But it was hard for Kay to see the big picture. There was simply so much to be done and she was too busy doing it to look up. Ike wanted to be close to the action, so after a couple of weeks in the apple orchard, the staff moved SHAEF to the seaside village of Granville. Mickey set up housekeeping in a comfortable little villa overlooking the water, with a breathtaking view of the ancient abbey of Mont-Saint-Michel, high on its island rock. He found and appropriated two placid Normande cows, spotted black and white, named Maribell and Lulabell. They provided milk for the General’s mess and cream for the fresh butter that Moaney churned with an eggbeater. Telek was there too, and Caacie and her pups, and Shaef the cat. The General’s family was more or less complete again.
But in early September, Eisenhower was grounded by an accident that could easily have killed him. He had flown to Versailles to confer with Bradley and Patton. When his B-25 was grounded with engine trouble, he and his pilot grabbed a single-passenger Stinson L-5 “Flying Jeep” and started back to Granville, ignoring warnings of bad weather. Short of fuel and unable to see the airstrip in the pelting rain, the pilot made an emergency landing on a sandy beach a couple of miles from the villa. The landing was successful, but when Ike was helping the pilot pull the plane above the high-tide mark, he wrenched his knee in the soft sand. A doctor flew in from London, set the knee in a plaster cast, and ordered him off it for a week.
Ike was a terrible patient, short-tempered and surly, fretting about being away from work, snapping at the doctor who put on his cast. And even though he was flat on his back, the traffic didn’t stop: Beetle and Tex were in and out every ten minutes, updating the maps that papered the walls of his bedroom, while the telephone rang constantly. Still, the enforced immobility had a silver lining, Kay thought, for he had slowed down a little. She brought papers from the office that had to be signed, and they chatted as he worked. Telek was there too, curled up on Ike’s bed. Evenings, they played bridge with Beetle and Ethel.
Then the General was on his feet again and back to nonstop, sixteen-hour-days. Kay drove him to Brussels and Luxembourg, to Nancy, to Aachen—to wherever the armies were on the move, liberating village after village, pushing the Germans back to the Rhine. They flew to Portsmouth and she drove him to London to confer with Churchill or to Bushy Park. Once or twice they found time to visit Telegraph Cottage, where they stole a precious hour or two for themselves. One and one time, Ike called it with a chuckle. But Kay knew that the war was always on his mind and was content simply to be with him, wherever he was, helping him do whatever he needed to do to win through to the peace.
Today, she reminded herself. No tomorrows, only today.
• • •
Granville was comfortable but the communications there were terrible, so Eisenhower’s command post moved again, this time to Versailles, just outside of Paris. There the headquarters staff took over the luxurious Trianon Hotel. The ornate Clemenceau Ballroom (where the Allies had negotiated the Treaty of Versailles) was turned into a map room, forests of radio antennae were planted in the royal gardens, and black-tie waiters served K-ration lunches on gold-rimmed plates.
Kay’s office, where she handled the calendar and the bushels of letters and gifts that came to the General, was partitioned from Ike’s with army-issue blankets hung from wires stretched across the room. She was billeted with the WACs in a flat above what had once been Louis XIV’s great stables. Ike lived four miles away at Saint-Germain, in an eighteenth-century chateau that had recently been vacated by Field Marshal von Rundstedt. The mansion was huge (ten bedrooms), ornate, and uncomfortably furnished with fragile antique furniture.
“Makes me feel like a goddamned bull in a china closet,” Ike grumped to Kay.
The garden was lovely, though, and Mickey found pasture for Maribell and Lulabell in a nearby field, so they had fresh milk and enough cream for butter. And there was room to entertain the parade of VIPs eager to enjoy the newly liberated Paris. Churchill came, of course, and the British top brass, as well as Marshall, congressional visitors from the States, and a star-studded troupe of American entertainers, including dancer Fred Astaire, crooner Bing Crosby, and comic Bob Hope.
It was Crosby who caused Kay all the trouble. He told the General that he was headed back to the States and would be glad to send him anything he’d like. “Just tell me what you want and I’ll get it for you,” he said.
“Hominy grits,” Ike replied promptly. “You know, I haven’t had any grits since I left home—and I miss it.”
“On its way,” Crosby promised, and it was. He mentioned it on his Stateside radio program, and the result was a deluge of hominy, arriving in bags and boxes and case-lot cartons. “Jesus Christ on a mountain,” Ike exclaimed when he saw the stacks in the hotel hallway, and vowed to never again tell anybody what he wanted, for fear he might get it.
Mickey took a dozen cans for the General’s breakfast. The rest of it was Kay’s problem. For weeks, she was kept busy dispatching hominy to refugee camps, hospitals, and orphanages—compliments of Bing Crosby and General Eisenhower. She wondered if they knew what to do with it.
• • •
On October 14, Ike turned fifty-four. Kay drove him to Liège, where he had lunch with King George, who gave him another medal: the Order of the Bath. That night, General Bradley and his staff threw a surprise birthday party for him, with an enormous cake with four stars and the SHAEF insignia and plenty of French champagne. Late into the night an orchestra played songs that took them away from the war, while Kay and Ike danced together in a dark, quiet corner.
“The best birthday ever,” he whispered, and she felt his arms tighten around her. Afterward, he came into her room for an hour.
He left before they could fall asleep. “If I’m asked,” he said, as he shrugged into his shirt, “I want to be able to say that I’ve never slept with Kay Summersby.”
• • •
In late October, Kay (still a British citizen) became a WAC officer—a great relief to her, since her presence as a civilian in Eisenhower’s headquarters in North Africa, England, and France had caused enormous headaches for everybody.
But the process hadn’t been easy, Tex told her, and some in the Pentagon had gotten quite fussy about it. It was only General Eisenhower’s persistence, a note from President Roosevelt, and the lucky precedent of three Australian women recently commissioned by MacArthur that forced Marshall’s reluctant approval. In a five-minute office ceremony, Kay stood up beside her desk to swear allegiance to the United States of America and Ike pinned the gold bars on her shoulders.
Then Second Lieutenant Kay Summersby went back to work—not, however, as the General’s driver. Ironically, now that she was an officer, she could no longer drive Eisenhower’s car. But winter was coming to northern Europe, and she was thankful that she didn’t have to push the big vehicle through the narrow, icy lanes. She had breakfast with Ike as usual every morning, rode with him to and from the office, and traveled with him when he flew to England or went on troop inspections. But now they sat together in the backseat, where they could talk face-to-face and occasionally touch hands.
All this ramped up the gossip, of course. Concerned, Butch came to Kay with the latest tittle-tattle. She listened, then shrugged and said, “I’m following the Boss’s lead.”
“You don’t care what people say?” Butch asked, frowning.
“I care about Ike,” Kay said simply. “Everybody else can go to hell.”
“Funny.” Butch gave her a crooked grin. “That’s exactly what Ike said, when I talked to him about it.”
• • •
Mid-December was memorable for many reasons. On the fifteenth, American band leader Glenn Miller disappeared during a cross-Channel flight from England to Paris in a single-engine Norseman. It was a shock to the office staff, because the General had asked Miller to head up a joint British-American radio production team to perform for troops and record for broadcast back home. Everybody loved Glenn Miller, and hi
s death was terrible news.
But the same day also brought good news, when the General learned that President Roosevelt had nominated him for a fifth star. He had spent sixteen years as a major and had risen from lieutenant colonel to General of the Army in forty-five months. He and Kay celebrated that night by playing five rubbers of bridge with Beetle and General Bradley.
The next day, Sunday, they went to a wedding. Ike’s longtime orderly, Mickey McKeogh, married his Pearlie in a beautiful ceremony in Marie Antoinette’s chapel in the palace at Versailles. Pearlie (the young WAC from Minnesota whom Mickey had met in Algiers) was attended by Margaret and Sue, two of Ike’s WAC secretaries. Kay arranged the reception at Ike’s chateau, with a towering French wedding cake and enough champagne to float the USS Missouri.
The staff saw the bride and groom off to Paris for a week’s honeymoon and then went back to the champagne. After all, there was plenty to celebrate. The Allies had now freed Rome, as well as Paris, Belgium, North Africa, Sicily, Crete, and Greece. The war wouldn’t be wrapped up by Christmas, but the game, Ike told Kay, was just about over.
But Hitler had one final hand to play. While the SHAEF staff was celebrating Mickey’s and Pearlie’s wedding and the General’s fifth star, the Führer made his move. Thirty German divisions—a quarter of a million men, with tanks, assault guns, and artillery pieces—thundered across an eighty-five-mile Allied front, from southern Belgium to the middle of Luxembourg. The massive counterattack was planned and supervised by Hitler himself. A complete surprise, it was designed to split the Allies and compel the Americans and the British to settle for a separate peace, independent of the Soviet Union.
The Americans bore the brunt of the attack. In some places along the thin forward line, they were outnumbered ten to one, and their immediate losses were massive. By Christmas, the German offensive had pushed some fifty miles into American-held territory. For nine interminable weeks, what came to be called the Battle of the Bulge raged through towns and villages, up and down narrow lanes, across the dense woods and hilly terrain of the Ardennes Forest.
The situation was worsened by the weather: it was the nastiest winter in memory, with below-zero temperatures and driving snow that reduced visibility to ten or twenty yards. Truck engines had to be run every half hour to keep the oil from turning to molasses, and tank treads froze to the ground overnight. The men were dressed for the autumn campaign, and frostbite became a stark reality. Some of the wounded, pinned down in foxholes, froze to death.
But the Americans, stoically determined and fighting on sheer gut, pushed the Germans back to the east. As the enemy literally ran out of gas, German losses grew to somewhere between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand men. By the end of January, the original line been restored, the Allies were regaining their balance, and the push toward Berlin was underway.
• • •
In January, Kay went with Eisenhower to Bastogne and Houffalize. Everywhere in the snow she could see evidences of the great fight the airborne troops had put up there, and what it had cost the Allies and the enemy. The fields around Bastogne were dotted with snow-covered mounds, bodies of dead soldiers—and sometimes a frozen arm upraised, as if reaching for help, or hope. Blackened hunks of tanks, smashed-up C-47s, and broken gliders—used to deliver combat surgeons, gasoline, and ammunition to the besieged towns—littered the ground. At Houffalize, where the armies of Montgomery and Patton had met, there was literally nothing left. The Germans were in full retreat.
And there was good news for Kay. Ike told her that Churchill had recommended her for the British Empire Medal, “for meritorious services.” She was astonished, but the recognition was welcome, especially from Churchill, for whom she had a great admiration. Her King might snub her, but the Prime Minister had always been both kind and attentive—perhaps because (as she remembered), he had stood up for King Edward when he wanted to marry Wallis Simpson. Churchill was a deep-dyed romantic.
At the end of January, Ike turned down the President’s invitation to go to the Yalta Conference because he didn’t feel he should leave his command. He sent Beetle instead. When Beetle got back, they moved the SHAEF command post to Rheims, in the heart of France’s champagne country. The offices were set up in a large red-brick schoolhouse on the main convoy route. The General’s office was the size of a closet, but his residence, the Brown House, was a large chateau owned by a local champagne baron. Mickey rounded up a record player, and Kay found an album of West Point songs that Ike could play in the evenings. He loved them.
• • •
On February 24, in Rheims, Kay’s life changed again. Ike promoted her to first lieutenant and she became his aide. And because Eisenhower was now a five-star general, she had become the first female five-star aide. Her new rank came with a new insignia, a blue shield decorated with five stars and topped with an eagle. In Ike’s office, when he was pinning the shield on the lapel of her uniform jacket, she said, “Is this part of your grand master plan?”
“You bet it is.” He kissed her quickly. “The war will be over in a few months, and it’s anybody’s guess where I’ll go after that. Berlin, maybe, to get things sorted out with the Russians. Eventually, Washington.” He put his hands on her shoulders. His voice was deep, deliberate, full of intention. “Wherever it is, I want you to be there, too, Kay. With me.”
She was elated, buoyant. She wanted to say, Wherever you are, that’s where I want to be. She had already looked into the process of becoming an American citizen. But the requirements—three years’ service in the U.S. military or five years’ residence in the States—seemed daunting, especially when she was trying so hard to focus on now.
Instead, she thought of Mamie, secluded for nearly three years in her apartment, barricaded behind her husband’s photographs, surrounded by images of him. It was a cautionary reminder of the exorbitant price sometimes exacted by love.
And for herself? She wanted love, but she didn’t want to be love’s chattel. And even though Ike might want to take her to America, could he? Would he? It wasn’t a matter of trusting or not trusting him, for experience had taught her that life often took matters out of the most willing hands.
He might want to take her with him. But she didn’t dare tie her dreams to his desire.
• • •
Throughout March, the Allies gained new ground every day. Bradley’s Ninth Armored Division unexpectedly seized the railway bridge at Remagen, and over the next two weeks, nine divisions crossed that bridge. Allied bombers from Britain, Western Europe, and Italy pounded German cities hard, over and over again. SHAEF began making plans to move the headquarters staff to Frankfurt. It was the end, everybody said. It was only a matter of time now—of days, not months. At the most, of weeks.
But Kay and Beetle were increasingly concerned about Ike. The knee he had wrenched in the airplane crash in September was giving him trouble again. He suffered through one cold after another and then the flu; he had to have a cyst cut out of his back. Most of all, he was exhausted. He had been constantly on the move during the nine months since D-Day, juggling the demands and needs of commanders, trying to outguess the enemy, and anticipating the political situation after the war. When he went out in public, he could muster the energy and spirit to flash that confident Eisenhower grin. But in the office, he let the pain show on his face, in his slumped shoulders, and in his temper—which, as Kay could testify—was increasingly terrible. He had a quarter-inch fuse, and the slightest thing set him off like a bomb.
“He’s going to have a nervous breakdown if he doesn’t get some rest,” Kay said worriedly, and Beetle agreed. Both of them pushed him, and finally he gave in. A wealthy American family had offered the use of a villa on the Riviera, so in the middle of a cold, wet March, Ike and Kay took off for a five-day rest in a luxurious villa called Sous le Vent, overlooking the Mediterranean. Beetle and Ethel went along, and General Bradley flew in the next day.
Ike was supposed to relax, play bridge, watch
movies, and sit in the sun on the villa’s private beach. The first two days, he did nothing but sleep, waking late in the morning and limping outside to the sunny terrace that looked out over blue sparkling water. He would eat there (the villa had a marvelous cook), drink a couple of glasses of wine, and go back to bed until dinner. After forty-eight hours, he was well enough to concentrate on bridge. Every day, he became more like his old self, and on the last day, he was Eisenhower again. Kay was with him every moment, thinking as she often did that the future was her enemy, that the present time, the now, was her dearest friend. There was grace in that knowledge, she told herself. All the grace she needed.
And now, so far away from curious eyes and surrounded only by friends they trusted, they even slept together, in a giant bed in a room that looked out over an azure sea. “Nobody’s going to ask,” Ike said to her the first night, “but if they do, we’ll just lie.”
“Just lie?” she asked, fitting herself against him as she had done on the train to Scotland, so many months before.
He was silent for a moment. “Nobody’s going to ask,” he repeated. “If they do, don’t answer. It’s nobody’s goddamned business.”
• • •
On April 12, Kay and the General met Bradley at Patton’s Third Army headquarters at Bad Hersfeld for a tour of the Nazi treasure hoard hidden away in the Merkers Salt Mine. A rickety wooden elevator took them a half-mile down. At the bottom, corridors opened out into vaulted caverns filled with pallets of gold bullion and bales of paper currency, art treasures pillaged from museums and homes of wealthy Jews, and endless rows of suitcases filled with watches, jewelry, and gold-filled teeth—all that was left of their murdered owners. The Merkers mine was in what had been agreed as the Soviet zone, and plans were already in the works to move the hoard to American-held Frankfurt, where the occupation forces were headquartered. It would be transported in thirty ten-ton trucks guarded by two MP battalions and seven infantry platoons, with air cover provided by P-51 Mustangs.
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