The chief of staff at work. A typical shot of Smith—at his desk, pen in hand, glasses and spent cigarettes at his side. The bulldog face and razor-sharp creases in his shirt speak to his personality.
At nine o’clock on the morning on 6 September, Nory and Dykes saw “dear old Beetle” off on his flight. Dykes took Nory back to Fort Myer and stayed for a cup of coffee. “She feels his leaving very much,” Dykes wrote.1 Smith doubtlessly felt it too, but a great deal else occupied his mind. With no time for decompressing after the intense pressure of the last few weeks, Smith probably felt like he had jumped from the frying pan into the fire. “This is the first assignment during my service that has frightened me a little,” he confided in his old mentor Moseley, “and I hope that General Eisenhower will not be disappointed in his choice.”2 During the long passage he slept only fitfully. In addition to being worked up worrying about what awaited him in London, his stomach issues returned with a vengeance.
It is not known what instructions, if any, Marshall gave Smith before he left Washington. Nobody predicted Eisenhower would command the first combined Allied offensive. He went to London to shake up the headquarters and push Bolero; in the event the coalition staged Sledgehammer, Eisenhower might act as Marshall’s deputy. Initially Marshall agreed to Smith’s appointment to ETO because he saw it as an investment; Smith probably would have served as his chief of staff. All this changed with the Torch decision. Marshall clung to the hope that “the vicissitudes of war” might revive the cross-Channel operation and prompt his going to London as supreme commander.3 Although no one admitted it, the scale of the Dieppe disaster proved beyond any doubt the unpreparedness of Allied forces for undertaking any large-scale cross-Channel operation in 1942. Finally on 22 August, Marshall admitted the inadvisability of Sledgehammer. Still Roosevelt balked at announcing Eisenhower’s appointment, and he never did until the landings. With Marshall out of the picture, the big command fell to Eisenhower. Now Marshall’s priorities shifted toward buttressing Eisenhower. The “trans-Atlantic essay contest” fixed two concerns in Marshall’s mind: Eisenhower’s hesitancy and his susceptibility to British pressure. Nor had Eisenhower sorted out the command and staff mess—the original reason for his dispatch to London. Evidence accumulated at the end of August that the inadequacies of the American staffs in England might force a postponement of the North African operation. Even if Marshall never specified Beetle’s assignment, Smith knew he faced a daunting set of tasks: buck up Eisenhower, resist British influence, and whip the American headquarters structure into shape.
One thing Smith need not have fretted about was the reception he would receive from Eisenhower. For two months Eisenhower had grasped the nettle, worried that Marshall might never sacrifice Smith. Indeed, Eisenhower had been “buggered about,” and Marshall had done much of the buggering. Marshall’s insistence on no slacking in preparations for Roundup “so long as there remains any reasonable possibility of its successful execution before July 1943” meant that, until 22 August, Eisenhower oversaw three separate headquarters—ETO, the combined Torch staff, and a planning staff for Roundup. As he complained to Patton, “I feel like the lady in the circus that has to ride three horses with no very good idea of exactly where any one of the three is going to go.”4 Pulled in different directions, he experienced maddening bouts of indecision. As his letters indicated, Eisenhower increasingly fell prey to a growing sense of insecurity in his relations with Marshall. In part, this stemmed from the fact that Marshall always treated Eisenhower as his executive officer. Eisenhower immersed himself in the details of his command and chafed under the burden of his heavy responsibilities and crushing schedule. Marshall and the JCS’s insistence on Casablanca and French Morocco sacrificed the strategic advantages of landings deep in the Mediterranean, threatening yet another impasse with the British and exposing Eisenhower to the countervailing pressures exerted by Churchill. In truth, Eisenhower never entirely bought Torch. In common with other senior American officers, he saw Torch as a “political” operation. From Washington came demoralizing predictions of failure. Handy told him on 23 August that from a strictly military viewpoint, Torch involved an “unjustifiable hazard and should be abandoned entirely or revised and directed toward a less ambitious objective.”5 At the same time, word broke hard about the worsening supply crisis. Uncertain of his position, his relations with his superiors, and Torch itself, Eisenhower’s trademark optimism eroded; he experienced problems curbing his furious temper. Irritable and depressed, he grew more irascible and remote.
Eisenhower despaired at Marshall’s delay in sending Smith. In the middle of May the British voiced serious disquiet over Eisenhower’s haphazard approach to organizing the combined headquarters. The BCOS complained of the “lack of a strong guiding hand,” someone to “sort out the tangle and … set people on the right road.” They could not do it; “it must be done by Eisenhower.”6 But Eisenhower demonstrated no willingness to crack heads. Both Eisenhower and Clark saw the combined staff primarily as a planning agency. Eisenhower expected that Smith would flesh out and organize the full staff, and at the end of July he requested Marshall to direct Smith to select the officers he wanted as heads of the general and special staffs. Nothing came of that while Smith remained in Washington.7 On 11 August a disheartened Eisenhower fled the office for a drive in the country. “Ike ruminated over the likelihood that Marshall will not permit Beadle [sic] to leave Washington,” Eisenhower’s Boswell, Harry Butcher, recorded, “thus depriving us of a crackerjack chief of staff.”8 Not only did Marshall retain Smith, but he also delayed dispatching American planners from the joint and combined planning committees. On 24 August Dill returned to London for talks with the BCOS. Eisenhower drove out to the airport with one purpose in mind: to plead for Dill’s intercession with Marshall on releasing Smith. Dill remained evasive, telling Eisenhower it would constitute “a great sacrifice for [Smith] to be taken away” from the CCS.9 “We’re in a bit of a tailspin,” Ike told Mamie on 26 August, “and we’re not going to get out of it completely until Bedell gets here.”10
The next day Eisenhower hit bottom. “Ike ate alone at the flat,” Butcher noted, “perturbed about the uncertainties and changes already made or completed in his first and his country’s biggest prospective action in this war.” Whenever Eisenhower experienced one of his “oh, what the hell” days, he withdrew into himself and spent time writing to family members, friends back in Kansas, and old acquaintances in the army. “One of the worst things about high military rank is the loneliness that it imposes on the individual,” he wrote to Charlie Harger in Abilene. “Right this minute nothing could give me more pleasure than to drop into Joner Callahan’s for a morning Coke with the gang.” To Moseley he lamented about his helplessness in unraveling the organizational Gordian knot created by placement of the SOS within his theater and combined headquarters, the “same problems that plagued you a quarter of a century ago,” he noted. “It is not the problem itself that always presents the greatest difficulties,” he continued, “it is the trouble one has in finding people of sufficient caliber to tackle the job intelligently. I get exceedingly weary of the little people that spend their time worrying about promotion, personal prestige, prerogatives and so on, rather than forgetting everything in the desire to get on with the work.” He longed for “the man that can really do a job without eternal supervision.” To BG Vernon Prichard, his classmate and a star quarterback, Eisenhower expressed his constant astonishment at “the utter lack of imaginative thinking among so many of our people that have reputations for being really good officers.” He pointed to the practice of appointing officers “based upon a number of unimportant factors—among which, personal propinquity, wild guesses, school records, past acquaintanceship, and a number of others, of which few really search down into the depths of character.” Eisenhower’s command style depended on delegated authority; despite glittering reputations, officers such as Clark and Lee failed to produce the results Eisenhower demanded. He saw in Smith the man who could do the job without interminable direction, and he agonized over Marshall’s delays.11
As Eisenhower told Marshall on 5 September, “the past six weeks have been the most trying of my life.”12 In the first week of September, the veil of gloom suddenly lifted. For the first time in weeks, Eisenhower could look beyond the strain, uncertainty, and tension that gripped him; a definite decision emerged on Torch, and word finally came that Smith was on his way. At long last he could set his sights on Torch, although the long period of “fence-sitting” made time desperately short.13 Despite the many tasks demanding his attention, Eisenhower drove out to Hendon airfield and collected Smith and, together with Butcher, ferried him to Telegraph Cottage, Eisenhower’s secluded country estate in Surrey, twenty-five miles outside London near Kingston-on-Thames.
“His square jaw and deeply dimpled chin indicate his character,” Butcher remarked of Smith; he was “tough in action with the staff but delightfully informal off duty.” Butcher never altered his assessment of the “official” Smith, but over time he found Beetle less and less a delight. After dinner, Ike and Beetle sat before a fire and talked. Eisenhower enjoyed getting out of London and into the countryside; Telegraph Cottage served as a retreat in more than one sense. Eisenhower liked kicking back, downing a couple of drinks, and chatting casually. And he and Beetle had a great deal to discuss.14
Smith shared with Eisenhower all the inside poop on what had transpired in the War Department, CCS meetings, and the White House over the last six weeks. Now that a decision had finally emerged, both expressed their relief and determination to get down to the nitty-gritty of planning the North African operation and pondered what turn grand strategy might take after Torch. Smith said the coalition leadership must surmount their fumbling over strategy if they sought any real advantage from operations in North Africa. The new CCS directive called for the complete annihilation of Axis forces in North Africa; both agreed that Torch ruled out any 1943 cross-Channel invasion.
The conversation turned to the political aspects of Torch. The two decried that military decisions must conform to the currents of public opinion. Smith conveyed the president’s assurances that Vichy officials in Morocco and Algeria would actively support the American invasion. “The President will handle the political angles of TORCH with the French,” Butcher recorded Smith as saying, “and he’s a master.” Smith had recently talked to Robert Murphy, the president’s special representative in French Northwest Africa and a man Smith held in high regard, who guaranteed that key civil and military officials in Casablanca and Algeria would come over to the Allies. Smith declared confidently that Torch “will be a pushover.”15
Eisenhower expressed his irritation with the “one man navy” and King’s continual delays in committing to Torch.16 Smith defended the admiral. King juggled a number of demands—escorts for convoys to Murmansk and for vital bauxite shipments from Brazil, setbacks in night surface actions against the Japanese in the Solomons, and anxieties over naval construction. Eisenhower vaguely spoke of the supply crisis. From Eisenhower’s opaque communications from London, Smith had already guessed the depth of the supply problem and sensed it was much worse than Eisenhower indicated. Somervell dispatched his two top assistants to England and charged them with getting to the bottom of the logistics troubles. As Smith soon discovered, supply dictated everything. Eisenhower assured him—taking his lead from Churchill—“come hell or high water” he would attack with whatever he could scrape together and not “whine to the War Department.”
Their discussion turned to less pressing matters. They talked about Marshall and the great debt both men owed him. Smith pointed to Marshall’s quirks, such as his poor memory, especially for names. Chiefly they marveled at his ability to maintain his equipoise in the storm. Smith mentioned that he expected to receive his second star soon, not knowing that Eisenhower had been pushing for his promotion for weeks.17
The fire and the alcohol made Smith dozy, so they took a stroll. They headed toward an adjacent golf course, a feature of any Eisenhower residence. As they walked, Eisenhower got down to brass tacks, explaining what he expected from Smith. Initially Eisenhower planned to place Smith in charge of the ETO staff, but with Torch now set, his thinking changed. Over the preceding month, the center of gravity had shifted from ETO to the combined staff. The scarcity of high-level American staff officers obliged Eisenhower and Clark to move their best officer talent from the ETO to the Torch staff; in many cases, officers held dual appointments on both staffs. Eisenhower wanted Smith to wear two hats—to double in brass, in army jargon—as chief of staff at both headquarters. Eisenhower made a number of points crystal clear. He insisted on a chief of staff “who could direct the organization as a real executive,” relieving Eisenhower of the headaches of organizing and staffing the headquarters and the mountain of detailed work that went with it. Interestingly, Eisenhower insisted on controlling his headquarters but fled bureaucratic responsibilities. Eisenhower saw no need to issue any directive specifying Smith’s authority. Since no “book” existed prescribing the authorities of a chief of staff in a combined headquarters, Eisenhower would grant Smith whatever powers he required. Command relationships and interservice and genuine Allied cooperation had not yet crystallized; Eisenhower would hammer out a solution to the first challenge and expected Smith to handle the second.18 As commander in chief he insisted on exercising his right to fashion his headquarters as he pleased, and Smith must guard against higher authorities dictating the details of organizational structures. And as theater and supreme commander, Eisenhower would exercise control through the combined headquarters.19 He asked for Smith’s opinion. Even though he had no real knowledge of the internal problems or requirements confronting either headquarters, Smith never voiced any concerns about the dual chief of staff solution and thought it best to shake the slackness out of ETO first; once he got it running smoothly, then he would shift over and assume direction of the Torch staff. Eisenhower agreed.20 Eisenhower’s views—on the relationship between a commander and his chief of staff and on staff organization—remained hard and fast for the duration of the war.
Smith retired early but could not sleep. At 4 A.M. he heard the crowing of a cock pheasant, piquing the interest of the hunter in him. Roaming the pines and rhododendrons that highlighted the ten-acre tract, Smith checked out the hunting prospects. Butcher got up around seven and, while brewing coffee, spied their houseguest emerging from the tree line. After breakfast, Smith accompanied Eisenhower to ETO headquarters.
The chief of staff at work. A typical shot of Smith—at his desk, pen in hand, glasses and spent cigarettes at his side. The bulldog face and razor-sharp creases in his shirt speak to his personality.
The buzz in headquarters centered entirely on the looming supply fubar.21 With the target date for loading ships for Torch only three weeks away, SOS possessed no firm handle on what supplies and equipment were in hand. The day Smith arrived, Eisenhower forwarded a communication to the War Department, less a whine than a plea: “US stocks on hand in the UK are not balanced,” he began. “Time for unloading, sorting, cataloging, and for subsequent boxing, crating, marking and loading simply does not exist. In certain cases therefore, some of our requests will involve items that the SOS in Washington will correctly state have already been shipped here in ample quantity.” Somervell handsomely responded, “Give no thought to our questioning duplications. Whatever you ask for will be produced if it is within our power to produce it.”22 He made that assurance before seeing the request. On 8 September COL Everett Hughes, the SOS chief of staff, submitted the long-awaited inventory of missing requirements. The catalog left staffs on both sides of the Atlantic astonished. The request took fourteen foolscap pages and 3,000 words enumerating the 244,000 ship tons of missing stocks.23
The mounting of Torch exposed the U.S. Army’s unpreparedness in meeting the organizational demands of modern war. Bolero suffered from confusion and false starts; matters only got worse after the Torch decision. The scarcity of trained SOS officers, cadre, and men in the port reception centers and depots produced the biggest headache. To greatly complicate matters, ETO and SOS lost their best senior people to the Torch staff.24 Earlier, Somervell’s office had directed that the priority was sending service troops to the United Kingdom and putting in place the necessary infrastructure and basic facilities for receiving, inventorying, and storing the vast quantity of materiel that would eventually flood the theater. Marshall and OPD saw things differently. Since ground combat and air force training required twice as long as that for service troops, the War Department decided to expand AGF and AAF at the expense of ASF. Based on the April 1942 troop basis, ASF’s proportion of the manpower allocation stood at a paltry 11.8 percent. With service and support units already in critically short supply in the corps areas, few remained available for overseas deployment. Even though the revised troop basis increased the SOS manpower ratio to 26 percent, the service units assigned to the United Kingdom remained undertrained, and as late as the end of September, the SOS component in ETO represented only 21 percent. Officers and men learned their jobs through trial and error, and there were plenty of both.
ETO/SOS and ASF did not talk the same language. None of the troop bases or shipping schedules tallied; ASF confessed complete mystification over ETO requirements and requisitions. No agency synchronized the movement of manpower and logistics support. As substance for his advocacy of Sledgehammer, Marshall rushed inadequately trained and equipped ground and air units to the United Kingdom. Troop ships, grouped into fast convoys, arrived far in advance of slow-moving cargo vessels. The hasty movement of ground and air forces precluded the preshipment of weapons. In the first half of 1942, the available lift capacity of the Allied pool of shipping exceeded Bolero requirements. Somervell took advantage of this situation by loading ships “full and down,” cramming holds with all available supplies while paying scant attention to balancing requirements. From July, the situation reversed. With time now at a premium, demands for Torch equipment and supplies exceeded lift by 600 percent. ASF accelerated the flow of materiel from the New York port of embarkation by continuing the “full and down” practice on the “first available ships.” The army categorized materiel and supplies into classes. ASF set the shipping schedule for Class II (clothing, weapons, and vehicles), Class IV (heavy engineering materials), and Class V (ammunition) supplies based on automatic supply tables, not requisitions from Lee’s command. The Transportation Corps—formed only on 1 July, and operating without standard procedures or even manuals—controlled the movement of all materiel and supplies throughout the entire supply chain from New York through the British ports to their assigned SOS depots. Transportation Corps officers drove up tonnages leaving New York, paying little heed to the specifics of what they shipped. New York struggled to meet the monthly targets by class but made only casual efforts, in the case of Class II supplies, to distinguish between types of weapons or vehicles. Shiploads were cut arbitrarily, inventories mixed, and records lost. Ship manifests arrived late if at all, and with rare exception, they bore no resemblance to the cargoes arriving in the United Kingdom. Ships entered British waters in convoys but landed at separate ports. The inadequately trained and undermanned SOS units nearly drowned in the deluge of materiel pouring into the United Kingdom. Owing to critical shipping shortages, ships never lingered in British ports. Unloaded in haste, increasingly by civilian stevedores, the mostly uninventoried supply stockpiles ended up in small warehouses and open storage areas scattered throughout the SOS command. Little time existed for proper record keeping and status reports. Inevitably, huge stocks went missing in the labyrinth of SOS installations.25
Critical shortages left units unprepared for active operations. The logisticians reported on 4 September that ETO and SOS could not supply the 55,000 American troops assigned to the Central Task Force in Torch from stocks in the United Kingdom. American forces in North Africa must depend on supplies shipped directly from the United States.26 Two days later Lee warned that shipping limitations might require reductions in both troop basis and supply levels for the operation.27
The story of the First Division best illustrates this. The “Big Red One,” the first major ground unit moved to the United Kingdom in early August, arrived without its weapons, vehicles, and most other categories of equipment. On 17 August Marshall wired that “a sizeable portion of 1st Division [men and equipment] left New York” ten days earlier. The War Department’s assurance that the ships would arrive in three days’ time conflicted with information available in London, which indicated that most of the division’s ordnance and heavy equipment remained in New York. Eisenhower replied to Marshall, “1st Division equipment is still on the ocean with some not yet shipped.” Under existing circumstances, Eisenhower wrote, First Division would not receive equipment in time to permit its training in amphibious warfare, so “the target date [for the landings] may have to be set back.”28 The month ended with no sign of the missing supplies. As Eisenhower informed Handy on 31 August, as matters stood, there was “no hope of the 1st Division being able to take part in a major expedition from UK.”29 The division began training by borrowing artillery from the British, a source of considerable embarrassment.30 On 3 September the chief of the Transportation Corps reported that First Division’s “stuff” would not arrive for another ten days. The next day a vexed Eisenhower told OPD that the delay in equipping the division would “become a determining factor in fixing date of attack.”31 A few days later, Clark told Hughes that unless he fixed the problem quickly, First Division “will be going in virtually with their bare hands.”32
Hearing all this must have made the drained Smith wilt even more. Clark placed the blame squarely on Lee and his organization. Officially, Eisenhower backed away from faulting Lee. He told Handy the supply emergency existed “due to conditions beyond the control of the SOS.”33 Privately, Eisenhower could only put the sting on Lee. Preoccupied with settling Torch, Eisenhower, who typically paid scant attention to supply matters, only belatedly realized the seriousness of the escalating crisis. Now Torch hinged not on the French reaction or Spanish intervention or the high surf off the Moroccan coast but on whether the American supply problems would force a postponement, modification, or even cancellation of the operation. Too exhausted to accompany Eisenhower and Clark to 10 Downing Street for one of the prime minister’s dinners and debating sessions, Smith retired early in Eisenhower’s town flat. Butcher was not around to record how well he slept. No doubt he had visions of Lee dancing in his head.
Smith assumed duties as ETO chief of staff on 8 September. The next day he began settling in, spending most of it in discussions with his predecessor, BG John Dahlquist. Before lunch, he and Clark met with Eisenhower. Smith took the bull by the horns—in this case, the bull being Lee. The night before, Churchill had pressed for an accelerated Torch. Eisenhower had begged off, telling the prime minister the acute logistics shortages required a delay of four days, to 8 November. As Eisenhower, Clark, and Smith well knew, the supply predicament might well push the date back even further. The British expected the new commander of their Eighth Army, LTG Bernard Montgomery, to open a major offensive against Rommel around 22 October. To reap real strategic benefit, Torch could not be delayed long. If the Americans could not answer the bell, the strategic and political consequences of their failure would be incalculable. And failure loomed as a real possibility. Smith argued, backed by Clark, for putting the fire to Lee. Eisenhower could only agree.34
John Clifford Hodges Lee was no lightweight. Raised by a widowed mother and two aunts in Junction City, Kansas, the post town of Fort Riley, Lee graduated from West Point in 1909 and entered the Engineers. He boasted an outstanding record in France; he rose to colonel and served on the staff of two divisions, first as the intelligence and operations officer and then as acting chief of staff. In the process he won the Distinguished Service Medal and Silver Star. Another bright young engineer served on Lee’s staff with the Eighty-ninth Division: Somervell. In the opinion of Hughes, Johnny Lee was a “queer duck.”35 He was not alone in that assessment. Lee’s friends called him Johnny or Cliff, but he carried a number of less flattering nicknames. Known as “Courthouse” because of his frequent volunteering to serve on courts-martial earlier in his career, the imperious Lee impressed fellow officers as a strange admixture of religiosity and pomposity. An intensely devout man, he worshipped daily and twice on Sundays, obliging his subordinates to join him. Behind his back they called him “Jesus Christ Himself,” a play on his initials. Obsessed with preserving the outward signs of efficiency and military protocol, Lee rigorously enforced codes of discipline and dress, insisting that everything be “spit and polish.” He had already taken to traveling around his domain in a private train. Although Lee capably shouldered an immense workload, his formidable manner and appearance, tactless exercise of authority, and jealous defense of his position made him a target of criticism. He produced results but also animosity.
Eisenhower backed off censuring Lee for a number of reasons. First and foremost, he could ill afford to antagonize Somervell—at this juncture, the last person he wanted to provoke. For two months Eisenhower sang the praises of Lee. Upon assuming command, Eisenhower complained that his faltering headquarters lacked confidence. The one officer who impressed him was Lee, who had “his whole gang going at top speed.”36 Eisenhower told Somervell of his great fortune at having “a man of Lee’s ability.”37 In July Eisenhower considered Lee “one of the finest officers in the Army.”38 In mid-August he nominated Lee as his “executive deputy” in ETO “to handle matters in his own name.” He told the War Department he “consider[ed] General Lee by far the best qualified” to be his successor as ETO commander.39 Now Eisenhower faced the prospect of making Lee the fall guy; it all rang rather hollow. Another factor lay behind Lee’s difficulties that Eisenhower never acknowledged: his own refusal to weld together the administrative and supply side of ETO.
Eisenhower possessed fixed ideas on how a headquarters should operate. He frequently told people he had served longer stretches on staff duty than anybody else in the U.S. Army and needed no instruction on how a staff should be organized and run. In truth, Eisenhower possessed no special knowledge of headquarters functions, never having spent any appreciable time in a senior staff billet; instead, he had spent most of his career as somebody else’s executive officer. Eisenhower and Lee flew to London together at the end of May. Part of Eisenhower’s job involved assessing Chaney’s failures in restructuring ETO. On 14 May Marshall ordered Chaney to reorganize the London headquarters “along the general pattern of a command post with a minimum of supply and administrative services. All of these services will be grouped under … SOS.” Theater organization should parallel the restructured War Department, meaning that ETO should feature three strong commands for ground, air, and supply.40 No doubt Eisenhower and Lee dissected the organizational issue during the long flight.
It became common currency that Somervell had engineered Lee’s appointment. In fact, Somervell apologized for “inflicting this job” on Lee, telling him he “wouldn’t wish such a job on such a good friend.” In 1941 Lee had commanded the Second Infantry Division. Clark, as AGF chief of staff, recommended Lee as the ideal choice for pushing through Bolero. Initially Lee balked, but he backed down when Marshall and Stimson insisted he accept the new assignment in London. Marshall granted Lee a mandate “to take all measures … necessary and appropriate to expedite and prosecute the procurement, reception, processing, forwarding, and delivery of personnel, equipment, and supplies” for the buildup in Europe.41 As commanding general of SOS, Lee held responsibilities equivalent to a corps area commander in the Zone of the Interior. Since Marshall’s reorganization left ASF outside the strategic and operational decision loop, Somervell instructed Lee to forge a functionally organized, semiautonomous SOS command inside the theater’s highest headquarters. He reasoned that whatever headquarters structure emerged in ETO would influence staff organizations in other theaters. When he arrived in London on 24 May, Lee “carried with him the SOS organizational set-up,” complete with a control division and a chief of administrative services.42
Chaney’s reaction exactly mirrored the sentiment of virtually all senior line officers, including Eisenhower. The artificial elevation of a detached administrative and supply command to a coordinate rather than subordinate status in the headquarters hierarchy appeared “revolutionary” and therefore highly dangerous. A separate SOS command violated prewar concepts of staff organization and command responsibilities; a subordinate officer could not exercise control over any general staff functions.43 Chaney clung to the “book” linear command system, which assigned a general full authority over all matters in his “territorial” command. Although an airman, he fought a bitter and eventually losing four-month-long rearguard action against the air force’s assertion of semiautonomous standing, especially over supply. Chaney denied his classmate Lee the authority necessary to carry out the reorganization. While Marshall’s directive instructed that Chaney maintain only a “skeleton [personal] staff,” it also provided him with an escape clause: “the organization prescribed … need not be slavishly followed.”44 Had Marshall issued a firm directive and vigorously enforced it, the administrative history of the U.S. Army in World War II would have been much different, but he chose not to.
For two weeks an acrimonious contest raged between Chaney and Lee, consuming the attention of much of the staff. In the end, a compromise emerged: Chaney’s headquarters retained direction of the administrative branches, while SOS controlled the technical and supply services.45 Lee decided later in June to move SOS headquarters to Cheltenham, 125 miles northwest of London. Cheltenham provided Lee better access to his bases sections, but SOS’s physical separation from ETO created yet another serious obstacle to cooperation. Instead of conserving scarce staff officers, the structure increased the drain; staffs became top-heavy with colonels, many of them serving in liaison capacities between ETO in London and SOS in Cheltenham. Divided authority resulted in overlapping and conflicting jurisdictions between ETO and SOS and within the respective staffs. ETO and SOS submitted separate requisitions to ASF; the technical and service chiefs did likewise, employing their own channels back to the bureaus in Washington. The services and supply chiefs both in Washington and in theater resented reorganization in any form and jealously defended their command statuses, old operating procedures, and control of their staffs. The wedding of manpower (an ETO function) with weapons and equipment (an SOS responsibility) presented difficulties in June; the flood of men and materiel in July and August overwhelmed the bifurcated structure.
None of this surprised Somervell. Before Eisenhower left Washington for ETO, the ASF chief had pulled him aside, warning that “one of the major encumbrances, if not the major encumbrance, upon the progress of the American Expeditionary Forces in France in 1917–1918 lay in bad organizational control of its SOS, and particularly in its being forced to adopt an organization radically different from that existing in the War Department.”46 Lee never tired of using the same analogy. As Eisenhower related to Butcher, “the same issue kept coming up throughout the last war and remains a tough one. There is no perfect solution.” Eisenhower’s answer involved relying on personalities, not organizational innovations. The discord between ETO and SOS resulted in Chaney’s firing, and Eisenhower, though troubled by the inadequacies of the organization, never intervened. Ignoring Marshall’s 14 May “instructions” and the dictates of the new field manual, and not knowing what to do, Eisenhower did nothing and simply preserved Chaney’s defective divided authority.47 “In General Lee,” Butcher recorded at the time, “Ike felt he had one of the finest officers in the Army and a man who had the best possible qualifications for a job that requires a high degree of human understanding.” He now had plenty of reasons to rue that hasty supposition.48
Even if Eisenhower proved open to the issue of reorganization—and he was not—little time remained. For Eisenhower, the problem resided in Lee’s failure to master the mounting operation. Smith required no prompting taking the lead; he came to London to stir things up and stiffen Eisenhower. On 10 September he drafted a scorching aidemémoire that Eisenhower signed and forwarded to Lee. It contained the first peremptory order Lee received: “Your basic mission is so to operate the Services of Supply in this theater as to insure adequate support of the American Expeditionary Force now being prepared in the United Kingdom.” Lee should delegate all routine administrative tasks to a subordinate “while you personally devote your attention to the primary mission.” Lee would submit daily written reports to Clark, outlining steps taken to deal with the crisis.49
Eisenhower activated Allied Force Headquarters (AFHQ) on 12 September, with Smith as chief of staff. Smith immediately directed that chief administrative officer MG Humphrey Gale, the senior British logistician in the headquarters, undertake a survey to answer two questions: the extent to which SOS could support its initial supply requirements, and how much was needed from external agencies to compensate for the deficiencies. Smith made it clear that AFHQ would superintend the mounting operation. That he turned to Gale signaled Smith’s mistrust of Lee’s entire organization. He wanted an independent source of information; he also put Gale on the spot.50
Two days later Hughes detonated an explosion that sent shock waves throughout the American command. Eisenhower considered Hughes the best supply man in the entire U.S. Army and the officer with the best overall picture of theater supply. As one of Eisenhower’s closest friends and confidants, Hughes’s views carried a punch well beyond his relative low rank. Citing a “multitude of problems,” Hughes concluded that Torch as contemplated could not be supported and maintained to a sufficient degree of efficiency within the “limiting dates set.” With September 12 “supposed to be the date when supplies were in hand,” SOS had not even begun the mounting process. He recommended a six-week delay in staging Torch, until 15 December.51 Eisenhower called an emergency commanders’ meeting for the next day.
At the meeting of the chiefs of staff the next morning, Gale made his recommendations. “Until the SOS reports its condition,” he stated, “no final decision can be made.” He predicted a gridlock would soon develop and raised doubts that SOS could meet its obligations in initiating the actual mounting operation even if it were pushed back to 5 October—the last possible date to begin the movement of materiel from depots to the assigned shipping. Gale provided Smith with precisely the ammunition he needed; he immediately reported Gale’s findings to Eisenhower and Clark.52
Before entering Eisenhower’s office for the emergency meeting, Clark laid into Lee, accusing SOS of totally failing in its mission. With Smith present, Eisenhower categorized the supply situation as “a major crisis,” and with uncharacteristic bluntness he told Clark, Spaatz, and Lee that their careers (he could have added his own) depended on solving the logistics muddle. He accentuated that “failure would mean only that the [faltering] officer’s usefulness was ended,” and he would be sent home in his permanent rank.53 Eisenhower talked tough, but he knew that Clark, Spaatz, and Lee—sent by Marshall and protégés of McNair, Arnold, and Somervell—remained virtually untouchable. In any event, Eisenhower meant only to fire a shot across Lee’s bow. With good reason, Lee remembered September 1942 as the most trying time of the war. “Not even the driving pressure of the 1944 summer campaign,” he remembered, “was as hard on [my] nervous system as the Fall of 1942.”54
Amidst all the collective angst about supply, another consideration loomed that neither Eisenhower nor Clark had much considered—the response American forces would receive in North Africa. Roosevelt put huge store in giving the invasion every appearance of being American. He remained convinced that Vichy officials were eager to change sides—a confidence that Roosevelt’s man in North Africa, Murphy, encouraged. On 16 September Murphy, under a cloak of tight security in the disguise of one Colonel McGowan, arrived from Washington. Because Smith knew him, he met Murphy at the airport and pirated him to Telegraph Cottage.
A career diplomat, Murphy had held minor consular posts in Paris from 1930 until after the fall of France. His responsibilities in the 1930s involved low-level duties requiring little diplomatic skill or deep knowledge of international affairs. A devout Catholic and anticommunist, Murphy associated with the French extreme Right. His otherwise lackluster career received a boost with the formation of the Vichy government, when he became American chargé d’affaires.
Early in 1941 the United States and Vichy France concluded a pact that permitted the posting of twelve vice-consuls in North Africa, ostensibly to facilitate the purchase of American consumer goods with French assets frozen in U.S. banks. Roosevelt selected Murphy as his private representative, supposedly as administrator of the program but in fact to build pro-American support. The interwar State Department resembled the army in some respects. Most senior diplomats came from privileged backgrounds and paid the bulk of their own costs of living in foreign capitals. With pay and promotion prospects so poor for junior diplomats, the service attracted and retained few men of real talent. Amazingly, in the whole State Department, not a single foreign service officer possessed the language skills and background required for this mission. The men selected—mostly the same Ivy League, Wall Street types Smith later encountered in the CIA—had neither diplomatic nor political training. This presented no problem to the president. As with Donovan and the OSS, Roosevelt preferred to go outside normal channels and enlist gifted amateurs for special missions. This proved unfortunate, since the North Africa mission involved gathering military intelligence and generating political support for the United States. Following Murphy’s lead, the vice-consuls associated themselves with rightist groups and gained badly distorted impressions of the political situation in French North Africa.55
Eisenhower convened a major conference that night at the cottage. Eisenhower, Clark, Smith, AFHQ intelligence chief Brigadier Eric Mockler-Ferryman, the three top men from the AFHQ political and civil affairs sections—W. H. B. Mack, H. Freeman Matthews, and COL Julius Holmes—and Ambassadors John Winant and Averell Harriman attended. Murphy described the various factions, personalities, and possible political complications likely to be encountered in North Africa. Eisenhower, who always played the political “babe in the woods,” listened with genuine “horrified intentness.”56 First Murphy had conspired with GEN Maxime Weygand, the last Allied supreme commander in 1940 and implacable foe of the Germans, who had served as Pétain’s delegate general in North Africa until the Abwehr insisted on his recall to Vichy. Next Murphy had turned to GEN Charles Mast, chief of staff of the corps stationed near Algiers; Mast possessed clandestine connections with GEN Henri-Honoré Giraud, whose daring escape from German captivity to unoccupied France made him a national hero and a focus of resistance. Murphy believed that Mast, who had masterminded Giraud’s escape, could arrange for Giraud to slip out of Vichy France and assume command of French forces in North Africa. If that happened, Murphy assured his listeners, a number of generals, including Louis-Marie Koeltz and Alphonse Juin in Algeria and Charles Noguës and Émile Béthouart in French Morocco, would rally. He believed the French air force would likely follow the lead of the army but doubted that the navy would. Murphy admitted he possessed no connections to the French resident-general in Tunisia, ADM Jean-Pierre Estéva. He said a great deal more, including making promises of active support from committed pro-Allied fifth columnists—in all, painting a rosy picture of what the Anglo-American forces in Torch might expect.57
The next morning over breakfast, Eisenhower outlined what Murphy could and could not tell his friends in North Africa. Murphy acknowledged his utter ignorance of military operations and suggested that Eisenhower send a senior officer to North Africa charged with clarifying what steps the French should take in support of the landings. Eisenhower agreed and settled on Smith for the mission. Since the mission required a man with intimate knowledge of the Torch plan, as well as someone who could impress the French and speak with full authority, Smith appeared to be the perfect choice. As Eisenhower knew, nothing Murphy had said the previous night surprised Smith; he had heard it all before. Plus, fresh from Washington, Smith could reinforce what Murphy had been telling the French about Roosevelt’s commitment to the liberation of French North Africa and metropolitan France. The venture had the potential to be as exciting as it was important. Traveling under utmost secrecy, first to Gibraltar and then by submarine to the coast of Algeria, the emissary would land in the dead of night on an uncertain beach and be spirited away for a rendezvous with French coconspirators. “Don’t think Beetle knows that Ike contemplates putting the finger on him,” Butcher surmised, “but he won’t mind I’m sure.”58
With the drama of Colonel McGowan’s visit over, attention returned to the sorry state of supply affairs. As Butcher noted, “The whole situation has Ike worried.” He was not alone. Following the upbraiding he received in Eisenhower’s office, Lee returned to Cheltenham and read the riot act to his staff. Agreeing that it looked “impossible to meet the job,” Lee told his supply chiefs they “must support the operations as now set” and challenged each of them to go out there and give it the old college try. “We must play the game as written down in the present book of rules,” he told Hughes, “which can’t be changed, as I see it and as I accept it.”59 Clark had told Lee he wanted an updated inventory of SOS stocks, and Lee completed a preliminary report on 18 September. “While, as Colonel Hughes indicates, it is difficult for the SOS to meet the dates now set for the operation,” he informed the increasingly impatient Clark, “I believe they can be met with fair efficiency.” He reassured the deputy commander, “The campaign should succeed although the logistical prearrangements be far from perfect.”60
More bad news followed. Hughes told Clark he could not promise adequate ammunition supplies for Torch. SOS could locate only 21,040 tons of ground forces ammunition. Much of the artillery ammunition proved unserviceable because of mishandling in transit.61 Then word came that two ships carrying the First Division’s 105mm howitzers would not arrive. One had gone aground off the Canadian coast, and the other had put in to Bermuda after its cargo shifted in heavy seas. The SOS also reported that the M-4 tanks would not arrive in time for the assault. Eisenhower advised the War Department that if the ships could not reach the United Kingdom by 21 October, “it means a corresponding delay in D-Day for every day’s delay.”62
The real problem stemmed from Lee’s insistence on putting the best possible gloss on his activities and those of his command. His blithe assurances struck the senior logisticians as another example of Lee’s Pollyannaism. Hughes noted that Lee supported Sledgehammer in an identical offhand manner. “I am up against Clark who does not want any bad news,” he complained, “and Lee who says he can support any operation.”63 BG Thomas Larkin, the officer assigned to command SOS units in Algeria, had the same reaction. He stormed into Clark’s office, “obviously highly agitated,” and complained that Lee’s solution simply involved tossing everything back to ASF. The SOS still had not completed its inventory of stocks in the United Kingdom. “After asking me if I understood what this meant,” Clark related in his daily summary to Eisenhower, Larkin stormed out of his office. “The increasingly apparent breakdown of SOS,” Butcher observed, “is giving rise to the question of General Lee’s ability to run the show.” And “in recent days,” Butcher continued, “there has been repeated criticism of General Lee’s riding around the Island on his special train, handsomely equipped, while the supply situation has been so difficult.”64 Lee’s stock hit rock bottom. On 19 September Eisenhower withdrew his recommendation that Lee succeed him as ETO commander.65
Lee was not the only one grating on the supreme commander’s rattled nerves. “Ike is beginning to have personnel problems at the top,” Butcher reported. “The persistent force of ambition is causing difficulties.” The rank-hungry Clark, discontented with his role as deputy and chief planner, incessantly lobbied for command of a task force. Smith, who probably wanted Clark out of his hair, endorsed the idea, pointing out that no precedent existed in American tables of organization for a deputy anything. Even though Eisenhower owed Clark, who had been instrumental in engineering the War Plans Division appointment that catapulted his career, his patience began to fray. He also began to question Clark’s vaunted reputation as a planner. Eisenhower bought off Clark with a promise to push his promotion. With Smith running the staffs, Clark’s sole attention now centered on planning, and despite Eisenhower’s concerns, he delegated to Clark full decision-making authority for concluding the Torch operational scheme.66
The tightness of shipping space in the convoys induced Clark to make the most crucial decision in the planning phase of Torch. The reshuffling of shipping schedules meant that SOS/ETO supplied American units in the Eastern Task Force, while the Center Task Force drew on support routed from the United States, supplemented by stocks in the United Kingdom and carried to Algeria on British ships. The entirely American Western Task Force, under Patton, would sail from U.S. ports. Limited lift capacity confronted Clark with a hard choice. The logisticians on both sides of the Atlantic argued for a reduction in the troop basis; although smaller, the forces would be fully equipped, supplied, and mobile. Clark ignored their advice. He decided to maintain combat ground strength while sharply reducing vehicles, weapons, supplies, and, correspondingly, service and supply troop levels. Eisenhower met with Clark, Smith, and the senior U.S. Navy commanders on 19–20 September and endorsed Clark’s verdict. On 20 September Smith drafted the first consolidated outline plan for Torch.67 Curiously, Eisenhower never discussed this decision in any of his lengthy correspondence with Marshall. On 23 September Clark and Larkin flew to the United States to finalize planning. Eisenhower correctly guessed that his unhappy deputy would call in his chits in Washington in his campaign to secure a command.68
The lone subordinate whose performance matched his reputation was Beetle Smith. Eisenhower wanted freedom from details so he could concentrate on bigger issues; Smith immediately provided it. A week after Smith’s arrival, Eisenhower could already detect a huge difference. “The presence of Beetle continues to be a great satisfaction to Ike,” Butcher noted on 15 September. “It relieves him from many of the details of staff direction he’s been forced to handle ever since his arrival in London.”69 For the first time Eisenhower felt secure enough to leave his office and visit nearby units.
Smith needed no encouragement to assert his control over the staffs. An American command, ETO offered little challenge. The ETO headquarters consisted primarily of a large G-1 staff, now under Dahlquist, and skeleton intelligence and operations divisions with a small G-4 liaison section. The combined headquarters had ruthlessly cannibalized ETO’s personnel. AFHQ proved a different matter. When Smith arrived in London, AFHQ had already existed in all but name for more than a month, but it lacked direction because Eisenhower’s and Clark’s attentions had been focused elsewhere; neither succeeded in putting his stamp on the headquarters. The structure was in place—based on the American system—but it lacked drive. That changed when Smith took over on 12 September. First Smith completed the formation of AFHQ’s general staff. He retained Gruenther as his deputy chief of staff for purely American matters and organizations, and he named MG J. F. M. Whiteley as Gruenther’s British opposite number. Eisenhower had warned Smith never to concede to the British committee system. Three days after becoming chief of staff, Smith hedged on this injunction and made Gale de facto deputy chief of staff and charged him with coordinating supply and oversight of the entire mounting operation. Otherwise, Smith left the structure and personnel he had inherited in place. American officers headed three divisions: COL Ben Sawbridge in personnel; BG Lyman Lemnitzer, who had served as interim deputy chief of staff until Smith showed up, continued as chief of the operations division; and COL Archelaus Hamblen directed supply and evacuations. Administration and personnel (G-1) and supply and movement (G-4) contained parallel American and British staffs; intelligence (G-2) and operations (G-3) were combined staffs. A British officer, Mockler-Ferryman, remained at the helm of the intelligence division. Next Smith accelerated the expansion of the staff, manning the American side of AFHQ with officers pinched from other U.S. establishments. On 19 September Eisenhower told a friend, Smith “is a natural-born Chief of Staff and really takes charge of things in a big way. I wish I had a dozen like him. If I did, I would simply buy a fishing-rod and write home every week about my wonderful accomplishments in winning the war.”70
By the third week of September, the logistics picture suddenly brightened. On 24 September Lee finally produced his “status of supply” report. The situation looked much improved. As Lee informed MG Leroy Lutes, the chief of operations and planning in ASF who was in the United Kingdom to help bring some order to the chaos, “Speaking in baseball vernacular, we lost only vendor supplies—pop, chewing gum—but no bats and balls.”71 In the first half of the month, SOS had unloaded 200,000 long tons, with half as much again due before the end of September. Despite everything, Lee preserved his equanimity, which he attributed to prayer. The solution to the supply mess rested not in divine intervention but in the labors of the War Department, especially ASF. Somervell resorted to extraordinary expedients. Training divisions in the United States returned their newly issued weapons and equipment to ASF—despite the heavy cost in unit morale and delays in training schedules—for transshipment to the Torch forces. By the end of September, it appeared Lee’s organization could meet its timetable for mounting Torch. Butcher noted that all the logisticians looked more cheerful.72 They were not alone.
Eisenhower’s liberation from, as he put it, “the backbreaking volume” of detail stood in direct proportion to Smith’s absorption in it. Forced to work fourteen-hour days, Smith rushed to complete the thousands of particulars that competed for his attention. In addition to verifying loading schedules, checking air and naval estimates, and overseeing the weaving together of countless other elements of planning, Smith performed the routine duties of chief to two staffs. These responsibilities included screening incoming and outgoing communications with the CCS and Marshall, monitoring the work of the staff sections, handling the assignment of personnel in his rapidly expanding AFHQ, and attending high-level conferences involving the senior American and British officers for Torch, the BCOS, and Churchill.
Smith proved particularly adept at handling the British. In a curious way, the British buttressed Smith’s position. When Clark assumed responsibility for organizing and manning the combined headquarters, he began by transferring officers from the ETO planning division. Beyond that, Clark did very little; a table of organization did not appear until 26 August, and the first request for personnel to flesh out the skeleton staffs took another week. Eisenhower held off any real organization of AFHQ, even its activation, until Smith arrived. The AFHQ operations division remained top-heavy in American officers; the War Office agreed to staff the intelligence section and designated some of its top men—Gale, Whiteley, Mockler-Ferryman, and COL A. T. de Rhé Philipe—for service on the combined staff.73 Things changed immediately after Smith took over. He took charge of the situation, and suddenly AFHQ began to kick into gear. Seeing this, the British rendered Smith all the support they could muster.74
Part of that support came in the form of helping the Americans master their logistical problems. Smith appealed directly to Ismay and worked through Gale. AFHQ correlated the revised shipping schedules with ASF, the British supply agencies, and the naval staffs. With it now clear that U.S. forces could not be supplied from American sources, Smith borrowed from British stocks, and Gale coordinated local procurement, including emergency production in British factories. British sources provided the Class I (rations), Class III (petrol, oil, and lubricants [POL]), and most of the Class IV (heavy engineering material) stocks. Many requests involved supplies for the comfort and convenience of U.S. troops; others added to existing reserves. U.S. Army regulations demanded every soldier be equipped with everything called for under prewar tables of supply, even if the articles would have little or no utility in active operations in North Africa. The British, suffering under spartan rationing and shortages, thought American demands excessive but complied nonetheless. The chronic shortage of service manpower meant that AFHQ relied on the assistance of the Ministry of War Transport to clear ports, marshal supplies, and move troops. The British even seconded elements of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in support. Since these involved Allied as opposed to American matters, AFHQ assumed responsibility for logistical management, merely coordinating these efforts with Lee and his SOS command.75
Smith held regular consultative discussions with the British, which required almost daily contact with Ismay and, through him, the BCOS and Churchill. An exponent of close Allied cooperation, Ismay became an invaluable link between the prime minister and AFHQ. Ismay and Smith had butted heads in the past, but those collisions never impaired their relationship. The two men shared one thing in common: both were devoted friends of Dykes. Reinforced by what Dykes told him, Ismay appreciated Smith’s strengths and the central role he must play in forging Anglo-American cooperation. In some ways, their relationship mirrored the Smith-Dykes partnership. Together they charted paths of least resistance: Ismay shielded AFHQ from Churchill’s interference; Smith gave expression to the British point of view in discussions with Eisenhower and Clark. During this difficult period, they built a close friendship. In his correspondence with Smith, Ismay sometimes signed off “Love, Pug”—a peculiarly unmilitary gesture, but indicative of the bond of trust that developed between them.76
Ismay could never contain the prime minister for long. A zealot on the importance of personal contacts, Churchill insisted on weekly dinners at 10 Downing Street with Eisenhower, Clark, and Smith. On 20 September the three American officers went out to Chequers, Churchill’s country estate, for meetings with the prime minister and the BCOS. As Brooke commented, the prime minister “never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius of his great ancestor, Marlborough.”77 Churchill lectured the senior British and American officers at length on all manner of topics. “It means a long night,” reported Butcher, “and these country boys always say how they hate it.”78 “Our relationships with the Prime Minister are on a most informal basis,” Smith related to Marshall. “Unfortunately, this happy state of affairs carries with it the obligation for a weekly dinner at No. 10 Downing Street which is usually terminated about 2:00 A.M.” Smith took amusement in watching Ismay and Brooke “brace themselves for hours in straight backed dinner room chairs” listening to Churchill’s “flights into the stratosphere.”79
Smith liked things simple. For him, ham hocks and beans represented a culinary delight. After the stresses of the day, he wished only to return to his rooms at the Dorchester Hotel for some downtime alone—an indulgence not easily achieved. Eisenhower insisted on cementing relationships with his closest advisers through intimate social contacts. In the army, an invitation from a superior amounts to an order. This meant that Smith’s rare free evenings were consumed with commutes out to Telegraph Cottage or trips to Eisenhower’s London flat for dinner, games of bridge, and idle chitchat. Smith was not the idle chitchat type. It also meant he spent his off-hours in the company of men he did not particularly like. Smith and Clark had attended Leavenworth and the War College together but never developed any real familiarity. Smith took an immediate dislike to Butcher, less because of Butcher’s ebullient personality than because Smith saw him as a “public relations hound.” Smith questioned Eisenhower’s wisdom in having a journalist, a civilian adman, keeping his headquarters diary. He worried about leaks to the press and correctly surmised that Butcher intended to profit by publishing the diary after the war.80 Evenings spent with Eisenhower, Churchill’s weekly dinners, and the odd weekend at Chequers provided no relief from the grind, disturbing Smith’s routine and robbing him of much-needed rest. The murderous pace of staff duties undermined Smith’s already fragile health, and a meal of game pie and the prime minister’s homemade onion soup triggered a serious flare-up of his bleeding ulcers.
Smith could no longer hide his ailment. Eisenhower offered to fly in a specialist from the United States. Afraid “the medicos would rule-book him out of the war,” Smith finally succumbed to Eisenhower’s pressure and took some rest. Despite going on a buttermilk diet, Smith’s condition worsened. Fond of the man he called the “American Bulldog,” Churchill could not believe how pale Smith looked during a 28 September dinner. Taking Eisenhower into an adjoining room, the prime minister insisted that Smith receive immediate medical attention. Eisenhower replied that he had ordered Smith to bed and arranged for a nurse to attend him at his apartment. With Clark in Washington, Eisenhower knew Smith’s absence from headquarters would require his own resumption of staff direction. As much as Eisenhower hated being shackled to his desk, given the option of losing Smith for a week or permanently, his choice was clear.
The next day the theater surgeon general, acting on Eisenhower’s directive, issued a verbal order sending Smith to the American General Hospital at Oxford. He refused until he received Eisenhower’s promise that he would be allowed to return as soon as his condition improved. Assured that Eisenhower had no intention of sending him home, Smith gave in. The trip up to Oxford did not improve his temper; the ambulance carrying him had two flat tires on the way. Making matters worse, after giving Smith a blood transfusion, the doctors informed him that he required several days of bed rest.
On 1 October Eisenhower took more than four hours from his busy schedule for a trip to Oxford. Recognizing the value of his chief of staff, Eisenhower wanted to put Smith’s mind at rest. Finding Smith in a state of agitation, Eisenhower reassured him that he had not let anyone down; although he was badly missed, the most important thing was for Smith to get better so he would be “useful when the big moment comes.” Hughes also made the trip up to Oxford. “Tell Mamie that Beadel [sic] Smith is sick in bed with two doctors and a nurse,” he instructed his wife. “No don’t tell her,” Hughes concluded, “she believes that Smith will save Ike.”81
Smith did not remain long in the hospital. Diagnosing himself fully recovered, Smith flew “the coop,” as Butcher put it, on 4 October. Alerted of his disappearance, Eisenhower found the fugitive fast asleep in his bed in the Dorchester. Although Smith had violated a direct order, Eisenhower could not bring himself to reprimand his chief of staff and left without waking him. For Smith’s birthday the next day, Eisenhower threw a small party. Over a game of craps, Smith loudly announced that his batteries had been charged and he stood “ready to electrify the world.” Although Eisenhower thought Smith had rushed his return, he expressed relief at having him back in the saddle.82
The prospect of losing Smith worried Eisenhower. He knew word of Smith’s serious health problems would surface in Washington, so he propped up Smith’s position to Marshall. While in Washington, Clark discovered that Marshall intended to promote Smith. “This would be of tremendous help to me,” Eisenhower told Marshall. “Smith seems to have a better understanding of the British and is more successful in producing smooth teamwork among the various elements of the staff than is any other subordinate I have.”83 After Marshall heard of Beetle’s bout with ulcers, Eisenhower reassured him of his chief’s improvement, reminding him that Smith “will not be exposed to the hardships that front-line soldiers have to bear.” And, Eisenhower pointed out, Smith’s “organizational and executive abilities are so outstanding that the beneficial effects of his presence are constantly evident.”84 Smith could not be spared.
Marshall shared Eisenhower’s anxiety over Smith’s condition. In a rare personal letter, Marshall made his displeasure clear. Gratified that Smith was on his feet again, Marshall pointedly informed his former assistant that unless he exercised more discretion, he ran the risk of losing Marshall’s favor.85 Although he made light of his health problems, Smith could not miss the gravity of the warning.
By the time Smith returned to his desk, the supply crisis had eased, and with it anxiety over Torch. While in Washington, Clark fixed planning with the task force commanders and Somervell’s people. The plan cut organic materiel by half. The reduced tonnage demands meant SOS could meet its loading schedules, American combat troop levels were preserved, and, according to Lee, “SOS will be able to give a 90% performance on TORCH.” As reported to Eisenhower, the American forces would face shortages of equipment, especially vehicles, and SOS troops for at least three months.86 Preoccupied with getting Torch off the ground, nobody gave much thought to what would happen after the American forces landed. With the supply emergency over and the operational issues settled, the mounting program proceeded with amazing ease. Smith now turned his attention toward organizing the combined headquarters for North Africa.