Omar Nelson Bradley

Steven L. Ossad's manuscript chronicles the accomplishments of a highly decorated U.S. military general. The historical import of Omar Nelson Bradley's military career is undeniable. As the officer with the “most European combat experience,” who “led more Americans in battle than any other man in our history” and maintained “a record of longevity that will never be broken as long as the U.S. Army survives,” Bradley is worthy of examination (pp. 4, 389). Despite his tremendous military accomplishments, Bradley remains “an almost totally hidden figure” (pp. 3–4). After convincingly justifying the need for a Bradley biography, Ossad takes readers from Bradley's humble beginnings as a working-class Missouri boy to his career as a highly decorated five-star general to his assignment as U.S. Army chief of staff until his death in 1981. By offering a painstakingly detailed analysis of Bradley's military career, using an array of archival records, Ossad chronicles Bradley's leadership of U.S. troops in North Africa on D-day, asserting that he was one of the “principal architects of the victory of the US Army in Europe in World War II” (p. 6). Ossad describes Bradley has having responsibility over the “implementation of the GI Bill” and argues that this legislation was “dwarfed by the success of the medical system” that transformed the “health of the American middle class” (pp. 352, 356–57). After crediting the Bradley-led Veterans Administration with achieving medical excellence, Ossad offers virtually no commentary on the nationwide segregation of veterans hospitals under Bradley's administrative leadership. Ossad does not mention how the U.S. government botched an opportunity to provide veterans of color with equal access to the G.I. Bill benefits that their military service warranted. While Bradley's record on racial equity was not Ossad's primary research focus, mentioning the national shortcomings of fairly implementing the G.I. Bill in a postwar society fraught with institutional racism is hardly asking too much, especially since recent scholarship has provided convincing evidence that the implementation of the bill was, at best, discriminatory

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