Eisenhower reported to Colonel Welborn in Washington twice a week. Otherwise, the training of the tank corps was in his hands.
My orders were specific, indeed rigid. I was required to take in volunteers, equip, organize, and instruct them and have them ready for overseas shipment when called upon. The orders warned that my camp was not only a point of mobilization but of embarkation. This meant that the troops sent from Gettysburg would go directly to a port without any intermediate stops.36
Working with whatever material he could find, Eisenhower transformed the old battlefield into a first-class Army camp. He obtained tents, food, and uniforms for his men, taught them to drill, and got them in shape. When a freak blizzard hit Gettysburg in April, he bought every available stove in the region. And when no tanks arrived, he organized telegraph and motor schools to maintain morale.
By summer, ten thousand men and six hundred officers were at Camp Colt under Eisenhower’s command. He was promoted to major on June 17, 1918, along with most of his infantry classmates. The engineers, all of whom stood higher in the Class of 1915, had been promoted several months earlier, and the artillerymen would be promoted in July. Except for the branch differential, promotions in Ike’s class thus far had been strictly in order of class standing at West Point.
Mamie and Little Ike arrived at Gettysburg in late April 1918, after a grueling four-day trip from San Antonio in a railroad day coach. Military quarters were nonexistent, and the Eisenhowers moved three times in the next six months, ending up in the unused Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity house on the campus of Gettysburg College. The house had a gigantic ballroom that would have been perfect for entertaining except there was no kitchen. Cooking was done on an electric hot plate with two burners, and the dishes were washed in the bathtub. When time permitted, Ike enjoyed roaming the Gettysburg battlefield, and Mamie—who was supremely uninterested in the location of Union brigades—often accompanied him. “He knew every rock on that battlefield,” she said later, which was not necessarily a compliment.37
Without tanks, the early training at Camp Colt was rudimentary. Ike eventually obtained some .30-caliber machine guns, mounted them on flatbed trucks, and taught the men to fire from moving platforms. “The only satisfactory place for firing was Big Round Top,” he remembered. “Its base made a perfect backstop. The firing might even have been heavier than during the great battle fifty-five years earlier.”38
As the size of Camp Colt increased, Ike doubled his efforts to stay on top of the situation. “Eisenhower was a strict disciplinarian,” Sergeant Major Claude J. Harris recalled.
He was an inborn soldier, but most human and considerate. Despite his youth, he possessed a high understanding of organization, the ability to place an estimate on a man and fit him into a position where he would “click.” In the event his judgment proved erroneous the man would be called in, his errors pointed out, and adjustments made to suit the situation. This principle built for him high admiration and loyalty from his officers perhaps unequaled by few commanding officers.39
The first tank—a seven-ton French Renault—arrived at Camp Colt on June 6, 1918. The Gettysburg Times reported that the troops “were as happy as a playground full of children with a new toy.”40 Two additional Renaults arrived later in the summer, accompanied by two British tank corps officers as advisers. In 1943, one of the British officers, Lieutanant Colonel Franklin Summers (retired), wrote Eisenhower reminding him of the summer of 1918 at Camp Colt, and asking that he write the introduction to a book on armor the British were publishing. Eisenhower had just completed the Sicily campaign, and he replied immediately.
No message that I have received in recent months has pleased me more than yours. I have often wondered where you were and what you were doing.
I assure you that I could not have attempted to write a forward for your book, except for my very great feeling of indebtedness for the advice and counsel you so kindly gave me years ago in the little town of Gettysburg. I hope I have profited somewhat of it.41
Eisenhower poses with the first Renault tank delivered to Camp Colt, 1918. (illustration credit 2.4)
In September 1918, Camp Colt was hit by the “Spanish flu” epidemic ravaging the country. More than 548,000 Americans succumbed to the virus, and an estimated 50 to 100 million persons worldwide. The true number that perished will never be known, but before the epidemic was brought under control, the average life expectancy in the United States had dropped by an unbelievable twelve years.42
The virus entered the United States through the port of Boston, and the first case was reported at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, on September 8, 1918. Shortly thereafter, 124 men were transferred from Devens to Camp Colt, and the virus came with them. Initially, camp doctors believed the men were suffering the aftereffects of inoculations they had received before shipment, but within twenty-four hours Spanish flu was recognized. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Scott, the camp’s chief surgeon, immediately isolated the patients. “We put up every kind of tent with makeshift bedding and any man with the slightest symptom was isolated from the others,” said Ike. “No more than four men were allowed in any tent; three wherever we had room. Each [man] who had been directly exposed to the disease was, whenever possible, put into a tent by himself.”43
Eisenhower and Scott moved aggressively to contain the disease. On Ike’s order, Colt was quarantined. MPs were posted to prevent soldiers without medical passes from leaving camp, restaurants in Gettysburg were ordered not to serve soldiers, and the town’s churches were placed off-limits lest an infected soldier inadvertently spread the virus. On clear days, tents were opened and the bedding aired in the sun. Floors were scrubbed daily with Lysol and kerosene. And every soldier in camp was given a daily medical examination.
When the virus struck, there were 10,605 men under Eisenhower’s command at Camp Colt. Between September 15 and October 5, 427 soldiers were admitted to post hospitals, 321 suffering from Spanish flu. Of those, 175 died from the disease. By mid-October the worst was over. On October 24, the Gettysburg Times reported that Camp Colt was “practically free of influenza.” Eisenhower issued a statement thanking the people of Gettysburg for their timely assistance. Later he wrote that “Lieutenant Colonel Scott is another of those men to whom I will always feel obligated.”44
The 175 deaths at Camp Colt compared favorably to most Army posts. The combination of Spanish flu and pneumonia killed 52,019 American servicemen in 1918, slightly fewer than the 53,402 who were killed in combat.45 In fact, so effective had Ike and Colonel Scott been in halting the spread of the disease that when Camp Colt’s record came to the attention of the War Department, Eisenhower was ordered to detail thirty members of his medical staff to other posts to show exactly what measures had been taken.
On October 14, 1918, Ike’s twenty-eighth birthday, he received orders from the War Department promoting him to lieutenant colonel. This time he was not in lockstep with his West Point classmates. Only ten members of the Class of 1915 were promoted to lieutenant colonel during World War I, and Ike was the second.46 Colonel Welborn rated Eisenhower “superior” (the highest category) in initiative, attention to duty, and capacity for command. “I regard this officer as one of the most efficient young officers I have known. He had the duties and responsibilities commensurate with the rank of brigadier general and he performed those duties under trying conditions in a highly credible manner.”47
Two weeks after his promotion to lieutenant colonel, Ike received another set of orders from the War Department. He could scarcely contain his enthusiasm as he showed them to Mamie. “My orders for France have come. I go November eighteenth.”48 Eisenhower was to lead the November contingent of troops from Camp Colt to the embarkation depot at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and then overseas. Once in France he would assume command of an armored regiment. Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the Allied supreme commander, was preparing a gigantic spring offensive, and Ike envisioned himself commanding the tanks that would lead the breakthrough on the
western front.
Colonel Welborn, who had initially approved Eisenhower’s request to go overseas, now had second thoughts about losing the commander of Camp Colt. He summoned Ike to Washington and offered to recommend his immediate promotion to full colonel if he would remain at Gettysburg. Eisenhower respectfully declined. He told Welborn that rather than stay in the States, he would prefer a reduction in rank if necessary to go overseas.49
Eisenhower readied the troops at Colt for a mid-November departure. Mamie and Little Ike would return to Denver and stay with the Douds while he was overseas. Before he could put Mamie and Little Ike on the train, however, a telegram from Elivera arrived with sad tidings. Mamie’s beloved younger sister Eda Mae (“Buster”) had died suddenly of a kidney infection at the age of seventeen. “This was a terrible blow for both of us,” Eisenhower wrote. “The two girls had been close and I had deeply loved ‘Buster.’ She was a favorite of the entire family.”50
On the morning of November 10, 1918, Ike and Mamie said a tearful good-bye on the Pennsylvania Railroad platform at Harrisburg. “Our parting was the most trying we had encountered in three years of married life.”51 Rumors were already in the air that an armistice on the western front was imminent. By the time Ike returned to Gettysburg, the news was out that a delegation from the German government had crossed the French lines on the way to Foch’s headquarters at Compiègne.f At 5:10 a.m., November 11 (11:10 p.m. on the tenth in Gettysburg), the Germans signed the armistice agreement. The guns would go silent at 11 a.m. That would be the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918.
Eisenhower was sitting in his headquarters with his classmate Major Norman Randolph when the news was announced. “I suppose we’ll spend the rest of our lives explaining why we didn’t get into this war,” Ike moaned. “By God, from now on I am cutting myself a swath that will make up for this.”52
Eisenhower was morose. He had missed out on the greatest war in history. For a professional soldier, nothing could be more humiliating. Although it was no fault of his own, Eisenhower was embarrassed that he had not seen combat. During World War II, Ike’s detractors, particularly in British circles, often pointed out that he had never commanded troops in battle. And it is true that he did not experience the horror of trench warfare on the western front. Yet that may have been just as well. Unlike many British senior commanders, Eisenhower had not been shocked into excessive caution by the futile slaughter of World War I. He was ready for a war of maneuver, and his early experience with America’s nascent tank corps perhaps prepared him far better than a year in the trenches would have done.
When the war ended, Colonel Welborn recommended Eisenhower for the Distinguished Service Medal, the Army’s highest peacetime decoration. “While commanding Officer of the Tank Corps Training Center,” the citation read, “he displayed unusual zeal, foresight, and marked administrative ability in the organization, training, and preparation for overseas service of the tank corps.”53
* * *
a On April 9, 1914, local authorities in Tampico seized a U.S. Navy whaleboat that was loading supplies at the wharf and took the crew into custody. When the error was recognized, the crew was immediately released and the Mexican commander sent an apology to Admiral Henry T. Mayo for the incident. Mayo, commanding the Navy’s Fifth Division, was not satisfied with the Mexican apology, and demanded that by way of retribution the American flag be hoisted at Tampico and rendered a twenty-one-gun salute. The Mexican government considered its apology sufficient and regarded Mayo’s demand as excessive. It considered the matter closed, “unless the United States is looking for an excuse to start trouble.” The New York Times, April 12, 1914.
Of course, that was exactly what Wilson was looking for, and Mexico’s failure to hoist and salute the flag by way of apology provided him with a reason (picayune though it may appear) to intervene.
b Mamie’s monthly allowance was not unique among Army wives. Two contemporaries of Ike’s, George Patton and Lucius Clay, also married women from wealthy families who received monthly stipends from their parents. This enabled Clay and Patton and Ike to live somewhat better than their contemporaries (much better in Patton’s case), and did not pass unnoticed by their fellow officers. Martin Blumenson, 1 The Patton Papers 201 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972); Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay 77.
c The remarkable York Pullman automobile was manufactured in York, Pennsylvania, from 1903 to 1917. It had six wheels, three on each side mounted one behind the other, with the power train flowing to the two middle wheels. The six-wheel concept soon soured, and the few cars that have survived are genuine curiosities. William H. Shank, History of the York Pullman Automobile, 1903–1917 (York, Pa.: Historical Society of York County, 1985).
d The origin of the term “buffalo soldiers” is often disputed, but the most compelling explanation relates to the heavy coats made of buffalo hides the soldiers wore during the harsh winters on the western plains. Clad in buffalo skins, the mounted black troopers of the 10th Cavalry from a distance appeared to the Plains Indians to resemble the buffaloes that roamed the countryside.
e It should be noted that by using regulars as cadre for new formations, promotion was more easily attained. In the Civil War the regulars serving in the Brigade of Regulars were denied promotion and continued to serve in their prewar ranks. That was a sore spot in the professional Army.
f On November 9, 1918, William II abdicated and was replaced by a republican government headed by Majority Socialist Friedrich Ebert. The armistice was signed on behalf of the new government by Vice Chancellor Matthias Erzberger, who was assassinated in August 1921 by German nationalists for having done so. Sir John W. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945 19–31 (London: Macmillan, 1964).
THREE
The Peacetime Army
No human enterprise goes flat so instantly as an Army training camp when war ends.
—DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
Instead of going overseas, Eisenhower was ordered to dismantle Camp Colt. “Nothing at West Point or in the forty months since graduation had prepared me for helping to collapse an Army from millions to a peacetime core,” Ike wrote. “As quickly as possible, we were to clear the site we had occupied for nine months, complete our records, then move to Fort Dix where we would await final orders.”1
Eisenhower arrived at Fort Dix in mid-December, 1918, with six thousand men and three Renault tanks. From there he was ordered with the remnant of the American tank corps to Fort Benning, Georgia. After discharges, separations, and transfers, only three hundred of the original six thousand remained. The eight-hundred-mile trip from New Jersey to Georgia by low-priority Army troop train took four days and, as Ike recalled, each day seemed like a year: There was no heat in the passenger cars, no electricity, no hot water, and field rations were cooked on camp stoves in the baggage car.
Ike brooded about his career. “I was older than my classmates, was still bothered on occasion by a bad knee, and saw myself in the years ahead putting on weight in a meaningless chair-bound assignment, shuffling papers and filling out forms. If not depressed, I was mad, disappointed, and resented the fact that the war had passed me by.”2 Eisenhower briefly considered an offer from an Indiana businessman, a former junior officer at Camp Colt, to join his manufacturing firm in Muncie at a salary considerably higher than his lieutenant colonel’s pay. But he decided against it, as he would other offers for civilian employment that came to him over the next twenty years. “A lot of his classmates were getting out,” Mamie remembered. “I said to him—it was about only twice that I really interfered—and this time I said, ‘Well, Ike, I don’t think you’d be happy. This is your life and you know it and you like it.’ ”3
Fort Benning, home of the United States infantry, provided a brief holding pattern for Eisenhower. The infantry had little interest in tanks, and as Ike wrote later, “I had too much time on my hands.”4 After several months of indecision, the War D
epartment selected Camp Meade, Maryland, midway between Washington and Baltimore, as the permanent home of the tank corps.
Shortly after Eisenhower arrived at Camp Meade, the War Department announced plans to send a truck convoy across the country from the East Coast to the West Coast. As with most such expeditions the purpose was part publicity and part training, and above all to demonstrate the need for better highways. In 1919 most long-distance travel in the United States was done by rail. There was no highway network, no maps, and drivers often were compelled to navigate by compass. The few vehicular bridges that existed were rickety and ill-constructed; roads were mostly unpaved, little improved since the first settlers moved west in covered wagons, and all but impassable in bad weather. Motor vehicles were uncomfortable, slow and unreliable, prone to breakdowns, and certain to experience one or more tire punctures every hundred miles. A cross-country motor march had never been attempted before, and the Army was not at all certain that it could be done.5
To ensure that the lessons of the convoy were disseminated throughout the service, the War Department asked for volunteers from various branches to accompany it. Eisenhower, not yet integrated into the routine at Camp Meade, was among the first to volunteer. “I wanted to go along partly for a lark and partly to learn.”6
On July 7, 1919, the transcontinental motor convoy departed from the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., bound for San Francisco—3,251 miles away. The expedition was eighty-one vehicles long, including various mobile repair shops, engineer bridging equipment, a wrecker, and requisite fuel and water trucks, plus a Renault tank lashed to a flatbed trailer. In march column the convoy stretched more than two miles. There were 24 officers and 258 enlisted men, plus some two dozen War Department observers. Sixty-two days later, only five days behind schedule, the convoy arrived in San Francisco. Average speed had varied between ten and fifteen miles an hour, and the column managed slightly less than sixty miles a day, marred by repeated breakdowns, rain that turned dirt roads into gumbo, dust that fouled carburetors, searing heat that caused radiators to boil over, collapsed bridges, deeply rutted roadways, and the absence in places of any roadbed whatever. Wyoming was particularly difficult. Most bridges were too light and had to be replaced or reinforced, and a few roads had to be constructed from scratch. In Nevada, deep desert sand delayed the convoy for several days as heavily loaded vehicles sank above their wheel wells and had to be laboriously excavated. An estimated 3.25 million people, roughly three of every one hundred Americans, saw the column as it passed. It aroused great interest in better roads, and several states adopted large bond issues for highway construction.
Eisenhower in War and Peace Page 6
