Eisenhower in War and Peace

“That order blew up a sizeable typhoon in the family,” Eisenhower said later. “At first I thought it was the old, old story that once more I was to start a tour of ‘staff’ duty instead of getting to troops.”³ Mamie was concerned about their quarters at Fort Lewis, and John was eager to enroll for his final semester of high school. When Ike indicated his desire to return to troops as soon as possible, DeWitt assured him the assignment was temporary. He needed someone to do the “pick and shovel work” of drafting orders to assemble the far-flung units of Fourth Army at the maneuver areas. By the end of January, he told Ike, he could proceed to Fort Lewis. Eisenhower and Mamie spent the next month at the Drisko Hotel in San Francisco, and John went on to stay with his uncle Edgar in Tacoma, where he enrolled at Stadium High School.⁴

In early 1940 the Army was still organized in the ponderous “square” divisions of World War I, a 28,000-man behemoth devised in 1917 for trench warfare on the western front.^b The troops were regulars—Congress would not enact the draft until September—and many in the 15th Infantry had seen service in China. But the War Department was already cannibalizing existing units to form new cadres. The authorized strength of the regiment was 2,961, but it was 400 men short. It also lacked mortars, machine guns, and automatic rifles.⁵ Eisenhower’s battalion, which normally would have had two majors and seven captains in addition to a full complement of lieutenants, had only lieutenants. Ike was the only officer above that rank.⁶

The Fourth Army maneuvers took place in August. For five days and nights Ike led his battalion across the cut-over timberland of Washington State. “Actually it would have made good stage-setting for a play in Hades,” he wrote his old friend Leonard Gerow. “Stumps, slashings, fallen logs, tangled brush, holes, hummocks and hills. Through the day I sweated and accumulated a grime of caked dust. At night, we froze. My youngsters kept on going and delivering handsomely after five days of almost no sleep! I was certainly proud of that gang.”⁸ Looking back on the Fourth Army maneuvers twenty-five years later, Ike wrote, “The experience fortified my conviction that I belonged with troops; with them I was always happy.”⁹

Eisenhower’s spirits were lifted even higher when he received a letter in September from George Patton, who had left the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer to assume command of the newly established 2nd Armored Brigade at Fort Benning. Patton was full of himself. “It seems highly probable that I will get one of the next two armored divisions,” he wrote Ike. “If I do, I shall ask for you either as Chief of Staff, which I should prefer, or as a regimental commander. You can tell me which you want. Hoping we are together in a long and BLOODY war.”¹⁰

Eisenhower was enthusiastic. “It would be great to be in the tanks once more, and even better to be associated with you again,” he replied. “I suppose it’s too much to hope that I could have a regiment in your division, because I’m still almost three years away from my colonelcy. But I think I could do a damn good job of commanding a regiment.”¹¹

Patton, who was in the field, answered as soon as he returned to post. He urged Ike to apply “for a transfer to the Armored Corps NOW. If you have any pull … use it for there will be 10 new generals in this corps pretty damn soon.”¹²

Ike wrote a similar letter to T. J. Davis, his Manila compatriot who was now in the office of the adjutant general: “My ambition is to go, eventually, to the armored outfit,” he told Davis. “George Patton has told me that at least two new armored divisions are to be formed early next year, and if he is assigned to command one of them he intends to ask for me, possibly as one of his regimental commanders. That would be a swell job and I only hope that the War Department won’t consider me too junior in rank to get a regiment.”¹⁴

Eisenhower’s concern about his lack of seniority was justified. Davis replied promptly that General Walter Krueger, who had just assumed command of VIII Corps at Fort Sam Houston, had asked for Ike to be his chief of staff (a colonel’s billet) but had been turned down by the War Department because Eisenhower was too junior. Ike was thrilled that Krueger had requested him, but was not displeased to have avoided another staff assignment. “The only job that would really tempt me to leave the 15th Infantry would be to obtain command of an armored regiment,” he wrote Davis.

Ike was stunned. He immediately suffered his first and only attack of shingles, a painful skin disease often associated with extreme nervousness or anxiety. Lying flat on his back, he wrote Gerow a three-page, single-spaced letter wrestling with his desire to remain with troops but not wishing to turn down an opportunity to be at the center of action in Washington. Eisenhower believed the letter to be the most important he had ever written,¹⁷ and in the end he left the decision to Gerow.¹⁸

As the attack of shingles suggests, Ike was torn. With the possibility of war on the horizon, he would have liked nothing better than to be in War Plans. He was confident of his ability to lead troops, but War Department policy explicitly required longer service with his regiment if he was to be considered for promotion to general officer. Gerow understood.

Eisenhower took Gerow’s decision philosophically. “I’d hate to think that, in trying to explain to you a situation that has been tossed in my teeth more than once, all I accomplished was to pass up something I wanted to do, in favor of something I thought I ought to do,” he replied.²⁰

Ike said much the same to his friend Everett Hughes.^c “I am delighted to stay with troops for two reasons. (1) I like it. (2) I want to convince the most ritualistic-minded guy in the whole d—— Army that I get along with John Soldier.”²²

As Eisenhower’s comment suggests, it was still business as usual for many in the Army. Despite the fall of France in June and the ongoing Battle of Britain, the possibility of war seemed remote. “The mass of officers and men lacked any sense of urgency,” Ike recalled. “Athletics, recreation, and entertainment took precedence in most units. Some of the officers, in the long years of peace, had worn for themselves deep ruts of professional routine within which they were sheltered from vexing new ideas and troublesome problems. Urgent directives from above could not eliminate an apathy that had its roots in comfort, blindness, and wishful thinking.”²³

General Marshall, who had been installed as chief of staff nine months earlier, was already trimming deadwood root and branch. His first target was the bloated square division of World War I.²⁵ As early as 1920, General Pershing had urged the square division be scrapped in favor of a 15,000-man “triangular” structure of three regiments, which he believed would be easier to control and more suitable to open, mobile warfare.^d Military traditionalists such as Lieutenant General Hugh Drum, the senior officer on active service, fought the change tooth and nail,²⁶ but General Marshall pressed ahead. By October 1, 1940, the Army’s nine regular divisions had been converted to the triangular structure, and the remaining National Guard divisions followed a few months later.²⁷

But it was the Army’s personnel system that required the greatest overhaul. In August 1940, Congress authorized the War Department to call up the nation’s 300,000 national guardsmen and reservists for twelve months of federal service. On September 16, the first peacetime draft in American history became law. Sixteen million men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five were registered, and they were inducted into the service at the rate of 50,000 a month. The Army, which had numbered 189,839 when Eisenhower returned from Manila, would top 1.4 million by mid-1941.³⁰

The influx of guardsmen and draftees brought new life to Fort Lewis. On November 30, 1940, Eisenhower was appointed chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division—the 15th Infantry’s parent unit. Ike’s personnel designation was “General Staff with Troops,” which kept the clock running on his required troop duty. Three months later he was named chief of staff of IX Corps, also at Fort Lewis. The assignment was identical to the posting that General Krueger had sought for Ike six months earlier. This time, rather than holding that he was too junior for such a position, the War Department promoted Eisenhower to colonel instead.

“It is a grand compliment,” Mamie wrote her parents on March 11, 1941. “We knew a week ago when Gen. Joyce [Major General Kenyon A. Joyce, commanding IX Corps] sent a telegram to Washington and have been sitting on needles and pins. It was so very secret. It may mean that we have to move up in the circle where the General’s house is.… I’m so glad for Ike. Am on my way to play Ma-Jong with Mrs. Joyce. Just wanted to let you know.”³³

Kenyon A. Joyce, who assumed command of IX Corps in the spring of 1941, was one of the last legendary cavalry commanders in the United States Army. He had enlisted as a private during the Spanish-American War, fought with the 3rd Cavalry in the Philippines, and had been severely wounded in France. From 1933 to 1937 he commanded the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer (George Patton was his executive officer), and before arriving at Fort Lewis had commanded the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Bliss, Texas. Joyce personified the panache of the horse cavalry. He was a superb leader of troops, a shrewd judge of character, and a commander who kept his eye on the big picture and did not fret the details. “I am finding this job most intriguing and interesting,” Ike wrote after his first month as chief of staff. “General Joyce is a swell commander and a fine person to work for.”³⁴

In an intellectual sense, Fox Conner had been Ike’s role model. But when it came to the actual command of troops, it was Kenyon Joyce. When General Joyce reached the mandatory retirement age in 1943, Eisenhower brought him to the European Theater and appointed him president of the Allied Control Council for Italy—a post Joyce held for the remainder of the war. When Joyce died in January 1960, President Eisenhower and Mamie attended his funeral service at Fort Myer.

In June 1941, the course of the war changed dramatically. On June 22, Hitler launched Operation BARBAROSSA—the invasion of the Soviet Union. At the time, Eisenhower was on maneuvers with IX Corps at the Hunter Liggett military reservation, south of Monterey. The German attack made little impact. But two days later, as Ike and General Joyce were standing on a hillside awaiting a report from one of the divisions, a messenger told Joyce that the War Department wanted him on the telephone. After taking the call, Joyce called Ike to his side. “Start packing,” he said. “Go back to Fort Lewis for orders, which will direct you to go to San Antonio as chief of staff, Third Army.”³⁶

Ike reported for duty at Fort Sam Houston on July 1, 1941. It was his and Mamie’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, and they were back at the post where their married life had begun. Instead of a two-room suite in Ike’s BOQ, they moved into one of the grand five-bedroom brick houses on Artillery Row. For their anniversary, Ike gave Mamie an elegant platinum watch encrusted in diamonds that he had ordered from Tiffany—and which he paid for from money earned in the Philippines.³⁸ Mamie wore the watch for the rest of her life. That same day their son John, joined by some 550 equally bewildered classmates, entered his plebe year at West Point. John had won a competitive senatorial appointment from Kansas, and, as he recalled, the ethnic and racial composition of his class was virtually identical to that of his father’s thirty years earlier.³⁹

As Third Army chief of staff, Eisenhower was entitled to an executive assistant and an orderly. As his executive assistant—military nomenclature for a gofer, aide, and man Friday—Ike retained Captain Ernest R. Lee, known to everyone as “Tex.” Lee, a former Metropolitan Life insurance salesman and sales manager for a Chevrolet dealership in San Antonio, was already working at Third Army headquarters. Eisenhower quizzed him for several days, liked his responses, and kept him on. Lee had a breezy, unflappable style, lacked “attitude,” and was profoundly loyal to those with whom he worked. He was also a go-getter. Ike and Lee hit it off, and “Tex” became the first member of Eisenhower’s personal staff.⁴⁰

The second member of Ike’s official “family” was his orderly, Private First Class Michael J. “Mickey” McKeogh—who responded to a help-wanted notice Mamie had posted on the Fort Sam Houston bulletin board. A young draftee from Corona on Long Island, Mickey had worked as a bellhop at New York’s posh Plaza hotel for seven years and was wise beyond his years in the ways of the world. His parents were Irish immigrants, and his father had risen to the rank of sergeant in the New York Police Department before his death in 1935. An orderly’s job, Mickey thought, was “right down his alley,” and like Lee he remained with Ike throughout the war.⁴¹

Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, Eisenhower’s new commander, was an amalgam of Fox Conner and Kenyon Joyce—a military intellectual who relished leading troops in the field. Universally regarded as “a soldier’s soldier,” Krueger was a combat infantryman at heart. He was also widely respected as one of the Army’s best educated and most perceptive officers, had taught at both the Army and the Navy war colleges, spoke three foreign languages, and as a young officer had translated into English the leading German military texts of the period.⁴³

Born into a military family in Prussia, Krueger was nine years older than Ike and at the top of his game. His widowed mother had immigrated to St. Louis when Krueger was eight years old. He enlisted in the Army at seventeen, served with distinction in Cuba, and fought in the Philippine insurrection, with Pershing in Mexico, and in the tank corps during World War I. Although he still spoke with a trace of a German accent, he would be the first officer in American history to rise through the ranks from private soldier to four-star general—a rank he achieved commanding Sixth Army in the Pacific. Eisenhower wrote in retrospect that few officers were physically tougher or more active. “Relentlessly driving himself, he had little need of driving others—they were quick to follow his example.”⁴⁴

Krueger was also self-effacing and shunned the limelight. His stern Prussian presence was often intimidating, yet he possessed a robust sense of humor. When he was commanding the 6th Infantry Regiment at Jefferson Barracks in 1933, his adjutant scribbled a covering note to a stack of court-martial proceedings stating that “a crime wave” appeared to have broken out in Missouri. Krueger wrote back, “Captain Wheatley, I do not expect to get all the virtues of mankind for thirty dollars a month.”⁴⁵

Krueger’s concern for his troops was legendary. Once, during a rainstorm on Leyte in 1945, Krueger found the sentry guarding his command post wet to the skin, cold, and shivering. He ordered the soldier inside and told him to towel off and change into one of Krueger’s dry uniforms. When a subordinate asked why, Krueger said, “Son, I’ve walked many an hour on sentry duty—wet and cold. I know how he felt out there.”⁴⁶

Eisenhower’s high-level staff experience proved a perfect complement. “Luckily I’ve spent most of my life in large headquarters, so am not overpowered by the mass of detail,” he wrote George Moseley. Ike’s approachable nature bridged another gap for Krueger. “Everyone comes [into my office] to discuss his troubles,” he told Moseley. “I’m often astonished how much better they seem to work after they have had a chance to recite their woes.”⁴⁷

“Last night’s paper carried the news of General MacArthur’s appointment to command all Philippine Forces,” Eisenhower wrote his old friend Wade Haislip, who was now the Army’s assistant chief of staff for personnel (G-1) in Washington.

Ike asked Haislip to confirm the paperwork pertaining to his position at Third Army. “In the meantime, don’t send me back to guguland, no matter how wonderful the possibilities may appear to be.… P.S. I’m not a Filipino.”⁴⁹ ^h

The United States was a latecomer to full-blown army maneuvers. As early as the era of Frederick the Great the nations of Europe regularly assembled their armies for large-scale maneuvers, not to train individual soldiers (who, for the most part, were regulars and already highly trained), but to familiarize division, corps, and army commanders and their staffs with the techniques of command and control. After the Franco-Prussian War, the maneuvers became annual events. The Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Hapsburg throne, happened to visit Sarajevo in August 1914 while observing the summer maneuvers of the Austrian Army nearby.

The clash of armies was preceded by maneuvers at the corps level. Krueger and Eisenhower left Fort Sam Houston for Lake Charles on August 11, 1941. Corps maneuvers commenced on the seventeenth. “All the oldtimers here say that we are going into a God-awful spot, to live with mud, malaria, mosquitoes and misery,” Eisenhower wrote Gerow in Washington. “But I like to go to the field, so I’m not much concerned about it.”⁵⁴

The battle between the Second and Third armies kicked off at 0500 hours on September 15, 1941. Lear’s Second (Red) Army, some eight divisions, including the nation’s only two armored divisions, was arrayed east of the Red River. Its instructions were to cross the river and destroy the Third (Blue) Army, which was assembled in the vicinity of Lake Charles. Krueger’s instructions were essentially the opposite. Blue Army (ten divisions but no armor) was to advance toward the Red River, destroy the invading army, and push into enemy territory.

From the beginning, Lear mishandled his forces, particularly his armor. An old horse cavalryman (Lear had won a bronze medal as a member of the United States’ three-day-event team at the 1912 Olympics), he used his tanks as infantry support, was slow getting his troops across the Red River, and was unprepared for the speed with which Krueger moved forward. On the third day of battle, the greater part of Second Army was still east of the river and had not made contact with the enemy. Krueger, on the other hand, had advanced with nine divisions (three corps) on line, wheeled right, and rolled over the units of Second Army that had crossed the river. “We’re attacking all along the line,” Ike wrote General Joyce.⁵⁵

Krueger’s Blue Army pressed north, again three corps on line, his right flank anchored on the Red River, his left flank on the Sabine, and Shreveport one hundred miles away. This time Lear’s caution worked to Second Army’s advantage. He fell back in an orderly manner and declined to give battle, while his engineers blew every bridge and culvert in Krueger’s path. High water slowed Third Army’s advance to a crawl. On the third day, still more than sixty miles from Shreveport, and still not having made contact with Lear’s main force, Krueger launched his armor, cavalry, and mounted infantry on a three-hundred-mile end run around Second Army’s flank. Spearheaded by Patton’s 2nd Armored Division, the troops from the Blue Army crossed the Sabine into Texas and headed north. Patton covered two hundred miles in twenty-four hours, recrossed the Sabine above Shreveport the following day, and was driving virtually unopposed on the city from the north.ⁱ “Had it been real war,” wrote Hanson Baldwin for The New York Times, “Lear’s force would have been annihilated.”⁵⁷ Third Army’s main force was still twenty-five miles south of Shreveport, but with Patton already on the city’s northern outskirts, General Leslie McNair, the chief umpire, terminated the exercise.⁵⁸

Krueger outgeneraled Lear throughout both phases of the Louisiana maneuvers. His grasp of the strategic requirements, and the command and control he exercised over Third Army, were nearly flawless. The aggressive, offensive-style defense that he waged in phase one, and the use of his armor and mobile forces to flank Lear out of his position in phase two, ran counter to the received wisdom of conventional Army thinking. Eisenhower’s role has been exaggerated. He performed ably as Third Army’s chief of staff, but command responsibility rested with Krueger. To credit Ike with Third Army’s success, as many commentators have done, is like crediting Walter Bedell Smith (Eisenhower’s highly efficient chief of staff) with D-Day, or Erich von Manstein rather than von Rundstedt with the 1940 German breakthrough in the Ardennes.

In his memoirs, Ike acknowledged that the credit belonged to Krueger.⁵⁹ His son John agreed. “Why Dad got so much credit for Third Army’s performance … I do not understand, because he was not the commanding general. But Krueger had a tendency to take a back seat, and I guess Dad had more visibility. Dad was not one that tried to shove himself in front … but he received much of the credit anyway.”⁶⁰ In retrospect, that is not difficult to understand. Partially it is a case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc. After Ike achieved fame as supreme commander in Europe, it was natural for writers and biographers to embellish his accomplishments in Louisiana. Also, while Krueger exercised hands-on command of Third Army, it fell to Eisenhower to conduct the twice-daily briefings for the press. To the journalists covering the maneuvers, Ike became the face of Third Army. Newsmen such as Hanson Baldwin, Richard C. Hottelet, and Eric Sevareid remembered Eisenhower and had no hesitation about touting his talent.

Insofar as doctrine is concerned, the maneuvers were a mixed bag. Traditionalists continued to believe that firepower trumped mobility, while armor advocates pointed to Patton’s whirlwind flanking movement as the future way of battle.⁶¹ In terms of logistics and supply, the maneuvers helped put in place the wartime coordination that distinguished the United States Army in every theater. Lieutenant Colonel LeRoy Lutes, who handled the supply effort of Third Army, became the Army’s chief of distribution during World War II and was ultimately promoted to lieutenant general. Lutes ensured that American forces always had more of everything than they might possibly need.⁶² The major accomplishment of the great Louisiana maneuvers, aside from the experience it provided for high command, was in the field of personnel. Of the forty-two division, corps, and army commanders who took part in the exercise, thirty-one were relieved or shunted aside.⁶³ On the positive side, officers who performed well—Patton, Omar Bradley, Terry Allen, William H. Simpson, Eisenhower, and Lutes—were tapped for greater responsibility.

The final critique of the maneuver was conducted by Mark Clark, the deputy chief umpire. As he spoke he was handed a telegram from the War Department listing the names submitted by President Roosevelt to the Senate for promotion to general officer. “I scanned the list,” said Clark, “and Eisenhower was number three. I read out the names, but when I came to Ike’s name I deliberately skipped it. I tell you, you could hear a pin drop.” Clark dismissed the audience, and Eisenhower was obviously crestfallen. As the officers filed from the room, Clark called them to order once more. “I forgot one name—Dwight D. Eisenhower.” Amid the general laughter, Clark recalls that Ike broke into a broad smile. “I’ll get you for this, you sonofabitch.”⁶⁴

On Sunday, December 7, 1941, Ike went to his office early to catch up on his paperwork. He returned to his quarters about noon, had lunch with Mamie, and went upstairs for a short nap. Scarcely had he gone to sleep before the phone rang with an urgent call from Tex Lee. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, said Lee, and America’s Pacific Fleet had been destroyed.

“Within an hour,” Ike recalled, “orders began pouring into Third Army headquarters from the War Department.” Antiaircraft batteries were dispatched to the West Coast; antisabotage orders were put in place; border patrols and port security were reinforced; and major troop formations were alerted for possible movement should the Japanese attack the Pacific mainland. “Immediacy of movement was the keynote. Normal channels of administration were abandoned. A single telephone call would start an infantry regiment across the country.”⁶⁹

On December 8, President Roosevelt went to Capitol Hill to ask for a declaration of war against Japan. “December seventh,” said the president, is “a date which will live in infamy.”⁷⁰ On December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. The following day, the phone on Ike’s desk that connected Third Army directly to the War Department began to ring.

Eisenhower had been with troops almost two years. His ratings were consistently “superior.” Colonel Jesse Ladd, commanding the 15th Infantry, called Ike “an enthusiastic, aggressive officer of the highest type. One of the few Army officers whom I consider deserves a straight rating of superior.”⁷² Major General Charles Thompson, commanding the 3rd Infantry Division, said Eisenhower was “affable, energetic, dynamic, zealous, original, loyal, capable, dependable, and outstanding.”⁷³ Kenyon Joyce believed that Ike was “one of the ablest officers in the Army. This officer is thoroughly qualified for division command at this time.” (At the time Eisenhower was a colonel; a division is commanded by a major general.)⁷⁴ General Krueger, on Ike’s final report, rated him second among the 170 general officers with whom he was acquainted.⁷⁵

^a Between 1923 and 1939, the Army maintained an average strength of 14,000 officers and 130,000 enlisted men. By contrast, the German Reichswehr was limited by the Versailles Treaty to 100,000 men, of whom no more than 4,000 could be officers. (Peacemakers wanted the German Army large enough to suppress domestic violence, but not so large as to menace Germany’s neighbors.)

These comparative figures suggest that the U.S. Army contained far too many officers for its overall strength, and one of General Marshall’s first tasks when he became chief of staff was to prune the deadwood. One of the rationales for the excess of officers in the American Army was their potential employment as cadre should the Army ever need to expand. Yet the German Army under Hitler expanded rapidly without difficulty and with far fewer officers.

^b The term “square” pertained to the four regiments in the division. The division was typically deployed with all four regiments on line, with battalions in a column within each regiment. The infantry was essentially cannon fodder. Following a rolling barrage, successive waves of infantry hurled themselves against the enemy trenches. Stacking the infantry battalions in tandem reflected the tactics of Napoléon at Waterloo and Beauregard at Shiloh, and for reasons that are less than obvious fascinated the department of military strategy and tactics at West Point. By 1918 such tactics were obsolescent and by 1939 wholly anachronistic. See especially Christopher R. Gabel, The U.S. Army GHQ Maneuvers of 1941 9–11 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1992).

^c Everett S. Hughes (USMA, 1908), a charter member of Club Eisenhower at the Wyoming, was an ordnance officer on the War Department General Staff. When Ike assumed command in North Africa, Hughes accompanied him as his deputy chief of staff. In 1945, Hughes became the Army’s inspector general, and later served as chief of ordnance.

^d Unlike the square division, which was designed for the attrition of head-on frontal assault, the triangular division (devised by the Germans) emphasized maneuver and flexibility. Every echelon within the triangular division, from the rifle company to the battalion, the regiment, and the division itself, possessed three maneuver elements, plus a means of fire support. One of the maneuver elements could fix the enemy, a second could find his flank, while a third remained in reserve.

^e Somervell, a career engineer officer, had served in Mexico with Pershing and won a Distinguished Service Cross for gallantry in France. In 1935 he took charge of the massive, highly combustible WPA program in New York City and ran it successfully for four years. His no-nonsense dedication and abrasive straightforwardness earned the respect of radicals and reactionaries alike as well as the lifelong confidence of Harry Hopkins. Lieutenant General Henry Aurand, one of Somervell’s key subordinates in World War II, called him “a man without a drop of human kindness.” Jean Edward Smith, Lucius D. Clay 111.

^f In 1901, Marshall and Krueger served together as young lieutenants in G Company of the 30th Infantry in the Philippines, and later (1908–10) were the only two lieutenants on the faculty of the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth. Krueger served as the Army’s assistant chief of staff for operations (G-3) from 1936 to 1938, when he was succeeded by Marshall. Their friendship ran deep, and they shared a mutual respect. See Forrest C. Pogue, 1 George C. Marshall 82–83, 107 (New York: Viking Press, 1963).

^g As a reader of military history, I have always been struck by the relations between Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and Erich von Manstein, his chief of staff—the team that planned the German breakthrough in the Ardennes in 1940 and then led Army Group A to victory. Manstein writes that patience was not one of von Rundstedt’s virtues. Their headquarters was awash in paperwork but “thanks to a very proper unwritten law in the German Army that the general commanding be kept free of all minor detail, v. Rundstedt was hardly affected and was able to take a long walk every morning on the Rhein promenade. On returning to his desk to await the oral reports which he daily received from myself and other members of the staff, he would fill the time by reading a detective thriller. Like many other prominent people, he found welcome distraction in such literature, but since he was rather shy about this taste of his, he regularly read the novel in an open drawer [of his desk] which could be quickly closed whenever anyone came in to see him.” Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories 69–70, Anthony G. Powell, ed. and trans. (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982).

^h Haislip replied by return mail that MacArthur had made Sutherland his chief of staff and had not asked for Ike. “I’m happy the ‘Field Marshal’ didn’t recall my name,” said Eisenhower. “While I felt reasonably certain he would not make a request for me, I didn’t want to take chances.” DDE to Haislip, August 1941, EL.

ⁱ During the long motor march, Patton refueled his vehicles at commercial filling stations, paying for the gas out of his own pocket. Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War 396 (New York: HarperCollins, 1995).

SEVEN

Louisiana Maneuvers