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Greyshaft -> RE: Name that MWiF counter - 30 (1/20/2006 1:35:33 AM)
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Aged 52 in 1939. General Courtney Hicks Hodges attended West Point for a year before his poor marks in mathematics motivated him to leave that Academy in 1906 and enlist in the 17th Infantry as a private. Three years later he had risen through the ranks to Second Lieutenant and during WWI he saw service in the Mexican Punitive Expedition and then in Europe in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. During WWI he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for personally leading a recon party and then an assault across the Meuse River. After WWI he returned to West Point as an instructor - quite a tribute to his practical military skills considering the circumstances under which he had left that establishment in 1906 - and then graduated from the Fort Leavenworth Command and General Staff School in 1925. By May 1941 he had been promoted to Major-General and was appointed Chief of Infantry. Further promotion to Lieutenant-General followed and in January 1944 he took the US Third Army to England where it was reassigned to General George Patton while Hodges found himself serving in the First Army as deputy to General Omar Bradley during the Normandy landings. In August 1944 Bradley was assigned to command the 12th Army Group and Hodges became head of the First Army. With Patton’s Third Army on his right flank Hodges pushed eastward across France. The task of liberating Paris fell to Hodges and his troops battled through the Ardennes before being the first Allied troops to cross the Siegfried Line into Germany in September 1944. Despite the setbacks caused by the German Ardennes offensive in December the First Army reached the Rhine in March, 1945 where the failure of the retreating Germans to demolish the Ludendorff railway bridge at Remagen allowed Hodges across Rhine and to meet up with Russian forces at Torgau in central Germany in April. After the German surrender Hodges received a promotion to full General and was preparing to take the First Army to the Pacific theater when the war ended in September. Hodges remained in command of the First Army until his retirement in 1949. He died in 1966. Hodges was a modest man not given to political maneuvering which makes his rise from Private to General all the more impressive.
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