Eisenhower in War and Peace
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Ike kept that sentiment to himself. To his staff he said TORCH was an order from the commander in chief and the prime minister, and that he was going to carry it out “if I have to go alone in a rowboat.”41
Not until well after the war did General Marshall acknowledge that Roosevelt had been right and he had been wrong. Even then his acknowledgment was halfhearted. “We failed to see that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained,” Marshall told Forrest Pogue. “That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought. The people demand action. We couldn’t wait.”42 Ike was more circumspect. “Later developments convinced me,” he wrote shortly after the war, “that those who held the [1942 cross-Channel] operation unwise were correct.”43
To head the planning for TORCH, Eisenhower prevailed upon General Walter Krueger to release Colonel Alfred Gruenther, who had been the operations officer for Third Army on the Louisiana maneuvers.44 Planning was shifted from American headquarters on Grosvenor Square to Norfolk House on St. James’s Square (the birthplace of George III), and Butcher located a suburban hideaway where Ike could relax—something that was long overdue. “He was not the cheerful man I remembered,” said Gruenther upon his arrival in London. “He had aged ten years.”45
Telegraph Cottage, the retreat Butcher found for Ike, was a picture-postcard English country house, situated on ten acres of dense woods and cultivated lawns, with a winding drive and high hedges that assured absolute privacy. Located between Coombe Hill and Little Coombe golf courses in Kingston, Surrey, the cottage was in the heart of what was known jokingly as London’s stockbroker belt, and was roughly thirty minutes from Eisenhower’s headquarters on Grosvenor Square. The cottage had five bedrooms, only one bathroom, and no central heating, but a massive fireplace in the living room and an old-fashioned coal stove in the kitchen kept the house comfortable most of the time. The only telephone was a direct line laid by the signal corps to headquarters on Grosvenor Square. At Churchill’s insistence, a bomb shelter was dug in the garden before Ike moved in.
Initially, Eisenhower went to the cottage only on weekends. But the atmosphere proved so congenial that he was soon spending four to five nights a week there. “Our cottage is a godsend,” Ike wrote Mamie on September 13. “Butch says I’m human again. When the day comes that all this business is over and I come back, you’d better ‘figger’ where we’ll go and how we’ll live. Possibly a shack, but at least we should be free as air. With a few pigs and chickens we can be as happy as a pair of Georgia crackers with a good still.”46
Ike’s rendering of Telegraph Cottage. Eisenhower painted this while president and presented it to Sergeant Moaney with the following inscription: “I helped plan both TORCH 1942 (the Invasion of North Africa) and OVERLORD (1944) D-Day—Telegraph Cottage—15 miles South of London. DDE.” (illustration credit 9.3)
Eisenhower shared Telegraph Cottage with Butcher and T. J. Davis, his adjutant general. Mickey McKeogh took charge of housekeeping details, Sergeant John Hunt did the cooking, and Sergeant John Alton Moaney was Ike’s batman and valet. Hunt was from Petersburg, Virginia; Moaney, from Maryland’s eastern shore. Both were black, and both remained with Eisenhower throughout the war. Moaney stayed until the general’s death. Rounding out Ike’s unofficial family was Kay Summersby, who initially began as Eisenhower’s driver but was almost immediately integrated into off-duty activities. When opportunity permitted, Ike loved to play bridge in the evening, and it was usually he and Kay against Butcher and T.J. When fortune smiled, General Gruenther, recently promoted, who was recognized as one of the nation’s outstanding bridge players, would take a hand.
At the time, Summersby was engaged to Richard Arnold, the young West Point officer in the Corps of Engineers who had been in Britain for over a year. Pert, bright, well-bred, and outgoing, Kay’s pedigree made her invaluable to her American bosses, who were painfully unfamiliar with English social customs. Summersby could tell them who should sit next to whom at dinner parties, the order in which dinner partners addressed one another, when to light up and when not,f when it was permissible to leave a gathering (after royalty departed), and such other details that English hosts took seriously.
The fact is Kay Summersby proved a perfect interlocutor, buffering the transition for Ike’s unofficial family into English life. She was thirty-four, one of five children of a retired lieutenant colonel in the Royal Munster Fusiliers—an Irish regiment of distinguished lineage. She was raised on the family estate, Inish Beg, a small island in the Ilen River in County Cork, and lived what she described as a sheltered life of privilege. “There was a succession of governesses, hunts, spatting parents, riding in the fields … the usual pattern of that obsolete world. The only tragedy which could becloud life in those days was a sudden Irish thunderstorm—because it might spoil my lovely tennis party.”47 As the daughter of an Army officer living in the country, she grew up around horses, was a fearless rider, and often rode to the hounds. She was also an accomplished bridge player, knew how to pour tea correctly, was well read, articulate, and, having been born into the propertied class, was less intimidated than most by Britain’s social stratification.
“Kay was very beautiful in those days,” said Anthea Saxe, a fellow member of the Motor Transport Corps. “She was charming and gracious, and she was gay and witty. She had a lot of energy and drive. She was also extremely capable and perhaps more important was very closed mouthed. She never blabbered about anything.”48
Telek on the boss’s desk. (illustration credit 9.4)
Ike was smitten. “Dad was attracted to vital women, like Marian Huff in the Philippines and Kay,” said John Eisenhower, “but these were friendships, not torrid affairs.”49
To complete the unofficial family, Eisenhower decided they needed a dog. “Would you like to have a dog, Kay?” he asked. “I think I can manage that. I’d like to do something for you for working all these crazy hours and everything.”50 Ike had never owned a dog during his military career, and he delegated the task of finding one to Summersby and Bedell Smith, a knowledgeable dog lover. “I’m going to get a dog,” he told Butcher, with a grin “as wide as a watermelon.”51
Beetle and Kay narrowed the search to two Scotties, and Ike made the final choice and picked the dog’s name: T-E-L-E-K. When asked, Eisenhower said the origin of the Scottie’s name was “a military secret.” To Kay he said, “It’s a combination of Telegraph Cottage and Kay, two parts of my life that make me very happy.”52
Michael Korda, Eisenhower’s most recent biographer, suggests that the selection of a Scottie was not surprising since Fala, FDR’s beloved companion, was probably the most famous dog in the English-speaking world. “But the name Telek was yet another indication that Ike’s feelings for Kay were hardly the normal ones of a three-star general for his driver.”53
To Mamie, Ike wrote, “I’m trying to get me a little dog—Scottie by preference. You can’t talk war to a dog, and I’d like to have someone or something to talk to, occasionally, that does not know what the word means! A dog is my only hope.”54 Eisenhower evidently saw no incongruity between his growing affection for Summersby and his love for his wife.
Ike’s selection to be supreme commander reflected circumstance more than choice—another example of the fortuna that followed him throughout his military career. He had gone to England in June 1942 as a stand-in for General Marshall to prepare for the cross-Channel attack that Marshall would command. When that was aborted and North Africa was selected as a substitute, neither Marshall nor Admiral King nor Secretary Stimson believed the new operation would ever take place. Certainly they were determined to prevent it. In that context there was little risk in selecting Eisenhower to command. The fact that he had no combat experience, virtually no command time, and was the most junior lieutenant general in the United States Army was of no consequence if the operation was never mounted.
But events took control. Or more accurately, Churchill and Roosevelt took control. Despite the Amer
ican military’s objection to landing in North Africa, the prime minister and the president ordered the invasion to take place. In addition, FDR insisted that the United States play the major role. The president, who considered himself an expert on French politics, was convinced the French had soured on Great Britain, believing the British had left them in the lurch by a premature evacuation at Dunkirk. To make matters worse, the Royal Navy had proceeded to sink much of the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir in July 1940 to prevent it from falling into German hands. Roosevelt assumed the French held no such animosity toward the United States. “I am reasonably sure a simultaneous landing by British and Americans would result in full resistance by all French in Africa,” the president cabled Churchill on August 30. But “an initial American landing without British ground forces offers a real chance that there would be no French resistance or only a token resistance.”55 If the United States was to provide most of the troops for the invasion of North Africa, it was logical that the operation should be commanded by an American. Eisenhower was in London, he was manifestly American, and he had impressed the British with his openness, his fairness, and his determination. With no alternative candidate in the wings, his selection was foreordained.
What may be most surprising is how Eisenhower rose to the occasion. At the time, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942 was the greatest amphibious operation that had ever been attempted. Unlike the 1944 D-Day landing in Normandy, for which the Allies had three years to prepare, TORCH was mounted in two months, with sketchy intelligence about landing sites, improvised shipping arrangements, and an Army that had never seen combat. Two great armadas totaling more than 400 ships, protected by 300-plus naval vessels, would carry 116,000 men (three-quarters of whom were American) to the invasion beaches. One fleet would sail 2,800 miles from Great Britain through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Algerian coast. A second would sail 4,500 miles from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to Morocco. The troops would be at sea for two weeks. They would land on a potentially hostile shore without benefit of off-loading and regrouping. And no one knew what their reception would be. Eisenhower may have been overwhelmed by the responsibility, but his marching orders to his command were concise. “The object of the operation as a whole is to occupy French Morocco and Algeria with a view to the earliest possible subsequent occupation of Tunisia.”56
Eisenhower recognized, as did most military planners, that French reaction to the Allied landing would be the single most important factor in guaranteeing early success. And here, FDR’s self-assurance about French politics proved misplaced. French North Africa—Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia—was not occupied by the Germans, and remained under the sovereign control of the French government in Vichy. TORCH, simply put, involved the invasion of the territory of a neutral nation without a declaration of war. The French Army in North Africa, well officered but poorly equipped, numbered 120,000 men—roughly the size of the invasion force. If the French high command chose to resist the landings, it would not only become a public relations embarrassment but could well result in military defeat.
Allied relations with Vichy were complicated. France, under the terms of the June 1940 armistice with Germany, had been split in two. Northern France, including Paris, was occupied by the Germans. Southern France remained unoccupied, the government located in the provincial resort town of Vichy, headed by eighty-six-year-old Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun. The Vichy government was collaborationist. But it also reflected the aspirations of that element of French society who rejected the secular, egalitarian principles of the French Revolution. Instead of the democratic ideals of Liberté, égalité, Fraternité, the Vichy regime embraced the old-fashioned virtues of Travail, Famille, Patrie (Work, Family, Country). It was supported by those who in the 1930s had rallied to the slogan “Hitler rather than Blum”—Socialist Léon Blum, leader of France’s Popular Front government. Primarily Catholic, ultraconservative, anti-Semitic, often the descendants of French nobility, and members of the officer corps and the high civil service, those loyal to Vichy accepted an alliance with Hitler as a means of preserving traditional values.
The United States recognized the Vichy regime as the legitimate government of France. Great Britain did not. FDR dispatched Admiral Leahy as American ambassador to Pétain in 1940; Churchill, on the other hand, embraced Charles de Gaulle as the “core of French resistance and the flame of French honour.”57 Roosevelt believed the Allies could do business with Vichy; Churchill took the position that the collaborationist scum should be relegated to the dustbin of history and that France should be reconstituted under de Gaulle’s Free French leadership.
FDR’s position was not simply a personal whim. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the Foreign Service, and Admiral Leahy especially espoused the cause of Vichy as the legitimate government of France. Eisenhower was caught in the middle. At this point in the war it was unlikely the French officer corps would accept de Gaulle, who many believed had foresworn his oath of allegiance and was engaged in a treasonous enterprise. It was equally unlikely that the Vichy government would change sides and support the Allies. With both alternatives ruled out, Washington adopted a deus ex machina scheme hatched in the State Department and spearheaded by career diplomat Robert Murphy, a longtime savant of French affairs and since 1940 the senior American official in North Africa. Murphy believed that if the invasion was placed under the command of a ranking French general, one ostensibly loyal to Pétain, the whole of North Africa “would flame into revolt.”58 Local military authorities would accept the incoming general as their superior officer, order a cease-fire, and embrace the Anglo-American forces as liberators and allies. Ambassador Murphy did not use the phrase “dancing in the streets,” but he might as well have done so.
There was little evidence to support Murphy’s hypothesis. A conservative Catholic—conservative even by the Paleolithic standards of the Foreign Service—Murphy considered de Gaulle’s Free French movement dangerously radical and found little to criticize in Vichy’s domestic policies.g He was awed by the skill with which French administrators kept North Africa’s Muslim population under control, and was convinced the Allies would have to retain the existing administrative structure to maintain order.59 His French friends were largely aristocrats and senior officials who welcomed the stability Pétain provided. De Gaulle said that Murphy was “long familiar with the best society and apparently rather inclined to believe that France consisted of the people he dined with in town.”60
Murphy was also glib, personable, extremely confident, and exuded Irish charm with a well-honed gift for telling important people what they wanted to hear. Butcher wrote that he “talked more like an American businessman canvassing the ins and outs of a proposed merger than either a diplomat or a soldier.”61 Roosevelt, who usually saw through such people, was utterly charmed by Murphy, and made him his personal representative in North Africa. More than anyone else’s, Murphy’s views colored FDR’s perception of the region and lay at the root of the plan the United States now put in place.
Murphy’s candidate to rally the French Army in North Africa was General Henri Giraud, a four-star general who had commanded the French Seventh and Ninth armies in northern France in 1940, was captured by the Germans at Wassigny, had escaped from German captivity, and was living quietly in the Loire. Although he was not on active duty, his rank as a full general made him senior to the military governors in North Africa, and as a supporter of the Pétain government he had not stepped across the line into mutiny. Giraud would become an idée fixe with FDR as the French alternative to de Gaulle, but the fact is he had no place in the command structure of the Army, no popular following, no organization, no program, no interest in politics, and little administrative ability.62 Simply put, he was an American puppet invented by FDR and the State Department to avoid having to deal with Charles de Gaulle.63 h None of this was known to Eisenhower, and none of it bothered Murphy, who was confident that a great many Frenchmen in North Africa would rally
to Giraud’s support.64
With the utmost secrecy, Murphy arrived in England on September 16, 1942, and was spirited to Telegraph Cottage, where he briefed Ike on the plan. After an all-night session, Eisenhower cabled Marshall that he had the utmost confidence in Murphy’s “judgment and discretion and I know that I will be able to work with him in perfect harmony.”65 Nevertheless, Ike was troubled by the wording of Murphy’s mandate from FDR, which was vague about his place in the chain of command. “Since I am responsible for the success of the operations,” he told Marshall, “I feel that it is essential that final authority in all matters in this theater rest with me.” Marshall agreed. On September 22, Murphy’s orders were revised by FDR clarifying that as the president’s personal representative, he was still subordinate to Eisenhower.66
Murphy believed that prior to the invasion a ranking American officer should go to Algeria and meet clandestinely with senior French officers to secure their support. Mark Clark, now Ike’s deputy, volunteered for the mission, and was landed by a British submarine on the Algerian coast in mid-October. Clark met with Murphy and Major General Charles E. Mast, chief of staff of the French XIX Corps. The results were inconclusive. Mast commanded no troops and spoke only for himself, and the meeting was disrupted by the local police. Clark fled, and in the process lost his trousers in the heavy surf reboarding the submarine. The disrupted meeting should have alerted Eisenhower, and certainly Clark, that Murphy’s rosy assessment of French cooperation was unlikely to be realized.67
Under Gruenther’s direction, planning for TORCH took shape. The assault troops were divided into three task forces—one for each target area. The western task force, some thirty-six thousand men commanded by George Patton, would hit the beaches at three points in the vicinity of Casablanca. These troops were drawn entirely from the United States.68 They would sail from Hampton Roads on October 24, 1942, and would land in the early morning hours of November 8. The Atlantic swarmed with German U-boats, and the mammoth surf on the Moroccan coast might prevent landing for several days, but Patton was undeterred. “I will leave the beaches either a conqueror or a corpse,” he told FDR on the eve of departure.69