The General's Women

by Susan Wittig Albert

  She still had her low points, of course, moments when she felt so sorry for herself that she just collapsed in a chair and cried. But she kept to a schedule as best she could. She got up in time for lunch, and in the afternoons (when the girls weren’t there for mah-jongg), she listened to her radio soap operas. Stella Dallas and The Romance of Helen Trent were her favorites, but really, she liked them all. There was cocktail hour and then the little supper the cook had left for her. In the evenings, she read mysteries and romance novels and listened to comedy shows, like Amos ’n’ Andy and—her favorite—Burns and Allen. Mamie loved Gracie Allen and joked that if she ever voted for anybody for president (she hadn’t), she would have voted for Gracie when she “ran” on the “Surprise Party” ticket in 1940. (That was a dig at Eleanor Roosevelt, of course, who involved herself much too much in public affairs.)

  Other army wives—General Patton’s wife Bea and General Clark’s wife Maurine—went around the country making speeches and selling war bonds, and General Marshall’s wife Katherine raised money for hospitals and servicemen’s canteens. But Mamie rarely went out now, except to go to the grocery store. War meant waiting, and she was managing to keep herself occupied and reasonably content while she waited for the war to be over and her man to come home.

  Until one evening toward the end of February, when everything just . . . well, it all just sort of fell apart. The cook had left her a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup and she was eating that with a few crackers and a glass of wine while she paged through the latest issue of Life magazine, noticing how much of the magazine was about the war effort, even the advertising. There was a full-page ad for Pond’s cold cream, featuring a girl who worked in a war production plant and was engaged to a boy who had enlisted in the army (“She’s engaged! She’s lovely! She uses Pond’s!”) There was a two-page ad reminding housewives that “food is ammunition” and that the reason they couldn’t buy meat at the butcher shop was that soldiers in training had to have a pound of meat every day to get them ready to fight the Nazis, which Hitler made sure were very well fed. And then her glance fell on an article called “Women in Lifeboats,” written by the famous photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White.

  Mamie’s eyebrows went up under her bangs. Miss Bourke-White was the woman who had taken the “official family” photo of Ike’s staff that had appeared in the magazine back in November—the photo that had introduced Kay Summersby. After that, Life had named Miss Bourke-White as the magazine’s official photographer for the U.S. Army Air Force, the very first woman to hold that accreditation. In early December she had boarded a troopship with some five thousand soldiers, nurses, and WACs, on their way to join the Allies in North Africa. But the ship hadn’t made it. It was torpedoed by a German submarine in the middle of the night.

  “The torpedo did not make as loud a crash as I had expected,” Miss Bourke-White wrote, “but somehow everyone on the ship knew almost instantly that this was the end of her. And possibly, of us.”

  Usually, Mamie wouldn’t read a story about a ship being torpedoed, but this one caught her attention. She had skimmed the first page and was halfway down the second when she stumbled across something that made her catch her breath. By the time dawn broke, Miss Bourke-White wrote, survivors had been pulled out of the water, several of the lifeboats had been roped together, and everybody was singing to keep their spirits up while they waited to be rescued.

  “People in the lifeboats were joking now,” she reported. “The irrepressible Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s pretty Irish driver, announced her breakfast order. She wanted her eggs sunny-side up and no yolks broken.” There was even a picture of Kay in the crowded lifeboat, although it showed only the back of her head.

  Kay Summersby? Mamie stared at the page, her heart beating as fast as if she’d just rushed up the stairs instead of taking the elevator. She read the sentence again, and then again. Kay Summersby, on her way to North Africa, on a troopship? But how could that be? She was a British citizen, a woman! She should be driving generals back in London. She—

  Mamie read faster now, flying through the paragraphs, looking for another mention of that woman’s name. On the next page, she found it. After hours adrift on the sea, the survivors had been picked up by a British destroyer and people were warming themselves on the deck with cups of hot Ovaltine, looking through their pockets to see what they had brought with them when they abandoned ship. A man had saved a pair of keepsake cufflinks. A woman had her rosary. And “the beauteous Kay still had two precious possessions, her lipstick and her French-English dictionary. She’s sure both will come in handy at Ike’s headquarters in Algiers.”

  At Ike’s headquarters! The words were a knife to Mamie’s heart. She closed the magazine and pushed her bowl away. She was too upset to even think about eating. She sat at the table as evening darkened the windows, then got up and drew the blackout curtains closed. It was time for Amos ‘n’ Andy, but she didn’t feel like laughing at the Kingfish’s hijinks, so she left the radio off. She went into the living room and sat in the dark for a while, trying to tell herself that she was getting upset over nothing.

  But a moment later, the telephone rang, and when she picked it up, she heard Cookie’s voice. “Mamie, have you seen the latest issue of Life?” She went on without waiting for Mamie to answer. “There’s an article about a troopship that got torpedoed on its way to North Africa. You’ll never in the world guess who was on that ship! Kay Summersby! Here. Let me read it to you.” She took a breath. “‘The irrepressible Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s pretty—’”

  Without saying a word, Mamie very quietly replaced the receiver in its cradle. She closed her eyes and drew in her breath, and when the phone rang again, shrilly, she put it under a sofa cushion. She got up and made herself a drink, which she carried into the bedroom. Ike’s photograph—her favorite, taken when he was a West Point cadet—sat on her dressing table, surrounded by her bottles of perfume and nail polish and tubes of lipstick. His face looked out from its silver frame with a frank, open smile. “For the dearest and sweetest girl in the world,” he had written under the picture.

  She picked up the photograph and stared at the inscription. She had loved Dwight Eisenhower for over a quarter of a century. She had borne him two sons: little Icky who had died so tragically, leaving a void between them that not even their common grief could fill; and sweet, strong Johnny, dear Johnny, of whose achievements and promise they were both so proud. She had supported him in all the ways she knew how, through all the difficult assignments his career had brought: the awful years in the tropical jungles of Panama, the unhappy years in the Philippines, the constant moves, the many homes she’d created.

  But in spite of all that, she didn’t know her husband. His hours, his days, his thoughts, his plans were separate from her, from anything they had together. She had sometimes—no, she had to confess it—she had often been jealous of the energy and time he gave to his work, and of the men he shared it with, men who took him away from home, from her. Now, the war had taken him away. And he was sharing his war with another woman.

  She looked at the inscription again. “The dearest and sweetest.” Did he still feel that way? He said he did. In fact, in his last letter, he had written, “I’ll never be in love with anyone but you!” She had been struck by the force of that sentence, which seemed half-defensive, almost a protest, or a reminder to himself of how he ought to feel. Was he in love with that other woman? Was that why he kept insisting he wasn’t?

  The phone was ringing again in the living room, muffled by the sofa cushion, but she ignored it. Somebody—Ruth?—was knocking at her door. She ignored that, too. After a while, she finished her drink, then picked up the photograph and carried it with her to the bed, where she lay down with it in her arms, cradling it against her, and began to cry.

  CHAPTER TEN:

  The End of the Beginning

  North Africa

  January–June 1943

  After the bleak, wintry
wreckage that was wartime London, Kay found Algiers to be a fascinating place, sun-washed, colorful, and lively. Everywhere she went, she saw new and exotic sights: snorting camels burdened with bolts of bright-colored weavings, barefoot young men in turbans carrying bunches of yellow bananas suspended from poles across their slim shoulders, toothless old women hawking fragrant mechoui, chunks of spit-roasted lamb wrapped in hot flatbread.

  But the colorful sights, scents, and sounds of this foreign city quickly slipped into the background. Kay and the five American WACs who had come to work as stenographers and typists in Eisenhower’s office were billeted in a small house a short distance from Ike’s villa. The women became friends, and although they were rarely all home at once, they enjoyed sharing their new life. Kay, who had been sleeping in a hospital bed and living out of a paper bag (her luggage was at the bottom of the Mediterranean), was glad to have a couple of bureau drawers and a third of a closet.

  In the office, Kay fell quickly into the familiar routine. Every morning, she had breakfast at the Villa dar el Ouad, then, with Telek in the seat beside her, drove the Boss to the St. George. At her desk, she helped with the now-voluminous mail, answered the telephone, and drove the General wherever he needed to go. Each day, the workload seemed to get heavier and the pressure more intense, and she could see that Eisenhower was often exhausted by the time she drove him back to the villa for drinks and dinner, often as late as nine or ten o’clock. On days when he quit earlier, they might have an evening of bridge, although their games were often interrupted by the sound of German planes and the thud of exploding bombs. When they went out onto the terrace to take a look at the action, they could see puffs of light smoke against the dark sky and tracers from the Allied anti-aircraft guns firing at the planes. The searchlights danced, the AA thumped, and the bombs exploded on random targets—ships in the harbor, a convent, a hospital. It was like being in the middle of a colossal Guy Fawkes Night fireworks celebration, Kay thought, with arcs of light and streamers of smoke everywhere.

  But this was no holiday celebration. It was war, war, and more war. The Darlan business lingered like a noxious fog, with snarling reports emerging daily in the newspapers in London and Washington, never quite charging Eisenhower with the admiral’s murder but blaming him for the whole sorry affair. The alleged assassin had been tried on the same day as Darlan’s funeral, the outcome so assured that the man’s coffin was ordered before his trial began. He was executed that night by a firing squad, at a moment when the sound of the gunfire was blanketed by the thunder of a German air raid on the harbor.

  In the Pacific, the war took a more encouraging turn as the Japanese were defeated at Guadalcanal. In Russia, the Germans were facing defeat at Stalingrad. But in the Tunisian desert, the wet, cold North African winter wore on. Kay heard the grim reports that came into the AFHQ. Allied troops—British, French, Americans—were stretched like a thin rubber band along a bleak three-hundred-mile front. Miscommunication left units stranded and confused, not quite certain who was commanding them. Burned-out vehicles littered the roads, mute testimony to the dangers of daylight driving. German Stukas and Me 109 fighters flew low over the ridgelines, sending men diving into slit trenches that were often filled with icy water. The weather forced Eisenhower to abandon the drive to take Tunis from Rommel, “the biggest disappointment so far,” Kay heard him tell Beetle. He had to report to London and Washington that he had failed to push the Torch offensive as far and hard as he had been ordered against the Axis forces in the desert.

  Eisenhower hadn’t said much to Kay after the Christmas party. His instructions to her were clipped and professional, he said very little in the car, and their bridge-table conversation was focused on the cards. Others might have been fooled by his ready grin, but she knew him well enough to sense that behind that easy manner, he was under a terrible strain. Confronted with the fact that the Axis forces were holding onto territory he was tasked to take, he had to admit that the Germans were better at making war than he was. Another commander might blame the humiliating defeats on the winter rains and the knee-deep mud, or the failure of supplies to get through, or the poor cooperation among the Allied field commanders: the recalcitrant French, the arrogant, know-it-all Brits, the inexperienced Yanks. But Kay could see that the General understood that the losses were his, and the knowledge was a bleeding ulcer in his belly. He was chain-smoking, working fourteen-hour stretches, and (according to Butch) his blood pressure was through the roof. He was worried and depressed. Kay often went into his office to find him slumped in a chair beside the smoky fireplace, staring at the maps that covered the walls.

  “It’s a helluva mess out there,” he’d mutter. “No movement, everybody’s mired in the goddamned mud. And I’ve got to face them in Casablanca.”

  The “they” he had to face were Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt, and the VIPs from the Imperial General Staff in London and the War Department in Washington, meeting in a top-secret conference at the Anfa Hotel in Casablanca. Eisenhower had been called on the carpet to explain, if he could, the humiliating setbacks in Tunisia. It wouldn’t be easy. The Allies all spoke English, but as far as military strategy was concerned, they weren’t speaking the same language.

  “The Boss has his neck in a noose,” Butch told Kay the day before he and Eisenhower left for the conference. “He’s in for a serious grilling. If they don’t like what they hear, he’ll be sacked.”

  “But he’s doing the best he can,” Kay protested loyally. “He’s on the job from dawn until way past dark. He knows how to deal with these crazy conflicts—the French, the British, the Americans, none of them talking to the other.”

  “Understood.” Butch was somber. “But sometimes the best you can do isn’t good enough. There are some who say that nobody could manage this war. It’s not just being fought on the battlefield, you know. It’s being fought in the newspapers back in England and the States. Churchill and Roosevelt read the papers. And Ike’s press isn’t good right now.”

  Kay shivered. Butch should know—the press was his business. “What will happen if . . . if he’s relieved?”

  “He’ll be shipped back to Washington,” Butch said matter-of-factly. “Somebody else will be sitting at his desk.” He regarded Kay, an eyebrow cocked. “One of your Brits. Montgomery, maybe.”

  “Montgomery’s not my Brit.” Kay snapped. She knew that Montgomery wouldn’t tolerate a female driver in the war zone. She’d be sent back to England so fast that she wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye to Dick.

  They hadn’t been able to spend much time together. There were letters, of course, and she had seen him once in Algiers when he’d come over from Oran for a meeting. All they’d had time for was a quick dinner and a few kisses before he flew back to his unit, but it was enough.

  It had to be. It was all they had.

  • • •

  As it turned out, Ike almost didn’t get to Casablanca. His B-17, long retired from combat duty, lost two engines over the Atlas Mountains. The passengers put on parachutes and stood at the hatches, ready to jump. The plane had limped in on two engines. To get back to Algiers after he made his report to the decision-makers, Ike had to thumb a ride with the Eighth Air Force.

  But he wasn’t sacked. He was kicked upstairs. He was given a fourth star and named Commanding General of the North African Theater of Operations, while three British generals were given command of daily air, sea, and ground operations. That is, the Brits now had control over what happened at the front. He had been outflanked and he knew it. Ike’s fourth star was political, Butch told Kay—and more than a little grudging, because there had been no victories to reward. Roosevelt and Marshall understood that one of the problems the American commander in chief had faced was the fact that he was outranked by the British generals who reported to him. Ike welcomed the promotion, but Kay—who was with him in his most unguarded hours—could see that he was dealing with something close to humiliation. He understood, in a way
he hadn’t before, that a title was one thing and authority was another.

  After Casablanca, General Marshall flew to Algiers for a private conference with Ike. Kay met him at the airport and felt instantly frozen by his glance of glacial displeasure. “Mrs. Summersby,” he addressed her, with emphasis. She didn’t understand—until Butch told her that Marshall had heard from his wife (who had heard it on the army wives’ grapevine) that Mamie Eisenhower had seen the Life magazine “official family” photograph back in November and was angry and unhappy about it.

  “But that’s not my fault,” Kay protested. “What does he want me to do?”

  Butch looked uncomfortable. “Marshall told Ike he should have left you in London.”

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Kay said despairingly. “He’s not going to insist that the Boss send me back, is he?”

  “That’s what he wanted to do, but Ike got stubborn, so he backed off.” Butch gave her a direct look. “You have to understand that Marshall is old-school, Kay. The army is his family, and he keeps a close eye on the way his boys behave. If they don’t toe the straight and narrow, he lets them have it, both barrels.” He chuckled ruefully. “I’m glad I’m in the navy. General Marshall isn’t my father.”

  There was more—and it was funny. That evening, Kay drove Marshall and Ike to Ike’s villa, where Marshall was to spend the night. Formidably formal, Marshall did not unbend when Telek jumped up to greet him, so Kay took the dog into the sitting room while Ike showed his boss to the elegant upstairs bedroom where he was to sleep. Telek, who always hated to be left out of the action, leaped out of her lap and dashed up the stairs.