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.

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.