Forgotten warrior: unknown outside the military, General William DePuy may have been the most influential soldier since World War II.

• Author: Ricks, Thomas E.
• Position: General William E. DePuy: Preparing the Army for Modern War - Book review

General William E. DePuy: Preparing the Army for Modern War

By Henry G. Gole

University Press of Kentucky, 364 pp.

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In a better, fairer world, Henry Gole's terrific biography of Gen. William DePuy, with its epic sweep from World War II to the post-Vietnam Army, would be known as well as Neil Sheehan's A Bright and Shining Lie.

DePuy was a consummate soldier who fought in Normandy in World War II and commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam. Among military insiders, he is best known for his pathbreaking work to fix the Army after it was broken by Vietnam. As Gole, himself a veteran of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, puts it in this book, some admiring officers described him as "the greatest soldier of his generation, the most influential soldier since World War II." DePuy was a genuine American hero, but he is barely known to the American public, and that is a shame.

DePuy's defining moment was the horrific summer of 1944, when an amateurish American military learned lessons the hard way against the Germans. Forget about Saving Private Ryan, with its fantasy of a handful of American soldiers blocking superior German forces in improvised street fighting. The real deal was that the Army General Eisenhower threw into Normandy, for better or worse, was undertrained and all too often horribly led. Almost all the pre-invasion preparation was about getting to the beach, with little taught about what to do after crossing it. Many officers knew more about how to transport troops in trucks than about how to lead them in combat. Gole notes that even data from the previous two years of fighting Germans in North Africa and Italy was largely ignored.

The price paid was huge, and collected swiftly. "In the first six weeks of the battle in Normandy, the 90th [the division in which DePuy served] lost 100 percent of its soldiers and 150 percent of its officers," DePuy later wrote, with replacements arriving daily in battalion-sized batches. To the humiliation of the 90th Division, on July 23, 1944, one of its battalions, with 265 men, surrendered to fifty Germans with two tanks. DePuy described his own battalion commander in Normandy as being "as close to being totally incompetent as it was possible to be." As for his regimental commander, DePuy considered him "a horse's ass ... a disaster."

DePuy, by contrast, was a natural combat leader, one of those gifted amateurs who rose to the top. He went into World War II a green lieutenant...