(2) Jonathan Horn ("the author, most recently, of 'The Fate of the Generals; MacArthur, Wainwright, and the epic battle for the Philippines": column introduced), Books on World War II Generals. Wall Street Journal, May 3, 2025, at page C7 (in the weekend column "Five Best")
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... i-generals-8589e1b4

Note:
(a) "From Marshall's selection followed many other felicitous choices, none more important than Dwight D Eisenhower"
(i)
(A) English dictionary:
* felicitous (adj; Did You Know?)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/felicitous

Etymology Online says this adjective came "from felicity + -ous." The felicity is English noun for happiness.
(B) Felix the Cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_the_Cat
(table: Gender: ,ale)

The corresponding female given name (of humans) is Felicia.
(C) Latin-English dictionary:
* felix (adjective masculine/ feminine/neuter SINGULAR; adjective neuter PLURAL fēlīcia): "happy"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/felix
(ii)
(A) George C Marshall (1880 – 1959; fill birth name: George Catlett Marshall Jr)
(B) Dwight D Eisenhower (1890 – 1969; The Eisenhauer (German for 'iron hewer' or 'iron miner') family migrated from the German village of Karlsbrunn [in present-day federal state of Saarland] to the Province of Pennsylvania in 1741")
(b) Pay attention to book 4, an autobiography.
(c) "honest life-and-times biography"

Mike Mendis, What Does 'Life and Times' Mean? Dec 19, 2014
https://mmendis.wordpress.com/20 ... nd-times-in-london/
("In the phrase 'life and times,' the word 'life' refers to the events in a person's life and the word 'times' refers to the historical context of that person's life (that is, what was going on in society and the world at large when that person was alive). It is often used in titles of biographies, for example, 'The Life and Times of William Shakespeare' ")
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Commander in Chief
By Eric Larrabee (1987)
1. Unlike Abraham Lincoln, who found his successful generals in the Civil War through protracted and painful trial and error, Franklin D. Roosevelt required few trials and seldom made errors in his choices for high command during World War II. “Somehow the right men were found, and it is asking too much of coincidence to suppose that care had not gone into their selection,” writes Eric Larrabee in “Commander in Chief.” Certainly, that was the case for the decision to elevate George C. Marshall, the Army’s 34th most senior general, to Army chief of staff in 1939, even though Marshall had dared to buck the president at a meeting. “Don’t you think so, George?” Roosevelt had asked of a plan to prioritize the buildup of airpower over manpower, only to find Marshall didn’t think so “at all.” From Marshall’s selection followed many other felicitous choices, none more important than Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would go on to command Allied forces in Europe. “The story of Marshall,” Larrabee writes, “in good part becomes . . . the story of Eisenhower, who could always be sure that Marshall was behind him and that behind Marshall stood” Roosevelt. In such ways, Roosevelt assembled the generals and admirals who would win World War II. Larrabee weaves together their stories into a narrative far richer and more expansive than his title suggests.


Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45
By Barbara W. Tuchman (1971)
2. “There will never be a single work of history with me in it,” Joseph Stilwell wrote years before World War II. At the time, he could not have imagined the fodder his diary and other private musings would provide for Barbara Tuchman in “Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45.” Described by the author as “impatient, acid, impolitic,” Stilwell more than lived up to his nickname of “Vinegar Joe.” In fairness, George Marshall described the mission that Stilwell took on during World War II as the top American general in China and as the chief of staff to the country’s nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek as beset with complications “in a degree I do not believe any other commander of modern times has experienced.” Stilwell discovered that Chiang had less interest in fighting the Japanese than in shoring up power over his fellow Chinese. Americans had based their policy in China on a delusional view of the nationalist leader. “Probably never before had the people of one country viewed the government of another under misapprehension so complete,” Tuchman writes. In her telling, the folly and frustration would almost be funny if not for all the blood spilled, the vast sums of American aid squandered and the thought of the good that a general as gifted as Stilwell might have done elsewhere.


Patton
By Carlo D’Este (1995)
3. When quoting letters written by the subject of his biography “Patton,” Carlo D’Este explains he has preserved misspellings and punctuational oddities because to do otherwise would conceal the learning disability that George Patton himself could not hide from contemporaries. A “feeling of inferiority,” D’Este writes, “is the key not only to understanding the source of Patton’s drive to succeed, but of the authoritarian, macho, warrior personality he deliberately created for himself.” From this act of self-invention sprang a man of many contradictions: an amateur poet predisposed to outbursts of profanity; an Olympic pentathlete prone to the most bizarre of accidents; a well-read military historian convinced that his knowledge of ancient battles owed to having fought in them in his “past lives”; a general who slapped soldiers for what he called cowardice even as he privately fretted that he himself might succumb to fear; a military genius whose public relations off the battlefield distracted from his great triumphs during World War II. Although Patton made a habit of practicing a “ferocious” face in the mirror, D’Este says that he “never deceived those who really knew him”—evidently not his biographer either.


General Wainwright’s Story
By Jonathan M. Wainwright (1946)
4. After his liberation from a prison camp in Manchuria at the end of World War II, Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright IV returned to the U.S. and commenced work on a series of newspaper articles that would become “General Wainwright’s Story,” a poignant memoir that takes readers through the desperate stand that troops under his command made in the Philippines in the early months of the war and the years of humiliation that he endured afterward as the highest-ranking American prisoner of the Japanese. Douglas MacArthur had escaped to Australia before the surrender of the Philippines, but Wainwright had vowed to remain and share the fate of his besieged garrison—and share it he did. A journalist assisting Wainwright with his memoir watched him one morning as he reviewed a section that recalled how his soldiers saluted him after he surrendered them in May 1942. Wainwright drew his pencil and added these words: “I am a student of the Civil War, but not until then did I know how General R.E. Lee felt after Appomattox.”


The Years of MacArthur
By D. Clayton James (1970-85)
5. “No character in modern American military history, even Patton, has been the subject of as much adulation and condemnation” as Douglas MacArthur, writes D. Clayton James early in the first volume of “The Years of MacArthur.” The same officer who became famous for his eagerness to expose himself to enemy fire during World War I became known to some of his soldiers early in World War II as “Dugout Doug” for his failure to visit them more often on the front lines. In defiance of MacArthur’s admirers and critics as well as the general’s own penchant for hyperbole, James sets out to write what he calls “a reasonably comprehensive, balanced, and honest life-and-times biography”—and succeeds. The author, for the most part, resists concluding his three volumes with sweeping assessments but does predict that future historians and biographers will view MacArthur’s role in rebuilding Japan after World War II as the “zenith” of his career.
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