Rudder: From Leader to Legend

Preface

The theme of this book is the triumph of humane and purposeful leadership in war and peace. The theme’s medium is character—what it is, how it was formed, and how it was manifest in the life of James Earl Rudder. Why Rudder? Because he was rose from obscurity and deprivation in the American heartland to be widely admired by heads of state, soldiers, mechanics , and scholars; because he combined hardheaded leadership with altruistic motives for service to others; because his life illustrates the supreme importance of community and family in character formation; and because his accomplishments are proof that in a free society where education is accessible to all, greatness can come from anywhere. As a young adult, I was fortunate to observe Earl Rudder at close hand several times. The first time occurred when he was commissioner of the General Land Office of Texas (1955–58), where I had a part-time job while an undergraduate at the University of Texas. Three years later I returned to the university for graduate study and was a lieutenant in the G-2 section (intelligence) of the 90th Infantry Division, USAR, which he commanded. When we went for summer training at Fort Hood, Texas, or Fort Polk, Louisiana , I was usually assigned to his headquarters. My services were so critical that once in Louisiana swamps I was charged with the construction of his latrine, with the assistance of two professional architects and a squad of other equally redundant army reservists. My military specialty was interpreting aerial photographs. From this, colonels on his staff presumed that I took them as well as explained them, and they would send me aloft in a small fixed-wing plane to shoot pictures of the division deployed in the field. After the film was developed and I had oriented the colonels to the photos, they would show them to Rudder, if he had not already come to look over my shoulder as I talked about them. I never showed the colonels where the guys had buried the beer, iced down in a tarpaulin removed from a truck, with brush pulled over it until after dark. Rudder became a serious subject when I began teaching the history of World War II at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1980s, with emphasis on the Battle of Normandy, where he played a significant role. This PREFACE xiv PREFACE led to taking groups—students, veterans and other adults—across battlefields of Western Europe, lecturing, and living for extended periods in Normandy , where Rudder’s name and likeness are carved on monuments. With no idea of writing his biography, I interviewed men in England and France who had known him during the war. The Pointe du Hoc battlefield, where he emerged as a legendary figure, was as familiar as my neighborhood park, and I strolled along the shoreline and bluffs above Omaha Beach with maps, planning documents of the invasion, and memoirs of men who were there. Similarly, I studied the Ardennes in Belgium and Luxembourg. In this book the reader has for the first time a detailed account of Rudder’s extraordinary exploits in five major battles of the European War: Normandy, Brittany, the Huertgen Forest, the Ardennes, and the Colmar Pocket. I composed the text for the non-specialist and put technical information in endnotes. Delving into Rudder’s life coincided with my serious interests in twentieth-century Texas history, U.S. political history, military history, and higher education. I had a special interest in Rudder’s close friend, Lyndon B. Johnson, whose tenure as U.S. senator, vice president, and president, 1948– 69, was almost the same as Rudder’s public service career, 1946–70. The fact that Rudder and I had similar origins in the Texas Hill Country made him a more compelling subject, although I am exactly a quarter-century younger. Fortuitously, too, as a youngster I was a regular visitor to Texas A&M and formed many of my basic ideas about education from observing its landgrant functions in action, which were his passions as well. Tracking Rudder from Texas to Britain, across France, Belgium, Luxembourg , and into Germany was high adventure. I went to every place that was significant in his life, from his birthplace in Eden, Texas, to an enemy fortress at the tip of Brittany, where he persuaded its commander to surrender fourteen hundred combatants in September 1944, to the wine cellar of a small hotel in the Huertgen Forest south of...