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<p>Robert Lee and Anne Chiffelle Hawkins Howze, ended an admirable military career as Deputy Commanding General and Chief of Staff, Seventh Army, Europe. He had previously served as Assistant Commandant of the Armored School, Chief of the Military Advisory Group, Korea (KMAG), Commanding General of the 1st Armored Division, and Deputy Commanding General of the Sixth Army.</p>
<p>He died as a result of an automobile accident in Carmel, California, where he had lived since his retirement in 1962. He is survived by his wife, Dorothy; three daughters—Anne (Mrs. Henry Lee Phillips), Margaret (Mrs. Robert Hampton Howe), and Elizabeth (Mrs. Justin Shout); ten grandchildren; a sister Harriot (Mrs. Henry Crampton Jones); and myself.</p>
<p>As evidenced by the expressions of regret by his classmates on his death, Bobby was popular as a cadet. He graduated high in his class and was the cadet captain of Company B—in the words of the <em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">HOWITZER</em>, “holding them back in their mad rush for the mess hall and chasing them out when it was time to leave.” He was on the swimming and polo teams. Particularly gratifying was the <em style="font-style: italic; font-weight: normal;">HOWITZER </em>note that there was many an “immortal” who had reason to be thankful for Bobby’s help in passing the semi-annual nightmare of writs.</p>
<p>Bobby was born on 23 March 1903 while his father was stationed in Puerto Rico. Because his mother did not feel well in the heat and humidity of the tropics, she elected to have her baby at the home of her father, Brigadier General Hamilton S. Hawkins, then retired from the Army and governor of the Old Soldier’s Home in Washington. Bobby was bom in the Army, brought up in the Army, served in the Army just as long as the law allowed, and gloried in it. He had his disappointments and personal sorrows, of course, like everybody else, but he gave one the impression that he had few unhappy moments in his almost thirty-eight years of military service.</p>
<p>The son of a cavalryman, grandson of an infantryman (both of whom served as Commandant of Cadets), and great-grandson of a Regular Army doctor who lost his life to yellow fever near Vera Cruz in the Mexican War, Bobby never contemplated an alternative to the Army. As a life-long cavalryman he had a passionate attachment to the horse, particularly to the polo pony and, of course, to polo itself. He was a graduate of Fort Riley’s Advanced Equitation Course, once a highly selective assignment for the best of the Army’s horsemen. Nothing to him as a young officer was more totally satisfying than to sit a fine horse at polo or at the head of a troop of cavalry.</p>
<p>In 1928 he was married to Margaret Palm of El Paso, who was killed shortly after their marriage in a tragic automobile accident. On 26 December 1930 he married Margaret Ward Richmond (Peggy) whose parents were Colonel Henry R. Richmond, a prominent cavalryman, and Mrs. Richmond. Peggy was the mother of Bobby’s three daughters, Anne, Margaret, and Elizabeth. The three charming little tow-headed girls became very well known in the Army. A friend once asked my brother why he did not bestir himself to have a son. Bobby, bearing in mind the names of his girls, said “Well, three queens are hard to beat.”</p>
<p>To the very great distress of all of Bobby’s family, Peggy suffered a long illness and died at Letterman General Hospital on 1 November 1958, while her husband was with the Sixth Army, headquartered at the Presidio of San Francisco.</p>
<p>On 21 September 1963 he married Dorothy Perkins Rand, widow of Lieutenant Colonel Peter Rand of the Army. It was an extremely happy marriage, for which his daughters have always been very thankful.</p>
<p>Bobby felt always that the crescendo of his life came in the Battle of the Bulge. His regular title was Commanding Officer, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment; his battle assignment was that of Commander, Combat Command “R” of the 3rd Armored Division, consisting of two task forces, each including elements of the 36th Armored Infantry but otherwise of varying composition.</p>
<p>In the vicinity of Soy and Hotton, Belgium, these forces felt the full weight of the German onslaught and held fast. Thereafter Combat Command “R” participated in the long, bloody counterattack, ending up in the Vaux-Sommerain area. In the exictement and fury of the battle Bobby felt that this was what he had worked up to, trained for and lived for; he recognized it as the supreme test and, of course, very possibly the culminating one. He fought his units with a combination of great energy and skill, and they won magnificently. For this and other combat action he was decorated twice by the United States, twice by the French, and three times by the Belgians.</p>
<p>In the course of preparation of this piece I asked his daughters to give me his likes and dislikes. Their report: he loved polo, people, and poker; he disliked liver, hippies, and powdered eggs. One can imagine no finer testimony to a man’s taste and sensibilities. As a matter of fact, he liked almost everything and everybody. He was a happy man, as he eminently deserved to be.</p>
<p>His daughters have poignant memories of their father, whom they obviously adored and with whom they had great fun.</p>
<p>When he was Chief of Staff of the Caribbean Command in Panama, he and his family went one weekend to visit a Panamanian doctor at his home up in the hills. Bobby’s youngest girl, then only 12, discovered a small horse on the premises and persuaded the doctor to let her ride it. Bobby wisely decided that as a proper and prudent precaution he should ride the animal first. As he began to mount, the horse suddenly backed up, quite violently, throwing Bobby to the ground, and then sat itself firmly on Bobby’s right leg. This was a surprising and inappropriate act on the part of the horse, my brother being an accomplished cavalryman, and of course very uncomfortable for Bobby. It seems as though this should have been only a very temporary state of affairs, but the horse chose to remain seated until forciby removed by the combined efforts of my brother’s family, the doctor’s family, and two tenant farmers.</p>
<p>Somewhere in Columbia, on an official visit there, Bobby had the unusual experience of attending a bullfight given in his honor. It must not have been a very high class bullfight or in a very substantial bull ring, because the bull on entering the ring charged not the matador but the grandstand where Bobby was sitting with the town mayor and other dignitaries. The stand collapsed like a house of cards under its occupants and the bull disappeared into the countryside where (in the words of one of Bobby’s daughters) he no doubt had a better idea of how to conduct himself.</p>
<p>The foregoing is the sort of thing that happens only to the active. One part of Bobby’s activity as a young officer was the nurturing of a pet wildcat, an activity which terminated when the cat got into the commanding general’s pigeon loft. Years later, while a colonel on the general staff in the Pentagon, he escorted three very high ranking officers from Washington to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, as they were being introduced to a new materiel development called the Seep, a nickname for an experimental amphibious jeep. Bobby drove the small party, all seated in the vehicle, down a bank and into a small arm of the Chesapeake Bay, upon which the Seep (a frightful name anyway) went right to the bottom, leaving, according to the sworn testimony of a witness, only the four hats afloat.</p>
<p>My father and mother were extraordinarily proud and extremely fond of their older son; so too were his sister and brother, his wife and daughters and grandchildren. Bobby was a cheery, amusing, tender, and considerate husband and father; he was a gentleman through and through, and a loyal friend to his associates. But above all he was an American patriot, a West Pointer, and a soldier. He was bom to the Army, and can never leave it.</p>
<div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">AR 1927</div>
<p><a href="https://usmalibrary.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/aogreunion/id/17748">Annual Report, June 13, 1927, p. 29 · U.S. Military Academy Library</a></p>
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