Omar Bradley: the GI General

Bradley commanded American troops in four campaigns covered on this site: the Battle of Normandy in the summer of 1944, the fighting around the Falaise pocket in August, the defense against the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge that winter, and the encirclement of the Ruhr Pocket in April 1945.¹

Where was Omar Bradley from?

Omar Nelson Bradley came from rural Missouri. He was born near Clark, in Randolph County, on 12 February 1893, the son of a poor country schoolteacher. After high school in Moberly he worked to save money for college, until he placed first in the entrance examination for West Point and entered the academy in 1911.²

He graduated in 1915, 44th in a class of 164, having lettered in football and baseball. One of his classmates was Dwight Eisenhower, and many others became generals in World War II.³

Did Omar Bradley fight in World War I?

No. When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Bradley's regiment was sent to guard copper mines in Montana rather than to France, and the war ended before he could go overseas. He saw his first combat a quarter of a century later, in Tunisia in 1943, already a general.⁴

Between the wars he studied and taught in Army schools, among them the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and the staff school at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. At Fort Benning he came to the notice of George C. Marshall, and in 1941 Marshall, by then Army Chief of Staff, gave him command of the Infantry School, which trained thousands of officers for the expanding Army.⁵

What did Bradley do in North Africa and Sicily?

He helped turn an inexperienced American force into a winning one. Eisenhower sent him to Tunisia in February 1943, after the defeat at Kasserine Pass, to study the American II Corps and recommend changes. By the final battles Bradley led the corps himself: it drove on Bizerte, and in May 1943 more than 40,000 German soldiers surrendered to it.⁶

Bradley then led his corps in the conquest of Sicily in the summer of 1943. There the war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote about his care for his troops and called him the “soldier's general,” the name that stayed with him; later writers turned it into “the GI's General.”⁷

What was Omar Bradley famous for?

Bradley is best known for leading American ground forces from D-Day to victory in Europe. On 6 June 1944 he commanded the US First Army, whose troops landed on Omaha and Utah beaches, and followed the landings from the cruiser USS Augusta. From August 1944 he led the 12th Army Group, which grew to more than a million soldiers.⁸

After weeks of costly fighting in the Normandy hedgerows, Bradley planned the attack that broke the deadlock. Operation Cobra opened near Saint-Lô on 25 July 1944 with a massed bombing of the German line, part of which fell on American positions. Infantry then opened a gap and armored divisions drove through it to Avranches.⁹

On 1 August 1944 Bradley handed the First Army to Courtney Hodges and took command of the new 12th Army Group, with George Patton's Third Army also under him. By the end of the war in Europe it was the largest force ever commanded by an American general, with more than a million soldiers.¹⁰

Why is Bradley's generalship debated?

Because two of his decisions in 1944 let German forces escape or caught him off balance. In August he halted Patton's advance at Argentan, leaving a gap through which German troops slipped out of the Falaise pocket, and in December the German offensive in the Ardennes struck a sector that his army group held only thinly.¹¹

Bradley stopped Patton's XV Corps at Argentan on 12 or 13 August (accounts differ), rather than let it push north to meet the Canadians coming south toward Falaise. The decision is still argued over: the historian Terry Copp writes that it gave the German armies in the pocket a chance to escape encirclement.¹²

When the Germans attacked in the Ardennes on 16 December 1944, Eisenhower placed the US First and Ninth Armies, north of the breakthrough, under Montgomery, against Bradley's wishes. Bradley turned Patton's Third Army north against the southern flank of the salient, and it broke through to the encircled troops at Bastogne.¹³

What was Omar Bradley's greatest victory?

His greatest victory came in spring 1945. After the First Army seized the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen on 7 March, his armies crossed the Rhine, and on 1 April they closed a ring around the industrial Ruhr. The trapped German army group surrendered in April, giving up more than 315,000 prisoners (317,000 in the National World War II Museum's count).¹⁴

What did Bradley do after World War II?

He held three of the country's top military posts. President Harry S. Truman named him head of the Veterans Administration in August 1945; on 7 February 1948 he became Army Chief of Staff; and in 1949 he became the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serving until he retired from active service in 1953.¹⁵

Congress promoted him to General of the Army, with five stars, in September 1950. The Army's Center of Military History gives the date as 22 September, while Arlington National Cemetery lists his date of rank as 20 September. He was the last American officer promoted to that rank, and no one has held it since his death.¹⁶

As chairman during the Korean War he advised Truman to avoid a general war with China, against the course urged by General Douglas MacArthur. After Truman relieved MacArthur in April 1951, Bradley told the Senate inquiry that widening the war to China “would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”¹⁷

How did Omar Bradley die?

Omar Bradley died in New York City on 8 April 1981, at the age of 88, still a five-star General of the Army. President Ronald Reagan announced his death the next day, called him the “G.I.'s General,” and ordered flags flown at half-staff until the funeral. He was buried with military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.¹⁸

In retirement he worked in industry and was still consulted by political and military leaders. In January 1977 President Gerald Ford awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, whose citation called him a “friend of the common soldier.” He wrote two volumes of memoirs, A Soldier's Story (1951) and, with Clay Blair, A General's Life, published in 1983 after his death.¹⁹