The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  At the beginning of 1939, American industry was still flat on its back. Factory output was less than one-half of capacity. Unemployment was above 20 percent. Five years later unemployment was 1 percent while factory capacity had doubled, then doubled again and yet again. In 1939, the United States produced 800 military airplanes. When President Franklin Roosevelt called for the production of 4,000 airplanes per month, people thought he was crazy. But in 1942, the United States was producing 4,000 a month, and by the end of 1943 8,000 per month. There were similar, all-but-unbelievable great leaps forward in the production of tanks, ships, landing craft, rifles, and other weapons. And all this took place while the United States put a major effort into the greatest industrial feat to that time, the production of atomic weapons (hardly begun in 1942, completed by mid-1945).

  That a cross-Channel attack against the Atlantic Wall could even be contemplated was a tribute to what Dwight Eisenhower called “the fury of an aroused democracy.” What made D-Day possible was the never-ending flow of weapons from American factories, the Ultra and the Double Cross System, victory in the Battle of the Atlantic, control of the air and sea, British inventiveness, the French Resistance, the creation of citizen armies in the Western democracies, the persistence and genius of Andrew Higgins and other inventors and entrepreneurs, the cooperation of business, government, and labor in the United States and the United Kingdom, and more—all summed up in the single word “teamwork.”

  * * *

  I. After the war, Higgins was beset by problems, some of his own making. He was not a good businessman. He could not bring himself to cut back because he hated to put his work force on unemployment. He fought the labor unions and lost. He was ahead of his time as he tried to move into helicopters and pleasure motor and sailing craft, pop-up tent trailers, and other leisure-time items that would eventually take off but not in 1946–47. He was brilliant at design but lousy at marketing, a master of production but a terrible bookkeeper. He went bust. Higgins Industries went under.

  But he was the man who won the war for us, and it is a shame that he has been forgotten by the nation and by the city of New Orleans.

  II. The Mulberries were not in operation long; a great storm two weeks after D-Day knocked out the American Mulberry and badly damaged the British one. But the great LST fleet more than made up the difference, raising the question: Was the expenditure of so much material and manpower on building the Mulberries wise? Russell Weigley’s answer is yes. He writes: “Without the prospect of the Mulberries to permit the beaches to function as ports, Churchill and his government would probably have backed away from Overlord after all” (Russell Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944–45 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981], p. 103).

  III. After the war, Ms. Gillars was tried and convicted of treason. She served a dozen years in a federal reformatory. Released in 1961, she taught music in Columbus, Ohio. She died at age eighty-seven in 1988.

  3

  THE COMMANDERS

  THE TWO MEN had much in common. Born in 1890, Dwight Eisenhower was one year older than Erwin Rommel. They grew up in small towns, Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas; Rommel in Gmünd, Swabia. Eisenhower’s father was a mechanic, Rommel’s a schoolteacher. Both fathers were classic Germanic parents who imposed a harsh discipline on their sons, enforced by physical punishment. Both boys were avid athletes. Eisenhower’s sports were football and baseball, Rommel’s cycling, tennis, skating, rowing, and skiing. Although neither family had a military tradition, each boy went off to military school; in 1910 Rommel entered the Royal Officer Cadet School in Danzig, while Eisenhower in 1911 went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

  As cadets, neither was an outstanding student, but both were competent and they shared a proclivity for breaking the rules. Rommel wore a forbidden monocle, while Eisenhower smoked forbidden cigarettes. They were dashingly good-looking in their uniforms; each courted and won the hand of a vivacious, young, and much-sought-after beauty—in 1916 Rommel married Lucie Mollin; the next year, Eisenhower married Mamie Doud.1

  Their careers diverged in World War I. Rommel was a combat leader in France and Italy, highly decorated (Iron Cross, first and second class, and the coveted Pour le Merite). Eisenhower was stuck in the States as a training commander, a bitter blow to him from which he feared he would never recover. Still, as junior officers, both showed remarkable leadership ability.

  Theodor Werner, one of Rommel’s platoon leaders, recalled: “When I first saw him [in 1915] he was slightly built, almost school-boyish, inspired by a holy zeal, always eager and anxious to act. In some curious way his spirit permeated the entire regiment right from the start, at first barely perceptibly to most but then increasingly dramatically until everybody was inspired by his initiative, his courage, his dazzling acts of gallantry. . . . His men idolized him and had boundless faith in him.”2

  Sgt. Maj. Claude Harris recalled of Eisenhower: “[He] was a strict disciplinarian, an inborn soldier, but most human, considerate. . . . Despite his youth, he possessed a high understanding of organization. . . . This principle built for him high admiration and loyalty from his officers perhaps unequaled by few commanding officers.”3 Lt. Ed Thayer, one of Eisenhower’s subordinates, wrote of him: “Our new Captain, Eisenhower by name, is, I believe, one of the most efficient and best Army officers in the country. . . . He has given us wonderful bayonet drills. He gets the fellows’ imaginations worked up and hollers and yells and makes us shout and stomp until we go tearing into the air as if we meant business.”4

  In the interwar years, Rommel remained a line officer, while Eisenhower was a staff officer. Promotions were slow at best, but neither ever thought of any life other than that of a soldier, even though each was ambitious and could have been a success at any number of civilian occupations. They impressed their superiors. Rommel’s regimental commander wrote of him in 1934: “Head and shoulders above the average battalion commander in every respect.”5 That same year Eisenhower’s superior, Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur, wrote of him: “This is the best officer in the Army. When the next war comes, he should go right to the top.”6

  The war brought both men out of obscurity. Rommel made his reputation first as commander of the panzer division that led the way through France in 1940; he added enormous luster to it and became a world figure as commander of the Afrika Korps in the eastern North African desert in 1941–42. Eisenhower became a world figure in November 1942 in the western North African desert as commander of the Allied forces.

  Despite his spectacular victories in the desert, after Rommel lost the Battle of El Alamein in the late fall of 1942 he became what Hitler called a defeatist, what others would call a realist. On November 20, when he learned that of fifty transport airplanes bringing fuel for his tanks forty-five had been shot down (thanks to an Ultra intercept), Rommel went for a walk in the desert with one of his young battalion commanders, Maj. Baron Hans von Luck.

  “Luck, that’s the end!” the major recalled Rommel saying. “We can’t even hold Tripolitania, but must fall back on Tunisia. There, in addition, we shall come upon the Americans. . . . Our proud Africa army, and the new divisions that have landed in northern Tunisia, will be lost. . . .”

  Major Luck protested that they still had a chance.

  Rommel said no. As Luck recalled the conversation, Rommel said, “Supplies will not be forthcoming. Hitler’s HQ has already written off this theater of war. All he requires now is that ‘the German soldier stands or dies!’ . . . Luck, the war is lost!”7

  Despite his misgivings, Rommel fought on. The Americans, coming from the west, were waiting for the Afrika Korps in Tunisia. There, in February 1943, Rommel and Eisenhower first clashed, in the Battle of Kasserine Pass. Through surprise and audacity, Rommel scored impressive initial gains against the untried and inadequately trained American troops, who were led by untried and ill-prepared American generals—including Eisenhower, who was fighting his first real
battle. Eisenhower made many mistakes but recovered from them, used his logistical and fire power superiority effectively, and eventually won the battle.

  By this time Rommel was suffering from high blood pressure (so was Eisenhower), violent headaches, nervous exhaustion, and rheumatism. Partly to preserve Rommel’s health, partly to preserve his reputation (surrender in North Africa was imminent), partly to save himself from daily demands for more supplies for North Africa, Hitler ordered Rommel home, after promoting him to field marshal. He spent most of the remainder of 1943 without a command.

  • •

  Eisenhower spent the remainder of 1943 commanding the assaults on Sicily and Italy. Both attacks were successful, but the campaigns that followed were disappointing. In Sicily, the American Seventh Army (five divisions strong) and the British Eighth Army (four divisions strong) took five weeks to drive two German divisions from the island; in Italy, progress was excruciatingly slow, and the Germans managed to impose a stalemate far south of Rome.

  Despite the disappointments and personal exhaustion, Eisenhower was consistently optimistic. He wrote his wife, “When pressure mounts and strain increases everyone begins to show the weaknesses in his makeup. It is up to the Commander to conceal his: above all to conceal doubt, fear and distrust.” How well he was able to do so was indicated by a member of his staff, who wrote from North Africa, “[Eisenhower] was a living dynamo of energy, good humor, amazing memory for details, and amazing courage for the future.”8

  He made a study of leadership, which in his view was not an art but a skill to be learned. “The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men,” he declared. He wrote that it was at his first command post, in Gibraltar in early November 1942, “that I first realized how inexorably and inescapably strain and tension wear away at the leader’s endurance, his judgment and his confidence.” No matter how bad things got, no matter how anxious the staff became, the commander had to “preserve optimism in himself and in his command. Without confidence, enthusiasm and optimism in the command, victory is scarcely obtainable.”

  Eisenhower realized that “optimism and pessimism are infectious and they spread more rapidly from the head downward than in any other direction.” He learned that a commander’s optimism “has a most extraordinary effect upon all with whom he comes in contact. With this clear realization, I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory—that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow.”9

  Eisenhower never talked to a subordinate the way Rommel talked to Major Luck. (Of course, Eisenhower had much more to be optimistic about.) But there were other striking differences between the two men, based as much on personality as on their positions. Rommel was impatient with the difficulties of logistics and administration while Eisenhower, for almost two decades a staff officer, was a master at both. Rommel tended toward arrogance while Eisenhower carefully cultivated an image of himself as a simple Kansas farm boy trying to do his best. Rommel did not like his Italian allies, indeed hardly tried to hide his contempt for them, while Eisenhower had a genuine liking for his British allies and did all he could to ensure smooth cooperation with them. Rommel often allowed his temper to flare with his staff (as did Eisenhower) and found it hard to delegate authority, an area in which Eisenhower was his exact opposite. Rommel was a loner, a solitary genius, a general who led by inspiration and intuition; Eisenhower was a team player, a manager of vast enterprises, a general who led by deciding what was the best plan after careful consultation with his staff and field commanders, then getting everyone behind the plan.

  On the battlefield, Rommel was an aggressive risk taker, Eisenhower a cautious calculator. Rommel won battles through brilliant maneuvering, Eisenhower by overwhelming the enemy. As Rommel always commanded forces that were inferior in numbers and firepower, his method was appropriate to his situation; as Eisenhower always commanded forces that were superior, so was his. Perhaps they would have acted differently had their situations been reversed, but that can be doubted—the way they exercised leadership fit their personalities.

  For all these differences, they had some remarkable similarities. Historian Martin Blumenson has written of Rommel, “If he demanded much from his men, he gave no less of himself. He worked hard, fought hard, lived simply, talked easily with his troops, and was devoted to his wife and son.”10 Exactly those same words could be written about Eisenhower.

  Each general had a strong, happy marriage. Through the war years, each man wrote regularly to his wife. In the letters, they said things they said to no other person, revealed their hopes and apprehensions, complained about the small irritations of life, expressed a constant desire to get back together to enjoy a quiet domestic life, recalled incidents from the early years of their marriages and, in short, used the letter-writing moments as an opportunity to find some peace and quiet in the midst of the war raging all around them.11

  Each general had one son. Manfred Rommel joined the Luftwaffe as an antiaircraft gunner in early 1944, immediately after his fifteenth birthday. John Eisenhower was a cadet at West Point who graduated on June 6, 1944, and went straight into the army. Each son has had a successful career in a field different from his father’s, Manfred as a politician, John as a writer of military history.

  Rommel and Eisenhower shared another fundamental trait: each hated what the war made him do. They wanted to build, not destroy, to nurture life, not snuff it out. Destruction appalled them; construction delighted them. Rommel once said that, when the war ended, he wanted to go to work as a hydraulic engineer, building water-powered generators all across Europe. (His son, as mayor of Stuttgart, sponsored tremendous construction projects in that booming city in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.) With the St. Lawrence Seaway and the Interstate Highway System, Eisenhower the president became one of the great constructors in American history. Had he lived, Rommel might have played a similar role as chancellor of West Germany. What we know about him leads to the thought that he might have been as popular a politician as Eisenhower proved to be.

  • •

  In late October 1943, Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of operations at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), suggested to Hitler that Rommel be given tactical command in the West, under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who was Commander in Chief West. Rundstedt was Germany’s senior serving field marshal, at sixty-nine much too old to command in battle. He was short of energy and short of supplies, so although he had been charged with building an impregnable Atlantic Wall, outside of the Pas-de-Calais little had been done. Jodl’s idea was that Rommel would provide the badly needed drive to get on with the work.

  Typically, Hitler temporized. He did not give Rommel tactical command for the invasion battle, but he did order him to make an inspection of the Atlantic Wall and report back to him. When he gave Rommel this news on November 5, Hitler stressed the significance of the assignment: “When the enemy invades in the west it will be the moment of decision in this war, and the moment must turn to our advantage. We must ruthlessly extract every ounce of effort from Germany.”12

  Rommel spent the middle two weeks of December on his inspection tour, traveling from the North Sea to the Pyrenees Mountains. He was shocked by what he saw. He denounced the Atlantic Wall as a farce, “a figment of Hitler’s Wolkenkuckucksheim [cloud-cuckoo-land] . . . an enormous bluff . . . more for the German people than for the enemy . . . and the enemy, through his agents, knows more about it than we do.”

  Drawing on his experience in North Africa, Rommel told his chief engineer officer, Gen. Wilhelm Meise, that Allied control of the air would prevent the movement of German reinforcements to the battle area, so “Our only possible chance will be at the beaches—that’s where the enemy is always weakest.” As a start on building a genuine Atlantic Wall, he said, “I want antipersonnel mines, antitank mines, antiparatroops mines. I want mines to sink ships and mines t
o sink landing craft. I want some minefields designed so that our infantry can cross them, but no enemy tanks. I want mines that detonate when a wire is tripped; mines that explode when a wire is cut; mines that can be remote controlled, and mines that will blow up when a beam of light is interrupted.”13

  Rommel predicted that the Allies would launch their invasion with aerial bombings, naval bombardments, and airborne assaults, followed by seaborne landings. No matter how many millions of mines were laid, he felt that the fixed defenses could only hold up the assault, not turn it back; it would take a rapid counterattack on D-Day itself by mobile infantry and panzer divisions to do that. So those units had to be moved close to the coast to be in position to deliver the decisive counterattack.

  On this critical issue, Rundstedt disagreed. Rundstedt wanted to let the Allies move inland, then fight the decisive battle in the interior of France, well out of range of the heavy guns of the British and American battleships and cruisers.

  This fundamental disagreement would plague the German high command right through to D-Day and beyond. Rundstedt and Rommel were offensive-minded generals, as were all Wehrmacht-trained officers. But they were on the defensive now. German generals never learned to like it, although in a tactical sense they became proficient at it—as the Red Army could attest. In the strategic sense, they never learned the plain lesson the Red Army could have taught them, had they studied Red Army strategy—that a flexible defense that can give under pressure and strike back when the attacker was overextended best suited the conditions of World War II.

  Rommel’s riposte, that Allied air power would make movement inland difficult if not impossible, ignored Rundstedt’s point, that by fighting on the beach the Germans would be putting themselves under the guns of the Allied fleet.