Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  After the decision was made, Eisenhower and his deputies broke for dinner and hoped for the best. “To be perfectly honest,” said Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, “it doesn’t look too good.”40 Tedder observed that it was curious to be invading Italy from the south. “Even Hannibal had the sense to come in with his elephants over the Alps.”41

  The troops were slated to go ashore at 0300 hours. As he waited, Ike broke the tension with a letter to Mamie. “In circumstances such as these, men do almost anything to keep themselves from going slightly mad. I can stand it better than most, but there is no use denying that I feel the strain.… Everybody is doing his best. The answer is in the lap of the Gods.”42

  When the first troops went ashore at 0335 hours, a bare half hour late, the storm had subsided. The surf was high on the American beaches, but the landings were largely unopposed, marred only by the usual map-reading fiascos and occasional poor helmsmanship by undertrained landing craft operators. The exception was the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment of Matthew Ridgway’s 82nd Airborne, which was decimated by friendly fire. As the troop-carrying C-47s flew over the invasion fleet on their way to the drop zone, trigger-happy antiaircraft gunners opened fire. Of the 144 planes that took off from Tunisia, 23 were shot down and 37 were badly damaged.43 Fourteen hundred of the 5,300 paratroopers in the regiment were killed or missing—one of the worst friendly fire episodes in modern warfare.44

  By nightfall on the tenth, the invasion force was four miles inland and the beachheads were secure. Panzers from the Hermann Göring Division launched a vigorous assault against the landing zone of the 1st Division, but were eventually repulsed by American artillery fire. Italian foot soldiers and coastal defense units surrendered by the thousands. More enemy soldiers were captured during the first week of fighting on Sicily than had surrendered to the U.S. Army in all of World War I.45 Others simply peeled off their uniforms and joined the hordes of refugees streaming inland—“self-demobilization,” in the terminology of the Axis high command.

  As the Italian Army melted away, Field Marshal Kesselring—whose skilled defense of Tunisia had delayed the Allies for six months—arrived on the scene, bringing with him two additional German divisions, the 29th Panzer Grenadiers and the 1st Parachute Division, to reinforce the two already on the island. With Allied forces on Sicily already numbering close to five hundred thousand, Kesselring understood that defeat was inevitable. But he was determined to “win time and defend,” and recognized that Sicily’s geography afforded an exceptional opportunity to build a defensive bastion along the slopes of Mount Etna and the Messina Peninsula.

  Once again, Allied planners underestimated German resiliency, minimized the topographic impediments, and overestimated American and British capacity. Two days after the landing, Eisenhower spent a day touring the beachheads and told newsmen that assuming everything proceeded satisfactorily, “We should have Sicily in two weeks.”46 Those two weeks turned into six. Eisenhower played little role in the battle. Alexander, commanding the ground war, had two scorpions in a bottle: Patton and Montgomery, who sometimes appeared more intent on watching each other than chasing Kesselring. When Eighth Army’s advance bogged down on the slopes of Mount Etna, Patton struck out on his own toward Palermo, in western Sicily. The military logic was dubious. Alexander let Patton have his way, but the Germans were mystified. Kesselring found it difficult to believe that the strong Allied forces advancing along the coast “had been dispersed to the western parts of Sicily, where the Americans just marched and captured unimportant terrain, instead of fighting at the wing where a major decision had to be reached.”47

  After reaching Palermo, Patton turned east and began attacking along the north coast toward Messina. German resistance was fierce, and Patton pushed his men to the limit. On August 17, 1943, the troops of Seventh Army beat the British to Messina by a number of hours. As in North Africa, brute force had prevailed. The outstanding performance of Seventh Army under Patton was the only bright spot in the fight. Kesselring, with sixty thousand troops, had held back two Allied armies for thirty-eight days, inflicting twenty thousand casualties at a cost of twelve thousand.48 And all four German divisions, the 15th and 29th Panzer Grenadiers, the 1st Parachute, and the Hermann Göring, were evacuated intact across the Strait of Messina, along with 70,000 Italian troops, 10,000 trucks, and 47 tanks. The withdrawal, one of the most successful in military history, went largely uncontested. Eisenhower’s headquarters had made no plans for severing the strait when HUSKY began, nor did any such plan emerge as the campaign reached a climax. Not once did the senior Allied commanders confer on how to prevent Kesselring’s escape.49 The coordination of the air, ground, and naval forces was Ike’s responsibility, and in this instance he dropped the ball. An after-action report of the British War Office called Sicily a “chaotic and deplorable example of everything that planning should not be.”50 Montgomery put it more directly. “The truth of the matter is that there was no plan” to prevent the German evacuation.51

  Allied euphoria over the capture of Sicily temporarily obscured the damage that had been done by permitting the German Army to escape. Like most Americans, Eisenhower rejoiced that Patton’s Seventh Army had beaten Montgomery to Messina, and privately relished Monty’s discomfiture. But that joy was short-lived. Within hours after Patton had taken possession of the city at a hastily improvised ceremony in front of city hall, Eisenhower found himself closeted with Brigadier General Frederick A. Blessé, the theater surgeon general, listening to Blessé’s confidential report about Patton’s incomprehensible conduct the week before when he had struck and verbally abused two enlisted men in the hospital.

  On August 4, Patton, who was relentlessly pressing his troops forward, visited a frontline hospital, where he toured the wards and spoke with the wounded. When he discovered a soldier with no apparent wounds, Patton lost his self-control, slapped the man twice, and called him “a Goddamn coward.” He repeated the episode a week later at another field hospital, where he called another soldier, whom he thought was a malingerer, a disgrace to the Army who ought to be shot, and then pulled his pistol from its holster and threatened to do it himself. Patton then struck the man with such force that his helmet liner was knocked off.f “I won’t have these cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals,” he told the surgeon in charge. “We’ll probably have to shoot them sometime anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.”52 (Patton had struck an enlisted man before. At the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September 1918, Patton, then a lieutenant colonel, hit a skulking soldier on the head with a shovel and wrote to his wife that he thought he had killed him.)53

  Eisenhower’s initial response was to minimize the episode. “If this thing ever gets out they’ll be howling for Patton’s scalp, and that will be the end of Georgie’s service in the war. I simply cannot let that happen. Patton is indispensable to the war effort—one of the guarantors of our victory.”54 Ike instructed Blessé to conduct a confidential investigation, and then wrote in longhand a personal letter to Patton, enclosing the surgeon general’s report, and asking for an explanation. Eisenhower’s letter was hand delivered, and he assured Patton that the affair would be kept confidential. “In Allied Headquarters there is no record of the attached report or my letter to you, except in my own secret files.” Patton was instructed to reply “personally and secretly.”55 In short, there would be no official reprimand, and Patton’s service record would remain unblemished.56

  “No letter that I have been called upon to write in my military career has caused me more anguish than this one,” Eisenhower wrote Patton. “In the two cases in the attached report, it is not my present intention to institute any formal investigation.… [N]evertheless if there is a very considerable element of truth in the allegations accompanying this letter, I must so seriously question your good judgment and your self-discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness.… I assure you that conduct such as that described in the accompany
ing report will not be tolerated in this theater no matter who the offender may be.”57

  Eisenhower instructed Patton to apologize to the men involved as well as to the doctors and nurses who had witnessed the episode. Later, Patton was instructed to apologize to all of the men under his command. Patton did so grudgingly, and did not fully grasp the seriousness of his offense. “It is a commentary on justice when an Army commander has to soft-soap a skulker to placate the timidity of those above,” he recorded in his diary on August 21, 1943.

  Eisenhower did his utmost to keep the two incidents under wraps. He did not inform Marshall or the War Department, and when a delegation of newsmen flew from Sicily to Algiers to confront Ike with the results of their own investigation, Eisenhower charmed them into suppressing the story. “Patton’s emotional tenseness and his impulsiveness are the very qualities that make him such a remarkable leader,” Ike told the reporters. “The more he drives his men the more he will save their lives. He must be indifferent to fatigue and ruthless in demanding the last atom of physical energy.”58

  Patton did not escape unscathed. A week after the capture of Messina, Eisenhower sent Marshall a report on his subordinates that the chief of staff might use in selecting his commanders for the invasion of France. It was widely assumed that Marshall would command the invasion and that Ike would either become his deputy or return to Washington as acting chief of staff.

  Patton’s ability spoke for itself, said Eisenhower. “He has conducted a campaign where the brilliant successes scored must be attributed directly to his energy, determination and unflagging aggressiveness. He is an army commander that you can use with certainty that the troops will not be stopped by ordinary obstacles.” But Patton brought some unfortunate baggage with him. Despite his success, he “continues to exhibit some of those unfortunate personal traits of which you and I have always known and which during this campaign caused me some most uncomfortable days.… Personally, I believe that he is cured—because fundamentally he is so avid for recognition as a great military commander that he will ruthlessly suppress any habit that will jeopardize it. Aside from this one thing, he has qualities that we can’t afford to lose unless he ruins himself.”59

  Eisenhower told Marshall that Bradley was running absolutely true to form. “He has brains, a fine capacity for leadership and a thorough understanding of the requirements of modern battle. He has never caused me one moment of worry.” Mark Clark, in Ike’s view, was the best of the three at planning, organizing, and training, but had not been in battle. “He will shortly have a chance to prove his worth.”60

  Marshall pressed Eisenhower for a specific recommendation. Which of the three would be best to head up preinvasion planning in England and later command American ground troops? Ike recommended Bradley. He was the best rounded of the three, “and he has the great characteristic of never giving his commander one moment of worry.” Patton, said Eisenhower, was primarily a combat commander. “Many people fail to realize that the first thing that usually slows up operations is an element of caution, fatigue or doubt on the part of a higher commander. Patton is never affected by these and, consequently, his troops are not affected.”61

  A week later, discussing the Army promotion list, Eisenhower wrote Marshall stressing again that he believed Bradley was “the best rounded combat leader I have met in the service. While he probably lacks some of the extraordinary and ruthless driving power that Patton can exert at critical moments, he still has such force and determination that even in this characteristic he is among our best.”62

  Eisenhower, who had decided it was best to keep the slapping incidents confidential within the theater, still did not inform Marshall. Yet he elliptically noted that in Sicily, Patton had “indulged his temper in certain instances toward individual subordinates who in General Patton’s opinion of the moment were guilty of malingering. I took immediate and drastic measures, and I am quite certain this sort of thing will never happen again.”63

  Following Eisenhower’s recommendations, Marshall chose Bradley to go to England, catapulting him ahead of Patton, who might otherwise have gotten the nod. Bradley had commanded II Corps in Patton’s Seventh Army, and like Ike had been five years junior to Patton in the Regular Army. It is possible that Marshall might have chosen Bradley over Patton in any event, but the slapping incidents effectively ruled Patton out. Eisenhower did not have to recite the details; his reference to Patton’s occasional lack of self-control was sufficient.

  Aside from having been passed over to lead the cross-Channel attack, Patton appeared to have weathered the storm. Inevitably, however, word of the slappings filtered back to the United States. On November 21, 1943, Washington investigative journalist Drew Pearson, who in 1934 had revealed Douglas MacArthur’s escapade with Rosario Cooper, his young Eurasian paramour, told his Sunday evening NBC radio audience that Patton had slapped “a battle weary soldier,” that he had been reprimanded by Eisenhower, and that he would never have another important wartime assignment.g The story was picked up by the wire services, and most of the nation’s newspapers carried articles about Patton the following day. When it was discovered that one of the soldiers was Jewish, the outrage intensified. “These are American soldiers, not Germans,” said an American Legion spokesman. “If our boys are going to be mistreated, let’s import Hitler and do it right.”64

  Pearson’s broadcast was picked up by Army monitoring stations in Algiers, and Eisenhower’s headquarters was immediately informed. Ike’s initial response was to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. Hoping to minimize his involvement, he dispatched Bedell Smith to meet the press and answer their questions.h But instead of controlling the blaze, Smith inadvertently added fuel to the fire. Asked by newsmen whether Eisenhower had reprimanded Patton, Smith replied that no official reprimand had been administered. To be fair, Smith may not have known of Ike’s private letter to Patton, but his answer was scarcely what the reporters wanted to hear. According to The New York Times, Smith’s statement “disgusted everyone who heard it.”65 i

  As Eisenhower wrote later, “The damage was done.”66 Within minutes, the news that Patton had not been officially reprimanded was flashed to the United States. Members of Congress demanded an investigation, and Marshall cabled for an explanation. What were the facts, he asked, and what had Ike done about the incident?67

  Eisenhower replied on November 24. Ike’s literary ability to convert defeat into victory was sorely tested, but he rose to the occasion. Patton had been the mainspring in Seventh Army’s drive for Messina, he told Marshall. “His absolute refusal to accept any excuses for delay or procrastination resulted in the rapid advance of that army and had much to do with the early collapse of resistance in Sicily. In the campaign he drove himself as hard as he did the members of his army and, as a result, he became almost ruthless in his demands upon individual men.” Eisenhower briefly described the slapping incidents, stressing that the men were “unwounded repeat unwounded.” He had personally reprimanded Patton, “expressing my extreme displeasure and informing him that any repetition would result in his immediate relief.” Ike said he had put nothing official in Patton’s 201 file, but had forced Patton to apologize not only to the men involved, but to all of the doctors, nurses, and others who had witnessed the incidents. Those apologies had been accepted.

  “To sum up: It is true that General Patton was guilty of reprehensible conduct with respect to two enlisted men. They were suffering from a nervous disorder and in one case the man had a temperature. After exhaustive investigations, including a personal visit to Sicily, I decided that the corrective action as described above was adequate and suitable for the circumstances. I still believe that this decision is sound.”68

  In Washington, Secretary Stimson and Marshall rallied to Eisenhower’s defense. “Drew Pearson has spilled the beans,” Stimson confided to his diary. “The incident was not a pretty one, but I fully agree with Eisenhower’s view that Patton’s services must not be lost.”69

>   After dispatching a stern letter to Patton, whom he regarded as the Army’s “problem child,” Stimson deployed his vast influence on Capitol Hill to quiet the furor.j Writing to Senator Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, Stimson emphasized the War Department’s determination to gain victory as quickly as possible, with as little loss of life as possible. Eisenhower, he said, had weighed Patton’s indefensible conduct against his outstanding service in both world wars and had decided that the country could not afford to lose Patton for the fighting still to come. Stimson observed that Ike had been “obliged to consider this matter from a military viewpoint rather than that of what is termed ‘public relations.’ ” Patton’s removal, Stimson cautioned, would deny the United States “the services of a battle-tested Army commander, and also afford aid and comfort to the enemy.”70

  After his return from the Teheran conference, FDR was asked at his White House press conference whether he would comment on General Patton. Roosevelt told the newsmen they might, without attributing the story to him, remember

  a former President who had a good deal of trouble finding a successful commander for the armies of the United States. And one of them turned up one day and he was very successful.

  And some very good citizens went to the President. “You can’t keep this man. He drinks.”

  “It must be a good brand of liquor,” the President replied.71

  As Eisenhower anticipated, the storm passed. On December 1, 1943, he wrote Patton, “I think I took the right decision and I will stand by it. You don’t need to be afraid of my weakening on the proposition in spite of the fact that I was more than a little annoyed with you.”72 To Kay Summersby, Ike said, “Georgie is one of the best generals I have. But he’s just like a time bomb. You never know when he’s going to go off. All you can be sure of is that it will probably be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”73