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The minds inside the bullet heads of the Wehrmacht officers hit the receptive mind of the U.S. captain with the impact of a robomb. German officers,* he found, were less flexible than U.S. military men. But they lived, breathed and dreamed war. They understood war as politics and peace as politics.
Later the War Department frisked Wedemeyer's memory for tidbits about Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and other Nazis. It showed scant interest in his incisive opinions about the Wehrmacht's masterminds and master weapons. Only one man took the captain's technical report seriously—Brigadier General George Marshall, then assistant chief of staff of the War Plans Division. Marshall had a long talk with the military student from Germany. When he became Chief of Staff, he remembered Wedemeyer.
General's General. So in 1941, the year the Wehrmacht turned from its victories in the West to overrun the Balkans and penetrate Russia, Wedemeyer was assigned to the War Plans Division. His job was to draw up the first overall war plan for the U.S. After Pearl Harbor, his estimates became the basic pattern of the U.S. war effort. By 1942's end, Wedemeyer was a member of Marshall's inner group, a key figure in overall strategy. He had become a general's general. He accompanied General Marshall on all the great conferences from Casablanca through Teheran. He had an important hand in Allied Mediterranean strategy and in the planning of the Normandy invasion.
When the Southeast Asia Command was set up (1943), Lord Louis Mountbatten chose Wedemeyer as his U.S. aide. At first the Southeast Asia Command looked like a dead end to Wedemeyer. Then one morning last October, he was handed a sealed envelope. He had been chosen U.S. Commander in Chief of the China Theater.
Moment of Destiny. Lieut. General Wedemeyer's directive from Washington was simple: help China forge an effective fighting force. In Chungking Wedemeyer faced a vortex of Chinese distrust, U.S. resentment, war weariness, political intrigue, near catastrophe. Two rare qualities were needed to cope with the problem—a mastery of soldiering in its highest reaches, and a talent for coalition war.
As staff general, Wedemeyer tirelessly studied China's beaten, war-weary, underfed, ill-armed, wretchedly conscripted army of 300 divisions which had to be whipped into shape. It was backed by a blockaded, withered economy producing some 10,000 tons of steel a year, supported by a transport system lacking a single effective railway, and equipped with less than 5,000 obsolescent trucks. It held a front almost 1,500 miles long. Its weapons were an international hodgepodge. But the invincible fact was that somehow this massive army existed, and somehow it fought on.
Wedemeyer began by amputation. He pointed out the absurdity of a nation of China's industrial weakness attempting to support 300 divisions (the U.S. maintains only about 100). China's able Minister of War, General Chen Cheng, saw the point. Within seven months, from the amorphous mass of the Chinese Army a hard core of elite troops began to take shape.