General Fox Conner: Pershing's Chief of Operations and Eisenhower's Mentor (The Generals Book 3)

“Conner had long had his eyes on Marshall.”47 On July 13, 1918, George Marshall reported for duty in Conner’s Operations Section. Marshall faced an adjustment to what he termed the “strange atmosphere” of Chaumont. As his new colleagues discussed the broad details of planning an army of millions, Marshall found himself in a “different world” from d

Leavenworth’s “applicatory method” drew heavily upon military history to analyze the quandaries faced by an army’s high command and to devise solutions under rapidly changing conditions. Students learned, through map exercises, to plan and control the movement of troops from afar.

President Wilson named one of his brightest generals to lead the incursion into Mexico: John J. Pershing. In a controversial move a decade earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had promoted Black Jack Pershing, over 762 superior officers, directly from captain to brigadier general. For the Mexican operation, Pershing selected several of the Army’s most promi

Fox Conner did not speak to Eisenhower about Napoleon or any other great commander of the past, nor did he discuss the importance of history to the development of a well-rounded military officer. Instead, Conner drew three novels from the shelves of his collection and handed them to his assistant. “You might be interested in these,” Conner suggeste

Eisenhower recalled that he mostly worked to “prevent the dry rot of tedious idleness.”

Conner believed he could compete academically; those that he could not outthink, he could outwork.

Fox Conner soon learned that he, as a high-ranking military officer during the 1930s, was almost as removed from the American mainstream as were his monastic neighbors. As noted in historian Russell Weigley’s History of the United States Army, a “gloomy, negative kind of pacifism, automatically hostile to any measure which might improve the Army” p

Eisenhower wrote in 1948: “Allied unity, and the ways and means of attaining it, constituted the principal war lesson”—as Fox Conner had told him it would be. In a 1967 interview with historian Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower credited his many discussions with Conner, as well as his own reading on the history of coalition warfare, as the keys to his su

“From the beginning,” Eisenhower recalled in his 1967 memoirs, he and Patton “got along famously.” The two officers shared similar views concerning the potential of armored warfare. Although prevailing Army doctrine limited the tank’s role—and speed—to the support of advancing foot soldiers, Patton and Eisenhower each foresaw the tank’s potential t