Exposing the Third Reich: Colonel Truman Smith in Hitler’s Germany

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi preface and Acknowledgments This book began with several straws blowing in the wind that landed on my desk. One was awareness of rich sources conveniently located. Another was readiness for a new project. Yet another was appreciation of the personal story of Truman Smith’s dedicated service to this country, which parallels the general decline of the patrician class, sometimes called “the northeastern establishment,” in American political leadership. Friends at the U.S. Army Military History Institute (MHI) in Carlisle , Pennsylvania, who had supported me in earlier work, among them Marty Andreson, David Keogh, Louise Arnold-Friend, Rich Baker, and Rick Eiserman, had years ago made me aware that Truman Smith’s memoir, “Facts of Life,” and his wife Katharine’s memoir , “My Life,” were in the MHI archives, crying for attention. After my biography of General William E. DuPuy was published in 2008, I was considering a novel as my next project. Richard Sommers encouraged me instead to tell the Truman Smith story. I thank him for that and the entire MHI staff for support and professionalism. I knew that Rick Eiserman had planned to write his dissertation on Smith and had done extensive research. However, he had put his project aside for personal and professional reasons. When he became aware of my interest in Smith, he sent me five banker’s boxes of research materials he had gathered from several archives and interviews he had conducted. That generosity was crowned with his best wishes for my success in telling this story. Roger Cirillo, editor of American Warriors, a series sponsored by the Association of the United States Army, encouraged me to write this book as an entry in the series. Roger had been enormously supportive in placing my three earlier books with their eventual publishers. At that point Steve Wrinn, Director of the University Press of Kentucky, entered the picture. Having recently published my Du- xii preface and Acknowledgments Puy biography, he joined Roger in encouraging me to write this book. Scanning the MHI holdings and the materials Rick had sent me, I became increasingly enthusiastic as I learned more about Smith from those sources and from reading letters and diaries I had uncovered . Truman Smith was born at West Point in 1893. His father, a U.S. Army captain, one of the last of the Indian fighters and an instructor at the United States Military Academy, was killed in action in 1900 in the Philippines. An old Yankee family, the Smiths had been in New England since the seventeenth century. Smith’s grandfather and namesake (Yale, 1815) had been a U.S. senator from Connecticut . Like his grandfather, Smith too was a Yale graduate (1915). He did graduate work in history at Columbia University, volunteered for the New York National Guard, served on the Mexican border, and became an officer of the RegularArmy. He distinguished himself as a commander in intense close combat in France in 1918, for which he was recommended for the Distinguished Service Cross and awarded the Silver Star for heroism. He served in the occupation of Germany from 1918 to 1920 in Coblenz where, among other accomplishments, he was editor and principal author of the “Report on Civil Government of the Army,” commonly known as the Hunt Report, later used as a reference for the occupation of Germany in the waning years of World War II. He served in Berlin from 1920 to 1924 during the early period of the Weimar Republic, first as “observer,” then as Assistant Military Attaché. In 1922 he interviewed Hitler in Munich and reported his impressions of Hitler and the “Fascisti” in Germany and Italy. He attended professional courses at the Infantry School and at Fort Leavenworth before becoming one of “Marshall’s men” at Fort Benning from 1928 to 1932. He and George Marshall maintained direct contact and correspondence until Marshall’s death in 1959. Upon completing the Army War College course, Smith commanded a battalion of the 27th Infantry in Hawaii from 1933 to 1935. I served in the same Wolfhound Regiment during the Korean War as well as in the 4th Infantry Regiment in Germany, Smith’s outfit in France in 1918. Also like Smith, I was assistant army attaché from 1973 to 1977, but in Bonn, Germany, not Berlin. Smith was military attaché in Hitler’s Germany from 1935 to preface and Acknowledgments xiii 1939. His close friendship with Charles A...