General Who Wore Six Stars

Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, commander of the Service of Supply (SOS) for the European Theater of Operations (ETO) during World War II, is a legendary military figure historians and servicemen love to hate. In this long-overdue biography of the brilliant yet eccentric commander, Hank H. Cox delves into the perplexing details of how Lt. Gen. John "Jesus Christ Himself" Lee let his idiosyncrasies get the better of him-or at least polarize him against his fellow officers. Though having had an illustrious and successful military career, Lee has gone down in history as "a pompous little son-of-a-bitch only interested in self-advertisement." Few can doubt this as he famously moved his headquarters to Paris where, during the height of the American Army supply crisis, 29,000 of his SOS troops shacked up in the finest hotels and, due to sheer number, created a black market on a grand scale. Since the main function of the SOS was to supply the combat troops with essential food, clothing, and medicine, it made little logistical sense to move the suppliers farther away from the battlefront. Yet, Cox argues, Lee's strategic genius throughout the war has been underappreciated not only by his contemporaries but also by WWII historians. Considering that one out of every four U.S. soldiers on the continent was under Lee's command, the man held a lot of power, which, many historians say, he abused. Drawing on Lee's own unpublished memoir as well as dense documentation of the supply situation in the ETO during WWII, Cox paints a vivid picture of the logistical supply chain during WWII and the man who ruled it all.