Eisenhower in War and Peace

by Jean Edward Smith

  Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. (illustration credit 14.1)

  Fortunately for the Allies, von Rundstedt was not the final authority. At 0630 hours, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, OKW’s chief of operations, who was with the Führer, called Saint-Germain and ordered von Rundstedt to halt the panzer divisions in place. Hitler was still asleep, said Jodl, but it was clear the airdrops were merely a feint. The panzer divisions must be held back to meet the real landing that was coming in the Pas-de-Calais. Von Rundstedt erupted with a string of expletives about the “imbeciles” in command, but declined to place a personal call to Hitler to protest OKW’s decision. It was not deference on von Rundstedt’s part so much as contempt for the man he habitually referred to as “that Bohemian corporal.”10 He would not beg Hitler’s permission. Not until midafternoon, ten hours later, did the Führer release the panzer divisions to von Rundstedt, and by then there was no hope they could arrive at the beachhead until the following day. To add to the German misfortune, the Luftwaffe put less than a hundred fighters in the air on D-Day, and mounted only twenty-two sorties against Ramsay’s fleet.11

  Eisenhower spent D-Day nervously awaiting news, but reports from Normandy were slow to trickle in. “I have as yet no information concerning the actual landings nor of our progress through beach obstacles,” Ike cabled Marshall that morning. “All preliminary reports are satisfactory. Airborne formations apparently landed in good order. Preliminary bombings by air went off as scheduled. Navy reports sweeping some mines, but so far as is known channels are clear and operation proceeding as planned. I will keep you informed.”12

  News of the crisis at Omaha reached Eisenhower at 1:30 p.m. through the Navy, which had observers at the scene. There was little Ike could do other than authorize Leigh-Mallory to deploy his tactical bombers to drop their payloads through the cloud cover, risking the possibility of short rounds falling on American positions.13 By evening it was clear the landings were a success. Eisenhower, Tedder, Leigh-Mallory, and Ramsay met again at Ramsay’s fleet headquarters in Portsmouth to review the day’s action (Montgomery had departed for Normandy). In Tedder’s view the Allies had achieved tactical surprise, but needed to link up the beachheads quickly. The next ninety-six hours would be crucial. Omaha, in the center of the invasion front, was still perilous. V Corps held but a sliver of territory, and was separated by ten miles from the British at Gold beach, and by seven miles from VII Corps at Utah. Montgomery was on the scene and in command, but Ike was restless and decided to cross the Channel himself for a look-see the following morning.

  After breakfast on June 7, Eisenhower boarded the British minelayer Apollo to visit the beachheads. He arrived off Omaha shortly after eleven, and by that time Montgomery and Bradley had already moved to consolidate the landings. Collins was ordered to turn VII Corps away from Cherbourg and link up with Gerow’s forces as soon as possible, and the British 50th Division at Gold was instructed to do the same. The change of plans would delay the capture of the port of Cherbourg, but would deny Rommel and von Rundstedt the opportunity to exploit the separation between Allied lodgments. “I briefed Ike as fully as I was able,” Bradley recalled. “I also told him of the modification in the battle plan Monty and I had agreed to earlier in the day. Ike had little to say. On the whole, Ike’s visit had been perhaps necessary for his own personal satisfaction, but from my point of view it was a pointless interruption and annoyance.”14

  Kay Summersby remembered that Eisenhower suffered a terrible letdown after D-Day. It was “as if he had run out of steam. And he was very much depressed.” Montgomery was running the ground war, Tedder and Leigh-Mallory handled what there was of an air war, and Ramsay controlled the fighting at sea. “Most of the time we simply sat in the trailer in the woods waiting,” said Summersby. “We stayed late every night waiting for just one more report to come through. I would call up the mess and have them send sandwiches over for supper, and I would boil water on the little spirit stove for Ike’s powdered coffee. He would sit there and smoke and worry. Every time the telephone would ring he would grab it.”15

  Eisenhower’s mood improved the following week when his son John, newly commissioned at West Point, arrived to spend his postgraduation leave with his father. “John will be in soon,” Ike wrote Mamie on June 13. “I’m really as excited as a bride—but luckily I have so much to do I haven’t time to get nervous.”16

  Like Summersby, John noted that his father was unusually fretful, “like a football player sitting on the bench, anxious to get in the game.”17 Despite their obvious affection, John was always conscious of their respective positions—as was Ike. “There existed a certain military wall between us,” said John.

  Had I ever, for example, even in later years, pre-empted the right rear seat of a car or walked on the Boss’s right, I knew he would have been annoyed, even though he might have said nothing.…18

  On practically the first evening I had arrived in London, Dad and I were walking together at SHAEF, and I asked in all earnestness: “If we meet an officer who ranks above me but below you, how do we handle this? Should I salute first and when they return my salute do you return theirs?” Dad’s annoyed reaction was short: “John, there isn’t an officer in this theater who doesn’t rank above you and below me.”19

  Summersby, who had the opportunity to observe father and son at close range, thought “Ike was not a particularly doting father. He loved John very much and he was proud of him, but he was also critical. John took it all very good naturedly. No matter how sharply Ike criticized him, it was obvious he adored this son of his.”20

  In Normandy, the Allies profited from Hitler’s assumption that the D-Day landings were a diversion and that the principal attack was still to come in the Pas-de-Calais. As a consequence, the German Fifteenth Army, some nineteen divisions with eight hundred tanks, remained idle north of the Seine awaiting an invasion that would never come.f To meet the threat in Calvados, Rommel was forced to rely on the seven infantry divisions available to Seventh Army, plus the panzer reserve Hitler had belatedly released.21 And his troops were stretched too thin. By the night of June 7 (D-Day plus one), the British Second Army held a solid lodgment twenty-two miles wide and five to ten miles deep; the U.S. VII Corps held a zone eight miles deep and nine miles wide; and the U.S. V Corps, now solidly ashore, moved inland rapidly against light opposition. British commandos linked up with Gerow’s forces on D-Day plus two, and four days later VII Corps joined, giving the Allies a continuous beachhead across the whole front.

  Both sides were plagued by a shortage of supplies. The Allies had an abundance of shipping but found it difficult to off-load matériel across the beaches, and the two MULBERRYs, while ingenious, could not accommodate the thousands of tons of food and ammunition that were required daily. At the end of the first week, less than 50 percent of the scheduled supplies had been landed; and at Omaha, less than 25 percent. The Germans, for their part, were hampered by Allied air supremacy, which prevented their use of the roads during daylight, plus the fact that the strategic bombing campaign conducted by Harris and Spaatz had effectively isolated the Normandy battlefields, rendering rail traffic impossible. In addition, the Resistance, now organized under the French Forces of the Interior, proved effective in hindering the transport of supplies forward. As early as June 10, the German Seventh Army found itself in serious straits for both fuel and ammunition.

  With the front in Normandy consolidated, Montgomery turned to the next stage: the capture of the vital port of Cherbourg, and the breakout of the American First Army from the hedgerow country of Calvados to the plain beyond. Monty’s strategy was straightforward: to pull the bulk of the German forces, particularly the panzer divisions, onto Dempsey’s Second British Army while Bradley took Cherbourg, wheeled east, and broke into the open against reduced resistance.22 Ike and Bedell Smith never fully understood Montgomery’s concept. Reared on the continuous-attack-all-along-the-line strategy espoused by Pershing and Marshall, they failed to understand
why the British Second Army did not go all out to capture the city of Caen. Like Pershing and Marshall, Ike and Smith subscribed to the doctrine of attrition. For Montgomery, given the horrendous British losses in the trench warfare of World War I, attrition was unthinkable. Instead, he preferred to keep the enemy off balance by maneuvering and then deliver a concentrated blow at a single point. Rather than conduct a broad-front offensive, Monty sought to breach the enemy line and exploit the breakthrough. “It is clear that Ike is quite unsuited for the post of Supreme Commander as far as running the strategy of the war is concerned,” Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, wrote in despair.23

  But Bradley understood Montgomery’s concept, Patton understood it as well, and so did Rommel and von Rundstedt. The British Second Army sat astride the direct route to Paris and the Ruhr beyond, and Dempsey’s troops had to be contained at all costs. By mid-June, the British Second Army confronted seven of the eight panzer divisions available to Rommel, all deployed in a defensive posture. Monty had tied the German armor down and deprived Rommel of the ability to mount a large-scale counterattack. As a consequence, Bradley would not necessarily have clear sailing, but he would have few panzer formations to contend with.

  “Was up forward again yesterday,” Rommel wrote his wife on June 14. “The situation does not improve. We must be prepared for grave events. The troops are fighting with the utmost courage, but the balance of strength tips more heavily against us every day. It appears dubious whether the gravity of the situation is realized up above, and whether the proper conclusions are being drawn.”24

  The destruction of Caen. (illustration credit 14.2)

  After the war, Eisenhower and Smith muddied the historical account of the Normandy breakout by asserting that Montgomery’s failure to capture Caen caused them to change plans and order Bradley to break out on the right instead.25 It is another example of Ike’s ability to spin the record, similar to his reshaping of his role under MacArthur at the time of the Bonus Army marchers in 1932. Bradley is harsh in his criticism. “I have never been able to understand why Ike and Bedell made those statements,” he wrote. “They were both intimately acquainted with the OVERLORD ground strategy formulated months before. That called for Monty not to ‘break out’ but to hold and draw the Germans to his sector, while I ‘broke out’ in my sector and wheeled east. We adhered to that basic concept throughout the Normandy campaign with no major changes in strategy or tactics.”26 In effect, by adopting Montgomery’s breakout strategy and attacking on a narrow front, Bradley was disregarding classic American military doctrine.

  As Bradley suggests, the ground war unfolded methodically under Montgomery’s direction. With the bulk of the German armor deployed against the British Second Army at Caen, Collins’s VII Corps sliced across the Cotentin Peninsula and reached the sea on June 18, isolating the port of Cherbourg and its defenders. Collins turned north and a week later Cherbourg capitulated, sending 39,042 German troops into Allied captivity. Add to that the number killed or missing, and the Germans had lost the equivalent of four infantry divisions that could not be replaced. By contrast, on June 26, when Cherbourg fell, there were twenty-five Allied divisions in Normandy, plus fifteen in Britain awaiting shipment to the front. “I am being bled white,” Rommel complained to von Rundstedt, “and have nothing to show for it.”27

  With the capture of Cherbourg, the Allies gained a port that could sustain the invasion force until Marseilles was liberated in August. Cherbourg had been badly damaged by the Germans, but was soon operating full tilt. By the first week in July, the Allies had landed more than a million men in Normandy, almost 200,000 vehicles, and a half-million tons of supplies. By the end of the month, there were 1,566,000 troops ashore, 333,000 vehicles, and 1.6 million tons of food, equipment, and ammunition.28

  Eisenhower may not have been fully cognizant of the ground strategy Montgomery was pursuing, but no one could have handled the political pressures that rained down on the supreme commander better than he. On June 13, the first V-1 rockets landed in Britain. The V-1,g developed under Wernher von Braun at the German research station at Peenemünde on the Baltic, was an unguided, jet-powered, flying bomb that flew at 420 miles per hour and delivered a payload of 1,875 pounds of high explosives that exploded upon impact. Between June 13 and the end of September 1944, the Germans launched more than 8,000 V-1s against Britain, killing more than 6,000 persons and injuring another 20,000. Its successor, the V-2, was a guided ballistic missile with a larger payload that reached an altitude of sixty miles traveling at a speed of 2,500 miles per hour. The V-1 had a maximum range of 125 miles; the V-2, which was far more deadly, could reach targets 200 miles away.29

  The rocket blitz had a pronounced effect on British morale, and large numbers of people were evacuated from London. “Had the Germans perfected the rockets six months earlier,” said Ike, “and had they targeted the assembly areas in Portsmouth and Southampton, OVERLORD might have been written off.”30 Churchill asked Eisenhower to give priority to bombing the launch sites and Ike agreed, although subsequent studies showed the bombings had little effect.31 But when the prime minister suggested that the Allies destroy specific German cities in a tit-for-tat reprisal, Eisenhower refused.32 A week later, when the British chiefs of staff proposed using poison gas against the launch sites, Ike blew his stack. “Let’s for God’s sake, keep our eye on the ball and use some sense,” he told Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder.33

  Dealing with de Gaulle brought out the best in Eisenhower. FDR and Secretary of State Hull, buttressed by Admiral Leahy and Robert Murphy, insisted that contact with de Gaulle be restricted to military matters. For Eisenhower, who was soon to be saddled with the problem of civil affairs in France, that was patently foolish. Fortunately Ike could count on the sympathy of the War Department—particularly Secretary Stimson and John McCloy, both of whom recognized his problem, and who were ably supported by Jean Monnet, the representative of the FCNL in Washington. The upshot was that Eisenhower paid lip service to the nonrecognition policy Roosevelt insisted upon, but for all practical purposes dealt with de Gaulle as France’s legitimate head of state.

  On June 14, little more than a week after the Allies had landed, de Gaulle returned to French soil with a lightning visit to the ancient Norman city of Bayeux, site of a majestic thirteenth-century cathedral and home of the world-famous Bayeux Tapestry.h Bayeux was the first French town liberated by the Allies. The British war cabinet, with Eisenhower’s approval, authorized de Gaulle’s visit, and Admiral Ramsay placed the Free French destroyer La Combattante at his disposal for the Channel crossing. June 14, as fate would have it, was the day the Germans had marched into Paris in 1940. “That was a mistake,” quipped de Gaulle when reminded of the fact.34

  De Gaulle enters Bayeux, the first town liberated in France, June 12, 1944. (illustration credit 14.3)

  At the entrance to Bayeux, de Gaulle dismounted from his vehicle and proceeded on foot to the town hall. He was immediately surrounded by vast cheering crowds. “We walked on together,” de Gaulle remembered, “all overwhelmed by comradeship, feeling of national joy, pride and hope rise again from the depths of the abyss.”35 At the town hall, where the portrait of Marshal Pétain had been removed moments before, the Vichy-appointed prefect pledged his support, as did all civil officials, as well as the bishop of Bayeux and Lisieux, who was the first caller to pay his respects. That symbolic union of the church and the republic, which had eluded France since 1789, was a vital component of the Gaullist appeal. De Gaulle later visited two nearby towns, received similar receptions, and departed that evening firmly in control. Whatever doubts Washington may have harbored about de Gaulle’s support had been crisply dispelled. SHAEF civil affairs officers threw their occupation manuals in the wastebasket and commenced working with de Gaulle’s appointees. For all practical purposes, Bayeux had become the temporary capital of Free France.36

  When he returned to Algiers on June 16, de Gaulle addressed the Fr
ench Consultative Assembly (the temporary stand-in for the National Assembly); informed them of what had been achieved; and paid tribute to Eisenhower, “in whom the French Government has complete confidence for the victorious conduct of the common military operations.”37 As de Gaulle recognized, Ike was largely responsible for the swift transition de Gaulle had made from being a controversial pretender to the unquestioned leader of France. Eisenhower had ignored Washington’s wishes and relied on his own judgment. As a recent biographer has written,

  Ike has received precious little credit for this, but it is a perfect example of what a quick learner he was. He had suffered through the chaos brought about by American policies in North Africa, when he had paid too much attention to Robert Murphy and the wishes of the president, and he was not about to let that happen again. No other American general, except perhaps Douglas MacArthur in his treatment of Japan at the end of the war, took on such heavy responsibilities or made such far reaching decisions on his own initiative.38