Dwight D. Eisenhower

III

Early Military Career

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eisenhower was promoted to captain and assigned to training duty. He applied for an overseas assignment that would get him into combat, but his superiors valued his work as an organizer and trainer and put him in command of Camp Colt at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. One of the army’s first tank corps was being formed there, and Eisenhower trained the fighting unit. In October 1918 he finally got orders to take the tanks to France, but the war ended before his outfit could sail. Eisenhower had done an outstanding job, for which he won the Distinguished Service Medal, but he was bitterly disappointed at missing combat.

Eisenhower continued working with tanks at Camp Meade, Maryland, in 1919. There he met Colonel George S. Patton, Jr., one of the army’s foremost tank tacticians, who became a lifelong friend. In 1922, by now a major, he went to the Panama Canal Zone, where he served under Brigadier General Fox Conner. Conner, an outstanding soldier and teacher, was an expert on military history, which he taught to Eisenhower. They talked for hours about military and international issues. Late in his life, Eisenhower declared, “Fox Conner was the ablest man I ever knew.”

Conner arranged for Eisenhower to attend the army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. It was extremely competitive, but thanks to what he had learned from Conner and to his own diligent study, Eisenhower graduated in 1926 as the top student in a class of nearly 300.

Eisenhower’s performance got him an appointment as an aide to General John J. Pershing, former chief of staff of the army and currently head of a commission supervising U.S. war memorials in France. Eisenhower interrupted that service to attend the Army War College, where he graduated first in his class in 1928. Then he went to France to prepare a guidebook of European battlefields of World War I. In 1932 the then chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, made Eisenhower his aide. In 1935 MacArthur stepped down as chief of staff to go to the Philippines as chief military advisor to that nation’s government. At that time the Philippines was being prepared for independence from the United States, and many U.S. soldiers were helping to organize a Philippines defense force. MacArthur brought Major Eisenhower along as his chief of staff.

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Eisenhower stayed in that post until 1939, when he returned to the United States Army to take another staff position. He was 49 years old and a lieutenant colonel. Although he had impressed all his superiors—MacArthur said he was the best officer in the army—opportunities for promotion were few because the army was relatively small. Promotion was based largely on seniority, not ability, and the higher ranks were held by those who had been in the army longer than he had.

IV

World War II

World War II began in Europe in 1939 and, although the United States was not involved, there was concern that it soon would be. The Congress of the United States responded by ordering a military draft that began in 1940. Suddenly the army was expanding, and Eisenhower’s abilities were in demand. When the army held maneuvers in Louisiana in 1941, he played a leading role as a staff officer, adding to his reputation and securing him a promotion to brigadier general. On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and the next day the United States entered World War II against the Axis Powers (Japan, Germany, and Italy). A week later, the army’s new chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, called Eisenhower to Washington, D.C., and put him in charge of the War Plans Division.

Opinions differed on how to fight the war. The United States had been attacked in the Pacific Ocean, but it was also threatened by Germany from the Atlantic side. As chief American war planner, Eisenhower favored the strategy of “Europe first,” meaning the United States would make its major effort against Germany. He felt that a major attack should not be launched in the Pacific until the Allies—consisting of the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and their partners in the war—defeated Germany. Marshall and President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed.

A

North Africa

Eisenhower’s performance so impressed Marshall that in March 1942 he promoted Eisenhower to major general and made him head of the Operations Division. In June Marshall put him in command of the U.S. Army’s European Theater of Operations, with headquarters in London, promoting him to lieutenant general. He would be leading U.S. forces in the offensive against Germany. Eisenhower wanted to start the invasion in the spring of 1943, but the British felt that was too soon because the U.S. Army was still being built and had no combat experience. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill argued successfully for an invasion of North Africa instead. Marshall reluctantly agreed, and Eisenhower was put in charge of Allied forces for the North African campaign, called Operation Torch.

In November 1942 Eisenhower launched his first invasion, landing British and U.S. troops in Algeria and Morocco. The assault was a success, but the drive toward the city of Tunis, where the Allies wanted to trap the Afrika Korps of German General Erwin Rommel, quickly bogged down in winter rain and mud. Eisenhower meanwhile spent much of his time negotiating with the puppet regime the Germans had set up in Algeria. The regime offered its help against Rommel if Eisenhower would leave it in control of Algeria for the time being. Eisenhower agreed and was criticized for doing so, but he weathered the controversy and was promoted to the rank of general.

In February 1943 Rommel counterattacked at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. This was the first real battle in Eisenhower’s career, and he did poorly. His troops were caught off guard and badly defeated in the first days of the fighting. But he recovered, stopped Rommel, and went on the offensive. By early May, the Allies under his command had cleared the Germans out of North Africa.

In July 1943 Eisenhower launched the invasion of the Italian island of Sicily, again with British and American troops going ashore side by side. It took more than a month to liberate the island. In September, Eisenhower commanded the invasion of the German-occupied Italian mainland. His troops got ashore but were then held up in their drive toward Rome by a skillful German defense.

B

The Normandy Invasion

The Italian campaign was still progressing, although slowly, when in December 1943 the combined chiefs of staff of the Allies selected Eisenhower to head Operation Overlord (see D-Day Invasion). This was the code name for the most coveted command in the war: the invasion force that was to cross the English Channel, land in France, and push on into Germany. The invasion was set for the spring of 1944. British and American troops, already gathering in England for the invasion, numbered more than 50 divisions (more than 150,000 troops), with thousands of bombers, fighter planes, and ships. Eisenhower was named Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces.

Eisenhower returned to London impressed with the gravity of the task. He told the combined chiefs of staff, “Every obstacle must be overcome, every inconvenience suffered, and every risk run to ensure that our blow is decisive. We cannot afford to fail.”

In that spirit Eisenhower drove himself and his troops relentlessly. He worked 20 hours a day; the men trained with live ammunition. His biggest problem was that he had only enough landing craft to open the attack to bring in 8 divisions at a time, while Rommel, now commanding the German forces in France, had more than 50 divisions. The Allies needed surprise to succeed. To achieve surprise, Eisenhower decided to attack south into Normandy rather than east toward Calais, where the German fortifications and troop concentrations were strongest. This was a gamble because success required that the Germans not shift more troops to Normandy before the invasion.

Eisenhower also needed to isolate the battlefield so that the Germans could not use the French railway system to rush in reinforcements. He insisted on using the Allied bomber fleet to destroy the railways, over the objections of the bomber commanders, who wanted to bomb factories and cities inside Germany. Eisenhower felt so strongly about this that he threatened to resign his command unless his approach, called the Transportation Plan, was adopted. Throughout the months of April and May, Allied bombers attacked railroad targets. By June, northern France had been isolated. It was necessary to isolate a large area so that the Germans would not guess that Normandy was the selected landing site. Two-thirds of the bombs were dropped outside the invasion area to mislead the Germans and keep them from shifting their troops.

The invasion day, called D-Day by the military, was set for June 5. On the 4th, however, a storm swept into the English Channel and Eisenhower had to postpone the invasion. In the early morning hours of June 5 he met with his officers. Despite heavy rain and wind, the storm was expected to end by afternoon and the weather on June 6 was supposed to be acceptable for an amphibious (air and sea) assault (see Amphibious Warfare).

Nearly 175,000 soldiers were waiting for their orders. Either they would go out that night, or they would have to disembark and wait for June 19, the earliest date when the tides would again be right for a landing. “The mighty host,” in Eisenhower’s words, “was tense as a coiled spring, ready to vault its energy across the Channel.”

Eisenhower asked his subordinates for their opinions. The army generals, British commander Sir Bernard L. Montgomery and U.S. General Omar N. Bradley, wanted to go. The air force generals and naval admirals advised postponement. Only Eisenhower could decide. After pacing for a few moments, Eisenhower stopped, stuck out his chin, and said, “O.K., let’s go!”

Beginning shortly after midnight, the airborne troops began dropping into Normandy, with the infantry coming in by landing craft at first light. By nightfall on June 6, the Allies had most of their troops on the Normandy coast. The greatest invasion in the history of war had worked.

In the seven weeks that followed, the Allies gradually expanded their beachhead but did not break through the German coastal defenses. The British held the left side of the Allied front, the Americans the right. Montgomery’s style of warfare led to frustration and argument because the American commanders believed he was too cautious. Many American and some British leaders urged Eisenhower to fire him, but Eisenhower, knowing how popular he was with the British people, refused.

Finally, at the end of July, Bradley’s First Army broke through at Saint-Lô, and the U.S. Third Army—commanded by Eisenhower’s old friend, Lieutenant General Patton—went into action. Patton’s tanks rolled through France. In late August, Paris was liberated; by September, the Germans had been driven from France.

But the Allies had outrun their supplies. There was not enough gasoline to keep both Patton’s and Montgomery’s armies advancing at a rapid rate. Each general asked Eisenhower to give his army all the gasoline and stop the other general where he was. Instead, Eisenhower insisted on a broad-front offensive, with the British in the north and Patton in the south, moving forward side by side. The advance was slow, especially when the Allies reached the fortifications at the German border.

C

The Battle of the Bulge

On December 15, Eisenhower was promoted to the U.S. Army’s highest rank, general of the army. The next day Germany began its last offensive, in the Ardennes highlands of Belgium. The attack caught the Allies by surprise. Badly outnumbered U.S. troops were forced to retreat. The Allied air force, which had won control of the skies, was grounded by bad weather and could not help. The Allies were close to panic. The deep German penetration created a bulge in the Allied lines, giving the battle its name.

When Eisenhower called a conference of his senior generals on December 19, they showed up glum and discouraged. He took one look at them and gave an order: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.” He said that the Germans had come out from behind their fortifications and exposed themselves; now was the time to start a counterattack and catch them in the open. He identified Bastogne, a crossroads in the Ardennes, as the key point to hold and ordered the United States 101st Airborne Division to that town. The Germans surrounded it on all sides with superior forces, but the Americans resisted stubbornly. When the Germans delivered an ultimatum to surrender, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, in command of the town, sent back the famous one-word reply, “Nuts!”

The 101st held out until Patton’s Third Army, sent by Eisenhower, fought through and relieved Bastogne on December 26. Eisenhower wanted Montgomery to counterattack from the north, but again Montgomery was too cautious and failed to respond. As a result, the German offensive in the Bulge was stopped, but most of the German forces escaped.

By early March 1945 the Allies resumed their broad-front offensive. The plan called for the British to cross the Rhine River into Germany in the north and Patton to cross in the south; but the Germans foiled the plan by blowing up the bridges across the Rhine as they retreated. However, on March 7, the United States First Army found one bridge still intact, at Remagen, and captured it before it could be destroyed. Eisenhower poured reinforcements into Remagen and expanded the bridgehead. German resistance everywhere began to crack.

Now began the last great British-American controversy of the war. Montgomery demanded that American forces and supplies be given to him for a last offensive into Berlin, the German capital. But Eisenhower was more concerned with what remained of the German Army. He feared that the Germans would retreat into the Alps and carry out a fanatical resistance in the mountains. To take that region before the Germans could get there, he sent Patton through Bavaria.

The disagreement was more political than military. Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviets had agreed to partition Germany into eastern and western sectors. The city of Berlin was to be partitioned the same way. The British wanted to reach Berlin ahead of the Soviets to ensure that the city would be within the western sector. Eisenhower did not believe his forces could get there in time without overcoming fierce resistance and was not willing to risk American lives for a purely political objective. He let the Soviets take Berlin, an action that cost them at least 100,000 men.

On May 7, 1945, the Germans surrendered unconditionally to Eisenhower at his headquarters in Reims, France. General Marshall sent him a cable of congratulations that perfectly summed up Eisenhower’s generalship: “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare. You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever been assembled. You have met and successfully disposed of every conceivable difficulty. You have been selfless in your actions, always sound and tolerant in your judgments and altogether admirable in the courage and wisdom of your military decisions.”

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