But that wasn’t where it had started. It had begun in the Packard, that long snout-nosed car which looked like a young whale on wheels. Bunched up with his team beside him, Eisenhower seemed happiest when he was in that car listening and debating while documents were passed back and forth amid a stream of profanity.
That’s what Ike liked about the Packard. It took him out of smoky offices with portraits of long-dead British grandees on the wall, to streets and roads of city and countryside where his impatience would be calmed by changing scenery and the knowledge that he could switch direction with a single command.
On those daily trips their eyes would meet in the rear-view mirror, usually after he had thrown up his hands in exasperation at the drafting of a document or the comment of an aide. He would flash a look at her eyes in the mirror as if to say: “Can you believe these guys?”
She would smile encouragement but he wouldn’t see that. He only ever saw her eyes in the Packard. That’s when it had begun, a conspiracy of eyes meeting in a rear-view mirror. You tell nothing from a face but see a world in the eyes. A long-ago poet had said that. It was true.
And that night on his first day back in the country he had taken her hand, touched her gently on the back as she left to go to bed and said he had missed her.
Such memories did not help her sleep that night. Whatever lay between her and the boss had aroused scurrilous gossip. There would be a price to pay one day; that’s what the vicious backchat told her.
Either way, even if he was aware of it, the talk didn’t bother Eisenhower. He never took her into top-level meetings, nor would he reveal the momentous decisions that were taking shape behind closed doors across London. She would wait patiently in the Packard, reading some of the western thrillers he liked so much.
Then, when he got back into the car, she would gauge the mood in the rear-view mirror; if he was alone, and the timing was right, she would drop a comment about the latest plotline or character she had come across from those wild days out west when good and evil faced each other on dusty main streets with guns in their hands.
He loved those stories and she made sure he always had a pile of the latest editions, sent over from New York. They were by his bedside every night with the Lucky Strikes, the lighter, and a carafe of water.
9
May 1944
Erwin Rommel stood on the cliffs overlooking the French port of Boulogne, surveying the defences along beaches and dunes for miles in either direction. This was Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, which stretched from Belgium along the length of the Channel coast all the way to the Cherbourg peninsula. As the newly promoted commander of Army Group B, Rommel’s orders were to strengthen the wall and defend occupied Europe against an invasion they all knew was coming – an invasion by one and a half million men and the might of the United States of America together with Britain and what was left of her Empire.
There were just twenty miles of open sea from this point on the coast to Dover on the English coast. This is where the Allies would try and force a landing. Rommel was certain of it. He knew that reports of invasion across the longer sea journey to Normandy were a carefully created deception. No general in his right mind would choose a sixty-mile crossing on a sea open to the Atlantic to a calm twenty-mile crossing further up the Channel.
The key to the coming battle was to know the mind of the man who had just been promoted to supreme Allied commander charged with liberating Europe: General Dwight Eisenhower. Know your enemy was the first rule of Clausewitz’s teachings on warfare.
He sat down to read the file on Eisenhower in the drawing room of his headquarters, a twelfth-century chateau forty miles north of Paris. He ordered a pot of coffee and told his staff not disturb him.
The file raised more questions than it answered. Eisenhower was a country boy from Kansas who had not done brilliantly at college or at the West Point Military Academy. He had been a sportsman at the former and something of a star poker player at the latter. He came across as a steady, studious learner who displayed no evident ambition to command men in battle.
Rommel frowned. How had a man with a lacklustre academic record at college and an undistinguished time at America’s most famous military academy climbed so far as to become supreme Allied commander of the British and American armies now gathered across the Channel? How had Eisenhower, who had graduated from West Point as a second lieutenant in 1915, coming sixty-first in a class of 164, risen so high?
He read on. The file had been first prepared by the German military attaché in Washington before Pearl Harbor had brought America into the war in December 1941. Events surrounding Pearl Harbor provided half the answer. When the American battleships of the Pacific fleet lay sunk or smouldering at their Hawaii base, General George Marshall, the army chief of staff, had summoned Eisenhower, then a lowly two-star general, to Washington from his base in Antonio, Texas and asked for a plan of action.
Eisenhower had shone at army manoeuvres the previous autumn, and Marshall wanted to see whether this unknown general could rise to the crisis facing the nation and deliver strategic thinking to match his tactical skills.
Eisenhower had returned the same day with a plan to set up a major base in Australia with secure lines of communication from which to launch forces to defend Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand from the Japanese. There were not enough available forces to cover every Allied territory. This meant exposing the Philippines to attack and possibly sacrificing US forces there.
Marshall accepted the plan, with the result that General Patton, the commander in the Philippines, who was robustly demanding reinforcements, was denied them. Furious, Patton flew to Australia, leaving behind an army that was forced to surrender to the Japanese. But the Eisenhower plan had saved bases and sea lanes vital for an American counter-attack. The unknown general from Abilene was on his way.
Rommel read further.
There had to be something else to explain the accelerated promotion of a man who possessed none of the intellect or the gravitas of the great George Marshall. Now there was a man Rommel could admire. The American chief of staff had proved himself to be a professional soldier with intellect, ambition and the ability to take difficult decisions at dangerous moments on the battlefield.
The Wehrmacht high command, and indeed Hitler himself, had expected the president to appoint Marshall to command the Allied invasion forces, not Marshall’s protégé, Eisenhower. Perhaps there was the key to the enigma – that word, protégé. Marshall, the finest military mind in Washington, had seen something in Eisenhower that had eluded German intelligence.
There were no clues in the family history. The file merely noted that the Eisenhauers had emigrated from Germany in 1741 and anglicised their name to Eisenhower sometime during the years of travel across America which finally took the family to Abilene, then the wildest of the western cattle towns.
Eisenhower’s personal life seemed conventional enough: married at the age of twenty-six to Mamie Doud, a young woman from a well-off family which ran a meatpacking business. Their first child, a boy, had died of scarlet fever at the age of three. A second son had appeared shortly after. The death of his first son had reportedly devastated Eisenhower.
Eisenhower’s family tragedy might explain a certain emotional detachment that had been noted in the profile, but it still did not explain his rise to such prominence.
Rommel found the answer he was seeking at the very end of the file in a section headed “Postscript”:
Eisenhower’s outstanding quality apart from purely professional skills is his tact, an unusual asset in an ambitious American commander. He has a quick temper with subordinates but conceals it well when dealing with his superiors. He deals effectively with difficult colleagues, soothing ruffled feathers after the inevitable rows and disagreements. He projects personal warmth which makes him well liked at all levels of the service. However on a personal level he is s
aid to find difficulty in expressing his feelings apart from occasional outbursts of anger especially when playing bridge or poker with his colleagues.
So that was it. The man had a political side, a charm rarely found in a soldier of such high rank. But charm alone could not explain why Roosevelt had overlooked Marshall and appointed Eisenhower to the top job. Roosevelt must have seen something else in the little-known general from the Midwest. Well, Eisenhower would need all his charm when dealing with that vainglorious bastard Montgomery, not to speak of the warmongering drunk, Churchill.
Rommel was about to close the file when he noticed an addendum on the final page, to which grainy black-and-white photographs had been attached. He glanced at the photos. They showed an attractive uniformed woman, probably in her mid-thirties, standing beside and behind Eisenhower, almost always with a large Packard in the fame. Her uniform was not military but seemed to have been put together by an organisation trying to look military. Beneath every photo the name Summersby had been written in indelible ink.
An anonymous intelligence officer in some bureaucratic backwater in Berlin with too much time on his hands had created profiles of every member of Eisenhower’s senior staff. Summersby’s promotion from driver to personal assistant and “confidante” was noted.
Rommel was interested. Civilian drivers did not become “confidantes” of senior generals without a very good reason. He at first suspected misinformation, a propaganda plant by Allied intelligence, but could see no reason for that.
Rommel found that friendly Latin American diplomats in Washington had passed on to Berlin the endless gossip which enlivened the cocktail party circuit in Georgetown and played out in the US press: the magazine pictures of Summersby standing right behind the so-called supreme commander on almost all official occasions told their own story.
Eisenhower’s personal life was not as conventional as Rommel had supposed. He was having an affair with his driver. He had promoted the Summersby woman from his car to his bedroom. There could be no other explanation. He looked more carefully at the photographs attached to the file. The woman was definitely pretty, but looked too conventional to have become a mistress. Rommel rebuked himself. It was a foolish judgement. How could he possibly know what moved a man like Eisenhower to take up with his driver?
The fact was that if the Allied commander couldn’t keep his flighty girlfriend a secret from the Washington press, how was he going to fool the German high command with a double invasion feint on the scale suggested? The invasion was obviously going to come across the narrow neck of the Channel to the Calais-Boulogne region. Only the Führer thought otherwise.
Rommel had enjoyed the reports on Summersby because they had showed up that lunatic Goebbels and his mad ideas. The propaganda chief had wanted to make much of Eisenhower’s “sluttish Irish mistress”, as he called her. He had planned to beam English and Spanish language broadcasts across the Atlantic, hoping to entangle Eisenhower in damaging publicity.
The Führer had rebuked him, a rare but welcome occurrence as far as Rommel was concerned. Goebbels was told not to waste his time. All American commanders kept mistresses when on active service, Hitler had said; it was almost a tradition in the US Army. Rommel knew there was another reason for the Führer’s reticence. Hitler’s inner circle were well aware that he kept his own mistress, Eva Braun, tucked away in the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria.
The German commander drew back the heavy brocade curtains of the drawing room and looked into the darkness. The stars were disappearing behind cloud. A north wind would bring rain that night. The fast-changing weather along the Channel would be an ally in the battle to come, another line of defence.
10
June 1944
For Kay Summersby and those who worked closely with her, the invasion of Europe began amid a rain-lashed tented encampment, generously described as a command headquarters, and ended in the sunshine of a Normandy orchard.
The thread of time that connected these two settings unspooled at a pace so swift that those who found themselves camped among laden apple trees looked back in disbelief at what had happened since they had stepped out of their tents that rainy morning. Four weeks had passed. It seemed like a day.
It was just before four in the morning on the 5th of June when Kay brewed up coffee in a canvas kitchen tent alongside Eisenhower’s camouflaged trailer in the woods near Portsmouth. She knocked briefly on the door and, hearing no reply, went in. Ike was sitting in semi-darkness on the edge of his bed rubbing his eyes.
“Boss, it’s time to go,” she said, handing him the steaming cup of coffee. Twenty minutes later, showered, shaved and wearing his battledress, Eisenhower was driven for a final conference with his generals, their senior staff and, crucially, the weather men.
Kay could hear every stitch of canvas in the tented camps around the headquarters straining in the wind and rain as they hurried, heads down, to the car for the drive to Portsmouth.
The night before her boss had paced the carpeted floor in the trailer, chain-smoking, flicking ash into fag-end choked ashtrays, coughing occasionally and sometimes bending double with indigestion. All the while the wind and rain battered against the windows.
Well past midnight Kay had tried to leave, telling her boss to get some sleep. He refused.
“You’re staying. I may need a driver any time.”
“I’m not staying. You need sleep, not a driver.”
She would not normally talk to him like that. But he didn’t snap back. He just looked at his watch and lit another cigarette. It was just after 1 a.m. when she left the trailer, hoping for a few hours’ sleep. As she closed her tent flap, Kay saw the light in the trailer go off.
It seemed only minutes later that she was opening the trailer door and handing him a cup of coffee. She next remembered opening the car door and watching Eisenhower walk through a gap in the camouflage netting that disguised the command headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force just outside Portsmouth. It was before dawn and still dark.
They were all there – Montgomery and British and American army, navy and air force commanders, all but Montgomery in battledress. Monty always liked to be different. He was wearing a fawn pullover with corduroys and a black beret.
They listened to the latest weather reports: a zone of high pressure was trailing a depression which was already passing through the Channel. Better weather could be expected to reach the Channel the following morning, June 6th. Critically the swell would have lessened, allowing landing craft onto the beaches.
The weather man brought the meeting to a conclusion. “Listen,” he said. Outside the wind had dropped, the lashing rain had eased into a ghostly pattering on the windowpanes. The sky was lightening outside. Everyone turned to Eisenhower.
“OK, we’ll go,” he said, looking at every face in the room in turn, not seeking agreement but wishing to imprint the finality of his decision on those present. He was met with smiles of relief.
Outside Kay was waiting in the car. It was still raining. She wound the window down and threw out a glowing stub. It was against his orders, but if ever there was a day to break the rules it was this day.
Ike got back into the car, lit a cigarette, drew on it with one deep breath then threw it out of the window.
He looked in the rear mirror and nodded. “It’s on,” he said.
The greatest military adventure in history remained in Kay’s mind as a series of jumbled images lacking sequence or meaning until placed in the context of the cryptic code name, “D-Day”.
A child’s drawing, a painted portrait of an ancestor, a blurred photo in a family album, an inky signature scrawled on an old love letter, a faded order of service for a funeral – such images open memories like flowers in the morning. So it was with Kay and D-Day:
The sun setting in a paint box of colours that evening, broad brush strokes of red, ora
nge and purple.
Faces of the paratroops blackened with charcoal and cocoa.
The ghostly features of Eisenhower moving among these men in darkness, shaking hands, accepting whispered messages to loved ones. In his face the pride of a father with his sons, the love of a man for his true family, a brotherhood of men at arms.
The way his eyes clouded, the way he bent his head to hear a soldier’s whispered remark, the way he took out a white handkerchief and blew his nose, the tears visible in his eyes, wiped away with the back of his hand.
Camouflaged troops, silky shadows in the darkness, their voices those of the night. In a few hours many would be dead. Everyone knew that.
Occasional torch flashes showing the easy familiarity with which the men carried their rifles and the way their battledress bulged with rations, spare ammunition and bandages.
Wingtips flashing white lights as the aircraft took off and climbed to join the armada above.
The sparkle of distant stars in a crowded sky.
Cigarettes glowing like fireflies as they watched from the roof of the control tower the first, and for many men the final, act of liberation.
She saw it all because he had ordered her to stay close as he moved among his men. She was to write down the names of those he talked to. She bent close to them with her notebook. Their breath smelt of chewing gum and whisky. He said nothing to her that night. He was not smoking. He seemed much calmer. Then came a story that would never be forgotten or retold.
It was well after midnight when they arrived at the final airbase that night. Unusually the men kept their distance. They didn’t look their commander in the face nor did they crowd around him. Eisenhower quickly learnt the reason. A platoon commander, a young officer in his twenties, had retreated to the command hut and was refusing to come out. Kay heard the word “breakdown” whispered in Eisenhower’s ear.
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