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CHAPTER 1
Itinerant Farmer from Little Dixie
With his rural Missouri background, and partly too, because of the limits of his education, he was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions. — David McCullough1
The Bradleys, Randolph County, Missouri, 1890s
BY THE TIME Omar Nelson Bradley was born a few miles from Clark, Missouri, on 12 February (Lincoln's birthday) 1893, his family on both sides had been living in Randolph County for more than a century. After emigrating from England in the mid-eighteenth century, and after a brief stop in Kentucky, his forebears had settled between Higby, a town of fifteen hundred, and Clark, scarcely any larger. They had been subsistence farmers and tradesmen for generations.
Randolph Country and the half dozen surrounding counties in the north-central part of the state were known as "Little Dixie," testament to the majority sympathy during the Civil War, with attitudes and a way of life that had changed little in the half century since the end of that war. Bradley's paternal grandfather, Thomas Bradley, was a private in the Confederate Army, and his other grandfather briefly fought for the Union. Bradley publicly proclaimed no preference, taking pride in his ability to deliver a speech anywhere; when in the South he spoke of Tom Bradley, and in the North he praised GAR vet Grandpa Hubbard. His real views on race continue to be debated, "I was not a racist," he claimed, but like his fellow Missourian, Harry Truman, he may well have harbored the racial prejudices that were typical of the time for people of his background and milieu.
Bradley's Veterans Administration (VA) biography attributes the selection of the Christian name Omar to his mother, who insisted on a name that wouldeasily distinguish him from his many relations. He believed the real reason was to honor Omar D. Gray (1869–1935), a local editor with a reputation for democratic prairie populism and a friend of his father. At the time, the name Omar had no association with Persian poets or other faraway peoples, at least not in Randolph County. In fact, Bradley's fourth grade teacher was named Omar Robb. Years later some in the army, including (not surprisingly) Patton, made fun of the name. Nelson, his middle name, was to honor their family doctor.
John Smith Bradley (1867–1908) was a subsistence farmer and a self-taught itinerant schoolteacher who "at the end of each short six-month term, took an interim job. Sometimes we lived on a farm, sometimes in town. For a period of several years we farmed 200 bottom-land acres." John had a reputation as a strict, occasionally physical, disciplinarian. In one widely cited episode he took on a pair of knife-wielding students in his multi-grade classroom with a club, knocking both trouble makers unconscious. Physically strong and imposing for the time, at five feet ten inches and 190 pounds, he was a bit shorter and heavier than his son at the same age. He was also opinionated, self- reliant, and resourceful, at home with the great books or alone in the wilderness.
After four years of teaching, at age twenty-five, John married one of his students, sixteen-year-old Sarah Elizabeth "Bessie" Hubbard (1875–1931), raising eyebrows about the age gap, especially when Omar Bradley was born exactly nine months later. The young couple lived with Bessie's parents for the first years in the same house where they were married, and where Bessie's younger sister died of tuberculosis, leaving two daughters, Nettie and Opal Bogie, aged eleven and eight, in the care of the young couple. Omar Bradley was happy with the arrangement, "they were like sisters to me," especially after his younger brother, Raymond, died in early childhood. Eventually John moved the extended family to a series of one-room log cabins, right out of the frontier myth but normal for many in Randolph County. As a boy Omar changed schools often, worked as a sharecropper or manual laborer when he could, and was, like the rest of his family, always living at the edge of poverty.
Bessie's hair went grey before her twentieth birthday, as did Omar Bradley's, and years went by before she had a permanent home. During Raymond's brief and tragic bout of diphtheria the family lived in a one- room cabin with an outside latrine and water drawn from a stream hundreds of yards away. By the time Bradley was a teenager, he had gone to a half dozen schools, "When you have your own father as your teacher you always do your homework." John judged his son by higher standards than the others and rarely offered praise for him in the classroom for fear of a charge of favoritism.
Everyone walked everywhere, often many miles a day on dirt roads, no matter the weather, for the family was too poor to own a mule or a bicycle. Unless it was winter, Bradley went barefoot, his clothes worn and frequently mended by his mother, a skilled seamstress. In the summers he thinned corn — pulling up the small stalks leaving the healthy ones to grow — hoed, and gathered the ripe crop. The money he earned — fifty cents a day, his first earned income — was barely worth the physical discomfort; the first time the smell of the green corn made him so sick he was confined to bed for two days.
The legend of Omar Bradley the great marksman and hunter dates from this time when his father gave him first an air gun, when he was seven, then a .22 rifle at age eight, and finally a L.L. Smith double-hammer shotgun at age thirteen. "His fame with fire arms became legendary in the United States Army," said lifelong friend Red Reeder '26, who accompanied him on many hunting trips and witnessed both skill and cunning:
It was almost embarrassing to hunt quail with him. On one occasion in South Georgia, when coveys of small quail whirred up in front of the pointer, I kept firing at the most obvious bird, regardless of which side of the dog the bird flew. I apologized and he answered, "I'll tell you what to do. Instead of aiming at birds on your side of the dog, you take your pick then I'll fire." It was unnerving to shoot and miss, or to cripple a bird, while Bradley waited and banged down bird after bird, often bagging a double.
The expense of firearms was a major investment for John Bradley in his family's survival and was repaid by his son's competence and pride in his ability as a hunter and marksman. Ownership and use of firearms was another opportunity for Omar to learn responsibility. After a while young Bradley was making good money selling the surplus dressed rabbits for a dollar a piece, and even his failures of those days, like a squirrel-hunting episode with his father when he failed to properly sight his weapon, were the source of lifelong lessons.
When he got older and more confident, he taught other boys his hunting and gathering skills, like laying traps for raccoon and beaver, then skinning, stretching, and curing the pelts. Once he even trapped a mink, getting $1.25 for that skin, a very big payday. He also was proficient with the slingshot, or "peashooter." His father had a bullet mold, which Omar now used to fashion pellets, so they were always uniform in size and weight, increasing accuracy. A friend questioned his claims and put up a penny twenty feet away. Bradley nailed it on the second try, and claimed kills of rabbits, squirrels, and sparrows with the weapon. Getting the technical details right — uniform pellets — became a hallmark of his professional career.
Another lucrative, if risky income producer was collecting the honey in tree hollows while avoiding the stings. One summer father and son collected 250 pounds of honey from wild bee trees:
I wasn't big enough to help in cutting down the tree or cutting into the limb, but I always went along. As soon as the tree fell Dad would rush in and stop the hole with old rags to keep the bees from coming out. Soon the air would be full of them. If I stayed away from the tree I had to run around to lose them but found the safest place was sitting astride the downed tree near where the honey was being removed. The bees were too busy eating honey to bother with me.
There was also some competition for nature's bounty. The custom was to cut a cross in the bark of a claimed tree, and one time when he was alone in the woods, he had a great find and was surprised that no one had marked it as it was on a well-traveled path. On the way home, he stopped to ask the farmer forpermission to cut the tree. "He told me the name of another man that found the bees and asked him to put a cross on it but he had forgotten. I told him I had already done it for him." Father and son also dug goldenseal, locally called "yellow root," to sell to apothecaries for its medicinal qualities.
Bradley settled into a more stable routine. "My chores were neither painful nor unpleasant. Each morning I filled the wood box with chips and kindling for the big kitchen stove. I kept the buckets filled with water from the deep well out in back. When there were cows in the barn, I helped with the milking. And during the years we kept 200 chickens, I helped Mother feed them, kept the hen-house clean, and counted new records in fresh white eggs. Once a week we went together to town carrying a great tin bucket of those gleaming eggs. They fetched ten cents a dozen."
Five years after the turn of the century, things began to improve dramatically, and John was able to buy a modest house at a sheriff's auction in the town of Higby. Phones were still rare, but he somehow secured a contract from a locally formed mutual telephone company to run a twenty-four-hour switchboard with a dozen lines from his house, each family member serving a full twelve-hour shift. The system had coverage of two miles from the switchboards and was battery operated, with the wire strung on the fence, the "poles" small trees cut locally. The reliability fell off in rain and electrical storms and was affected by weeds and roots in the fencerows. All early phones were on "party lines," each instrument had a separate ring, but all phones on the line rang when any number was called, allowing anyone on the line to pick up and listen to the phone calls of the others. For a few years, the pressure eased, and a measure of security was achieved. The Bradley family was settled, had a predictable income and a stable home ably managed by the girls; John Bradley had finally found himself and ceased wandering.
Although outwardly respectful, Omar Bradley occasionally gave way to boyish mischief. His mother, who was distant, domineering, and buffeted by a hard life, was not spared. On his only trip outside Randolph County before West Point, at age seven he visited his paternal grandfather's mountaintop farm just outside of Brentwood in rural northwest Arkansas. During the vacation, he drank sassafras tea made by his grandmother from the roots of the bush, "it didn't taste bad." Even compared to what he was used to, "Life there was primitive. They made yellow laundry soap with lye and wood ashes." During a walk, he caught a lizard, put it in his pocket, and then dropped it in his mother's lap. She was enraged, although his punishment isn't revealed. There was no closeness in their relationship, his few references to her are cold and rarely go beyond traditional expressions of filial respect.
Now that he was living in a town with other boys his age around and free of some responsibilities due to the family's change in fortune, he started to play a lot of pickup baseball. His father was a good ball player and encouraged him, carved his bats, and taught his boy basic skills and to throw and hit a curve ball. He also taught him to practice math problems while lying in bed, and how to sightread words even before the youngster learned the alphabet. Reading was an early passion of Bradley's, with historical fiction and adventure stories his lifelong favorites, especially Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books. Somehow, in spite of their poverty, his father always seemed to have a new book for him to read, and in the pages of those books Bradley discovered his first military heroes, Grant, Lee, and Sherman, and experienced a boy's surge of patriotism reading about Prescott at Bunker Hill, Gates at Saratoga, and Washington at Valley Forge.
"I was a rather ardent student of military history particularly the French and Indian War and the Revolution, and I could visualize those battles. In the wintertime I had to stay in the house so I played battle on the floor. I used empty .22 cartridges for men and built forts out of dominoes." In the springtime campaigns, spent shotgun shells became heavy infantry, and the cannon were made out of elderberry sticks hollowed out and fitted with wood-whittled projectiles that were blown out the "guns." A hand-crafted bow and arrow wreaked direct fire havoc on the enemy and his fortifications, and "whichever side I designated Americans always won."
Then, suddenly, everything changed. John Bradley died of pneumonia after a few days of illness during a brutally cold stretch in January 1908 that also felled his son with a terrible fever. Omar was so weak he couldn't attend his father's funeral, for which he expressed great regret. Nowhere is there a hint of resentment about any of the hardships of his early years. Instead, the tone is respectful, always grateful to his parents, especially his father, for the examples they set and the interests they fostered: "he took me into the woods with him and taught me many things about nature and her children." Some of his closest-held and personal memories of his father are rooted in those things and recalled in great detail in all his interviews, how the snow looked when they were hunting early on Thanksgiving morning, an adventure with a bull interfering with one of their honey hunts, and experiencing a surge of strength that allowed him to carry a very heavy deer as he was overcome by the excitement right after the kill.
His father was as much a companion as a parent and teacher, but Bradley saw both his parents as they were and did not mythologize their virtues or discount their flaws. They were plain people, without airs, who taught him the moral values, to be considerate of others, and to love his neighbors. Most of all, and crucial for his generalship, John Bradley taught his son to listen, the quiet part of the soul of a good teacher or soldier. "We'd sit down at the supper table — my mother, my dad and I, and we'd talk things over. That's where I learned a lot about love of country, and right from wrong."
Outsider, Moberly High School, Moberly, Missouri, February 1908
Bradley, just shy of his fifteenth birthday, was once again forced to assume burdens and responsibilities beyond his age. Bessie was able to buy a place on South Fourth Street in Moberly, a small county seat of ten thousand people and closer to relatives, supporting the family by taking in boarders and working as a seamstress. Bradley ran two Moberly Democrat newspaper delivery routes, worked at odd jobs, and relied on his well-honed hunting skills for additional sustenance. It was harder for him to make his way as a shy and awkward teenager in a new town, high school, and church, where he immediately felt an outsider. At first there was confusion about what grade he should be in, and he changed classes several times, increasing his sense of isolation. Most of the kids in his class had known each other since birth and formed a tight-knit clique no more inclined to welcome a gangly, shy, and awkward stranger as any such group would be today.
Finally, he settled into the Moberly High School Class of 1910, where athletics provided a strong grounding and a way to break in. Bradley became "a baseball nut," as the editor of the yearbook described him, "a good ball player, if he doesn't look like one" (not exactly what a teenager wants to hear). Most important was his growing friendship with his neighbor Mary Elizabeth Quayle (1894–1965), a pretty and popular girl and the daughter of his Sunday school teacher at the Central Christian Church, which was a sect of the Disciples of Christ named Campbellites.
Called after their nineteenth-century founding theologians, the congregation considered the label a negative term, considering themselves a restoration movement harking back to an earlier, more conservative, more ascetic, and purer form of Christianity. They had an austere view of religion: "The Bible clearly teaches that the modern dance; card parties and card playing, either for amusement or for wager or prize; theatre going; fornication; adultry [sic]; stealing; lying, perjury; the use, sale, and manufacture of alcoholic spirits as beverage; betting; covetousness; neglect of the worship of the house of the Lord; and all other disorderly conduct are hurtful and pernicious, both in themselves and in their consequences."
Although not religious, Bradley never missed Sunday services, except for when he had the measles or the mumps, and he was baptized two days after his sixteenth birthday. Any such interest in undergoing that ceremony undoubtedly stemmed from his interest in Mary, who came from a family of true believers and denounced many small pleasures, like drinking and smoking. For most of her life, Mary avoided people who used tobacco and alcohol, and she avoided socializing with people who indulged. The Quayle family, their church, and circle of friends became pillars of support for Bessie and Bradley.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Omar Nelson Bradley"
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