From Private to Four-Star General: Courtney Hicks Hodges - Part 1: Humble Begginings

From Private to Four-Star General: Courtney Hicks Hodges - Part 1: Humble Begginings

The Mustang Officer

Dubbed the 'Soldier's Soldier' and 'General's General' by General Omar Nelson Bradley, General Courtney Hicks Hodges occupied an unusual place in the annals of American WWII Army Generals. In fact, he can be best described as an ‘Anti-Patton’.

Source: Wikipedia

There are a plethora of adjectives that can be used to describe the 57 year-old, courtly, closely clipped and trimmed moustache, grey-haired General Hodges. Calm, restrained, quiet, modest, soft-spoken, shy, inarticulate, self-effacing, reserved, and more focused on infantry-based ground fighting operations (as he put it, “We were a zonal army. We just slugged. …”), he  was not one to become a public headlines sensation or show-stealer. In fact, he was averse to tumult and glitter, he preferred this restrained behavior to publicity-provoking eccentricities. Discipline, General Hodges maintained, could be achieved without shouting. Contrast this to the flamboyant, boisterous, loudmouth, and vulgar showman that was George Smith Patton Jr., a true darling of the press with a knack for armored, cavalry-like exploitation operations constantly making the news. 

At 5 feet, 9 inches tall, ramrod straight in his carriage, and fastidious in his dress, he appeared stiff and aloof. Or as Major Chester B. Hansen, Bradley’s aid, put it, ”Essentially a brittle, impersonal general to the bulk of his staff.” According to Historian Rick Atkinson, He was of average height but so erect that he appeared taller, with a domed forehead and prominent ears. Army records described the color of his close-set eyes as “#10 Blue.” “God gave him a face that always looked pessimistic,” Eisenhower once observed, and even Hodges complained that a portrait commissioned by Life in early September made him appear “a little too sad.” According to Hodges himself, “.. .Some people [like Patton] just naturally attract attention, and all my friends tell me that I look more like a school teacher than a general.” Atkinson further added that he was "A crack shot and big-game hunter—caribou and moose in Canada, elephants and tigers in Indochina—. He smoked Old Golds in a long holder, favored bourbon and Dubonnet on ice with a dash of bitters, and messed formally every night, in jacket, necktie, and combat boots." While US Official Historian Charles McDonald described him as the figure of an impressive soldier, many others thought of him as an unimaginative and colorless leader. The harshest critics come in the form of American military historians Carlo d’Este describing him as utterly uninspiring and Russell Weigley assessed him as prickly and insecure, perhaps even the model of a rumpled, unassertive, small-town banker, the reverse of a strong military commander.

Yet it was Hodges who commanded the US 1st Army, the largest and most experienced US field army of the time, with 9 divisions and 250,000 men within its V, VII, and XIX Corps, after the elevation of Omar Bradley to commander of the  US 12th Army Group, consisting of the US 1st and 3rd Armies. In fact, it was the 1st Army's D-Day and Normandy commander's examples that Hodges would follow. Throughout the rest of the war, Hodges would mold his leadership and command style and plan and execute combat operations along Bradley’s lines: cautious, stolid, dependable, thorough, and painstakingly meticulous, befitting a fellow infantry officer. Even then, there were noticeable differences.

The Robert E. Lee of World War II

Courtney Hicks Hodges was born in the small town of Perry, Georgia, on 5 January 1887, the fourth of eight children and the son of a newspaper publisher from southern Georgia. A First Army officer later described him as the “Robert E. Lee of World War II” and “every inch the gentleman ... gracious, understanding, and possessed [of] a keen mind.” One division commander said of him: “Unexcitable. A killer. A gentleman.” A reporter wrote that even in battle “he sounds like a Georgia farmer leaning on the fence, discussing his crops.” An accomplished horseman and one of the best shots in Perry, he remained an avid hunter throughout his life. Hodges also held and maintained the not untypical prejudices of his day, having little time for blacks rising above their station in the contemporary social order, something he definitely had in common with Patton.

An Old-School-Type Soldier, his lack of intellectual gifts, especially compared to someone like Bradley, was made evident when he enlisted into West Point in 1905, only to drop out a year latter due to failing in 'plebe geometry' mathematics. However, he more than made up for it in terms of determination, hard work, dilligence, and discipline. Unlike his more famous classmate, George S. Patton, who also failed an exam, Hodges did not repeat his freshman year. but instead, enlisted as a private in 1906 with the L Company of the 17th Infantry Regiment, serving 3 years with the regiment at Fort McPherson, Georgia. He then attained a commission through competitive examination. Following seven more years of service at army posts in the southwestern United States and the Philippines (the latter being where he met George Marshall), he was promoted to lieutenant and in this rank, he joined up with Pershing’s Punitive Expedition into Mexico in search of Pancho Villa in 1916-17. Promoted to captain in May 1917, Hodges went to France in the spring of 1918 with the 6th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Infantry Division. In the temporary grades of major and lieutenant colonel, he subsequently saw heavy action, making him one of a few future top American commanders in World War II who had seen combat before at a line company level. As a battalion commander, he earned the Distinguished Service Cross and the Silver Star after seeing action during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne Offensives. Hodges had even earned two Purple Heart citations after being gassed but tore them up as excessively “sissy.” Hodges finished the war as a regimental commander and, after the armistice, participated in the advance of American troops into the Rhineland. He returned to the United States in the summer of 1919 and remained in the regular army, reverting to the permanent grade of captain. 

Calm Before the Storm

During the interwar years, Hodges rapidly rose through the ranks and attended and instructed in various Army Schools. In order: He was promoted to major in 1920 and in 1921, completed a course at the Field Artillery School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He then served 4 years as an instructor in the Department of Tactics at West Point, where he first met Bradley, who, ironically, taught mathematics. In 1924-25, he attended and graduated from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. He subsequently completed tours of duty as an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and at the Air Corps Tactical School at Langley Field, Virginia. In June 1928, he married the widowed Mildred Buckner in Montgomery, Alabama. Following troop duty with the 38th Infantry Regiment at Fort Douglas, Utah, he returned to Fort Benning, where he served as a tactics instructor and member of the Infantry Board from 1929-1933, when he and Bradley attended the Army War College in Washington, D.C. On graduating in 1934, Hodges was promoted to lieutenant colonel and assigned to Vancouver Barracks, Washington, where he served consecutively as the executive officer of the 7th Infantry, and the 5th Infantry Brigade, and the Vancouver District of the Civilian Conservation Corps. In May 1936, Hodges transferred to Manila for another tour of duty. In February 1938, Hodges received orders assigning him to duty at the War College as an instructor, but was switched to appointed assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning in the rank of colonel. His close friendship with Bradley (they used to shoot skeet or hunt quail together on Sunday mornings at Fort Benning), acquaintance with Eisenhower in his second Phillipine tour of duty, and gaining Marshall's confidence, helped him through the rest of his career. He also met Douglas Macarthur twice, first at West Point and second in the 2nd Phillipines Tour. 

In April 1940, well after the Second World War erupted, was promoted to brigadier general, which drew a congratulatory letter from Eisenhower. In October, Hodges became commandant of the Infantry School, but with war looming, Marshall,  who had first been impressed with Hodges while he himself was assistant commandant of The Infantry School, brought Hodges to Washington in February 1941 to assume the position of acting chief of infantry and later, chief of infantry as a major general. Hodges’s replacement at the Infantry School was his good friend Bradley, six years his junior. From 25-29 November 1940, Hodges attended the Carolina maneuvers as an observer and rendered a critical report that noted frontages were excessive and that the desire for speed too often resulted in haste. In 1942, after the reorganization of the army on the entrance of the United States into World War II, Hodges was named commanding general of the Replacement and School Command, Army Ground Forces, at Birmingham, Alabama, but the need for experienced senior commanders was so great that Hodges shortly received orders to proceed to Texas to activate the X Corps as part of the U.S. Third Army under Gen. Walter Krueger. In February 1943, he was promoted to lieutenant general and succeeded Krueger upon his reassignment to command the Sixth Army in Australia.  His performance as an administrator already proved, General Hodges showed his ability as a field commander while directing the Third Army during the 1943 Louisiana maneuvers. Near the end of that year, on Marshall’s order, Hodges visited Allied field formations and installations in French North Africa and Italy and, once again, submitted a detailed and critical report on what he saw.

Hodges retained command of the Third Army until he turned it over to Patton and went overseas to become deputy commander to Bradley in the U.S. First Army. At least one officer, the Patton loyalist Col. Robert S. Allen, claimed that Hodges was actually removed for failure to demonstrate strong command ability. In addition to being shy, quiet, and inarticulate, Allen claimed that Hodge couldn’t talk on his feet, and disapproved of the “bare-knuckle frankness,’ of previous 3rd Army Commander Walter Kreuger, (latter commander of the 6th Army in the Pacific). While commanding the 3rd Army, Hodges had abolished the critique system for maneuvers used by generals like Kreuger. Instead of conducting the critiques himself, Hodges turned them over to corps and divisions, which had little experience and less time to prepare comprehensive observations. The results were thus very spotty and had limited value. In contrast with Krueger, who kept a firm hand on policies and decisions while leaving details to his chief of staff, Hodges let his chief of staff run the entire show, to the point that he, rather than Hodges, appeared to command the army.

This is contradicted by Eisenhower decision to direct Hodges to become deputy commander of the First Army in anticipation that he might take over the field army on Bradley’s elevation to command of the 12th Army Group but he also even considered having Hodges replace Patton as head of the Third Army. Apparently, Hodges believed he should have taken command of the First Army on his arrival in Britain in February 1944, but this would have meant elevating Bradley, who had not yet commanded a field army, over Patton, who had. In fact, the succession arrangement was not officially approved until 18 May 1944, and since the position of deputy commander was not an authorized appointment at the time, Hodges was left largely supernumerary to establishment. Nonetheless, Hodges continued to work as a competent, though unassuming, administrative role of deputy commander tasked with training and coordination of troops on the Corps and Divisional levels, observation of operations, and attending conferences between visits to said corps and divisions. His time to shine would come soon enough, though.

References

Atkinson, Rick (2013). The Guns at Last Light. Henry Holt and Company

English, John A. (2009). Patton's Peers: The Forgotten Allied Field Army Commanders of the Western Front, 1944−45. Stackpole Books.

Ford, Ken. (2000). The Rhineland 1945: The Last Killing Ground in the West. Osprey Publishing.

Ford, Ken. (2005). Falaise 1944: Death of an Army. Osprey Publishing.

MacDonald, Charles B. (1993). The Siegfried Line campaign. Center of Military History, United States Army.

MacDonald, Charles B. (1973). The Last Offensive. Center of Military History, United States Army.

Zaloga, Steven J. (2007). Siegfried Line 1944–45: Battles on the German frontier. Osprey Publishing.