When that phone call came through, Ike’s heart sank. He knew that Bedell Smith’s call could mean only one thing. “The chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away,” Smith said. “Tell your boss the formal orders will come through later.”
“How long?” asked Ike.
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “Just come along.”
Ike hurried home to collect the suitcase that his wife had packed for him, not knowing that he was embarking on a journey that would lead him to become the Allied commander in Europe and then, a decade later, president of the United States. It was not inevitable that Eisenhower would be chosen for top command. “Had Drum or another officer become chief of staff instead of Marshall, the roster of World War II generals would have looked very different,” commented historian D. K. R. Crosswell.
Marshall did not know Eisenhower well. The young officer had spent much of the previous decade working as the top aide to Douglas MacArthur, who was perhaps Marshall’s opposite in temperament, and indeed might have tried to sidetrack Marshall’s career in the early 1930s. Marshall might have considered Eisenhower in the camp of the petulant former Army chief, but he nevertheless picked Eisenhower from relative obscurity, tested him, and then groomed him for supreme command. At the time Eisenhower was tapped, he was writing to George Patton, pleading for a position of command. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that I could have a regiment in your division,” Ike implored his old friend. “But I think I could do a damn good job of commanding a regiment.”
In some ways Eisenhower did not fit the Marshall template. Most notably, he did not have a reputation for being aggressive, and he lacked combat experience. But in other categories he more than compensated. It is easy to forget now, as we try to peer past World War II and President Eisenhower, what it was about Ike the prewar Army officer that caught Marshall’s eye. Marshall knew something that is now forgotten: that Eisenhower was a surprisingly sophisticated man, well read and well traveled. During World War II, his public relations aide depicted him as a normal fellow who liked to relax with a Western dime-store novel. Eisenhower allowed this to happen, and likely encouraged it, but in his last volume of memoirs he went out of his way to note that as an officer in the interwar period, he had prepared diligently for his profession, for example reading Clausewitz’s On War three times. Once, after World War I, a friend asked him why he was reading so many books about Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Ike responded that he was doing so because that was where the next big war would be fought.
Ike also was cosmopolitan, having lived between the wars in Panama, the Philippines, and France, as well as near Washington, D.C. Behind his grinning farm-boy persona there existed an innovative military thinker, as well as fierceness in both ambition and temper. During the interwar period, he worked with Patton, exploring how to use tanks as more than protection for infantry. His work got him in hot water with his own leaders, so much so that after an article by him appeared in the November 1920 issue of Infantry Journal, he was called before the chief of the infantry branch and ordered to desist or face a court-martial. “Particularly, I was not to publish anything incompatible with solid infantry doctrine,” which maintained that tanks needed to move only as fast as a soldier could walk, as the Army held that the combat task of the tank was to escort the foot soldiers.
British generals in the war tended to treat Eisenhower as a strategic lightweight, and many historians have followed their lead. But there is ample evidence that if he was not a strategic designer himself, he brought to his post a solid understanding of strategy, especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It is thinking and doing.
• • •
The opening for Eisenhower to be called to Washington was created by trouble on the staff of the Army during the dizzying days after Pearl Harbor. Frank McCarthy, Marshall’s junior aide (and decades later the producer of the movie Patton), remembered that on the day of the attack, Brig. Gen. Leonard Gerow, the chief of the War Plans Division, which oversaw military operations, “was nervous as a girl, terribly disturbed and concerned, and he didn’t seem to be making good decisions. He didn’t radiate confidence, let’s put it that way.” In the wake of that performance, Marshall had one comment, McCarthy said: “Get that fellow Eisenhower.” Ironically, Ike had been Gerow’s study partner at Command and General Staff College.
As he hurried to leave San Antonio for Washington on that Friday afternoon in December 1941, Eisenhower was far from pleased. “This message [of summons from Marshall’s office] was a hard blow,” he would remember. Ike already had missed combat in one world war, having been assigned to a stateside training job. Now it looked as if he would be sidetracked into another staff job. “I hoped in any new war to stay with troops,” Eisenhower later explained. “Being ordered to a city where I had already served a total of eight years would mean, I thought, a virtual repetition of my experience in World War I.”
But this would prove to be perhaps the most momentous weekend of Eisenhower’s life, the beginning of both his climb to the top of the military and his subsequent political career. He had missed the last passenger train heading east that day from San Antonio, so he had an Army cargo aircraft fly him along the treetops through stormy weather to Dallas, where he caught up with the eastbound Blue Bonnet Express.
Finding all the train’s seats taken, he sat on his suitcase in an aisle. William Kittrell, a Texas lawyer he knew, came across him perched there. “General, I’ve got a drawing room back there; would you like to come back and sit?” he said. Kittrell was an attorney for Sid Richardson, the oil tycoon, who was relaxing in his own special railcar. Eisenhower accepted the invitation, and the three talked and played poker for much of their ride to Washington, D.C. Early on Sunday, December 14, Eisenhower detrained at the capital’s Union Station, where he was met by his brother Milton. Eleven years later, Richardson, the card-playing oilman, would become a major financial backer of Eisenhower’s presidential campaign—opposing a more conservative group of Texas oilmen backing Ike’s old boss, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
A few hours after arriving in Washington, Eisenhower entered the office of Gen. Marshall, with whom he would have an encounter even more fateful than the one on the train. He didn’t know the Army chief well, having met him only twice and having spoken to him for only about two minutes each time. Marshall clearly had heard good reports about the newly minted brigadier general, as he had invited him to come teach at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. But on this first Sunday following Pearl Harbor, when Ike came into his office in the Munitions Building, Marshall got right to the point. “I walked into his office and within ten seconds he was telling me the problem he wanted me to attack. . . . He just said, ‘Look, there are two things we have got to do. We have got to do our best in the Pacific and we’ve got to win this whole war. Now, how are we going to do it? Now, that is going to be your problem.’” In summary, the question was, Marshall said, “What should be our general line of action?” Both knew what that meant: Where do we draw the line and begin to fight? And do we abandon our men in the Philippines? This was the kind of trial Marshall had in mind when he shared with George Fielding Eliot his thoughts about testing rising officers.
“Give me a few hours,” Eisenhower requested. It was a difficult assignment, but the kind that Ike particularly relished. He would write decad
es later that “I loved to do that kind of work. . . . Practical problems have always been my equivalent of crossword puzzles.”
“All right,” the Army chief agreed, turning away and then leaving the office to make Sunday calls on Gen. Pershing and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
Eisenhower sat quietly in a nearby office in the Munitions Building, which would be torn down in the 1960s and eventually replaced by, among other things, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “The question before me was almost unlimited in its applications,” Eisenhower later wrote. When Marshall returned that afternoon from his round of visits, Eisenhower gave him a three-page typed memo that laid out what he thought the American approach to World War II should be. The Philippines, Ike wrote, were beyond hope. Don’t be sentimental. Give up the islands, and leave American and Filipino friends there to their fate, while giving them what small aid we can. Fall back and regroup. Nor should the Army heed the panicky calls of West Coast politicians for military protection for their cities, which would divert desperately needed troops and gear. Rather, the initial focus of American military operations against Japan should concentrate on faraway Australia, which would have to be the launching platform for the counteroffensive. Thus, the top military priority in the Pacific would be to keep open the air and sea lanes to it, which meant holding Hawaii, Fiji, New Zealand, and the other islands along the route, as well as Australia itself. That task was essential, and to carry it out successfully was worth almost any risk and expenditure.
Marshall read the memo, then looked up. “I agree with you,” he told the young brigadier. Eisenhower had passed his first major test. It was not a test of national strategic planning, but almost certainly one of personality and intellect. That is, Eisenhower in his memo simply elaborated on strategic decisions that the American military establishment had been mulling for the previous decade, when it was all but ignored by the public during the depths of the Depression. In the early 1920s, the Navy’s War Plan Orange, written for a conflict with Japan, had called for aggressively defending Manila, but by the early 1930s the plan had been revised in a cautious manner and called for forfeiting the entire Philippine archipelago. In 1939, Maj. Gen. John DeWitt, commandant of the Army War College, emphatically stated in an internal discussion of war plans that “we cannot, even as conditions are today, reinforce the Philippines. We are going to lose them right away. We are 9,000 miles away; the Japanese [are] next door.” This conclusion was made policy in a series of secret discussions between the American military and the British military starting in January 1941. The Navy’s “Rainbow 5” global war plan stated in May 1941 that “no Army reinforcements will be sent to the Philippine Coastal Frontier.”
So, rather than looking for strategic guidance, Marshall was more likely seeing if Ike had sufficient ice in his veins to recommend that thousands of his old friends and comrades in the Philippines be abandoned, condemning them to death or a war spent as prisoners of the Japanese. Marshall also probably wanted to gauge how much of a hold Gen. MacArthur still had on Ike. It is not clear whether Marshall knew that, in 1938, MacArthur had put aside Ike as his senior staff member and replaced him with the sycophantic Richard Sutherland, who would serve MacArthur throughout World War II—faithfully, except for repeatedly disobeying orders to get rid of the mistress he kept nearby. Ike found out about his demotion only when he returned from leave. When he protested, MacArthur coldly told him he was free to seek another assignment.
At any rate, Eisenhower passed Marshall’s first test. Marshall looked up from the memo and immediately gave the brigadier another one: Tell me how to implement this. Ike later would recall how Marshall concluded the conversation on that grim Sunday in December 1941. “Eisenhower,” Marshall said, “the department is filled with able men who analyze their problems but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.” Ike thought to himself that as Marshall spoke, his eyes were “awfully cold.”
Prioritizing tends to be a forgotten aspect of strategy. The art of strategy is foremost not about how to do something but about what to do. In other words, the first problem is to determine what the real problem is. There are many aspects to any given problem, but the strategist must sort through them and determine its essence, for there lies the key to its solution. Eisenhower clearly understood the need to separate the essential from the merely important. In March 1942, he and an aide drafted a long memo for Marshall that differentiated primary war aims from lesser ones. The three primary goals, they wrote, had to be “the security of England, the retention of Russia in the war as an active war ally, and the defense of the Middle East.” (Holding the Mideast prevented the possible linkup on land of German and Japanese forces in, perhaps, Iran and also kept open the supply line to Russia, at a time when keeping Russia in the war was indeed essential.) Everything else was secondary, they noted, in a classic summary of the nature of strategic decision making: “All other operations must be considered highly desirable rather than in the mandatory class.” The implication of that conclusion, they continued, meant that victory in Europe had to take precedence over winning in the Pacific. Again, this was not original thinking. If anything, it made explicit the Army’s version of a quiet understanding that already existed with the British. But it showed a clear grasp of how to implement that understanding.
Eisenhower himself also could be coldly calculating about risk. In his memoirs, he recalled making the decision to put fourteen thousand soldiers aboard the Queen Mary and send it through submarine-infested waters, knowing that its lifeboats and rafts could hold only eight thousand. He had calculated that, while it lacked armed escort, the ocean liner was fast enough to outrun German submarines—but not if it encountered one by chance. He had experienced some anxiety when the ship put into a Brazilian port and an Italian radio transmission was intercepted reporting its presence and, later, the direction in which it sailed.
Six months later, in October 1942, Eisenhower would write to Marshall from London, laying out a fairly clear plan for the remainder of the war. Looking forward through the fog and chaos of war is never easy, but Eisenhower, having settled into his new post as U.S. commander for operations in Europe, made it look so when he confidently wrote—even before U.S. forces were engaged against the Germans in North Africa in “Operation Torch”—that he could envision “launching a decisive blow in the spring of ’44.” In this scenario, “the summer of ’43 would be used for building up the necessary forces in Great Britain, firmly establishing ourselves in favorable positions in the Southwest Pacific and exploiting TORCH.” That, of course, would prove to be a prescient sentence.
Marshall knew that he could tutor the bright, ambitious Eisenhower in strategic planning in part because Ike already embodied Marshall’s insistence on a team spirit in his senior leaders. Military historians tend to dwell on Eisenhower’s personal cooperativeness, and indeed he was cooperative, unusually so—with other branches of the military, with civilian American officials, and with representatives of other nations. It was a quality not shared by many of his Army peers, some of whom seemed to revel in distrusting the British. It may have been Ike’s most important personal asset. “Some men reach the top through a tremendous intellect, a ruthless disposition, a burning ambition, or an utter disregard for the feelings of others,” wrote Maj. Gen. Sir Francis de Guingand, chief of staff through most of World War II to Gen. Bernard Montgomery, who certainly excelled at disregarding the feelings of others. But this was not the case with Eisenhower, de Guingand continued:
I think his success was largely due to his great human qualities: his sense of humor, his common sense and his essential honesty and integrity. He inspired love and unfailing loyalty; he had a magic touch when dealing with conflicting issues or clashes of personalities; and he knew how to find a solution along the lines of compromise, without surrendering a principle. He is, in fact, a great de
mocrat.
Ike’s British subordinates also found him very American. “Here was somebody who seemed eager to cast aside conventions and get on with the job” was the first impression he gave to Maj. Gen. Sir Kenneth Strong, his intelligence chief for most of the war. “He seemed to represent a new and interesting world.” (Interestingly, one of the officers on his staff Strong deemed “most able” was Enoch Powell, who before the war was a brilliant professor of Greek, during the war turned sharply anti-American, and after the war would become prominent as an anti-immigration politician in the British Parliament. Powell’s edition of Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War is still studied and respected.) The sort of man who became a general in the American military was different from the British mold of minor aristocrats and country gentlemen. One officer who shot to prominence, J. Lawton Collins, was the offspring of Irish immigrants. Maurice Rose was the son of a rabbi. Several other senior generals, such as Clarence Huebner, Courtney Hodges, Ben Lear, Walter Krueger, and Troy Middleton, had risen from the enlisted ranks. An armor general, Ernest Harmon, was an orphan. One of the fastest risers in the Army of World War II, the paratrooper James Gavin, had been adopted out of an orphanage by a Pennsylvania coal-mining family and, not wanting to become a miner himself, had run away from home as a teenager to join the Army.
Marshall and Ike mature
Both Marshall and Eisenhower made several major mistakes during the war. Most notably, Marshall repeatedly advocated invading Europe earlier than the British wanted to. Had the Allies landed in France in 1943, as he advised, they would have been pitting less experienced troops against a veteran German army that still enjoyed adequate air support, which would have made the Normandy landings a far riskier proposition than they were a year later. He and Eisenhower also opposed Operation Torch, the U.S.-led foray into North Africa in late 1942, which in retrospect probably was essential as a shakedown campaign for the green American forces and their untried commanders. Marshall also seemed to have a tin ear on issues of race and perhaps could have done far more to integrate the armed forces during World War II than he did.
The Generals Page 5