Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  “I’ve been with this regiment about five months, and am having the time of my life,” Eisenhower wrote Omar Bradley on July 1, 1940. “Like everyone else in the Army, we’re up to our necks in work, but this work is fun. I could not conceive of a better job; except, of course, having one’s own regiment, which is out of the question because of rank.”7

  The Fourth Army maneuvers took place in August. For five days and nights Ike led his battalion across the cut-over timberland of Washington State. “Actually it would have made good stage-setting for a play in Hades,” he wrote his old friend Leonard Gerow. “Stumps, slashings, fallen logs, tangled brush, holes, hummocks and hills. Through the day I sweated and accumulated a grime of caked dust. At night, we froze. My youngsters kept on going and delivering handsomely after five days of almost no sleep! I was certainly proud of that gang.”8 Looking back on the Fourth Army maneuvers twenty-five years later, Ike wrote, “The experience fortified my conviction that I belonged with troops; with them I was always happy.”9

  Eisenhower’s spirits were lifted even higher when he received a letter in September from George Patton, who had left the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer to assume command of the newly established 2nd Armored Brigade at Fort Benning. Patton was full of himself. “It seems highly probable that I will get one of the next two armored divisions,” he wrote Ike. “If I do, I shall ask for you either as Chief of Staff, which I should prefer, or as a regimental commander. You can tell me which you want. Hoping we are together in a long and BLOODY war.”10

  Eisenhower was enthusiastic. “It would be great to be in the tanks once more, and even better to be associated with you again,” he replied. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that I could have a regiment in your division, because I’m still almost three years away from my colonelcy. But I think I could do a damn good job of commanding a regiment.”11

  Patton, who was in the field, answered as soon as he returned to post. He urged Ike to apply “for a transfer to the Armored Corps NOW. If you have any pull … use it for there will be 10 new generals in this corps pretty damn soon.”12

  Eisenhower wrote immediately to Mark Clark, who had been ordered to Washington by General Marshall. Would Clark please let the chief of infantry know how much he wanted to command one of the new armored regiments? Ike asked. “They will probably think me a conceited individual, but I see no objection to setting your sights high. Actually, I will be delighted to serve in the Armored Corps in almost any capacity, but I do hope to avoid Staff and to stay on troop duty for some time to come.”13

  Ike wrote a similar letter to T. J. Davis, his Manila compatriot who was now in the office of the adjutant general: “My ambition is to go, eventually, to the armored outfit,” he told Davis. “George Patton has told me that at least two new armored divisions are to be formed early next year, and if he is assigned to command one of them he intends to ask for me, possibly as one of his regimental commanders. That would be a swell job and I only hope that the War Department won’t consider me too junior in rank to get a regiment.”14

  Eisenhower’s concern about his lack of seniority was justified. Davis replied promptly that General Walter Krueger, who had just assumed command of VIII Corps at Fort Sam Houston, had asked for Ike to be his chief of staff (a colonel’s billet) but had been turned down by the War Department because Eisenhower was too junior. Ike was thrilled that Krueger had requested him, but was not displeased to have avoided another staff assignment. “The only job that would really tempt me to leave the 15th Infantry would be to obtain command of an armored regiment,” he wrote Davis.

  In view of the fact that the War Department thinks I am too junior to be a chief of staff of the corps, it seems evident that they will consider me too junior for commanding a regiment.

  It strikes me that this business of being so particular about the details of rank is, to say the least, somewhat amusing under existing circumstances. When a man has reached the age of fifty years, and has been graduated more than twenty-five, and is some two and one-half years away from his eagles, it seems that the matter of rank could be so adjusted that the War Department could put a man wherever they wanted to.15

  For the next several weeks Ike dreamed of commanding an armored regiment under George Patton. “But the roof fell in on me shortly after the middle of November.”16 Eisenhower received a telegram from Leonard Gerow, who was now a brigadier general and chief of the War Plans Division in the War Department.

  I NEED YOU IN WAR PLANS DIVISION. DO YOU SERIOUSLY OBJECT TO BEING DETAILED ON THE WAR DEPT GENERAL STAFF AND ASSIGNED HERE? PLEASE REPLY IMMEDIATELY.

  Ike was stunned. He immediately suffered his first and only attack of shingles, a painful skin disease often associated with extreme nervousness or anxiety. Lying flat on his back, he wrote Gerow a three-page, single-spaced letter wrestling with his desire to remain with troops but not wishing to turn down an opportunity to be at the center of action in Washington. Eisenhower believed the letter to be the most important he had ever written,17 and in the end he left the decision to Gerow.18

  As the attack of shingles suggests, Ike was torn. With the possibility of war on the horizon, he would have liked nothing better than to be in War Plans. He was confident of his ability to lead troops, but War Department policy explicitly required longer service with his regiment if he was to be considered for promotion to general officer. Gerow understood.

  AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION OF CONTENTS OF YOUR LETTER, I HAVE WITHDRAWN MY REQUEST FOR YOUR DETAIL TO WAR PLANS DIVISION. REGRET OUR SERVICE TOGETHER MUST BE POSTPONED.19

  Eisenhower took Gerow’s decision philosophically. “I’d hate to think that, in trying to explain to you a situation that has been tossed in my teeth more than once, all I accomplished was to pass up something I wanted to do, in favor of something I thought I ought to do,” he replied.20

  Mamie, of course, was brokenhearted when she learned the opportunity to go to Washington had fallen through. “I didn’t know this in advance,” Ike wrote Mark Clark, “or I might have given up my struggle to stay with the regiment”—a remarkable admission that speaks volumes about the lack of intimacy that apparently characterized the Eisenhowers’ domestic life. Ike told Clark that he had an ulterior motive in wanting to stay with the 15th Infantry, “and that is my hope that I may get one of the armored regiments next spring. I realize this is a very slim possibility and I’m not counting on it at all, but I still think it is a good thing for me to get in at least one year of regimental duty. That year will not be up until the middle of February.”21

  Ike said much the same to his friend Everett Hughes.c “I am delighted to stay with troops for two reasons. (1) I like it. (2) I want to convince the most ritualistic-minded guy in the whole d—— Army that I get along with John Soldier.”22

  As Eisenhower’s comment suggests, it was still business as usual for many in the Army. Despite the fall of France in June and the ongoing Battle of Britain, the possibility of war seemed remote. “The mass of officers and men lacked any sense of urgency,” Ike recalled. “Athletics, recreation, and entertainment took precedence in most units. Some of the officers, in the long years of peace, had worn for themselves deep ruts of professional routine within which they were sheltered from vexing new ideas and troublesome problems. Urgent directives from above could not eliminate an apathy that had its roots in comfort, blindness, and wishful thinking.”23

  In Washington, it was anything but business as usual. In June, on the eve of the Republican convention, President Roosevelt dumped Harry Woodring and Charles Edison, his somnambulant secretaries of war and Navy, and added Republicans Henry L. Stimson and Frank Knox to the cabinet—not only reaching across party lines, but bringing in two of the nation’s leading advocates of preparedness. Stimson, who had been secretary of state under Herbert Hoover and secretary of war under William Howard Taft, was the principal spokesman of the GOP’s eastern establishment. Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, had been Alf Landon’s running mate in 1936 and w
as a vigorous supporter of a peacetime draft for the armed services.

  Stimson brought a new broom to Washington. His assistants, Judge Robert Patterson of the United States Court of Appeals; John J. McCloy, managing partner of the Wall Street law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore; and Robert Lovett, senior partner at the investment house of Brown Brothers Harriman, were dedicated Republicans who had never voted for Franklin Roosevelt. But they were hard-driving administrators who revitalized the War Department—a building Lovett characterized as “so full of dead wood that it was an absolute firetrap.”24

  General Marshall, who had been installed as chief of staff nine months earlier, was already trimming deadwood root and branch. His first target was the bloated square division of World War I.25 As early as 1920, General Pershing had urged the square division be scrapped in favor of a 15,000-man “triangular” structure of three regiments, which he believed would be easier to control and more suitable to open, mobile warfare.d Military traditionalists such as Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, the senior officer on active service, fought the change tooth and nail,26 but General Marshall pressed ahead. By October 1, 1940, the Army’s nine regular divisions had been converted to the triangular structure, and the remaining National Guard divisions followed a few months later.27

  The Army’s equipment was equally antiquated. Like the square division, most of the stocks on hand dated from World War I. The basic infantry weapon was the 1903 bolt-action Springfield, a rifle of remarkable accuracy but little sustained firepower. Its replacement, the semiautomatic Garand M1, would not become widely available until 1942. The artillery still relied on a modified version of the French 75 mm as its basic fieldpiece; vehicles were in short supply; and the United States did not have a heavy tank, even on the drawing board. From 1936 to 1939, the Army high command had systematically reduced the War Department’s meager development funds, preferring “proven” World War I models to “needless expenditures for unessential research.”28 General J. O. Mauborgne, the Army’s chief signal officer, complained that it took twenty-seven months just to complete the paperwork for a new item of equipment—and six years to get it into production.29 Marshall, aided by Judge Patterson as undersecretary, took Army procurement in hand. Military purchasing officers, many of whom were temperamentally incapable of moving with the speed that mobilization required, were replaced, and Major General Brehon Somervell—an officer of unrelenting purposefulness—was brought in by Marshall as the Army’s chief logistics officer (G-4) to impart a sense of urgency.e

  But it was the Army’s personnel system that required the greatest overhaul. In August 1940, Congress authorized the War Department to call up the nation’s 300,000 national guardsmen and reservists for twelve months of federal service. On September 16, the first peacetime draft in American history became law. Sixteen million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five were registered, and they were inducted into the service at the rate of 50,000 a month. The Army, which had numbered 189,839 when Eisenhower returned from Manila, would top 1.4 million by mid-1941.30

  To find competent officers for an expanding Army, and to separate from the service those who were not competent, was one of Marshall’s biggest problems. Initially his hands were tied. The Army’s seniority-based promotion system had been put in place by statute and could only be changed by legislative action. In June 1940, under prodding from Marshall and Stimson, Congress agreed to promote all officers one rank, based on time in grade. Eisenhower received his promotion to colonel on March 6, 1941—roughly two years ahead of schedule. In October 1940, Congress authorized additional temporary promotions to general officer. But it was not until the summer of 1941 that Marshall received authority from Congress to retire officers who had outlived their usefulness and to promote junior officers of exceptional ability without regard to seniority.31 Even at that late date, the seniority system had staunch defenders on Capitol Hill. The measure that gave Marshall the authority to circumvent it was concealed as a rider to the Army’s annual appropriation bill.32

  The influx of guardsmen and draftees brought new life to Fort Lewis. On November 30, 1940, Eisenhower was appointed chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division—the 15th Infantry’s parent unit. Ike’s personnel designation was “General Staff with Troops,” which kept the clock running on his required troop duty. Three months later he was named chief of staff of IX Corps, also at Fort Lewis. The assignment was identical to the posting that General Krueger had sought for Ike six months earlier. This time, rather than holding that he was too junior for such a position, the War Department promoted Eisenhower to colonel instead.

  “It is a grand compliment,” Mamie wrote her parents on March 11, 1941. “We knew a week ago when Gen. Joyce [Major General Kenyon A. Joyce, commanding IX Corps] sent a telegram to Washington and have been sitting on needles and pins. It was so very secret. It may mean that we have to move up in the circle where the General’s house is.… I’m so glad for Ike. Am on my way to play Ma-Jong with Mrs. Joyce. Just wanted to let you know.”33

  Kenyon A. Joyce, who assumed command of IX Corps in the spring of 1941, was one of the last legendary cavalry commanders in the United States Army. He had enlisted as a private during the Spanish-American War, fought with the 3rd Cavalry in the Philippines, and had been severely wounded in France. From 1933 to 1937 he commanded the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer (George Patton was his executive officer), and before arriving at Fort Lewis had commanded the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Bliss, Texas. Joyce personified the panache of the horse cavalry. He was a superb leader of troops, a shrewd judge of character, and a commander who kept his eye on the big picture and did not fret the details. “I am finding this job most intriguing and interesting,” Ike wrote after his first month as chief of staff. “General Joyce is a swell commander and a fine person to work for.”34

  Eisenhower as IX Corps chief of staff, 1940. (illustration credit 7.1)

  Eisenhower served with Joyce less than four months. But he witnessed firsthand the art of direct command. “The commanding General’s method of operation is to announce policies and major decisions in definite terms and then to require his Chief of Staff to see to their execution,” Ike wrote in a memo to his successor. “Daily you will find that the General spends long periods with the troops. General Joyce does not read long directives, regulations and circulars. He expects his Chief of Staff to absorb the essentials and to keep him informed.” Ike added that Joyce was always interested in uniforms, saluting, and the conduct of the troops in public. “These subjects are important to him as outward signs of real discipline; and he insists that our big job is to inculcate in all ranks a conception and practice of fundamental discipline.”35

  In an intellectual sense, Fox Conner had been Ike’s role model. But when it came to the actual command of troops, it was Kenyon Joyce. When General Joyce reached the mandatory retirement age in 1943, Eisenhower brought him to the European Theater and appointed him president of the Allied Control Council for Italy—a post Joyce held for the remainder of the war. When Joyce died in January 1960, President Eisenhower and Mamie attended his funeral service at Fort Myer.

  In June 1941, the course of the war changed dramatically. On June 22, Hitler launched Operation BARBAROSSA—the invasion of the Soviet Union. At the time, Eisenhower was on maneuvers with IX Corps at the Hunter Liggett military reservation, south of Monterey. The German attack made little impact. But two days later, as Ike and General Joyce were standing on a hillside awaiting a report from one of the divisions, a messenger told Joyce that the War Department wanted him on the telephone. After taking the call, Joyce called Ike to his side. “Start packing,” he said. “Go back to Fort Lewis for orders, which will direct you to go to San Antonio as chief of staff, Third Army.”36

  Eisenhower could scarcely believe it. The United States was divided into four tactical army areas. Third Army (Southern Command) stretched from Florida to New Mexico with a present-for-duty strength of 270,000 men. Lieutenant General Walter Krueger h
ad recently assumed command (moving up from VIII Corps), and once again he wanted Ike to be his chief of staff—a position that called for a brigadier general. This time Krueger bypassed the chief of infantry and wrote directly to his old friend and comrade George Marshall.f Krueger told Marshall that he wanted a chief of staff “possessing broad vision, progressive ideas, a thorough grasp of the magnitude of the problems involved in handling an army, and lots of initiative and resourcefulness. Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower, Infantry, is such a man.” Marshall agreed. Whatever objections the adjutant general or the chief of infantry might have had were ignored or overruled.37

  Ike reported for duty at Fort Sam Houston on July 1, 1941. It was his and Mamie’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and they were back at the post where their married life had begun. Instead of a two-room suite in Ike’s BOQ, they moved into one of the grand five-bedroom brick houses on Artillery Row. For their anniversary, Ike gave Mamie an elegant platinum watch encrusted in diamonds that he had ordered from Tiffany—and which he paid for from money earned in the Philippines.38 Mamie wore the watch for the rest of her life. That same day their son John, joined by some 550 equally bewildered classmates, entered his plebe year at West Point. John had won a competitive senatorial appointment from Kansas, and, as he recalled, the ethnic and racial composition of his class was virtually identical to that of his father’s thirty years earlier.39

  As Third Army chief of staff, Eisenhower was entitled to an executive assistant and an orderly. As his executive assistant—military nomenclature for a gofer, aide, and man Friday—Ike retained Captain Ernest R. Lee, known to everyone as “Tex.” Lee, a former Metropolitan Life insurance salesman and sales manager for a Chevrolet dealership in San Antonio, was already working at Third Army headquarters. Eisenhower quizzed him for several days, liked his responses, and kept him on. Lee had a breezy, unflappable style, lacked “attitude,” and was profoundly loyal to those with whom he worked. He was also a go-getter. Ike and Lee hit it off, and “Tex” became the first member of Eisenhower’s personal staff.40