Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,785

This is the grave of Lyman Lemnitzer.

Born in 1899 in Homedale, Pennsylvania, Lemnitzer graduated from high school there, got a West Point appointment, and finished there in 1920. He became a coast artillery man and went to the Coast Artillery School, graduating there in 1921 and joining that part of the Army. The 20s was not a time for rapid advancement in the American military and a lot of promising young officers left, but Lemnitzer stuck it out and was mostly in Rhode Island and the Philippines. In Rhode Island, he was stationed at Fort Adams, today the home of the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals. The housing there is still military with signs there to stay away when you are visiting the festival. He slowly moved up in the ranks, doing a lot of teaching.

By the time World War II broke out, Lemnitzer was a colonel, still working almost entirely with the Coast Artillery. This was important stuff in a global war since invasions from the sea had to be figured out. He got on Eisenhower’s staff pretty quickly and was promoted to brigadier general in 1942. He was deeply involved in the planning of the North Africa and Sicily invasions. His work with Operation Torch is particularly notable. Here, he and Mark Clark got into North Africa by secret submarine to make connections with Free French forces defying Vichy to support the invasion. This was pretty real spy work–once he had to hide in an Algerian wine cellar as Vichy police searched the room above for rumored Americans. His B-17 was attacked on its escape to Allied forces too; the co-pilot was seriously wounded but Lemnitzer was not. In 1944, he got promoted to major general and was one of the central figures in Operation Sunshine in 1945 to try and get the Nazis to surrender in Italy before the end of the war. That led Stalin to believe that the Americans were trying to negotiate a separate peace and laid the groundwork for the Cold War. This was also pretty real undercover work, requiring him to sneak into Switzerland under the guise of buying a dog, wearing civilian clothes. They had dog biscuits and everything in order to avoid suspicion.

Well, Lemnitzer certainly had no problem with a Cold War. Or a hot one for that matter. He was a real right winger after the war and brought those politics to the Cold War, now as a leading general and military figure. He had to testify in the case of Edwin Walker, the general who openly accused Harry Truman of being a communist. They were close. He certainly wasn’t as famous as Eisenhower or MacArthur, but he was very influential in Washington. In the early Cold War years, he remained actively involved in military operations. In 1950, at the age of 51, he took parachute training himself and was named commander of the 11th Airborne Division. He then was given command of the 7th Infantry Division and sent to Korea in November 1951 before being promoted to lieutenant general in 1952.

Lemnitzer received his fourth star in 1955 and was named commander of the Far East Command and the Eighth Army. In 1960, Eisenhower named him Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kennedy would keep him on and it is for these years why we remember Lemnitzer today.

See, our competent and slowly rising general had some special ideas when it came to Cuba. He was a big supporter of Operation Northwoods. This took the plans to eliminate Fidel Castro to a level of such evil and absurdity that it’s hard to believe they were serious. But they were, oh yes they were. Lemnitzer and his supporters actually called for the CIA to carry out attacks on the American military, as well as civilian targets, on US soil, and then blame them on Cuban terrorism, which the nation could then use to declare war on Cuba and invade. This was completely insane. The seriously considered ideas included shooting down Air Force planes, blowing up Navy ships, and bombing American cities. Say whatever you will about Fidel Castro, and there’s plenty to criticize, but the level of insanity he generated in American policymakers is utterly astounding and of course explains the evil embargo still in place today that has done nothing but reinforce the Cuban Communist Party after over six decades, one of the great foreign policy failures in American history. More than anyone else, this was Edward Lansdale’s baby, one of the most evil Americans of the Cold War era, but Lemnitzer not only signed off, but supported it.

Lemnitzer wrote about the Cuba plans:

This plan should be developed to focus all efforts on a specific ultimate objective which would provide adequate justification for US military intervention. Such a plan would enable a logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective and create the necessary impression of Cuban rashness and irresponsibility on a large scale, directed at other countries as well as the United States.

To his credit, JFK was not having any of this nonsense and the idea was put in the trash.

Promoting such utterly insane ideas probably hurt Lemnitzer’s career. He was demoted from head of the Joint Chiefs to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander after this, which might not seem like a demotion, but politically it was. In fact, he was the only Joint Chiefs head to ever hold another position in the military after it, since for everyone else, it’s the peak of their career and they retire from it. There was some business to take care of in NATO in these years of course, including the Cyprus issue and the withdrawal of NATO troops from France in 1966. But let’s just say that Kennedy and Johnson kept Lemnitzer the hell away from anything having to do with Vietnam.

Lemnitzer retired in 1969. Even though he had nothing at all do with Vietnam, he retired as one of only four American generals to have been a general during 3 wars, joining Winfield Scott, Douglas MacArthur, and Lewis Hershey. Somewhat hilariously, Gerald Ford appointed Lemnitzer to the Commission on CIA Activities, part of the response to the Frank Church’s investigations of what the CIA was doing in the U.S., which was of course totally illegal. The Ford administration wanted to squash any real revelations, thus Lemnitzer. Dick Cheney was involved in this too, speaking on the long arm of evil.

Lemnitzer died in 1988. He was 89 years old. When he died, the fawning New York Times obituary mentioned nothing about Cuba at all. It was all just the fun World War II stuff.

Lyman Lemnitzer is buried on the grounds of the Traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other World War II generals, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Mark Clark is in Charleston, South Carolina and the wonderfully named Graves Erskine is in Arlington as well. I need to visit his grave just based on his name, not to mention his work at Iwo Jima. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.