Ax and Scalpel

He was "Tootsie" to his parents, "Roosevelt's butcher" to the Nazis, "Taskmaster" to his hard-driven aides in Viet Nam and "an American hero" to President Ford. From his emergence as a tank commander in World War II to his death last week of lung-cancer complications at 59, Creighton Abrams Jr. won respect even from enemies abroad and antiwar activists at home.

As a swaggering 29-year-old lieutenant colonel, he swept his 37th Tank Battalion through Normandy, sealing off the peninsula in the eleven days after Dday. In his dramatic breakthrough to relieve Bastogne and his near legendary dash across the Rhine, "Abe" Abrams terrified the enemy as a daring tactician who relied on swift movement and overpowering violence. He believed in the shock value of mass attack combined with an awesome firepower that approached overkill. A captured German document said, somewhat hysterically, that Abrams' forces were totally made up of men who had been born out of wedlock or killed their mothers.

The son of a Springfield, Mass., railroad repairman, Abrams graduated 185th out of 276 in his class at West

Point and developed a tough, he-man reputation, despite his love for classical music and gourmet cooking. His image as a crusty, limited man who loved destruction and hated to take prisoners led to some predictions that he would stumble after the war. But he served with distinction in the Pentagon, Europe and Korea, and displayed sensitivity and tact in 1962 and 1963 when President Kennedy called on him to command federal troops during tense racial confrontations at Oxford, Miss., and Tuscaloosa and Birmingham, Ala.

Earthy Soldier. The same gift for deftness and diplomacy, still widely unsuspected, emerged in his dealings with South Vietnamese officers. Assigned in 1967 as deputy to General William Westmoreland, Abrams courted top Saigon officers, accepting slights with patience and devouring a Vietnamese meal intended to make him gag--chicken heads, goat meat and paddy rat.

Appointed by President Johnson in mid-1968 as Viet Nam commander, Abrams presided with considerable skill over the American withdrawal from the fighting. He de-emphasized the Westmoreland strategy of massive search-and-destroy missions, favoring more mobile "spoiler" patrols of four or five men sent out to ambush and disrupt the enemy. Abrams gave subordinate commanders unusually wide latitude. Always a strong believer in risking machines more than men, he smoothly replaced ground forces with planes as troop reductions proceeded.

Tactical differences cannot easily be compared: Westmoreland was the crusader sent to win the war; Abrams was the realist sent to help end U.S. involvement in it. Differences in style, however, were clearer. Westmoreland was the stiff, ramrod, ceremonial-looking commander who saw light at the end of the tunnel. Abrams was a blunt, earthy soldier who gave reporters refreshingly frank estimates of the precarious American position and surprised critics of the Army by insisting on the prosecution of six Green Berets who murdered a suspected Vietnamese double agent.

Named Army Chief of Staff in June 1972, Abrams worked to reshape the peacetime Army, reducing desk jobs in favor of more fighting strength, modernizing reserve forces and their training, and stimulating skeptical subordinates to make the new volunteer Army work.

For all his cigar chomping, Pattonesque toughness, Abrams was an intelligent, flexible and realistic man. He was quite in tune with the "new Army" concepts advanced by younger officers, including his close friend and probable successor as Chief of Staff, General Frederick C. Weyand. Abrams once said that a commander must know how to use a battle-ax and a scalpel. After World War II, no one doubted his prowess with the ax. Now few doubt that the apostle of overpowering violence turned out to be adept with a scalpel too.

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