Twelve Desperate Miles

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Authors: Tim Brady
shared a number of interests and had similar straightforward styles. They were combat soldiers, good at leading and inspiring their troops and getting the most out of them in war.
    Born to hardscrabble circumstances in 1895 in Texas, Truscott was raised primarily in Oklahoma, the son of an itinerant country doctor who frequently moved his family around from one fresh-timber town to the next in the newly formed Sooner State. The most notable moment in Lucian’s youth was an accident that wound up scarring Truscott for the rest of his life.As a child wandering around in his father’s office, LucianJr. got his hands on a bottle of carbolic acid and decided to take a sip. His father probably pumped his stomach to emit the poison, but the acid wound up shredding the lining of his throat, leaving Truscott with a distinctive voice, described by one writer, as similar to “a rock-crusher.”
    To help the family make ends meet, Truscott went to a normal school and got his teaching certificate at the ripe old age of sixteen. He took his first job at a country school near his family’s home in Stella, Oklahoma, but teaching turned out not to be the life for him. When the United States entered World War I, Truscott enlisted in an officers’ training program designed to quickly turn young recruits with potential into military leaders. A first generation “90-day wonder,” Truscott was sent off to Arizona for three months to learn how to command troops.
    Truscott never made it to Europe for the war, remaining instead in the Southwest; but soon after the armistice, he had decided that he was suited for the military and would stay in the army. In the succeeding years, his career took him to many of the peacetime army stops that George Patton had made, including Hawaii and Texas, where Truscott, like Patton, indulged in a newfound passion for polo. Truscott was also stationed at Fort Riley and wound up teaching at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth. The gravelly voice, skilled horsemanship, and leathery demeanor of an Oklahoma cowboy gave him instant presence, and Truscott developed a reputation as a fine and tough trainer of men.
    It was at that Fort Myer posting in 1932 where he met Patton that Truscott first crossed paths with Eisenhower, too. Ike was serving as an aide to Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur.
    Truscott spent the remainder of the 1930s slowly moving up in the ranks of the peacetime army. He was reunited with Eisenhower just before the war, serving on “Ike’s” staff in Fort Lewis in the state of Washington, prior to the war games in Louisiana and his departure for the combined staffs assignment in London.
    In contrast to Patton’s bluff and drama, Truscott could appear to be a laconic and distant figure. Robert Henriques, an Englishman who waspart of Mountbatten’s combined staff in London and ultimately a close and important aide to Truscott in the Operation Torch planning in both England and the United States, was less than impressed when he first met Truscott. In fact, he thought that the American wasa little “dim.” In meetings, Henriques reported, Truscott was “withdrawn almost to extinction and almost inarticulate. Like a student, conscientious but not very bright, he attended every conference as an observer and exclusively fulfilled this function, sitting at the table for hours with a perfectly blank face. When invited to comment by Mountbatten … he usually shook his head.”
    Henriques would soon realize that his initial assessment was far from accurate. He’d mistaken Truscott’s thoughtfulness and consideration for dullness. He was somehow more “comprehensible” in the United States than in England, Henriques felt. “That soft Texan drawl, inaudible in London, now seemed infinitely friendly, purposeful, easy on the ear.… That Texan handshake and slow, very wide smile was instantly reassuring.” Later, he would write of Truscott: “He inspired intense

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