New Take on the Life of Ike's Chief of Staff

New Take on the Life of Ike's Chief of Staff Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith. D.K.R. Crosswell University Press of Kentucky. 1,088 pages; black-and-white photographs; maps; index; $39.95.

General of the Army Dwight D. (Ike) Eisenhower considered his wartime chief of staff LTG Walter Bedell Smith indispensable to the Allied victory in Western Europe. Six decades after the war, however, "Beetle" Smith is largely unknown except by serious students of World War II. At long last, D.K.R. Crosswell fills the historical gap with what will likely prove to be the definitive biography of Ike's most trusted staff officer.

Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith is not Crosswell's first effort to examine Smith's military and political career. As part of Greenwood Press' Contributions in Military Studies series, Crosswell produced a similar biography entitled The Chief of Staff in 1991. The notion of the same author writing a second biography is "unconventional," as Crosswell admits, but the publication of The Chief of Staff 'left Crosswell with "no sense of closure." Feeling that he did Smith an injustice by portraying him "as a one-dimensional S.O.B." - precisely the persona that Smith himself labored to project - Crosswell now depicts his subject as a necessary junior partner to Eisenhower as supreme commander.

Crosswell brings impressh'e credentials to his analysis of Smith's career. Dating to 1982 when he served as a researcher for Merle Miller in writing Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him, Crosswell has "lived with" his subject for 28 years. The result of this association leads Crosswell to assign high marks for Smith's sagacity in maneuvering through the complicated bureaucracy of a multinational coalition commanded by a popular general. Aside from providing an account of Smith's career, in Beetle, Crosswell's purpose is twofold: to address controversial topics and "to make the connection between command decisions and the limitations imposed by logistics broadly defined."

Beetle's structure is admittedly "unorthodox" in that Crosswell begins his biography with Smith's postwar career serving two Presidents: as ambassador to the Soviet Union and later director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Harry S Truman; and as under secretary of state and government advisor during the Eisenhower administration. Crosswell's decision to begin with Smith's postwar career, before examining Smith's career in the Army of the "Long Generation," 1917-1939, is the complete reversal of Crosswell's earlier The Chief of Staff. Crosswell leaves the efficacy of such an approach to the reader.

Two aspects of this excellent biography merit special attention. Crosswell's description of the Army's emphasis on institutionalized professional education during the interwar period and Smith's relationship with Army Chief of Staff GEN George C. Marshall shed new light on what constituted a "Marshall man." Once an officer received an appointment to Marshall's headquarters, he rose or fell depending on his performance against the Chief of Staff's exacting and preconceived standards. Smith's unique career pattern, which included service as aide, adjutant and assistant chief of staff under an officer whom Marshall held in high regard; his tour in Washington with the Bureau of the Budget; graduation from the Infantry School, Command and General Staff School and the Army War College; and the recommendation of then-LTC Omar Bradley qualified Smith as the ideal candidate for Marshall's staff secretariat.

As with his later service on Eisenhower's staff, Beetle proved an efficient administrator who shielded his boss from unnecessary interruption and mundane affairs. Smith quickly proved indispensable to Marshall by adeptly handling Marshall's relationships with President Franklin Roosevelt's longtime military aide and secretary MG Edwin "Pa" Watson and with industrialist Bernard Baruch. In the process, Smith emerged as Marshall's principal apprentice and troubleshooter. Newly appointed BG Eisenhower quickly recognized Smith's ability when he joined the War Department's General Staff in December 1941 and requested Smith's services immediately upon his own appointment as commander of the European Theater of Operations in June 1942. Eisenhower deemed Smith "exceptionally qualified for service as chief of staff" in Allied Forces Headquarters and later in Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).

Any chief of staff performs the function and the role designated by the commander, and the Eisenhower-Smith "partnership" proved no exception. Crosswell's decades-long fascination with Smith leads him to conclude that Smith "was much more than advertised, and his boss, Eisenhower, considerably less." The supreme commander who emerges from these pages is not only an indecisive leader who "proved decisive only when the decision was not to do something," but also a general who routinely "failed to confront the perpetual problems historically faced by the U.S. Army in war: manpower, supply of forces in the field and civil affairs." if the reader accepts Crosswell's interpretation of events, one ponders how the Western Allies succeeded with Eisenhower at the helm. History, as well as this reviewer, believes otherwise.

In celebrating Smith at Eisenhower's expense, Crosswell falls into the familiar trap of many authors who feel that the road to victory is so narrow that no two individuals, to say nothing of America's allies and a host of others, can walk abreast. That Smith proved an inspirational choice as Ike's chief of staff throughout the war is undeniable. So, too, is the fact that SHAEF's chief of staff made important recommendations, but not the command decisions that proved decisive in winning the European war.

In short, Crosswell has written the most comprehensive biography of this largely unheralded staff officer to date. Crosswell's "epilogue as prologue" expertly chronicles Smith's frustrating post-World War II career that was equally distinguished as his wartime achievement. When Smith died in 1961, Eisenhower served as an honorary pallbearer. As befitting the Eisenhower-Smith relationship, Ike gets the last word. Quoting French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who had assured Eisenhower that his "place in military history was secure since the only requisite for an enduring spot in the history of battles was wisdom in selecting a chief of staff," Eisenhower remarked, "No one in World War ? was quite as wise, or at least as fortunate, as I in this regard. And of this circumstance, I would of course be forever the beneficiary."

[Sidebar]

Ike's generals: (Front row, from left) Carl Spaatz. General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and Courtney H. Hodges: (rear) Hoyt S. Vandenberg, then-LTG Walter Bedell Smith and Otto P Weyland.

[Author Affiliation]

By COL Cole C. Kingseed

U.S. Army retired

[Author Affiliation]

COL Cole C. Kingseed, USA Ret., Ph.D., a former professor of history at the U.S. Military Academy, is a writer and consultant.