by Jim Newton
Marshall was meticulous in all things, but none more than the selection of subordinates, an area to which he “gave long and earnest attention,” rejecting the importuning of others. He kept a book in which he listed names of promising men, adding some as he heard new information about them, striking those who disappointed him. He had plucked Eisenhower off that list at Mark Clark’s suggestion in 1941. Now, as armies trained for Europe and men died in the Pacific, as American industry stepped up to its role as the “arsenal of democracy” and the Depression subsided, Marshall made a fateful decision: he dispatched Eisenhower to Britain. There, Eisenhower took charge of coordinating an invasion by two armies, thankfully of shared language but of different strategic traditions, intelligence capabilities, technological advancement, and even rank structures. The melding of such armies was of paramount necessity, and Ike, still a novice, relied heavily on his chief deputy, Bedell Smith, whose sour willingness to say no balanced and permitted Eisenhower’s cheerier disposition.
On July 25, after what Ike described in his diary as “tense and wearing” days, the Allies chose North Africa as the site for the Allied landing against the Axis powers—in that decision, FDR overruled his military commanders, who wanted a more direct strike on Europe—and agreed that they would fight beneath an American leader. The following day, Marshall picked the leader for the attack, known as Operation Torch. He named Eisenhower. In his official diary, Ike recorded the moment with dispassion that almost, but not quite, masked his unmistakable pride. “According to General Marshall’s understanding of the agreement,” he wrote, “I am to be that … commander.”
The last hours before American forces entered the European war were agonizing, and Eisenhower had few to whom he could confess his anxieties. He shared them with Marshall. “We are standing, of course, on the brink and must take the jump—whether the bottom contains a nice feather bed or a pile of brickbats,” he wrote. Hours later, with Eisenhower commanding from a headquarters in Gibraltar, American and British forces landed along the coast of North Africa. It was November 8, 1942.
Tens of thousands of young men flopped onto beaches near Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers; many died in ports or sank with ships, burned in oil, drowned in surf, their bodies cast into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, drawn by currents across thousands of miles of African coast. Those who survived the landings pressed inland off the beaches and harbors and turned left to confront Rommel and his German forces, then being pursued from the east by the British Eighth Army.
As soldiers poured from landing craft, Eisenhower paced and smoked and allowed himself a brief moment of wonder. “I have operational command of Gibraltar,” he wrote. “The symbol of the solidity of the British Empire, the hallmark of safety and security at home, the jealously guarded rock that has played a tremendous part in the trade development of the English race! An American is in charge, and I am he.”
If the landings at last put Allied troops in combat under unified command, the initial efforts also demonstrated America’s rustiness and the enormous complexity of the task at hand. Poorly packed supplies were hard to unload, landing craft failed and sank, tanks turned out to be too wide to ship on some North African rail lines. Ike displayed some rookie failings as a commander. He was distracted by politics; he sometimes dawdled when quick and decisive action might have sped along the Allied advance. General Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, sized up Eisenhower early in the war and dismissed him with a sniff: “Deficient of experience and of limited ability.” Marshall may have harbored private worries as well. Still, he stood behind Ike.
The campaign for control over North Africa intermingled military and political strategy as the Allied forces confronted the vexing problem of how to deal with the French armies in the region. French soldiers yearned for liberation by the Allies, but the Vichy government was expected by its German masters to fight those same Allies. To face French resistance while embarking on a campaign to liberate Europe—including France—exasperated Eisenhower, and occasionally he let his temper boil over. “If we had come here merely to whip this French Army, I would be registering nothing but complete satisfaction at this moment,” he wrote to Marshall. But he conceded he was “irritated” at the thought that every bullet fired at a French soldier was one that could not be used against a German, every lost minute on the way to Tunis was time for Germany to regroup. “I find myself getting absolutely furious with these stupid frogs,” he fumed.
The pressure on Eisenhower mounted, and he punished himself. Roaming the gloomy underground headquarters at Gibraltar, he shivered and suffered. He was querulous and unpleasant, complaining about the pressures of his job. Patton worried that he was “timid” and complained to his wife that the Allied forces comprised “many commanders but no leaders.” Ike smoked. He was inhaling sixty cigarettes a day and had become so dependent on them that on one trip aboard a B-17, the crew warned him of the danger of smoking with gas fumes all around. Eisenhower lit up anyway.
Eisenhower and the Allied leadership had hoped Henri Giraud, an angular, frosty, proud French general, would take command of the French forces in the area and ally them with the Americans and British. To that end, Giraud was smuggled out of Vichy and delivered to Gibraltar by submarine. Giraud quickly became a headache, “temperamental, wants much in power, equipment, etc., but seems little disposed to do his part to stop fighting,” Ike confided to his diary. Denied the opportunity to lead the invasion force, Giraud pouted, and Eisenhower turned to another option, as his top aides in North Africa instead recruited François Darlan, a senior French naval officer promoted to its highest ranks by the Vichy government. Darlan offered the opportunity to bring French troops under Allied control, but that opportunity was mixed at best, as Darlan also was a detestable collaborator and opportunist. Eisenhower grimaced and cut the deal.
Under the agreement negotiated and approved by Eisenhower, French forces were placed under the command of Admiral Darlan, and those forces agreed to “take up the fight against the Axis powers for the liberation of French territory.” France maintained control over North Africa, and the Allies promised no permanent occupation; in return, they were granted access to French ports and facilities.
That halted the fighting between the Allies and the French, but the decision to unite forces with Darlan was intensely controversial, flaring opposition back home and, even more acutely, in Britain. Some critics called for Ike’s job. Marshall defended him, and Eisenhower, defensive about his actions but appreciative that Marshall protected him, thanked his boss. “I am pleased that you and the President saw the thing in realistic terms and realize that we are making the best of a rather bad bargain,” he wrote to Marshall on November 17. Still, it ruined no Christmases in London or Washington when Darlan was assassinated on December 24. Giraud took his place.
After delay and difficulty of every type—rains that turned North African roads to mud, overstretched lines that buckled under German counterattack, faulty intelligence estimates of German troop strength, weak fighting by French soldiers, an alarming setback at Kasserine Pass—the Allies in the spring of 1943 mounted their decisive assault toward Tunis, where they hoped to rout the remainder of Germany’s forces in the region and secure a port for their invasion of Europe. Marshall, having chosen Eisenhower for this assignment and defended him when others questioned Ike’s judgment, now watched proudly as America’s men took ground and defeated enemies. “At the moment there seems nothing for me to say except to express deep satisfaction in the progress of affairs under your direction,” he wrote to Ike. “My interest is to give you what you need, support you in every way possible, and protect you against the ravages of ideologies and special pleaders of democracies, to leave you free to go about the business of crushing the Germans and gaining us great victories.”
Marshall’s confidence in Ike was vindicated. Patton, who just months earlier had privately scorned Eisenhower’s capacity as a leader, now praise
d him fulsomely. Eisenhower had “developed beyond belief,” Patton reported to his wife, back home in Pasadena, California. He was, Patton added, “quite a great man.”
On May 20, a victory parade through the streets of Tunis marked the end of Germany’s North African occupation. The Allies turned now to Sicily and Sardinia.
Since the beginning of the war, it was anticipated that Operation Overlord, the main thrust into northern Europe, would represent the heart of the Allied response to Hitler. Marshall yearned to lead it. It was, as all knew, the preeminent contest of the war, the moment when the fruits of America’s military buildup, of which Marshall was the chief architect, would confront its most heinous enemy. So even as Mark Clark fought up the Italian peninsula, Roosevelt was meeting with Allied leaders in Cairo and contemplating his choice for Overlord. He admired Marshall; virtually every senior official in the war did. But Roosevelt also was deeply impressed with Eisenhower’s victories in Africa and his successful management of the landings there and in Italy. Perhaps more important, given Roosevelt’s penchant for sizing up associates, he liked Ike (he would not be the last). He appreciated Eisenhower’s upbeat disposition and his genial ability to command, to be decisive without being overbearing, and to exercise professional but warm leadership.
Roosevelt considered and then, on December 5, broke the news to Marshall that he was going with Eisenhower. Gracefully, he explained: “I didn’t feel I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.” It is testament to Marshall’s dignity that he gave no sign of displeasure. He took Roosevelt’s handwritten order appointing Ike and forwarded it to Eisenhower as a keepsake. It was, Eisenhower later wrote, one of “my most cherished mementos.” The note was dated December 7, 1943, the second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Eisenhower’s orders were succinct: “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other Allied Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her Armed Forces.” Through the spring, the Allies trained and feinted. Patton, fighting his way back to the action from still another public blunder—one in which he seemed to denigrate Russia’s role in the war—was used as a decoy to draw German attention elsewhere. Ike fretted over weather reports and tidal charts, searching for the ideal day. The options were limited: Stalin was desperately pushing for an early date; anything past midsummer was further complicated by the coming fall and winter and the difficulties cold weather would impose on fighting into Germany. Tides, weather, and geopolitics suggested June, and those days approached with gathering anxiety.
On June 4, 1944, a fierce wind tore through Britain, and Ike hesitated; then, as it began to clear, he gave his approval, officially issuing the order at 4:15 a.m. on June 5. That night, Eisenhower visited with soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division. They lustily cheered his arrival. In closer quarters, they shrugged off any hint of nerves or danger. “Don’t worry, General,” one young man said to Ike. “We’ll take care of this.”
Eisenhower stayed with those young men, many destined to die that night, until the final airplane was aloft. As it departed, he turned back to his car, where Kay waited for him. He had tears in his eyes. “Well,” he said. “It’s on. No one can stop it now.” Thousands of miles away, John Eisenhower slept his last night as a West Point cadet; his graduation was the following morning. Ike pondered the implications of the invasion’s failure and resolved that he alone would take responsibility if the Allies were repulsed. To insure his accountability, he wrote a note, to be released in the event of calamity. It read:
Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.
As Eisenhower waited and worried, twenty thousand paratroopers drifted into Normandy that night. Many died landing in the darkness. Scuba divers also led the way, sliding into the dark ocean from submarines to clear mines and obstacles strewn by Hitler’s forces along the coast.
Then, in the early morning of June 6, 1944, Allied forces came ashore on the beaches whose names would be imprinted on a generation: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. At last, word came from the Continent. Fighting was heavy in some spots—Omaha Beach was particularly hard-won as landing forces there came under devastating machine-gun fire. But troops bravely moved up and off the beaches, aided by confusion and miscommunication in the German high command (Hitler’s aide elected not to wake him at the early reports of the landing); by night, more than 150,000 British, Canadian, and American soldiers were on French soil. Tens of thousands more would follow. Eisenhower commanded an army of 2.8 million men.
At 9:30 a.m. on June 6, the free world reveled in the word released from the Allied headquarters in Europe: “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.” The Battle of Stalingrad had broken the German army in the East; now it would face a fight on its western front as well. It was, Kay reflected, “the beginning of the end of the war.”
The enormous undertaking of D-day was followed, for Ike, by a brief emotional letdown, the natural falloff from the execution of such a complex and consequential mission. He moped about for a few days, aching to join his forces across the channel, desperately craving news from the front. “He would sit there and smoke and worry,” Summersby recalled. “Every time the phone rang, he would grab it.” Those anxious days were broken by the arrival of his son, the newly commissioned second lieutenant John Eisenhower. With Marshall’s help and encouragement, John shipped out for London before heading on to Fort Benning, where he would complete his infantry training. He arrived on June 13, a week after the invasion, and greeted his father with a kiss. Ike, Kay remembered, “was just one big grin.”
An eager, young West Point alumnus and newly commissioned officer, John was thrilled to accompany his father and wanted to observe the niceties of their relationship—both as father and son and as superior and junior officer. Soon after arriving, John asked his father how he should salute if they were approached by an officer who outranked him but was outranked by Ike. Eisenhower’s reply reminded John who was who. “John,” his father said, “there isn’t an officer in this theater who doesn’t rank above you and below me.”
As that exchange suggests, Ike could be tough on the young man. He did not suffer his son’s military theories when they challenged his own; he grumbled when John seemed not to appreciate the hardships of others fighting around them. For his part, John was willful as well, every bit his father’s son. They butted heads, as they had throughout John’s growing up. But Ike enjoyed the rare treat of seeing his son follow in his footsteps with honor to them both. And John, as Kay recalled it, took his father’s negative comments in good stride. “No matter how sharply Ike criticized him, it was obvious that he adored this son of his,” she wrote.
The next months of World War II were dangerous and often calamitous. Hitler’s armies fought furiously, and his machinery of death continued its genocidal mission even as his armies fell back through Poland and out of France and the Low Countries. Steadily, Eisenhower’s forces pressed eastward across a long front. The Germans staged a ferocious counterattack, and the line buckled at the Battle of the Bulge, but the Allies rallied, led by Patton’s stunning drive to the rescue. As the war ground on, Churchill meddled—even Marshall’s confidence ebbed on occasion, only to be revived—and de Gaulle preened. When Ike proposed to withdraw troops from Strasbourg during the Battle of the Bulge, de Gaulle threatened to pull French forces out of the alliance. John recalled his father’s reaction: “Dad told him to go ahead, since the Americans and British could win the war anyway.”
Within his command, Eisenhower oversaw similarly varied and demanding personalities
. Omar Bradley, whom Ike regarded as the most capable general of the war, orchestrated a methodical destruction of German power. Montgomery dawdled, sometimes at the edge of insubordination, and bickered over Eisenhower’s decision to press a broad front across Germany rather than pursue a more focused charge toward Berlin. Patton strained at the bit, stretching supply lines in his manic quest to chew up enemies and territory. Yet even the most tempestuous commanders took their direction from Ike. Unlike Patton or Monty, de Gaulle or even Hitler, Eisenhower refused to be distracted by the lure of tactical success; he relentlessly balanced his forces and concentrated all his energies on strategic victory. He was, Lieutenant General Hastings Ismay said later, the “only man who could have made things work.”
Much would be made in later years over Eisenhower’s willingness to let Russia take Berlin. There is something to be said for holding Eisenhower accountable for broad strategic and political decisions. As was the case in North Africa, Ike functioned as more than mere military commander. With communications strained by the technological limitations of the time, Eisenhower was placed in the role of political strategist, not simply military leader. Still, his mission was to destroy German military strength, not to capture its center of government. And though Soviet occupation of Berlin would have consequences for the Cold War to come, there was no avoiding it in the early months of 1945. Even the occupation zones agreed to by the political leaders of the Allied nations contemplated Soviet oversight of what was to become, for far too long, East Germany.
It is, in short, unfair to blame Eisenhower for allowing the Soviets to occupy Berlin when Ike’s orders, as well as logistical demands and European geography, prevented any other outcome. Nevertheless, few criticisms stung Ike more woundingly or lastingly; he devoted much of his later years to fending off the charge—raised most annoyingly by Montgomery—that the British and Americans could have taken Berlin if permitted by Ike to do so. The so-called pencil thrust might have taken Berlin, but it risked disrupting Allied supply lines and offered little long-term gain, since the Allies had already settled on the partitioning of Germany, with Berlin inside the Soviet zone. Monty’s proposal, Eisenhower insisted, was “impractical—in fact, slightly hair-brained.”
