Ike and Kay

by James MacManus

  “Please tell some folks back home that we’ve got a war to win and that’s rather more important than who drives my car.”

  Eisenhower stood up and looked out of the window. The engine of the Packard was running. He could see Kay in the front seat. She had lit a cigarette and was blowing smoke out of the window. That was against the rules. He would talk to her about that.

  “OK, Ike. It was only advice.”

  “Thanks, general.”

  The two men shook hands. Marshall’s grip was hard, and the metallic blue eyes that looked straight at Eisenhower were cold.

  Damn you, thought Eisenhower. He was in the middle of a campaign that was costing heavy casualties. He was having difficulty dealing with a Brit field marshal who was not up to the job, and a prime minister who thought he could do Eisenhower’s job. Patton was on his back night and day, and Bradley was bitching about Monty. And he’d just got a piece of snide criticism from his chief of staff about a member of his team who happened to be an attractive woman.

  Was that her fault? Was it her fault she was doing a great job for him? Was it his fault that he happened to like her company and enjoy a late-night drink and a chat with her? So what if people gossiped in DC or over here – damn the lot of them. And damn George Marshall. He loved him like a brother but he was well out of line on this.

  So Marshall thought he was having an affair with her and couldn’t bring himself to say so? Well, he wasn’t. All right, he had kissed her. Plenty of times in fact. And he had held her close, feeling her body against his. Back in Kansas when he was young his parents would have called that making love.

  But that was then. Now a kiss was just a kiss. It wasn’t an affair. Did he want to have an affair with her? Hell, yes – who wouldn’t? She was more than just an attractive woman. She meant a great deal to him. But he was a soldier. He knew his duty. And George Marshall should know his. Which was to leave him to get on with this war and stop worrying about what the gossips back home were saying.

  Eisenhower told himself that was a sensible and logical reaction to an out of line intrusion into the way he ran the war. But there was another small voice which told him that Marshall might have had a point. He had feelings for Kay Summersby, he could hardly deny that.

  They had kissed and would kiss again. The taste of her lips and the scent of her forbidden perfume lingered like a long sunset. Kay and her perfume were supposed to be against the rules, beyond reach. Maybe that was why he wanted her so much.

  Or maybe it was the war. The casualty reports crossed his desk every morning. He dreaded those documents. The dead were not just numbers on paper. He had seen their bodies in the field, young men with bodies ripped open, their entrails spilling onto the earth, others gazing sightlessly at the sky without a mark on them but very dead.

  He had seen men die in the forward nursing stations, some while they struggled to speak to him or shake his hand. No man could look on such sights without silent shame, rage and the fearful knowledge that there were many more deaths to come.

  That is why he needed her, to help him escape, even for moments, from the battle orders and the death and destruction that followed.

  Who was that Brit writer he had read about somewhere who had seen a woman being hanged, struggling in the noose, in London a century or so ago and who had sought “immediate release between a woman’s legs”.

  Death does that to you. It makes you want to live, to erase forever the memory of that woman choking at the end of a rope. It is a fearful reminder that you are alive and have a life to live. There was no maybe about it; that is why he wanted her so much.

  And Mamie? He wrote long loving letters to her, didn’t he? And he loved her as any man would love a wife of some twenty-five years and the mother of his children. Of course he did. But Kay was different. She was here with him now.

  He loved having her around. He still held the memory of cupping her breasts tightly in the darkness on the plane. He had held them in his hands, soft but firm, and felt her nipples harden. If it had been anywhere else he would have gone further much further. He couldn’t do without her. That was the truth. And the men that really mattered, his senior commanders, Bradley, Clark and Patton, knew that and never raised an eyebrow.

  Throughout the summer Eisenhower and his immediate staff flew regularly between his campaign headquarters at Versailles and the headquarters of the Allied war effort in England.

  One night at Telegraph Cottage Kay cooked dinner, with Mickey’s help in the kitchen – a roast chicken and vegetables from the patch that Ike had sown earlier that year. Averell Harriman, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Britain, and his wife Marie had come for dinner, bringing with them a gift of malt whisky and London’s latest gossip.

  All the talk was of the damage done in and around the capital by the Hitler’s new rockets. Telegraph Cottage was only fifteen miles from the centre of London and several V1 rockets had already landed close by. Confidential reports that the V1s, which lacked any navigation system, had been replaced by a larger, more accurate rocket that would be immune to interception were even more worrying for those in on the secret.

  Harriman said that Londoners would quickly realise that the Nazis’ new and more deadly form of aerial bombardment was invulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. Civilian morale, which had risen to a crest after D-Day, would slump at the prospect of a new phase in the air war. London can take it! had been the civilian battlecry all through the Blitz three years previously, but that spirit had gone.

  There was now a sullen and fearful awareness of sudden death from the skies. The incoming howl of the first V1 rockets cut out moments before impact, leaving those below wondering and waiting in dread suspense for the explosion. There would be no sound at all from the V2s except a sudden whoosh as if the air had been sucked into the sky and then a shattering explosion. It would be hard to take.

  Kay watched Eisenhower as he listened to the ambassador’s account of the new dangers of life in a city that thought it had been freed from sudden death. There was a not-so-subtle subtext to the conversation, and she could see from the frown lines on her boss’s face that he understood exactly what was being suggested: for God’s sake break out of Normandy and nail those rocket sites.

  After dinner the four played bridge. Kay partnered Ike, as usual, and they won the first rubber. As Harriman later said to his wife, the two played as if each knew the mind of the other.

  “Hardly surprising,” said a sleepy voice from the bed. “They play regularly together. It’s his way of relaxing, they say.”

  “I could have sworn he squeezed her hand under the table. I think they were cheating,” he said.

  “Don’t be so bloody naïve,” she said and went to sleep.

  12

  July 1944

  The truth which Rommel had dismissed as a ghostly apparition from the darkest depth of his mind had emerged to assume reality. He and his men were committing themselves to a losing battle on behalf of a bestial political order. His soldiers would die in their tens – no, hundreds – of thousands for a lost, satanic cause.

  Eisenhower had done it. Rommel never thought the man had the imagination and the nerve to throw a million troops across the Channel at its widest point when the weather kept even the inshore fishermen in harbour. The main thrust and the obvious line of attack was to the beaches along Pas-de-Calais, but “obvious” had been a trap into which they had all fallen.

  The Führer had reacted in characteristic and calamitous fashion. There was to be no tactical retreat. Every position must be held to the last man. Since telephone lines to coastal units had been destroyed and radio was not deemed to be secure, Rommel used motorcycle riders to convey the Führer’s orders to the coast.

  He could imagine what that would do to the morale of young soldiers shocked, deafened and terrified by the naval barrage. Thank God, he thought, that his son Manfred was not two year
s older.

  That night in the chateau, Rommel briefly left his staff officers to grapple with the developing crisis while he retired to the study, where he reopened the file on Eisenhower. He turned to his days at West Point where the young lieutenant had proved so skilled in the weekly poker games. Poker was a game of deception and bluff.

  Eisenhower had made money, if not friends, in those games. At the same time he had been trained in the art of camouflage and deception, an important part of the West Point curriculum; and deception was the crucial skill required for a winning poker player. Rommel hadn’t thought this important when he’d first read the profile.

  What was the Allied commander’s next move? Where was George Patton really, the one general who could be relied on to make the big breakout from the beachheads the Allies would need? Could it still just possibly be true that Normandy was a poker bluff?

  How could anyone read the mind of this man who faced him, not across the Channel now but on French soil?

  And what of Hitler’s secret weapons that were supposed to swing the balance of war back to Berlin? Rommel briefly thought of the rockets that were being launched at London from silos in the countryside near Calais.

  They would not make any difference. Nothing would make any difference now. Rommel knew that. He also knew that the high command in Berlin and the Führer himself were in the grip of insanity.

  Suspecting treachery after the initial success of the Allied Normandy landings, Hitler had sacked all his senior commanders in France except Rommel. The German general was left alone that month to face the Allied onslaught with orders from the Führer that forbade the obvious strategy of a fighting retreat. For the man hero-worshipped by his countrymen, it was further confirmation that the war was lost. He knew too that he had not long to live.

  The pilot of the Spitfire saw the open Horch car driving at speed on a small country road in Normandy. The road was tree-lined but the vehicle was clearly visible when it left the cover of overhanging branches. From a height of eight hundred feet the pilot could see there was a pennant on the vehicle. He knew from briefings that this was the staff car of a senior German officer. He knew too that the car was driving on a small country road for a very good reason. The main roads were choked with burning, broken vehicles and with refugees fleeing the fighting further west.

  Manoeuvring the aircraft into position and dropping to treetop height, he opened fire at a range of six hundred yards, pumping machine-gun and cannon fire into the vehicle. Bark and wood splintered off trees and fountains of earth rose from the roadside. As the plane flashed past he saw the car careen off the road, through the trees and down a steep slope.

  Rommel recovered consciousness, though only barely, the next day in a military hospital. He had no memory of the attack nor any idea where he was.

  He was told he was still in France. He had a fractured skull and was lucky to be alive. His driver and a third man in the vehicle were dead.

  That same day, at his command headquarters near Portsmouth, Eisenhower paced the floor of his trailer like a caged tiger. The cinder track outside the trailer was gradually crunched into a smooth furrow as the restless commander walked back and forth, peering at the lowering clouds above.

  Churchill arrived in time for lunch and didn’t complain when presented with cold beef sandwiches accompanied by a bottle of red wine. Kay joined them at the table, officially as a note-taker, although the prime minister had long ago accepted that her role now was that of hostess. Eisenhower frowned, looked down at the table and seemed to sink into his own thoughts as Churchill launched into a long history of famous battles won by British generals.

  The purpose of the sweeping summary of military triumphs became clear when he came to the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. Montgomery might be a difficult wartime colleague, Churchill said, but his victory in the North African desert that year had turned the tide of the war against Hitler.

  Eisenhower raised himself from his reverie and said, “Difficult, did you say, prime minister?”

  Churchill, ever the conversational tactician, changed the subject and looked out of the window at the grey murk outside.

  “You won’t be flying today, general,” he said.

  “I’ll cross that that damned Channel tomorrow even if I have to swim,” came the reply.

  Churchill raised his glass and proposed a toast to a safe journey.

  The trouble, as usual, was the weather. Fog had descended on the south coast, and the commander’s B-25 plane was grounded. Kay had never seen him so frustrated and depressed; he was a man wrapped in a mood of pure blue indigo, as Tex put it, a remark so memorable that Kay made a mental note to put it in her diary later; she thought she might try to turn it into a song she would sing for him that night at drinks before dinner.

  It was a silly idea, but she and the rest of the staff were prepared to try anything to take the boss’s mind off the frustrations of the weather. Ike badly wanted to take a hard look on the ground at Montgomery’s bungled campaign since D-Day.

  The time had come for a face-to-face talk with a man who was causing division and dissent within the Allied command. Senior people around Eisenhower, and not just American generals such as Omar Bradley, who had never disguised his loathing of Monty, but also his British deputy, Air Marshal Tedder, were urging Ike to sack him.

  Monty had failed to deliver his long-promised break­through on the Allies’ northern flank. He issued communiqués, without reference to Allied headquarters, in which every setback was somehow hailed as a victory. Ike had had enough. The mere mention of Montgomery’s name was enough to send his blood pressure soaring.

  “Fact is that if Rommel had been British and Monty German, the war would have been over long before now.”

  Having blazed with praise for the supreme commander after D-Day, American radio and newspaper journalists were now criticising Eisenhower for being little more than a figurehead in a war in which the British were taking all the credit and doing far too little of the fighting and dying.

  Montgomery wasn’t the only problem; Churchill was another. The prime minister prowled around Allied headquarters, criticising plans for an invasion of southern France, demanding to be allowed to visit the battlefront, and above all thundering on about the damage done by the German rockets. He was always meddling, and had even visited Ike and the family at Telegraph Cottage, there to marvel at the general’s interest in his vegetable garden.

  Kay smiled as she watched Ike walk Churchill around his small kitchen garden, pointing out rows of vegetables, some already climbing neatly placed bamboo canes, and explaining when he had personally seeded the beds. He was especially proud of the large-sized marrows but admitted that American corn had failed miserably in the English climate.

  Churchill pretended to take an interest. It was a mark of his humanity, Kay told her mother in a letter, that he completely understood Eisenhower’s need to find a sanctuary at Telegraph Cottage.

  “You wouldn’t believe how two men could be so different,” she wrote. “Ike handed the PM a marrow and Churchill looked at it as if someone had thrust a dribbling baby into his arms. He was smoking his usual cigar and the ash fell all over the marrow. Ike took it back looking offended. I don’t think Churchill had ever seen a raw vegetable, let alone a marrow, in his life.”

  Drawing Kay aside before he left, Churchill said, as he had said in North Africa the year before, “I am so glad you’re continuing to look after our general, giving him all he needs.”

  Looking into his face, Kay found not a hint of hidden meaning in that remark. Whatever he was inferring Churchill knew exactly how important she was.

  Eisenhower was at his desk at the Portsmouth headquarters with a gusting wind threatening rain outside. She was still wearing the light cotton uniform he had ordered for her in North Africa. He looked up, took off his reading glasses and said, “Take a seat.”

&nb
sp; She sat down on one the chairs in front of his desk.

  “I think you need a new uniform.”

  “Oh, no thank you, sir, this will do fine.”

  “Nonsense. It looks worn.”

  He was right of course. Her skirt was not only baggy but had a shiny seat from sliding in and out of the staff car. And the thin cotton offered little comfort against the chill of an English summer. She had been forced to buy thick woollen underwear to wear against the cold.

  “But you’ve already given me two new uniforms, sir. I don’t need another one.”

  “Those were desert uniforms. You’ll need two new ones. I’ll have them made up for you.”

  There was no point arguing with Ike. When he wanted something done he issued an order and that was it. Life in the army was so simple, she thought. You gave orders and obeyed them. There were no arguments, no appeals to common sense, no shades of meaning, none of the misunderstandings that tangled the lives of ordinary people.

  The military admitted none of the complexities and mysteries of civilian life where ordinary people sought guidance from custom, conscience, religion or maybe even the stars above. It was easy to get lost in the real world. In the army you might get killed but you never got lost.

  Kay wondered what the rigid certainties of the military mind would make of the greatest mystery of all: in some far stratum of the sky beyond sight but within the girdle of the planet there must be someone or something who understood the mysterious attraction one earthbound mortal feels for another. Poets called it love, but that was too easy. Kay knew that no one who had spent a lifetime in the army would ever understand that.

  “Thank you, sir,” she said.

  “They should be ready in a couple of weeks. They don’t work as fast here as in Tangiers.”

  “Sir,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  Ike looked at her sharply. She took a deep breath.

  “Everyone else has to make do with what they’ve got. I don’t want any special favours, thank you.”