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CHAPTER 1
Slings and Arrows
They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips.
— Psalm 140:3
Any history of the European theater of operations during World War II not written by Jean Edward Smith will likely contain harsh words about Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, such as these by Geoffrey Perret in There's a War to Be Won:
Arriving in England, Lee demanded a train. The British were dumbstruck. The King had a private train, they conceded, but a small one. Not even Churchill had his own train. And Eisenhower never asked for a train. Lee insisted until he finally got one — two cars for his staff, two flatcars for vehicles, a dining car, a conference car, a private car for the general and several others. He liked the millionaire lifestyle, whatever the cost, submitting expense claims that might make an advertising vice president blush.
A stickler for ritual and a man whose memoirs refer to the author as "We," Lee expected dumb shows of deference wherever he went. He loved to hobnob with British aristocrats and aped their affectations. Lee expected to be noticed. He got Sam Goldwyn's former press agent assigned to SOS to help keep track of his doings.
Jonathan W. Jordan, author of Brothers, Rivals, Victors, describes an occasion when Patton met with Lee in London:
After a pea-soup flight to London, George [Patton] was greeted at the airfield by Harry Butcher and Lieutenant General John Clifford Hodges Lee. Cliff Lee, a fifty-six-year-old classmate of George's, had Patton's penchant for self-aggrandizement and an appetite for creature comforts that dwarfed George's living standards. He assigned himself a beautifully furnished personal train to move about the country, his helmet was decked with triple stars front and back, and he defended his perquisites like Rommel with his back to the sea.
Supply never gets good billing, but Lee's self-indulgences, his backroom politicking, his ostentation, and the natural inefficiency of a system supplying millions of men made him one senior general whom all field commanders could hold in quiet — and sometimes not-so-quiet — contempt. After working with Lee for a few months, George would subscribe to one officer's description of him as "a pompous little son-of-a-bitch only interested in self-advertisement," and it didn't help George's temperament when, on his arrival in London, Lee's SOS men had quartered him in a hotel room that resembled a garish bordello, its boudoir featuring a white bear rug, nickel-plated furnishings, and a satin-sheeted bed perched low under a lewd ceiling mirror.
Antony Beevor takes issue with Lee's move into Paris early in the ETO campaign:
In Paris, Lieutenant John C. Lee, the Army supply supremo of the Communications Zone, known as "Com Z," took over 315 hotels and several thousand other buildings and apartments to house his senior officers in style. He also appropriated the Hôtel George V almost entirely for himself. The pompous and megalomaniac Lee even expected wounded soldiers to lie at attention in their hospital beds whenever he appeared on a tour of inspection in boots, spurs and riding whip, accompanied by a fawning staff.
Eisenhower was reportedly enraged by Lee's takeover of Paris. Ike's naval aide, Capt. Harry C. Butcher, sometimes referred to as Eisenhower's Boswell, recounted his reaction:
The Com Zone headquarters had been at Valognes, but when Paris fell, this center of transport, supply and personnel became the natural location for the large service organization. Ike felt that the combat troops who had taken Paris would look back over their shoulders from the front lines and see the supply people living in the luxury of Paris. He thought this very bad psychologically and was in the process of ordering General Lee to abandon Paris completely but found the movement had proceeded so far that stopping it was impossible. So he had instructed General Lee to stop the entry of every individual who was not needed at that spot for essential duty. General Lee is to have an investigation of the American personnel in Paris and is to send away from there everyone whose presence is not necessary. He is to use every type of transport available to get them out, including empty trucks returning to base. He had also heard, as I had, that the dress, discipline, and conduct of American personnel in Paris left much to be desired. Paris was to be used as a recreation center for combat troops and space was to be retained for their comfort.
(General Lee did not follow through on this order.)
Rick Atkinson chimes in on Lee and his Paris adventure:
In Paris, Lee kept a huge war room in the Hôtel Majestic basement, and three suites upstairs for his own use. (His personal baggage included a piano.) The adjacent Avenue Kléber became known as the "Avenue de Salute," and Lee dispatched officers to patrol the sidewalk and take the names of soldiers who failed to render proper courtesy. Additional suites were reserved for him in other grant hostels; denizens at one were advised, "The Hôtel George V is considered General Lee's personal residence, and assignments of accommodations carry the understanding that such persons are his guests." The front curb was to be kept clear for his own entourage; other cars "will be required to park around the corner or down on the next block."
"Why didn't someone tell me some of those things?" Eisenhower later asked after hearing of Lee's idiosyncrasies. The complaint said more about the supreme commander's inattention than about Lee. Not for two weeks did Eisenhower learn of the ComZ land rush in Paris, which he had intended to keep mostly free of Allied soldiers. He referred to Lee as "a modern Cromwell."
"Lee was an unrepentant sinner," Atkinson writes. "'I have no regrets,' he said. 'One should be as far forward as possible.'"
In his biography of Eisenhower's chief of staff, Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, D. K. R. Crosswell writes,
Lee's friends called him Johnny or Cliff, but he carried a number of less flattering nicknames. Known as "Courthouse" because of his frequent volunteering to serve on courts-martial early in his career, the imperious Lee impressed fellow officers as a strange admixture. ... Obsessed with preserving the outward signs of efficiency and military protocol, Lee rigorously enforced codes of discipline and dress, insisting that everything be "spit and polish." He had already taken to traveling around his domain in a private train. Although Lee capably shouldered an immense workload, his formidable manner and appearance, tactless exercise of authority, and jealous defense of his position made him a target of criticism. He produced results but also animosity.
In his biography of Gen. Brehon Burke Somervell, the senior supply officer in Washington and Lee's boss, the historian John Kennedy Ohl has described Lee as a bald, fussy "oppressively religious" man. Lee was, he concedes, "an able, efficient, quick thinking, aggressive operator," but he projected the image of an empire builder. He had an exaggerated sense of his own importance, had eccentricities that wore badly on others, and was overly concerned with spit and polish. He also had a "supply sergeant's mentality" and doled out equipment to troops and generals alike "as if it were a personal gift."
That J. C. H. Lee was the chief Allied logistician was detrimental to an effort that required the hand of someone far more skilled in the school of logistical support than the general sneeringly referred to as "Jesus Christ Himself," according to Carlo D'Este, who goes on to suggest that "Lee's narrow-mindedness, conventional peacetime quartermaster's mind, and his unwillingness to use every means at his disposal to improve a logistics system tailored to the needs of the combat armies (the Red Ball Express notwithstanding) produced what has aptly been called 'the tyranny of logistics' in the late summer and autumn of 1944. But instead of concentrating on the problems of resupply, Lee seemed more interested in winning the race with SHAEF to claim the best hotels and facilities in Paris, and in indulging his mania for creature comforts."
But without doubt the most scathing indictment of Lee is offered by Stephen E. Ambrose:
The biggest jerk in ETO was Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee (USMA 1909), commander of Service of Supply (SOS). He had a most difficult job, to be sure. And of course it is in the nature of an army that everyone resents the quartermaster, and Lee was the head quartermaster for the whole of ETO. ...
He hated waste; once he was walking through a mess hall, reached into the garbage barrel, pulled out a half-eaten loaf of bread, started chomping on it, and gave the cooks hell for throwing away perfectly good food. He had what Bradley politely called "an unfortunate pomposity" and was cordially hated. ...
Lee's best-known excess came ... at the height of the supply crisis. Eisenhower had frequently expressed his view that no major headquarters should be located in or near the temptations of a large city, and had specifically reserved the hotels of Paris for the use of combat troops on leave. Lee nevertheless, and without Eisenhower's knowledge, moved his headquarters to Paris. His people requisitioned all the hotels previously occupied by the Germans, and took over schools and other large buildings. More than 8,000 officers and 21,000 men in SOS descended on the city in less than a week with tens of thousands more to follow. Parisians began to mutter that the U.S. Army demands were in excess of those made by the Germans.
The GIs and their generals were furious. They stated the obvious: at the height of the supply crisis, Lee had spent his precious time organizing the move, then used up precious gasoline, all so that he and his entourage could enjoy the hotels of Paris. It got worse. With 29,000 SOS troops in Paris, the great majority of them involved in some way in the flow of supplies from the beaches and ports to the front, and taking into account what Paris had to sell, from wine and girls to jewels and perfumes, a black market on a grand scale sprang up.
Recounting Eisenhower's enraged reaction, Ambrose notes that Lee and his staff stayed put in Paris:
And of course there was solid reason for so doing. And of course the combat veterans who got three-day passes into Paris could never get a hotel room, and had to sleep in a barracks-like Red Cross shelter, on cots. The rearechelon SOS got the beds and the private rooms. And their numbers grew rather than shrank. By March 1945, there were 160,000 SOS troops in the Department of the Seine.
The supply troops also got the girls, because they had the money, thanks to the black market. It flourished everywhere. Thousands of gallons of gasoline, tons of food and clothing, millions of cigarettes were being siphoned off each day. The gasoline pipeline running from the beaches to Chartres was tapped so many times only a trickle came out at the far end.
Most of this was petty thievery. It was done at the expense of the front-line troops. As one example, the most popular brand of cigarettes was Lucky Strike, followed by Camel. In Paris, the SOS troops and their dates smoked Lucky Strikes and Camels; in the foxholes the men got Pall Malls, Raleighs, or, worse, British cigarettes.
Overall the historian's take on Lee is uncomplimentary to say the least. Even the official history compiled by Roland G. Ruppenthal and published in 1952 by the U.S. Army Center of Military History struggles to put a positive spin on Lee. "General Lee continued to be a controversial personality throughout the history of the theater, owing in part to the anomalous position which he held," Ruppenthal writes. He continues,
But the controversy over the SOS was heightened by his personal traits. Heavy on ceremony, somewhat forbidding in manner and appearance, and occasionally tactless in exercising authority which he regarded to be within the province of the SOS, General Lee often aroused suspicions and created opposition where support might have been forthcoming.
It appears, however, that few of his subordinates and certainly fewer still of the persons with whom he dealt got to know him well. Those who did knew him to be kindly, unselfish, modest, extremely religious, and a man of simple tastes, however much this seemed to be contradicted by the picture of ostentation presented by the living arrangements of his staff and by his use of a special train for his comings and goings in the United Kingdom. General Lee has been aptly referred to as a "soldier of the old school," one who believed firmly in the dignity of his profession and wore the uniform with pride. He expected every other soldier, from general to private, to revere that uniform as he did. Many, without attempting to understand his rigid sense of discipline, were quick to label him pompous and a martinet. There can be no doubt that General Lee was motivated by a high sense of duty, and he expected others to measure up to his own concept of soldierly qualities.
Even the estimable Jean Edward Smith, who has suggested Lee was the "unsung hero of World War II" in his biography of Eisenhower, was a bit more critical in his 1990 biography of Gen. Lucius D. Clay: "Lee's preparation for D-Day left little to be desired and the Allies crossed the Channel in fine shape — an achievement of enormous magnitude," he writes. "But over the long haul, Lee wore badly. A slightly pompous officer with the religious ardor of a Chautauqua evangelist ... Lee doled out supplies with a supply sergeant's eye for rewarding past favors and punishing grievances."
Not a fun guy, in other words. An unidentified officer privately offered that Lee was no one he would want to go fishing with for a week. But for the eleven months of the ETO campaign the head quartermaster's boss, Eisenhower, resisted intense pressure to dismiss Lee or at least limit his authority. In the end the Allies won the war. The question remains whether this was because of or in spite of the contributions of Lee.
CHAPTER 2
A Woman Named John
There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but boys, it is all hell.
— Gen. William T. Sherman
John Clifford Hodges Lee was born August 1, 1887, in Junction City, Kansas, then and now a small city attached to the U.S. Army's Fort Riley, home of the storied First Division — known as the Big Red One. From his earliest days he was surrounded by military people and immersed in military culture. His maternal grandfather, Capt. John Noble Hodges, was killed in action as a supply service officer in the Confederate army — so that provides a connection, however tenuous, between Lee and the supply component of the military. Captain Hodges was married to Josephine Fredonia Hodges (nee Whitaker). Lee's grandmother Katherine's sister Sarah Katherine was married to John Hodges's older brother, Cooper Hodges.
When Captain Hodges was killed in action, Josephine was pregnant with what she hoped would be a son, to be named after his father. She had a girl instead but still named her John. The middle name Clifford came from another kinsman. Thus the mother of John Clifford Hodges Lee was named John Clifford Lee. It is possible — even probable — that she was the only woman named John in Kansas, or indeed the nation.
The Hodges family was well off, but most of Captain Hodges's near male relatives had been killed in the war. His brother Cooper had survived but was partially paralyzed from his wounds. In the postwar years the widow Josephine Hodges was struggling to manage seven plantations in Mississippi. An old family friend from Vermont, James Streeter, came to visit and persuaded the widow to marry him and live with him in Kansas, where he and a partner had a bank, a general store, and a hotel, the Hale House. In those days westward-bound wagon trains plying the Santa Fe Trail depended on protection by troops at Fort Riley. Streeter died in 1896.
At the age of nineteen John Clifford Hodges married Charles Fenelon Lee, who his son described as an "insurance promoter" from Iowa. The teenaged John had met Charles Lee in Leadville, Colorado, where they both lived at the time. They later moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and spent much time riding the train back and forth to Junction City, where John's mother lived. John and Charles had three children: John C. H. Lee plus two sisters, one older and one younger than he. They were all born in Junction City. In 1892 Lee's mother left his father and moved with the children to Junction City to live with her mother and stepfather. Lee offers no explanation of this in his memoirs.
At one time James Streeter had owned substantial property, the last 550 acres of which were still held by Josephine when John C. H. was a boy. This farm lay along the Republican River just above its junction with the Smoky Hill River and across from Fort Riley. Many years later General Lee recalled that the family had a close relationship with local African Americans, some of whom had worked on the family plantations in Mississippi.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The General Who Wore Six Stars"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Hank H. Cox.
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