In coordination with the U.S. forces, the British sent the Second British Army, British XXX Corps, and the 3rd British Infantry, 6th British Airborne, 50th British Infantry, and 3rd Canadian Infantry divisions to land at Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. These ground troops were further supported by the Royal Air Force’s Second Tactical Air Force and the Royal Navy’s Eastern Task Force.
As the day for the invasion neared, Eisenhower sensed that the tactical situation in France was changing, as the number of German ground forces in the area began to increase. He also had serious concerns about the weather and personally made the decision to invade with the words “Okay, we’ll go.”78 The decision made, Eisenhower issued a statement to the Allied troops to explain the significance of the operation, saying:
You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely.
But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940–41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-toman. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory!
I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!
Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.79
General Eisenhower talks with paratroopers from the 101st Airborne Division at Green Common Airfield, England, on June 5, 1944. (Library of Congress)
While publicly expressing the utmost confidence in the Allied effort, privately Eisenhower wrote a letter in which he accepted full responsibility in the event that the invasion failed. In the aftermath of the landings in France on June 6, 1944, and despite the loss of approximately 10,000 men, however, Eisenhower did not need to submit his letter, as the Allies had gained a foothold on the Continent. Though there was still significant fighting to be done before the collapse of the German and Axis powers, Eisenhower had established himself in the annals of military history as the supreme Allied commander who oversaw the successful invasion of Europe.
Eisenhower’s success earned him a fifth star in December 1944. For the next five months Eisenhower continued to command the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF), which had been established in Versailles, France. In April 1945 an advanced headquarters opened in Rheims, France, where on May 8, 1945, Eisenhower oversaw the unconditional surrender of the German military, effectively ending the war in Europe.
In the immediate aftermath of the war in Europe, Eisenhower served briefly as military governor of the United States Occupied Zone until asked by President Harry S. Truman to become the Army chief of staff upon General George C. Marshall’s retirement. Though not wanting the position, Eisenhower agreed to Truman’s request with the proviso that he would not serve the full four-year term, but, rather, only two years.80 On November 19, 1945, Eisenhower became the Army chief of staff.
Although the war was over, Eisenhower had to preside over the massive demobilization that took place at the end of the war. The Truman administration had publicly established a goal of 700,000 discharges a month, which proved to be impossible to achieve. Eisenhower explained to Truman that the real issue was the need for transportation to get the soldiers home. After working on a demobilization plan, Eisenhower got the Truman administration to restate its demobilization goal of 300,000 soldiers per month.81 By the end of 1946, just fourteen months after assuming the position of chief of staff, Eisenhower had supervised the largest demobilization in the history of the United States.
After demobilization, Eisenhower supported President Truman’s proposal to unify the three military services. To Eisenhower “victory required a single commander with absolute authority to harness the power of ground, air, and naval forces in a way that brought the strengths of each to maximum effectiveness. No duplication of effort, no untapped resources, no inter-service rivalry.”82 Yet despite his vast experience, there was too much entrenched history to move forward with the concept of a unified military. In the end the United States Air Force became a separate military service and the War Department was reorganized under the National Security Act of 1947, which established a unified organization under a secretary of Defense, created the Central Intelligence Agency, and formed a permanent Joint Chiefs of Staff. This action was not quite unification, but it was an attempt to take the lessons learned during war and apply them to the emerging Cold War.
As Eisenhower’s tenure as chief of staff neared its end, he was faced with a series of choices. He had several options. The first was to leave active service and enjoy the quiet life. This did not appeal to Eisenhower. The second was an offer to run as Truman’s vice presidential candidate in 1948 in an attempt to reverse Truman’s slumping approval rating. Again, this did not appeal to Eisenhower, as he had also been approached by the Republicans to run as a Republican candidate for the presidency. A third offer was to become president of Columbia University. Eisenhower finally accepted this offer in June 1948.83
While at Columbia, Eisenhower had to become accustomed to a very different pace and protocol. He recounts in At Ease that on one of his first attempts to go to his office on a Saturday, which was his custom in the military, he was confronted with a locked door to the building, as well as by an inquiring policemen who did not believe that he was the president of the university, and had apparently never heard of Eisenhower. The issue was resolved when another police officer vouched for the new university president.84 After a period of transition, Eisenhower settled into the position at Columbia University and began to enjoy the academic life. As 1950 came to a close, Eisenhower received a call from President Truman that would interrupt his tenure at Columbia.
Truman told Eisenhower that the member nations of the newly created North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had formally requested that Eisenhower be appointed the first commander of NATO’s combined military forces. The position, supreme Allied commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, would allow Eisenhower to go back to Europe and command troops once again.85 Upon accepting the position, however, he found that it was more a political job than a military one. The real purpose of his command was to build international consensus on the validity of NATO and its mission in the early days of the Cold War. After two years of political wrangling, France, the last country to sign the collective security pact, initialed the treaty in May 1952. Eisenhower believed that this act completed his assigned objective and that he could finally “be released from active duty.”86 He retired from service on May 31, 1952, and resigned his commission in July 1952.
Having left active military duty, Eisenhower was courted by both the Democrat and Republican parties during 1951. Eventually, he succumbed to the Republican “Draft Eisenhower” movement and began his run for the presidency.87 On November 4, 1952, Eisenhower was elected the thirty-fourth president of the United States. One of the major planks of his platform during the campaign had been a promise to end the Korean War. Accordingly, he helped broker a long-term cease-fire in 1953. Eisenhower’s two terms as president entailed confrontation with the Soviet Union, race issues in the United States, concerns about the economic stability of the United States, and the start of the space race.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Library of Congress)
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Having begun his presidency by overseeing a cease-fire in Korea, Eisenhower embraced the tenets of NSC-68, which outlined containment as the basic national security strategy for the United States during the entirety of the Cold War.88 Seeing the need to maintain a strong military presence in Europe and Asia, Eisenhower outlined a “New Look” policy that emphasized the use of nuclear weapons from the tactical to the strategic levels of war.89 As a fiscal conservative, Eisenhower was deeply concerned with the extensive monetary outlays needed to rebuild the conventional elements of the U.S. military to compete with the vast manpower advantages of the Soviet Union and the other members of the Warsaw Pact. To compensate for this shortfall, under the New Look Eisenhower emphasized that the U.S. military could get “more bang for its buck” by relying on nuclear weapons to compensate for the conventional force imbalance.90
In addition to reliance on the New Look to reshape the U.S. military, Eisenhower supported the concept of Massive Retaliation, which was formally presented by his secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in 1954. This policy held that the United States needed to move away from the symmetrical containment policies of the Truman administration and embrace asymmetrical containment, founded on nuclear weapons, in an effort to assert a stronger deterrent against Communist expansion. Although it was an effective policy in the period 1954–57, the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik eroded the validity of Massive Retaliation because the enemy now possessed the ability to strike the United States rapidly with intercontinental ballistic missiles, a capability that the Soviet Union had lacked in 1954 when John Foster Dulles announced the policy of Massive Retaliation.91 Yet Eisenhower steadfastly supported the tenets of the strategy even under increased pressure from General Maxwell Taylor, who argued that it was dangerous and outdated.
A critical and well-known element of Eisenhower’s presidency was his support of the development of military and civilian space programs. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957, Eisenhower supported the development of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). By establishing a civilian agency, as well as supporting the civilian use of space, Eisenhower believed that the United States could use these examples of its technological and engineering capability as critical tools in the Cold War contest with the Soviet Union. His prime objective was to demonstrate to the world that the United States was the world’s leader in advanced technology, science, and engineering.92 Additionally, Eisenhower’s support of NASA emerged as a crucial way to establish that the United States was interested in the civilian and peaceful benefits of space and saw no need to arm the heavens.93
Though a champion of the civilian space program, Eisenhower remained conservative about the need to stay focused and constrained in the space race, so as not to bankrupt the nation as it tried to respond to the series of space firsts achieved by the Soviet Union. Eisenhower did not want to charge headlong into “space stunts” just for the sake of publicity. Instead, he believed that the United States needed to maintain steadfastly its intended objective, as it would have additional benefits for the nation and its allies in the long-term context of the Cold War. Eisenhower was correct. By the middle of the 1960s, the United States had finally started to win the space race, largely on the basis of the programs begun in the final days of Eisenhower’s administration and certainly because of his calm and steadfast leadership.
As president, Eisenhower also had to deal with domestic social issues. In the landmark legal case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed the legal ruling of segregation that the Supreme Court had outlined in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court ruled that the concept of “separate but equal” was no longer valid, and Eisenhower had the difficult task of enforcing the Court’s ruling.94 Although the process of full desegregation would extend beyond his tenure as president, Eisenhower took the early step of sending the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock, Arkansas, to ensure that school desegregation took place in a peaceful and orderly fashion.
During his two terms as president, Eisenhower firmly established the United States as the free world’s leader in the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. Critical to this position was the U.S. military’s embrace of a greater reliance on nuclear weapons, as well as streamlining the process of outlining strategy and plans for strategic nuclear warfare.95 Eisenhower based his strategic planning on the intelligence gathered from manned overflights of the Soviet Union by the Strategic Air Command and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which he had authorized.
Eisenhower did not just brandish a big stick. He also saw the need to use other elements of U.S. power, such as the pursuit of mutual security. Using NATO as the model, Eisenhower negotiated the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Australia, New Zealand, and United States Pact (ANZUS) to bolster the defensive posture of U.S. allies in the Pacific. In addition to security pacts, Eisenhower also used the CIA in covert operations in Guatemala and Iran to ensure that leftist governments did not gain footholds in Latin America and the Middle East.96 Again, his objective was to check the expansion of the Soviet Union and Communism.
Domestically, Eisenhower ushered in a period of social and economic transition as the nation settled down to a period of peace in the aftermath of the Korean War. For Eisenhower this entailed the United States maintaining the right balance between the need for national security and the demands of a peacetime economy that fostered economic prosperity. In addition to the economic demands of the nation, Eisenhower had the duty to enforce school desegregation. Despite his strong leadership, Eisenhower had developed a public reputation as a manager of his administration, rather than a strong, imperial president. Historians writing in the 1980s reexamined his presidency and came to the conclusion that Eisenhower had a much greater role in major policy debates, exercising significant control in the decision-making process.97 This leadership style has been identified as the “hidden-hand” presidency, and Eisenhower’s reputation as a strong chief executive has increased.
As a testament to his abilities and keen intellect, in his farewell address Eisenhower warned the United States about the expansion and growth of the “military-industrial complex” and cautioned the nation about the need to maintain the proper balance between the proverbial “guns and butter.” After leaving the presidency, Eisenhower retired to his farm in Gettysburg and lived a relatively quiet life. He wrote three books on his life and experiences in war and peace, played golf, tended to his garden, painted, and focused on establishing his presidential library in Abilene, Kansas, which was to be built on the land of his boyhood home. In March 1969 Eisenhower died. His family buried him in April 1969 in the chapel on the grounds of his presidential library.
“Duty, honor, country” are the three words that characterize the influence Dwight D. Eisenhower had not only on the U.S. military, but also on the nation as a whole. From his first days at West Point he dedicated himself to the nation and strove to make it better, leaving a lasting legacy as a military commander and national leader.
Notes
1. Eisenhower was not held in very high regard as a politician when he left the White House in 1961. Rather, the general public and historians tended to rank him as a mediocre president. In 1982, however, the political scientist Fred I. Greenstein published The Hidden-Hand Presidency (New York: Basic Books), which fundamentally challenged the traditional interpretations of Eisenhower’s leadership style and argued that Eisenhower was a much stronger president than had been perceived.
2. Geoffrey Perret, Eisenhower (New York: Random House, 1999), 6; Piers Brendon, Ike: His Life and Times (New York: HarperCollins, 1986), 14.
3. Brendon, Ike, 16.
4. Perret, Eisenhower, 6.
5. Ibid., 7.
6. Ibid.
7. Dwight D. Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), 32.
8. Brendon, Ike, 21.
9. Ibid., 36.<
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10. Ibid.
11. Perret, Eisenhower, 29.
12. Ibid.
13. Eisenhower, At Ease, 41–43; Perret, Eisenhower, 27–29; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890–1952 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 33–36.
14. Perret, Eisenhower, 31.
15. Brendon, Ike, 25–26; Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 38. Edgar Eisenhower was pursuing a law degree at the University of Michigan.
16. Perret, Eisenhower, 37; Brendon, Ike, 26; Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 38.
17. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 40–41.
18. Michael Korda, Ike: An American Hero (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 87; Eisenhower, At Ease, 4.
19. Eisenhower, At Ease, 4.
20. Perret, Eisenhower, 49; Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 49.
21. Eisenhower’s West Point class had 164 members, 54 of whom rose to the rank of brigadier general. Some of the other prominent members were Vernon Prichard, Charles Ryder, Stafford Irwin, Joseph McNarney, and Hubert Harmon.
22. Eisenhower, At Ease, 118; Korda, Ike, 114–15.
23. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 57; Perret, Eisenhower, 66.
24. Mark C. Bender, Watershed at Leavenworth: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Command and General Staff School (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute, 1990), 18; Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 61–62.
25. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, 62; Bender, Watershed at Leavenworth, 18.
26. Eisenhower, At Ease, 156; also cited in Bender, Watershed at Leavenworth, 20.
27. Brendon, Ike, 46; Bender, Watershed at Leavenworth, 20.
28. Eisenhower, At Ease, 156.
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