When the roll is called of U.S. Army generals in Europe during World War II, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and George Patton routinely lead the list, with Mark Clark and Courtney Hodges in the next tier. Only among hard-core enthusiasts does the name of Jacob Loucks Devers (1887-1979) readily come to mind. Yet Devers was senior in four-star grade to all but Eisenhower and one of only two American army-group commanders in the European theater.
Given how many volumes have been devoted to World War II leaders, it is perplexing that Devers has lacked a major biography until now. The late Brig. Gen. Thomas E. Griess, longtime head of the history department at West Point, conducted extensive interviews with Devers and his contemporaries in the 1970s, intending a biography that never came to fruition. Griess’s research is now housed at the York Historical Society in Devers’s birthplace, York, Pa., and it forms the foundation of John Adams’s solid and informative “General Jacob Devers: World War II’s Forgotten Four Star.”
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