Eisenhower in War and Peace

Gibraltar had all the earmarks of a beleaguered fortress. Honeycombed with thirty miles of tunnels, the surface crosshatched with water catchment ditches running into underground cisterns, and with an airfield capable of holding six hundred planes, wingtip to wingtip, the Rock would not only provide air cover for the landings, but also afforded Ike a command center from which to communicate with the task forces. Supreme headquarters was six hundred feet deep inside the Rock, ventilated by a few ineffective fans of unknown vintage, dimly lit, rodent infested, and constantly damp from condensation dripping from the ceiling. Eisenhower referred to the setting as “the most dismal we occupied during the war.”³

To make matters worse, General Henri Giraud, who had been spirited out of France by Murphy’s operatives, arrived on Gibraltar on the afternoon of November 7, ready to assume overall command of the invasion. Murphy, it appears, had assured Giraud that if he would put himself at the disposal of the Allies, he would supersede Eisenhower as supreme commander. The unhappy task of disillusioning the general fell to Ike, who called it “my most distressing interview of the war.”⁴

During the dinner break, Eisenhower consulted with his diplomatic advisers, H. Freeman Matthews from the State Department and William H. B. Mack of the British Foreign Office. They suggested placing Giraud in nominal command, with Eisenhower retaining operational control as Giraud’s deputy. Eisenhower rejected the proposal.⁸ Mark Clark and Admiral Cunningham agreed. Cunningham called Giraud’s demands “preposterous and unreasonable.”⁹

When the meeting resumed at 10:30 p.m., Giraud remained adamant. After two unproductive hours the discussions broke off. “Giraud will be a spectator in this affair,” the French general announced with a shrug.¹⁰ Eisenhower bid him good night, and then informed Marshall he thought Giraud was playing for time. “He realizes that he can do nothing with respect to the landing itself and can gain no credit for it, no matter how successful. Consequently he is choosing to wait to see what happens. If we are generally successful tonight, I will not be surprised to find him more conciliatory tomorrow.”¹¹ ^b Marshall replied that Ike had been absolutely correct in the stance he took. “Our only regret is that you have been forced to devote so much of your time to this purpose.”¹²

Shortly after 2 a.m. on November 8, 1942, the troops of the western (Patton), center (Fredendall), and eastern (Ryder) task forces debarked from their transports and headed toward the North African shoreline for a hazardous night landing. The surf on the Moroccan coast was unprecedentedly benign (less than four feet), and Patton’s men got ashore with no more than the usual number of mishaps. Fredendall’s troops misread their maps and landed four miles off target, but for the most part the initial phase of TORCH went as planned. “Information from the task forces is meager,” Ike reported to Marshall at 9:30 a.m., “but we do know that we are fairly solidly ashore at eastern and central points and that western attack began as scheduled.”¹³

As the troops made their way inland, the fighting intensified. The French were standing their ground. The battle was heaviest at the ports of Algiers and Oran. In the port of Algiers, French coastal batteries sunk an American destroyer, and there was fierce fighting in the harbor itself. At Oran, the planned pincer movement failed to materialize. The airfield and port remained in French hands, and two British destroyers were sunk by naval gunfire. The stubborn resistance of the French, combined with the slowness of inexperienced troops coming under fire for the first time, created increasing anxiety at Eisenhower’s headquarters.¹⁴ That anxiety was intensified by the lack of information from Patton in Morocco. Gibraltar had lost radio contact with the western task force, and the last information indicated that a ferocious battle had been joined all along the line.¹⁵

Isolated from the fighting, and with no ability to influence the outcome, Eisenhower became introspective. At the Wilderness, Grant had passed the time whittling sticks. Eisenhower chose to put his thoughts on paper. “Worries of a Commander,” he scribbled at the top of a sheet of government-issue foolscap. In short order, Ike ticked off ten potential problems: Spain was ominously quiet; Giraud was difficult to deal with; Giraud wanted planes; Giraud was impossible.

Alone, and with nothing to do but wait, Ike dispatched a cable to Beetle Smith in London. Could he send a “skeletonized Wack [WAC, Women’s Army Corps] Company of fifteen or twenty secretaries and stenographers essential to the headquarters’ effective operation?”¹⁷ Eisenhower had evidently planned this beforehand, and it was his way of bringing Kay Summersby and others to North Africa.^c

Beetle immediately put the wheels in motion. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am that you have got the Wack business all buttoned up,” Ike replied on November 11. “When we get to our own headquarters and can run our own establishment according to our own likes and dislikes, a gang of friends around with whom we can have an hour’s conversation a day will be a God-send.”¹⁸

Eisenhower missed the presence of women. Throughout his military career, Mamie (with few exceptions) had always accompanied him. And the first year in the Philippines when she had not, he had struck up an abiding friendship with Marian Huff. “I think I have learned more about the value of feminine companionship in the last month than I ever knew in my life,” Ike wrote Mamie’s sister Mike on December 4, 1942. “If a gang of men are off on an expedition of golf or hunting, their sense of loss on this score would not be so noticeable. The difficulty is that all of us live under the highest pressure of responsibility and strain and our only companionship, even at meal time, is ourselves. The result is that finally one feels a bit bewildered but there is nothing to do about it.”¹⁹ Eisenhower found the needed companionship with Kay Summersby. Beetle, who suffered from ulcers, developed a relationship with his nurse, Ethel Westermann, sometimes described as “the most beautiful nurse in the whole European theater.”²⁰ Ike’s friend Everett Hughes found solace with Rosalind Prismal, a young British widow who worked as his secretary. Butcher had a variety of female friends but eventually was attracted to Molly Jacobs, a young Red Cross worker. George Patton traveled with his “niece.” It was not out of the ordinary for the senior commanders of World War II to move with a retinue of female support staff. In the Pacific, MacArthur’s wife, Jean, was in residence, and his senior staff became notorious for their dalliances with headquarters personnel. General Marshall kept an edgy eye on what was happening but chose not to intervene.

While Eisenhower reflected on the problems he confronted, the battle hung in the balance. But as French resistance stiffened, fortuna intervened once again on Ike’s behalf. Admiral Jean-Louis Darlan, the deputy head of the Vichy regime and commander in chief of French armed forces, was in Algiers visiting his son Alain, who had recently contracted polio. Darlan’s presence was unexpected. Of more immediate import, General Alphonse Juin, the overall commander of the French Army in North Africa, was also in Algiers. Juin was subordinate to Darlan, but unlike the admiral, he was decidedly anti-German.^d By noon on November 8, Juin concluded that it was absurd for the French Army to be fighting the Allies. On his own authority, with Darlan’s reluctant acquiescence, Juin sought out General Ryder to arrange an armistice in Algiers.²¹

“Will you assume responsibility for keeping law and order if Algiers is surrendered to you?”

“Yes,” Ryder replied, “provided I may have the services of the French gendarmes acting under my orders.”

At Juin’s order, the French garrison in Algiers ceased fighting and returned to its barracks. Ryder’s forces entered the city at 8 p.m. With Algiers in Allied hands, Eisenhower immediately dispatched Clark and Giraud to the city to negotiate a general cease-fire. Except for the surrender of Algiers, the military situation remained uncertain. Fredendall’s forces were stymied outside Oran (Fredendall had yet to set foot on shore), and the trickle of news from Morocco portended disaster. “Disturbing report (garbled) was to the effect that at one beach [Patton] was re-embarking under a flag of truce,” Eisenhower cabled Bedell Smith. “That I do not believe. Unless my opinion of Georgie is 100% wrong, he wouldn’t re-embark anything, including himself.”²³

Ike hoped that Giraud’s arrival in Algiers would signal the end of French resistance. But that did not happen. “General Giraud’s cold reception by the French in Africa was a terrible blow to our expectations,” Eisenhower wrote later. “He was completely ignored. He made a broadcast, announcing assumption of leadership of French North Africa and directing French forces to cease fighting against Allies, but his speech had no effect whatsoever.”²⁴

With Giraud unexpectedly out of the picture, Clark and Eisenhower recognized that Admiral Darlan, and only Admiral Darlan, could order French forces to end their resistance. But Darlan declined to do so. The situation in Algiers, precipitated by General Juin, was an anomaly. Marshal Pétain had ordered that North Africa be defended, and Darlan, as Pétain’s deputy, told Clark that he had no alternative but to do so. “All of my associates and I feel hostilities are useless,” said Darlan. “I can simply obey the orders of Pétain.”²⁵

Sixty-one-year-old Admiral Jean François Darlan was (along with Pierre Laval) the most formidable member of the Pétain government. His anticlericalism set him apart from most in Vichy, but he embraced Pétain’s appeal to hierarchy, order, and discipline. Short, thick, energetic, and cynical—he was reputed to have the worldly deviousness of a Renaissance cardinal—Darlan had been the principal architect of Vichy’s military cooperation with the Third Reich. Unlike Laval, Darlan was not so much pro-Nazi as he was pro-German and anti-British. As head of the French Navy since 1937, he believed that France might return to glory on Hitler’s coattails. Churchill called him “a bad man with a narrow outlook and an evil eye.”²⁶

At midnight on November 10, as the fighting at Oran and in Morocco continued, Hitler renounced the terms of the German armistice with Vichy and ordered troops into unoccupied France. Ten German and six Italian divisions spilled across the frontiers and by dawn had snuffed out what little autonomy Pétain enjoyed. That gave the French leadership in North Africa an excuse to renounce their oath of allegiance to the marshal. A day of tough bargaining ensued and by nightfall an armistice with the Allies had been declared. French forces in North Africa were ordered to stop fighting.

The battle for Algeria and Morocco was over. But the terms and conditions of what was to follow had yet to be ironed out. For the next two days, General Clark, Ambassador Murphy, Admiral Darlan, and General Juin hammered out what came to be known as the Clark-Darlan Agreement, specifying Allied rights in North Africa and confirming the continuation of French sovereignty.^e Under the terms of the agreement the Allies were granted control of all airports, harbor and port facilities, fortifications, arsenals, and military communication networks. The agreement also recognized extraterritorial status for Allied personnel and granted wide emergency powers in case of domestic disorder. In return the Allies guaranteed the preservation of the status quo ante bellum—in effect leaving the Vichy administration of North Africa intact. French military and naval forces remained under French command, independent of the supreme commander. Nowhere in the agreement was there any requirement to remove fascist elements from the governmental structure, to repeal Vichy’s anti-Semitic regulations and restrictions, or to liquidate the North African version of the SS. Darlan became high commissioner of North Africa, Giraud assumed direction of French armed forces, and Juin was given command of the Army.²⁸

Eisenhower was delighted. “I approve of everything you have done,” he cabled Clark on November 12.²⁹ The following day, Friday the thirteenth, Ike flew to Algiers to put his seal of approval on the document. He was greeted like a conquering hero. According to one observer, Eisenhower was “a living dynamo of energy, good humor, amazing memory for details, and amazing courage for the future.”³⁰ After a celebratory lunch at the Hotel St. Georges, he pinned a third star on Mark Clark’s shoulders and flew back triumphantly to Gibraltar.

For Eisenhower, the agreement with Darlan was essential to permit the Allies to shift their focus to Tunisia (where arguably it should have been from the beginning). For Clark, the admiral was a man you could do business with.³¹ For Murphy, Darlan was the man of the hour. His appointment as high commissioner would ensure that experienced representatives of the Vichy regime would continue to administer Algeria and Morocco—where the specter of Arab revolt was a continuing concern. In that context, Murphy saw Vichy’s anti-Semitic stance as a tactical advantage because it resonated with the indigenous Muslim population. Murphy also believed that the continuity Darlan represented would prevent the dispatch of Gaullist Free French figures from London—men such as Jean Monnet, Maurice Schumann, François Mitterrand, and Michel Debré—whom he considered dangerously radical. “We had no thought,” Murphy wrote later, “that a ‘Darlan deal’ would not be acceptable in Washington.”³²

The euphoria was short-lived. When news of the Clark-Darlan Agreement arrived in London, a firestorm erupted. The British war cabinet was appalled. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden said the deal smacked of Munich. Churchill’s friends in Parliament asked, “Is this then what we have been fighting for?”³³ Public opinion followed suit. Edward R. Murrow, in his daily broadcast to the United States from London, asked: “Are we fighting Nazis or sleeping with them? Why this play with traitors? Don’t we see that we could lose this war by winning it?”³⁴

The furor in Britain spilled over into the United States, and the administration was caught with its pants down. Roosevelt had initially approved the Clark-Darlan Agreement, but in the face of the public outcry he quickly backed away. On November 17, FDR issued a public statement rapping Ike’s knuckles. “I have accepted General Eisenhower’s political arrangements made for the time being in North Africa and West Africa. [But] no permanent arrangement should be made with Admiral Darlan. The present temporary arrangement in North and West Africa is only a temporary expedient, justified solely by the stress of battle. No one in our Army has any authority to discuss the future government of France or the French Empire.”³⁶

Eisenhower accepted responsibility for the Darlan decision, and he suffered the consequences. At any moment it was possible that Washington might cut him loose. “From what I hear of what has been appearing in the newspapers,” Ike wrote his son John, “you are learning that it is easy enough for a man to be a newspaper hero one day and a bum the next.”³⁸

Roosevelt’s emphasis on the temporary nature of the Darlan accord failed to quell the public outcry. On November 26, 1942, Churchill’s national unity government confronted a motion in the House of Commons placing the House on record that “our relations with Admiral Darlan and his kind are inconsistent with the ideals for which we are fighting this war.”⁴⁰ So great was the opposition in the House that Churchill felt compelled to convene a rare secret session. “I hold no brief for Admiral Darlan,” he told the members. “I must however say that personally I consider that in the circumstances prevailing, General Eisenhower was right; and even if he was not quite right I should have been very reluctant to hamper or impede his action when so many lives hung in the balance.”⁴¹ ^h

Meanwhile, on November 11, British general Sir Kenneth Anderson assumed command of the eastern task force and set out for Tunis, 540 road miles away. Eisenhower (as well as military planners in Washington and London) assumed it would be a cakewalk. The distance from Algiers to Tunis was roughly that between Washington and Cincinnati, the French were coming on board, and Allied intelligence had predicted that it would take at least two weeks for Axis soldiers to reach Tunisia in strength. Even when they did, the troops would be “low category and without motor transport.”⁴⁴

Once again, preinvasion estimates proved worthless. Within hours of learning of the Allied landings, Hitler had ordered frontline German troops into Tunisia. “To give up Africa means to give up the Mediterranean,” he declared. “It would mean not only the ruin of our revolutions, but also the ruin of our people’s future.”⁴⁵ On the morning of November 9, as the forces of Patton and Fredendall fought their way inland, the first Luftwaffe fighter planes touched down at airfields north of Tunis. Dive-bombers and military transports followed in their wake. By evening, almost one hundred planes were in place, the airfields ringed by paratroopers from the Hermann Göring Division. French response was ambivalent. Initially undecided, the French Navy and Air Force chose not to resist the German arrival. In Tunis, Army commander General Georges Barré, pursuant to orders from General Juin, evacuated the city and marched his division (almost ten thousand men) westward into the mountains to await the Allies. Not one French weapon was discharged to prevent the German landing. There were no casualties, no vehicles destroyed, and no planes shot down. The German takeover of the principal cities of Tunis and Bizerte was as bloodless as the 1940 capture of Copenhagen. In Tunis, the German high command established its headquarters in the abandoned American consulate.

Anderson’s advance guard reached the crest of the Dorsal range of the Atlas Mountains on November 17. Tunis lay less than thirty miles in the distance, its towers and rooftops visible to the naked eye. Remarkable as it appears in retrospect, it required another six months for the Allies to dislodge Kesselring’s forces—due largely to faulty preinvasion planning, poor performance, and inferior equipment, not to mention inexperienced leadership, including that of the supreme commander. “Had we struck out boldly and landed our forces far to the east, even in Tunisia,” Mark Clark wrote subsequently, “we would almost certainly have been successful.”⁴⁷

When Anderson moved out from Algiers to take Tunis, his army numbered fewer than twelve thousand men—barely one-tenth of the Allied invasion force. His armor consisted exclusively of light tanks: British Valentines and American M-3 General Stuarts. The Valentine was armed with a minuscule 40mm (two pounder) principal weapon. The General Stuart was even more lightly armed with a 37mm “squirrel gun,” a turret that had to be manually rotated, and an engine that was hand cranked.⁴⁸ Neither came close to matching the main German battle tank, the Mark IV. When Eisenhower sought to reinforce Anderson with the medium tanks that had landed with Patton in Morocco, the vehicles proved too wide to fit through the narrow tunnels on the only rail line available—a fact that easily could have been ascertained had Allied planners consulted the dozens of Free French officers in London who had spent the bulk of their careers in North Africa.

By the third week in November, Anderson had reached the end of his tether. His forces had managed to link up with General Barré’s French troops, who were holding firm on his southern flank, but his army was overextended. Troops faced constant bombardment from the air, resupply from Algiers was hampered by lack of transportation, and units were too thin on the ground. Rather than thrust directly toward Tunis, Anderson had divided his forces and advanced along a broad front. That was the preference of Eisenhower’s headquarters, and it was consistent with American battle doctrine since the time of Ulysses Grant. Lieutenant colonels at Leavenworth continue to debate whether a pointed drive would have served Anderson better than a broad-front advance. A more pertinent question is why land thirty-five thousand troops under George Patton in Morocco, one thousand miles from the objective?

Eisenhower did not move his headquarters to Algiers until November 23, 1942, and even then he showed no inclination to travel to the front.⁵² Not until November 28—five days after he arrived—did he and Clark go forward to meet General Anderson. They traveled by armored car with escorts fore and aft, did not cross into Tunisia, and were never remotely close to the fighting. Eisenhower’s preoccupation with political issues served the military cause poorly. Churchill cabled as early as November 22 that he hoped Ike was not “too much preoccupied with the political aspect.”⁵³ But Churchill’s warning had little effect. As Rick Atkinson observed in An Army at Dawn, Eisenhower had yet to learn the art of command. “But a quarter-century as a staff officer, with a staff officer’s meticulous attention to detail and instinctive concern for pleasing his superiors, did not slough away easily.”⁵⁴

By the first week of December the initiative in Tunisia had shifted to the Germans, who had increased their forces much more rapidly than the Allies. Anderson’s men were dug in along a line that roughly paralleled the Dorsal range, from Cape Serrat, on the Mediterranean, to El Guettar, three hundred miles to the south. Superior German firepower, plus almost total air supremacy, had compelled Anderson to assume a defensive posture. Battle losses had not been made good, fuel and ammunition were running low, and Anderson’s five-hundredmile supply line was stretched to the breaking point. The destruction of the port facilities at Bône had deprived the Allies of the only deepwater harbor available, which meant that everything shipped forward went over roads that had seen little improvement since the time of the Caesars. Even worse from an offensive standpoint, the weather had turned against the Allies. Tunisia receives sixteen inches of rain per year, almost all of which falls from December to February. The army was mired in a sea of mud that rendered any movement all but impossible.

In their postwar memoirs, Eisenhower and Clark imply that General Anderson was to blame for the failure to take Tunis because he did not strike out boldly. Yet the primary responsibility rested with Ike. Churchill complained that Eisenhower’s army was “all tail and no teeth”—a reflection of the fact that less than one-tenth of the forces available were engaged in Tunisia.⁵⁸ General Sir Bernard Montgomery, whose Eighth Army was slowly driving Rommel back across the Libyan desert toward Tripoli, looked on the failure to take Tunis with disgust. “The party in Tunisia is a complete dog’s breakfast,” he cabled London, concerned that Kesselring’s forces might defeat “the Western Army” and join forces with Rommel at the Libyan border.⁵⁹

George Patton, whom Ike sent to the front for a look-see, blamed Eisenhower for not taking personal command. “Ike is not well and is very querulous and keeps saying how hard it is to be so high and never to have heard a hostile shot. He could correct that very easily if he wanted to.”⁶⁰ At the front, Patton found that he was the only general officer the troops had seen since the battle began three weeks earlier. “I think this is true, and it is a sad commentary on our idea of leadership.” When he returned to Algiers, Patton found Ike and Clark discussing what to do next. “Neither had been to the front, so showed great lack of decision. They are on the way out, I think. They have no knowledge of men or war.”⁶¹

No one was more critical of Ike’s handling of the assault on Tunis than General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff. “Eisenhower seemed unable to grasp the urgency of pushing on to Tunis before the Germans built up their resistance there,” he wrote in his diary in late November 1942. Echoing Patton’s complaint, Brooke wrote: “It must be remembered that Eisenhower had never even commanded a battalion in action when he found himself commanding a group of armies in North Africa. No wonder he was at a loss as to what to do.… I had little confidence in his having the ability to handle the military situation confronting him, and he caused me great anxiety.”⁶² ⁱ

General Marshall offered last-ditch advice. “I think you should delegate your diplomatic problems to your subordinates and give your complete attention to the battle in Tunisia,” he instructed Ike on December 22. “I want you to feel you can do this and depend on us to protect your interests and that you do not have to give your time to making lengthy explanations to us to justify your position.” Marshall said he wanted Eisenhower “to feel free to give your exclusive attention to the battle, particularly as German intentions against your right flank seem evident.”⁶³

Stung by Marshall’s admonition, Ike immediately set out for the front, uncertain what to expect. Because the Luftwaffe controlled the skies, he and Butcher traveled in a five-car motorcade to Anderson’s headquarters, five hundred miles away. Driving through steady rain, they arrived a day and a half later—midafternoon on Christmas Eve. Anderson had assembled his corps and division commanders for Ike’s benefit, and their message was uniformly grim. The winter rains would continue until February. Until the ground dried, no offensive action could be considered. The troops were taking a pounding from German artillery, and the lack of air cover was becoming a serious morale factor, but the weather affected the Germans just as much. They, too, were unlikely to mount any large-scale attack.

The news was scarcely what Ike was hoping for. Nevertheless, his long-overdue visit to the front was salutary. Had he remained in Algiers, he might well have ordered Anderson forward—just as Grant had ordered George Thomas to advance against John Bell Hood from Nashville during an incredible ice storm in December 1864. Neither movement was possible. Grant had been unaware of the problem Thomas confronted, but Ike saw firsthand that a stalemate had settled in along the Tunisian front.

As Eisenhower sat down to enjoy a Christmas Eve dinner with Anderson and General Juin, he received an urgent phone call from Clark asking him to return to Algiers immediately. Clark spoke in guarded terms, but from the message Ike understood that Darlan had been assassinated.⁶⁶ At two-thirty that afternoon a twenty-year-old Frenchman, Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, had entered the summer palace in Algiers where Darlan had his office. He waited in an anteroom for Darlan to appear, and then shot him twice at close range. Darlan died an hour later on a hospital operating table. Bonnier was arrested, tried summarily, and executed by firing squad, all in less than thirty-six hours. To this day, his motivation remains a mystery, and the plot is unsolved. Immediate speculation was that Bonnier de la Chapelle was a monarchist who by assassinating Darlan hoped to aid the cause of the Comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne.

In Washington, White House officials, principally Admiral Leahy, disseminated a story alleging the assassin was a Gaullist.⁶⁷ What is known is that Bonnier was a member of the Corps Franc d’Afrique, a paramilitary formation being trained west of Algiers under the direction of Carleton S. Coon, sometime professor of anthropology at Harvard, and the resident OSS official in the area. Coon was near the palace when the assassination occurred, and the weapon Bonnier used was a Colt Woodsman pistol, identical to one owned by Coon.⁶⁸ Professor Coon and the Office of Strategic Services were never tied to the plot, and Coon was immediately transferred to a British Special Operations Executive (SOE) unit in Tunisia. Bonnier was executed before any investigation could be conducted. The fact that Admiral Leahy immediately dispatched a cable to Eisenhower authorizing him to appoint Giraud as Darlan’s successor,⁶⁹ and that Ike immediately understood from Clark’s cryptic phone message that Darlan had been assassinated, is enough to suggest that the United States may at the very least have had prior warning.^j

Eisenhower returned to Algiers in the late afternoon on Christmas Day. He was delighted to find that the WAC detachment, including Kay Summersby, had arrived safely, following a harrowing sea voyage from Scotland. Rather than chance a flight through Luftwaffe-infested airspace, Beetle had sent the WACs by troopship, only to have the vessel sunk by a German submarine off the Algerian coast. The women spent a nervous night bobbing in a lifeboat, and were rescued the next morning by a British destroyer that landed them in Oran. Ike’s plane fetched them to headquarters, and the evening of Christmas Day, Beetle hosted a grand dinner party for everyone at his villa. George Patton had shipped two live turkeys from Morocco, and the festive atmosphere revived Ike’s sagging spirits.^k During the duty day, Smith exhibited all of the warmth of an SS general, Summersby recalled, but off duty he was charming, witty, thoughtful, and a perfect host.⁷⁰

For Eisenhower, the stalemate at the front, the fallout from the Darlan assassination, and the growing criticism from London were more than enough for him to deal with. But Kay’s arrival softened the impact. “We’ve got a lot of bridge to play,” he told Summersby, and they soon settled into a nightly routine.⁷¹

“Sat around with Ike after the party broke up,” Everett Hughes recorded in his diary. “Discussed Kay. I don’t know whether Ike is alibiing or not. Says he likes her. Wants to hold her hand. Doesn’t sleep with her. He doth protest too much, especially in view of the gal’s reputation in London.”⁷²

If Eisenhower was infatuated with Summersby, he retained his love for Mamie. At the same time that Hughes was recording Ike’s confidences in his diary, the supreme commander was writing to his wife.

While Ike attempted to reconcile his love of his wife with his growing affection for Kay, Churchill fretted about the situation at the front. “I am most anxious about the military situation,” he cabled Roosevelt on December 31, 1942. “If [the Germans] can get enough transport—a big if—they might bring off the same kind of attack along the sea flank that Alexander and Montgomery did at Alamein with the disastrous results to all our forces that befell the Italians.”⁷⁵ To Eisenhower, Churchill was more direct. “I am deeply concerned about the unfavorable turn in Tunisia, and our staffs take an even more serious view.”⁷⁶

Eisenhower’s response was to order Fredendall’s center task force, now designated II Corps, into position on the right flank of Anderson’s First Army. If the bulk of Anderson’s forces were bogged down, Ike believed that Fredendall could punch through to the coast and drive a wedge between Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the German forces in the north. The plan was christened Operation SATIN, and Ike’s staff put it together during the first two weeks in January. Fredendall’s attack was scheduled for January 24—a date when “General Mud” still commanded the battlefield in the north.

On January 14, 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca for their first overseas conference since their shipboard meeting off Newfoundland in the summer of 1941. Marshal Stalin had been invited, but with the Red Army fully engaged all along the eastern front, he decided that he should remain in Moscow. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss military strategy, and the two leaders were accompanied by their military staffs. As Allied supreme commander in North Africa, Eisenhower was not a member of the conference, although he was invited to brief the Combined Chiefs at 2 p.m. on January 15. This was the third session of the chiefs at Casablanca, and they wanted to hear Ike’s assessment of the Tunisian campaign and his plan for Operation SATIN.⁷⁷

General Brooke was skeptical. The German Fifth Panzer Army in the north, now commanded by Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen von Arnim, a battle-scarred veteran of the Russian front whom Hitler had handpicked to defend Tunis, had 85,000 troops available; Rommel’s Afrika Korps was estimated to number 80,000. Rather than drive a wedge between the two armies, wasn’t it more likely that II Corps would be ground up between them? Anderson could not prevent von Arnim from moving troops south, and Montgomery was in no position to prevent Rommel from striking north. The 30,000 men of Fredendall’s corps would be defeated by superior forces attacking from both sides before any assistance could arrive.⁷⁹

Eisenhower was stunned. Sir Alan Brooke had been cited for gallantry six times in World War I, and had managed the British evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940. His battlefield credentials were unassailable. Ike’s plan was something that he and Leonard Gerow might have cooked up as students at Leavenworth, or that Gruenther might have devised for the Louisiana maneuvers. It looked good on paper but failed the test of combat worthiness.

Eisenhower attempted a rebuttal, but his balloon had been punctured. General Marshall sat as silent witness to the demolition of Operation SATIN, as did Hap Arnold and Admiral King. They recognized that Brooke was correct. The entire episode lasted less than twenty minutes. As Atkinson put it, “Eisenhower saluted and left the room with the grim look of a man in full retreat.”⁸⁰ Brooke said later that Ike’s plan “was a real bad one”—and the subsequent performance of II Corps under Fredendall at Kasserine Pass suggests he knew what he was talking about.⁸¹

Later that afternoon, at the president’s request, Eisenhower called on FDR at his villa. “Ike seems jittery,” Roosevelt told Hopkins, and it was easy to understand why.⁸² “His neck is in a noose, and he knows it,” said Butcher.⁸³ Roosevelt quizzed Eisenhower about the Tunisian campaign. “How long is it going to take to finish the job?”

“With any kind of break in the weather, sir, we’ll have them all either in the bag or in the sea by late spring.”

Roosevelt accepted Ike’s assessment, but the delay in Tunisia made any cross-Channel attack in 1943 virtually impossible. FDR showed his displeasure later in the conference when Marshall recommended that Eisenhower be promoted to the rank of a full four-star general. Ike’s principal subordinates, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, held that rank, and Marshall claimed it would simplify the command structure if Eisenhower were promoted as well. Roosevelt refused. “The President told General Marshall that he would not promote Eisenhower until there was some damn good reason to do it,” Harry Hopkins recorded. “The President said he was going to make it a rule that promotions should go to people who had done some fighting, and that while Eisenhower had done a good job, he hasn’t knocked the Germans out of Tunisia.”⁸⁵

For his own part, Marshall was disappointed with Ike’s limp showing before the Combined Chiefs.⁸⁶ Taking Eisenhower aside, he suggested that it might be prudent to appoint George Patton as deputy commander to oversee the fighting while Ike handled the politics. Later that evening, Eisenhower put the possibility to Patton.

“He and I talked until about 0130,” Patton recalled. “He thinks his thread is about to be cut. I told him he had to go ‘to the front.’ He feels he cannot, due to politics.” When Ike suggested that Patton become his deputy, George was skeptical. “I doubt if it comes out and am not sure I want the job.⁸⁷ ^l

Eisenhower’s position as supreme commander was never in jeopardy. His executive ability was unquestioned and his dexterity in keeping all of the balls of an international coalition in the air was truly remarkable. General Sir Alan Brooke, while disparaging of Ike’s strategic understanding, thought that he “possessed an exceptional ability to handle Allied forces, to treat them all with strict impartiality, and to get the best out of an inter-Allied force.”⁸⁸ Tedder and Cunningham agreed, and Cunningham’s opinion always carried great weight with Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill, for his part, repeatedly proclaimed his admiration and affection for Eisenhower, and Roosevelt—buttressed by Marshall’s persistent faith in Ike—was unwilling to consider any change.⁸⁹

What was at stake was the control of the ground war in Tunisia, and even Marshall had to concede that Ike was in over his head. When the Combined Chiefs met on January 20, 1943, Brooke proposed that when Montgomery’s Eighth Army reached Tunisia, it be placed under Ike’s command, and that “General [Sir Harold] Alexander should come in as Deputy Commander-in-Chief under General Eisenhower with the primary task of commanding the group of armies on the Tunisian front.”⁹⁰ Alexander, the third son of the Earl of Caledon, had been the youngest general in the British Army, and had an impeccable combat record stretching more than thirty years. Commanding the 1st Division of the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk in 1940, he was literally the last Englishman to leave France. Utterly unflappable, he was Montgomery’s superior as head of the British Near East Command.^m Brooke’s proposal meant that Ike would be retained as supreme commander but that he would have three deputies who would exercise the actual command of the fighting forces: Admiral Cunningham at sea, Air Chief Marshal Tedder in the air, and General Alexander on the ground. Brooke also suggested that Eisenhower assume responsibility for whatever subsequent operation (Sicily or elsewhere) was to be undertaken, again with Alexander as his deputy. Consensus came quickly. Marshall was pleased with the arrangement because it left Eisenhower in supreme command, and the British were delighted to have Alexander control the ground war. Eisenhower was not consulted. When Ike told Marshall that he intended to name Patton as his deputy, Marshall told him to hold off. “Alexander will be your man when British Eighth Army joins you after Tripoli.”⁹¹

Eisenhower announced the new command setup at a press conference in Algiers on February 10, and praised his British deputies as “three of England’s stars.” But in truth, Butcher reported, Ike was burning inside. His years of high-level staff duty had given him impeccable instincts about power relationships, and it was obvious that he had been kicked upstairs.⁹³ Whatever hurt Eisenhower felt, however, was quickly assuaged when on February 11 he received notice that FDR had approved his promotion to full general. If Ike was to be supreme commander with three British deputies, Roosevelt recognized that he needed the rank to go with it.

With that promotion, Eisenhower became the twelfth four-star general in American history, Ulysses S. Grant having been the first. That evening, Ike broke out the champagne and hosted an impromptu celebration for his unofficial family. “I’ll never forget the sheer pleasure that radiated from him,” Summersby remembered. “The General was always very charming, always had that grin at the ready, but underneath it all he was a very serious and lonely man who worried, worried, worried. I used to feel it was a real achievement whenever we were able to divert him so that he forgot his problems for a little while and was able to have fun.”⁹⁴

Elspeth Duncan, an attractive Scottish colleague of Kay’s on Eisenhower’s clerical staff, complained to Everett Hughes that she resented being used as cover for Ike and Kay. (Duncan was often included in their outings.) “She foresees a scandal. Wants to quit. I tell her to stick around. Maybe Kay will help Ike win the war.”⁹⁶

Eisenhower’s weekly letters to Mamie continued to profess his love. “I just want to say that you’re the greatest gal in the world,” he wrote on February 20, 1943. “I’ll never be in love with anyone but you! So, please be sure of that—and I hope it really means as much to you as ever.”⁹⁷

On February 22, Eisenhower’s professions of love were sorely tested. Margaret Bourke-White, the noted photojournalist, published an article in Life magazine detailing the travails of the WAC detachment when their troopship had been torpedoed. Bourke-White had been on board. Entitled “Women in Lifeboats,” the article featured Elspeth Duncan, “the best rower of all,” and “the irrepressible Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s pretty Irish driver.” Bourke-White reported there had been seventeen lifeboats, each carrying between fifty-five and one hundred passengers. She was in the boat with Kay, Elspeth, and Ethel Westermann, who was on her way to be chief nurse at the headquarters dispensary. There were pictures galore, including two of “the beauteous Kay.”⁹⁸

Mamie saw the article, as did most Army wives in Washington—and those who did not soon learned of it. “Army cats of the worst sort surrounded her,” wrote Kevin McCann, a postwar aide to Ike, “relaying to her—in the most affectionately sympathetic manner—and enlarging viciously on it, the latest bit of scandalous gossip leaked through censorship.”⁹⁹ Mamie was hurt and embarrassed by the article. Her letter to Eisenhower has apparently been destroyed, but from Ike’s reply it is clear that she put him on the spot.

“So Life says my old London driver came down,” Eisenhower answered on March 2, 1943.

The day after receiving notice of his promotion, Eisenhower slipped out of Algiers for a quick tour of the southern end of the front held by II Corps. Fredendall’s troops were spread thin, but Ike was confident no enemy attack was in the offing. “Axis cannot risk at this moment to embark on an operation which might mean heavy losses of men and equipment,” he informed the War Department on February 13.¹⁰¹ Eisenhower was distressed that the frontline units had made little effort to fortify their positions, but he thought the disposition of the forces was “as good as could be made pending the development of an actual attack and in view of the great value of holding the forward regions.”¹⁰²

Scarcely had Eisenhower returned to II Corps headquarters when disaster struck. At 0630 on Sunday, February 14, tanks of the 10th and 21st Panzer divisions crashed out of the Eastern Dorsals and began to roll up the front line of II Corps, which Fredendall had deployed in penny packets on the valley floor. The 21st Panzer came on from the south, the 10th Panzer from the north, and by 1700 the two had completed a double envelopment, sending the remnants of the American 1st Armored Division in headlong retreat. Of the fifty-two Sherman medium tanks the 1st Armored had deployed, only six survived.

At II Corps headquarters Eisenhower, who had received preliminary reports of the rout, whistled in the dark. “I really believe that the fighting of today will show that our troops are giving a very fine account of themselves even though we must give up part of our extended line,” he informed General Marshall.¹⁰³ The fact is the green American troops were no match for the German veterans. The 10th Panzer Division had led von Rundstedt’s breakout in the Ardennes in 1940, and the 21st—the first German division in Africa—was in the words of one military historian “perhaps the most experienced desert fighters on earth.”¹⁰⁴ Some American troops fought well, but they were the exception. Battalion after battalion was surrounded, overrun, or simply disintegrated.

^a Eisenhower received an unsigned cable shortly afterward from London reporting “Telek is fine.” On November 11, he wired Beetle, “You would scarcely believe me if I should tell you how much the good news about Telek meant to me. The little black imp has a real personality that appeals to me tremendously. While I think this is the one thing in which I did not accept your advice (I mean the choice of the two dogs), I am delighted I took him on ‘love at first sight.’ ”

Telek accompanied Ike throughout the war. When Eisenhower returned to Washington to become chief of staff in November 1945, Telek remained with Kay and died in New York in 1959 at the age of seventeen. The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 2, The War Years 693–95, cited subsequently as 2 War Years; Kay Summersby Morgan, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower 281 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976).

^b Eisenhower’s assessment of Giraud’s motives proved correct. After a night’s sleep, Giraud capitulated. “Have just concluded gentleman’s agreement with KINGPIN [Giraud’s code name] that is entirely acceptable,” Ike cabled Marshall on November 8, 1942. “The basis of the agreement is exactly what I offered KINGPIN throughout the long conference of yesterday.” Eisenhower to Marshall, November 8, 1942, in 2 War Years 675–76.

^c On October 27, 1942, Brigadier General Everett Hughes, working as deputy chief of staff at Eisenhower’s London headquarters, wrote in his diary, “I suspect from the females that Ike is taking that Butch [Commander Harry C. Butcher] has his eye on a bit of **** for the C[ommanding] G[eneral].”

General Hughes was an old friend of the Eisenhowers from their days at the Wyoming in Washington and the Army general staff. A charter member of Club Eisenhower, he was called “Uncle Everett” by young John. Hughes remained with Eisenhower throughout the war, and was widely regarded as Ike’s “eyes and ears.” Simply put, Everett Hughes was one of Eisenhower’s closest friends. His assessment was that of someone who had known Ike and Mamie for over twenty years. Everett Hughes diary (handwritten), Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Also see John S. D. Eisenhower, Strictly Personal 7 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974).

^d General Juin, who lost the use of his right arm in World War I, had been a classmate of Charles de Gaulle’s at Saint-Cyr, the French military academy. In 1940, he commanded the 15th Motorized Infantry Division, whose heroic defense of Lille provided time for the British evacuation at Dunkirk. Despite the senior position he held under Vichy, his sympathy for the Allies was well known. Later, as head of the French Expeditionary Corps fighting as part of Fifth Army in Italy, he asked to be reduced in rank from full general to lieutenant general so as not to outrank Mark Clark. After the war Juin became French chief of staff, represented France at the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations, commanded allied ground forces under NATO, and was made a marshal of France in 1952—the last person invested with that office. He is entombed in Les Invalides. Anthony Clayton, Three Marshals of France: Leadership After Trauma 10–38, 65–92, 165–97 (London: Brassey’s, 1992).

^e The Clark-Darlan Agreement, some twenty-one articles, is reprinted in United States Department of State, 2 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1942: Europe 453–57 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962).

^f As the symbol of the Free French movement, de Gaulle chose the tricolor flag of the republic with the cross of Lorraine superimposed, reflecting for the first time in French history the union of Christianity and the republic.

^g Alerted by Beetle Smith in London and by Marshall that a storm was brewing over the Darlan deal, Eisenhower dispatched a lengthy justification to the Combined Chiefs of Staff that acknowledged that the situation in North Africa “does not repeat not agree even remotely with some of prior calculations.” He pointed out that the end of French resistance had come about from Darlan’s orders, not because the Allies had prevailed in battle, and that if they did not cooperate with Darlan additional trouble might ensue. “I realize there may be a feeling at home that we have been sold a bill of goods, but I assure you that these arrangements have been arrived at only after incessant examination of the important factors and with the determination of getting on with the military objectives in winning the war.” Eisenhower made no mention of the political aspects of the agreement. DDE to CCS, November 14, 1942, 2 War Years 707–11.

^h Stalin also came to Ike’s support. On December 13, 1942, he wrote FDR that, “in my opinion, as well as that of my colleagues, Eisenhower’s policy with regard to Darlan is perfectly correct. I think it is a great achievement that you have succeeded in bringing Darlan and others into the orbit of the Allies fighting Hitler.” USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2 Correspondence Between the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR and the Presidents of the United States and the Prime Ministers of Great Britain During the Great Patriotic War 44 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958).

ⁱ Later, Brooke wrote that Eisenhower “was blessed with a wonderful charm that carried him far; perhaps his greatest asset was a greater share of luck than most of us receive in life. However, if Ike had rather more than his share of luck we, as allies, were certainly extremely fortunate to have such an exceptionally charming individual. As Supreme Commander what he may have lacked in military ability he greatly made up for by the charm of his personality.” Arthur Bryant, The Turn of the Tide: A History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field-Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff 430–31n (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957). (Emphasis added.)

^j Charles de Gaulle puts the proposition with droll understatement in the second volume of his Memoirs.

The man who killed [Darlan], Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, had made himself the instrument of the aggravated passions that had fired the souls around him to the boiling point but behind which, perhaps, moved a policy determined to liquidate a “temporary expedient” after having made use of him.… He believed, moreover, as he repeatedly said until the moment of his execution, that an intervention would be made in his behalf by some outside source so high and powerful that the North African authorities could not refuse to obey it. Of course no individual has the right to kill save on the field of battle. Moreover, Darlan’s behavior, as a governor and as a leader, was answerable to national justice, not certainly, to that of a group or an individual. Yet how could we fail to recognize the nature of the intentions that inspired this juvenile fury? That is why the strange, brutal and summary way the investigation was conducted in Algiers, the hasty and abbreviated trial before a military tribunal convened at night and in private session, the immediate and secret execution of Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle, the orders given to the censors that not even his name should be known—all these led to the suspicion that someone wanted to conceal at any price the origin of his decision and constituted a kind of defiance of those circumstances which, without justifying the drama, explained and, to a certain degree, excused it.

Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs 74–75 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959).

^k Patton’s virtues as a hell-for-leather combat commander have obscured the savoir faire he brought to the table. A well-traveled member of the horsey set, Patton admired French civilization, spoke the language easily, and was as much at home with first-growth Bordeaux as with bourbon and branch water. He related easily to the sultan of Morocco, and unlike Clark and Ike (who were culturally limited), quickly established a harmonious working relationship with French civil and military officials in Morocco.

^l Patton’s doubts about accepting the post may have been well founded. In May 1862, before the Battle of Corinth, General Henry W. Halleck took Grant away from troops and made him deputy commander of the Union Army in the West. Like Patton, Grant was a troop commander par excellence, not a paper pusher, and he became despondent in his new role. Sherman found Grant packing to leave the Army and return to St. Louis, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he convinced Grant to remain. Jean Edward Smith, Grant 208–10 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).

^m Rudyard Kipling, the historian of the Irish Guards Regiment in World War I, said of Alexander, “At the worst crises he was both inventive and cordial and … would somehow contrive to dress the affair in high comedy.” Richard Doherty, Irish Generals: Irish Generals in the British Army in the Second World War 32 (Belfast: Appletree, 1993).

ⁿ “My main anxiety is the poor fighting value of the Americans,” Alexander cabled London on February 25. “They simply do not know their job as soldiers and this is the case from the highest to the lowest.… Perhaps the weakest link of all is the junior leader, who just does not lead, with the result that their men don’t really fight.” Quoted in Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942–1943 377 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002).

As a young lieutenant serving with the 6th Infantry Regiment in Berlin in the 1950s, I once accompanied our commander on a visit to the Black Watch. We arrived in the early afternoon, and no officers were present. My colonel asked the Scottish sergeant major where the officers were. “They are not here, sir,” he replied. It was during the duty day, and my colonel was surprised.

“Not here?” he asked. “It’s only two o’clock. What do the officers do?”

“They show us how to die, sir,” said the sergeant major, standing rigidly at attention. That effectively ended the conversation.

TEN

Baptism by Fire