Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Ike went to his office early to catch up on his paperwork. He returned to his quarters about noon, had lunch with Mamie, and went upstairs for a short nap. Scarcely had he gone to sleep before the phone rang with an urgent call from Tex Lee. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, said Lee, and America’s Pacific Fleet had been destroyed.

  “Within an hour,” Ike recalled, “orders began pouring into Third Army headquarters from the War Department.” Antiaircraft batteries were dispatched to the West Coast; antisabotage orders were put in place; border patrols and port security were reinforced; and major troop formations were alerted for possible movement should the Japanese attack the Pacific mainland. “Immediacy of movement was the keynote. Normal channels of administration were abandoned. A single telephone call would start an infantry regiment across the country.”69

  On December 8, President Roosevelt went to Capitol Hill to ask for a declaration of war against Japan. “December seventh,” said the president, is “a date which will live in infamy.”70 On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The following day, the phone on Ike’s desk that connected Third Army directly to the War Department began to ring.

  “Is that you, Ike?” asked Bedell Smith, secretary of the general staff.

  “Yes.”

  “The Chief [General Marshall] says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away. Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.”71 Eisenhower was being summoned to Washington to join the War Plans Division of the Army general staff.

  Eisenhower had been with troops almost two years. His ratings were consistently “superior.” Colonel Jesse Ladd, commanding the 15th Infantry, called Ike “an enthusiastic, aggressive officer of the highest type. One of the few Army officers whom I consider deserves a straight rating of superior.”72 Major General Charles Thompson, commanding the 3rd Infantry Division, said Eisenhower was “affable, energetic, dynamic, zealous, original, loyal, capable, dependable, and outstanding.”73 Kenyon Joyce believed that Ike was “one of the ablest officers in the Army. This officer is thoroughly qualified for division command at this time.” (At the time Eisenhower was a colonel; a division is commanded by a major general.)74 General Krueger, on Ike’s final report, rated him second among the 170 general officers with whom he was acquainted.75

  * * *

  a Between 1923 and 1939, the Army maintained an average strength of 14,000 officers and 130,000 enlisted men. By contrast, the German Reichswehr was limited by the Versailles Treaty to 100,000 men, of whom no more than 4,000 could be officers. (Peacemakers wanted the German Army large enough to suppress domestic violence, but not so large as to menace Germany’s neighbors.)

  These comparative figures suggest that the U.S. Army contained far too many officers for its overall strength, and one of General Marshall’s first tasks when he became chief of staff was to prune the deadwood. One of the rationales for the excess of officers in the American Army was their potential employment as cadre should the Army ever need to expand. Yet the German Army under Hitler expanded rapidly without difficulty and with far fewer officers.

  b The term “square” pertained to the four regiments in the division. The division was typically deployed with all four regiments on line, with battalions in a column within each regiment. The infantry was essentially cannon fodder. Following a rolling barrage, successive waves of infantry hurled themselves against the enemy trenches. Stacking the infantry battalions in tandem reflected the tactics of Napoléon at Waterloo and Beauregard at Shiloh, and for reasons that are less than obvious fascinated the department of military strategy and tactics at West Point. By 1918 such tactics were obsolescent and by 1939 wholly anachronistic. See especially Christopher R. Gabel, The U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941 9–11 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1992).

  c Everett S. Hughes (USMA, 1908), a charter member of Club Eisenhower at the Wyoming, was an ordnance officer on the War Department General Staff. When Ike assumed command in North Africa, Hughes accompanied him as his deputy chief of staff. In 1945, Hughes became the Army’s inspector general, and later served as chief of ordnance.

  d Unlike the square division, which was designed for the attrition of head-on frontal assault, the triangular division (devised by the Germans) emphasized maneuver and flexibility. Every echelon within the triangular division, from the rifle company to the battalion, the regiment, and the division itself, possessed three maneuver elements, plus a means of fire support. One of the maneuver elements could fix the enemy, a second could find his flank, while a third remained in reserve.

  e Somervell, a career engineer officer, had served in Mexico with Pershing and won a Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry in France. In 1935 he took charge of the massive, highly combustible WPA program in New York City and ran it successfully for four years. His no-nonsense dedication and abrasive straightforwardness earned the respect of radicals and reactionaries alike as well as the lifelong confidence of Harry Hopkins. Lieutenant General Henry Aurand, one of Somervell’s key subordinates in World War II, called him “a man without a drop of human kindness.” Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay 111.

  f In 1901, Marshall and Krueger served together as young lieutenants in G Company of the 30th Infantry in the Philippines, and later (1908–10) were the only two lieutenants on the faculty of the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth. Krueger served as the Army’s assistant chief of staff for operations (G-3) from 1936 to 1938, when he was succeeded by Marshall. Their friendship ran deep, and they shared a mutual respect. See Forrest C. Pogue, 1 George C. Marshall 82–83, 107 (New York: Viking Press, 1963).

  g As a reader of military history, I have always been struck by the relations between Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and Erich von Manstein, his chief of staff—the team that planned the German breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940 and then led Army Group A to victory. Manstein writes that patience was not one of von Rundstedt’s virtues. Their headquarters was awash in paperwork but “thanks to a very proper unwritten law in the German Army that the general commanding be kept free of all minor detail, v. Rundstedt was hardly affected and was able to take a long walk every morning on the Rhein promenade. On returning to his desk to await the oral reports which he daily received from myself and other members of the staff, he would fill the time by reading a detective thriller. Like many other prominent people, he found welcome distraction in such literature, but since he was rather shy about this taste of his, he regularly read the novel in an open drawer [of his desk] which could be quickly closed whenever anyone came in to see him.” Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories 69–70, Anthony G. Powell, ed. and trans. (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982).

  h Haislip replied by return mail that MacArthur had made Sutherland his chief of staff and had not asked for Ike. “I’m happy the ‘Field Marshal’ didn’t recall my name,” said Eisenhower. “While I felt reasonably certain he would not make a request for me, I didn’t want to take chances.” DDE to Haislip, August 1941, EL.

  i During the long motor march, Patton refueled his vehicles at commercial filling stations, paying for the gas out of his own pocket. Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War 396 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

  EIGHT

  With Marshall in Washington

  Tempers are short! There are lots of amateur strategists on the job—and prima donnas everywhere. I’d give anything to be back in the field.

  —DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER,

  January 4, 1942

  General Marshall knew Eisenhower by reputation. They had met three times, but only briefly: first in Paris, where they discussed Pershing’s memoirs; then in January 1940 during California maneuvers; and most recently in Louisiana. It was in Louisiana that Marshall first began to consider Ike as a possible chief of the Army’s War Plans Division. “Toward the end of the Louisiana maneuvers,” General Walter Krueger recalled, “General Marshall asked me whom I regarded as best fitte
d to head the War Plans Division, which I had headed several years before, and I named Eisenhower, though I was loath to lose him.”1 Marshall and Krueger had served together for forty years, and Marshall trusted Krueger’s judgment. But before turning War Plans over to Ike, he wanted to see for himself. When Eisenhower reported for duty at the War Department on Sunday morning, December 14, 1941, he was assigned a desk well down the War Plans pecking order and told that General Marshall wanted to see him immediately.

  “It was the first time in my life that I talked to him for more than two minutes at a time,” Ike remembered.2 Marshall made no effort to put him at ease. There was no salutation and no small talk. Marshall outlined the grim situation in the Pacific. America’s battleship fleet would be out of action for many months; the Navy’s carriers (which had been at sea at the time of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) lacked sufficient escort vessels; Hawaii lay open to attack. The two remaining Allied battleships in the western Pacific, the Royal Navy’s Prince of Wales and Repulse, had been sunk near Singapore by Japanese airplanes. Japan’s Army had landed in strength in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and was marching from Indochina into Burma. In the Philippines, what limited air strength there was had been caught on the ground and badly damaged by Japanese bombers; the naval facility at Cavite, just outside Manila, was a mass of rubble; and the total strength of the American garrison numbered fewer than thirty-two thousand. The Philippine Army, poorly trained and badly equipped, totaled one hundred thousand, most of whom were reservists recently called to active duty. Marshall said the evidence indicated that the Japanese intended to overrun the Philippines as rapidly as possible.3

  “What should be our general line of action?” he asked Eisenhower. Ike had spent four years in Manila with MacArthur, and knew the situation on the ground. Marshall was testing him. As one biographer has written, “Marshall wanted to know who could do the job for him and who could not, and he wanted to know it immediately.” Eisenhower’s answer would tell Marshall whether he was up to the challenge.4

  Ike was stunned. “I thought for a second and, hoping I was showing a poker face, answered, ‘Give me a few hours.’ ”

  “All right,” said Marshall.5

  Eisenhower recognized the enormity of the problem—as well as the fact that he was under scrutiny. “If I was to be of any service to General Marshall, I would have to earn his confidence. My first answer would have to be unimpeachable, and the answer would have to be prompt. [It] should be short, emphatic, and based on reasoning in which I honestly believed. No oratory or glittering generality.”6

  Three hours later, Ike marched back for a second interview. His thoughts were contained in a three-page triple-spaced memorandum that he had typed out but kept in his pocket.7 Marshall preferred his briefings conducted without notes. That compelled briefing officers to be concise, and Ike was.

  General, it will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than the garrison can hold out with any driblet of assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. We must do what we can. Our base must be Australia, and we must start at once to expand it and to secure our communications to it. We must take great risks and spend any amount of money required.8

  Marshall appeared satisfied. “Eisenhower,” he said, “this Department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well but feel compelled to always bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done. The Philippines are your responsibility. Do your best to save them.”9

  As Eisenhower recalled, “I resolved then and there to do my own work to the best of my ability and report to the General only situations of obvious necessity or when he personally sent for me.”10 Three days before, Ike had been chief of staff of Third Army in San Antonio. He was now Marshall’s deputy overseeing America’s military effort in the Philippines. Eisenhower stepped up to the responsibility. He and Brehon Somervell, the Army’s chief of supply, became a two-man team working against time. “I met with Somervell every day,” Ike recalled, “in a desperate hope of uncovering some new method of approach to a problem that defied solution. General Marshall maintained an intensive interest in everything we did and frequently initiated measures calculated to give us some help. In the final result all our efforts proved feeble enough, but I do not yet see what more could have been done.”11

  Eisenhower’s ability to act without consulting him impressed Marshall. Ike’s deployment of the Cunard liner Queen Mary is an example. The British had converted the eighty-thousand-ton luxury vessel—as well as her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth—into troopships, each capable of carrying fourteen thousand men. When the Queen Mary arrived in New York in January 1942, Eisenhower loaded the better part of an infantry division aboard and dispatched the ship without escort to Australia. The Queen Mary sailed at a cruising speed of almost thirty knots, which Ike believed provided a margin of safety from possible U-boat attack.a

  The voyage was a long one, and the Queen put in to Rio de Janeiro to refuel. It was spotted by an Italian agent who radioed Rome that the vessel, “with about 15,000 soldiers aboard,” had left port and was steaming eastward across the Atlantic. “For the next week we lived in terror,” said Ike.12 When the ship arrived safely in Melbourne, the War Plans Division breathed a collective sigh of relief. “This was the kind of thing we kept from General Marshall. There was no use burdening his mind with the worries that we were forced to carry to bed with us. He had enough of his own.”13

  Eisenhower assumed General Marshall was unaware of the risk he had run. But when he informed him that the Queen Mary had arrived safely in Australia, Marshall said, “I received that radio intercept [from Rio] the same time you did. I was hoping you might not see it and so I said nothing to you until I knew the outcome.”14

  Eisenhower brought a unique set of skills to War Plans. In addition to his recent experience in the Philippines, he had served directly with the Army’s senior leadership for the past twenty years. For six years he had worked with Fox Conner and George Moseley, the intellectual kingpins of the interwar Army. He was with Pershing for two years, and had served with MacArthur for seven. Most recently he had worked for two of the most gifted troop commanders on active duty, Kenyon Joyce and Walter Krueger. He understood the nuance of command at the highest level, as well as the reality of translating orders into action in the field. Above all, he had learned to look at problems from the standpoint of high command.

  Working with Marshall was a special challenge. Years before, Fox Conner had told Ike that he should try for an assignment under Marshall. “In the next war we will have to fight beside allies and George Marshall knows more about the techniques of arranging allied commands than any man I know. He is nothing short of a genius.”15

  On the surface, Ike and Marshall could not have been more different. Eisenhower made everyone feel at ease in his presence. Almost no one felt at ease in Marshall’s presence. Eisenhower’s grin was infectious, Marshall’s visage was intimidating. Everyone (except Marshall) called Eisenhower “Ike”; no one, not even President Roosevelt, called Marshall “George.” Eisenhower never forgot the name of anyone he met; Marshall had difficulty remembering the names of those closest to him. His longtime aide, Frank McCarthy, was always Frank McCartney; his secretary, Miss Nason, was Miss Mason; and his second wife, Katherine, was often “Lily”—which had been his first wife’s nickname.16 Both men had terrible tempers, and Ike blew his stack frequently. Despite his anger, Marshall remained calm on the surface. Rarely, if ever, did he betray the slightest emotion. When informed at his quarters early on the morning of June 6, 1944, that the Allies had landed in France, he hung up the phone with a curt “Thank you.” When Mrs. Marshall inquired whether he had asked how things were going, Marshall said he had not. “At this distance
, don’t you think that is Eisenhower’s problem?”17

  George Catlett Marshall was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on the last day of December 1880. Like MacArthur, he was ten years older than Ike. All three men were raised by stern fathers and strong, adoring mothers who had lasting influences on their lives. Marshall had gone to the Virginia Military Institute, not West Point, and, like MacArthur, had been first captain of cadets. He was commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry in 1901, fought in the Philippines, was the honor graduate (like Eisenhower) at Leavenworth, and later taught there. In World War I, Marshall served as Fox Conner’s deputy at Pershing’s headquarters. When Pershing became chief of staff in 1921, Marshall became his principal military assistant. After four years with Pershing he went to China with the 15th Infantry, taught at the Army War College, and served as assistant commandant and chief academic officer at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. In 1933 he assumed command of the 8th Infantry at Fort Moultrie, South Carolina, and also became the commanding officer of District F of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), responsible for organizing nineteen CCC camps in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.

  General George C. Marshall. (illustration credit 8.1)

  It seemed clear that Marshall was destined for high command. But late in 1933, General MacArthur, always resentful of “the Pershing clique” in the Army, abruptly transferred him to what appeared to be a tombstone assignment as senior adviser to the Illinois National Guard. Marshall was fifty-three years old and still a colonel. If not promoted to general officer shortly, he would face mandatory retirement. Marshall’s career was rescued by Pershing and Malin Craig, who succeeded MacArthur as chief of staff. In September 1936 a new promotion board advanced Marshall to brigadier general, and in 1938 Craig brought him to Washington to head the Army’s War Plans Division. Later that year Craig advanced him to deputy chief of staff. When Craig’s own term as chief of staff expired in 1939, President Roosevelt, at the urging of Pershing and Harry Hopkins, reached down the Army seniority roster and appointed Marshall chief of staff, jumping thirty-three officers who were senior to him.