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Soldier Bradley had other, more immediate problems. Nobody but a fool would have wanted his job, and Bradley is no fool. A friend said to him: "Inside of two years they'll toss you out of your office window right on your face. And you'll land so hard you'll bounce." His friend had in mind the politics and pressures which swirl around "the country's second lousiest job." Colonel Charles Forbes had retired from the job in 1923 to a federal penitentiary, convicted of selling contracts. Forbes's successor, honest, penurious Brigadier General Frank T. Hines, had left with dignity but no glory.
"All Our Confidence." Essentially the VA is an enormous business and sociological enterprise—and Omar Bradley is neither sociologist nor businessman. But he has other qualifications—a professional soldier's careful mind, a straightforward approach to his tasks, a reassuringly homely character. His is a steady hand.
Born near Moberly, Mo. (where a sign along the railroad proclaims: "Moberly, Home of General Omar Bradley"), he went to West Point, spent World War I in the U.S. and the 23 years afterwards studying for World War II, which was no surprise to him.
In February 1943 he arrived in North Africa. There he commanded the II Corps in the Seventh Army of George Patton. In that brutal and bloody campaign, U.S. troops learned how vastly different real war was from Tennessee maneuvers. Then the flamboyant George Patton overshadowed Bradley, but it was the quiet, bespectacled infantryman in the old trench coat who made the jittery divisions into a fighting machine. George Marshall wired him: "All our confidence in you has been justified."
When the U.S. First Army hurdled the Channel and plunged into Normandy, it was Omar Bradley who was in command. The First broke the Germans' human dam at Saint-Lo. Bradley was lifted then to command of the Twelfth Army Group. Once again the spectacular Patton got the headlines and the popular applause, lancing through France with his Third Army tanks. But it was Bradley, scowling over his maps, mixing an occasional whiskey old-fashioned with orange marmalade, plodding through the churned-up battlefields of France, who held the destiny of U.S. soldiers in his steady hands.
Across Belgium, over the German frontier, into the Saar, halted and thrown back in the Battle of the Bulge, surging forward again in the great Rhine offensive, the tanks and infantrymen of Bradley's great armies rolled on. On May 8, 1945, the tall, spare infantryman said to one of his staff: "With hostilities over, now our troubles really begin."
A General's Sleep. At war's end he came home. He thought he had earned a rest; but the President still needed him.
He plunged into his new job with vigor. As his chief deputy in VA he moved in his old Twelfth Army Group deputy, Brigadier General Henry B. Lewis. With Hawley on the hospital end, they went to work, rebuilding the cumbersome, antiquated bureau, decentralizing the vast machinery.