The Warrior Class
They left West Point in 1939, soldier-scholars who made a difference
They are the boys of the class of '39, the class the big wars fell on. The charter members of the greatest generation, they were the young princes of World War II. Many were colonels before they were 30. Today, their hair, what's left of it, is gray. Backs that were ramrod straight in troop assemblies on dusty parade grounds are bent now. Legs that marched through the hedgerows of Normandy and the jungles of Bataan now are no longer so trustworthy. The boys, even the youngest now, are in their 80s. But don't think of them as old. Think, rather, of lions in winter.
Back in the summer of 1935, over 700 of the boys marched up the hill to the Plain from the train station at West Point. Four years later, having survived the hazing, the hassles, and the academic grind, 456 cadets graduated. Last month, 78 members of the class of '39 came back to West Point. The occasion was their 60th-anniversary reunion, and the '39-ers know for most this will be their final roll call. They looked just ahead of them in the Old Graduates' March and saw only eight members of the Class of '29. The toll of years is inexorable, but somehow it's not very frightening to these men. After all, they have known death intimately for most of their lives.
"We did our job." West Point is a special place, and every graduating class has its share of heroes and visionaries. The class of '39 is special, though, for the impact its members had on the military--molding, shaping, and leading through World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. "The reason our class had an impact," says retired Gen. Walter "Dutch" Kerwin, who served as vice chief of staff of the Army, "is because we came in in 1939 and got our feet on the ground and moved into key positions. We had a substantial impact by having gone through three wars. . . . We, as individuals, did not change things, but we as a class, moving up the line, made substantial changes." Gen. Andrew Goodpaster served as President Eisenhower's top military aide and, later in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as supreme allied commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Europe. Known as "Good P" among the '39-ers, Goodpaster credits the influence of the class to "outstanding professional ability and character and readiness to take responsibility." In a word, Goodpaster says, "We did our job."
The numbers bear him out. Seventy-two members of the class became general officers in the Army and the Air Force. An additional 224 rose to the rank of colonel. Many served for 30 years or more.
But starting out was a shocker. As new second lieutenants, the class of '39 joined a peacetime Army that had stagnated for years at 148,000 men and 12,000 officers. After World War I, most served with little hope of promotion and none for a pay raise. Over the next four years, these second lieutenants would be the core around which the Army grew to a trained force of 12 million men. At West Point, the cadets were taught by instructors who had been frozen at the rank of lieutenant for more than 15 years; many of the class of '39 would end the war in 1945 wearing a full colonel's eagles. They led infantry and armor regiments, Air Corps bomber and fighter groups. Class members fought and died in every theater of the war. Someone from the class of '39 fought in virtually every major battle, from Corregidor to North Africa, from Normandy Beach to the Bulge. The casualty rate, unsurprisingly, was high. The war claimed more than 40 members of the class.
advertisement
