Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  Ike looked at an aide and nodded towards the hut. The two men walked over, opened the door and went in. Eisenhower paused at the door, looked back at Kay and nodded. She slipped in behind him and stood against a wall.

  The soldier was squatting on the floor, hunched forward, his back against a wall, visibly trembling. Kay noticed his hands immediately. They were twisting and turning into each other as if trying to break free. There were streaks of tears on his charcoal-blackened face. His rifle was lying some distance away, suggesting it had been thrown rather than placed on the ground.

  Eisenhower leant his back against the wall, slid down and squatted beside him. The two men stared ahead, neither looking at the other; Eisenhower spoke slowly and softly.

  “Soldier, I am your commanding officer, I want you to stand up. Right now.”

  The soldier sniffed, rubbed the back of his hand against his nose and remained where he was. He was still shaking, not violently but as if possessed of a high fever. His hands continued to writhe like tethered puppies. Eisenhower got to his feet. He did not look at the man. His voice hardened.

  “Get to your feet, soldier. Now.”

  Slowly the man stood up and swayed slightly on his feet, looking down. Eisenhower faced him for the first time.

  “Your name and rank, soldier?”

  “McMichael, sir. Captain.”

  “Look at me, Captain.”

  The soldier remained looking down and spoke in a whisper.

  “I can’t do it, sir. I’m sorry.”

  Kay tried to gauge his age. He looked no more than a boy but was perhaps twenty-three, a young officer schooled in the art of war at West Point. There was no wedding ring on his finger but there would be a girl somewhere, a fiancée maybe. Behind the tears and the camouflage he was a good-looking young man.

  Eisenhower unbuttoned his tunic and opened it.

  “Put your hand on my heart, Captain.”

  The man shook his head and mumbled something inaudible.

  “Do it.”

  Kay wanted to shout “Don’t do it! Stay as you are!” The soldier wiped the back of his hand across his nose again, sniffed and, still looking down, placed his hand inside Eisenhower’s tunic.

  “Look at me, soldier.”

  The man looked up.

  “What do you feel?”

  “Your heart, sir.”

  “And?”

  “It’s beating, sir.”

  “If our hearts don’t beat, what happens?”

  “Sir?”

  “We die, right?”

  The man began to pull his hand back but Eisenhower took it gently and placed it back on his chest.

  “Am I right – we die?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If we die, we don’t fight, do we, we don’t win?”

  “No, sir. I mean yes, sir – yes.”

  “We lose, right? All of us here on this island and back home in the States, we lose everything.”

  They looked at each other in silence. Kay wondered whether American officers were trained in this somewhat sinister way of dealing with reluctant soldiers. It was like watching a puppet being jerked around on a string or a child being coaxed from a hiding place.

  “That’s right, isn’t it, Captain?”

  The soldier nodded but said nothing.

  “Say it, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s right, sir.”

  The man was standing straight now. He was still trembling slightly but had stopped sniffing. Eisenhower took the man’s hand away and buttoned up his uniform.

  He had won, thought Kay. A broken man had been put back on his feet and patched up for the battle ahead. The honour of the unit had been saved. A cynical appeal to patriotism had denied a sick man the treatment he clearly needed.

  For a moment the two men paused, looking at each other. Eisenhower spoke slowly and softly.

  “Pick up your rifle, Captain.”

  The man hesitated for a moment and then walked across the room, bent down and picked up the weapon.

  He straightened up, faced his commander and saluted.

  Eisenhower returned the salute. Kay watched as he stood aside to let McMichael leave the room first. She did not know whether to feel admiration or repulsion for the scene she had just witnessed.

  Long after midnight he sat in his command trailer, smoke rising from his cigarette, while she worked on his shoulders. They were as hard and tense as a ship’s cable. Eisenhower had sent everyone else to bed.

  McKeogh checked his watch. In a few hours it would be dawn. Ships and planes were on the move across the Channel. A million men were preparing to assault heavily defended beaches. He was shocked to see that once again that woman remained at Eisenhower’s side. There had been no attempt to disguise the fact: he had said quite openly within hearing of those around, “Come and work my shoulders, Kay.”

  And that was what she did. He had stripped to the waist, and in the mirror on a side wall she watched his eyes close as she worked to unclench the fists of muscle around his neck and shoulders.

  She knew it was the only way he would get a few hours’ sleep. She knew too that in their tents pitched around Ike’s trailer, his aides and security guards would exchange the same old vicious gossip. She almost exulted in the venom aroused by these late-night visits to the trailer. He had made her the queen in his circle. He needed her at his side, especially now.

  That he needed his shoulders rubbed was all anyone needed to know tonight or any other. They did not need to know how, stripped to the waist, he enjoyed the warmth of her hands on his back and shoulders. In the early hours of D-Day, with Kay Summersby at his side in the command trailer, worries faded from his mind and became no more than the barking of dogs in the night. She put warmth and movement into what had been twisted into knots. After a few minutes he reached back, twisted round and took her hand.

  “Thank you,” he said. She kissed him quickly on the cheek, a touch of the lips, a whisper of a kiss.

  11

  June 1944

  A sudden vanishing. It was the old stage trick much loved in children’s pantomimes. A bang, a puff of smoke, a deus ex machina rises to the stage from the bowels of the theatre, the scenery changes, new players come on.

  After the sound and fury of D-Day the pastoral peace of a Normandy orchard, where Ike had made his forward base, felt just like that. The camp was a picture postcard of rural bliss, filmic fantasy, a Hollywood setting for a wartime epic.

  The command headquarters had been set up amid fruit-laden trees that sloped gently down to a river. Next to an old stone barn, a large wooden-floored tent had been erected as an office. A communications room was attached under a camouflaged canvas wing of the main tent; a trailer served as the general’s living quarters.

  The staff all lived under canvas close to the river. Only Kay had a tent to herself. At night the only sound was the rhythmic murmur of the river, and the occasional sharp cry as a fox or a smaller predator made a kill. The rumble of distant artillery fire was the only reminder of the war that was being directed from this haven.

  Kay fell asleep most nights thinking of Captain McMichael and remembering his tear-streaked face and. She wondered what had happened to him.

  Eisenhower had sent for his close aides, including Kay, when it became clear that the German lines were holding and there would be no early breakout from Normandy.

  The reed-lined banks coiled around the orchard head­quarters, providing a measure of security on which the Allied commander’s special forces security unit had insisted.

  The protection unit patrolled the surrounding woods and fields day and night, taking turns to sleep in camouflaged bivouacs. Eisenhower had personally supervised these arrangements. He had been told he was a target for ass­assination. At least that’s what British intelligence said, b
ut Eisenhower doubted it. The Brits were good at magnifying risks and dangers.

  At night Kay and McKeogh produced rations from a makeshift kitchen in the barn. Ike had turned down offers from local farmers of food and suggestions that their wives might cook for him.

  He was only ever alone with Kay late at night when the last planning session had finished and the rest of the team had returned to their tents. Then it was the usual last, long, weak whisky, a quick talk about Telek, who was said to be pining for his master in kennels in England, and perhaps questions about the progress of the vegetable patch at Telegraph Cottage. He would talk about anything but the war and the military stalemate that had followed the success of D-Day.

  “What are you going to do when the war is over?” she asked one night.

  “I hate that question,” he said. “The simple answer is I don’t know. I’ll probably get some boring job in DC.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “You’re going to be a national hero. They’ll put you in command of the whole army.”

  “I don’t know who ‘they’ are, but a lot of silly things get said in Washington. And you, what are you going to do?”

  She looked at him. He gave her the Eisenhower smile, quick and toothy.

  “You know what I am going to do – I think.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “I suppose I might go back to London, wander around the bombsites and drink a lot of gin.”

  “Or you might obey orders?” he was still smiling.

  “What orders? I’m not in the army.”

  Two could play this game, she thought.

  “You’re under my command, right?” he said.

  “I know my duty, if that’s what you mean.”

  “ Touché!” he said and laughed.

  Only the maddening behaviour of Montgomery and his failure to deliver repeated promises to break through German defence lines brought military problems bubbling into the evening conversations. Kay listened night after night as Ike vented his anger at the British field marshal. One night he went further than usual, kicking out at chairs as he paced the room.

  “Montgomery could have finished Rommel off in the desert back in ’42 but he didn’t have the nerve. If he had had one tenth of Patton’s guts or Bradley’s imagination we wouldn’t be stuck in this godforsaken orchard. He doesn’t like spilling blood, that’s his problem.”

  She calmed him, pointing out that if ever fate had decided to create two gifted but wholly incompatible military men it would be him and Montgomery.

  He smiled at the remark and shook his head.

  “You need to get some sleep,” she said. She was always the one who decided it was time to leave, taking with her the brimming ash trays and empty glasses.

  She knew he was watching her as she left, and she knew too that his anger and frustration concealed desire. They both knew that. They had both chosen to ignore it. Tonight felt different.

  “Kay, come here,” he called.

  She returned and he took her face gently between his hands. He looked at her, his face close to hers. Then he kissed her lightly on the lips. The kiss lit a flame. He moved his hands behind her head and covered her face and neck with little kisses. After a moment he dropped his hands and stepped away saying nothing. Their shared surprise had left them silent.

  She wanted him to kiss her again, and knew he would, and that it would be very different from the chance encounter in the back of the big transport plane.

  That quick kiss in the dark on the plane had brought them much closer. What had been clear on the plane was now even clearer in the apple orchard in Normandy.

  He stepped back now, smiling, and turned and walked to the drinks trolley.

  “How about a drink?” he said.

  Still speechless with surprise, she nodded. He poured the drinks, put them on the low coffee table and sat down on the sofa.

  “Come here,” he said, patting the sofa beside him.

  The bucolic setting did much to fill the family photograph albums that would be admired back home in years to come but did little to calm the nerves within the command tent. Eisenhower left every morning to inspect units on the front line that now took in Normandy and much, but not all, of the Cherbourg peninsula.

  In the last week of June the battle for Normandy was approaching a climax. The Allies had intercepted the German high command’s instructions that German forces should be ordered to fight to the last man. Eisenhower noted with interest that Rommel had passed the order on but changed it to read “fight to the last bullet”. The German general obviously had no appetite for Hitler’s “death or glory” battle orders.

  The German line was close to collapse. It was a matter of when and where the breakthrough would come. These questions wormed their way into every conversation in the headquarters camp, much as swarms of wasps fell on the fallen fruit around the tents.

  Those under Eisenhower’s command felt his frustration. Montgomery barked back in short sharp messages by cable and secure phone lines and occasionally apologised for his slow progress.

  At the end of June Eisenhower left the apple orchard and returned to London to brief Winston Churchill and, rather more importantly, his own superior, George Marshall, the US chief of staff, on the military situation. He knew Marshall was sure to query the slow progress in breaking out of Normandy.

  Kay was first off the plane at Portsmouth and slipped behind the wheel of his Packard, having made sure the car was flying both flags, the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack, for the drive to the War Ministry in London. It was 10 a.m. and she had promised to deliver him no later than noon. By now she knew every bump and bend in the road.

  She remained, in theory, just his driver, although in the operational areas of Normandy he had forbidden her to take the wheel of his jeep. But she had still accompanied him every day as a secretary, diary keeper, coffee maker, always with a spare pack of Lucky Strikes in her pocket.

  Everyone accepted that Ike rarely moved without her and did so only when he visited front line positions. Her presence alongside her boss was such a familiar sight that whenever they met General Bradley he would greet them with a salute for Eisenhower and then turn to her saying, “Oh, here’s Ike’s shadow.” He didn’t seem to mind a bit.

  The day-long meeting at the ministry broke up shortly before 5 p.m.

  Ike looked out of the window. Kay was standing beside the Packard, waiting to drive him to Telegraph Cottage, where Mickey McKeogh and Butch were preparing an evening meal. They did not have to be told what to cook – it was always the best Scotch steak. He could see she was anxious to get going. She would have to wait. Marshall had called him back to the conference room.

  Eisenhower refused a cup of coffee and waited. The chief of staff had already made valuable tactical suggestions during the conference and drawn together the various strategic threads which criss-crossed the table as everyone spoke their minds, delivered their briefs and gave their opinions. He had woven these threads into a narrative that left everyone confident that they had just heard a plan that would bring the war to an end within months.

  “You’re looking tired,” said Marshall.

  “There’s a lot on, General.”

  “Don’t we know it. They’re looking after you, are they?”

  “Sure. I’m more worried about casualties – we’re getting there but losing a lot of men. Same with Monty’s people around Caen. He’s flattened the place and the Germans are still fighting.”

  “Monty’s a problem, I know that. But I’m more worried about you. Who’s looking after you these days? You still got Lee, McKeogh, and that Brit on your staff?”

  Eisenhower did not rise to the very obvious bait.

  “Sure. I’ve got a great team. They take real good care of me.”

  “That driver you had in England, is she still with you?”
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  Eisenhower reached for the cigarette packet in his pocket and lit one, exhaling a long plume of smoke high into the air. So this was what the meeting was about. Marshall knew perfectly well that Summersby was still working for him.

  “Sure. Kay Summersby is a member of my team. She does a great job.”

  There was a pause as Marshall in turn lit a cigarette.

  “I’m sure she does. But there’s a lot of talk in DC,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be DC if there wasn’t.”

  “This is kinda personal talk, Ike, you and that driver.”

  He and Marshall were as close as two senior officers get in the military, but not Christian name close. Marshall wasn’t like that.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. She goes everywhere with you – lunch with Churchill, picnics in the desert with the president.”

  “That was a year back ...”

  “Then there’s that cottage.”

  “Come on, George.”

  He wanted to see how Marshall would take the use of his first name: whether it would bring the meeting down to casual comradely talk between two brothers-in-arms.

  Marshall stubbed his cigarette out, twisting the butt into the ashtray vigorously.

  “It doesn’t look great.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Look, it’s your choice, your command, your staff ...”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “... but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t offer a little advice.”

  “Which is?”

  “Drop her. Get another driver.”

  Eisenhower looked at Marshall, eyes narrowed.

  “Are you telling me to fire a loyal and efficient member of my own staff at a time like this?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “It’s just good advice.”

  “Do you really think that’s appropriate right now?”

  “Some folks back home think it’s not appropriate that you’ve got so close to her.”