The Pentagon: A History Read Online Free Page A

lethargy with reveille at dawn and worked them from first light until dark, with barely a break for meals. Somervell’s hurry-up style was evident in all he did. Finding no proper sleeping quarters for the regiment, he bought new tents without waiting for a purchase order. The Army billed him for $17,755 and threatened to deduct the cost from his pay, but Somervell argued his way out.
    For over a year Somervell toiled, building dumps, barracks, and a poison-gas depot, and he was awarded with a temporary promotion to lieutenant colonel and the Distinguished Service Medal for his record of “unusual vision [and] initiative.” Somervell was far from satisfied. He begged for transfer to combat duty, but he had made himself too useful to supply commanders, and they refused to spare him. Given leave in the fall of 1918, Somervell spurned the chance to relax in Paris, instead pleading with Pot Graves to lend him his Army sedan, a big Cadillac, so he could make “just a little visit” to the front. It was not merely adventure he was seeking; calculating as always, Somervell was also thinking of his career. “I have yet to hear a hostile shot and I’m not going home with that on my record,” Somervell insistently told Graves.
    The gruff but good-natured Graves finally capitulated and did not see his Cadillac again until after the armistice. Somervell’s timing, as usual, was prescient. He arrived at the front October 31, the day before the final phase of the Meuse-Argonne offensive that would break the German army. Somervell worked his way to the headquarters of the 89th Division, which was taking part in the push to the Meuse River. The division’s operations officer had just been captured by the Germans while on reconnaissance, and a replacement was needed.
    “What do you know about military tactics?” Somervell was asked.
    “Practically nothing,” he admitted.
    “An ideal man for the job,” replied a sardonic officer. But the 89th was in a fix, and Somervell got the post.
    The division chief of staff, Colonel John C. H. Lee, found his new operations officer to be “truly an answer to prayer. He learned with lightning-like rapidity, was fearless and brilliant.” By November 5, the 89th had reached the Meuse opposite Pouilly in northeast France, where the retreating Germans were thought to have destroyed all bridges in the area. Late in the day, the division learned that the Germans had failed to blow a bridge leading to town. Somervell accompanied Lee on a reconnaissance to the frontline, along a canal that paralleled the river. Reaching the approach to the bridge, they found it had been damaged, but in the darkness could not tell how badly. Shortly before midnight, Somervell went forward with two scouts, moving more than five hundred yards beyond the last American outposts and fording three branches of the Meuse. Across the river, they encountered a German detachment and drove it off with a brief exchange of fire. Somervell considered chasing them but wisely turned back. The bridge was passable, Somervell reported to his superiors. The division crossed the river several days later and was advancing when word came after sun-up on the morning of November 11 that an armistice was to go into effect at 11 A.M. that day.
    For his exploits at Pouilly, Somervell was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest decoration for bravery. Now a certified war hero—one of only nine officers to win both the Distinguished Service Cross and the Distinguished Service Medal during the conflict—Somervell’s reputation was made. Pot Graves’s evaluation of the subordinate who absconded with his car was succinct: “This is the best officer I ever saw, or hope to see.” It was high praise, but Graves’s words hinted at the ambivalence some officers felt about Somervell. His brilliance was darkened—and in part fueled—by an aggressive and opportunistic nature so powerful that his peers, many of them