History may criticize the Leyte campaign — but we did win it.” He insists there is no such thing as a military expert; that “battles are not scenarios, with a beginning and an end; no one really knows the answers at the start.” But he pays homage to basic principles — principles so basic as to seem hackneyed: “Simplicity in strategic conception, perfection in technique, firmness in execution.” Beyond firmness, he worships boldness. In his 46 years of soldiering, war’s techniques have changed, but boldness remains a constant. “Decisive results can be achieved by the offensive only.”
When his patrols were pushing down Highway 3 toward Tarlac and Manila, Krueger rode to San Fabian, the northernmost beachhead, and on to Damortis, where his Sixth Army’s left flank was being extended.
The inspection satisfied him that the landings had been properly planned and executed. “Landings farther north would have been fine from the enemy’s viewpoint,” he reported. “I’ve inspected that ridge country behind the beaches up there.
They’d have been looking down our necks if we’d come in there.” Last week, nobody was looking down Krueger’s neck as he retraced his youthful steps into Tarlac, toward Angeles and Manila.
The Japs had left Tarlac nothing but a blackened husk of a town. They had got their men out and destroyed their supplies. Only in the northeast they were fighting like catamounts, forcing some Sixth Army units to fierce local combat, which was incongruous with the overall pattern of planned withdrawal. There was evidence that the enemy, having been bested by Krueger in 16 operations, at last had realized that it was useless to fight an old soldier on his own terms.
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