Omar Bradley

Omar Bradley was born February 12, 1893, in a rented cabin near Clark, Missouri, the only child of a schoolteacher who never earned more than forty dollars a month. His father died when Omar was fifteen, and money stayed short enough afterward that Bradley graduated high school in Moberly and took a job as a boilermaker on the Wabash Railroad, saving toward law school at the University of Missouri. A Sunday school teacher at his Moberly church talked him into sitting for West Point instead. He entered in 1911 and graduated in 1915, in a class so heavy with future generals it became known afterward as the class the stars fell on.

He commanded II Corps in North Africa and Sicily, the First Army on Omaha and Utah beaches on D-Day, and then the Twelfth Army Group, which grew to four field armies and 1.3 million men. Some 20,000 to 50,000 German troops escaped the Falaise pocket because he held back the closing pincer, a decision historians still argue over, and his command also absorbed the costly Hurtgen Forest campaign and the breakthrough that opened the Bulge. He led the Veterans Administration after the war, chaired the new Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1949, and in 1950 became the last officer ever promoted to five-star General of the Army. He helped persuade Truman to fire MacArthur in 1951, warning Congress against the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy.

The nickname that outlived him, the GI's general, came from the war correspondent Ernie Pyle, who wrote him up as approachable and plain, a commander who said please before giving an order. Soldiers who served under him disputed it; the historian S.L.A. Marshall later called the image mostly Pyle's invention, arguing ordinary troops barely knew who Bradley was. The gentler reputation also sat oddly against the record: he relieved more generals during the war than the supposedly ruthless Patton did, recommended death sentences for men in his own ranks, and, as Army Chief of Staff in 1948, publicly resisted Truman's order desegregating the armed forces, calling it no place for social reforms, before Truman made him apologize.

Bradley married Mary Quayle in 1916; she died of leukemia in 1965, and he remarried the following year. He spent his last years at an Army medical center in Texas and appeared, frail and 87, as Ronald Reagan's honored guest at the 1981 inauguration, dying eleven weeks later, on April 8, of cardiac arrhythmia in New York. He was buried at Arlington beside both wives. His name went onto an armored troop carrier still in Army service, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and onto a museum in Moberly built around the boilermaker who became a general. Historians rank him among the war's most capable organizers of enormous forces, with Falaise and Hurtgen Forest the argument that never fully closes.

Omar Bradley's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Command of II Corps in Tunisia and Sicily mission
  His first combat command, taking over from Patton 1943
• First Army command on D-Day mission
  Directed the Omaha and Utah beach landings 1944
• A Soldier's Story book
  His World War II memoir, drafted from his aide's daily war diaries 1951
• Joint Chiefs of Staff chairmanship other
  First officer to hold the position, serving 1949-1953 1949
• A General's Life book
  Posthumous autobiography completed with Clay Blair 1983

• 1908 aged ~15 His father dies; the family's finances tighten further
• 1910 aged ~17 Graduates Moberly High School and takes work as a railroad boilermaker
• 1911 aged ~18 Enters West Point after his Sunday school teacher urges him to apply
• 1915 aged ~22 Graduates West Point in what became known as the class the stars fell on
• June 6, 1944 aged 51 Commands the First Army landings on Omaha and Utah beaches
• August 1944 aged 51 Leaves the Falaise pocket partly open, letting thousands of German troops escape
• August 1949 aged 56 Becomes the first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
• September 22, 1950 aged 57 Promoted to five-star General of the Army
• April 8, 1981 aged 88 Dies of cardiac arrhythmia in New York City

• George S. Patton 1885–1945
  Armored commander whose aggressive leadership made him one of the most prominent American generals of World War II. rival
• Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
  Commander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy. opposed
• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. served under
• Harry S. Truman 1884–1972
  33rd President who authorized the atomic bomb and implemented the Marshall Plan. appointed
• Ernie Pyle 1900–1945
  War correspondent whose columns on infantry life defined American reporting of the Second World War. nicknamed