Patterson native's book examines a soldier's soldier

LAFAYETTE — You might remember Steve Rabalais.
He was in the Class of 1978 at Patterson High. He played football for the ’Jacks. He’s the son of the late Merrill and Betty Rabalais, and his dad was a history teacher who went on to be the principal at Patterson Junior High.
Now Rabalais, an attorney in Lafayette for more than 30 years, has written a book about another man you shouldn’t forget, not if you like history, especially the history of the world wars.
The man is Fox Conner, who served as Gen. John J. Pershing’s chief of operations during World War I and went on to influence some of the key players — and big personalities — of World War II. Despite the influence he exerted in two of history’s most lethal wars, Conner is nearly forgotten.
“He was not a guy who enjoyed the limelight,” Rabalais said in an interview last week.
Conner, who died in 1951, gets a posthumous spotlight in “General Fox Conner: Pershing’s Chief of Operations and Eisenhower’s Mentor,” the book Rabalais wrote because he couldn’t find such a book when he needed it. The publisher is Casemate.
After Patterson High, Rabalais studied broadcast journalism at LSU before going on to get a law degree. Years later, friend Jim Engster asked Rabalais to guest-host Engster’s radio talk-interview show, which airs locally on KTIB. The subject: Fox Conner.
“I looked around to get a Fox Conner book,” Rabalais said. “There was no Fox Conner book at that time. I thought, ‘Well, you know, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing. Here’s a subject that warrants a book.’ So I decided to give it a try.”
Aside from his journalism training, Rabalais had the advantage of being the son of a history teacher who happened to be a World War II Navy veteran.
Two uncles served with Gen. George Patton, one of the great World War II leaders who figures in Conner’s narrative. Another uncle, who grew up speaking French in Avoyelles Parish, served as an aide, translator and driver for another general in North Africa, Corsica and France. Yet another uncle served at Okinawa. And Rabalais’ father served in the Navy.
Rabalais worked on his book for more than eight years, setting it aside at times, working on weekends at other times. He estimates that the research took about three years.
Conner himself made the research more difficult by ordering his personal papers destroyed.
But official documents survive in the National Archives at College Park, Maryland. Rabalais also Googled up a history teacher, Pam McPhail, who lives in north Mississippi, where Conner was born in 1874 to a man blinded in the Civil War. McPhail had compiled information on Conner.
“Pam put me in touch with people who put me in touch with people, and eventually I was able to meet Conner’s grandson,” Rabalais said. “He had a large cache of information, some of which had been handed down from the family.”
That was MacPherson Conner, who has since died.
“Conner didn’t keep a body of papers,” Rabalais said. “But Conner shows up in everybody else’s papers. And this guy had done a lot of extracting needles from haystacks.”
Another relative, Norm McDonald of Ossining, New York, had been married to Conner’s granddaughter. McDonald is a historian.
The picture of Conner that materialized is of a man who, in a quiet way and behind the scenes, accomplished great things on his own and trained men who would accomplish more great things.
Rabalais’ research indicates that it was Conner, along with colleague Hugh Drum, who analyzed the Army’s structure as it prepared for World War I in 1917 and recommended the creation of oversized divisions that would hit the Germans hard. Almost as important, the big divisions reduced the strain on the Army’s sparse supply of trained officers.
The British and French wanted American troops to be assigned immediately to the British and French armies in Western Europe.
The Germans had effectively knocked Russia out of the war. The Allies, exhausted by three years of individual battles in which casualties ranged from tens of thousands up to a million men, knew Germans from the Eastern Front would be heading west, and they wanted the Americans to help beat back the enemy.
“Conner did the strategic analysis to determine whether that was necessary,” Rabalais said. “That would have been the expedient thing to do. But was it necessary?
“(Conner and his colleagues) said no. They believed the British and French could fight on the defensive long enough to allow the Americans to form their army, which then, when the Germans petered out with their big spring offensive, could come and defeat them. And that’s exactly what happened.”
Conner also decided the question of whether the Americans should fight at the Saint-Mihiel salient, as the American wanted, or go along with the French plan to cut German supply lines near the Meuse River and the Argonne Forest. Conner and his subordinate, future World War II Chief of Staff and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, managed to pull off both, hastening the war’s end.
The Germans surrendered after having fought no battles on their own soil. Conner saw the seeds of another European war in the way World War I ended.
“(The Germans) had the choice of being withdrawn or destroyed,” Rabalais said. “They chose to quit and march it on home. But that’s where the ‘stab in the back’ came from. They came home with the banners flying and the drums and bugles playing.”
Conner’s other contribution was the impact he made on a circle of colleagues and acquaintances who included Marshall, Patton and another promising young officer named Dwight David Eisenhower, who would go on to command Allied forces in World War II’s European theater.
According to an online article by Russ Stayanoff, “General Fox Conner: Soldier, Mentor, Enigma: Operations Chief (G-3) of the AEF,” Conner saved Eisenhower from a possible court martial in the years between the wars after Eisenhower unwittingly accepted a $250 housing alliance to which he may not have been entitled.
“I think (Conner) was a guy who was pretty reserved in his affections,” Rabalais said. “He had a small group of people. He wasn’t a gregarious, outgoing guy at all, very quiet.
“But if he took a liking to you, he liked you a lot. I think he saw in Eisenhower a lot of things that reminded him of himself. Both were farm boys. Neither one of them came from a prominent military family. Just as Eisenhower had missed out in World War I, Conner had missed out on the Spanish-American War and felt himself kind of behind the pack from the soldiers who had been able to distinguish themselves in actual combat.
“I think he saw something in Eisenhower that reminded him of himself because of those similarities, and he decided to help him along the way, the way other senior officers had helped him.”
Eisenhower didn’t forget the lessons he learned under Conner, who had three principles of warfare: never fight when you don’t have to, never fight alone and never fight for long.
Some advice didn’t work out so well. Rabalais said Patton sought Conner’s advice between the wars, when Patton had to choose between an infantry command and going into tanks. Conner advised Patton to stay with the infantry.
Patton went on to become one of World War II’s greatest tank commanders, first in North Africa and Sicily, then by slashing his way across France and into Germany after the breakout from the Normandy beachheads.
Conner suffered a stroke in 1938 and wasn’t able to participate in World War II. Even so, when Conner is remembered at all, he’s remembered as a key figure in America’s 20th century military history.
He was smart, Rabalais said, and he believed in what he was doing.
“They all had a basic belief that I think our military shares today, which is that at its essence, they are a force for good,” Rabalais said. “The United States, the institutions of the United States, stress civilian control of the military. These guys honored that and respected that.
“None of them viewed themselves as having a function of aggression or a function of empire-building or a function of anything like that. They viewed themselves as defenders of something that was noble and good and beneficial to the world.
“These guys believed in the rightness of what they were doing, and this was the way they handled themselves and handled other officers.”
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review. Reach him at bdecker@daily-review.com.