MacArthur’s assault on the “Bonus Army” led to disaster. Ignoring orders from the secretary of war not to provoke a larger confrontation by crossing the bridge over the Anacostia River, MacArthur led his cavalry forces directly into the encampments. Federal troops were thus turned on the former military men in the streets of the nation’s capital, and the huts of the protestors were set ablaze. The event haunted Eisenhower for years, and though he obediently wrote MacArthur’s official report of the incident, he privately railed against the chief’s lack of restraint. “The whole scene was pitiful,” he felt.19
Eisenhower’s value to the chief of staff was so great that he was given increasingly large tasks to perform, as MacArthur lobbied Congress heavily for increased army budgets. It was hard going, and four years of intense work in the War Department took a terrible toll on Eisenhower’s health: severe back problems and attacks of abdominal pain—the start of a long affliction that would finally be diagnosed as ileitis—left him exhausted. But with Eisenhower helping him, MacArthur got results, and the fate of the armed services slightly improved under his leadership. After an unprecedented five years as chief of staff, MacArthur received orders in 1935 to go to the Philippines to create a new army for the soon-to-be-independent nation. He had no doubt which officer he wanted to serve as his military adviser.
Eisenhower endured a difficult four-year tour in the Philippines under MacArthur. The task he had been set, to plan for the construction of a Philippine army and the defense of the islands, was almost impossible, since the Philippine government had no money to pay for such a force, nor did it have any sort of military tradition or infrastructure from which to begin. Eisenhower had to devise a 10-year plan for training an officer corps, building up a reserve, equipping this armed force with everything from uniforms and rifles to aircraft, designing a network of training facilities, and putting together a curriculum for officers: all without the needed funds. MacArthur left the work to Eisenhower while he basked in the adulation that came to a man of high rank. (He managed to appoint himself field marshal of the nonexistent Philippine army.) MacArthur loved a stage, and Eisenhower, on a 15-man staff, was obliged to serve as audience while the general fulminated about President Roosevelt or bored his subalterns with soliloquies about his West Point days. MacArthur may have been America’s most distinguished soldier in these years, but his patronage did Eisenhower little good as long as he was stuck in the Pacific, without a combat command, drafting plans for a phony army that would never see the light of day. “The sooner I get out of here, the better I’ll like it!” he privately wrote.20
World events would soon reshape Eisenhower’s career path. In early September 1939, sitting in a friend’s living room in Manila, Eisenhower heard a crackling, barely audible radio broadcast from London, carrying an astonishing message from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In a voice that was “stricken” with defeat and sorrow, Chamberlain declared that all his peacemaking overtures to Hitler had failed. His country was at war with Germany. Though a tragedy for the world loomed, Eisenhower must secretly have rejoiced. “I hoped a field command awaited me,” he admitted. The task ahead was one “for which all my life I had been preparing.”21
V
When war broke out in Europe in September 1939, Eisenhower was a 49-year-old lieutenant colonel stuck in a distant outpost in the Pacific. Less than three years later, in June 1942, General Eisenhower took command of the entire European Theater of Operations in the war with Germany. Some contemporaries expressed wonder and sheer bafflement at this meteoric rise to fame and power by the once-obscure staff officer who had never commanded troops in the field. Yet inside the armed forces and in Washington, D.C., Eisenhower had developed a reputation for planning brilliance, hard work, supreme organizational skills, and personal qualities of tact, loyalty, devotion to duty, and optimism. Eisenhower himself said it best: he had been preparing all his life for this moment, and he would make the most of it.
First he had to get out of the Philippines as fast as possible. He begged MacArthur to let him transfer to a combat command, and MacArthur, perhaps now seeing in Eisenhower a rival, seemed glad to be rid of him. Pulling strings with friends in the States, Ike secured an appointment to the 15th Infantry Regiment at Fort Lewis in Washington State. He kept moving up, first to chief of staff of the 3rd Division at Fort Lewis, and in March 1941 to chief of staff to the IX Corps. With that post came a promotion to colonel. But he had no time to rest on his laurels. In June he became the Third Army’s chief of staff, with orders to relocate to San Antonio.
With war in Asia and Europe brewing, the U.S. Army at last roused itself from its long interwar slumber and began to knock off the rust of two decades. Congress, which in September 1940 had passed legislation creating the country’s first peacetime draft, reluctantly extended the law in August 1941. Millions of young men were now registering for what would soon become a huge expansion of the armed forces. As Third Army chief of staff, Eisenhower had to prepare these raw recruits for real fighting. In the late summer of 1941 he staged a military exercise in the swampy Louisiana backwoods, a war game that involved half a million men and 19 divisions in a mock clash between two armies, spread out over 3,400 square miles. Eisenhower’s staff work helped lead to a smashing victory by his Third Army forces, and it also got him his first star. He was promoted to brigadier general on October 3, 1941. Powerful figures in Washington took note.
Certainly the new army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, noticed. Marshall, the man identified by Fox Conner a decade earlier as the army’s finest officer, had begun to assemble the brightest minds he could find to staff the War Plans Division in Washington. Just days after the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, Marshall ordered Eisenhower to report for duty in the nation’s capital. After a brief stint as the deputy of war plans under his friend Brig. Gen. Leonard “Gee” Gerow, Eisenhower took the helm as chief of the War Plans Division in February 1942. The appointment was reported by the New York Times, the first time Eisenhower had his picture in that paper.22
Once again Eisenhower had been snatched up by a powerful patron—first Conner, then Pershing, MacArthur, and now Marshall—who needed his competence, his hard work, and above all his confidence in making large decisions. Marshall placed enormous trust in Eisenhower, and Ike always honored him for it. “I must have assistants who will solve their own problems,” Marshall told him, “and tell me later what they have done.” The historian of Eisenhower’s presidency can draw a direct line between these words and Eisenhower’s own management style as chief executive, when he too would look for powerful and confident lieutenants and allow them the freedom to run their own departments.23
Marshall and Eisenhower made a dynamic team, among the best general officers the U.S. Army ever produced. The two men collaborated in developing America’s grand strategy for the war. The United States faced the awful dilemma of choosing between fighting Japan or Germany, for it could not engage both fully right away. With MacArthur pinned down by the Japanese invasion of the Philippines and desperately short of everything, the temptation to try to rescue the American and European position in the Pacific was powerful. But Marshall’s new chief of war plans saw the larger picture. “We’ve got to go to Europe to fight, and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world, and still worse, wasting time,” Eisenhower confided to his diary. “If we’re to keep Russia in, save the Middle East, India and Burma, we’ve got to begin slugging with air at West Europe, to be followed by a land attack as soon as possible.”24
President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill, meeting in Washington for three weeks from December 22, 1941, to January 14, 1942, reached the same conclusion, but translating this broad idea into operations would prove immensely complex. To speed things up, Eisenhower had his War Plans Office flesh out the “Germany-first” plan. The first stage would be a massive buildup of U.S. forces in Britain, code-named Bolero, followed by a cross-channel invasion of F
rance. General Marshall tried to sell the plan to the British, who were apprehensive about rushing onto the continent too quickly with too few resources. As Anglo-American strategic conferences fought over the precise timetable and direction of the cross-channel attack, Eisenhower sketched out the creation of a European Theater of Operations, supervised by a London-based Allied headquarters. In June, after showing Marshall the plans he had devised, the chief of staff assigned Ike “the biggest American job of the war”: he was to become commander of the entire Allied war effort against Hitler.25
On June 24, 1942, Major General Eisenhower arrived in London and assumed command of the Allied war in Europe. He started his tour of duty in typical Eisenhower fashion, as the New York Times wryly noted: he “talked informally off the record with British and American correspondents, giving an excellent demonstration of the art of being jovially outspoken without saying much of anything.”26
VI
Eisenhower’s three years in command of the Allied armies in Europe featured an almost unimaginable series of crises, decisions, conflicts of personality, disappointments, and setbacks. Yet with perseverance and exhausting effort, and the heroic sacrifice of millions of soldiers from dozens of nations, Eisenhower led the Allied forces to victory over Germany. These were years that could have broken any man; they certainly took a terrible toll on Eisenhower’s health. Yet he came through the ordeal as a revered, universally acclaimed military leader, a man recognized for his decisiveness, tact, unfailing goodwill, penetrating intelligence, and absolute commitment to victory. In preparing him for a future career as a political leader and commander in chief of the United States, the war years steeled him as no other experience could have done.
As the military leader of a multinational alliance, Eisenhower faced a preeminently political task: to fuse together the British and American military establishments, with their wholly contrasting traditions, organizations, and operational doctrines, into an effective fighting force. Such an amalgamation proved enormously difficult for, as historian Max Hastings has recently shown, American opinion toward the British in mid-1942 was low indeed. The Americans thought the British were shy of fighting after their licking at Dunkirk in May 1940, and British reluctance to open up a second front in France sustained this opinion. One English visitor in America declared that “anti-British feeling was beyond belief,” especially among senior army officers.27
Eisenhower had to reverse this tide, quickly. Upon his arrival in London he set the tone in terms that would come to mark the Eisenhower style. In his first day on the job, he demanded “that an atmosphere of the utmost earnestness coupled with determined enthusiasm and optimism characterize every member of this staff . . . that pessimism and defeatism not be tolerated, and that any person who could not rise above the recognized obstacles and bitter prospects that lie in store for us has no recourse but to ask for instant release from this theatre.”28
The British high command placed the first obstacles in Eisenhower’s path. Churchill had very definite ideas about how the war should be run. He wanted to attack the “soft underbelly” of the enemy in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Italy. Eisenhower and Marshall strongly opposed this plan, which they considered a diversion of men and resources into a theater with little real strategic significance. Victory must come by slaying the German dragon in its lair, namely, Germany. But Churchill and his military commanders, especially the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Gen. (later Field Marshal) Alan Brooke, would not relent. In any case, it had become clear that Eisenhower’s favored alternative, an immediate cross-Channel attack in France, would not be ready in 1942. Roosevelt ordered his generals to stand down. The Americans had to get into the fight somewhere, and in 1942 it would be in North Africa. Eisenhower now had to lead Operation Torch, the invasion of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, a plan against which he had vociferously fought.29
All this was unknown to the wider world, of course. Publicly Eisenhower cultivated the image of a sturdy American fighting man, all business and little fun. The press played up these traits: a profile of the general on the eve of the North African campaign described him as “tall and lean with hard muscles around his jaws and lips that can straighten into an Archimedean line, blue eyes that glint like marbles—he is as tough as hell.” The reporter wrote that the general was known informally as “Ike,” the nickname he’d had since childhood. “He is the best liked and least social of any American officer in London. The town is full of stories about him, but hardly anyone outside military circles knows him.” Early in his London tour he ceased attending clubs and social events, seeing such frivolity as time-consuming and wasteful. “He has established the seven-day week for his officers and eliminated any idea of the eight-hour working day.” The press relished Eisenhower’s public persona as a driven, tough, relentless military mastermind.30
It was hard to live up to the hype. The North African campaign, once under way in November 1942, did not go well. Within days of the landings in Morocco and Algeria, Eisenhower had to make a political judgment that nearly upended his career. By welcoming into the ranks of the Allies the collaborationist French leader Adm. François Darlan, who was in North Africa at the time of the invasion, Eisenhower seemed to be coddling the enemy and rewarding the treacherous behavior of Frenchmen who had made common cause with Hitler. Eisenhower’s view was simple: Darlan’s popularity in North Africa meant that the French Army, which deeply resented the Anglo-American invasion of their empire, would come over to the Allies without further bloodshed, allowing Eisenhower to turn on the real enemy, the Germans, all the more swiftly. But at home and in Britain, Eisenhower’s “Darlan deal” triggered a good deal of negative press.31
More important, Eisenhower’s operational plan in North Africa was unduly cautious and slow, giving the Germans ample time to counter the invasion and reinforce Tunisia. Terrible weather, a thin supply line, inexperienced troops, and a chaotic command structure slowed progress. It would take seven months of heavy fighting to gain control there, and the Germans made the green American soldiers pay dearly. The British generals sharpened their knives: According to General Brooke, Eisenhower was “at a loss as to what to do, and allowed himself to be absorbed in the political situation at the expense of the tactical.” In late December, Brooke huffed in his diary, “Eisenhower as a general is hopeless! He submerges himself in politics and neglects his military duties.”32
Still, Eisenhower retained the confidence of the men who mattered. On January 23, 1943, General Marshall visited him in his headquarters in Algiers and reaffirmed his belief in Eisenhower’s talents. Shocked by Eisenhower’s harried, anxious appearance, Marshall instructed Eisenhower’s naval aide, Capt. Harry Butcher, to “look after him. He is too valuable an officer to overwork himself.”33
Surviving the political and military missteps of North Africa, Eisenhower was now saddled with another operation he opposed: the invasion of Italy. This too reflected British strategic interests, asserted at the Casablanca conference in January 1943, and was another waste of precious resources. But once committed to it, Eisenhower toiled to make it work. The invasion of Sicily and the southern tip of the Italian peninsula during July–September 1943 featured many of the same mistakes made in North Africa. The Americans lacked daring, relied instead on a slow buildup of materiel before taking decisive action, and again the Germans escaped a decisive engagement. Eisenhower was not above self-criticism. In August 1943, with Sicily just about fully in Allied hands, he was still assessing previous operations and identifying mistakes. “The trouble with Ike,” Butcher noted, “is that he has no harness for his brain cells. They keep poring over problems both real and imaginary as ants swarm over an anthill.”34
By the end of 1943 Eisenhower’s forces had been fighting in the European theater for over a year but had yet to land a mortal blow on the German Army. Even so, Eisenhower emerged as a popular public figure, in large part because of his excellent relations with the press and his candid, upbeat person
ality. He was the embodiment of Allied unity and optimism. His zeal in waging a war for freedom never waned, and the public could see the sincerity of his commitment. “In no other war in history,” he wrote to his friend Swede Hazlett in a letter typical of his unfeigned devotion to the cause, “has the issue been so distinctly drawn between the forces of arbitrary oppression on the one side, and on the other those conceptions of individual liberty, freedom and dignity under which we have been raised in our great Democracy.” He confessed he had become “a crusader in this war.”35
The press became devoted to Eisenhower, in large part because he confided in journalists and trusted them to act as his partners rather than his enemies. Butcher called Eisenhower “the keenest in dealing with the press I’ve ever seen, and I have met a lot of them, many of whom are phonies.” Even the skeptical British commanders respected him and liked him more than any other American general (most of whom they openly loathed). With Marshall too valuable as chief of staff to be sent to the field command he yearned for, Roosevelt made the obvious choice to place the invasion of France in Eisenhower’s hands. “Well, Ike, you’re going to command Overlord,” Roosevelt casually told him in the backseat of an armored Cadillac in Cairo in December 1943. It was the biggest command job of the war. Eisenhower earned it through his competent management of the troops, his disciplined strategic focus, and his scrupulously fair treatment of his resentful and frequently embittered British allies. Overlord was the turning point in Eisenhower’s career. The fame and accolades he earned leading the invasion of France in 1944 and then the final assault on Germany in 1944–45 transformed him into the face of American victory and set spinning the wheels of fortune that would carry him to the White House precisely nine years after being told of his new command.36
The Age of Eisenhower Page 4