School of War - Ep. 2: Daniel Bolger on Maurice Rose

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Biography Daniel Bolger is a retired Lieutenant General of the United States Army. A graduate of the Citadel, Lt. General Bolger earned five bronze stars during his time in the military. He served as the commander of several units, including the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, as well as the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan. He earned a Ph.D. in military history form the University of Chicago and currently teaches at North Carolina State University. Times 02:04 - Introduction 03:15 - Why Maurice Rose? 06:30 - What we know about Rose 10:39 - Rose's Motivations and relentless leadership 12:31 - Tank divisions in World War II 17:14 - Tank warfare following D-Day and maneuvering through the bocages 22:29 - Rose's command in the Battle of the Falaise Pocket 27:06 - Exhaustion and perseverance during battle 29:55 - What it takes to be a successful commander 34:07 - The final months of the War for Rose 40:09 - Leadership in today's forces Recorded August 27, 2021

The Netherlands-American Cemetery is a few miles east of the town of Maastricht near the Belgian border. It lies along the highway that Hitler's troops used to invade the region in 1940. It's the same road they retreated on in 1944. Amidst the Rose and Rose of the Fallen lies a man you probably haven't heard of before, Morris Rose. But those who served with Rose spoke of him in the same terms of reverence and respect, with which they spoke of George Patton. As it happens, George Patton was one of the pallbearers at Rose's funeral in 1945.

So was Omar Bradley. Rose had been the commander of the third armored division, taking command amidst the brutal fighting amongst the head rose of Normandy, relinquishing it at his death in action just before the war ended. Rose fought the Nazis and led his troops with a grinding passion and a relentlessness so stark that his superiors had to admonish him for the way he exposed himself in his headquarters troops repeatedly to the fighting at the front. He was taciturn in general, and especially quiet about his religion,

Unusually for the senior army officers of the era, he was the son and grandson of rabbis. His grave is marked with a simple white cross. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who not these buildings down, We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields

and in the streets. We shall never surrender. I'm Aaron McLean, the host of School of War. On this podcast, we talk about strategy and military and diplomatic history. We ask ourselves, what can we learn from the words and deeds of battlefield leaders and statesmen and theorists of the past that's relevant to policymakers and engaged citizens today? Have we forgotten things that are important? Is our forgetfulness putting us at risk? Well, to help us with these questions today, I am delighted to welcome retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bulger. General Bulger served for 35 years in the U.S. Army, commanded troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He commanded the first cavalry division and earned a bronze star for valor and four additional bronze stars to round that

achievement out. And in addition to being a soldier, he's a scholar. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago. Today he teaches at NC State. He's the author of numerous books, including I I learn while preparing for this podcast a novel. We might ask him a bit about that as we go on here. But most recently, he's the author of a new book, The Panzer Killers, the untold story of a fighting general in his spearhead tank division's charge into the Third Reich. It's really the story of the American Army in the Second World War, from Normandy through to VE Day,

told through the lens of the story of the third armored division, and its commander, Morris Rose. and I don't think many will have heard of Morris Rose. I will confess that I had not heard of Morris Rose before coming across this book. And so my first question for you, General Bulger, is with so many colorful personalities on the battlefield, with so many storied units fighting in the American Army in this famous campaign, why a book about Morris Rose? Well, Aaron, you ask you a great question.

It's one of the ones I asked myself when I first heard about General Rose. And not surprisingly, the first thing I heard about him was actually from another World War II general, who folks may have heard of, the commander of our forces down in Italy, but fifth army for most of the war in the later 15th Army group, and that's General Mark Clark. He was a major figure, you know, from his time as a very young officer, Baroque, Italian commander in World War I, big commander down in Italy and all that in World War II. but among his other jobs, he also participated just before hostility started for America with the Pearl Harbor Tech in all the training and stuff. And he was trusted by senior leaders like General George Marshall, the chief of staff the Army.

And he was one of the people who sort of picked a roster of potential commanders. And General Clark was an individual I got to speak with in the 1970s, me being, you know, a young guy. I didn't ask me a question, but one of the people with me did said, well, General Clark, who was a good commander that wasn't on your roster? Morris Rose, he was killed in action fighting the Germans at the head of his division at the end of the war. Whoa, a division commander killed an action. I don't think I've ever heard this story. What General Clark said was correct, you know, commanded the third armor division, which are a very famous unit. Rose was the commander for most of the war for that division during the big campaign that started in Normandy invasion and ended with

victory in Europe Day in May of 1945. Rose commanded almost to the end, he's killed in action at the end of March in 1945. Aaron, as you mentioned, I have always liked writing history. I wrote some of it while I was in active duty during my military schools. I thought, you know, it's about time I look more into this guy, General Rose, in his division. And that's what came together as this book that's now the Panzer Killers.

You can tell as you're reading the book, which I should say for everyone listening, is a really fantastic read. Beyond being just extremely well written, I failed to mention in my introduction of Lieutenant Bulry, also has a PhD from the University of Chicago, which I don't think is all that common amongst our general officer corps, just our officer corps, broadly speaking.

It's a gripping read. It tells a fascinating story. And it's full of these quick analyses of battlefield decisions and battlefield personalities that come from what's clearly a deep reservoir of experience combined with research. And in the case it rose specifically, and here's my question,

you face a real challenge, right? I mean, all of these other guys, you know, Eisenhower, Bradley, you know, the famous personalities from the battlefield, for the most part, they survive the war. They write memoirs, they give interviews. There's a lot of just material

on what they were thinking on their kind of interior life through the critical moments of the war. Rose, of course, dies before the war is over. And as you document and discuss frequently, it's not like he was all that talkative when he was actually there leading his division.

So how did you handle that? How did you try to tell the story of a guy who, compared to some of his peers, there's just not as much available to read about him? That's one of the things about General Rose is actually fascinated me. And the more I delved into Rose's background and his story, he was a very private man. There's reasons for that that we can guess.

And that's all we can do is guess. He did not leave a diary. He loved very few letters. Rose rarely gave press and reviews. There's only a couple cases. And really, he was a guy who let his deeds do the talker. But the number of people who served with him who have comments is significant. Here's a guy who left a very big wake among the soldiers of the Third Armored Division.

They definitely knew he was different than the average Greta Kat general officer that they'd seen. And his thing that made him different, I believe, was a commitment to leadership by example. And he was a younger general officer. He was in his mid-40s when he took over the division. In big wars like that, the age of our senior leaders creeps down. I think most of them now that I see on TV it look like they all should be drawn on Social Security.

But back then, that was not the case. And yet, here's Rose, and he sees it not only as his duty, but he sees it as something that's integrated in how he's going to command his division. He will be out front. he will be he will see what's going on with his own eyes here with his own ears and he will be seen by the soldiers of the third armoured division if they wonder what to do or what's important all they got to do is look at where their generals at because that's going to tell them a message can i ask you

to speculate a little as to why he was such a private person so morris rose his family originally landed in the united states in connecticut his dad's name before got fixed by the immigration authorities was Raus. He was from Eastern Poland, which at that time was under Russian control in the late 1800s. His mom's made name, although she and her family came ashore, she was Catherine Brown, but it was actually Bronowitz. Both of them were from Jewish families that had left Russian-dominated Poland and Ukraine about the turn of the century and just before. And of course, if you're familiar with that period of that era, that was the period of the great grums against, you know, the killing of Jews in their villages, the burning of towns, frankly, by militia groups in

the Russian Empire, encouraged to agree by the Russian seafel police and by the Tsar, you know, because the Jewish people were seen as scapegoats. Well, flash forward, you know, that's the Hitler line about Jewish people. You know, they're the cause, the reason the Imperial German army was beaten in World War I, never beaten on the battlefield, said Hitler stabbed in the back by Jewish, Bolshevik, you know, communist elements in the streets in Germany. But that's the universe that Rose grew up in. Today, it's hard for us to understand what would be the position of a young person who is of Jewish origin wanting to join the regular army of the United States as an officer. I wouldn't say it was never done. It was done. But how you did it and how you presented

yourself in that era was very, very tricky. Most of the officer corps were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Not all. Not all. I mean, there were exceptions even then. Morris Rose was like zip-lib. I'm not talking about any of that stuff. His ethnicity, if you would ask him, although officially, it said, you know, American, it said Episcopian religion on his forms and all that, that he was a general Protestant. The reality was his ethnic group was U.S. Army. And that's the way he chose to present himself. And I think it bled over in other things.

If you don't talk about something as personal as your upbringing religion, pretty soon you just don't talk about anything other than work. Now, and you have some fascinating moments in the book where you, there's a relentless quality to his leadership. I mean, even compared to others on the battlefield who are also relentless, he stands out as somebody who was willing to push men and material to the absolute brink. In particular, the period that you talk about this is the drive to the German frontier, where there's a chance that if you get there fast enough, you might get to the so-called Western Wall before the Germans really have the opportunity to properly defend it and end the war early.

I've been a division commander. A lot of things motivate. You know, obviously you're interaction with your soldiers, what situation you're facing, what enemy you're facing. But there's got to be that inner fire. There's got to be that inner spark that keeps you going. The thing that'll make you go an extra few hours when a normal person would say, hey, I need to get some sleep. The thing that says, no, we punched through the first belt of fortifications, we've got to get through the second belt and we've got to get through now. I think that that motivation from his upbringing is part of that because we know the scale and scope, the horrors of the Holocaust, with millions being run. mounted up and killed. But evidence of that was already known before the American forces landed in Europe. And we were finding each place that we went through, even in occupied France, where there was a

lot of bad things done to Jewish people. We were finding evidence of this. And it was not a secret. And it was fairly obvious that as we get deeper and deeper into the heart of the Third Reich, we were going to run across more of this. For a guy like General Rose, from my perspective, who already had a strong driving will to defeat this enemy, I mean, this was personal in every sense. In his mind, he was seeing the faces of his family. He was seeing those in the community back in Connecticut when he was a little boy and then in Denver when he's older. You know, many of them were the relatives of most people. And he knew that. You know, he had no idea what it happened to the Brannowitz or Rouse family in Poland, but he knew it probably

wasn't good. Let's talk for a minute about tanks and tank warfare and the kind of war that Rose was involved in. Armored vehicles, motorized. warfare is a defining feature of the war from 1939 on. What happened? What is why have tanks? How did they come into being in why? And what happens in the interwar period that they become these really formidable and important weapons such that you organize whole divisions around them and put your most aggressive officers in charge of those divisions? So the World War I tanks, they were designed for one purpose. It was it was the British who actually put the idea together of using caterpillar traction like you would see today on a bulldozer or something like

that can go over any kind of terrain because it basically lays its own little road. That's what the caterpillar track is. Put together that tractor with a big armored box on top of it, you know, to protect the crew, and then you put weapons on, a cannon, machine guns, all this kind of stuff. And the idea would be you had something big enough that it could cross trenches, crush barbed wire, and get through the trench lines that were stopping ground attacks. You know, your other alternative if you don't use a tank is a set of a guy dressed sort of like you or me, you know, with a cloth shirt to protect him, to run as fast as they could. And, you know, last I checked, none of us can outrun bullets.

So the British, the French, spent a lot of time with tanks of World War II. Interestingly enough, the country that didn't spend hardly any time with tanks was the Germans. And there was a good reason for that. Imperial Germany was under a very tight blockade from the British. when Americans think of World War I, we think of, oh, the Lusitania and the U-Boats, and, you know, eventually we'd come in because they were sinking our neutral shipping. Yeah, there was a reason for that because the Germans were being starved. In World War I, there were over 300 and some thousand Germans who died of starvation and disease related to that British blockade. That's how effective the blockade was.

It cut them off from everything. In the between the war era, interestingly enough, the Germans were prohibited from having tanks, naturally. you know, they couldn't have anything because of the Treaty of Versailles. Yet, they continue to want to experiment. And so in a weird setup, sort of like suicide squad or something, you know, where all the bad guys get together, the Germans got with the communist Russians, and Germans from Weimar, Inner War, Germany, go out and do tank experiments in the Soviet Union hidden where no one can see him behind the Iron Curtain of that era.

And the Germans developed this interest in tanks, and they develop an interest in how do I integrate the tank to make an offensive operation so that the next war is not fought in a trench. Instead, it's fought in the enemy rare area by a vehicle that can go 30 or 40 miles an hour, covered by airplanes that can go hundreds of miles now. The Germans do all those experiments. The Soviets are sitting there watching and they're doing them too. They'll both get to try them out on each other in World War II. Americans, you know, World War II starts for us with Pearl Harbor, but they've been over two years of combat by the time we get in. And the Allies have successfully watched what

thought were very strong countries get rolled over. The polls on paper had a great army. They couldn't stand against the new German Panzer Division. The French had been the victors in World World War I. They'd never given up their defense of their border region. They're smashed in a couple weeks by German Panzers. And even though the French and the British and the Poles all had tanks or versions of tanks, theirs weren't well organized. They weren't trained to work with the aircraft. In some case, they didn't even have radios support. So they, you know, they had them, but they didn't know what to do with them. The Germans figured out what to do with them. Americans, because we were let entry, had a chance to at least look at what happened. And young American officers, by then almost

middle-aged officers like Morris Rose, were among the Americans who studied that and began to organize our tank forces. Most of these people came out of the capital, not all, but George Patton's the biggest example. And by the way, he'd been a tank brigade commander in World War I. And Morris Rose came from that background because he was an infantry guy when he fought a young, young officer in World War I. He switched to cavalry around 1930 and that's how he got his entree into the U.S. version of these tank units. So the classic, you know, the paradigmatic armor operation is this, you know, campaign of deep penetration, these fast movements through the, you know, the enemy's rear area. You know, that's what a tank commander wants to be doing.

That's not how it started for the third armored division in Normandy. And maybe we can talk about that for a minute. I think a lot of Americans helped by movies like Saving Private Ryan and also just by the fame of DDA itself can kind of picture what it was like to fight on the beaches on June the 6th. I think fewer Americans probably know how the next two months went and how little progress was actually made, how the American, British, Canadian Allied forces essentially got bogged down in this extraordinarily difficult terrain, just interior from the beaches, the bocage, which was a particularly difficult challenge for tanks insofar as the train didn't permit the kind of rapid mobile warfare that we were just discussing. So what was that kind of fighting like? How did a tank commander

like Rose deal with it? Very interesting, Aaron, that you mentioned it. So we landed Normandy, great landing, you know, D-Day, like in saving Private Ryan and Omaha Beach, you know, we fight our way ashore against the German defenses. And we immediately begin landing our tank forces because now we're going to break out and we're going to head across and liberate Paris and drive to Germany and all that kind of stuff. In all the energy spent, and this is no small thing, you know, to have the longest day, to have the landing, to successfully drop the paratroopers, land the landing craft, air bombardment, sea bombardment. It was always sort of an afterthought, well, once we get them ashore, what's going to happen? Well, you know, we're going to land the tanks and bust out, you know, like usual.

It's one of these things, the nature of life is in the military. You tend to focus on the immediate target. Staying alive. I mean, you mentioned saving private Ryan. It's not like they land at Omaha Beach and have time to have a coffee break and discuss how things are going today. And of course, here's the other challenge. When the Germans pull out their great Panzer success against the Poles and even the French, nobody'd seen that kind of stuff before. By the time we're fighting the Germans in 1944, guess who's an expert on Panzer Warford? That's right, the Germans.

They did study the area around Normandy. The guy who was in charge of the Norman defense was Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, one of the greatest armored commanders in history, a guy who led a Panzer Division during the 1940 invasion of France, led the German Africa Corps fighting the British and us in North Africa. So Rommel's the commander, and he immediately identified. He said, yeah, they don't get ashore. But then they're going to get bogged down in this bocage. What is the bocage? All of Normandy is broken up in this patchwork of quarter acre, third acre, bocash, little boxes of land. Each of them would have a little opening where the farmer could go in and farm the field. And you walk out. So the way to think of it, it's almost like much taller. It's almost like

you walk into a modern office and we've got cubicles. Well, imagine if those cubicles were each a quarter of an acre across. And instead of being chest high, they were 15 feet high. They were twice as tall as me and more than that. Hundreds and thousands of these. We're talking 30 miles of depth of this behind the Normandy beaches. Our people weren't prepared for that at all. General Jim Gavin, who jumped as a one star with 82nd. One of the smartest guys we had, very combat experience, fought in Sicily, fought in Italy. I didn't even pay any attention to it. When I saw the aerial photographs, I said, well, that's interesting.

They have a patchwork of fields. This has never occurred to me, each of a 15-foot wall around them. And worse, well, each of the fields has a little opening so the farmer could get in. Guess where the American troops immediately go, right to the opening. And the Germans, that's the fatal funnel. It's like entering a room. They got covered. So they're sitting in the corners with their machine that's blazing away.

It took us weeks to figure out how to crack this code. You had to use firepower. You couldn't just blow them out of there because today we'd sort of say, well, why don't we just line up the airplanes and blow the crap out of them with artillery and stuff like that? The Germans weren't bunkers. They could take hits unless directly hit their bunker and went through the top. So that alone is going to sort of get their heads down, but you're only going to get a few direct hits.

Same for artillery. Artillery of that era was not as precise. I think today because of modern precision weapons, we think, oh, you know, point and shoot and it goes right where we want. That was not the case in World War II. You had to work with volume. So we had to figure out a way to get the tanks into these bocage enclosures. And again, it's too tall for the tank to drive over. I mean, they tried to drive the tank over, flipped on its side, you know, that didn't work.

Amazingly enough was an American mechanic sergeant who said, you know, hey, I was back at the beach the other day. and all these German beach obstacles, you remember like when Tom Hanks hides behind the metal thing that was supposed to rip the bottom out of landing craft, we landed at low tide so they didn't work, but we used them as cover. Well, this sergeant, a guy named Cullen, he looks at it, he says, I think I can cut that up and turn it into a fork

and put it on the side on the front of the tank. You put that low on the tank, put two big fork prongs underneath it. If you dig into a wall like that and churn your treads, basically you pop the wall up, And you make a hole. And now instead of opening at the opening where the Germans got all the machine guns, they're coming through in all different spots all over.

The Germans never used those forks. So they, you know, it shocked them. They didn't expect it. And combined with the air, combined with their artillery and a lot of brave engineers and infantry, we can go in and we started cleaning those bocash spots. Once you get out of that, you got open farm field. And at that point, you can turn loose guys like Rose and Pat. Right.

And so we have the brain. break out. There's a fierce German counterattack, which ultimately reaches its own culminating point, sort of loses momentum. And this leads to a situation where you have this large, so-called pocket of German forces in Normandy. And what ensues is kind of a more of a classic battle of maneuver in the attempt to close this pocket, the fillet's pocket, and then a pursuit that ensues of the German forces across France. Talk a little bit about Rose's command of the Third Armored during this period. What's his role in the Battle of the Flai's pocket? And what happens? Because we didn't actually trap the Germans there, did we? No, we got a lot of them. But if you think it's just

Rose. So Rose starts the breakout. His first job of the breakout, he's still a subordinate commander in the second armored division, his old outfit. He rose in that division from being a colonel, then, you know, division chief of staff and eventually becomes a one star in that division. So he's leading the task force in the breakout. And so in the middle, the breakout, the American commanders are watching the third armored division. Remember, I said roses in second. So third armored division is next door. Their commander was a very nice guy, General Leroy Watson. Everybody loved him. He's sort of a coach type guy, big huggy bear. You know, everybody liked them. But he lacked the killer instance. War is not a place for nice guys when you need

drive and determination. So they knew they had to get Watson out of there and get the third armored division motivated. So in the middle of this breakout, so we're like a few days into the breakout, they call Rose and they say, hey, turn over command of your task force. You're taking command of the third armor division during the breakout, during an armor movement. So he takes over his division right in the middle of this German counterattack. And obviously they had to stop the German counterattack. That was one thing.

Some of his division had been detached because they didn't trust Watson. So they detached some of the division to back up infantry units like the 30th infantry division. And so Rose takes over and he's got to figure a way to stop. the German counterattack and it closed this bag that the Germans have driven themselves into because we hold around the edges. The British and Canadians hold to the north. We hold to the south. We hold the nose of it, which is to the west toward the French coast. And the Germans are in this bag. Well, the Germans aren't stupid. You know, they've been doing arm of warfare for a while and they

realize, you know, we're in big trouble. We don't get the hell out of here. We're going to get, we're going to get wiped out. So a lot of people make the point, well, the bag wasn't closed. There's There were plenty of finger pointing. Generally, mostly, the Americans finger point at Montgomery and the British and Canadians. And the British Canadians and Montgomery finger pointed us. And nobody actually fingers pointed who really did it, which would be to say the Germans, who were pretty damn desperate and didn't want that hold of close. All the famous German divisions you've ever heard of, second Panzer division,

the infamous S.S. Raffin S.S. Panzer divisions like the first, the second, the ninth, the 12th Hitler youth, you know, that had fought the Canadian. a can, they're all involved in this operation. Because the Germans in this bag, besides being attacked from the south by Rose and the Third Army Division, many other U.S. divisions and Canadian and British from the north, even a free Polish and free French Army Division were involved in. So they're surrounded, they're getting pounded.

The air is coming in. They had to abandon their vehicles. They ran out of fuel. So they leave most of the tanks, the Panzers. They leave the trucks. And you talk about cold-blooded. The Germans basically said, hey, we're pulling out the senior arms. officers and the senior NCOs so we can reform these divisions. And the rest of the German

privates are like, well, what about us? Die in place, Fritz. Your job is to hold the edge of this so we can get your leaders out to reform a counterattack force. I mean, the Germans are Nazis, the bad news ideologically and all that, but they fought like hell. They were able to hold it just long enough to get those caddards on. Tremendous casualties. The Germans lost a quarter of a million people in the Normandy campaign, almost all their army, almost everything. And you, you're able to You mentioned, so what happens? We don't totally close this for about a week after the Germans got some people extracted, but close is good enough.

And we really destroyed their panzer force and their ground units in Normandy. Only remnants got back to the German border. But they would reconstitute from that because they're Germans. But what it did is it immediately opened an opportunity to sweep across France. And this is where George Patton, Morris Rose, even Monty, Montgomery to extent, come into their own in this great pursuit to the to the German border. Now, General Bulger, you've commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. You know, when you write about this phase of the war in your book, you know, there's sort of paragraph

after paragraph with with lines that are easy to write, but I think hard to imagine, you know, how one actually lives them. You know, you know, at 2 a.m., you know, the task force stepped off and was on the move for 20 hours, you know, the battalion took two killed in action, 18 wounded in action, lost two tanks, you know, and then at 3.30 a.m. they were attacked, you know, and just sort of paragraph after paragraph like that. Speak, if you, if you, if you would, to what the experience of that pace of operations is like for the young soldier. I mean, basically, they feel like the walking dead after a couple days of this, you know, so sleeping goes out the window right away. You're catching catnaps or you're falling asleep as the

tank is rolling along. And that sounds like a good idea unless the tap is. be the driver who's fallen asleep. And then the thing goes in the ditch and all that other stuff. It's August in France, so it's hot. You're getting daily thunderstorms, so you're wet and you're damp and you're ringing out. We talk in the military, we say, now, every day, it's very important to do personal hygiene and to shave and to change our socks. People aren't worried about shaving and changing our socks. If they get an extra 10 minutes, they're crashed asleep. Eating becomes sort of a luxury. So people aren't eaten properly. And by the way, one of the things you have to do every day You can eat and drink is you got to go to the bathroom.

And, you know, the tank does not have a porta potty abhor. Okay. So you've got to get out. And anytime you leave that haul, you're subject to enemy attack and all that kind of stuff. So no sleep, not much food, not a lot to eat, tough to do bodily functions, hygiene is breaking down. And these vehicles are complicated. You know, we say, well, it's a World War II vehicle. Hey, they still got to be refueled.

They've got to be greased. You have to change our parts that break down. And that's in addition to fight in the war. Everything I've mentioned now has nothing to do with the Germans other than taking fire. And the Germans are fighting to save their lives in the spleen pocket and then to hold you up as you're trying to cross friends. You know, day after day of constant fighting like this, where's people, equipment just down to a number? So we would say, sitting back here in 2021, oh, it's a glorious victory. You know, we crushed the Germans in the fillet pocket and then we broke out across France.

Most people who did it can barely remember any. several accounts you read from veterans. They say it wasn't until I saw the documentary video or the watched World at War in the 1970s that I really realized where my unit was and what we were doing. Because all they're doing is going to the next bridge, going to the next town, up, time to refuel, crash for an hour on the road, then get up and go again. I mean, it's a degree of exhaustion that you can't even imagine. And that's besides the adrenaline exhaustion of the fear of fighting Germans.

And again, a formidable enemy. you in addition to rose offer strong opinions throughout the book on various American commanders and allied and German commanders for that matter who are fighting in the war you definitely have those who you pretty consistently admire and have positive things to say about so Rose of course Patton lightning Joe Collins General Ridgeway General Gavin and you have some who you're not such a big fan of Courtney Hodges you don't have a particularly high opinion of you make very clear repeatedly through the book And even some generals who, you know, I don't think you have a negative view of him exactly, but have acquired a kind of soft glow in American memory. What did it take to be a successful commander in conditions like these? So, of course, the Germans who are good at fight wars, I mean, the old British line, you know, you don't know war until you fought the Germans. They should know because they fought them a few times as a week.

But the Germans of that era used to have one of the typical Germanic military terms, finger spitzing de view, which meant the fingertip feeling. You got to see and be seen, as I said when we talked about Morris Rose. Good generals are up with the soldiers experiencing with their experience. They are side by side. They're shoulder to shoulder. They're with them. They're seeing what they see. They're hearing what they hear. They're not back in a command post sticking pins in a map or today putting pixels on a PowerPoint slide or whatever. Generals must be forward with modern communications and those were available. World War II with modern radios, you can go as far forward as you needed to be.

And the personal influence of the general, the personal understanding of the general makes all the difference in the world. You mentioned Courtney Hodges, who was a very heroic officer of World War I, earned the distinguished service crosses of the battalion commander in World War I. So, I mean, he was no shrinking vital. Omar Bradley, who, you know, who rose to five-star general, later chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all that kind of stuff during the Korean War. these guys are very famous generals, but their war was fought from a command post.

They were very rarely forward. And as a result, they were issuing orders that in many cases were unexecutable. You've got to be up with those young soldiers to see what they're seeing and to do what they're doing. Rose was there. You mentioned Lightning Joe Collins. He was there. Guys like Ridgeway and Gavin were the first paratroopers out the door. Hell, Gavin and Ridgeway and the hedgerows in Normandy as general officers were out fighting Germans with their rifles.

You must know what's going on at the point of most danger. And your soldiers have got to see you there. They've got to know, hey, the old man knows what's happening. He may be an old dude. He may be general. But he's up here with me. And guess what? When that force of personal example is there, the soldiers, there's no limit to what they will do.

You depict this remarkable scene as the Third Armored Division approaches the German frontier. And Rose's command post, Omaha Ford, which the troops nicknamed Omaha Wayford. given Rose's habit of putting it, you know, in earshot, if not actually in the fighting. He gets a visit from General Collins' boss. And, you know, AIDS who are there on the scene later document and you record in your book, a pretty epic ashtun that Collins delivers to his subordinate division commander. It's not entirely clear from what you describe in the book exactly what the subject of it was because only the two generals were privy to exactly what was said.

but it seems quite likely from the context that Rose is getting shoot at for putting his command post too close to the fighting. So if Lightning Joe Collins thinks you're too close, you are. That was a valid warning. Collins, as you said, no shrinking violent guy was always up forward. But he thought Rose was taking it too far. And moreover, it wasn't just Rose. One of the reasons we have command posts in the military, you do set them a little back. That's to run the battle while you're up doing all that inspirational scene and being seen.

And what Collins was getting out with Rose was, hey, you know, Morris, you're doing a good job. You're doing what you're supposed to do. But when you put your headquarters in that same position, we're going to lose the whole brain of this organization with a couple artillery shells. You've got to give yourself some distance. Now, of course, the rest of that story that is worth mentioning was Collins knew it. He writes it in his autobiography, Lightning Joe. He says, you know, I knew that Rose would keep doing things the way he was doing. He always does that that way.

And by the way, on the way out, Collins congratulates, hey, congratulations. You just got your second star as a major general. You know, so it wasn't ass chewing, but it was certainly not, you know, to a degree, Collins knew Rose was going to fight like that. And it was just, it was priced into the deal. So the third armored division becomes one of, if not the first American units to actually pierce the Western Wall. And ultimately, of course, there's the furious combat at the bulge and then on into Germany itself.

Talk about the final months of the war for Rose and the manner of his death. which happened at the hands of the enemy at the front of the fighting. So the third armor division, like most of the allied military, the British, the American, the Canadians, everybody sort of closes up on the German border very quickly, bus through France during the month of August after breaking out of the Normandy Beachhead after two months of slogging through this bocage, they get to the German border and basically the supplies run out. You know, it's just the way it was.

The tanks needed gas, the troops needed food. Everybody needed rest. The vehicles were breaking apart. And they'd just gone too far too fast. The supply people could not keep up. And by the way, we had, for good reason, destroyed all the French railroads, blown all their bridges, done all that stuff to stop the Germans from counter attacking us. Well, the problem is now we need those roads and railroads, and they all got to be fixed.

So from about September, the Americans, the British, Canadians, everybody's bogged down in this German West Wall. And we're messing around with that between September and November. we make very little progress. In December, while we're still finally trying to work our way through this Westwall fortification, weather's horrible. You know, it's autumn in Europe. That means you get an alternating rain and snow. It's crap weather.

You know, the supply lines still aren't quite straight. And the Germans mount a major counterattack. All those cadres, they pull out of the flay pocket. Well, now they show up with a bunch of new Hitler youth troops and brand new Panthers and Tigers, there's heavy tanks and they come busting out of the Ardennes forest and catch the Americans by surprise. We were using that as a rest area. We would put divisions that were chewed up fighting along the Westwall there and brand new

divisions that were just coming into the front to get to fight. So we got caught with our pants around our ankles. And Rose, who's north of there, is one of the forces sent down to restore the situation. Basically, the Americans do what they're supposed to do. They hold the shoulders and they begin to send relief. forces. Most of us know the story of George Patton and the Third Army coming up from the south to leave the 101st Airborne at Bastogne where they were surrounded. Most of us don't know the story. I sure didn't know as much about it until I worked on this book. The Third Armour Division,

in many parts of the First Army came down from the north and launched similar countertacks. And Rose was one of those guys. So the Bulge fights out through January and now it's time to cross the Rhine River. That takes about two months. The Germans flood the flood plain of the Rhine. they make it very difficult. You know, they're Germans. They're going to fight to the end. Hitler, given orders, stand to the last soldier, and they were going to carry it out.

So, I mean, it's just horrendous situation on the German Rhine River in February March. We get a foothold across the Rhine. And after that foothold, the Germans began to crack. Rose is leading his third armor division. Now, exploitation across Germany, to the north of where the third army division across the Rhine River is the Rur Valley.

And that's the big industrial heart of Germany. We'd bomb the hell out of it, but a lot of factories were still working. Germans have what's left of a whole army group trying to protect it. So from the north, the British are coming down with the U.S. 9th Army attacks. From the south, Rose is leading the First Army. They want to make a pocket that this time complete the pocket around the rural. And the key target city that Rose's tank forces were aiming at was Paterborn. It's not a major German city, but it was just on the map where they were going to make the link up somewhere near Paterporn.

So he's driving the hell out of people. I mean, they're going dozens of miles a day, in some cases, up to 60 miles a day. And, I mean, that's easy for us if we're driving down I-95 or something like that. But they're doing this rolling over, distance forces, rolling over Hitler, youth, and old guys with Panzer Faust and all this trying to stop them with these shoulder-fired weapons. Poor Rose pressing the attack like he always does. He's up forward. He's in a Jeep, you know, and if you know, jeeps, they have no armor on him.

He's got his radio. He's well up front so we can see and be seen. They get into a night engagement with an SS panzer unit. And the SS unit is armed with Tiger 2 tanks. These big immense tanks, they're like the same size of our modern M1A because they got an 88-millimeter gun full of these fanatic SS guys. Rose gets cut off between a couple of German tanks. They literally bust down to the road, catches Jeep, crush his Jeep against a tree. Rose and the aide and the driver hop out.

They have no idea who they're fighting. I mean, they didn't realize they were SS guys. So they start to basically put their weapons on, they put their hands up. And the tank commander of the German tank shoots the middle guy who was the tallest guy, Morris Rose. Never, as near as we can tell, didn't know he was a general, certainly didn't know he was a Jewish origin. He shot him because he was the tallest guy in the middle, and the tanks got on their way because they were worried about the sun coming up and the American airplanes catch him.

Rose was his left line in the road dead. They had multiple rounds. He was killed instantly, including rounds in the head, two went into his head. his helmet with the two stars was laying in the road. You can see that today in the Army Museum. It was at Fort Knox for years. Now it's the Army Museum at Fort Belvoir. And patrol goes back and recovers roads the next morning.

The Germans didn't even take the maps on Rose's sheet. They didn't take the radio freak of nothing. They killed them and left. They were just trying to get out of it. Just what a way to go. So we've been at war in Afghanistan for 20 years. And I should say we're recording this episode here in the last week. week of August, watching in real time the chaos of the evacuation going on at the airport in

Kabul. We lost a squad's worth of Marines, sailors, a couple soldiers as well. In addition to serving and commanding in both Iraq and Afghanistan, leading the mission to train Afghan forces in Afghanistan, you've written on the war, broadly speaking, both wars Iraq and Afghanistan and the American conduct of those wars. Thinking about a guy like Morris Rose and his attributes of command, his personal dedication to mission accomplishment, which is sort of physically manifested in him being right there at the front. Do we have that today in today's General Officer Corps? We've got it, but it's not as prevalent as it should be. There are generals who still lead that way. I tried to the extent that I could. I'm no Morris Rose, but I do know that you got to

see and be seeing and you've got to get in the fight with your people. I think there's a tendency because we're in this sort of counter-guerilla counter-terrorist war to say, oh, it's all small unit actions. This is a corporal and sergeant's war. I'll stay at the command post and just look at the PowerPoint display. Look, you're commanding nothing from a command post. All you're doing is looking at videos and stuff like that. People who think that you're going to micromanage this from a drone video or something. They're out of their mind. You've got to get forward, see, feel, hear, sweat alongside your troops and understand what they're doing. A lot of this war is consisted of ignorance, second-guessing, goofy, annoying rules of engagement that tie people's hands.

Any frontline commander doesn't allow any of that stuff. I sure has held in in any of the commands that I hit. And you can't allow that. The soldiers, the Marines, they've got to be able to take the fight to the enemy to use whatever they need to use to get the job done. But that's only if you're forward to understand that stuff. You can't understand it from a command post. You sure can't understand it from Washington, D.C.

and anybody thinks they can. It's just crazy. So a lot of people know General Stan McChrystal. He was the guy who had to running with the Rolling Stone reporter got fired for some colorful language about our political leaders. Okay, you're not supposed to do that. Article 88 of the uniform code of military just pretty specific about not being contemptuous of our civil leadership elected and appointed. So poor General McChrystal got canned from his command in Afghanistan. What a lot of people don't know about Stam McChrystal is when he was a two, three, and four,

star commander, he went out on the ground on patrols, missions, and rates, both in the special ops command, and then later as the commander in Afghanistan. He didn't have to do that. You know, in other words, nobody expected him to do it except him because that's the kind of guy he was. And that's the kind of guy Morris Rose was. He's not the only guy like that. Many people, our old secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, that was the way he was. General Mattis was a two, three, four star general in this war. Many, many times Lance Corporals talked about, hey, I'm out on a mission. and who's this guy next to me, this old guy. Well, the old guy was General Mattis.

All right. What does that give men like Stan McChrystal Jim Mattis? What it gives them is that feeling of what's actually going on the war. That's why those guys didn't issue stupid orders because they were among those who would execute these orders. And that's what we see with Rose. That ideal is still there and it's a high ideal. And I mean, it's a dangerous idea.

If you're going to fight like that, you're going to put yourself at risk. But as we know, we got our men and women. at risk every day and night. And the generals need to be part of it. General Bulger, thanks for writing this fantastic book. Thanks for all of your service to our country. And thanks for joining us today on the School of War. Thanks, thanks, sir. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.