From the S&S archives:
Stripes' Soldier of the Week: Gen. Omar N. Bradley

FRANKFURT, Sep. 7 — Gen. Omar N. Bradley likes to do the unexpected in his own informal way.

In Berlin last week, the Veterans Administration chief absented himself from his aides and guides, and, with Mrs. Bradley, wandered into Crump Hall. Sitting between two GIs, he nonchalantly ate the regular enlisted men's mess.

In Frankfurt the other day, Bradley, who is making a reorientation tour of the EC, stood beside a one-stripe private. A band was playing, other generals milled nearby and more then 1,000 troops were wheeling into review position to do him honor.

The four-star general asked the private if he were homesick.

"Gosh, no, general," the private replied. "But sometimes I wish I could see America."

"I felt like that, too, during the war," Bradley said. "I wasn't homesick. I just wanted to see home."

"Doughfoot's General"

An infantryman at heart, the son of a Missouri schoolteacher became known among troops of his armies as the "doughfoot's general." He convinced them he knew armies advanced no faster than the men with the rifles.

Staff officers in the 12th Army Gp. soon learned to expect the general's unheralded departures from the command post to get closer to the men he had to order.

On the eve of his departure to the EC a few weeks ago, he told reporters he wanted only to "orient" himself. Public information officers were instructed to inform the press the general was not "inspecting," in the formal, military sense. He just wanted to know for himself what was going on.

Tall, with a gangling stride. Bradley's career started in 1915 when he was graduated from West Point as an infantry lieutenant. He was 22.

Led Normandy Attack

Border duty in Arizona took up his time during World War I. But, by May 1943 he had become the first American commander to demand and receive an unconditional surrender from German forces, the crack Afrika Korps in North Africa.

He then led the U. S. attack on Normandy, pushed through the heart of the Continent, and by the final spring of the war commanded more than 1,500,000 combat troops in the 1st, 3rd, 9th and 15th American armies. The infantryman won his fourth star.

"You give true meaning to the most honored concept of a general," Dartmouth College said in June 1947 in presenting him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws for his war service and administration of veterans' affairs.

In selecting the "Soldier of the Week," The Stars and Stripes could not overlook the fact that the "Doughboy's General," Omar N. Bradley, was in the EC. Although the Veterans Administration director is not assigned to the European Command, he is closely associated in the minds of Americans with U.S. occupation forces.