Ike the Unlikely

He possessed, like his boss, an invincible smile. The era had two of them. Roosevelt’s was the hail of a champion. Ike’s, they say, was worth twenty divisions.

Generals never smile. That was only one of the rules he broke. MacArthur didn’t smile. Bradley either, it wasn’t his nature—besides, his teeth were false. Ike smiled all the way, and his smile was instant and true. Even de Gaulle, a man not easily taken in, was impressed by him and sensed both generosity and warmth.

He never really commanded like Napoleon or Grant. “He let his generals in the field fight the war for him,” MacArthur commented disdainfully, while “he drank tea with kings and queens.” In an even more acidic mood he described him as the “best clerk I ever had.”

We see the grand MacArthur striding through the surf onto the shore of the Philippines, fulfilling his pledge, trouser legs soaked, weathered hat on his head, the legendary figure who fought back from stunning defeat across a battlefield that was an ocean so vast that men’s perceptions could barely cross it and who even after victory did not return home but chose to remain in Tokyo as proconsul and govern the shattered Japanese. He did it magnificently and with remarkable discernment, knowing it would be the capstone of a great career. While poor Eisenhower, whose dream of the future was merely a quiet cottage, had to oversee the demobilization, accepted the presidency of Columbia, for which he was ill-suited, recovered his poise to some extent in command of NATO, and finally lifting his head to the shouts was swept to the presidency by an adoring public. Thus the farm boy and the last of the aristocrats.

He was born in obscurity in northern Texas, one of seven children, all boys, in a family that always had to struggle and soon moved back to Kansas. From his mother Eisenhower inherited his chin, high forehead, and steady gaze. She was a hardworking, honest, no-nonsense woman, a pacifist who eventually became a Jehovah’s Witness. “He that conquereth his own soul is greater than he who taketh a city,” she told her son.

It was 1890, bread cost three cents a loaf. The plains were still crude and raw, the railroad the sole connection with the rest of the world. He was born into a home where the Bible was read daily, into a town that still lived by the frontier ethic, and into a world where man’s temporal role could be summed up in one word: work. As a boy he grew vegetables behind the house and sold them. He worked in the Belle Springs Creamery, where his father was also employed, after school. Together with his brother he tried to earn enough money so that one of them could go to college, the other to follow afterward. Years later he was asked by someone if he was really a conservative. “Any of you fellows ever grow up working on a farm?” he asked.

At the urging of a friend, he took the exam for Annapolis and for West Point too while he was at it. It turned out he was too old for the naval academy, but the first man for West Point failed the physical and Eisenhower got the appointment. He arrived in June 1911. He had come mainly for a free education. Here he is, making his first, brief appearance as a running back for Army: sandy hair, five feet eleven inches, stocky, called Ike by his classmates. As a measure of his indistinguishability, there were four other “Ikes” in the class. There were also nicknames like Nigger, Jew, Dago, and Chink. It was the class of 1915, the class they later said “the stars fell on.” In what could pass for a gentleman’s world, a backwater world as was the army it fed into, they rode horses, studied geology, engineering, natural philosophy, and hygiene, and pitched tents for the summer at the far end of the Plain. It was a closed world that held a certain comradeship and mystery.

He did not seem destined for greatness. Academically he was only average. He was not one of the cadet pantheon; neither was Bradley. He was well enough liked, confident, breezy. He preferred poker to dancing, and his classmates noted that he was fond of shooting the bull.

Caught up in the rising swell of the First World War, he was given training assignments and rose to become lieutenant colonel on his twenty-eighth birthday, but the war ended and he had suffered the classic grief of young officers—he had not seen action. The army quickly shrank. Everyone was demoted. He reverted to the rank of captain and together with Mamie vanished down the dusty roads that led to routine and remote posts—Leavenworth, Camp Meade, Fort Benning—while Jimmy Walker, Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth strode the stage. Lingering behind him, like a faint epitaph, was the opinion of one of his instructors at West Point who, like the others, had found him unremarkable: “We saw in Eisenhower a not uncommon type, a man who would thoroughly enjoy his army life . . .” But not much besides.

The most important group in the United States Army of the ’20s and ’30s was Pershing’s men, the officers who had found his favor either before or during the war. George Marshall, who had been in his headquarters in France, was one. Douglas MacArthur, though he had performed brilliantly as a troop commander, a dashing and gallant figure right out of Journey’s End rising to become the youngest brigadier general in the army, was not. He was too vivid, too pushy, too iconoclastic. He and Marshall never liked each other. They had much in common—both were aloof, puritanical, driven. Marshall, however, had hardly a single watt of military glory. It was the “loftiness and beauty of his character” that stood out, as Dean Acheson noted. MacArthur was not without character, but the thing that shone so unmistakably from him was ambition.

Another of Pershing’s favorites was George Patton, who had gone to France as the old man’s aide and wangled his way into the front lines, commanding the first tanks near the end of the war. Eisenhower met him in 1919 at Camp Meade. Patton was a temporary colonel, tall, glamorous, every inch a soldier. He was rich and so was his wife—he would always be known as the wealthiest man in the army. He owned a yacht, played polo, and taught ladies’ riding classes. He was five years older than Eisenhower, with a high, squeaky voice and a foul mouth with which he loved to shock social gatherings, but he also had shrewdness and an intense love of his profession. It was at Patton’s house one night that Eisenhower met and made an impression on a general named Conner, who a few months later invited him to come to Panama as his executive officer. He was the first of the two important sponsors Eisenhower was to have during his career.

Fox Conner was a Mississippian with the common touch who’d been Pershing’s operations officer in France and had a reputation in the army as a brain. He was always quoted as saying that if we ever had another war he hoped to God we wouldn’t have allies. In Panama he took Eisenhower under his wing, encouraging him to read and discussing with him strategy, commanders, and the fate of nations.

“Someplace along the line there Ike got serious—there isn’t any question about that,” one of his classmates remembered. It’s uncertain exactly when or how this happened. It may have been due in part to the settling effect of marriage or to the death of his young son from scarlet fever a year before Panama. The change may have been something that was coming all along. What we do know is that when Conner arranged for him to get into Command and General Staff, the most important of the army schools, Eisenhower went, determined to do well. Those admitted were already an elect, and graduation high in the class was said to mark a man for future advancement. At the end of the year Eisenhower was number one.

George Marshall always kept a file of officers who impressed him and it’s probable that Eisenhower’s name first came to his attention at this time.

Known for years mainly as a coach of post football teams, Eisenhower was now viewed differently. The Army didn’t exactly stand on its head for him, but in a few years he found himself in Washington working for the assistant secretary of war and then for the chief of staff, a man of dizzying ego, phenomenal memory, and comprehensive knowledge who liked to refer to himself in the third person—in short, MacArthur. They had adjoining offices with only a slatted door between them. When, on his retirement, MacArthur accepted the post of military adviser to the Philippines, he took Eisenhower with him for what MacArthur said would be a year or so.

They arrived in Manila in September 1935. Already balding, wearing a white suit and straw hat as did MacArthur, Ike is in many ways fully formed—the man who, unknown to himself, will command the war. He stands dutiful and frowning in the tropical sun as his renowned chief poses. He was twenty years into his profession now and still a major. Years later a woman asked him if he knew the celebrated MacArthur. Yes, he knew him, Eisenhower said, he’d studied dramatics under him for seven years.

In the Philippines they worked to create a defense force. There was little money or equipment, and as the hundreds of ordinary days drifted behind there began to appear, drawing closer and closer, the storm they all knew was coming. Everybody felt it. One evening on an antiquated radio Eisenhower heard Neville Chamberlain declaring war. The first flicker of lightning. In far-off Europe catastrophe had arrived.

Eisenhower went to MacArthur and requested to return to the States, feeling he would be needed more there. He left at the end of 1939 and began a series of assignments as what he had always been, a staff officer, first at regimental, then division and corps level. He bumped into Marshall at some maneuvers soon after getting back. Duty in the Far East, everyone knew, was duty with houseboys, servants, amahs. Even privates got spoiled. With the barest of smiles Marshall inquired, “Well, Eisenhower, have you learned to tie your shoes again?” It was only the second time they had met.

In the fall of 1941 in huge maneuvers held in Louisiana, Eisenhower stood out as chief of staff of the victorious Third Army. He got his promotion to brigadier general just as the dust of the maneuvers was settling. It was late September. Two months later, all negotiations at an impasse, a powerful Japanese strike force left port and slipped into the fog of the Northern Pacific under sealed orders that when opened read “Pearl Harbor.”

It is easy to see in retrospect the confusion and fears, the long ordeal the end of which no one could foresee, the great wave that swept over the nation and half the world, the greatest event of the century: the Second World War.

Summoned abruptly from San Antonio to Washington a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to fill a need in plans for someone who knew the Far East, Eisenhower went directly from the train station to Marshall’s office. He was to face an immediate test. For twenty minutes Marshall outlined the grave situation in the Pacific with its nearly insoluble equations. Then he looked at Eisenhower and said only, “What should be our general line of action?”

Eisenhower had just arrived, he was unfamiliar with the latest plans, he had no staff. He hesitated for a moment and then said, “Give me a few hours.”

Sitting in an empty office he thought at some length and then with one finger began to type out his recommendations. He went back to Marshall. The Philippines, with their weak forces, would probably fall, Eisenhower said. Nevertheless, everything possible should be done to help them hold out. This was important. All the peoples of Asia would be watching the coming battle there—they would accept defeat but not abandonment. Meanwhile, Australia was the key—it had to be built up as a base of operations and the long line of communications to it kept open at any cost. “In this last we dare not fail.”

When he had finished, Marshall said just four words: “I agree with you.”

Now began desperate days, during which they tried to find men, aircraft, equipment, and, above all, ships to carry them to distant garrisons. The news was worse and worse, naval disasters, staggering Japanese triumphs. The days were eighteen hours long and Eisenhower came home exhausted to his brother Milton’s house in Falls Church for a sandwich at midnight. In three relentless months, however, he had Marshall’s confidence and was wearing a second star.

Allied strategy was, Europe first—the defeat of Germany before anything else. The Americans favored a direct, cross-Channel invasion of the continent to which the British agreed in principle but with deeply ingrained reservations. For a nation that had known Gallipoli and would soon know Dieppe, the idea of a seaborne assault against a strongly defended mainland was not something to be viewed with enthusiasm. Ike had been responsible for drawing up plans for the invasion force to be built up in Britain and he offered Marshall a profile of the sort of officer who should be sent to command it, someone who was flexible, whom Marshall trusted completely, and who might further serve as Marshall’s deputy when the former was named to lead the invasion (which was expected). A month later, an officer “then almost unknown,” as Churchill called him, arrived in England and was welcomed at Chequers for the first time by the prime minister, who was wearing a siren suit and carpet slippers. That officer was Eisenhower.

They were to become very close, and it was always Ike’s good fortune to have a supporter on one side as staunch as on the other. For his own part, he had come with the determination to get along with the British. You could call a British officer a bastard, the word was, but you could not call him a British bastard. He became a champion of Allied cooperation. It was not merely a question of the British agreeing to call lorries trucks and the Americans in exchange to call gasoline petrol, it was the task of hammering out an acceptable common strategy and bending difficult and proud commanders to fight side by side. The war was not waged in a spirit of pure harmony. Generals have ambitions. Nations have their goals.

Eisenhower was a major general when he came to England, almost a lowly rank. He was nearly fifty-two years old, he had never commanded troops, never seen a battle. In a matter of a few months, the invasion put aside for the time being, he found himself, quickly promoted, in a damp tunnel in Gibraltar waiting uneasily while fourteen convoys from both sides of the Atlantic, all bearing forces under his command, converged for simultaneous landings at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers.

The invasion of North Africa had been hastily decided upon and planned, with Eisenhower as the logical commander since it was to appear as an American initiative. Actual military command, however, was in the hands of three experienced deputies, all British, for land, sea, and air.

There were problems with the colonial Vichy French, battles with the French fleet, and the usual early disgraces that go with poor officers and green troops. Americans dropped their weapons, abandoned equipment, and fled at Kasserine Pass. Eisenhower had neither the tactical nor strategic experience required, the chief of the British Imperial Staff, Alan Brooke, decided. He was putty in British hands, said Patton, who was also making his first appearance in the war; “I would rather be commanded by an Arab,” Patton wrote in his diary. “I think less than nothing of Arabs.” A depressed Eisenhower kept repeating, “Anybody who wants the job of Allied commander in chief can have it.” Nevertheless, he took full responsibility for the confusion and first defeats, and by spring, the supply situation better, the bad weather past, his reorganized forces had battled through Tunisia to meet Montgomery coming the other way. In the sudden, final collapse in May 1943, almost 250,000 Germans and Italians, many of them driving their own trucks in search of POW compounds, were taken prisoner. These were veterans, and with them went the Mediterranean.

Sicily was next, a less than brilliant campaign. The plan of invasion was uninspired—the Germans never could comprehend why the Strait of Messina had not been immediately seized to cut them off. The fighting was in the heat of summer, fierce and bloody. Patton, now an army commander, revealed some of his dash here and also his impulsiveness. Bradley, more temperate, would rise above him. Neither of them liked Montgomery: “pompous, abrasive, demanding, and almost insufferably vain,” Bradley described him.

The campaign in Italy was more of the same—bad strategy, landings in the wrong places, lost opportunities. As Mediterranean Theater commander, Eisenhower was far from the center of things. Italy was a mere sideshow compared to the immense scale of the Russian front, where literally hundreds of divisions were engaged, and in the course of a battle the opposing armies might lose a division a day. Though assured there would be a second front in the spring, Stalin shrewdly demanded to know who its commander would be. That he would be American was understood, since the bulk of the forces were to be American. That it would probably be Marshall was also understood. But at the last moment Roosevelt decided otherwise. The principal figures had been in their roles too long to change. A deeply disappointed Marshall had the grace to send to Eisenhower as a memento the handwritten note that named him supreme commander.

Generals who do not fail, succeed. From the middle of the pack, past Clark, who was left mired in Italy, past Bradley, who had gotten a star first but was late getting to Europe, past the brash Patton, through all of it, gathering strength, experience, the feel of battles, learning to predominate in conference, perfecting the structure, prodding, cajoling, slowly becoming unchallengeable, Ike made his way.

When he arrived back in London to take charge of the enormous planning, D-day was set for May 1, 1944, a mere three and a half months away.

The Germans knew it was coming. There were fifty-eight German divisions in France, all that could be taken from the east for what Hitler had told his generals would be the decisive battle of the war. If the Allies were defeated, they would never invade again, he pledged—the losses and the blow to morale would be devastating. The Germans could then transfer their entire strength to the grinding eastern front “to revolutionize the situation there.” The waters off the French coast were dense with steel piles, stakes armed with mines, iron barriers. There were over four million land mines laid along the beaches, wire, concrete gun emplacements. At Dieppe, at Tarawa, these defenses had proved murderous.

To England, convoy after convoy had brought the heaviest of all things: armies, with their vehicles, tanks, mountains of munitions, guns. D-day had finally been set for the fifth of June. On that morning tides, moon, everything would be right. But not, as it turned out, the weather. At the last moment the initial eight-division assault had to be postponed, and the following day, with only an uncertain pause in the winds and storm and the immense force leaning forward, as it were, Ike turned it over in his mind, pondered on destiny, and said at last, “Okay, let ’er rip.”

He stood at an airfield in the darkness saluting each paratroop plane as it took off. In his pocket was a folded message on which he had scribbled a brief statement to be used in the event of disaster: the landings had failed and the troops, having done all that bravery and devotion could do, had been withdrawn. “If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.” These were the words, as historian John Keegan says, of a great soldier and a great man.

In France, dogs were barking in the windy darkness. Beneath the low clouds and the usual steady sound of aircraft crossing, the Germans were asleep, expecting a quiet night, when, at about two in the morning, into the country behind the beaches twenty-four thousand armed men came floating down. It was the airborne overture. The ships came at dawn, appearing out of the mist in numbers so great they could not be counted.

On the American beaches alone there were eight thousand casualties. Utah was not too bad, but Omaha was a bloodbath. The outcome was in doubt there for half the day. By that night, however, 150,000 Allied troops had gotten ashore. “Their road will be long and hard,” Roosevelt broadcast to the nation that night, leading it in prayer. “Give us faith in Thee, faith in our sons, faith in each other . . .”

The campaign that began that day lasted for eleven months and became the greatest Allied victory of the war. Eisenhower held big cards and he played them correctly. His armies and his generals by that time were battle-hardened, but there was also considerable finesse. He deceived the Germans by keeping Patton, whom they feared, in England for a long time in command of a phantom army. When the battle of Normandy was over, Rommel was writing to his wife, “We’re finished . . .”—even if the German High Command did not admit it, even though the life and death struggle went on. The Allies had more materiel, better intelligence, and, above all, command of the air, but the Germans were incomparable soldiers and for them there was no way out. Generals committed suicide and men by the tens of thousands died along the road.

That December saw the last great German offensive of the war. Massed in absolute secrecy, under the cover of bad weather, three German armies fell on the four weak divisions that were stretched out to cover eighty-five miles of front in the Ardennes. It was an attack that Hitler personally had conceived and von Rundstedt commanded. Almost simultaneously the first V-2s began to fall on England.

It was just before Christmas. Ike had only that day received his fifth star and was celebrating by drinking champagne and playing bridge when the word came of what would become the Battle of the Bulge. At first neither he nor Bradley could believe what was happening, but soon the scope of the breakthrough became apparent. “Calamity,” Alan Brooke admitted, “acted on Eisenhower like a restorative and brought out all the greatness in his character.” There were black headlines in the newspapers and grave meetings, but Ike had come of age. He committed his strategic reserves to hold the critical area around Bastogne at all costs, which they did. At the end of a week the weather broke and fighter-bombers swarmed over the front. From this time on, Bradley noted, Montgomery or not, Ike ran the war.

On May 7, 1945, with Eisenhower refusing to see the German emissaries who had come to sign the surrender as he had refused to meet captured generals throughout the war, the road at last came to an end. The thrust into Europe, the crusade, as he called it, was over. There had been 586,628 American casualties during the campaign.

Perhaps he was not a great general. He was not a heroic one. He cannot be imagined crying to his troops, “Forty centuries look down upon you!” or “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” He was a new invention, the military manager, and the army was made over in his image. Those who think of him only as president, an old crock with a putter, fail to see the man as he really was. He was tough, resilient, wise. In a sense, the war used him up. For years he gave it every hour, every thought, every breath. It discovered him, and he is entombed in it, together with our greatest victory. The rest is epilogue.

He died on March 28, 1969, twenty-four years after the surrender. He was in Walter Reed Hospital, an invalid, ruined by heart attacks. His last words were, “I want to go. God take me.”

Esquire

December 1983