Brothers, Rivals, Victors

He also had every right to be pleased with his headquarters team, whom he had gotten to know and appreciate over the past two months. With the exception of his incoming chief of staff, an abrasive tyrant from the Keystone Division named Bill Kean (nicknamed “Captain Bligh” by terrified staffers), Brad kept the corps staff intact. As with Ike and George, Brad had also cultivated a reliable, fanatically loyal “war family” that included aides Chet and Lew, his stateside driver, Alex Stoute, and a crackerjack orderly, a Michigander named Corporal Frank Cekada whom Brad had picked up after moving to Africa. It was a solid cadre, he thought, and as the time to assault Bizerte approached, Bradley worked alongside his men with a calm, unruffled confidence.²

Soon after he took the reins of II Corps, Bradley decided to loosen up some of Patton’s old edicts. Breakfast, for instance, would henceforth be served until 8:30 a.m., a move he believed “vastly improved the efficiency of command at headquarters,” whose personnel often worked deep into the morning hours. He had no time for the “hat patrols” and other pointless minutiae of the Patton regime, and he scaled back George’s uniform policies. With everyone out from under Patton’s boot heel, Brad figured he could get more work out of his corps if he backed off the spit-and-polish stuff for a while.³

If anything began to rub Bradley the wrong way, it was Eisenhower’s well-intentioned meddling in corps business. For a man who had never commanded troops on a battlefield, Brad thought, Ike dispensed an awful lot of tactical advice. When he read Ike’s first official letter to the incoming corps commander, Brad found it patronizing in its tone. Ike’s suggestions about troop dispositions, he felt, were poorly conceived, even dangerous. On the whole, Ike’s comments convinced Brad that his old classmate had little or no understanding of battlefield tactics. With more than a wisp of contempt, Brad took note that Ike was pressing him to attack along the Tine River valley in his southern sector with tanks in the lead. That route—a funnel-like defile under enemy guns, nicknamed “Mousetrap Valley”—smacked of old Fredendall’s Waterloo just a few months before. Turning over Ike’s letter in his head, Brad concluded Ike’s proposal would lead to disaster. He later told his biographer, “Had I followed Ike’s suggestion—it was tantamount to an order—I feel certain we would have suffered another Kasserine Pass.”

With the attack set for April 23, Bradley and his staff polished their plans to a mirror-like finish. Nothing was left to chance, and if Brad was nervous, he showed little sign of it. But at a conference of Anderson’s corps commanders on April 18, the confident tactician had the first of many awkward moments among his more worldly European counterparts. During the planning meeting, General Louis-Marie Koeltz, commander of the French XIX Corps, began to outline his group’s objectives in his native tongue. “I tried to follow him as best I could with my rusty West Point French,” Bradley recalled. “When Koeltz apologized for not presenting his plan in English, Anderson waved him airily on. ‘Of course, everyone here understands French,’ he said. I didn’t—but I suffered in silence.” George had studied la langue française since before the First World War, and Ike had a squad of translators at his beck and call. Bradley wished he had his French Acadian driver with him, but for the moment he had little choice but to stand among the erudite commanders in uncomfortable silence, a backwoods provincial among the profession’s elite.⁵

On D-minus-one, his plans for Bizerte approved, Brad unrolled his maps and outlined his strategy to a group of reporters. It was his first press briefing as an operational commander, and the man with the round spectacles and gentle twang skipped the theatrics. Standing before an easel, he gave his presentation “with no more panache than a teacher outlining the curriculum for the new semester.” But, for the schoolteacher’s son, what he said was far more important than how he said it.⁶

The plan to capture Bizerte was as straightforward as the man himself. Eddy’s 9th Division would attack “the other fellow,” as he often called the enemy, from the north, while Allen’s 1st Division would attack from the south. Doc’s 34th Division would neutralize an Axis redoubt designated “Hill 609,” near the center, while part of Harmon’s 1st Armored Division would roll forward on Doc’s right. The rest of Ernie’s tankers would be held in reserve, ready to exploit any breakthrough .⁷

The approach carried risks, of course, but when Bradley’s mind was engaged in planning, his gray matter focused on the objective, not the flesh and blood behind or before it. He did everything he could to minimize loss of life, of course, but, as his aide wrote, when Bradley was planning an attack, “troops become blue and red symbols on a sheet of acetate as he jockies for thrusts into the enemy weak positions.” Men were, as near as Brad could make them, simply inputs into an equation.⁸

To keep up with Brad’s progress, Eisenhower sent his official spy, Major General Harold “Pink” Bull, to act as his eyes and ears at II Corps—just as he had sent Bradley before. Then, as the opening salvos were about to begin, Ike and his retinue joined Bull and Bradley at II Corps, along with a small group led by Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, who was in Africa as Marshall’s eyes and ears. Thus, Brad’s headquarters was crowded with official spies, as well as spies spying on the men to whom other spies reported—all out in the open with everyone aware of one another’s presence.⁹

For Bradley’s first offensive, Ike and his entourage became a distraction he neither needed nor wanted. The influx of “visiting firemen” obliged him to give the brass a corps-level briefing before shuttling everyone over to Terry Allen’s command post, where the group sat in on Allen’s final briefing of the 1st Division staff. It made little military sense to put on these dog-and-pony shows, but it was part of the game. Brad tolerated it, and Ike came away well pleased with his friend’s performance.¹⁰

H-hour arrived at half past three on the morning of April 23. By then, even the imperturbable Bradley began showing signs of nervousness. During the lull between the attack’s step-off and the initial reports, he fidgeted around the command post until, sick of the four walls of his office, he suggested to his two aides that they take a short walk. The trio strolled out to a nearby gulch at the desert’s edge, where the general, unslinging a carbine, shot at rocks tossed into the air. Firing off a few light rounds seemed to settle Brad’s nerves, and he returned to his command post, ready to run the battle.¹¹

But on the third day Brad’s corps hit a brick wall—or rather, the tall, rocky prominence of Hill 609, the objective assigned to Doc Ryder’s 34th Division. The hill, over eighteen hundred feet high, dominated the routes into Bizerte, and Axis guns posted along its ridges pounded the Big Red One every time General Allen’s men ventured toward their target. Brad knew that if he wanted to capture Bizerte, he would have to plant the Stars and Stripes atop that hill.¹³

Brad watched Ryder’s troops assault the hill three times, only to scurry back down under withering German fire. Momentarily stumped, Bradley hit on the solution; he supplemented his infantry with a company of Ernie Harmon’s tanks. Using Harmon’s Shermans as mobile howitzers, Ryder’s men took the summit on their fourth run, on April 30; they consolidated their position the next day, and with Hill 609 in Allied hands, the road to Bizerte lay open.¹⁴

Picking their way over scrubby, rock-strewn terrain, Brad’s riflemen had to take their objectives slowly. But slow and careful was fine with the methodical Omar Bradley, who directed the battle from his command post, seated in a metal folding chair in front of a giant situation map. He was a patient man, and he knew the end of Bizerte must be in sight.

It was an article of faith that Brad would not rush his men into untested defenses when a more careful, disciplined approach would save lives. As he saw it, his job was to take Bizerte, and whether he took it on May 1 or May 15 made no difference to him unless the risks and effusion of blood were even—and they rarely were.

Patience was a lesson he had learned in his early childhood. As a young boy hunting squirrels with his father, little Omar had fidgeted and squirmed as his father lined up his rifle sights on a squirrel. Unable to contain himself, Omar threw a rock at the animal, which ran off before his father could fire; the pair returned home without their quarry. This lesson stayed with him as he grew up, and he carried that bit of backwoods wisdom into battle.¹⁵

But while the delay didn’t affect his strategy with the enemy, it gave General Anderson time to infuriate Bradley with a request for a U.S. regiment to be placed under his First British Army command. It was a dangerous precedent, one Bradley and Patton had railed against in private, and Brad was determined to spike Anderson’s guns, even if it meant running to Ike for protection.¹⁶

When Ike visited Brad’s command post the next day, Omar brought up the subject. He made his case forcefully against the transfer of U.S. troops to a Briton, and to his relief, Ike assured him, “Stand your ground, Brad. I’ll see Anderson this afternoon and back you up.”¹⁷

Perhaps George’s polemics about Black Jack Pershing and American prestige had made an impression on Eisenhower after all. Perhaps Ike sensed that, with the eyes of Marshall looking down on him, he needed to let Bradley wave the American flag for a while. Whatever the reason, Ike was dead set against the move, and Anderson had no choice but to back down. Bradley, like the revered General Pershing, had kept all his troops under one flag.¹⁸

With Anderson, Montgomery, and Bradley in position, Alexander ordered the final push to begin on May 6. Ernie Harmon, whom Bradley considered foulmouthed and boastful but a superb division commander, was to take the lead with his tanks. Eddy’s 9th, Allen’s 1st, and Ryder’s 34th Divisions would support the breakout.

The plan worked almost perfectly, Bradley’s only complaint being that Terry Allen had ordered an unauthorized attack, which was repulsed with heavy losses. It was just the kind of move Patton might have attempted, although George, Brad knew, would have had better luck. “From that point forward,” Brad said, “Terry was a marked man in my book. I would not permit him or his division to operate as a separate force, ignoring specific orders from above.”¹⁹

Despite local setbacks, Ike was happy with Brad’s progress. He visited the front three times after the offensive was launched, and he joined Brad in regular briefings. He assured Bradley, “You must know that everything you are doing excites not only my great admiration but my very deep appreciation.” On the seventh, Ike visited the II Corps command post at Sidi Nisr, a town mispronounced “Sneer” in Bradley’s Missouri twang. At Sneer the two old classmates, unfolding their spectacles, pored over huge, acetate-covered maps marked with arrows and circles as they speculated about the final end of the Fifth Panzer Army. The West Pointers were happy men.²⁰

The day after Eddy launched his final assault on Bizerte, the lead elements of his 9th Division broke into the city. On May 9, his position untenable and his back to the sea, German General Fritz Krause, commander of Bizerte’s defenders, accepted Bradley’s terms of unconditional surrender. The fighting was at an end.²¹

The death of an army is a somber, awe-inspiring sight, much like the image of a still-smoldering woods after a forest fire, or the smashed carcass of a coastal city after a hurricane has swept through. It begins with a lull in the fighting, followed by uncertain, hesitant steps by the bravest men, men who risk death at the hands of nervous victors to walk across No-Man’s-Land. As word spreads through the defeated ranks, clusters of exhausted men rise from their trenches and begin walking, limping, carrying friends and personal belongings toward their armed captors and the yawning mouths of the steel enclosures that await them. As the unfamiliar stillness thickens, undulating columns of men—some sullen, some smiling with relief, some stonefaced—lengthen and swell like swarms of locusts as sergeants, MPs, and company-grades herd their human spoils into one giant cage after the next. For the victors, the unshaven men cradling M-1s and Thompsons by the side of the road, it is a sight never to be forgotten.

The last hours of Fifth Panzer Army were no different. Upon confession of defeat, Axis prisoners, most of them sick of war and thankful to escape death, began pouring into Brad’s makeshift POW camp on bicycles, motorcycles, donkeys, half-tracks, and German trucks stenciled with the faded palm tree and swastika of the Afrika Korps. The prisoner haul, some forty thousand men, was so copious that Brad’s provost marshals had to conscript German engineers to help build larger enclosures to house their countrymen.²²

To Bradley, this victory, the product of his planning, his sweat, his leadership, was the most thrilling moment of his war service. “No other single incident of the war brought me the elation I experienced in viewing this procession of PWs,” Bradley later recalled.²³

Shortly after the twin victories at Tunis and Bizerte, George Patton paid a visit to Algiers to make good on an old bet with Ike that the Allies would not drive the enemy out of Africa until June 15. George was good-natured about losing, and in his usual theatrical style, he stomped ostentatiously into Ike’s office with a five-hundred-franc note on a silver tray and red rose, bellowing, “Hail, Caesar!”²⁵

The two men talked for some time, smiles beaming right and left. But George left Algiers a little perplexed and annoyed over Ike’s lack of appreciation for the fine work of Bradley’s illustrious predecessor. The man who had rebuilt II Corps and smashed the Germans at El Guettar and beyond. He commented later that day:

[Ike] walked the floor for some time, orating, and then asked me to mention how hard he had worked—what great risks he had taken—and how well he had handled the British, in my next letter to General Marshall. I wrote a letter which largely overstated his merits, but I felt that I owe him a lot and must stay with him. I lied in a good cause. As a matter of fact, I know of no one except myself who could do any better than Ike and God knows I don’t want his job.²⁶

As the Tunisian campaign shuddered to its denouement, the Supreme Commander was hailed on three continents as the hero of the hour. He was careful, however, to spread the credit among his senior generals, particularly the Missouri crack shot who had busted open Bizerte. He told Brad, “I am bursting with pride over you and the magnificent fighting team you are commanding,” and in a letter to Marshall, Ike privately recommended Bradley for promotion to lieutenant general. When a waggish classmate bestowed the nickname “Ikus Africanus” on Eisenhower, Ike pointed out several other Class of ’15 graduates who had contributed to the North African campaign, even suggesting the title “Omar Tunisus” for his II Corps commander. The day after Bizerte fell, The New York Times introduced its readers to Omar Bradley. Ike gave his prized corps commander a further boost by advising a hovering war correspondent named Ernie Pyle to “go and discover Bradley.” Before long, Brad would be basking in well-crafted praise from the prolific writer, whose columns touted the soft-spoken Missourian as the “GI’s General,” a nickname that would stick with the public.²⁷

With the end of the North African campaign, Ike was finally able to lift the lid on press restrictions about the names of his senior commanders, including Patton and Bradley. Accredited journalists, who could always count on splendid copy from Patton, naturally wanted to know why Ike had relieved Old Blood and Guts in favor of Bradley. Ike repeated the official line at his next press briefing: Bradley’s background was in infantry, “and therefore more suitable for mountainous fighting.” Patton, he explained, was a tanker at heart, and the man for the job when the war rolled across the flatlands to the south.

After giving them the official line, Ike took the assembled journalists off the record and explained that Patton would take part in the next big operation, and had only left the Tunisian campaign to go back to his headquarters to concentrate on the assault. Ike could not, of course, tell the press where that assault would take place. Everything was under wraps for now, he cautioned, because he didn’t want Hitler finding out where the Allies would strike next .²⁸