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Chapter 10
Something About Commanders
Don Thomson always said that the 90th Division was at its peak in the next
campaign when we crossed the Moselle River and helped take Metz. The soldiers were
"blooded" and had learned not only how to win battles, but also to be confident in their
ability to do so. In the assault troops - infantry, engineers, tankers, and tank destroyers -
the incompetent commanders had been weeded out, wounded, or killed, and replaced by
ones who were at worst competent and at best brilliant. On the other hand, of the new
generation of good commanders only a few had been lost.
However, during October and early November, the Division did lose all three of
its generals, each of them kicked upstairs into a more important job. The division
commander, Major General McLain, left to command a corps and later to become the
only national guard officer to achieve the rank of lieutenant general during WWII. The
assistant division commander, Brigadier General "Wild Bill" Weaver, was sent to
command a division, as was the division artillery commander, Brigadier General Devine.
Our new Division commander, a bull-necked brigadier named James Van Fleet,
had a hard act to follow: Maj Gen McLain had commanded us from the breakout at St. Lo
and all the time we were charging across France. He "gave the Division back its soul."
But now that McLain was leaving us for a bigger job, there came the question: could Van
Fleet fill McLain's shoes? He had a good record, having landed in Normandy as a
Colonel, earned the rank of Brigadier General, and was now deemed worthy to be
assigned to a Major General's job. And in the next action he proved that he was truly up
to the job of succeeding McLain.
Colonel, later Brigadier General, Tully replaced Weaver. He kept a much lower
profile than his predecessor, and I had no direct contact with him at all, but I gather that
he was competent, if not brilliant.
As for the artillery, we were less fortunate. We probably never had fully
appreciated our leadership. Brigadier General Devine, despite his small size and low-key
style, looked and acted exactly as a general should look and act. His executive officer,
John Daly, a highly competent artilleryman with a sardonic wit, had been with us from
the very beginning, and might have had been considered to replace him. But Daly was
killed in action on a trip up to the front lines just at the beginning of the Falaise Gap
operation. Ironically, it happened the same day his promotion from lieutenant colonel to
colonel came through.
So to replace Devine, we got Colonel Earnest A. Bixby, a pudgy, red-faced,
unpleasant man, full of sound and fury. He lost no time in making himself unpopular with
his subordinates. Like Devine, he came from an armored division, and he never got over
the idea that towed howitzers like ours should get ready to move as quickly as the cannon
he was used to, self-propelled 105s which had merely to be started up and shifted into
gear. Nor could he understand that a unit like ours which relied primarily on telephone
communications took longer to get its wire laid than an armored unit took to switch on its
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