The Yanks Are Coming! (22 page)

He was ordered home in 1909, promoted to lieutenant colonel, and given the opportunity to attend the Army War College, where he excelled, catching the eye of future senior Army officers. In November 1910 he took command of the Marine Barracks in Brooklyn, New York; in 1912 he led a Marine peacekeeping force ashore in Cuba; and in 1914 he commanded the Marines occupying Vera Cruz. Colonel Lejeune returned home to become assistant to the commandant of the Marine Corps, Major General George Barnett, and in 1916 was promoted to brigadier general.

The Marine Corps had been slowly expanding even before World War I to meet the need for small expeditionary forces that could be deployed around the globe, but especially on extended constabulary deployments in the Caribbean and Latin America. With the declaration of war on Germany in April 1917, the Marines were eager to be in on the action—one of their recruiting slogans during the war was “First to Fight”—and through deft political maneuvering the 5th Marine
Regiment sailed off with the American Expeditionary Force in June. Lejeune was not with them, but he was pressing for a command. In September 1917, he became commander at Quantico, supervising Marines training for combat service.

“THE DIVINE SPARK IN MEN”

In May 1918 he finally got his orders for France, arriving in-country a month later. His goal was to create a Marine division, though this was opposed by General Pershing, who wrote to Secretary of War Newton Baker, “While the Marines are splendid troops, their use as a separate division is inadvisable.”
⁵
The Marines got wonderful press, which irked the Army, and if Pershing had his druthers, the Marines would be kept guarding ports and acting as auxiliary military police. If Pershing was worried about uniformity of training, formations, and equipment, there was every reason to form a Marine fighting division, but even Lejeune had to concede, in due course, that “Headquarters could scarcely provide [Marine] infantry replacements for the Fourth Brigade—impossible for an entire division.”
⁶

In July, Pershing appointed Lejeune commander of the Marine 4th Brigade. Lejeune was ecstatic; it was the 4th that had won such renown at Belleau Wood. No sooner had he been made brigade commander than a shakeup of assignments put Lejeune in command of the 2nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force, which included the Marine 4th Brigade as half its infantry strength. Promoted to major general, he was the first Marine officer to command a division.
⁷
Lejeune's division fought at Saint-Mihiel and with heavy casualties seized the heights of Mont Blanc. Though he chafed under the bellicose leadership of his corps commander during the final push of the war—General Charles Summerall, commander of V Corps—Lejeune was
proud of the fighting spirit of the 2nd Division, which simply would not be stopped, advancing by day and by night, as it battled against the retreating Germans. The war ended with Lejeune's 2nd Division having just crossed the Meuse.

The Marines as a whole took more than 50 percent casualties in the war. Lejeune, totting up his losses but proud of his division's victories, wrote, “While war is terribly destructive, monstrously cruel, and horrible beyond expression, it nevertheless causes the divine spark in men to glow, to kindle, and to burst into living flame, and enables them to attain heights of devotion to duty, sheer heroism, and sublime unselfishness that in all probability they would never have reached in the prosecution of peaceful pursuits.”
⁸

Lejeune's Army superiors were of mixed opinions about him. They could not deny the success of the 2nd Division—it gained more ground than any other—but some found him too independent-minded and too ready to question orders, and held suspect Lejeune's style of leading men rather than driving them. Still, Pershing kept him on. The 2nd Division was not pulled out of the line and sent home; instead, it was assigned to occupation duty in Germany until late summer 1919.

In October, Lejeune took command at Quantico. He had three immediate objectives: to rebuild the base, which had taken a beating during the rush to train Marines for the war; to provide vocational training for the enlisted men so that service in the Marines was not a dead end; and to turn Quantico into a center for advancing the education of Marine officers.

COMMANDANT

He wasn't at Quantico long. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels had long had his eye on Lejeune as a future commandant of the
Marine Corps, and in 1920 Daniels ousted the sitting commandant, General George Barnett, and put Lejeune in his place. Like the leaders of the other services, Lejeune had to find a way to stave off draconian congressional budget cuts. Marines were still quick-fix troops whenever there was trouble overseas, from Nicaragua to China, but to keep the Corps in the public eye, Lejeune pitted Marine athletic squads against college teams and put Marines in the forefront of Civil War reenactments. He renewed the traditional Marine training emphasis on marksmanship, and his publicity campaign received a boost when President Harding asked the secretary of the Navy to assign Marines to guard railway mail cars. These had suffered a spate of robberies, and the Navy secretary's order to the Marines could only bolster their public image: “If attacked, shoot, and shoot to kill. The mail must be delivered or there must be a Marine dead at the post of duty.”
⁹

Lejeune proved himself a deft administrator, doing much with the small budget Congress allotted him, including keeping Marine Corps aviation alive and laying the intellectual groundwork for the Marine Corps of the future—as an amphibious assault force. Stark reductions in manpower, which left the Marines barely able to fulfill their current duties (two-thirds of them were at sea or on overseas assignments), made planning for amphibious warfare, on a far larger scale than Marine Corps police actions, seem visionary.

With Marine Corps strength slipping beneath twenty thousand men, Lejeune economized by closing recruiting stations, raising recruiting standards (with few slots open, the Marines could be choosy), and extending enlistments to keep trained men a year longer. In 1925, Lejeune was reappointed as commandant for a second four-year term, and he likely could have been reappointed to a third term had he not tendered his resignation, effective the day after Herbert Hoover was inaugurated president in March 1929.

LEADERSHIP AS A MORAL CALLING

Though Lejeune had not planned it this way, he was offered the perfect position for a general so dedicated to improving the education of his officers and enlisted men. The superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute was retiring. The VMI Board of Visitors presented the job to Lejeune, who accepted it gratefully. Using his connections in Washington, Lejeune embarked on a major refurbishment and expansion of the school, which received a massive influx of dollars from Washington in the 1930s. President Franklin Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, was a friend, and construction projects were part of the administration's recovery program from the Depression. VMI, under Lejeune's leadership, was a beneficiary.

Lejeune's devotion to the school, however, nearly killed him. Inspecting a newly built water tower in September 1932, he fell, cracked his skull, broke an arm, and was unconscious for days. Before the accident he had been an inspiring speaker. After, he could speak only from prepared remarks, which he read ploddingly. He nevertheless recovered well enough to continue to lead the school until October 1937.

The former commandant and superintendent retired to Norfolk, Virginia. When Hitler and Stalin parceled Poland between them in 1939, Lejeune sensed war was near and offered to come out of retirement to lead Marines. The commandant of the Marine Corps, General Thomas Holcomb, politely declined his offer, though in 1942 Lejeune received a post-retirement promotion to lieutenant general. The only other Marine to hold that rank at that time was Holcomb himself, promoted by Roosevelt slightly earlier in 1942.

Lejeune died in November 1942, from prostate cancer. His doctors had long advised him to have his prostate removed, and he had long denied them the honor, trusting that horseback riding and, later,
golfing would keep him healthy. Before he died, he had the pleasure of seeing a grandson, a Naval Academy graduate, class of 1939, commissioned into the Marine Corps.

Though he looked like an old boot—naturally, perhaps, for a general of leathernecks—it might strike some as ironic that one of the most famous commandants of the Corps was a teetotal, highly religious Episcopalian whose idea of a good time was Sunday dinner with his family. But it shouldn't. Lejeune—the general whose name is remembered on halls at the Naval Academy, VMI, LSU, and the Marine base at Quantico, not to mention Camp Lejeune in North Carolina—believed that leadership was a moral calling. He believed in leading by example. He wanted the example he set to be a good one—and as evidenced by the honor of Marines ever since, and the continued affection and esteem of his fellow Devil Dogs, it was.

PART IV

THE YOUNG LIONS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

GEORGE S. PATTON (1885–1945)

P
atton's paternal line was Virginian—Confederate, martial, gentlemanly. His father, a VMI graduate (as was his grandfather), was a lawyer and occasional district attorney in Los Angeles, where his family had moved after the War Between the States. His mother was from Southern California—well-to-do and well educated, a Western aristocrat with a pioneer father, a family ranch, and the conservative politics that typified much of Southern California for the next hundred years. Patton and his younger sister grew up at his mother's family ranch, fishing, shooting, riding, and playing soldier.

Patton had doting parents and a happy childhood, and he did some of his schooling at home because he was dyslexic. Though
reading was consequently difficult for him, memorizing poetry was not—and Patton committed to memory swathes of the Bible, Shakespeare, and Kipling. He relished tales of heroism (usually read to him), be they Norse legends or the chivalric novels of Sir Walter Scott, or better yet, familial stories about the Pattons (seven Patton brothers had served as Confederate officers, and both bloodlines, originally from Scotland, counted patriot veterans of the Revolutionary War).

THE CADET

The young Patton regarded himself as part of a noble class for whom character, including courage, was everything. He could not let his ancestors down. He was already determined to be an officer; his most avid reading at school was in military history, learning lessons he intended to apply in his own life.

The first goal was West Point, but he didn't go directly; he enrolled at the Patton family alma mater, VMI, spending a year there as preparation. At VMI, Patton took the same uniform size as his father and grandfather, and the handsome, blond, blue-eyed, consciously stern-visaged young man applied himself rigorously to his duties. He made a near-perfect cadet and thrived at VMI. But the goal was still West Point. Patton's father had lobbied Thomas Bard, U.S. senator from California, for an appointment. The Republican lawmaker invited Patton to return to Los Angeles and sit an examination with other candidates. Three passed, and Patton was the one selected.

He found the cadets at West Point, on the whole, socially inferior to the cadets at VMI—not all of them were Southerners, after all. Still, his dyslexia meant he had to study harder than most; he was
no languid aristocrat but a striver, fearful of failure, eager to be a master of his profession. He needed steely self-discipline to get through his books, exams, and written presentations that meant standing before a class and writing on a blackboard, trying desperately not to misspell words. Dyslexia was not a recognized diagnosis in those days, and Patton felt it only as a great vulnerability: he thought he was smarter than many of his classmates but had to wonder if he was somehow stupid given how much more effort it took him to succeed. He had to repeat his first academic year at the Point.

He took to keeping a notebook. Its first entry: “Do your damdest [
sic
] always.” He wrote that he was determined to be a great man, a great soldier: “I am different from other men my age. All they want to do is to live happily and die old. I would be willing to live in torture, die tomorrow if for one day I could be realy [
sic
] great.”
¹
There was no failure, he thought, in dying in battle—but the battle must be won. Every attack—and a commanding officer should always be on the attack—must be all in, because “the world has no use for a defeated soldier.”
²

He made lists of books—military histories—that he thought he needed for his professional education, and he read them.

           
In order for a man to become a great soldier . . . it is necessary for him to be so thoroughly conversant with all sorts of military possibilities that when ever an occasion arises he has at hand with out effort on his part a parallel. To attain this end . . . it is necessary . . . to read military history in its earliest and hence crudest form and to follow it down in natural sequence permitting his mind to grow with his subject until he can grasp with out effort the most abstruce
[
sic
] question of the science of war, because he is already permiated [
sic
] with all its elements.
³

For all his academic struggles, he was an educated soldier, a lifelong student of military history.

When not reading or studying or performing the other duties of a cadet, he was training his body through athletics. He played football, but an injury cost him his spot on the team. He ran track (setting an Academy record in the hurdles), fenced, rode horses, and was a marksman with pistol and rifle. He tested himself in other ways too. Once, he stood up in the pits where cadets raised and lowered targets for rifle practice. He wanted to see what it was like to get shot at, to reassure himself of his courage. He was lucky the cadets were on-target.