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27 New York City, Summer 1943. Mike Daly had not had an easy or successful first year at West Point. He had survived a brush with the Honor Committee and the incessant hazing of the senior cadets (whom he seemed to infuriate continually), but he still faced his old academic nemesis, math, and its academic “relative,” mechanical engineering . He had won a narrow reprieve the first semester but succumbed in the second by failing math. Unless he could pass a re-entrance test at the end of the summer, he faced possible dismissal. At the urging of his father, who had returned from the South Pacific in May 1943 and was stationed at Fort Lewis, in Washington State, Mike grudgingly enrolled for summer remedial classes with the brilliant tutor, Jacob Silverman, who had helped prepare him the previous year for his West Point entrance exam. Members of the remedial class included George Patton IV, son of America’s most aggressive field commander . A tiny (5'3"), balding man, Silverman wore suspenders and sported an enormous black mustache. And he swore colorfully. Patton remembered him saying: “George, George, you son of a bitch! You pay attention, George. And don’t write like fly shit!” Silverman also enjoyed a reputation for successfully tutoring cadets to pass the readmission exam. During the sweltering summer after the West Point term ended, Mike Daly found himself at Silverman’s Bronx home “sweating,” both figuratively and literally, under Silverman’s tutelage.1 Following graduation from Georgetown Prep, the sixteen-year-old Daly stood at an important crossroads. His father, unaware of his son’s private misgivings, wanted him to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. Michael’s last two years at Prep had corresponded to the beginning of World War II in Europe. In November 1939, two months after Hitler’s invasion of Poland but about seven months before the German blitzkrieg swept through France, a poll of students at Prep found that 68 percent opposed US entrance into the war. The same percentage thought that the United States would not eventually be drawn into it, as opposed to 32 percent who 3 A Disappointment to His Family 28 Chapter 3 held the opposite views on both questions. Seventy-two percent, however, indicated their willingness to fight if a foreign power invaded South America. In the next issue, 86 percent of the predominantly Republican student body expressed opposition to FDR’s running for a third term, an opinion shared by Mike and his parents.2 Because Mike would not turn seventeen until September, too late to apply for admission to the Academy for the 1941–42 academic year, his father arranged for him to spend a postgrad year at Portsmouth Priory,3 a Benedictine boarding school about six miles outside Newport, Rhode Island. This would give Mike a chance to strengthen his academic skills, particularly in math (precalculus), chemistry, and physics. At the Priory, Daly grew taller and more muscular and improved as an athlete. He played football on a team that included Robert F. Kennedy, did little work in the classroom, and sneaked into nearby Newport to drink with his friend, Kevin Hughes. Mike had been raised in a household in which alcohol flowed freely. According to a close family friend, the Dalys had a reputation for pouring drinks for friends and family at almost any social gathering in their home. One person described their style of drinking as “joke-filled fun punctuated with a lot of ‘goddammits ,’ as in, ‘Goddammit, Tim Smith, I remember when. . . .’”4 Toward the end of Mike’s first semester, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the United States into war. Gen. George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, designated Brig. Gen. Alexander “Sandy” Patch, Paul Daly’s close friend, to go to the South Pacific to organize the reinforcement and defense of New Caledonia, a strategically located French-controlled archipelago that lay between Australia and Fiji. According to his biographer, Patch was a tall, lean, ramrod-straight officer with piercing gray eyes and something of a scholar’s air. His thinning red hair, by then gray, had earned him the nickname “Sandy” at West Point, where he and Paul Daly had become close friends. Their friendship deepened during the first months after the arrival of the 1st Division in France, where it was “broken in” near the French garrison town of Toul, just west of Nancy. During quiet periods the two...

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