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Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition

Omar Nelson Bradley

by Kirk For Jr.

Military leader

Born: February 12, 1893; Clark, Missouri

Died: April 8, 1981; New York city, New York

Primary conflict: World War II (1939-1945)

Bradley provided stability and continuity within the U.S. military establishment during the critical period following the end of World War II and the onset of the Cold War.

Early Life

Omar Nelson Bradley was born to John Smith Bradley, a schoolteacher, and Sarah Elizabeth Hubbard Bradley, a homemaker. Though “desperately poor,” to use Bradley’s words, his family took in the two daughters of his mother’s sister when the latter died, and they became his “sisters.” A second son was born to the Bradleys but died of scarlet fever before his second birthday.

Bradley’s father, who supplemented the modest income he received from his teaching with what odd jobs he could find, contracted pneumonia and died in January, 1908. The family moved to Moberly, where Bradley attended high school and became interested in Mary Quayle, the daughter of his Sunday school teacher and his future wife. Having been graduated in 1910 with good grades, “but not the highest,” Bradley planned to become a lawyer, though he was uncertain as to how he would fund his education. His Sunday school superintendent suggested that he consider the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York.

Bradley took the advice, competed for and won an appointment to West Point, and entered the academy in 1911. In later life, he would remark that the four years spent at West Point were “among the most rewarding of my life.” Considering the subsequent career that sprang from those four years, one might say that the country as a whole was handsomely rewarded as a result of Bradley’s decision.

When he was graduated from West Point in 1915, Bradley stood 44th in a class of 164. He later confessed that his affinity for sports Bradley played on the varsity football and baseball teams might have detracted from his academic performance. Bradley’s class would gain fame as the one that “the stars fell on.” Bradley, who would ultimately wear five of those stars, was always proud of a complimentary entry in his senior yearbook, which described “his most promising characteristic” as “getting there. . . . “ The words of praise came from fellow classmate Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was himself destined to wear five stars and be twice elected president of the United States.

Omar Nelson Bradley (Wikimedia Commons)

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Life’s Work

Following graduation, Bradley was assigned to duty with the Fourteenth Infantry Regiment at Fort Laughton near Seattle, Washington. He was later transferred to Douglas, Arizona, but did not join the Pershing expedition into Mexico. On December 28, 1916, Bradley, by then a first lieutenant, married his high school sweetheart, Mary Quayle. Four months later, the United States entered World War I. Convinced that his career would suffer irreparable harm if he did not see duty in France, Bradley desperately tried to secure assignment to a combat unit. He never succeeded; instead he spent the war guarding copper mines in Montana. When he was finally ordered to report for overseas duty, his destination was not France but Siberia. Fortunately, those orders were canceled, and Montana suddenly looked much better than it had before.

Meeting of the Supreme Command, Allied Expeditionary Force, London, 1 February 1944. Left to right: Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, Commander in Chief 1st US Army, Admiral Sir Bertram H Ramsay, Allied Naval Commander in Chief, Expeditionary Force, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur W Tedder, Deputy Supreme Commander, Expeditionary Force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander, Expeditionary Force, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, Commander in Chief, 21st Army Group, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, Allied Air Commander in Chief, Expeditionary Force, Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff to Eisenhower. (Wikimedia Commons)

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Like most career officers, Bradley found duty in the peacetime army to be rather routine and advancement quite slow. He spent five years teaching in one capacity or another, one year as an instructor in the ROTC program at South Dakota State University and four years in the math department at West Point. He became a father during his tour at West Point, when Mary gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. An earlier stillborn birth and complications arising during the second pregnancy convinced the Bradleys that they should have no more children.

After completing his tour at West Point in 1923, Bradley attended infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia, for one year and was then assigned to duty in Hawaii for three years. While there he met George S. Patton, then serving as chief intelligence officer of the Hawaiian Division and described by Bradley as “one of the most extraordinary men military or civilian I ever met.”

Returning to the United States in 1928, Bradley attended the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after which he had a choice of assignments between Fort Benning and West Point. He chose the former, later recalling that it was “the most important decision of my life.” While at Benning he attracted the attention of George C. Marshall, who would later, as chief of staff of the Army, prove to be instrumental in Bradley’s rapid rise to high command during World War II. In fact, after attending the Army War College and serving another four years at West Point, Bradley served under Marshall following Marshall’s appointment as chief of staff in April, 1939. When, in late 1940, Marshall offered Bradley command of the Eighty-second Division, he became the second in his class to get two stars and the first to command a division.

Like so many of his colleagues, Bradley first attracted widespread public attention during World War II. Though he never reached the pinnacle of command achieved by Eisenhower or assumed the almost legendary proportions of the flamboyant Patton, he carved his own special place in United States military history as the “G.I. General.” Newsman Ernie Pyle, whose cartoons and reports made household names of many wartime personalities, confessed that it was a challenge to write about Bradley because he was so “damn normal.” Rather tall and solidly built, Bradley was never described as handsome. In his late forties when the United States entered the war, he was balding and bespectacled, conveying a congeniality not usually associated with a combat general.

Bradley was not assigned to overseas duty until February, 1943, when he joined Eisenhower in North Africa. For a brief time he served as deputy commander of the United States II Corps under George S. Patton and later assumed command of that unit when Patton was called to head Seventh Army operations in the Sicilian campaign. Bradley again served under Patton in Sicily, where he became disillusioned with his superior’s methods both on and off the battlefield. Patton’s involvement in the infamous slapping incidents in Sicily, in which he struck two enlisted men who were suffering from battle fatigue, cost him any chance he might have had for immediate advancement. Consequently, when Sicily was safely in Allied hands, it was Bradley who was chosen to command American forces in the next major operation of the war Normandy while Patton remained behind.

President Harry S. Truman promotes General Bradley to five-star rank, 22 September 1950. (Wikimedia Commons)

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Bradley played a key role in Operation Overlord, first as commander of the American First Army and later as head of the Twelfth Army Group, on an equal footing with Britain’s field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. In an ironic twist, Patton, who assumed command of the newly activated Third Army on August 1, 1944, was now subordinate to Bradley. This proved to be a workable combination when Bradley the strategist and Patton the tactician combined to parlay Operation Cobra into a theater-wide breakout, leading to the eventual liberation of most of northern France. Bradley proved to be an asset to Eisenhower in more ways than one. He not only demonstrated great competence as a strategist and battlefield manager but also held a tight rein on Patton and frequently served as a buffer between him and the equally irascible Montgomery.

As the war in Europe drew to a close, Bradley did not have to worry about a new assignment. Marshall, Eisenhower, and President Harry S. Truman were unanimous in the opinion that he should be made head of the Veterans Administration. In August, 1945, Bradley assumed the new duties of his office and all the headaches that went with it chief among them being administration of the G.I. Bill and upgrading the quality of medical care for veterans. He found his job to be challenging and rewarding, deriving the greatest satisfaction from the improvements made in the quality of medical care that veterans received.

In February, 1948, Bradley left the Veterans Administration to become chief of staff of the Army, a post he held for about eighteen months before becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in August, 1949. This was the position he held when the so-called Cold War turned hot in Korea in June, 1950. Bradley’s view that the United States was right to intervene in Korea while not seeking to expand the war in Asia represented a consensus within the military; his often quoted statement that a wider war in Asia would be “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy” succinctly summarized the military’s position. This conviction put him at odds with General Douglas MacArthur, then commander of United Nations forces in Korea, but ultimately it was Bradley’s viewpoint that prevailed.

“Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share the guilt for the dead.”

The Korean War ended in 1953 during Bradley’s tour as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and shortly thereafter he resigned from full-time active service. Ceremonial duties as one of the nation’s senior military statesmen took some of his time, but most of it was devoted to his business interests. He served for a while as chair of the board of the Bulova Watch Company and was a director on several other corporate boards. In 1965, Bradley’s wife died, and for several months he suffered from severe depression. In September, 1966, he married Kitty Buhler, a gregarious Hollywood screenwriter, who, despite being thirty years his junior, remained devoted to him until his death in April, 1981.

Significance

Bradley was the product of rural, mid-western America the values of which were always reflected in his career. Cognizant of his own modest beginnings, he identified and sympathized with the plight of the common soldier. He successfully made the transition from combat general to administrator and from total war, as required by World War II, to the concept of limited war, as imposed by the constraints of the Cold War. His career spanned two world wars and the Korean conflict. During World War II, his professional military talents had carried him to the position of Army Group command. He ultimately wore five stars as general of the Army and served as head of the Veterans Administration, chief of staff of the Army, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Who could doubt, to paraphrase Eisenhower, that the farm boy from Missouri had truly “gotten there”?

Further Reading

1 

Blumenson, Martin. Patton: The Man Behind the Legend, 1885-1945. New York: William Morrow, 1985. This book offers insights into Patton’s candid assessment of Bradley, first as a subordinate and later as a superior. Patton displays great respect for Bradley while objecting strenuously to some of his military decisions.

2 

Bradley, Omar N. A Soldier’s Story. New York: Henry Holt, 1951. Published during Bradley’s tenure as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these wartime memoirs, though informative, reflect the restrictions imposed on Bradley by his official position and government classification of many World War II documents.

3 

Bradley, Omar N., and Clay Blair. A General’s Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Begun as an autobiography and subsequently completed by Blair after the general’s death, this is the only work that entirely covers Bradley’s life and career.

4 

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., and Louis Galambos, eds. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower. 11 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970-1979. Bradley and Eisenhower confronted many common problems from different perspectives both during and after World War II. These volumes are useful and illuminating for both periods.

5 

Eisenhower, Dwight D. Crusade in Europe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1948. Eisenhower’s wartime memoirs contain much information on Bradley and the major campaigns in which he participated. Eisenhower’s appreciation of Bradley’s talents is apparent.

6 

Jordan, Thomas M. “Battle Command: Bradley and Ridgway in the Battle of the Bulge.” Military Review 90, no. 2 (March/April, 2000): 95. Describes the role of Bradley and Lt. General Matthew Ridgway in the Battle of the Bulge in Germany in 1944.

7 

Muench, James F. Five Stars: Missouri’s Most Famous Generals. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Profiles five American generals from Missouri, including Bradley.

8 

Pogue, Forrest C. Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1943 and Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945. Vols. 2-3 of George C. Marshall, 3 vols. New York: Viking Press, 1963-1966. Perhaps more than any other, Marshall was instrumental in Bradley’s rapid climb to Army Group command in 1944. The works cited here cover only the war years.

9 

Weigley, Russell F. Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-1945. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981. A brilliant work describing the last major military campaigns of the European war. This book evaluates Bradley’s skills as a strategist while inviting comparisons with his colleagues, British and American.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
For Jr., Kirk. "Omar Nelson Bradley." Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition, edited by D. Alan Dean, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AmHero_0154.
APA 7th
For Jr., K. (2019). Omar Nelson Bradley. In D. Alan Dean (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
For Jr., Kirk. "Omar Nelson Bradley." Edited by D. Alan Dean. Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2019. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.