The subject of military history in our colleges and universities is in a sad state, as Victor Davis Hanson recently demonstrated in these pages (“Uses & abuses of military history,” The New Criterion of January 2023). But the writing of military history, particularly that of America’s role in World War II, has attracted some of the best scholars and also some lively books in recent years. To mention just a few of the luminaries: Carlo d’Este, Craig Symonds, Martin Blumenson, and Rick Atkinson. Joining them is Robert L. O’Connell, who has recently produced an outstanding group biography, Team America—his sobriquet for the four men who led America to victory in the Second World War: George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower.
This is not a bad grouping, although unfair to the U.S. Navy. Any analysis of America’s role in defeating the Axis should include the contributions of Ernest King, William Halsey, and especially Chester Nimitz. The strategy that they hammered out was a major factor in the Allied victory, especially the defeat of Japan in the Pacific.
He kept their names in his famous black book of military talent.
The four protagonists of O’Connell’s study—two West Pointers and two Virginia Military Institute graduates—knew each other and had interacted before World War II. Eisenhower and Patton’s friendship dated back to the end of World War I. Marshall followed the careers of Patton and Eisenhower in the 1920s and 1930s. He kept their names in his famous black book of military talent to be tapped in the event of a new war. All of them knew MacArthur, who had a distinguished career before and during World War I. In fact, Eisenhower served under MacArthur for seven years: three as his assistant in Washington and four under him in the Philippines. Or, as Eisenhower put it, “I studied dramatics under MacArthur for seven years.”
Given the nature of the military bureaucracy, it was exceedingly helpful for each of these men to have a patron, someone who could direct his career, a point O’Connell draws out nicely. Initially MacArthur benefited from the influence of his father, Arthur, who had made his reputation putting down the insurrection in the Philippines in the pre–World War I army. Once established as a military man of the future by his brilliant record at West Point and in World War I, however, MacArthur could direct his own career.
Both Patton and Marshall benefitted from the support of General John J. Pershing, the most influential American military figure since Ulysses S. Grant. More important to Eisenhower’s career than his service under MacArthur was the tutelage he was given by the military intellectual General Fox Conner in the interwar years. It was Conner who recognized Eisenhower’s intelligence and his ability to handle and even manipulate men, to best don what the British military historian John Keegan called “The Mask of Command.”
Of O’Connell’s foursome, only Eisenhower has received a recent biography of merit, Jean Edward Smith’s Eisenhower in War and Peace (2012). The other three are overdue for updated analyses of their careers. William Manchester’s long and overly sympathetic life of MacArthur, American Caesar (1978), has turned biographers away from one of America’s unforgettable characters. George Marshall, the only one of O’Connell’s foursome to not write some kind of memoir, is due for a lively biography given the scope of his career: chief of staff, secretary of state, and secretary of defense. Patton wrote a short sketch of his career, but despite attracting several biographers he undoubtedly will be best remembered for George C. Scott’s overpowering performance in the 1970 film Patton.
O’Connell is balanced in his analysis of the role his foursome played in America’s contribution to the Allied victory in World War II. MacArthur he credits for the strategy of bypassing Japanese strongpoints in New Guinea, an example of the “leap-frogging” approach U.S. forces used in defeating Japan in the Pacific. It should be noted that Nimitz used the same approach in taking the navy across the Pacific.
The author is also rightly impressed with the successful job MacArthur did in resurrecting Japanese society after the war. He was the perfect proconsul for the Japanese and almost as important for the nation’s revival as the emperor was.
George Marshall is presented as the great military organizer of America’s contribution to the war.
George Marshall is presented as the great military organizer of America’s contribution to the war, a man of absolute integrity and self-control. Marshall tracked the development of the best military talent to emerge after the First World War. Most of the American generals who commanded during World War II were his lieutenants, men whose careers he had nurtured. A cool disciplinarian, Marshall’s admirers were a who’s who of American government: fdr, Truman, Eisenhower, and others. A difficult man to know, Marshall refused to laugh at Roosevelt’s jokes, and, despite their closeness, never called Eisenhower by his first name. Truman regarded him as the greatest American of his generation.
O’Connell finds Patton the most colorful of his foursome but does not rank him on the same level as the others. Patton was a top-notch field commander with a gift for inspired leadership, but he was a flawed personality: mercurial, politically tone-deaf, and often his own worst enemy. But you sense that O’Connell enjoys writing about his eccentricities and quirks.
Patton’s career came to an end, O’Connell notes, when he compared fights over using Nazis to administer Germany after the war to the disputes between Republicans and Democrats. Yet within months all the Allied powers were recruiting and using ex-Nazis to put Germany back on its feet.
If O’Connell has a special hero, it is Eisenhower. The author shines a light on the difficult task he mastered, which was to control the greatest military coalition in history while dealing with trying personalities like Winston Churchill, Field Marshal Montgomery, Charles de Gaulle, and others. Eisenhower, O’Connell believes, was at his best in organizing a team, a group that worked together efficiently. It was a quality that O’Connell sees as having made Eisenhower not only a great general but also a successful president.
Team America is well written and well organized. O’Connell’s study of these four American military giants should take its place among the best works on the role of the U.S. Army in World War II.