ARMED FORCES: Forces on the Ground

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The Clean Sleeve. A slight, hollow-eyed boy, he heeded the advice of older brother Coe (who died in 1917), managed to win an appointment to West Point. Two Honesdale teachers helped him cram for six weeks to get a head start, but the Point was like hitting another stone wall. Blunt-spoken upperclassmen advised him to give up, and it soon became apparent that he would always be a "clean-sleeve" cadet, without visible marks for leadership, scholarship or athletics. Once he made the baseball team wearing the catcher's "tools of ignorance," but that ended when he tore a ligament sliding into base. He graduated 86th out of 271 in the class of 1920. Among his classmates: longtime Army Coach Earl Blaik; Thomas D. White, now Air Force Chief of Staff; Lieut. General Francis W. Farrell, now Seventh Army Commander in Germany; and General Henry Hodes. U.S. Army Commander in Chief in Europe 1956-59-Second Lieut. Lemnitzer married Honesdale's dark-eyed Katherine Tryon just before he was assigned to the first of his two tours (1924-25, 1931-34) with the Coast Artillery batteries on Corregidor. Their honeymoon cruise was made aboard a troopship so crowded that husbands and wives had to travel segregated in five-passenger cabins.

Mystery in the Den. In the years that followed, Lemnitzer settled purposefully into the orderly routine of the peacetime Army, started early his habit of retiring behind his "bear's den" door at night to read newspapers, magazines, technical journals ("I don't know," says wife Kay, "whether he goes in there to work, or read, or snooze"). He became the formidable but revered "Pop" to their two children: son William, now an Army captain and assistant professor of chemistry at West Point, and daughter Lois, wife of Artillery Lieut. Henry E. Simpson at Fort Sill, Okla. He rose fast to brigadier general, took the 34th Antiaircraft Artillery Brigade to England in 1942.

When war came studious, hard-working Lyman Lemnitzer was a major who had taken fullest advantage of the educational system by which the Army developed its peacetime professional officer corps to an astonishing level of efficiency. He had taught physics and allied subjects at West Point, was a graduate of the Command and General Staff School and the Army War College, and was accounted one of the Army's finest staff officers.

Chill in the Woods. Joint air-sea-land operations in coordination with Allies were to become standard operating procedure in World War II, but when the Allies landed on North Africa ("Operation Torch") in November 1942, the idea was a formidable novelty to planners. Lemnitzer drew up the plans for Torch. As Supreme Commander Eisenhower's Assistant Chief of Staff (G-3), he showed such a gift for working out the tactical obstacles and logistic snarls of joint operations that he became a sort of permanent, rotating staff officer, got little chance to command his own unit.