Eisenhower in War and Peace

Eisenhower, who was solicitous about the welfare of his staff, was not pleased with the gilt-edge accommodations at Claridge’s. They were far too elegant for his tastes. The liveried footmen seemed especially out of place in wartime Britain, the ornate lobby struck him as ostentatious, and the red-and-gold Chinese wallpaper in his bedroom resembled a New Orleans bordello. “I think I’m living in sin,” he told Harry Butcher.²

Within the week Ike moved to less pretentious quarters at the Dorchester, across Park Lane from Hyde Park, another of London’s first-class hotels but one whose elegance was understated. Eisenhower’s suite, which overlooked Hyde Park, had three large rooms: a generous bedroom for him, another for Butcher, and a stately sitting room with a fireplace. “The General loved an open fire,” said Mickey McKeogh, “not so much for the warmth as to look at. He loves to sit in front of a fire and just look into it, and it is handy to throw his cigarette butts into. He always throws them into a fireplace if there’s one around.” Eisenhower was smoking three to four packs a day, and as Mickey recalled, he did not have much use for ashtrays. “He knocks the ash off his cigarettes by tapping his hand against something—the arm of a chair, the edge of his desk—and he believes that cigarette ashes are good for carpets.”³ The Dorchester would remain Ike’s London residence for the duration of the war. It was a short walk to his headquarters on Grosvenor Square, and a quick drive to Whitehall and 10 Downing Street.

“I cannot tell you how much I miss you,” Ike wrote Mamie shortly after his arrival. “An assignment like this is not the same as an absence from home on maneuvers. In a tent, surrounded by soldiers, it seems natural to have to get along alone. But when living in an apartment, under city conditions, I constantly find myself wondering, ‘why isn’t Mamie here?’ You’ve certainly become most necessary to me.”⁴ Eisenhower wrote 319 letters to Mamie while he was overseas, roughly two each week. And every letter was handwritten, though he sometimes complained about the time that this required. Mamie wrote to Ike just as frequently, and she saved all of his letters to her. For whatever reason, Eisenhower apparently did not keep those he received from Mamie.⁵ ^a

Eisenhower’s first order of business was to establish the command structure for the European theater, and he followed the model General Marshall had established at the War Department. Mark Clark, who headed II Corps, became the commander of Army ground troops; Major General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, who led Eighth Air Force, became Ike’s air commander; and Major General John C. H. Lee would assume a post similar to Brehon Somervell’s as the commander of American service forces in the theater. Spaatz, who was a year ahead of Eisenhower at West Point, had been one of the pioneers in Army aviation. He had won the Distinguished Flying Cross for gallantry during World War I, and in 1929 set the world flight endurance record commanding a Fokker trimotor transport that stayed aloft for 150 hours—refueling in the air thirty-seven times.^b A member of the Army general staff like Eisenhower, he had spent the last months of 1940 observing the Battle of Britain. When the United States entered the war, Spaatz was given command of Eighth Air Force and returned to London in March 1942.⁶

Major General John C. H. Lee, a 1909 classmate of George Patton’s at West Point, had been born in Junction City, Kansas, in 1887. A career officer in the Corps of Engineers, Lee had been aide-de-camp to General Leonard Wood when Wood was Army chief of staff, had fought in France, and was district engineer in Vicksburg during the great flood of 1927. When war began he commanded the 2nd Infantry Division in California. Like Somervell, Lee was an inveterate empire builder who could be relied upon to provide an army with everything from safety pins and condoms to main battle tanks. Unlike Somervell, he was an evangelical Christian who carried a Bible with him at all times, frequently quoted scripture, and earned the nickname J[esus] C[hrist] H[imself] Lee because of his sanctimoniousness. Eisenhower called Lee his “Cromwell,” and considered him “one of the best officers in the Army.”⁷ And to Lee’s credit, he not only got the Allies across the Channel in 1944, he melded the various service branches—ordnance, quartermaster, transportation, signal, engineers, chemical, military police, medical, dental, adjutant general, judge advocate general, and finance—into an effective supply service that freed Eisenhower from logistical concerns and allowed him to concentrate on fighting the enemy. Lee and Spaatz outranked Eisenhower in the prewar Army, just as Sherman, Meade, and Thomas had outranked Grant. It is a reflection of the professionalism of the Regular Army that this made no difference whatever. Just as Sherman, Meade, and Thomas followed Grant’s orders to the letter, Lee and Spaatz worked easily under Ike.

Before leaving Washington, Eisenhower had asked Marshall for Bedell Smith as his chief of staff. At the time, Smith was secretary of the Army general staff and Marshall’s principal assistant. Smith and Marshall had first met at the Infantry School at Fort Benning in the late twenties when Marshall had been assistant commandant and Smith was the school’s secretary. A former enlisted man, Smith was abrasive, bad-tempered, foulmouthed, and addicted to duty. Perhaps because his grandfather had been an enlisted man in the Prussian Army, he had a passion for order and discipline. Forrest Pogue, Marshall’s biographer, said, “Those who worked under Smith dreaded both his tongue and his exactions. In an Army where Marshall depended on officers like Eisenhower and Bradley to do their jobs quietly, to conciliate, and to persuade, he required others like Smith who could hack a path through red tape and perform hatchet jobs.”⁸ Eisenhower needed Smith in precisely that capacity. As Drew Middleton of The New York Times put it, “Smith had a mind like a steel trap and was just naturally mean. He was Ike’s sonofabitch.”⁹ Marshall initially did not want to release Smith, but eventually relented, and Beetle (as he preferred to be called) reported to London in September.

After putting his command structure in place, Eisenhower turned to theater headquarters. “Now that everyone here is at liberty to talk to me freely,” he wrote Marshall on June 26, 1942, “it becomes abundantly clear that some change was necessary.”¹² Eisenhower immediately put the Army on a seven-day week. He was shocked when on his first Sunday several division heads sauntered into their Grosvenor Square offices at ten o’clock. He was even more surprised when he found that many at headquarters routinely left work before he did. “I’ve served on general staffs probably longer than any officer in the Army,” he told Butcher, “and I never left headquarters until my ‘Old Man’ departed.”¹³ Eisenhower did not belong to the “counsel and correct” school of military leadership. If an officer underperformed, he was summarily relieved and sent back to the United States. “Colonel Summers requested today that I revoke his orders for returning to the states,” Ike recorded in his diary on June 27. “I declined but told him I would carry him over for a month to avoid the implication that I relieved him immediately upon arrival.”¹⁴

While Eisenhower established himself as theater commander, Harry Butcher renewed his friendship with the CBS contingent in London: Edward R. Murrow, Robert Trout, and Charles Collingwood, as well as Ray Daniell of The New York Times and Quentin Reynolds of Collier’s. “I trained Bob [Trout] from a pup at WJSV,” Butcher recorded.¹⁶ The press corps, most of whom had been in London during the Blitz, were far better informed about the conduct of the war than most officers at Eisenhower’s headquarters. Daniell and Murrow were often briefed by Churchill himself, and all had contacts at the highest level in Whitehall. For Butcher, it was a two-way street. The journalists provided a back channel that kept Ike informed, and Eisenhower enjoyed favorable press coverage from the beginning.

As the commander of all American forces in the European theater, Eisenhower met daily with one or more of the British chiefs of staff, or with Lieutenant General Sir Hastings (“Pug”) Ismay, Churchill’s personal chief of staff. He saw Churchill several times a week, often at a private lunch, and was occasionally invited to spend the weekend at Chequers, the prime minister’s country estate. Early on, Ike sensed the British were not happy with a cross-Channel attack, certainly not in 1942. “There seems to be some confusion of thought as to the extent of the British commitment,” he alerted Marshall on June 30, 1942.¹⁷

Washington’s announcement of a second front in 1942 galvanized Churchill. To cross the Channel in 1943 might be feasible; 1942 was out of the question. The last thing the British government wanted was a premature cross-Channel attack. The enormous battlefield losses of World War I, Churchill’s own unfortunate experience with the amphibious landing at Gallipoli in 1915, plus an awareness of how ill-prepared the Allies, particularly the United States, were to take on a battle-tested German Army, caused the British government to rethink its earlier commitment. Scarcely before the ink was dry on the Washington-Moscow communiqué, Churchill boarded a plane for the United States determined to dissuade Roosevelt from any thought of a second front in 1942, and possibly in 1943 as well.

Churchill spent two days cloistered with FDR at Hyde Park. Whenever the two Allied leaders were alone together, policy makers down the line became nervous. “The President was always willing to do any sideshow, and Churchill was always prodding him,” said Marshall.¹⁹ Stimson said, “It looks as if the President is going to jump the traces.”²⁰ The fact is, Churchill’s arguments against a 1942 cross-Channel attack were remarkably sound. There was a severe shortage of landing craft, the Luftwaffe held a six to one advantage in tactical air, Britain’s forces were too thinly spread, America’s were unproven, and the time to prepare was too short. “No responsible British military authority has so far been able to make a plan which has any chance of success unless the Germans become utterly demoralized, of which there is no likelihood,” said Churchill. The prime minister conceded that the Western Allies could not remain idle “during the whole of 1942,” and suggested they redirect their efforts toward landing in North Africa (GYMNAST).²¹

The president’s principal concern was to bring U.S. ground troops into action against the German Army as soon as possible. American public opinion was clamoring for vengeance against Japan. To keep the nation’s strategic priorities straight, it was essential to join the battle against Hitler as soon as possible, regardless of the location. There was also the need to assist Russia, which could not be done so long as American forces sat on the sidelines. Finally, congressional midterm elections were set for November. It was inevitable that the Democrats would lose seats, the question was how many? If the United States had not mounted an offensive by then, the loss might be catastrophic.

The June conference in Washington (ARGONAUT) failed to find a solution. Meanwhile, the military situation continued to deteriorate.²⁴ The British garrison in the Libyan port city of Tobruk surrendered, opening the door for Rommel to move on Alexandria, Cairo, and the Suez Canal. In Russia, the German Army had crossed the Don and was approaching Stalingrad on the Volga; the Crimean fortress of Sevastopol had fallen; and the oil fields of the Caucasus appeared within Hitler’s reach. The Chinese war effort had all but collapsed, the fighting on Guadalcanal hung in the balance, four of America’s seven aircraft carriers had been sunk, and two were in dry dock for repairs. In the Atlantic, German U-boats prowled virtually unmolested. A thirty-three-ship convoy bound for Archangel lost twenty-four vessels en route, causing shipments to the Soviet Union’s Arctic ports to be suspended indefinitely.²⁵

An agreement on an offensive strategy was urgently required. On July 16, FDR dispatched Hopkins, Marshall, and King to London to settle the matter. “It is of the highest importance that U.S. ground troops be brought into action against the enemy in 1942,” said the president.²⁶ Eisenhower, who had not been privy to the discussions thus far, met Marshall upon his arrival in London. At the chief of staff’s direction, he prepared what amounted to a legal brief detailing the advantages of a cross-Channel assault in 1942 and negating any benefit that might accrue from landing in North Africa—which Marshall considered “completely out of the question.”²⁷

Ike did not participate in the conference with the British chiefs, but the meetings were tense and sometimes acrimonious. Marshall continued to press for crossing the Channel, but he was fighting a losing battle. On July 22, the British announced that the matter had been submitted to the war cabinet, which had voted unanimously against any cross-Channel operation in 1942.²⁸ For all practical purposes that decided the issue. When Eisenhower learned of the decision, he told Butcher, “July 22, 1942 could well go down as the ‘blackest day’ in history”—a silly overreaction he later regretted.²⁹

After the British made it clear that they would not cross the Channel in 1942, Hopkins asked Roosevelt for instructions. The president said he was not surprised at the British refusal. He repeated his insistence on coming to grips with the Germans as soon as possible, and suggested that North Africa was the best place to do so.³⁰ Marshall and King grudgingly acknowledged the president’s wishes but remained skeptical. At their final meeting on July 25, the CCS tentatively agreed to a largely American-led landing in North Africa in October, and repledged themselves to a cross-Channel attack in the summer of 1943.

The following day, Marshall told Eisenhower that he would command the North African expedition, which had been rechristened TORCH for security reasons. “General Marshall added that my appointment was not yet official, but that written orders would come through at an early date. In the meantime, he said that I should get started on the planning.”³¹ Marshall did not tell him of the War Department’s skepticism about what it believed was a North African sideshow.

FDR was delighted with the outcome of the London discussions. “I cannot help feeling that last week represented a turning point in the whole war,” he cabled Churchill on July 27.³² Despite the president’s clearly stated preference, Marshall and King continued to resist landing in North Africa. Their opposition surfaced at a meeting of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington on July 30. The meeting was chaired by Admiral William D. Leahy, who had recently assumed his duties as chief of staff to the president. When the issue of North Africa arose, Marshall said he did not agree that a final decision had been made; King added that it was “his impression that the President and Prime Minister had not yet reached an agreement.”³³ When Admiral Leahy reported the discussion to FDR, the president was furious. Marshall and King were ordered to the White House at eight-thirty that evening, and Roosevelt took the chiefs to the woodshed. As reported afterward by the War Department: “The PRESIDENT stated very definitely that he, as Commander-in-Chief, had made the decision that TORCH would be undertaken at the earliest possible date. He considered that this operation was now our principal objective and the assembling of means to carry it out should take precedence over other operations.”³⁴

Ultimately Roosevelt and Churchill intervened in what Eisenhower called a “transatlantic essay contest,” and a compromise was reached.³⁷ Allied troops would go ashore at three points: near Casablanca, in French Morocco, and close by the port cities of Oran and Algiers, in Algeria. Eisenhower set the date for November 8, 1942, barely two months away but five days after U.S. congressional elections.^e

Eisenhower shared that sentiment. “The past six weeks have been the most trying of my life,” he wrote George Patton. “You can well imagine that my feelings at the moment are those of great relief that a final decision now seems assured.”³⁹

Privately, Eisenhower confessed doubts. “We are undertaking something of a quite desperate nature,” he wrote in his diary in early September. “In a way it is like the return of Napoleon from Elba—if the guess as to psychological reaction is correct, we may gain a tremendous advantage; if the guess is wrong, we will gain nothing and will lose a lot.… [W]e are sailing in a dangerous political sea, and this particular sea is one in which military skill and ability can do little in charting a safe course.”⁴⁰

Ike kept that sentiment to himself. To his staff he said TORCH was an order from the commander in chief and the prime minister, and that he was going to carry it out “if I have to go alone in a rowboat.”⁴¹

To head the planning for TORCH, Eisenhower prevailed upon General Walter Krueger to release Colonel Alfred Gruenther, who had been the operations officer for Third Army on the Louisiana maneuvers.⁴⁴ Planning was shifted from American headquarters on Grosvenor Square to Norfolk House on St. James’s Square (the birthplace of George III), and Butcher located a suburban hideaway where Ike could relax—something that was long overdue. “He was not the cheerful man I remembered,” said Gruenther upon his arrival in London. “He had aged ten years.”⁴⁵

Telegraph Cottage, the retreat Butcher found for Ike, was a picture-postcard English country house, situated on ten acres of dense woods and cultivated lawns, with a winding drive and high hedges that assured absolute privacy. Located between Coombe Hill and Little Coombe golf courses in Kingston, Surrey, the cottage was in the heart of what was known jokingly as London’s stockbroker belt, and was roughly thirty minutes from Eisenhower’s headquarters on Grosvenor Square. The cottage had five bedrooms, only one bathroom, and no central heating, but a massive fireplace in the living room and an old-fashioned coal stove in the kitchen kept the house comfortable most of the time. The only telephone was a direct line laid by the signal corps to headquarters on Grosvenor Square. At Churchill’s insistence, a bomb shelter was dug in the garden before Ike moved in.

Initially, Eisenhower went to the cottage only on weekends. But the atmosphere proved so congenial that he was soon spending four to five nights a week there. “Our cottage is a godsend,” Ike wrote Mamie on September 13. “Butch says I’m human again. When the day comes that all this business is over and I come back, you’d better ‘figger’ where we’ll go and how we’ll live. Possibly a shack, but at least we should be free as air. With a few pigs and chickens we can be as happy as a pair of Georgia crackers with a good still.”⁴⁶

Eisenhower shared Telegraph Cottage with Butcher and T. J. Davis, his adjutant general. Mickey McKeogh took charge of housekeeping details, Sergeant John Hunt did the cooking, and Sergeant John Alton Moaney was Ike’s batman and valet. Hunt was from Petersburg, Virginia; Moaney, from Maryland’s eastern shore. Both were black, and both remained with Eisenhower throughout the war. Moaney stayed until the general’s death. Rounding out Ike’s unofficial family was Kay Summersby, who initially began as Eisenhower’s driver but was almost immediately integrated into off-duty activities. When opportunity permitted, Ike loved to play bridge in the evening, and it was usually he and Kay against Butcher and T.J. When fortune smiled, General Gruenther, recently promoted, who was recognized as one of the nation’s outstanding bridge players, would take a hand.

The fact is Kay Summersby proved a perfect interlocutor, buffering the transition for Ike’s unofficial family into English life. She was thirty-four, one of five children of a retired lieutenant colonel in the Royal Munster Fusiliers—an Irish regiment of distinguished lineage. She was raised on the family estate, Inish Beg, a small island in the Ilen River in County Cork, and lived what she described as a sheltered life of privilege. “There was a succession of governesses, hunts, spatting parents, riding in the fields … the usual pattern of that obsolete world. The only tragedy which could becloud life in those days was a sudden Irish thunderstorm—because it might spoil my lovely tennis party.”⁴⁷ As the daughter of an Army officer living in the country, she grew up around horses, was a fearless rider, and often rode to the hounds. She was also an accomplished bridge player, knew how to pour tea correctly, was well read, articulate, and, having been born into the propertied class, was less intimidated than most by Britain’s social stratification.

“Kay was very beautiful in those days,” said Anthea Saxe, a fellow member of the Motor Transport Corps. “She was charming and gracious, and she was gay and witty. She had a lot of energy and drive. She was also extremely capable and perhaps more important was very closed mouthed. She never blabbered about anything.”⁴⁸

Ike was smitten. “Dad was attracted to vital women, like Marian Huff in the Philippines and Kay,” said John Eisenhower, “but these were friendships, not torrid affairs.”⁴⁹

To complete the unofficial family, Eisenhower decided they needed a dog. “Would you like to have a dog, Kay?” he asked. “I think I can manage that. I’d like to do something for you for working all these crazy hours and everything.”⁵⁰ Ike had never owned a dog during his military career, and he delegated the task of finding one to Summersby and Bedell Smith, a knowledgeable dog lover. “I’m going to get a dog,” he told Butcher, with a grin “as wide as a watermelon.”⁵¹

Beetle and Kay narrowed the search to two Scotties, and Ike made the final choice and picked the dog’s name: T-E-L-E-K. When asked, Eisenhower said the origin of the Scottie’s name was “a military secret.” To Kay he said, “It’s a combination of Telegraph Cottage and Kay, two parts of my life that make me very happy.”⁵²

To Mamie, Ike wrote, “I’m trying to get me a little dog—Scottie by preference. You can’t talk war to a dog, and I’d like to have someone or something to talk to, occasionally, that does not know what the word means! A dog is my only hope.”⁵⁴ Eisenhower evidently saw no incongruity between his growing affection for Summersby and his love for his wife.

Ike’s selection to be supreme commander reflected circumstance more than choice—another example of the fortuna that followed him throughout his military career. He had gone to England in June 1942 as a stand-in for General Marshall to prepare for the cross-Channel attack that Marshall would command. When that was aborted and North Africa was selected as a substitute, neither Marshall nor Admiral King nor Secretary Stimson believed the new operation would ever take place. Certainly they were determined to prevent it. In that context there was little risk in selecting Eisenhower to command. The fact that he had no combat experience, virtually no command time, and was the most junior lieutenant general in the United States Army was of no consequence if the operation was never mounted.

But events took control. Or more accurately, Churchill and Roosevelt took control. Despite the American military’s objection to landing in North Africa, the prime minister and the president ordered the invasion to take place. In addition, FDR insisted that the United States play the major role. The president, who considered himself an expert on French politics, was convinced the French had soured on Great Britain, believing the British had left them in the lurch by a premature evacuation at Dunkirk. To make matters worse, the Royal Navy had proceeded to sink much of the French fleet at Mers el-Kébir in July 1940 to prevent it from falling into German hands. Roosevelt assumed the French held no such animosity toward the United States. “I am reasonably sure a simultaneous landing by British and Americans would result in full resistance by all French in Africa,” the president cabled Churchill on August 30. But “an initial American landing without British ground forces offers a real chance that there would be no French resistance or only a token resistance.”⁵⁵ If the United States was to provide most of the troops for the invasion of North Africa, it was logical that the operation should be commanded by an American. Eisenhower was in London, he was manifestly American, and he had impressed the British with his openness, his fairness, and his determination. With no alternative candidate in the wings, his selection was foreordained.

What may be most surprising is how Eisenhower rose to the occasion. At the time, the invasion of North Africa in November 1942 was the greatest amphibious operation that had ever been attempted. Unlike the 1944 D-Day landing in Normandy, for which the Allies had three years to prepare, TORCH was mounted in two months, with sketchy intelligence about landing sites, improvised shipping arrangements, and an Army that had never seen combat. Two great armadas totaling more than 400 ships, protected by 300-plus naval vessels, would carry 116,000 men (three-quarters of whom were American) to the invasion beaches. One fleet would sail 2,800 miles from Great Britain through the Strait of Gibraltar to the Algerian coast. A second would sail 4,500 miles from Hampton Roads, Virginia, to Morocco. The troops would be at sea for two weeks. They would land on a potentially hostile shore without benefit of off-loading and regrouping. And no one knew what their reception would be. Eisenhower may have been overwhelmed by the responsibility, but his marching orders to his command were concise. “The object of the operation as a whole is to occupy French Morocco and Algeria with a view to the earliest possible subsequent occupation of Tunisia.”⁵⁶

There was little evidence to support Murphy’s hypothesis. A conservative Catholic—conservative even by the Paleolithic standards of the Foreign Service—Murphy considered de Gaulle’s Free French movement dangerously radical and found little to criticize in Vichy’s domestic policies.^g He was awed by the skill with which French administrators kept North Africa’s Muslim population under control, and was convinced the Allies would have to retain the existing administrative structure to maintain order.⁵⁹ His French friends were largely aristocrats and senior officials who welcomed the stability Pétain provided. De Gaulle said that Murphy was “long familiar with the best society and apparently rather inclined to believe that France consisted of the people he dined with in town.”⁶⁰

Murphy’s candidate to rally the French Army in North Africa was General Henri Giraud, a four-star general who had commanded the French Seventh and Ninth armies in northern France in 1940, was captured by the Germans at Wassigny, had escaped from German captivity, and was living quietly in the Loire. Although he was not on active duty, his rank as a full general made him senior to the military governors in North Africa, and as a supporter of the Pétain government he had not stepped across the line into mutiny. Giraud would become an idée fixe with FDR as the French alternative to de Gaulle, but the fact is he had no place in the command structure of the Army, no popular following, no organization, no program, no interest in politics, and little administrative ability.⁶² Simply put, he was an American puppet invented by FDR and the State Department to avoid having to deal with Charles de Gaulle.⁶³ ^h None of this was known to Eisenhower, and none of it bothered Murphy, who was confident that a great many Frenchmen in North Africa would rally to Giraud’s support.⁶⁴

Murphy believed that prior to the invasion a ranking American officer should go to Algeria and meet clandestinely with senior French officers to secure their support. Mark Clark, now Ike’s deputy, volunteered for the mission, and was landed by a British submarine on the Algerian coast in mid-October. Clark met with Murphy and Major General Charles E. Mast, chief of staff of the French XIX Corps. The results were inconclusive. Mast commanded no troops and spoke only for himself, and the meeting was disrupted by the local police. Clark fled, and in the process lost his trousers in the heavy surf reboarding the submarine. The disrupted meeting should have alerted Eisenhower, and certainly Clark, that Murphy’s rosy assessment of French cooperation was unlikely to be realized.⁶⁷

Under Gruenther’s direction, planning for TORCH took shape. The assault troops were divided into three task forces—one for each target area. The western task force, some thirty-six thousand men commanded by George Patton, would hit the beaches at three points in the vicinity of Casablanca. These troops were drawn entirely from the United States.⁶⁸ They would sail from Hampton Roads on October 24, 1942, and would land in the early morning hours of November 8. The Atlantic swarmed with German U-boats, and the mammoth surf on the Moroccan coast might prevent landing for several days, but Patton was undeterred. “I will leave the beaches either a conqueror or a corpse,” he told FDR on the eve of departure.⁶⁹

“Don’t scare the Navy, George,” Marshall cautioned, “they are already afraid of you.”⁷⁰

Both the western and center task forces were composed entirely of American troops. The eastern task force, which was to take Algiers, consisted of twenty-eight thousand British and thirteen thousand American troops. The initial assault would be commanded by Major General Charles “Doc” Ryder, Ike’s West Point classmate. After the city was secure, command would revert to British lieutenant general Sir Kenneth Anderson, a dour Scot whose American code name was GROUCH. (The British called him “Sunshine.”) Blunt to the point of rudeness, Anderson was an aggressive commander who led his men with the rugged determination of a Highland Scot. “He was not a popular type,” said Eisenhower, “but I had real respect for his fighting heart.”⁷²

The eastern and center task forces sailed from the Firth of Clyde on October 26, 1942, under the command of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, who subsequently became Eisenhower’s naval commander in chief, and in 1943 succeeded Sir Dudley Pound as Britain’s first sea lord. Ike called Cunningham a real sea dog—an admiral in the mode of Nelson who “believed that ships went to sea in order to find and destroy the enemy.”⁷³ ^j

Ike remained in Scotland for three days, and his visit was a tonic for the troops’ morale. But he departed downcast and disappointed. “We are short on experience and trained leadership below battalion commander,” he informed Marshall. The troops “did not know exactly what was expected of them.” Privately, Ike said, “They’ll be sitting ducks if they don’t sharpen up.”⁷⁵

Back in London, Eisenhower asked Kay Summersby whether she would like to accompany him to North Africa—an assignment far removed from the Motor Transport Corps.

“It’s settled then. You’ll be following us. It will probably be a month or so before the situation is stabilized. And Kay, you don’t have to be told this is top secret. Not a word to anyone.”⁷⁶

Before leaving, Eisenhower paid a farewell courtesy call on King George VI at Buckingham Palace. Clark accompanied him. “Didn’t you get stranded on the beach without your pants?” the King asked Clark.⁷⁷ Eisenhower had worried about the protocol requirement that he not turn his back on the King when leaving. “It was no problem,” said Ike. “He came right to the door with us.”⁷⁸

Eisenhower was now upbeat. “Everything for TORCH is well in hand,” he told Marshall on October 29. “I fear nothing except bad weather and possibly large losses to submarines. Given a fair break in these two matters, you may rest assured that the entry will go as planned.”⁷⁹

The following day, Robert Murphy threw a spanner in the works (as the British would say). With the invasion armadas already on the high seas, he radioed Ike asking that the landings be postponed for two weeks. General Giraud, it seems, was unable to leave home until November 20, 1942. Eisenhower exploded. “It is inconceivable that [Murphy] can recommend such a delay,” he cabled Marshall. “Recommend the President advise [Murphy] immediately that his suggested action is utterly impossible.”⁸¹ Roosevelt, who was spending the weekend at Hyde Park, wasted no time. “I fully concur in General Eisenhower’s recommendation,” he told Marshall. “Please inform him to that effect at once.”⁸² The invasion was on.

To screen Eisenhower’s departure from London, the Army devised the cover story that he was returning to Washington for consultation. The story was widely circulated and Mamie made preparations to receive her husband at their apartment. To maintain security, there was no way Eisenhower could inform her that he would not be coming. Being in transit and headed for battle, there was also no way for him to know when he could write next. His final act in London was to send his wife a postdated letter. “By the time you read this your newspapers will probably have told you where I am and you will understand why your birthday letter had to be written some time in advance.” Mamie’s forty-sixth birthday was November 14, 1942.

“I’d like to be there to help you celebrate, and to kiss you 46 times (multiplied by any number you care to pick). I will be thinking with the deepest gratitude of the many happy hours and years you have given me.… I’ve never wanted any other wife—you’re mine, and for that reason I’ve been luckier than any other man.”⁸³

^a In a curious coincidence, FDR retained all of Eleanor’s letters to him, but ER destroyed Franklin’s to her, finding his youthful avowals of love too painful to reread. To judge from Ike’s replies to Mamie, it would appear that she often raised questions he also preferred to forget. Jean Edward Smith, FDR 37 (New York: Random House, 2007).

^b Spaatz’s plane, the Question Mark, was crewed by Captain Ira Eaker, Lieutenant Elwood Quesada, and Lieutenant Harry Halverson. Eaker succeeded Spaatz as commander of Eighth Air Force in December 1942; Quesada commanded the Tactical Air Command and in 1959 was appointed by President Eisenhower to be the first head of the Federal Aviation Administration; and Halverson led the great bombing raid on the Ploesti oil fields in Romania.

^c The second occasion in which the president asserted his authority was in March 1943, when FDR gave Admiral King a direct order to transfer sixty B-24 Liberator bombers from the Pacific theater to the Atlantic to combat German U-boats. Until that time, the Navy had resisted the transfer and the U-boats had gone largely unchallenged. After the transfer, the Battle of the Atlantic was quickly won. FDR to COMINCH [King], March 18, 1943, FDRL. Also see David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 589 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); John Keegan, The Second World War 120 (New York: Viking, 1989).

^d Probably a red herring. As Marshall’s official biographer wrote: “On no other issue did the Secretary of War and the Chief of Staff differ so completely with the Commander-in-Chief. Their distrust of his military judgment, their doubts about the Prime Minister’s advice, and their deep conviction that TORCH was fundamentally unsound persisted throughout August. With the same kind of tenacity that Churchill used in 1944 in the hope of scuttling the landings in Southern France, they continued by a fine splitting of hairs to insist that the final decision for TORCH had yet to be made.” Pogue, 2 Marshall 349.

^e The election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost eight seats in the Senate and fifty in the House, reducing their majorities to twenty-one and ten respectively.

^f At a time when smoking was more common, it was considered impermissible to light one’s cigarette at the table before the toast to the Crown, usually rendered close to the end of the meal. As a young American professor at the University of Toronto in the early 1960s, I was introduced to the custom, which I considered a quaint relic of colonialism. For Eisenhower, who was a nicotine addict, the rule was oppressive, and when hosts learned of his habit, the toast to the Crown was regularly given after the first course was served.

^g After August 1940, Vichy France became a one-party state. Labor unions were dissolved, free secondary education was abolished, divorce was made more difficult, and married women were denied employment in the public sector. The Jewish Statutes of October 1940 and June 1941 excluded Jews from the civil service and most professions. A Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives was established to enforce anti-Jewish regulations. Thousands of Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps, and all Jews were persecuted.

Roosevelt’s approval of the Pétain government, like his order to evacuate Japanese Americans from their homes along the Pacific coast, and arguably his failure to disrupt German concentration camps, reveals a side of the president’s personality that is difficult to explain. Jean Edward Smith, FDR 549–53, 610–13. Also see Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews 121–76 (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 51–233 (New York: Knopf, 1972); and David Thomson, Democracy in France Since 1870 222–24 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

^h For the genesis of the Giraud gambit, involving Murphy, H. Freeman Matthews, and various operatives of the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA), see William L. Langer, Our Vichy Gamble 276–85, 305–35 (New York: Knopf, 1947).

ⁱ “My original selection of General Hartle for the Center Task Force was based upon the conviction that he would do a workmanlike job,” Eisenhower cabled Marshall on October 3, 1942. “As agreed in subsequent telegrams, I am substituting Fredendall for him and will leave Hartle here in London as my deputy.” DDE, 1 War Years 590–92.

^j In late 1943, Eisenhower asked Cunningham to send the British battle fleet, carrying a division of soldiers, into Italy’s Taranto harbor, known to be saturated with mines and other underwater obstacles—an extremely hazardous undertaking that many naval commanders would have avoided. “Sir,” replied Cunningham, “His Majesty’s Fleet is here to go wherever you may send it.” DDE, Crusade in Europe 89.

^k Butcher, in recording the dinner in his diary, neglected to include Summersby when listing those present. Harry C. Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower, 1942 to 1945 160 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1946).

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TORCH