VIII

EISENHOWER

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER GRAVITATED UPWARD as naturally as a sunflower seeks the sun. Partly it was a matter of personality, of an open and transparent fairness that immediately impressed itself upon the observer, and of a disarming grin that alone—said his colleague Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan—was “worth an army corps in any campaign.”¹ Partly it was a matter of prior preparation, of study and self-discipline over many a superficially empty year. But mostly it was a quality that Eisenhower himself went to some lengths to conceal from the public: intelligence, an intelligence as icy as has ever risen to the higher reaches of American life.

Eisenhower moved into the upper levels of national policy-making as though he had always belonged there. Within weeks of his arrival in Washington in December 1941, as deputy chief of the War Plans Division for the Pacific and Far East, he was drafting messages and memoranda not only for Marshall and Secretary Stimson but for the President himself. He wrote Roosevelt’s reply to Quezon when the Philippine president blamed the Americans for providing the islands with inadequate defenses, and he wrote Roosevelt’s reply to MacArthur when MacArthur forwarded with a favorable endorsement Quezon’s proposal that the Philippines be neutralized. He wrote, and personally took to the President, the latter’s cable to Chiang Kai-shek about command arrangements in Burma, and he wrote Roosevelt’s cable to Churchill on the same subject.²

On June 21, during Churchill’s second visit to Washington, Harry Hopkins said to him, “There are a couple of American officers the President would like you to meet,” and that afternoon at five, Eisenhower and Mark Clark were brought to Churchill’s quarters in the White House. “I was immediately impressed,” he wrote, “by these remarkable but hitherto unknown men…. We talked almost entirely about the major cross-Channel invasion … on which their thoughts had evidently been concentrated…. I felt sure that these officers were intended to play a great part in it, and that was the reason why they had been sent to make my acquaintance. Thus began a friendship which across all the ups and downs of war I have preserved with deep satisfaction to this day.”³

On the day of Pearl Harbor, Brigadier General Eisenhower had been at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he was chief of staff of Third Army under Walter Krueger. The next week was filled with the feverish extemporization of means to move troops and guns to the West Coast as rapidly as possible. On the morning of the twelfth, a direct-line phone to the War Department rang and the voice of Colonel Walter Bedell Smith asked, “Is that you, Ike?” It was. Thus Smith: “The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away. Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.”

Eisenhower’s heart sank. During World War I his every effort to get into action had failed; he had since put in eight years’ duty in Washington, and he wanted to stay away from it, to stay with troops. He reported to Marshall on Sunday morning, the fourteenth, to be given one of Marshall’s masterly twenty-minute summations, in this case of the military situation in the western Pacific, followed by the abrupt question: “What should be our general line of action?” Hoping that he was showing a poker face, Eisenhower asked for a few hours’ time. “All right,” said Marshall.

This was the fourth time the two had met, and the first occasion on which they had exchanged more than a few dozen words. But Eisenhower had heard enough about Marshall to know that his answer had better be short, emphatic, and to the point. He typed out notes for himself, triple space, on a yellow sheet of paper, which began, “Build up in Australia a base of operations …,” the first official proposal that this be a priority. He returned to Marshall and said that in his opinion it would be a long time before reinforcements could reach the Philippines, but that everything humanly possible should be done to get them through, to establish the Australian base and secure communications to it. The peoples of Asia will be watching us. “They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment…. We must take great risks,” he ended, “and spend any amount of money required.”

“I agree with you,” said Marshall. “Do your best to save them.”⁴ Eisenhower was now in charge of the program he had just proposed. He had passed the test, by arriving at a conclusion Marshall had already reached. Now all he had to do was make good on it, which apparently he did to Marshall’s satisfaction, for on February 16, Marshall made Eisenhower chief of the Plans (later renamed Operations) Division and a month later, promoted him.

An episode preceded this last that delightfully embroiders Marshall’s methods and the relationship, formal yet strong, that was building between these men. One day the subject of an officer’s promotion came up and Marshall took the opportunity to expound his theory that promotions should go only to field commanders and not to staff officers who clutter up the headquarters. “Take your case,” said Marshall. He knew that Eisenhower’s superiors had recommended him for divisional or even corps command. “That’s all very well. I’m glad they have that opinion of you, but you are going to stay here and fill your position, and that’s that.”

Eisenhower got a little angry. “General,” he said, “I’m interested in what you say, but I want you to know that I don’t give a damn about your promotion plans as far as I’m concerned. I came into this office from the field and I’m trying to do my duty. I expect to do so as long as you want me here. If that locks me to a desk for the rest of the war, so be it!” He got up and started to leave the room, but at the door he stopped and turned, a bit ashamed of himself for this outburst, and saw pass across the face of George C. Marshall the shadow of a smile. Three days later, there arrived on his desk a copy of Marshall’s recommendation to the President that he be made a major general.⁵

The man who had told Eisenhower about George Marshall was a major general named Fox Conner, a hard-bitten Mississippian with whom Eisenhower served in Panama in the early 1920s. Conner had been Pershing’s operations officer in France and spoke to Eisenhower often about Marshall’s “genius,” his fine judgment and integrity. Even after Eisenhower retired from the presidency in 1961, he said that Conner was the ablest man he had ever known, which covers a lot of territory. Conner was Eisenhower’s graduate school, his first true military education. As a boy, Eisenhower had been an omnivorous reader, but at West Point in his day military history was taught by rote, as a memory course, with no attempt to explain why battles happened or what their commanders were trying to do, and he had acquired an aversion to it.

Conner started him off on historical novels and then asked him if he wouldn’t like to know what the armies were up to during the same stretch of time. Before long, Eisenhower was borrowing one history book after another from Conner’s well-stocked library, and after he finished each, Conner would quiz him about it: Why had such and such a decision been made? What would have happened if it had been made otherwise? Eisenhower read Clausewitz’s On War three times. Conner gave him the courage to apply to Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth and the background that enabled him to graduate there first in his class. Eisenhower said later that it took him years to appreciate the value of what Conner had led him through.⁶

Conner also drummed into Eisenhower a set of convictions about the future: (1) the Treaty of Versailles made another war with Germany inevitable and it would come within thirty years; (2) it would be a coalition war and America would enter it; and (3) it would be won by the Western allies under a unified command. Eisenhower governed himself accordingly, so much so that some of his fellow officers called him “Alarmist Ike.” During one of Eisenhower’s early tours of duty in Washington, a friend noticed in his apartment a number of books about Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Low Countries, and asked why they were there. Because, said Eisenhower, that was where the next war was going to be fought and he intended to know more about it than anyone else. Conner must also have warned him that coalitions can be frustrating, for he noted on his desk pad in February 1942: “Conner was right about allies. He could well have included the Navy!”⁷

Eisenhower was always interested professionally (much more so than Marshall) in the technical side of warfare, especially tanks. In the early 1930s, he worked for the office of the assistant secretary of war on problems of industrial mobilization, involving such recondite subjects as synthetic rubber, and after consultation with Bernard Baruch, he drafted the War Department’s mobilization plan. He was one of the first in the General Staff to sense the importance of landing craft, and his papers during the months he headed the Ops Division are filled with indications of his strong feeling that not enough was being done to produce them. He was concerned about antitank weapons and he foresaw the need for army divisions to be equipped with a small “puddle-jumper” type of aircraft. Tanks he came to be familiar with when as a major he commanded a tank battalion in World War I (though it never got overseas), and in 1919 at Camp Meade, Maryland, he and a colonel named George S. Patton entirely disassembled a tank, including the engine, and put it back together again. (P.S. There were no parts left over and it was still in running order when they finished.)⁸

The association with Patton is noteworthy: “you are about my oldest friend,” Patton wrote Eisenhower in early 1942, after a visit to Washington. At Camp Meade, the two of them had been the center of a group of young officers, tank enthusiasts, who were trying to rewrite the doctrine for employing armor and to redesign the tanks that would execute it. The well-to-do Patton had his own stable of horses, and Eisenhower shared his devotion to riding and shooting, though a knee injury acquired playing football at West Point prevented him from indulging in Patton’s other passion, which was polo. “From the beginning he and I got along famously,” wrote Eisenhower. They had come to the conclusion that current infantry-oriented theory, and tanks that could go only three miles an hour, were all wrong. “We believed that they should be speedy,” Eisenhower wrote, “and that they should attack by surprise and in mass … [to] make possible not only an advance by infantry, but envelopments of, or actual breakthroughs in, whole defensive positions”—fairly unorthodox stuff for 1920—and these heretics had found a tank designer who thought as they did.⁹

J. Walter Christie is an unsung hero of American military technology. He was a builder and driver of fast motorcars, ranking with Barney Old-field; he designed the standard turret track for battleships and the first four-wheel-drive mobile gun mounts. He has justly been called the father of the modern tank, for he was the first to realize that an ability to cover rough ground rapidly was a desirable characteristic. This is a function of compression amplitude, or the degree to which the wheels within the tank tracks can move up and down. World War I tanks had a compression amplitude of two to three inches at the most; a Christie tank had one of twenty-four inches, could do sixty miles an hour on tracks (faster with the tracks removed), and could climb a two-and-a-half-foot wall and jump a seven-foot trench.

Christie like many military pioneers believed that his inventions “would make war too costly for civilization to withstand,” but Eisenhower and Patton recognized what Christie had to offer them, and they were delighted when the Ordnance Department in June 1920 signed a contract with him for a prototype chassis. Eisenhower wrote that Christie “was designing a model we thought had many advantages over those of the war vintage.” Patton said he understood that “in the Christie [tank] we are buying a principle not a vehicle.” Patton went on supporting and working actively with Christie over the next ten years, and may even have provided him with funds—which Christie badly needed.¹⁰

For this man’s way was not an easy one. Engineers respected his ideas but not his personality; he thought he could do everything better than they could, which was not always so. Ordnance purchased a total of seven tanks from him but then refused to declare the model standard or to pay him further. (It was a time of wait and see on American arms development.) Christie began investing his own money in his product, including an airborne variant, and in 1928 he sold two Christie tanks to the Soviet Union, where they became known as the “Christie-Russki” and were copied by the thousands. Over the years, the Russians beefed up the “Christie-Russki” in the heaviness of the gun and the thickness of the armor, until eventually it became the T-34, by common consent the best tank of World War II, bearing a recognizable configuration clearly derived from Christie’s original.¹¹

It was with the T-34 that the Russians fought the Battle of Kursk in July 1943, greatest tank battle of all time—Todesritt, the Germans called it, the death ride of the panzers, the defeat from which they could not recover. Russian T-34s in the hundreds charged at full speed across the open country of the upper Donets valley—“streaming like rats across the battlefield,” said one German Tiger tank commander—and on August 5, Moscow celebrated its first “victory salute” of a hundred and fifty guns. “The Tigers are burning,” reads a Russian dispatch.¹² The Germans in Russia never again took the offensive; the vision of the young Eisenhower at Camp Meade two decades before—surprise, mobility, mass—had been realized. Christie lived to survive, though unhappily not to savor, this victory; he died—destitute, facing eviction, and suing the government—on January 11, 1944.¹³

That Eisenhower knew Patton so well, and inhabited a common universe of tactical discourse with him, was one of the more fortunate circumstances of the war. Eisenhower, as a stranger might not have been able to, could see Patton’s strength and understand his weakness, preserving him from the consequences of his loudmouth indiscretions for the performance of tasks that no one else could carry out so well as he. We are the better off for that, by many lives and many victories Patton spared others the burden of winning (the present author was a minute quantity among that multitude), and we have Eisenhower to thank. Behind Patton’s blood-and-guts personality was an absolute professional, one of the most competent army commanders our side put into the field; the Germans were painstaking in their analysis of the leaders who faced them in battle, and Patton was the only Anglo-American who seriously troubled them. They could never predict what he was going to do next. Yet it was not in him to accept Eisenhower’s magnanimity with good grace; Patton’s diaries and letters to his wife reveal his discomfort in references to Eisenhower as “Divine Destiny” and in reflections on how much better the war would be fought if he and not Eisenhower were supreme commander.¹⁴

Something similar happened to Eisenhower’s relationship with MacArthur, with whom he served in both Washington and Manila during the 1930s. For a time they had worked closely and harmoniously together, and as a writer Eisenhower may even have been at least a co-inventor of the florid MacArthurian prose style. “You know that General MacArthur got quite a reputation as a silver-tongued speaker when he was in the Philippines,” Eisenhower wrote to a friend. “Who do you think wrote his speeches? I did.” MacArthur was Eisenhower’s first exposure to a senior officer who chose not to draw a clear-cut distinction between the military and the political in Washington’s commingling of the two, who had a wide acquaintance with people in every branch of government. “Working with him brought an additional dimension to my experience,” said Eisenhower.¹⁵

MacArthur was aware that Eisenhower had been directing the War Department efforts to reinforce him but ignored this, and his reaction to Eisenhower’s progress toward eminence in Europe was a mixture of envy and something close to paranoia. MacArthur told his British liaison officer, Gerald Wilkinson, that Eisenhower had not been “wholly loyal” and that for this reason MacArthur had not kept him on in the Philippines when his term was up. (Eisenhower says the opposite: that he requested to be let go and that MacArthur tried to persuade him to stay on; given the choice, belief inclines toward Eisenhower.)¹⁶ MacArthur told Wilkinson that he thought Eisenhower, “spotting White House jealousy of himself (MacA) has enhanced his own position by feeding the White House with anti-MacA data”—a delusion on MacArthur’s part, to say the least.

MacArthur described Eisenhower to Wilkinson as “the ablest officer he has ever known at absorbing 30 minutes detailed description of an idea (or plan or strategic conception?) and getting the whole thing out on paper—orders, arrangements etc etc—in 10 minutes.” According to Wilkinson’s journal, MacArthur said that Eisenhower was “ambitious, clever, hardworking (an excellent bridge player) … a brilliant executive of someone else’s original thought but not—as far as MacA knows—in any way an original mind—and no fighting experience…. MacA thinks (and possibly almost hopes) that commanding real fighting British officers will shew up E’s defects [sic] true proportions.”¹⁷

Eisenhower in turn had no illusions about MacArthur but acknowledged the power of the man’s personality and his capacity for leadership. When Eisenhower took command in the European theater, an off-the-record dinner was arranged for him in London to meet a group of American correspondents, who quizzed him about MacArthur. Eisenhower described the now-familiar characteristics—the ego, the love of the limelight, the self-dramatization, the unstable temperament—and then added: “Yet, if that door opened at this moment, and General MacArthur was standing there, and he said ‘Ike, follow me,’ I’d get up and follow him.”¹⁸

Of Eisenhower’s respect for Marshall there can be no doubt; he told Beetle Smith that he wouldn’t trade Marshall for fifty MacArthurs. (“My God,” the thought came to him, “that would be a lousy deal. What would I do with fifty MacArthurs?”) Eisenhower wrote to a friend that Marshall was “a great soldier … quick, tough, tireless and a real leader. He accepts responsibility automatically and never goes back on a subordinate.” Eisenhower said that he had conceived “unlimited admiration” for Marshall because of the burden Marshall bore without complaint, being at the same time “rather a remote and austere person.” Eisenhower had been known in the Army as “Ike” since the day he entered West Point, but Marshall (except on one occasion) always called him “Eisenhower.” The one exceptional lapse into “Ike” so embarrassed Marshall that Eisenhower said he used “Eisenhower” five times in the next sentence to make up for it.¹⁹

The American military have a wise custom allowing officers in a high command relationship to exchange not only formal reports but personal letters in which they unburden their thoughts to one another (as before the war Admiral Stark did to Admiral Kimmel). It is an admirable if not always foolproof device for avoiding misunderstandings. The letters of Eisenhower to Marshall (published separately from the Eisenhower papers under the title Dear General) are of singular interest in the picture they provide of the way these two men interacted, with Eisenhower exposing his judgments on men and events so that Marshall, if so he wished, could offer corrections or suggestions. There seem to have been few of either.

Marshall had a very large respect for Eisenhower’s mind; he wanted it kept in trim, for he well knew that a sharp mental edge can be a wasting asset. When he visited Algiers in January 1943, Marshall had a long post-breakfast chat with Eisenhower’s naval aide, Commander Harry C. Butcher, in which he virtually “ordered” Butcher to make Eisenhower relax, get him outdoors as much as possible, get him home early, get him to take regular exercise. Marshall did not like working with people whose ideas went no further than his own; he had enjoyed Eisenhower’s alive and inventive approach but wanted it preserved for future challenges to come. “You must keep him refreshed,” Marshall told Butcher. “It is your job in the war to make him take care of his health and keep that alert brain from overworking, particularly on things his staff can do for him.” Eisenhower might think he had encountered troubles thus far, Marshall said, but he would have so many more before the war was over that those up to now would be nothing.²⁰

As he had done before becoming deputy chief of the plans division, Eisenhower designed the next job he would hold. He wrote for Marshall the basic strategy of a European war and in May 1942 Marshall sent him to London, ostensibly to study command arrangements for an invasion but actually to let the British have a look at him (Eisenhower met Brooke, Montgomery, and Mountbatten, among others²¹).

On his return, Eisenhower revised a directive he had written outlining the role of Commanding General, ETOUSA (European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army) and showed it to Marshall, asking him to read it carefully because it was likely to be an important document in the subsequent course of the war. “I certainly do want to read it,” said Marshall. “You may be the man who executes it. If that’s the case, when can you leave?” Eisenhower professed his astonishment in a desk-pad note;²² on June 24, he arrived in London to take charge.

This was a most unusual man, a veiled man, so seemingly forthright, so ready to volunteer his thoughts, yet in the end so secretive, so protective of his purposes and the hidden processes of an iron logic behind them. A reviewer of his published diaries commented on his “closed, calculating quality” and went on: “Few who watched him carefully indulged the fantasy that he was a genial, open, barefoot boy from Abilene who just happened to be in the right place when lightning struck.”²³ Another perceptive comment was made by the war correspondent Don Whitehead, who covered the European theater and the invasion for the Associated Press. “I have the feeling,” Whitehead wrote years later, “that he was a far more complicated man than he seemed to be—a man who shaped events with such subtlety that he left others thinking they were the architects of those events. And he was satisfied to leave it that way.”²⁴

Eisenhower conveyed warmth but there was a chill inside him. An early sorrow, the death of his first son, had seared his emotional nerve endings. “This was the greatest disappointment and disaster of my life,” he wrote, “the one I have never been able to forget completely. Today when I think of it, even now as I write of it, the keenness of our loss comes back to me as fresh and terrible as it was that long dark day.” He came to question whether passionate attachment to another person was a luxury that could be afforded. In 1947, he was told of the crack-up over personal loss of a wartime associate and wrote in his diary: “makes one wonder whether any human ever dares become so wrapped up in another that all happiness and desire to live is determined by the actions, desires—or life—of the second.” The associate in question was Kay Summersby, his driver and secretary, to whom he himself appears for a time to have been attached, and his words bear the mark of a steely will.²⁵

Not the least of the paradoxes is that Eisenhower wrote such lucid and at times almost elegant prose. (The impression he later gave as President, of waffling vagueness and wandering syntax, was contrived for presidential purposes; Roosevelt himself was no less guilty of similar obfuscations when required.) During the 1920s in France, Eisenhower wrote the guidebook of the American Battle Monuments Commission and among the many speeches he wrote for MacArthur was a much-admired one called “Farewell to the Army,” which MacArthur delivered when he resigned as Chief of Staff. Eisenhower dictated Crusade in Europe in seven weeks. For years, he kept Fowler’s Modern English Usage at close hand, and he was said to have fired an aide who couldn’t master the difference between “shall” and “will.” He told John Gunther that he thought very few officers knew “how to use the English language.” After V-E Day, when he was made a citizen of London, he gave a speech at the Guildhall that Gunther accurately describes as “pithy, vivid, not a word wasted, no false oratory, and moving in the extreme.”²⁶

The Guildhall speech is the capstone of Eisenhower’s conduct of the war and the keystone, to preserve the metaphor, of his postwar career as Allied leader and as President. It was an impressive achievement; even Brooke was awed (“I had never realized that Ike was as big a man,” he wrote in his diary, “until I heard his performance today”²⁷). As far as can be proved, Eisenhower did write it himself (he told Gunther that he had worked on it for three weeks; no one else has published a claim of authorship).

In it he said that he could receive the honor of London’s citizenship only as representative of all the Allied men and women who had served with him, and that no commander could contemplate with anything but humility and profound sorrow the blood that had been shed and the sacrifices that had been made. He wove together the theme of his rural American origins with the historic grandeur of London, with the admiration Americans felt for British endurance, with the readiness of free men to defend their freedom, with the success of the Allied partnership, and with the hope that it would continue on into a world where wars would not be necessary. This was a political speech in the best sense of the word, drawing people together and, as though accidentally, offering himself as symbol of their unity.²⁸

Eisenhower disliked excessively rhetorical flourishes because they betrayed a desire to be ingratiating, or overly persuasive, or too eager for promotion. Fox Conner had drilled him in the army mystique of never seeking or refusing an assignment, and Eisenhower always managed matters so that the assignments sought him. His gift for being offered jobs he had not asked for would appear almost magical if one did not keep in mind “that alert brain” at work. One of the most tedious and revealing sections of his “diaries” deals with the self-examination he went through to persuade himself to run for President in 1952. Couldn’t the man see? the reader keeps asking himself. No, he could not. It was not in his nature to appear to want something; his nature was to be wanted. And so he progressed from obscurity—he first appears in the White House Usher’s Diary at two-thirty on February 9, 1942, as “P. D. Eisenhauer”—to greatness. His rise was rocketlike. Within less than two years he went from lieutenant colonel to full general.

His exposure to politics in the raw came as rapidly as his promotions. When he was appointed to command the North African expedition, Eisenhower was briefed by Robert Murphy, our diplomatic representative there, on the “bewildering complexities” of the quarrels among not only French factions but Spanish, Arab, Berber, German, and Russian as well. “Eisenhower listened with a kind of horrified fascination,” wrote Murphy, “to my description of the possible complications…. The General seemed to sense that this first campaign would present him with problems running the entire geopolitical gamut—it certainly did.”²⁹ What he could not have realized was that it would also place him in the crossfire between two towering political personalities, Franklin Roosevelt and Charles de Gaulle.

Say this, too, for Eisenhower: He was able to confront himself, in words and on paper, with the harsh unpleasantness of the work that lay ahead. “The actual fact is,” he wrote in a note to his desk pad on May 5, 1942, “that not 1 man in 20 in Govt. (including the W. and N. Depts) realizes what a grisly, dirty, tough business we are in!”³⁰

♦

Roosevelt knew France and considered himself well conversant with it. From the age of seven to fifteen he annually traveled several months in England, France, and Germany with his parents. On his first visit, in 1889–90, he played in the parks and gardens of Versailles and the Tuileries, walked the Champs Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne, and climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower with his father. “Furthermore,” as de Gaulle shrewdly observed, “he felt a genuine affection for France, or at least for the notion of it he had once been able to conceive” (emphasis added). Roosevelt from age five to eleven had been tutored by European governesses and he spoke French (as opposed to the fractured Harrovian Franglais Churchill invented for himself) well enough to be proud of it. “He is affronted and insulted,” reads a memo to Herbert Bayard Swope signed with Grace Tully’s initials, “by your suggestion that his French is ‘as good’ as that of Winston … the President’s accent is not only infinitely superior but his French profanity is so explosive that you had better not be within a half mile of him when it goes off.”³¹

De Gaulle thought it was Roosevelt’s very attraction to France that caused him to be “at heart disappointed and irritated by yesterday’s disaster among us [the defeat in 1940] and by the mediocre reactions the latter had aroused among so many Frenchmen, particularly those he knew personally.” The France Roosevelt observed was the prewar Third Republic, which provided the world such an unedifying picture of hooded Fascists, decadent aristocrats, sullen proletarians, and left-wing intellectual politicians tearing one another to bits in the aftermath of historic arguments that had never been resolved but only postponed. Roosevelt described to de Gaulle with bitterness what his feelings had been “when before the war he watched the spectacle of our political impotence unfold before his eyes.” It was not to be wondered that the President’s expectations for postwar France were set so low, that he thought it would take ten or twenty years to reestablish France as an important power, and that in the meantime he felt himself to be in some measure a custodian of her fate. “It seemed to me,” wrote Anthony Eden, “that Roosevelt wanted to hold the strings of France’s future in his own hands.”³²

In this the President reckoned without Charles de Gaulle, who knew the flaws in the French character as well as or better than Roosevelt did but knew also that the way to redeem it was to ennoble it. De Gaulle intended to purify France in the process of saving her. He instinctively appreciated that to distract his countrymen’s attention from each other one must keep their eyes on the flag—“France cannot be France without greatness”—and hold before them an embodiment of national aspiration and unity even if that had to be, faute de mieux, oneself. He must yield nothing, nowhere and to no one, in this endeavor; obstinacy must become his armor. And so he undertook what he called the “perpetual bondage” of symbolizing “the image of a France indomitable in the midst of her trials.”

De Gaulle by sheer determination and force of character (and British help) established the existence of a “Free” France apart from and opposed to the defeated and past-enshrouded government in Vichy, and he did it over Roosevelt’s prolonged and strenuous obstructions and objections. Gaullism as a faith made the President uncomfortable because it challenged faith in himself and his convictions, but it was nonetheless very wrong of him to put down and disparage as mere ego what he of all people should have recognized as self-identification with destiny, at a level so high that the word “ego” becomes meaningless (perhaps that is why it made him so angry); and he continued to make this mistake even after—on de Gaulle’s visit to Washington in July 1944—Roosevelt began to treat de Gaulle as someone to be taken seriously. De Gaulle was a far better and more fair-minded judge of Roosevelt than Roosevelt was of him, and it is depressing to have to record that the President seemed never to assimilate this.³³

The President, Secretary Hull, and Admiral Leahy as our ambassador there were all more comfortable with Vichy France than they had any call to be. The State Department’s striped-pants affinities, and the President’s preference for the company of well-bred foreigners, combined to disastrous effect. Leahy had moments of admiring Petain. In his first report, he spoke of the marshal’s “vigor and strength of character,” and of his “personal appreciation of the friendly attitude of America.” Leahy thought that by discouraging de Gaulle we would stiffen Petain’s resolve to take a stronger stand against the Germans, an absurd hope. (State Department officials like Roy Atherton, acting chief of the Division of European Affairs, strongly subscribed to this same anti-Gaullist argument.)

Roosevelt sent Petain a letter of “sympathy and understanding” for his “steadfast courage and determination” in fighting for a “free and independent France,” an absurd characterization of Petain’s conduct in office. The President seemed almost to feel that France and Petain deserved one another, and that the marshal was thus a logical figure on whom to base American policy. Roosevelt was convinced that once the Germans withdrew, France would undergo a revolution in which its myriad political factions, unable to arrive at stability, would end up with a “federal form of government” on the American model, an absurd vision of a France not renewed but merely put on hold in the President’s imagination.³⁴

Roosevelt clothed his policy toward the Vichy regime in a mantle of high principle. He said that he had a sacred duty to the French people not to impose a government on them against their will. He would not recognize “any one person or group as the Government of France,” as he told Robert Murphy, “until a liberated French population could freely choose their own government.” Though these feelings were no doubt genuine, they happily accorded with his less elevated motives—his plain dislike of de Gaulle, his mistaken belief that in a free election de Gaulle would lose—and the line he followed in practice was one of outright expediency: hoping that Petain and his colleagues could be kept from coming totally under German domination, hoping to detach or at least immobilize the French fleet at Toulon, hoping that Vichy-appointed officials in North Africa would welcome an American invasion.

Of this last point the President was particularly persuaded. His government, wrote Harold Macmillan (who was sent to Algiers in December by Churchill with the rank of minister, to advise Eisenhower), “suffered under the delusion, to some extent shared by the American people, that they were especially popular in France.” Roosevelt on invasion’s eve thought he could convince Petain that his sending of troops to North Africa had no other purpose in view than “to support and aid the French and their administration.” He had confidently written Churchill in September that an “American expedition led … by American officers will meet little resistance from the French army in Africa…. I have several experienced civilians who would be persona grata to accompany the landings and be charged with getting French civil co-operation.”³⁵ There was unseemly condescension here.

Eisenhower’s policy was one of expediency pure and unalloyed. An element of bluff still attended the Allied enterprise and he was charged with sustaining it. He simply did not have enough troops to maintain a military occupation of Morocco and Algeria while at the same time fighting the Germans in Tunisia, his most immediate task. That being so, the French would have to govern for him; he had neither any choice in the matter nor any way of explaining this without giving the game away.

The result was the so-called Darlan-Clark Agreement—literally wrung out of Admiral Darlan by General Mark Clark and later signed in its full form on November 23—which established the right of the Allied forces to be in North Africa at the price of retaining the existing (Vichyite) administration. Once made known, it produced howls of outrage from the press and politicians in both Britain and the United States. It was denounced as “a sordid nullification of the principles for which the United Nations were supposed to be fighting.” De Gaulle expressed his contempt by asserting that elimination of the “guilty men” who had taken their orders from Vichy was an essential precondition for Gaullist cooperation with any French North African authority.³⁶

There was no little virtue in the negative reaction. Among the French of North Africa, the colons, were many if anything more admiring of the Germans and antipathetic to the Allies than the Vichy government they professed to serve. The large landowners of Morocco were so sunk in greed, so contemptuous of democracy, so pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic—thus spoke A. J. Liebling of them—that they “had not really collaborated with the Nazis; the Nazis had come along belatedly and collaborated with them.”³⁷ Since the armistice in 1940, they had happily exported to Germany their grain, their fruit, and the alcohol made from their brandy, which the Germans had paid for in paper francs of dubious value. Then we came along, pegged their currency, and made real millionaires out of them—and still they hated us. There were many unpleasant incidents of Vichy-appointed officials, with our apparent blessing, continuing to persecute and imprison Jews and the pro-Allied French who had expected us to come as benefactors. It took some time to undo all this, though undone it eventually was.

In the process, the general educated the President as often as the latter the former. Eisenhower was aided by events that mercifully cleared the air. Vichy did not bend before our windy puffs of goodwill. The day after the Allied landings, the Germans, with Vichy’s consent, began to send troops to Tunisia. In violation of the Armistice, and throwing all pretense aside, they moved their army into that part of France they were not occupying already. Petain repudiated Darlan’s cease-fire, and Darlan’s order that the fleet leave Toulon to join the Allies was ignored.

When the Germans tried to seize the ships, however, in a glorious if tardy gesture, the French Navy—one battleship, two battle cruisers, seven cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers and torpedo boats, and sixteen submarines—scuttled itself in port. (Few who were present will forget the performance that evening of the Boston Symphony, which opened its concert not with “The Star-Spangled Banner” but with the Marseillaise; there was scarcely a dry eye in the house.) Then on Christmas Eve, irrelevantly but providentially, Darlan was assassinated by a young anti-Nazi royalist.

Eisenhower had started the exercise that led to his ascendancy over misguided superiors by establishing his credentials. When the furor over the “Darlan Deal” broke around his head, he had written a cable to the Combined Chiefs (dated November 14) asserting his competence to judge local conditions and to take action on the basis of them. He began by stating bluntly that what he had been told to expect was not borne out by what he had found: “The actual state of existing sentiment here does not repeat not agree even remotely with some of prior calculations.” The idea that French affection for Americans would overpower their sense of loyalty to their legally constituted government—or cause them to take orders from the figurehead we offered them, General Henri Giraud—was self-deceptive.

The French stopped fighting because Darlan, as their legitimate leader, had told them to; they would obey no one else. An early conquest of Tunisia would be impossible without his aid. No one who was not there on the ground could have any clear appreciation of what Eisenhower called “the complex currents of feeling and of prejudice that influence the situation.” If the two governments were dissatisfied with the measures he had taken, then they should send British, American, and even Gaullist representatives to Algiers, “where, in ten minutes, they can be convinced of the soundness of the moves we have made.”³⁸

On receiving Eisenhower’s communication, the Combined Chiefs sent it to the President at Hyde Park. Sherwood has recounted how Roosevelt then declaimed it aloud to him and to Hopkins, giving it the full treatment, almost as if it were one of his speeches; “he sounded as though he were making an eloquent plea for Eisenhower before the bar of history,” wrote Sherwood. Well might the President be impressed. Here was an extraordinary thing: a general who could think politically, with cool realism, and then act with an amorality worthy of the Old Master himself. He was discovering a man who would one day reveal gifts for handling “complex currents of feeling and of prejudice” to rival his own.

Two days later, at a press conference, the President read a public statement backing Eisenhower’s “temporary arrangement” and privately he sent the general a message of support, adding that Darlan was not to be trusted or kept in civil power “any longer than is absolutely necessary.” To his press conference Roosevelt quoted what he said was an “old Bulgarian proverb of the Orthodox Church: ‘My children, you are permitted in time of great danger to walk with the Devil until you have crossed the bridge.’”³⁹

Darlan’s death spared Eisenhower the eventual task of discarding him, but it raised the embarrassing question of who would be his replacement. Giraud filled the bill briefly but ineffectually; he had by now shown himself clearly to be no long-term answer. By the time of the Casablanca Conference, in January 1943, Eisenhower was being advised politically by Murphy and Macmillan, whom he trusted, and they had formed common cause. They were agreed that there must be a merger of Giraud’s North African administration and de Gaulle’s French Committee for National Liberation in London, under Giraud’s and de Gaulle’s joint leadership.

Macmillan liked Murphy and sympathized with the vulnerable position in which he had placed himself, having had to make contact with Frenchmen both reputable and disreputable, and to incur obligations that had become difficult to fulfill. “Murphy,” wrote Macmillan, “was inexorably caught in the meshes of a past which everybody now wished to forget.” Murphy’s French acquaintances were aristocrats, Roman Catholic (like himself), and authoritarian in politics; for the job next needing to be done they were the wrong allies. Macmillan thus admired Murphy all the more for being willing to support a policy and program that would not please his friends nor be welcomed in the State Department and the White House, and he admired Eisenhower in turn for having the fortitude to give the two of them authority and let them carry out their notion of a Giraud–de Gaulle binary regime.

It was an unequal partnership, bound to advance the cause of one at the expense of the other. “De Gaulle was strong, but uncertain,” wrote Macmillan. “Giraud was reliable, but weak.” Steadily during the spring, the influence and popularity of de Gaulle grew, the Americans became increasingly disenchanted with Giraud’s stupidity, and pressure built up for the formal recognition by Britain and the United States of de Gaulle’s French Committee for National Liberation. This was resisted every inch of the way by President Roosevelt, who protested and repeatedly expressed his inalterable opposition. In June, Roosevelt proposed to Eisenhower and Churchill that they break with de Gaulle entirely, and Eisenhower (with Macmillan’s strong encouragement) had to calm him down.⁴⁰

“More clearly than Roosevelt …,” writes Eisenhower’s biographer Stephen Ambrose, “Eisenhower recognized de Gaulle’s strength…. [He] also realized—as Roosevelt did not—that de Gaulle could not be intimidated or bribed.” Eisenhower remained patient and steady through weeks of tedious and complicated argument. “If the President knew how much [his] policy is disliked and even despised by the American Army here,” Macmillan wrote in his letter-diary to his wife on July 27, “I think he would get a rude shock.” On August 4, Churchill cabled Roosevelt calling attention to Macmillan’s and Murphy’s view “that extreme bitterness and resentment will be caused among all classes of Frenchmen by continued refusal” to recognize the FCNL.⁴¹

Losing interest, and with fewer and fewer on his side, the President backed away. By August 26, a compromise had been worked out for parallel (American and British) statements of recognition of the FCNL, differing slightly in formula but each acceptable to the other and, unexpectedly, to both de Gaulle and Giraud. A milestone had been passed in the politico-military conduct of the alliance in its relations with a major once and future ally. Roosevelt to the contrary, de Gaulle was now in effect prime minister of a provisional government of France.

It was a solution generally along the lines Eisenhower had recommended, and it secured tranquillity in the rear-area base of the military operations he was conducting in Sicily and would open soon in Italy. Over the intransigence of his Commander in Chief, he had achieved what the military necessities required, and had built the foundation for a political accommodation with the French future that the President’s policy would have frustrated.

Eisenhower, too, had grown. He and Omar Bradley, though West Point classmates, had seen one another scarcely a half-dozen times in the years since, and when Bradley reported to Eisenhower at the St. Georges hotel in Algiers, he found a larger human being than he had remembered. “Ike had matured,” he wrote, “into a charming man with a first-class mind.” John Eisenhower noticed the change in his father. “Before he left for Europe in 1942,” young Eisenhower said, “I knew him as an aggressive, intelligent personality.” Then there had been a transformation “from a mere person to a personage … full of authority, and truly in command.”⁴²

Eisenhower was not yet in Roosevelt’s full confidence, but he was gaining a place there. At the Casablanca Conference, he had dined with the President and given him details that had not earlier reached Washington on Darlan’s actual position (Roosevelt had not realized the degree to which the admiral had been virtually an American prisoner). He took the opportunity to explain why he had proceeded in the “Darlan Deal” without Washington’s permission; it was central to Eisenhower’s thinking that generals can be replaced if they make mistakes, governments cannot. This pleased the President, but he still held back when later in the conference Marshall urged him to promote Eisenhower to full general. Roosevelt wanted to wait until there was some “damn good reason.”⁴³ He wanted a victory.

♦

The Tunisian campaign was the education of the Americans, and of their commander. Eisenhower had never before led troops in combat; those units under him of his own nationality had never before fought the Germans, let alone Rommel, the Desert Fox. They would do so under rain and leaden sky, in a hilly, bare, and rock-strewn country, far at the end of tenuous supply lines, fragmented and at times confused in command, and in company with allies they did not particularly like, who heartily disliked them in turn. When it was over, the enemy would have suffered a greater loss in men than the Germans did at Stalingrad, the Americans would have absorbed and surmounted the experience of failure, and the groundwork would have been built for that uneasy but firm coordination between them and the British that won battle after battle to come.

Eisenhower and Patton had been right in their estimate that the odds of reaching Tunisia before the Germans did were no better than fifty-fifty. Eisenhower ordered a British force called an army but in fact consisting of scarcely two divisions to move eastward as rapidly as possible. Communications were miserable—the four hundred miles from Algiers to Tunis were covered by a rudimentary single-track railroad and a two-lane dirt road—and the weather was worse, turning the ground into mud that engulfed vehicles and aircraft. Eisenhower ordered Combat Command B (CCB) of the 1st Armored Division to go forward with the British, over the objections of George Patton (help the British!) and of a staff officer obsessed by regulations who said that driving half-tracks that far would wear them out. On Christmas Eve, Eisenhower was forward at “army” headquarters in Medjez-el-Bab. About thirty feet off the road, he saw four soldiers struggling to get a motorcycle out of the mud; by the time they gave up, it was in deeper than when they started. That convinced him; he called off the attack. The race to Tunis from the west had been lost.⁴⁴

As the British under General Sir Harold R. L. G. Alexander approached Tunisia from the east, there arose a delicate question of command. It was resolved at Casablanca. Somewhat to Marshall’s surprise, the British members of the Combined Chiefs proposed that Eisenhower continue as Supreme Commander, with three British deputies: Alexander for land forces, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder for air, and Admiral Sir Andrew B. Cunningham for sea—all of whom were one grade senior to him! There were good reasons for this: Eisenhower got on well with Tedder and Cunningham and he had already established the only genuinely Allied headquarters in North Africa. The move was flattering to the Americans while preserving the British “committee” approach to command, which was their normal practice and preference. Yet British intentions were complex. “We were pushing Eisenhower up into the stratosphere and rarefied atmosphere of a supreme commander,” wrote Brooke, “where he would be free to devote his time to the political and inter-allied programs.”⁴⁵ The day-to-day conduct of the campaign would be handled by the triumvirate of Britons, or so he thought. They misread their man.

Eisenhower did not believe that in modern warfare such a fragmentation of authority would work, and in retrospect there is much to be said for his—i.e., the American—viewpoint. He was delighted to be Supreme Commander, but to him that did not mean just sitting in Algiers receiving dignitaries, worrying about de Gaulle, and announcing victories. He intended to command. When the Combined Chiefs sent him directives in mid-January spelling out organizational procedures in a detail he thought to be his business and not theirs, he dictated a scorching reply that Beetle Smith persuaded him to tone down. Marshall had clearly counseled Eisenhower at Casablanca not to let British conceptions of organization prevail, and he did not. “As far as I am concerned,” he wrote Marshall on February 8, “no attention will be paid to such observations…. I believe that I have grasped your idea and that I will be constantly on my guard to prevent any important military venture depending for its control and direction upon the ‘committee’ system of command.”⁴⁶

Eisenhower was dissatisfied with the way things were going. He wanted the 1st Armored Division to operate as a unit, concentrated, not scattered around the countryside, and he was angry when he discovered—despite his orders—that this was not being done. He wanted supply to be better organized, and pressed the Joint Chiefs for more trucks (five thousand, with Admiral King providing convoys, were soon on the way). He was dismayed to discover that the overall American commander, Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall of II Corps, was digging his headquarters into caves near Tebessa, some hundred miles behind the front, and he pressed Fredendall to make commanders go forward (to no avail, in Fredendall’s case).

Most of all he was concerned about the poor performance of American soldiers. Air and ground force coordination was inadequate; the physical condition of the men left much to be desired. “Troops must be hard,” he wrote to his commanders, ordering cross-country runs and something better than perfunctory calisthenics. Combat exercises must be continuous, especially at the level of squad, platoon, and company. “I cannot urge too strongly,” wrote Eisenhower, “that emphasis be placed on individual and small unit training.”⁴⁷

The test that Eisenhower anticipated was soon to come, in a composite of battles that are grouped together under the generic name Kasserine Pass. The German Afrika Korps under Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel had been retreating westward through Libya, with British Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery, in not exactly ardent pursuit. (Montgomery was a week or so behind the Germans and was not doing them much damage.) Rommel, safely beyond a prepared position in the Mareth Line, decided the opportunity had been offered him to turn in the other direction and teach the Americans a lesson, to strike them a blow so savage that it would thereafter linger in their memories, would establish the same kind of moral ascendancy Robert E. Lee achieved by similar means—and relied on to fuddle the minds of his opponents—would (in Rommel’s own words) “instil in them from the outset an inferiority complex of no mean order.”⁴⁸ In this he failed, though not for lack of effort on his part.

Eisenhower, informed by British (Ultra) intelligence that an attack impended but not sure where, spent the afternoon of February 13 consulting with his officers at corps and Combat Command A of the 1st Armored. He came as far forward as the front lines at Sidi Bou Zid, where a little after midnight he went for a walk in the desert under a shining moon. To the east he could just make out the gap in the black mountains at Faid Pass; all was quiet. He returned to his car and the long drive back to II Corps headquarters, which he reached around five-thirty in the morning, to learn that the Germans were attacking through Faid Pass. This was the 10th Panzer Division, which had come over from France. It wiped out an American tank battalion, overran a battalion of artillery, isolated two large pockets of American troops, and drove Combat Command A out of Sidi Bou Zid, back toward Sbeitla. CCA lost ninety-eight tanks, fifty-seven half-tracks, and twenty-nine field guns. “It had,” writes Stephen Ambrose, “in effect, been destroyed.”⁴⁹

The German onslaught was in two spearheads, of which this was the northernmost, and it was the other, to the south, that on February 19 arrived at Kasserine Pass, which was held by a mixed bag of American and British infantry, artillery, engineers, and tank destroyers. The Germans had achieved a deep penetration into the Allied front; it would eventually go twice as deep as the Bulge, the similar counterattack they later launched in Europe, but it was similarly unsuccessful in reaching its goal. Rommel broke through at Kasserine Pass. He himself was present on the nineteenth, urging 10th Panzer forward against what he described as “extremely well placed American artillery and mortar fire from the hills.” By 5:00 P.M., the Germans held the pass and were pressing forward toward Thala and the road to Tebessa. Thus far and no farther.

Rommel thought that the Germans had committed a tactical error. Their first attack at Kasserine had been made not by 10th Panzer but by a task force of Afrika Korps veterans from the desert, and it failed. They had relied on their skills in using armor to push through on the valley floor, even though the Americans held the heights above and called down on them that “well placed” artillery fire. They should have “combined hill and valley tactics,” Rommel wrote, “and should have taken possession of the hills on either side of the pass,” as under his angry goading they before long did. “The Americans had fought extremely well,” Rommel added, “and [German] losses had been considerable.”

When they pressed on through Kasserine Pass, the desert veterans, to Rommel’s annoyance, again held to the valley bottom and again the British and American artillery brought them to a halt. The next day, Rommel concluded that the enemy had grown too strong for him and broke off the offensive. American losses in the Kasserine battles had been heavy—over two hundred tanks shot up and four thousand men captured—and the American commanders, as Rommel surmised, had been shaken in their confidence. But for the American soldiery as a whole, it had been a humiliation rather than a major defeat. They had learned a great deal, and they would come out of Tunisia stronger than they entered it.

Eisenhower had been very busy: ordering the 9th Division artillery forward, stripping 2d Armored and 3d Infantry of equipment to send II Corps, cannibalizing other units intended for the invasion of Sicily, to get trucks, tanks, and ammunition—not the distant “chairman of the board” commander Brooke had in mind and others have pictured him as being. Above all, a sense of “inferiority” had turned upon those who had planned to “instil” it. The Americans, wrote Rommel, “made up for their lack of experience by their far better and more plentiful equipment and their tactically more flexible command … we could look forward with but small hope of success to the coming mobile battles.”⁵⁰

♦

Eisenhower had established an advance headquarters at Constantine under the direction of Major General Lucian K. Truscott as his deputy chief of staff (Truscott later commanded Fifth Army during the drive into northern Italy). Truscott was dismayed, as Eisenhower was, at the bickering between allies at the senior level and the bickering even of American commanders among themselves. Fredendall had been put in charge of II Corps at Marshall’s behest, so that Eisenhower was reluctant to relieve him, but gradually it became apparent that Fredendall would have to go. “Small in stature, loud and rough in speech,” wrote Truscott of Fredendall, “he was outspoken in his opinions and critical of superiors and subordinates alike…. He rarely left his command post … yet he was impatient with the recommendations of subordinates more familiar with the terrain and other conditions than he was.”⁵¹ Fredendall was promoted to lieutenant general and returned home to a hero’s welcome, but he never commanded in combat again. To replace him, Eisenhower turned to George Patton.

Patton was to lead II Corps for forty-three days (before returning to his more important task of preparing for the invasion of Sicily), and it was during this period that he acquired his reputation as a rigid disciplinarian in trivial things. He needed some way of making every member of II Corps aware that they had a new commander and that the days of sloppiness and defeat were over; casting about, he hit upon the regulations concerning uniform. Helmets, neckties, and leggings would be worn; violators would be fined, and they were frequently rounded up by Patton himself. “Every time a soldier knotted his necktie, threaded his leggings, and buckled on his heavy steel helmet,” wrote Omar Bradley (who had become Patton’s deputy), “he was forcibly reminded that Patton had come to command the II Corps, that the pre-Kasserine days had ended, and that a tough new era had begun.”⁵² Patton led them in an attack intended to relieve pressure on Montgomery and British Eighth Army, coming ponderously in the other direction—“with the majestic deliberation of a pachyderm,” says the U.S. Army historian—and they won the battles of Gafsa and El Guettar. (Eisenhower thought Patton could have done even more if Alexander had not held him back.)⁵³

When with Patton’s departure Bradley took over II Corps, its mission was an unsatisfactory one. Alexander proposed to have the two British armies converge on Tunis, in which case the Americans between them would be pinched out and play no part in the conclusion of the campaign. (American suspicions that the British were trying to hog the limelight began around that time and later grew to epic proportions.) Eisenhower made it plain to Alexander that this was to risk the loss of American public support for the Europe-first strategy, and Alexander got the point. At Eisenhower’s order, II Corps was assigned a new sector to the north, opposite Bizerte, and using the trucks the Joint Chiefs had sent him, Eisenhower moved 100,000 troops and their supporting units around the rear of British First Army in two days—“an operation,” writes Ambrose, “that showed the Americans at their logistical best.”⁵⁴

The terrain to which Bradley was now assigned (he says at his request⁵⁵) was far from promising, filled with hills and unsuitable for armor, yet here he began to demonstrate the tactical flair and the capacity to inspire confidence that led him to greater heights in Europe. He avoided the mistake of the Germans at Kasserine Pass; he told his commanders to shun the valleys and move through the hills. “I told them to stay off obvious routes of approach such as macadam roads …,” he wrote, “and first take the high ground.” (This was the way to go; the Germans had covered all the “obvious routes” with batteries of 88-mm guns.)

The highest ground in Bradley’s front was a rocky knob known as Djebel Tahent, or Hill 609 (the height in meters). Bradley gave Hill 609 as an objective to the 34th Division, believing that success would restore its sagging morale. (The 34th had taken a beating at Fondouk not entirely its fault, and been subjected to scorn from the British, Alexander included; there was talk in high quarters of sending it back to the States for retraining.) The 34th took Hill 609 in stride on May 1, rejuvenated itself, and went on to be in Bradley’s judgment “one of the finest infantry outfits of World War II.”⁵⁶ A. J. Liebling, who as a war correspondent was just getting to know Bradley, wrote of this: “Many generals, in the course of history, have taken a hill at the cost of a division, and as many have lost a division without taking a hill. Bradley took a key hill and saved a division.”

Liebling first encountered Bradley at a press briefing on a brush-covered hillside near a place called Beja. Bradley arrived in his jeep, carrying a map and accompanied by an aide with an easel and a pointer. The general was wearing his helmet, a regulation field jacket, leggings, and pants—“thus qualifying,” wrote Liebling, “as the least dressed up commander of an American army in the field since Zachary Taylor, who wore a straw hat.” In contrast with Patton, “the new general, lanky and diffidently amiable, seemed a man of milk.”⁵⁷ Thus the correspondents assumed that the Americans were going to have little to do with the final drive and they were suitably skeptical when Bradley unrolled the scheme for a major attack—with all the panache of “a teacher outlining the curriculum for the next semester,” said Liebling—and seemed to take it for granted that his plan would succeed on the same ground where in late November the British 36th Infantry Brigade had failed. Bradley was right; his plan worked. At three-thirty in the afternoon on May 7, the Americans were in Bizerte, only twenty minutes later than the British arrived in Tunis.

The same things tended to happen to Bradley. He would be given a subordinate mission and a secondary supply priority. Then when the end came, the closing in for the kill, there would be Bradley delivering a decisive blow—in this case, foreclosing the possibility of a last-ditch German defense on the Tunisian tip. It happened in Tunisia, it happened in Sicily, it happened on the Rhine: After a while you begin to wonder. This was one of the great tacticians, and he had absorbed from Marshall at Benning a taste for the unorthodox. “I never saw that one in the book,” he said after one of his maneuvers on the march to Bizerte, “but it seemed like a good idea so I did it.”⁵⁸ Eisenhower gave him highest marks. “There is very little I need to tell you about him,” Eisenhower wrote to Marshall in the fall of 1943, “because he is running absolutely true to form … in my opinion the best rounded combat leader I have yet met in our service. While he possibly lacks some of the extraordinary and ruthless driving power that Patton can exert at critical moments, he still has such force and determination that even in this characteristic he is among our best.”⁵⁹

President Roosevelt had not waited for a victory before promoting Eisenhower to full general, but had accepted Marshall’s recommendation after the British chiefs agreed to keep Eisenhower on as Supreme Commander (in order, at least, to put him on a par with his British deputies). The news came through (and Eisenhower promoted all the enlisted men in his headquarters one grade) just before Kasserine Pass. Two years later during the Bulge, when the same thing happened again, Eisenhower said to Patton, “Every time I get a new star I get attacked.” Patton replied, “And every time you get attacked, I pull you out.”⁶⁰ In December, Eisenhower had written Handy: “I think the best way to describe our operation to date is that we have violated every recognized principle of war, are in conflict with all operational and logistic methods laid down in textbooks, and will be condemned, in their entirety, by all Leavenworth and War College classes for the next twenty-five years.” He wrote to a friend: “I think sometimes that I am a cross between a one-time soldier, a pseudo-statesman, a jack-legged politician and a crooked diplomat.”⁶¹ But he won Tunisia and 275,000 enemy troops surrendered.

In August 1943, Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters published a document called “Lessons from the Tunisian Campaign”; when Marshall read it he had it republished and distributed throughout the Army “for the information of all concerned” (this author’s copy was issued to him at the Tank Destroyer School in Camp Hood, Texas). It is an absorbing example of how experience can be condensed and made accessible (it was carefully read at Camp Hood, as I can testify, because the Tank Destroyers had performed in Tunisia quite contrary to the doctrine we were being taught in Texas). It was filled with obvious advice: emphasize scouting and patrolling, better map-reading, defense in depth, closer coordination between infantry and tanks, and so on—but the best thing about it was that it had been written by men no greatly different from ourselves, products of the same training as ours, who had survived, and who said that the “myth of the invincibility of the German army and its equipment has been exploded.”⁶² This may have been overstated, but it carried a tone of conviction.

Many among the Americans looked back on Tunisia as the place where they discovered themselves and each other. “Hundreds of company and battalion officers,” writes George F. Howe in the U.S. Army history’s volume on North Africa, “were sifted by situations in which they showed what they could give and how much they could take. Regimental and division officers were winnowed by the same process.” Some went back to the United States to start and train new units; others stayed on to carry forward their achieved self-possession in their own organizations. Indirectly, this is a validation of Roosevelt’s decision to invade North Africa first, over Marshall’s objections. To have moved into Western Europe against German veterans without attaining this military maturity beforehand would have been an ardent exercise but an adolescent one, and who knows what would have come of it? We needed a place to be lousy in, somewhere to let the gift for combat and command be discovered, to let at least a few of our divisions be “blooded”—a harsh if apposite word.

George Howe wrote that another among the “fruits of victory” in Tunisia was an integrated international Allied headquarters as “a successful going concern,” able to take on the campaigns in Sicily and Italy to come. “Anglo-American co-operation had survived some hard tests during the preceding months,” wrote Howe. “If the coalition, with the disappointments, frustrations, and recriminations inherent in such a union, could survive the initial and struggling phases, it seemed certain to remain effective as the war … proceeded.”⁶³ Eisenhower thought that the great lesson of Tunisia was the necessity for commanders to put Allied unity ahead of the frictions inevitable when men are fighting for their lives, abnormally sensitive to newspaper headlines and radio broadcasts that appear to favor one nationality over another, and to observe this principle scrupulously not only in public but “in the confidence of the personal contacts of subordinates and staffs.”⁶⁴ If such appears obvious now, one must remember that it did not appear so then to many American and British officers.

American antipathy toward the British, as Eisenhower observed to Marshall in April 1943, came from seeds of discord “sown, on our side, as far back as when we read our little red school history books.” There was an undercurrent of Americans-coming-to-the-rescue that went back to World War I, when there had been references to the A.E.F. as “After England Failed.” Each military system assumed its own to be the only proper way of doing things, and the two differed in countless details. (General Sir Frederick Morgan said that when he received the American operational order for the North African invasion, “a weighty document,” he had to read it several times before he could admit to himself that he didn’t understand a single word.)

Styles of behavior that seemed normal to the British seemed supercilious to Americans, and British remarks about the Americans as “our Italians” didn’t help much, either. Ismay’s deputy, Sir Ian Jacob, thought that the U.S. Army was “a mutual admiration society, [so that] any failings in this theater can be comfortably blamed on the British.” Alexander in particular acquired a low opinion of the Americans that overcame his customary suavity. He wrote to Brooke that they “simply do not know their job as soldiers … the junior leadership … just does not lead with the result that their men don’t really fight … they are soft green and quite untrained”—in which there was, of course, some truth, though Rommel and Bradley thought otherwise—and he showed his lack of confidence by giving them limited missions lest they get in trouble.⁶⁵

Eisenhower devoted his considerable gifts to preventing the damage all this might have done. One of his reasons for dismissing Fredendall was Fredendall’s constant disparagement of the British. In Eisenhower’s headquarters, every major subordinate or staff head of one nationality had a deputy of the other, and descriptions of particular plans or positions as “British” or “American” were not allowed. A story was later told and retold throughout the European theater, though it is not clear where and when it happened, which so perfectly epitomizes Eisenhower’s influence that it deserved its wide circulation. He was supposed to have sent an American officer home for getting into an argument with his British “opposite number,” in the course of which the former had called the latter a son-of-a-bitch. “As far as I can see you were justified,” Eisenhower is said to have told the man, “but you called him a British son-of-a-bitch, and for that I’m sending you home.”

Much the same story of the stormy but enduring Anglo-American marriage could be told of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy, but it would add little to what we have already seen. Sicily, in particular, saw the further exploits and excesses of George Patton, the steady performance of Omar Bradley (as a corps commander under Patton), and the emergence of Colonel (later Lieutenant General) James M. Gavin of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regimental Combat Team as one of the youngest and ablest of the American battlefield commanders, and among them by far the best writer (his account of the action on Biazza Ridge in Sicily will reward the reader who wishes realism and clear explication in war writing⁶⁶).

In Sicily and Italy, on the British side as well, realization grew that this was no longer the main show (as Marshall had all along insisted) and that nothing lay ahead here but hard fighting to no great gain. Montgomery and British Eighth Army, the heroes of El Alamein, felt downgraded; the Americans, loyal to the priority of invading France, saw themselves becoming partners to a stalemate. J. F. C. Fuller, in his history of World War II, divided the Italian campaign into three stages: the reasonable (securing Naples and the Foggia airfields, the political (taking Rome), and “The Daft, from the occupation of Rome onwards.”⁶⁷ More must be said of this later.

At the first Cairo Conference, Eisenhower made a presentation to the Combined Chiefs on the war in the Mediterranean that confirmed their good impression of him. He told them that in Italy he wanted to reach the Po Valley but that without more materiel, especially landing craft—which would mean delaying Overlord sixty to ninety days—the best he could do in the spring was take Rome and establish a defensive line. By this time he was trying to reconcile himself to a return to Washington as Chief of Staff when Marshall, as everyone expected, went to London to command the invasion. (Eisenhower thought that he himself was temperamentally unsuited to be Chief of Staff.) At Cairo, Marshall gave a Thanksgiving dinner and discovered that Eisenhower hadn’t realized it was Thanksgiving. He ordered Eisenhower to take a vacation. “Just let someone else run that war up there for a couple of days,” said Marshall. “If your subordinates can’t do it for you, you haven’t organized them properly.”⁶⁸

President Roosevelt had been stalling on the Overlord appointment, but the pressure on him had been building up, especially after Stalin repeatedly asked at Teheran who the commander was going to be. As we have seen, the decision was largely shaped by negative reasons—why the choice could not be Marshall—but there were positive factors as well in the President’s mind as he weighed the alternatives. During the second Cairo Conference (after the return from Teheran), Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to take a drive with him out to see the Sphinx, and on the way the President casually remarked that General Marshall could not be spared and would Eisenhower be acceptable? Churchill said that it was for the President to decide but that the British would gladly entrust their fortunes to Eisenhower’s direction. The two of them gazed at the Sphinx for some minutes in silence. “She told us nothing,” Churchill wrote, “and maintained her inscrutable smile.”⁶⁹ On December 7 they parted, Roosevelt by plane for Tunis, where Eisenhower met him. When they were seated in the car, Roosevelt turned to Eisenhower and said, “Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.”

Roosevelt had examined the job and the man and found them compatible. Many months later, James Roosevelt asked his father why, in view of his obvious respect for Marshall, he had chosen as he did. “Eisenhower is the best politician among the military men,” replied the President. “He is a natural leader who can convince other men to follow him, and this is what we need in his position more than any other quality.”⁷⁰

II

There was never anything before like D-Day and there will never be again. Stalin, no easy judge, said that “the history of warfare knows no other like undertaking from the point of view of its scale, its vast conception, and its masterly execution.” It was surrounded by risk; many who made it happen were anticipating the worst. Ismay wrote in March that “a lot of people who ought to know better are taking it for granted that Overlord is going to be a bloodbath.” Brooke, up to the very last moment, feared that “it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.”⁷¹ Britain was sending into Normandy its only remaining army; after this there was nothing left. If the invasion failed, it was not likely to be repeated; all was being wagered on a single throw.

Force of every form that ingenuity could then contrive would be concentrated upon a single fifty miles of gravelly seashore. We would have to breach the Atlantic Wall, Hitler’s vaunted ring of steel and concrete fortifications that circled the coast. Behind the vanguard would come the ranked array of Allied formations, which envisaged nothing short of the total destruction of the most formidable military power of the twentieth century. On all sides the invasion was awaited with hushed expectancy and repressed anguish: this enormous venture, this event of infinite complexity and guile, of bravery beyond measure, of sorry mistakes and unbidden initiatives, of humor and pathos, of Americans on its eve making a show of confidence for their commander and of British officers quoting Shakespeare’s Henry V to one another.

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named …

There will be no more D-Days; the atom bomb will see to that. It was the last great continental exercise in “conventional” military arms: preliminary air and naval bombardment, an armada of landing craft debouching armor and infantry, and infantry most of all—the hapless foot soldiers who must slog their way inshore with nothing but their rifles, their grenades, and with luck a mortar or machine gun or two. A major amphibious operation runs the gamut from the macro to the micro in scale, from the vast numbers in which it must be visualized down to the relative paucity of human beings who at the moment of “Down ramp!” wade forward bearing the weight of decision. D-Day is the monumental plan, but it is also the few scores of men on Omaha Beach who reached out and plucked the flower victory from a nettle of smashed ships, drowned tanks, dead and mangled comrades, blood-running tide, and punishing gunfire from the bluffs above them.

If the will behind it was American, the mind was British. The decision where to land was British, the design of the landing craft and other special equipment was British, the skill in combined operations that underlay it was British, and above all the deception plan—the most successful manipulation of an enemy’s mind in modern warfare—not only was British in origin but was resisted and misunderstood by Americans who grumpily participated in it.⁷²

More than a million and a half American soldiers, sailors, and airmen had been assembled in Britain, an encounter between cultures which mixed warmth, inconvenience, and disbelief that people who spoke the same language could behave so strangely. The British had become accustomed to the presence of foreign military—Dutch, Polish, Czech, the Dominions—but the Americans were more numerous, more exasperating, more generously paid and supplied, more rambunctious.⁷³ British pubs resounded with American voices and British homes were opened to them; many American memories of that time are nostalgic. They trained in British fields and valleys, and they would march down British country lanes to their ships. They would go forward in company with British fighting men and with the hopes and anxieties of a Britain that had been through five years of war, with more than its share of loss and sorrow, of which this enterprise was to be the climax and redemption.

Five Allied divisions would make the first assault. On the American beaches alone the first day we were planning to land the equivalent of two hundred trainloads of troops. These would be followed, in the next two weeks, by twice as many American soldiers as there had been in the entire U.S. Army in 1939 and by enough vehicles to form a double line from Pittsburgh to Chicago. They would be taking with them everything that modern war requires, from 120-foot steel-span bridges to sulfa pills, not to mention fresh drinking water (300,500 gallons of it for the first three days). General Bradley likened the transit of the Channel to disassembling a giant jigsaw puzzle and then putting it back together on what he and others now referred to as the Far Shore. The process was so complicated that an early operational order of First U.S. Army had more words in it than Gone With the Wind.⁷⁴

The debarking schedule was literally minute by minute. On the American beach between Vierville and Colleville, which had been code-named “Omaha,” at H-Hour minus one, would land thirty-two floatable tanks of the 743d Tank Battalion, and on their left at H-Hour, LCTs (landing craft, tank) would bring in twice as many more. At H+01, twenty-four LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle and personnel) would land four companies of the 116th Infantry of the 29th Division, and at H+03, twelve LCMs (landing craft, mechanized) would follow with demolition experts of the 164th Engineer Combat Battalion to clear the beach of German mines and obstacles. Wave would come after wave: H+30 and H+40 (headquarters detachments and more engineers), H +50 (four more companies of the 116th Infantry). Between H +60 and H +90 would arrive the first artillery and antiaircraft. The real influx of vehicles and supply would begin at H +180, and by H +240 there would be cranes, tank-recovery vehicles, half-tracks and every possible kind of truck, in particular the rugged amphibious version called the DUKW.⁷⁵

The invasion plan in all its intricacy was the handiwork of a joint Anglo-American staff that had been assembled in early 1943 under the command of Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, who had led a British corps in North Africa. He bore the title of COSSAC, Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander (designate), meaning that he served a boss who had not yet been appointed, and eventually COSSAC came to be the usual name for the Allied group around him. Morgan was an ideal choice and COSSAC did its job well. At the outset he insisted on two points, which the British chiefs were wise enough to accept: (1) this was not to be a paper exercise but the real thing, the plan actually to be executed, and (2) there was to be a complete amalgamation of American and British “staff, effort, troops, and everything else from the very beginning,” on the model of what he had seen work so effectively under Eisenhower in Algiers.

Morgan said later that very little original work turned out to be needed, since so much had already been accomplished in the way of study and preparation: “The more we became aware of what had been done, the more we came to realise that we were heirs to a considerable fortune” (without it, he doubted that they could have finished their labors in time). “From all kinds of unexpected quarters,” he wrote, “men of all ranks and all services came into Norfolk House [COSSAC headquarters] telling us of the bits and pieces on which they had been working and suggesting how they might be fitted into the broader picture.”⁷⁶

The first steps to solve the problem of invading Europe had been taken two and a half years earlier with the creation of Combined Operations, the “commandos,” for the purpose of conducting small-scale attacks on the Nazi-held coast: the Lofoten islands, Vaagso, Dieppe, Bruneval, Guernsey, Saint-Nazaire. Goebbels referred to them contemptuously as “Red Indian” raids,⁷⁷ and in stealth and ferocity, that they were, but they gave the German sentries something to think about and they provided the all-essential test-in-action for Combined Operations’ organization, tactics, training, and equipment. In the fall of 1941, Churchill had brought in Captain Lord Louis Mountbatten to head Combined Operations and had instructed him: “You are to prepare for the invasion of Europe…. You must devise and design the appliances, the landing craft and the technique to enable us to effect a landing against opposition and to maintain ourselves there…. The whole of the south coast of England is a bastion of defence … you’ve got to turn it into the springboard for our attack.”⁷⁸

COSSAC’s most elemental decision was where the landings should take place. Actually this did not prove to be so difficult a question as might have been thought. Given the need for air coverage by fighter planes, there were only two serious possibilities: the Pas de Calais—that is, the coast of France immediately across the Strait of Dover between Dunkirk and Boulogne—or Normandy, between the mouth of the Seine and the Cotentin peninsula. The Pas de Calais had much to recommend it, so much so that many German military professionals assumed it to be the necessary choice. (Hitler’s intuition, for once in working order, told him they were wrong.) It was the shortest crossing and the most direct route to Germany; behind it was open country leading to Brussels and the great port of Antwerp.

But there were many objections to the Pas de Calais, in sum persuasive. The coast was more exposed and the weather would predictably be worse than in the sheltered bay of the Seine. The beaches, though adequate in themselves, did not have as good exits as there were in Normandy, and it would be vital to get the battle off the beaches as rapidly as possible. The ports in the Pas de Calais were meager; how could a lodgment area be built around them for the massive buildup needed for a breakout? Where did you go from here, anyhow? From Normandy you could go to Brittany, and Brittany had ports large enough for major reinforcement. Not least, since the Germans expected us in the Pas de Calais, that was where their defenses—in guns, divisions, and concrete—were concentrated. All in all, Morgan and his co-workers began with a preference for Normandy and never abandoned it.

COSSAC was by no means unaware of the hazards. “The prospect of launching an invasion out of England was little short of appalling,” writes Morgan. “There was no precedent in all history for any such thing on such a scale.” They could hope at best for a slender margin of superiority. In the early planning stages, they lacked the landing craft for more than a three-division assault, which meant they would have to concentrate on the beaches opposite Bayeux and might not have the strength to cut the Cotentin peninsula and capture the major port at Cherbourg. It was doubtful that tactical surprise could be achieved. An early COSSAC estimate was that the scheme could succeed only if there were no more than twelve fully mobile German divisions in reserve in France. (Told of this by Churchill at Teheran, Stalin asked what would happen if there were thirteen.) Ringing in Morgan’s ear was the parting admonition he had received from Brooke, the chief of the Imperial General Staff: “Well, there it is. It won’t work, but you must bloody well make it.”⁷⁹

Gordon Harrison, in the official U.S. Army history of D-day, tries to provide an explanation for what he calls “this ready agreement to mount the cross-Channel invasion on a shoestring.” The Americans wanted a firm decision on action with a definite target date, even if this meant making do with less than ideal conditions. “The British,” he writes, “were not likely to take serious issue.” They attached little importance to long-range planning and were mainly interested in the next operation to come.⁸⁰ Morgan agrees: “the British authorities,” he adds, “had at this time no real plan for the day when they would have to stop being flexible.” Years of cheese paring and parsimony had ill prepared them to visualize the immense resources that D-day would require and that the United States would be bringing to bear. “I fancy it is little exaggeration,” writes Morgan, “to say that the sheer size of Overlord was not appreciated by some of the British higher-ups until very late in the day.”

Within the British services generally, COSSAC encountered resistance to the concept of any invasion at all being possible. From what threatened to become a deadlock they were saved by Admiral Mountbatten, who organized a combination seminar and demonstration on the subject at Combined Operations headquarters at Largs, on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland. A course routinely given there was subtly altered in enrollment and content to include the principal skeptics and the principal points at issue. Mountbatten’s showmanship could not have been better: On sentry go were commandos of impressive bearing, the weather was Scotland’s finest, and from time to time bagpipers of the local Home Guard appeared to offer what Morgan called “the indigenous substitute for music.” By the end, the doubters had come around. “For the first time,” said one of them, “I really believe in this operation.” Morgan wrote that Mountbatten “rescued” Overlord—and certainly some such idea was in George Marshall’s mind, for later, when he and the other Combined Chiefs visited the Normandy beachhead on D+6 (and dined that night on Churchill’s train returning to London), Marshall drafted a cable of acknowledgment to Mountbatten and they all signed it.⁸¹

Landing craft soon became the principal preoccupation: “the destinies of two great empires …,” Churchill was to complain, “seemed to be tied up in some god-damned things called LSTs.” The story is a wretched one, from which few emerge with much credit. The U.S. Navy had not been interested in landing craft. By 1937, they had developed nothing but an unsuccessful tank lighter; they did not start ordering Higgins boats until September 1940, nor did they order them in quantity until the spring of 1942. “During the first years of the war,” writes Harrison, “the majority of naval leaders resisted the development of landing craft as a foolhardy gamble with an untried weapon and a waste of resources badly needed for naval construction.” President Roosevelt, as late as early 1942, told Captain McCrea that he thought building landing craft was a mistake.⁸²

The British, meantime, had done what had to be done. As far back as 1920, they had produced a tank lighter which, with few changes, became the LCM. In 1938, deciding that special-purpose ships were going to be important, they developed the LCA (landing craft, assault), and in 1940—at Churchill’s insistence—they came up with the LCT, which could carry three forty-ton tanks and disembark them in three and a half feet of water on steep beaches. Finally, seeing the need for a larger, oceangoing equivalent, they contrived the LST (landing ship, tank), with a bow that unfolded like a sideways clamshell to disgorge tanks and trucks, one of the simplest-seeming yet most fundamentally transforming technical innovations of the war. The LST, 328 feet long, with a 50-foot beam and twin-diesel screws, could carry a deadweight load of 2,100 tons; its deckload could even include a fully loaded LCT; diving tanks similar to a submarine’s enabled it to reduce the seagoing draft of the bow for beaching. The United States undertook the entire production of LSTs and in the spring of 1942 began a program of mass-producing landing craft intended for the 1943 invasion of France proposed in the Marshall memorandum.⁸³

However, the production of landing craft had to be superimposed on top of already jam-packed American production schedules. Contracts had to be let to small boatyards and manufacturing companies on the inland waterways, which had never made anything like this before. LSTs were built along the Ohio River, for example, at Pittsburgh and Ambridge, Pennsylvania, at Jeffersonville and Evansville, Indiana; they were slid sideways off rough ramps and sailed down to the sea by green crews. (One of them from the Great Lakes missed the turning into the Erie Canal in the Niagara River at night and would have gone over the falls if it hadn’t run aground.) During 1942, landing craft were built on priorities established by emergency directives, but once the heat was off—with the successful landings in North Africa—they fell back into competition with other compelling needs (e.g., for destroyer escorts). In October 1942, they had been in second place on the Navy Shipbuilding Precedence List (aircraft carriers were first), but by November they had slid down to twelfth. Landing craft were not included in President Roosevelt’s “must” list of programs for 1943.⁸⁴

In March 1943, the British pointed out to the American Joint Chiefs that the prospect of an invasion in 1944 was being jeopardized by a shortage of LSTs and LCTs; they said that British production was at its peak and could not fill the gap. This was met with a mean and sullen suspicion. The Americans thought the British were rigging the figures; they thought the British were trying to make an invasion appear impossible in order to get out from under the obligation of undertaking it. Admiral King stated flatly that any increase in landing-craft production would cause serious dislocation in other and more important programs; one Navy spokesman said it “would be disastrous from a standpoint of all other Naval construction.”⁸⁵

Many British believed that the shortage in landing craft arose because Admiral King was diverting them to the Pacific for his own campaigns. Brooke was especially resentful of what he saw as the Americans’ use of landing craft as bargaining chips to get their own way in strategy. “History will never forgive them,” he wrote in his diary. Chester Wilmot, in The Struggle for Europe, stated that at the end of 1943, “by far the greater part of the U.S. Navy’s landing-craft was in the Pacific,” and he gave a table of landing craft “on strength” as of May 1, 1944, to prove his case. A necessary distinction must be made, however, between those “on strength” (American: “on hand”) and those serviceable and operational, as Admiral Morison cogently argued in rebuttal. Morison’s figures (as of June 1) show that many landing craft were in the United States and not yet serviceable, that the number both operational and in the Pacific was far less than Wilmot implied, and that in actuality, “the war in the Pacific was not a drag on the war in Europe.”⁸⁶

In retrospect, one marvels that this snarl of misperceptions was ever disentangled, but somehow—after a fashion—it was. Morgan was unrelenting in his realism, in giving the indifferent what he called “a proper earful,” and the Americans increasingly realized that if they wanted Overlord so badly, then there was a cost to be paid. Admiral King did relent; at the Quebec Conference in August 1943, he said that a halt in constructing 110-foot subchasers might increase landing-craft production by as much as 25 percent, and in September he raised this to 35. When General Morgan visited Washington in October, at Marshall’s invitation, he had hopes of getting it raised still further, though they went unfulfilled.⁸⁷

Morgan’s mission to Washington was a high point in his friendly acquaintance with Americans. He was met at La Guardia Airport by a guard of honor and “a platoon of general officers,” then put up in what after years of British austerity “seemed like paradise itself, the visiting general officers quarters at Fort Myer,” which appeared “to entail a standard of living slightly higher than that portrayed by Hollywood as befitting a multimillionaire.” The Marshalls had him to lunch a trois, and Marshall enjoined on him that he must take time off and see something of the country, go wherever he pleased.

Where would he like to go? Morgan decided to obey Mark Twain and, when in doubt, tell the truth. Since the days he started soldiering he had admired Stonewall Jackson and longed to visit the Shenandoah Valley. They looked at him unbelievingly. “If you had thought it out for a hundred years,” said Mrs. Marshall, “you couldn’t have given a more tactful answer. We love the place. It is where we live.” Morgan had his tour, with Marshall’s friend Brigadier General John MacAuley Palmer (retired), now military historian to the Library of Congress, as guide.

He was taken to inspect amphibious training on the Gulf of Mexico, to the infantry at Fort Benning, the airborne at Camp McCall, the artillery at Fort Bragg, the air force at Miami, and the Port of Embarkation at New York, where he saw for himself “profusion on an unlimited scale,” provision for dealing with everything from locomotives to lice-infested German prisoners. “A liberty ship was fully loaded, it seemed, almost before our eyes.” And he spent an hour, in the President’s study, with Franklin Roosevelt. “Never before had I been,” wrote Morgan, “and seldom in future can I possibly be, lucky enough to encounter so immediately and powerfully attractive a person.” Their conversation ranged widely over the shape of things to come. To Morgan’s amazement, Roosevelt seemed to be entertaining odd ideas about invading France, whose source Morgan thought he could detect, and this led to a discussion of the relationship between President and Prime Minister.

“The things that man has called me,” said Roosevelt, “you wouldn’t believe. But don’t think he has it all his own way. No, sir. You know perhaps the clearest indication of the strength of our alliance is that we can call each other every name we can lay our tongues to and yet remain good friends. Once we start being polite to each other it won’t be anything like the same thing.”⁸⁸

♦

Eisenhower came to Overlord as though born for it. His mentor had predicted it. He was one of the principal designers of the strategy that led to it; he had written many of the directives from which the driving power behind it came. He had commanded three successful amphibious invasions and he had the confidence of men (or most of the men) from the several arms, services, and nationalities he would be working with. He had successfully set up a functioning Allied headquarters that would serve as model for the one he must now create. He got along well with Churchill. He and Marshall were virtually as one, Marshall and Roosevelt were in harmony about his mission, and Roosevelt had picked him because of strengths he saw in Eisenhower that he thought the task required. More than this would not be reasonable to ask.

Churchill once wrote of Eisenhower that “he supervised everything with a vigilant eye, and no one knew better than he how to stand close to a tremendous event without impairing the authority he had delegated to others.”⁸⁹ It is a just assessment, and it puts Eisenhower in the proper context of a role which had not existed before and which he must therefore invent. Eisenhower was later to be criticized, and not only by British observers, for failing to take a more vigorous part in the direct supervision of the battle, yet it must be kept in mind that he guided himself by a thought-through and tested conception of what it was a supreme commander did, and did not, do. (One may argue that the conception was wrong, but preferably by proposing a better.) He did not go out of his way to explain his reasons. This was not the kind of thing Eisenhower talked about except in abstractions; when it came to his own motives and methods he expected to be judged on the outcome, and otherwise left alone. Eisenhower did not mind in the slightest, as Don Whitehead suggested, if others believed that they were the active and initiating agents—provided the thing got done, and done with a will, and done the way he wanted it done.

When Eisenhower first saw the early COSSAC plan in North Africa, even before he knew he would command it, his immediate reaction was that the number of divisions in the first wave must be increased, and he pointed this out to Montgomery when he encountered the latter at Marrakech visiting a convalescent Churchill. (Churchill at Quebec, four months before, had also urged Marshall that the landings be in greater force.) Montgomery, characteristically, later said that it was he who had pointed out the flaws in the plan to Eisenhower. Montgomery’s biographer Nigel Hamilton goes further and insists that Montgomery was “alone” in having the “courage and conviction” to replace COSSAC’s scheme with a better one, a claim more legitimately belonging to the field of hero worship than of history.⁹⁰ Montgomery, as ground force commander in the opening phase, was a major asset to Overlord, but it was Eisenhower who fleshed out the total plan, who secured the necessary landing craft to enlarge the assault, who fought for the additional landing in southern France over British objections, who approved any proposals for the landing itself, and who had the courage to order employment of the American airborne divisions despite the repeated assertions of his air commander that they would be massacred.

Eisenhower established SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—in London on January 16, 1944. SHAEF was located first at 20 Grosvenor Square, but Eisenhower wanted to get away from the city, with its endless distractions, and on March 5 moved to Bushy Park, near Kingston, under tents and camouflage. He was able to secure the out-of-the-way rural retreat he had enjoyed before, Telegraph Cottage, a tiny slate-roofed house in a ten-acre wooded tract near Richmond Park, between Coombe Hill and Coombe Wood golf courses, with a lawn in back and a small rose garden. Here he could lounge around in an old shirt, GI slacks, a half-suede, half-leather jacket, and a pair of straw sandals left over from his days in Manila. Here he could work, relax, play a little golf, and read Western magazines to his heart’s content. (Asked by Kay Summersby why he enjoyed cheap cowboy fiction, Eisenhower said, “I don’t have to think.”⁹¹)

“Our only hope,” German General von Thoma was overheard to say as a prisoner, “is that they come where we can use the Army upon them.”⁹² In France, Belgium, and Holland, the Germans had fifty-eight divisions, of which ten were panzer, sixteen were “attack” and thirty-two “static” infantry, under Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt as Oberbefehlshaber West (Commander in Chief in the West) and Erwin Rommel as commander of Army Group B, reporting directly to Hitler and the army high command. If they could concentrate at the point where the landing came, either before or after it, then the landing could with good probability be shattered. To fight on the beach was Rommel’s idea, to counterattack the lodgment area was von Rundstedt’s, but either would have worked had it been implemented in sufficient force.

Our prime and overriding object was therefore to cause the Germans to disperse their strength, and this could be done by (1) keeping them in doubt as to where the landing would be, and (2) convincing them that the first assault was not the main one but would be followed by another and larger somewhere else. After the landing, a further means of preventing a German concentration of force was by (3) isolating the battlefield, and this could be done through air attacks on bridges, railyards, and moving columns, and through sabotage by the French Resistance. All these methods were used, and all of them—to the great relief of the Allied commanders—worked.

The British had been sharpening their skills at deception for some time, and had scored notable triumphs in North Africa. (A fine effort, though its success is disputed, was the planted false “going” map intended to lead Rommel at Alam Halfa into ground unsuitable for tanks.) They invented twenty-six imaginary divisions, and no less than twenty-one showed up in German intelligence estimates as genuine. By May 1944, the Germans thought there were seventy-one Allied divisions in the Mediterranean theater when there were actually only thirty-eight. The invasion of Sicily achieved tactical surprise in part through deceptions—like the celebrated “man who never was,” the corpse left floating in the sea off Spain with false credentials and false documents—which caused them to keep substantial forces in the Balkans and divide their resources in Italy equally between Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

The main preinvasion deception plan consisted of two parts, the first of which threatened an invasion of Scandinavia. This the Germans took very seriously indeed; they had twelve divisions in Norway and five in Denmark. These, as a result of what they thought were vigorous training exercises in Scotland by a nonexistent “Fourth Army,” were put on a state of readiness in May 1944; an additional first-class division was sent to Norway and a reduced one to Denmark (that many more who would not be available in France). The second part of the plan, however, and the most important, was the threat of a massive attack on the Pas de Calais, two hundred miles east of the true landing place. Charles Cruikshank, in his Deception in World War II, describes it as “the largest, most elaborate, most carefully planned, most vital, and most successful of all the Allied deceptions.”⁹³

The base of it was an imaginary army group, theoretically commanded by George Patton, stationed in East Anglia and ready to pounce across the Channel. Its existence was confirmed by dummy installations, false radio traffic, and reports from the numerous German spies in England, who were all (conveniently) under British control. A bonus was provided by the breaking of the German codes that has come to be called Ultra, which enabled the British to monitor the progress of the deception measures by watching the German reactions. This was all beneficial beyond belief to the Allies. German Fifteenth Army, fifteen divisions in all, was in the Pas de Calais and it stayed there, waiting for an assault by fifty-seven divisions (forty-two were fictitious) that von Rundstedt believed he lacked the resources to resist. The Germans went on believing in a second invasion for weeks after the real one began, to our great gain in preponderance at the point of contact.⁹⁴

The decision had yet to be made as to the invasion date. There were a number of constraints on this. We should ideally land at or near dawn, to allow the fleet to approach under cover of darkness and give the men ashore a full day to establish a beachhead. Since the Germans had covered the beaches between the high- and low-tide marks with steel obstacles, to rip apart the landing craft, it was compulsory to land at low tide despite the hazards of crossing the intervening sands under fire. A full moon would expose the fleet, but a partial one was needed by the paratroopers. The date should be late enough to permit maximum preparation but early enough to leave four months of campaigning before winter came. All these conditions could be met only three times in the spring of 1944: the first days of May and two periods of a few days each in the first and third weeks of June.

Eisenhower as always insisted on an atmosphere of confidence and optimism in his headquarters. He operated on the assumption that this was the major operation of the war and that if he stated his needs plainly and cogently enough, then they would be met. He insisted on having officers in the major commands whom he knew and trusted, even at the cost of denuding the Mediterranean (one he wanted but failed to get was Lucian Truscott as a corps commander). Eisenhower demanded that the bomber forces in England, both British and American, be used in support of the invasion during the months preceding it, though this contravened the deeply held convictions of their commanders, Harris and Spaatz. Eisenhower had his way, though he had to use the threat of resignation to get it, and he ordered Harris and Spaatz to concentrate on isolating the battlefield—the “transportation plan”—despite the latter’s insistence that it would not work. The “transportation plan” did work; the battlefield was significantly isolated. Eisenhower had been right, and the fact that he held firm, writes Stephen Ambrose, “was perhaps his greatest single contribution to the success of Overlord.”⁹⁵

He had more than one occasion to exercise firmness. Among the most energetic arguments thus far provoked between the Americans and the British was that on the question of whether or not to support Overlord by invading southern France as well. Eisenhower badly wanted this done (Marshall’s feelings were even stronger, and substantially reinforced Eisenhower’s). Brooke and Churchill were opposed, bitterly opposed, to subordinating the Mediterranean—with what Churchill called “all its dazzling possibilities”—to an operation they believed to be hazardous and unnecessary. They argued (correctly) that it would not draw as many German divisions away from Eisenhower’s front as would an active campaign in Italy, that (incorrectly) the Germans would fight an effective delaying action in the Rhone Valley and southern France would thus become a dead end.

The differences caused what Eisenhower said was “one of the longest sustained arguments that I had with Prime Minister Churchill throughout the period of the war.” At one point Churchill threatened “to go to the King and lay down the mantle of my high office.” When it was over, and Eisenhower had prevailed, U.S. Ambassador John Winant said of Churchill that he had “never seen him so badly shaken.”⁹⁶ For Churchill, this was a premonition of what it would feel like to be no longer senior partner in the Grand Alliance, to be no longer able to work his will.

The American reasoning was so far apart from the British that the two positions scarcely came into contact. In Marshall’s view, this was the moment to put on the brakes at last in what he had always regarded as a waste of resources in a subsidiary theater. He and Eisenhower both believed that the port of Marseilles was essential to Overlord for at least three reasons: for supplying the armies that would otherwise be dependent on the Normandy beaches, for bringing fresh American formations more rapidly and directly from the United States, and (this was much in Eisenhower’s thoughts) for enabling the French divisions we had at some expense been equipping in North Africa to participate in the liberation of their homeland. President Roosevelt supported Marshall and Eisenhower—“I always think of my early geometry,” he cabled Churchill; “a straight line is the shortest distance between two points”—and Churchill had to give ground.

Eisenhower’s intelligence sources told him that German defenses in southern France were weakly held and would be easily penetrated, which proved to be the case. As for the importance of Marseilles, the Americans again were right. It became SHAEF’s major source of supply, and remained so until Antwerp came into full operation in January 1945. Between September and December 1944, more tonnage came in through southern France than through any other Allied port, and during the last three months of 1944 this amounted to over a third of the total unloaded by the Allies in Europe.⁹⁷ In standing up to the Prime Minister, Eisenhower had saved for Overlord the extra increment of power it would need.

But by far the most burdensome of Eisenhower’s preinvasion decisions came in the final week. It concerned the employment of the two American airborne divisions, the 82d and the 101st. The exits from the westernmost American beach, code-named “Utah,” led over causeways the Germans could easily interdict. General Bradley, commanding First U.S. Army in the assault, believed that an air drop behind Utah Beach to seize the exits from the causeways was central to the success of the landing. On May 29, Eisenhower got a letter from his air commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, recommending that the American parachute drop and glider landings be canceled as too dangerous.

The British airborne operation east of Caen Leigh-Mallory thought still to be sound, but he said that recent intelligence information indicated a German buildup in the American drop zone. He did not think that the results there would justify the cost, which he estimated as high as 70 percent in casualties, and the next day he called on Eisenhower to make his plea personally, speaking of the “futile slaughter” of two fine divisions. “It would be difficult,” wrote Eisenhower, “to conceive of a more soul-wracking problem.”⁹⁸

He went to his tent alone to think it through, concluded that the American airborne attack must proceed, and called Leigh-Mallory to tell him so. (When the air drop took place, it was scattered by clouds and antiaircraft, but it accomplished its mission and casualties were only 5 to 8 percent; partly in result of it, on Utah Beach two regiments of the 4th Division had casualties of less than 4 percent.)⁹⁹

Eisenhower had set the Day for early June, and throughout May his forces began to assemble in southern England. It required 54,000 men merely to maintain housekeeping for their marshaling areas, which were sealed off from the rest of the world and guarded by 2,000 counterintelligence agents; 4,500 new Army cooks had to be trained in order to feed them; 3,800 trucks transported them and hauled their supplies. Final rations and ammunition were issued, maps distributed, briefings completed, and units broken down into boatloads for the move to the ships. This last began on May 30, and by June 3 nearly all the troops had been loaded. Eisenhower used a figure of speech to describe his armed host that others have adopted since: “a coiled spring … a great human spring coiled for the moment when its energy should be released and it would vault the English Channel.”¹⁰⁰

For now sits expectation in the air

And hides a sword, from hilts unto the point …

♦

Southwick House, a mansion with extensive grounds, lay in the lee of the downs above Portsmouth. This was the headquarters of Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsay, naval commander for the invasion, and here on the first of June, in tents and caravans under the trees, Eisenhower established SHAEF Advance, where he would stay until the decision to go or not to go was made. Weather was the concern that demanded attention above all else. Twice daily, Eisenhower and his commanders met with the meteorologists, headed by Group Captain James M. Stagg, whom the general described as a “dour but canny Scot.”¹⁰¹

The weather conferences took place in the senior officers’ mess of Southwick House, a room Stagg said remained vivid in his memory a quarter century later. It had once been a library but now the bookshelves were bare, the tables had been pushed aside, and easy chairs and couches were arranged in roughly parallel arcs. Two or three other chairs faced them, the one nearest the door invariably occupied by the Supreme Commander. Eisenhower would call them to order and then say, “Well, Stagg, what have you for us this time?”

Stagg was in a quandary. The forecasters who reported to him were organized in a half-dozen centers, differing in nationality, in branch of the service, and in technique; not surprisingly, they more often than not differed in their predictions, which it was Stagg’s duty to reconcile. The Americans had more confidence in long-range forecasting than he did and, worse, at first the U.S. team at strategic air force headquarters was determinedly optimistic about the critical period ahead.

Stagg was not. He decided to conceal the divided nature of the counsel he was receiving and stick to his own convictions. “There goes six foot two of Stagg,” said an admiral, “and six feet one of gloom.” Since mid-April, Eisenhower had been asking for weekly forecasts, so that he could get a feel of what to expect and then test it against the outcome, and his confidence in Stagg’s restraint and precision had been growing. This was well, for when Stagg looked at his charts in the first days of June—with their isobars, their fronts, their highs and lows—he did not like what he saw, not in the least.

The weather situation over the British Isles and the northeast Atlantic was very disturbed and complex. A series of three low-pressure depressions was strung out between Scotland and Newfoundland, and an anticyclone it had been hoped might act as a bumper against them was weakening and giving way. At the moment Stagg reported this (the 9:30 P.M. conference of Saturday, June 3), the skies over Portsmouth were clear and the air calm, but Stagg expected heavy clouds, low visibility, high winds, and drenching rain to arrive soon and remain through Wednesday.

Even the American optimists had come around to this dark view and Stagg, for once, was able to report unanimity. Though D-Day had been scheduled for June 5, after hearing Stagg out and consulting the others, Eisenhower postponed it for twenty-four hours. (Stagg thereby earned his pay and the honors he was later given; Monday morning the weather along the French coast was just as bad as he had predicted: Strong onshore winds would have made the landings almost impossible and a continuous sheet of low cloud would have obscured the targets of bombing and naval gunfire—well done, Stagg!)

Yet Eisenhower was born to be lucky and his luck was holding. When Stagg rose to face them Sunday night, he had a surprise to share; “since I presented the forecast last evening,” he said, “some rapid and unexpected developments have occurred over the north Atlantic.” The rain that was at that moment lashing their windows would stop in two or three hours. A vigorous cold front from one of the depressions had pushed east more quickly and farther to the south than could have been foreseen. It would pass through the Channel that night and early Monday, and be followed by an interlude of only partly cloudy skies and decreased winds.

They questioned him closely about what would happen later in the week and how great his confidence was (he was firm about the latter but insisted that the former was still beyond calculation) and they met again on Monday at 4:30 A.M., all in battle dress except Montgomery, who was wearing a fawn-colored turtleneck sweater and light corduroy trousers. The room was quiet, faces grave. “Go ahead, Stagg,” said Eisenhower.

“Gentlemen,” said Stagg, “no substantial changes have taken place since last time but as I see it the little that has changed is in the direction of optimism.” The “interlude” would extend into Tuesday afternoon, winds would be moderate, visibility good. “The relief that statement brought into the room was a joy to behold,” wrote Stagg. “Immediately after I had finished the tension seemed to evaporate and the Supreme Commander and his colleagues became as new men.”¹⁰²

Now sits the wind fair, and we will aboard …

But it was up to Eisenhower. If there was to be any further postponement, it would have to be for two weeks, until a favorable condition of tides and moonlight would recur; security might be compromised, morale dampened. (Two weeks later came the storm in the Channel that irreparably damaged the American artificial port—Eisenhower luck.) Finally, after polling them again, he spoke the words only he could speak: “O.K. Let’s go.” The subordinates leapt to their tasks and within less than a minute the room was empty except for their commander.

“The outflow of the others and his sudden isolation were symbolic,” writes Stephen Ambrose. “A minute earlier he had been the most powerful man in the world. Upon his word the fate of millions of men, not to mention great nations, depended. The moment he uttered the word, however, he was powerless. For the next two or three days there was almost nothing he could do that would in any way change anything. The invasion could not be stopped, not by him, not by anyone…. He could now only sit and wait.”¹⁰³

There was something in the air that D-Day eve, something akin to confidence yet beyond it, something felt by the soldiers, sailors, and airmen in their thousands, something more resembling an awareness—in the words of General Morgan—“that there was arising a surge that would not be denied,” something that “spoke through the lips of General Eisenhower when at dead of a June night he said, ‘Go,’ and it went.”¹⁰⁴

Ambrose believes that by this time the Supreme Commander had become more adept at killing time. Eisenhower after breakfast visited Portsmouth to see British soldiers board their landing craft. He played checkers with his aide Harry Butcher and got a draw out of what had looked like a certain loss. They told each other dog-eared political stories and in the afternoon he met with the press. “The nonchalance,” wrote Butcher, “with which he announced that we were attacking in the morning and the feigned nonchalance with which the reporters absorbed it was a study in suppressed emotion which would interest any psychologist.”

Eisenhower got a phone call from Beetle Smith at SHAEF Main that de Gaulle was acting up again and refusing to make a broadcast tomorrow. Before dinner he wrote out for himself, as he had done before each of his previous invasions, a statement to be issued if it should not succeed: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops…. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”¹⁰⁵ And at six o’clock he drove to an airfield near Newbury, where men of the 101st Airborne Division were loading up. These were the paratroopers Leigh-Mallory had told him were going to suffer 70 percent casualties.

Goronwy Rees of The Spectator, who was there, said that over the years he had watched many generals address their troops before battle and had noted the various styles—flamboyant, belligerent, mock simple—none of which had seemed to him really successful in overcoming the uneasy awareness that some of these men were going to die and the general was not. Eisenhower walked among them, talking and listening; one from Texas, who owned a ranch, offered him a job after the war. They told him not to worry. Rees realized later that the led were reinforcing their leader as much as the other way around.

“General Eisenhower spoke to each of the crews individually,” Rees wrote, “joked with them and almost always asked them where their home was, and as one heard them say, ‘Kansas, sir,’ ‘Iowa, sir,’ ‘Missouri, sir,’ and the States of the Union answered in turn, like a roll of battle honours, one was suddenly aware that this general and these men were intimately associated in some great romantic enterprise, whose significance could not be wholly grasped by an Englishman, and yet one felt it to be of profound importance, in ways one could not quite penetrate then, to oneself as well as to them.”¹⁰⁶

Eisenhower waited until the last C-47 had left the runway and then turned with a sag in his shoulders and, so one reporter thought, tears in his eyes. “Well,” he said, “it’s on.”¹⁰⁷

O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts;

Possess them not with fear; take from them now

The sense of reckoning …

All over southern England that night people wakened to a sound that filled the sky; over London it lasted two and a half hours. They had by that time become practiced at distinguishing the noises airplanes make, but this was different, not the Germans, not Bomber Command outward bound at dusk and returning at dawn. Some knew or guessed that they were hearing the largest airborne armada hitherto assembled, and that it was headed south.

In the west country, in a small town in Devon, a ten-year-old boy named John Keegan had been making the acquaintance of the Americans, with their astonishing equipment and their carefree way of driving a jeep with one booted foot hanging casually over the side. He came down into the garden with his parents when the roar began. “It seemed as if every aircraft in the world was in flight,” Keegan wrote years later, “as wave followed wave without intermission…. Long after the last had passed from view and the thunder of their passage had died into the stillness of the night … we remained transfixed on the spot where we stood, gripped by a wild surmise at what the power, majesty and menace of the great migratory flight could portend.

“Next day we knew. The Americans had gone.”¹⁰⁸

In Wiltshire, near towns with names like Chilton Foliat and Crooked Soley, there was an airfield that had filled them with the noise and bustle of the Americans who made practice parachute jumps in the nearby parks. But that night the bar of the Stag’s Head in Chilton Foliat was strangely silent, nobody but the local regulars nursing a mild and bitter; the bottled ale and the rationed whiskey stayed on the shelves. At closing time, the landlord locked up, washed a few glasses, and went outside to shut in his chickens. Suddenly the airfield came to life as the transports rose up over the elms of the park in twos and threes, then dozens, and then joined others coming from the north in hundreds. He called to his wife to come listen. “This is it,” he said.

Down on the Channel, at Saint Alban’s Head, a coast guard watcher named Percy Wallace had come off duty after an extraordinary day. For weeks now, the panorama he could survey with his field glasses—from Weymouth and Portland in the west past the mouth of the Solent and the Isle of Wight to the east—had been filling with ships. Portland harbor was black with them, until they began to overflow into Weymouth Bay and destroyers were sent out to screen them while hundreds more came in.

Then that morning they had all departed, more than a thousand of them, together with battleships and heavy cruisers that steamed up from the west, and still another fleet from Southampton emerged from the Solent and turned south past the Isle of Wight. “Wallace stood on the head of the cliff,” wrote David Howarth, “entranced and exalted by a pageant of splendor which nobody had ever seen before, and nobody, it is certain, will ever see again. Before evening, the last of the ships had gone, hull down on the southern horizon, and once more the sea was empty.”

Wallace was making his way homeward when the sound in the sky began. “This is it,” he said to his wife.

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here …

By morning everyone knew. Berlin radio began broadcasting fragmentary reports at six-thirty, though in London the first formal announcement, and a guarded one at that, did not come until nine. Services were held in St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. “Some people had a sense of anticlimax,” writes Howarth; “it seemed wrong that life should go on as usual.” In the factories, where the workers were mainly women—few of whom did not have husbands, lovers, sons, or brothers they had not heard from recently—many wept over their work.

The House of Commons was packed, but tradition must be served. First, question time: A Communist member called for the abolition of banks; an independent asked the secretary of the treasury to make certain that “office cleaners” be referred to thenceforward as such and not as “charwomen” or “charladies.” Finally, Churchill rose and, savoring the suspense, talked for ten minutes about Rome’s fall the day before.¹⁰⁹

Then he proclaimed the invasion.

“I have also to announce to the House,” said Churchill, “that during the night and the early hours of this morning the first of the series of landings upon the European continent has taken place…. So far the commanders who are engaged report that everything is proceeding according to plan. And what a plan!” He described the vast size of the fleet and the air umbrella over it; he mentioned the airborne landings, the silencing of shore batteries, the probability that surprise had been achieved, and the probability for the enemy of many surprises in store. “The battle that has now begun will grow constantly in scale and intensity for many weeks to come, and I shall not speculate upon its course. This I may say however. Complete unity prevails…. There is a brotherhood in arms between us and our friends of the United States.”¹¹⁰

President Roosevelt had spent the weekend at Pa Watson’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia. Grace Tully again noticed his tenseness and preoccupation. He fingered his Book of Common Prayer, looking for words appropriate to the occasion. Monday he returned to Washington and that evening made a broadcast about the fall of Rome, the great city, embodiment of Christianity and now of Allied victory. During the night he kept in touch with the Pentagon. At three-thirty the news was official, and at four the White House operator began waking staff members to tell them of it. By the time of his regular press conference Tuesday morning, the President was cheerful, if “a little sleepy,” he said. That night on the radio he led the nation in prayer for its sons—“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith”—and for those at home who would have to bear the travail and sorrows to come.¹¹¹

♦

Sorrows on Omaha Beach there were aplenty. Let us follow two companies of the 116th Infantry, Able and Baker, as they came in on their assigned sector opposite Vierville, known as Dog Green. At 4:30 A.M., Able unloaded from the British transport Empire Javelin into LCAs and LCVPs and began the two-hour, eleven-mile run in to the shore. The sea was choppy; they were drenched with spray, many became seasick, and the landing craft took in cresting waves that had to be pumped or bailed out in helmets. They passed men in the water with life preservers or on rafts, fortunate to have escaped from the floatable tanks that had failed to float in the rough seas (if a tank went down, the crew had twenty seconds in which to abandon it). At about five thousand yards out, they came under artillery fire and at a thousand yards Boat No. 5 of Able Company was hit dead on and foundered; six men drowned and the other twenty-one paddled around until picked up by the Navy. They were the lucky ones. At a hundred yards, a shell hit Boat No. 3 and killed two men; taking to the water as it sank, another dozen drowned. That left Able Company with five boats.

Boat No. 6 simply disappeared. No one knows what happened to it; there were no survivors, only corpses of about half its complement found next day along the beach. When Boat No. 7, carrying a medical section, lowered its ramp, two German machine guns opened up and every man aboard was killed instantly. The men in Boat No. 1 jumped off in water over their heads and, weighed down by equipment, many drowned; the others clung to the sides of the boat to stay afloat. Same story with Boat No. 4. From Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Edward Tidrick took a bullet in the throat as he left the ramp and staggered onto the beach, ordering PFC Leo J. Nash to advance with wire cutters. Nash had no wire cutters. Giving the order had caused Tidrick to raise up on his hands, and Nash watched as machine-gun bullets ripped through Tidrick’s body. By the end of ten minutes, all the sergeants of Able Company were either dead or wounded and only one officer was alive, Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who had two bad wounds, in the heel and stomach. Not a shot had been fired at the Germans. The right wing of the assault, as Gordon Harrison put it, had “all but disintegrated.”

Baker Company was supposed to come in on the same part of the beach a half hour later. Smoke and dust raised by mortar fire and gunfire obscured it from them until the last moment, when the landing-craft coxswains—seeing the debacle ashore and the blood, dead, and dying in the water—wanted to veer aside. Captain Ettore V. Zappacosta drew his Colt .45 and said, “By God, you’ll take this boat straight in.” Gallant but foolhardy; within minutes he was dead; only one man from his boat got out of it unharmed, and managed this mostly by crouching in the water for two hours behind a piece of driftwood in the advancing tide. He and a rifleman from Able Company dragged ashore the bodies of men they could recognize; the unrecognized they left to the sea. Only one other boat from Baker Company came in straight on Dog Green. It foundered and all aboard—a British coxswain and thirty American infantrymen—were killed. Of them nothing more is known.

Other Baker Company boats turned to the left and right. Those on the latter landed in a cove under the promontory called Pointe du Hoc and joined a ranger battalion whose mission was to neutralize the heavy coastal defense guns on top of it. (They succeeded; the guns had been moved inland, where the rangers found them unguarded and destroyed them.) Those who turned left did relatively well; some encountered gaps in the intensity of German fire and worked their way through it. Seven men under Technical Sergeant William Pearce—whose lieutenant, badly wounded, had handed him a map and compass, the symbols of authority—had wiped out a German hedgerow line beyond a draw in the bluffs and walked, exhilarated with success, into Vierville, where they found Baker Company’s Lieutenant Walter Taylor. Taylor had come in on a beach opposite Hamel-au-Pretre, miraculously free of fire. Pearce told him that his own officer was out of action. “I guess that makes me company commander,” Taylor said. He took a head count: twenty-four, including himself. “That ought to be enough,” said Taylor. “Follow me.”

There are such men, and by no other sign shall you know them except that in combat they show no fear and seemingly without hesitation go forward. “We followed him,” said Pearce later, “because there was nothing else to do.” As far as they could have known, the invasion was a failure and they were advancing on their own. Taylor took them inland. Joined by fifteen rangers, they beat off three truckloads of German infantry who suddenly appeared and deployed in the fields around them. By dark they were near the village of Louvieres, a mile and a half from the beach and almost a half mile out in front of the rest of the U.S. Army, and a runner had to be sent to tell them that what remained of their battalion was reassembling closer to the sea, and that they should fall back. There are such men.¹¹²

The situation was not quite so bad elsewhere on Omaha Beach as it was on Dog Green, but it was bad enough. The coast here is a shallow crescent almost four miles long and there was a tidal current pulling eastward that caused boats to land in the wrong places, off by as much as a hundred to a thousand yards. Maps had been made and descriptions given of the German fortifications in each sector, but they were useless anywhere else. The heavy naval gunfire was comforting, but the men in the first waves quickly discovered that it had done little damage to the enemy defenses. Neither had the aerial bombardment a half hour earlier by over three hundred Liberators from Eighth Air Force; of their thirteen thousand bombs, all had fallen inland, some by as far as three miles. Only five of the thirty-two floatable tanks made it ashore (the rest were swamped), which together with losses to the sixty-four loaded in LCTs meant that strength in tanks had been reduced by a third even before they landed.

Only a third of the engineer demolition teams arrived on their proper locations, and these had lost much of their equipment (of their sixteen bulldozers, only three became operational on the beach). Their marking buoys and poles were missing, so that when by heroic efforts they cleared six lanes through the obstacles, only one of these could be marked. (This meant that landing craft of the successive waves would not know where to come in on the rising tide and might be torn open by the obstacles now underwater.) Fifteen officers and men of the engineers, from colonel to private, were awarded the DSC for what they did this day: They had suffered 41 percent casualties, most of them in the first half hour.

Surveying Omaha Beach from its western end, the German commander of the fortifications on Pointe et Raz de la Percee concluded that the invasion had been halted in its tracks. He could see ten tanks and many other vehicles burning. He could see the dead and wounded lying on the sand; those of the Americans who were still unhurt could be seen huddled behind the gravel shingle, or any other piece of cover they could find. He thought the fire from his own position and from the artillery had been excellent, and had caused the heavy American losses. The German 916th Regiment, in the center of the division whose responsibility included the beach, reported to higher headquarters that the landing had been repulsed, though they added that their own losses were mounting and that they needed reinforcements.¹¹³

Omaha Beach hung on the edge of disaster but did not fall over it, and the reasons why are worth assessing. Partly it was a matter of pure weight; men and machines were being sacrificed but there were many more of both behind them. Partly it was the thinness of the German line; the reinforcements they needed did not get to them, or not in time or in sufficient numbers. Some landing craft in the later waves bravely tried to ram their way through the obstacles, and enough of them made it. The naval gunfire was critically important, as it became increasingly accurate and daring.

Nine U.S. and three British destroyers under Captain Harry Sanders, USN, decided on their own to close the beach until their bottoms scraped and to blaze away with their gun batteries at every target they could see. (One group of Germans, waving a white flag, accomplished the unusual feat of surrendering to destroyer McCook.) Inspecting the concrete pillboxes and gun positions after they had been overrun, the chief of staff of the 1st Division (which landed left of the 29th) concluded that without the naval gunfire we could never have crossed the beaches.¹¹⁴ But there was another factor that made a difference, and it is less easy to explain.

One by one, first as individuals and then as groups never larger than a company, the men pinned down and lying prone behind the shingle began to get on their feet and move inland. Leaders of uncommon valor urged them on. No one knows how many groups failed to make it, but it is clear that many tried, and that roughly a dozen succeeded. A lieutenant stood up and said, to no one in particular, “Are you going to lay there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?” A private tried to blow a gap in the barbed wire and died in the attempt; the lieutenant who followed him detonated the charge. The first man to enter the gap was killed, but then others followed, in twos and threes, until what was left of their company had passed through.

The intention had been to leave the beach by way of the draws, but these the Germans still covered with fire, so that making a virtue of necessity, handfuls of Americans went up over the bluffs and attacked the German positions from the flank and rear. These men deserve a special place in memory. They had few heavy weapons and no artillery support, but they put a crack in the Atlantic Wall that could not be closed.¹¹⁵

During the afternoon, German artillery and automatic-weapons fire continued but with diminished fury. As the tide receded, the engineers went to work again on the obstacles and cleared five large and six small boat channels. By evening, while still being shot at, they had bulldozed five exits from the beach and built a new road inland. Later waves of landing craft followed apace. Tanks began to move south, artillery was being landed in strength, and by dark the better part of five infantry regiments from the 29th and 1st divisions was ashore and had formed a continuous line from southwest of Vierville to east of Colleville. This was short of their planned objectives, and unloading was behind schedule, but momentum had been regained and casualties and materiel losses, if still high, were falling. Omaha Beach had been secured.

I have taken this single action to stand for what happened on D-Day because it was so fiercely fought and so narrowly won, but of course it was only a stanza in a poem of epic proportions. The American airborne drop had been an epic in its own right: 13,000 paratroopers in 822 transport planes, coming in across the Cotentin peninsula from the west to jump between 1:15 and 1:30 A.M. on drop zones behind the second American beach, called Utah.

Flying in the lead serial, Jim Gavin—now a brigadier general and assistant division commander of the 82d—could see from the open door the stream of aircraft behind him as far as the eye could reach. Sporadic antiaircraft fire came up at them from the Channel Islands; it increased in intensity when they passed the coast, and one minute inland they ran into a heavy cloud bank that obscured landmarks and broke up the formations. The 82d jumped on schedule but in disarray; some ended up miles distant. Fortunately, the greater portion came down near one of their objectives, the village of Sainte-Mère-Église. Lieutenant Colonel Edward C. Krause hit the ground on exactly the spot he had picked from an aerial photograph for his CP. But the most reassuring thing that night was to land, as General Gavin did, near a group of cows, whose benign presence indicated that the field you were in had not been mined.

In the little village of Azeville, a German soldier named Erwin Müller was standing guard near a garden gate when the whole sky to the south and west filled with parachutes, and he knew in a moment that Germany had lost the war. During the night, a friend of his was killed and another wounded; somewhere he could hear a man screaming. After dawn, he and his sergeant captured two Americans, one of whom said, “Say, how far is it to Paris, fella?” and offered him a piece of chocolate. A third American was badly wounded; when he died they folded his arms across his chest and a small group of Germans and Americans said the Lord’s Prayer for him in their respective languages. A week later, Müller himself was captured, and so returned alive after the war to his wife in Denmark, where he lived.

The paratroopers identified themselves to each other in the dark by snapping small toy crickets, and this way groups began to form. The largest from the 82d was gathered by General Gavin, who from a scout’s report of a railway embankment now knew where he was and what to do next, which was hold the bridges on the Merderet River, across which the Germans would have to come if they counterattacked, as they surely would. Sainte-Mère-Église had meanwhile been occupied by a group under Colonel Krause, first town in France to be liberated, an honor it still celebrates in an annual fete on the sixth of June. Krause found the cable that connected Cherbourg to Paris and cut it. He sent a report—“I have secured Ste. Mère-Église”—and distributed his forces to organize a defensive position around it. By the end of D-Day, the 82d controlled about 40 percent of its infantry and 10 percent of its artillery, and was strongly positioned around Sainte-Mère-Église, but it was not yet in contact with the 101st or with the seaborne landing at Utah Beach.¹¹⁶

These two, however, were in contact with each other. The drop of the 101st was almost as badly scattered as the 82d’s, but they had somewhat better luck in assembling large groups. The Germans had dispersed their own units, small packets in isolated villages and strongpoints, so that there took place numbers of individual and confused firefights, further broken up by the ubiquitous hedgerows of the Normandy bocage country. On both sides, immediate knowledge was limited to a few hundred yards. The Americans had at least the advantage of knowing their missions, and how these fitted together, and they set about accomplishing them. Within hours they had seized or cleared the exits from the causeways across an inundated marsh behind Utah Beach, and before dawn they had captured the lock that controlled the flow of water into the flooded area. By the end of D-Day, the 101st had assembled only about 2,500 of its 6,600 men who had jumped, but they had accomplished the essential mission of clearing the way for the assault from the sea. The airborne and the seaborne forces met at 11:05 A.M.¹¹⁷

It can be argued that the scattering of the paratroopers all over the landscape had a useful side effect: It thoroughly confused the Germans, and it brought about what David Howarth called “a gigantic and lethal game of hide-and-seek,” fought out over ten square miles between ten thousand Americans and perhaps five thousand Germans. “In this unique contest,” writes Howarth, “the Americans knew what was happening, but few of them knew where they were; the Germans knew where they were, but none of them knew what was happening.”¹¹⁸ German communications broke down; their telephones would go dead, their dispatch riders would drive off into the night and disappear. If a kind of torpor seems to have overcome the initial German reactions to the invasion, one reason for it was their inability to get a clear picture of what was going on.

The landings on Utah Beach—by the 4th Division in column of regiments on a two-battalion front—went comparatively well. Smoke and dust from the naval bombardment again obscured the landmarks, and the boats came in two thousand yards south of where they were supposed to, which was that much to the good, since the place they did land at was less heavily defended. By H+3 hours, the beach was clear and the later waves of landing craft were coming in routinely, harassed from time to time by sporadic German artillery fire. Though not all the D-Day objectives had been reached by day’s end, the backup forces from the transports were coming ashore virtually unhindered and on schedule. Eisenhower’s “soul-wracking” decision to commit the airborne divisions had been handsomely rewarded.

♦

Forty years afterward, the Normandy campaign is still being argued over. Was it well or badly done on our side? Did the Allied planners have any awareness of what they were getting into in the bocage, the hedgerows in which the Americans entangled themselves? (Each side believed the hedgerow country to favor the other, but both agreed it was a miserable place to fight.) Could the Germans, had it not been for their demented Führer’s reluctance to commit reserves, have conducted an even more resourceful defense than they did? Was it a “failure” on Montgomery’s part not to capture Caen promptly, as he had asserted he would do? Did the eventual American breakout to the west proceed according to Montgomery’s prior design, or had he seriously meant his own attack east of Caen to be the major effort? When subsequently the Germans were very nearly surrounded near Falaise, could the gap have been closed and their entire Seventh and Fifth panzer armies have been trapped? Ultimate success has not prevented these points from remaining in dispute.

This was Montgomery’s battle and he won it, but reading his mind on such questions as the above is made difficult by two of his psychological quirks that did not accord well with one another. Before an action began, he liked to make bold predictions as to its outcome; this was part of his way of gingering people up, of creating an aura of victory to come. In the aftermath, however, he liked to claim that everything had gone exactly as he had intended. When the two did not jibe, as ofttimes happened, the observer was compelled to conclude either that Montgomery’s original plan had not been what he said it was, or that something other than the original plan had been followed. On occasion, the documentation permits either or both interpretations, and in whichever case Montgomery comes out looking the worse for it.

On D-Day he looked just fine; his own airdrop and landings had been near letter-perfect. The mission of the British paratroopers was to wipe out a coastal defense battery that commanded the British beach near Ouistreham, to protect the beachhead flank by destroying five bridges over the Dives River, and to capture intact two bridges over the Orne that would be needed in the advance. All were accomplished with finesse, casualties few. The three British (one Canadian) seaborne landings were somewhat more expeditious than the American and at lighter cost—partly because they employed specialized armor (which the Americans had spurned) to clear minefields and reduce pillboxes—but the fine-grain detail was no different: landing craft disabled, trucks and tanks set afire, bodies riddled and blown apart.

There was no easy way ashore that morning. By nightfall, the British penetration was wider and farther inland than the American, and a heavier body of armored formations was building up, but Caen had not fallen and already there were signs that attempts to take it would be hotly contested. By the end of the first week, despite their grievous losses, the Allies had linked up and achieved a bridgehead fifty miles long and eight to ten miles deep. In the week that followed, the Americans—VII Corps under Major General J. Lawton Collins—cut across the base of the Cotentin and by the end of the month they had occupied Cherbourg.

To have secured a large and continuous lodgment and a major (though heavily demolished) port in a matter of weeks was a fine thing and a great victory, but from long back the SHAEF staff and commanders had realized that the period ahead would be even more alive with dangers than the landing itself. They must somehow find a way out of the beachhead, for it could contain only a certain amount of troops and stores, and as time passed, an inescapable arithmetic would increase the number of Germans who could be brought to face them. Most to be feared was “stabilization,” a stalemate degenerating into fixed-position warfare on the mind-chilling model of World War I, and this was a very real possibility taken seriously by, among others, Omar Bradley and George Patton.¹¹⁹

The Allied advantage lay less in infantry than in air power and mobility, and to exploit these there must also be a breakout somewhere. But where? Logic said to the east, in the British sector, where lay open country usable by tanks and roads that led to Paris. But logic said the same thing to the Germans, who considered the British to be the more menacing opponent anyhow, and so the Wehrmacht put the bulk of its power there and fought with grim determination. Montgomery made three attempts to crack through and encircle Caen; all failed.

His chief, Brooke, did not believe that the Americans could achieve what Montgomery had been unable to. “I know the bocage country well from my boyhood,” Brooke wrote to Tedder, “and they will never get through it.” Brooke was wrong. The breakout when it came was a revelation in the Word According to Liddell Hart, the “expanding torrent” of his between-the-wars writing and lecturing,¹²⁰ a brilliant exercise in blitzkrieg that determined the outcome of the European war and still dominates the maps of it, a great branching tree of American divisions rampaging through France, an exultant Patton at their head. But sight should not be lost of Bradley, who planned it—Bradley, pacing the wooden floor of a tent at his headquarters near Colombieres, in which he had mounted an eight-foot map of the beachhead, “scribbling boundaries, penciling roads, coloring the river lines,”¹²¹ until the outlines emerged of a detailed scheme in which Collins and VII Corps, aided by a massive air bombardment, would punch a hole in the front, and the rest of First Army, fifteen divisions strong, would stream through it behind him. There are some battles that might have been lost and victory still won, but not this one: This one tipped the balance that could not be restored, and afforded Rundstedt his famous reply to Hitler’s headquarters when they asked him what to do now: “Make peace, you idiots! What else can you do?”¹²²

The air bombardment on July 25 was a mess (it killed General McNair and many other Americans), but it stunned and disoriented the Germans, and that afternoon—even though the infantry at first bogged down and Bradley grew discouraged—Collins made the critical decision to commit the armor; two days later, one of his division commanders reported: “This thing has busted wide open.”¹²³ On August 1, two entire corps (VIII and XV) of the newly activated Third Army under Patton were pouring through Avranches at the base of Brittany and across a single bridge at Pontaubault—“one of those things which cannot be done,” wrote Patton, “but was”—and riding with them in his jeep, he shouted with delight each time he ran off one map and had to start using another. “Compared to war,” he wrote in his diary that day, “all [other] human activities are futile, if you like war as I do.”¹²⁴ He was in his element and on his way, and nothing would stop him now until, quite literally, he ran out of fuel.

Bradley believed, and according to his posthumously published memoir went on believing to the end, that this had all along been Montgomery’s object: to draw the Germans toward his left flank so that the Americans could deliver an overwhelming blow on the right; if such is so, it was self-denying on Montgomery’s part, and all honor to him for carrying through on it. But Bradley—who now commanded an American army group containing the armies of Patton and Hodges—suspected that Montgomery had several other purposes in sight, among them the possibility that his own third and final attack might in fact become the breakout, and this eventuality Montgomery had clearly underscored to others at the time with his customary sauciness. The “others” included Brooke, whom he had no reason to deceive, and most inopportunely Eisenhower, who took Montgomery’s professions of high intent at face value and got up hopes for decisive results which then faded and dissolved in the absence of their realization.

Montgomery later claimed that Eisenhower’s aroused expectations were caused by military inexperience and incomprehension of the Plan, which is tantamount to saying that Eisenhower was a fool to have believed him, not a firm base on which to build a command relationship. Eisenhower was more than a little angry at being let down—Bradley says “red as a hot coal”—and Bradley believed that the Supreme Commander would have dismissed Montgomery there and then if he thought Churchill and Brooke would have allowed it.¹²⁵

Liddell Hart thought that the one American general who really understood deep armored exploitation and the importance of speed better even than Patton did was John S. Wood—“P” Wood, for “professor,” from West Point days when he tutored other cadets—commander of 4th Armored Division, the first to drive through Avranches and on into Brittany. Wood wanted to pivot eastward to Chartres or Orleans, and beyond them to Paris, but his assigned mission was to take the port at Lorient, which was the wrong job for an armored division, and the Allied command could not readjust quickly enough to turn him loose from it. Both Montgomery and Eisenhower realized by this time that Brittany was not going to require more than a corps of Patton’s Third Army, the rest of which should do as Wood wanted, but the realization somehow failed to be converted into orders, Wood was immobilized, and not until mid-August was 4th Armored—among the most reckless, confident, and aggressive of divisions—set free and headed east. “It was,” Wood told Liddell Hart later, “one of the colossally stupid decisions of the war.”¹²⁶

By then, Patton had turned his XV Corps east and told its commander not to be surprised if orders came to go northeast or even north. Patton, whose battlefield nostrils were as sensitive as any known, could smell the chance to trap the Germans west of the Seine by a wide envelopment, and so could Bradley, who told a visitor (Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau): “This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century.”

It had been brought about by Hitler’s determination not only to keep his Seventh Army in Normandy but also to have Fifth Panzer Army attack from Mortain toward Avranches and cut Patton off, a decision that cost Hitler his hold on France. Ultra picked up and decoded his order on August 3 and both Bradley and Patton knew of it, so that when the counterattack came on the night of August 6-7, it ran into fierce U.S. resistance and the encirclement continued. By the eleventh, the Germans were beginning to pull back, and by the sixteenth, Hitler had (with great reluctance) been persuaded to authorize both armies’ withdrawal from an exposed salient in which they were being gripped from three sides at once.¹²⁷

Should they—or could they?—have been prevented from escaping? Much ink has been spilled over this issue. Bradley ordered Patton, who was coming from the south, to halt at Argentan, and Patton told his diary that he believed this order to have originated with Montgomery, who was coming from the north. (Bradley said not so: It was his idea.) Some hundred thousand Germans were being caught in the Falaise Pocket, as it came to be called, and the first fact to be noted is that not all of them did escape, at best from twenty to forty thousand, of whom most were service and not combat troops, and they left behind virtually all of their equipment (not only tanks and artillery but machine guns and radios and field kitchens). The Germans surrendered in droves (one of their sergeants shot a company commander who tried to halt this), thousands a day, so many the Allies could not count them, perhaps fifty thousand in all, including three general officers. Inside the pocket, the devastation caused by Allied artillery and fighter-bombers was awesome: Approximately ten thousand German dead were counted amidst the smoldering wreckage of their guns and vehicles—“as if,” wrote one American officer who could compare this with World War I, “an avenging angel had swept the area bent on destroying all things German.”¹²⁸

The Americans thought Montgomery’s move from the north to close the gap a poor performance; he did not give it his best effort, and he seemed more intent on squeezing the Germans out of the pocket than on containing them within it. But Bradley never denied that the decision to halt Patton was his, and over the years he offered a number of explanations for it (misleading intelligence, lack of sufficient force, need to avoid friendly units’ firing on each other). All are somewhat short of satisfactory, since they fail to include the more probable possibility: namely, that Bradley did not want to tangle with a buzzing swarm of angry Germans.

“I much preferred,” he wrote, “a solid shoulder at Argentan to the possibility of a broken neck at Falaise.” The experienced British combat writer Max Hastings gives Bradley credit for having the good sense not to move in precipitately on a trapped, desperate, and deadly enemy. “If the man outside the thicket,” writes Hastings, “knows that the wounded tiger within it is bleeding to death, he would be foolish to step inside merely to hasten the collection of the trophy. If this was indeed Bradley’s reasoning, he was almost certainly correct.”¹²⁹

The two opponents had taken each other’s measure thus far, and the phenomenon had to be faced—as men so far removed from one another as Patton and Churchill both faced it—that the Americans and British were not as good infantry fighters as the Germans. “The Germans liked soldiering,” said one of Montgomery’s officers. “We didn’t.” An American statistical study showed that man for man, the Germans inflicted at least 50 percent more casualties on us than we did on them, and this was true whether they were attacking or defending, whether they won or lost. It is what General von Thoma meant by wanting to “use the Army” upon us; his was not an idle boast. They seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of colonels who could form battle groups out of whatever soldiers they found at hand, and of noncoms and junior officers who could lead them in platoons and companies. Not always, but again and again, a small group of Germans with a tank and a field gun or two would hang in there beyond the point of reasonableness or necessity and bring a well-organized Allied attack to a halt. To repeat, this was the best army in the world.

Also, their weapons were better. Their light machine gun, the Spandau MG-42, was more portable than our Browning 30-caliber and had a far more rapid rate of fire. Their mortars were more numerous and more murderously accurate, accounting for as much as three quarters of Allied casualties in Normandy. Their Nebelwerfer, multibarreled rocket projectors for which the Americans had no equivalent whatever, threw a bomb fitted with a siren almost as unnerving as the explosive it contained. Their tanks—the Mark V Panther and the Mark VI Tiger—were more heavily gunned and armored than our M-4 Sherman, the Allied workhorse; a Tiger’s 88-mm gun could knock out a Sherman at four thousand yards, while the Sherman’s 75-mm could not get through a Tiger’s frontal armor at all.¹³⁰

The penetration of armor is a function of muzzle velocity, to which the Germans had devoted great attention, developing long, tapered barrels that sent shells popping out like steel champagne corks at thousands of feet per second. The alternative is a shaped charge, which literally burns a hole through a tank’s armor and sprays red-hot particles around inside it, but here our “bazooka” was a toy popgun compared to the German Panzerfaust. The 82d Airborne captured truckloads of Panzerfäuste, Gavin had translations made of their instruction manuals, and training was conducted in their use.¹³¹ Of the American carbine the less said the better; in action it was worthless, and it jammed at a dirty look.

If so, how did we manage? The answer was a combination of things or, rather, combination was the answer. The Americans, summoning up a native talent for on-the-job training, learned how in ways that had not been foreseen to combine their strengths. Of these, the greatest was artillery, which the Germans had neglected; they had counted on the Stuka dive-bomber as a substitute, as for a time it was, but when the air filled with high-speed Allied fighter planes, the slow Stuka vanished from the skies, not to be replaced. They had nothing comparable, for example, to our 155-mm Long Tom, prince among long-range rifles, of which we had twelve per division and as many more per corps as need required.

Nor did they have anything approximate to the American volume and organization of fire; artillery, as the American military historian Russell Weigley puts it, was “the outstanding combat branch of the American ground forces.” The Americans could bring to bear the artillery of an entire corps (perhaps two hundred guns) on a single target, a so-called serenade, and sometimes they fired it TOT (time on target), a calculation of each shell’s trajectory so that all arrived at the same instant. Survivors of a TOT serenade were unhesitating witnesses to its devastating efficacy.

The great discovery was that infantry, tanks, artillery, and fighter-bombers form a team, each member of which needs the others, and the total of which is greater than the sum of their parts; together they composed a military instrument of a kind the Germans had once wielded to deadly effect but no longer possessed, at least not on a comparable scale, and mainly because they had lost control of the air. The Luftwaffe had destroyed itself in the great air battles over Germany of earlier in the year, and had ceased to exist as a fighting force. The British Typhoons and the American P-47 Thunderbolts roamed the battlefields with impunity. During the breakout, a tank column would call its group of P-47s to ask: “Is the road safe for us to proceed?” and get the reply, “Stand by and we’ll find out,” followed by the destruction of four German tanks and the message: “All clear. Proceed at will.”¹³²

None of this had been carefully thought through in advance; it was extemporized by individual ground and air commanders rather than provided for in tables of organization and manuals of tactics (a field manual on the subject was not published until later in the war). The air force bomber barons had given ground support scant attention and Bradley said the Americans “went into France almost totally untrained in air-ground co-operation.” The lack of it was made up for by experience gained in Italy and by a single man, thirty-six-year-old “Pete” Quesada, now a major general, who had caught Eisenhower’s attention in North Africa and been made commander of IX Tactical Air Force, Bradley’s air arm. Breezy and untrammeled, Quesada brought to ground support the same intensity of conviction and determination to prove the worth of air power that Spaatz and Eaker had for strategic bombing.

Quesada landed on the Far Shore in a P-38 Lightning on D + 1, set up his tent next to Bradley’s, and by the end of the month had established sixteen fighter-bomber groups at fields in Normandy. He hung heavier and heavier bombs under the wings of fighter aircraft. He found Bradley willing to let him have a few tanks, in which he installed air force radios, so that tank and fighter-bomber could talk to each other. He created units called Forward Air Controllers, who rode with the ground troops to keep the air in contact with them, and later he urged the use of radar to vector the fighter-bombers in on target. “This man Quesada is a jewel,” Bradley wrote to Hap Arnold; “he was not only willing to try everything that would help us, but he inspired his whole command with this desire.”¹³³ Tactical air became so effective that during the breakout it took over the task of protecting Patton’s southern flank.

Whatever else you say of the Normandy campaigns, they unlimbered the muscles of mobility in the Allied armies, especially in the American, whose zest for motion seemed to echo some innate national impulse. When Churchill visited Bradley’s CP at Saint-Sauveur Lendelin on August 7, Bradley showed him a map on which it could be seen that twelve U.S. divisions had already passed through Avranches. “Good heavens,” said Churchill. “How do you feed them?” Bradley explained that trucks ran bumper to bumper night and day, a way of warfare new to the Prime Minister.¹³⁴

Even Montgomery, whose lack of interest in the exploitation phase of a battle had been noted by Liddell Hart as early as 1924, was about to break loose in a spirited pursuit of the fleeing Germans that impressed his most convinced critics. These were many, and it is perhaps the aftereffect of Normandy most ominous for what was to come that they had been given something they considered to be just cause by his combination of boastfulness and plodding performance. The preliminaries were in place for the confrontation between Montgomery and Eisenhower that would provide the latter with his most severe test as Supreme Commander.

III

Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery was the object of such overpowering veneration by the British public that it was impossible then (and is little less difficult today) to arrive at any balanced view of his merits and defects. With one success in October 1942 he had swept clean the memory of a past littered with failures. El Alamein was less of a decisive battle than an icon; it was a triumphant reassertion of national valor, a recapture of ongoing self-confidence summed up in Churchill’s observation that before Alamein they never knew a victory, after it they never knew defeat. Montgomery became a cherished symbol of this return to familiar commerce with an almost foregone glory; he walked in the company of the great captains, his every step a vindication of their living presence. Crowds followed him, yearned to touch his sleeve. He had become a rule unto himself and could do no wrong. He wore his nonregulation uniform of sweater and beret even in the presence of the monarch, who smiled. He was known to be arrogant, puritanical, eccentric; numerous anecdotes told of this. They were greeted with chuckles. Good old Monty.¹³⁵

Behind the public personality was a private one of considerable interest, and thus of fascination to biographers who would rather grant their subject human failings than military ones, who would rather have him dismaying than mistaken. His supporters are prickly; one of them refers to a reputable British writer’s study of Montgomery’s North African campaigns as an “attempted character assassination.” Some—beginning with Brooke, who noted it in his diary in June 1943—have emphasized the personal animosity Montgomery aroused in Americans,¹³⁶ as though this explained away American misgivings about his generalship. Agreed that arguments abound around him, but what were they all about? For purposes of acuity in this regard, one might wish it were possible to ignore Monty the personality—the warmth that endeared him to his staff officers, the conceit that drove Americans up the walls—and try to focus instead on Montgomery the professional soldier. But human beings, alas, are of a piece.

For an American to write about the military Montgomery is an awkward exercise, since there is a wrenching disproportion between the legend and the reality as Americans perceive it. The transatlantic view is not only less charitable than the homegrown one but alien, in a literal sense, to the world Montgomery inhabited, in which public approval was confirmed by that of his service superiors—Brooke preeminently but also the director of military operations, Major General Frank Simpson, and the secretary of state for war, Sir James Grigg—who strongly and steadfastly supported him. He breathed an atmosphere of professional reinforcement in what he was about. To admit of doubt was not in his nature, and no reason to doubt was brought to his attention. British discussion of his leadership accordingly tends to begin with an assumption of his “greatness” and then go on to admit certain deplorable faults, while the American begins with an assumption of unproven merit and goes on to admit certain strengths.

Strengths, then: force of character, singleness of mind, fidelity of purpose, the self-assertion essential in a field commander. “He was a magnificent master to work for,” said his chief of staff. “He never got excited, never lost his temper, gave you the task and then left you to carry it out without interference.” His headquarters ran smoothly and he took meticulous care in appointing subordinates, many of whom he knew personally, down as far as battalion level; during battles he visited his commanders every day. He communicated well with troops (including American troops), infusing them with his conviction of success and making them feel a part of a sound plan. At a “set-piece” operation he excelled. When he took command of the ground forces for the invasion, they acquired a vigor and sense of direction few others could have imparted, and this earns him credit that his subsequent blunders and misbehavior do not deface. Both Beetle Smith and Eisenhower told Drew Middleton after the war that the invasion would not have been possible without Montgomery.

For many Americans, however, his “greatness” is only another example of an inflated military reputation, of a halfway competant general mistakenly elevated to a level above his capacity, where he could no longer cope with either a mobile battlefield or the complexities of an Allied relationship. Montgomery reciprocated in kind. He believed that the British and the Germans understood warfare in a way the Americans did not. “The real trouble with the Yanks,” he wrote to Grigg, “is that they are completely ignorant of the rules of the game we are playing with the Germans. You play so much better when you know the rules.”¹³⁷ He not only had a low military opinion of Americans but found them incomprehensible professionally—in their silences, their maddening politeness, their stubborn refusal to accept the subordinate position in which they so evidently belonged. All of this would be of interest merely as a case history in how military ability is formed and judged, and in Anglo-American disparities of perception, were it not for the contest in which Montgomery and the Americans were engaged, which had to do overtly with the conduct of the war and covertly with the future of the world.

Montgomery believed that if he had been allowed to have his way, the war would have been won before the end of 1944, hypothetically with the capture of Berlin by Allied armies. “The point to understand,” he wrote in an entry for his diary-log the week after V-E Day, “is that if we had run the show properly the war could have been finished by Xmas 1944. The blame for this must rest with the Americans.” Here is a heinous charge, not to be lightly made or lightly discounted, inasmuch as the “blame” encompassed is not only for the deaths of thousands of British and American soldiers and airmen but the prolonged sufferings of a prostrate Europe. Montgomery’s biographer Nigel Hamilton includes within it the deaths of Anne Frank and the “millions of Jews, political opponents, and ordinary people” subject to the Nazis, for whom the Allies “arrived too late.”¹³⁸ A further extension of the thesis holds that had we met the Russians sooner and farther east—on the Oder, say, rather than the Elbe—the postwar Soviet domination of Eastern Europe might have been forestalled or mitigated. If Montgomery was right, the Americans and their President have much to answer for, since Eisenhower’s views prevailed at Roosevelt’s insistence.

The problem as Eisenhower had to face it was primarily one of logistics. The breakout from the beachhead had encountered supply difficulties by mid-August, and by mid-September it had reached the end of its logistical tether. Patton and others lavished reproach on the supply moguls of Supreme Headquarters for allowing this to happen. The support apparatus of SHAEF, known as Com Z (Communications Zone), was commanded by Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee (sometimes called “Jesus Christ Himself” Lee), and Com Z personnel were alternately loathed and envied by the frontline units. After Paris was liberated, Eisenhower wanted it reserved for combat troops on furlough, but without his knowledge Lee moved 8,000 officers and 21,000 men into Paris and filled up so many hotels that a French satiric magazine referred to SHAEF as Societé des Hôteliers Américains en France.¹³⁹ Eisenhower was furious but did not, as he should have done, send Lee home.

Yet it is hard to see how the shortages of August 1944 could have been relieved even by prodigies of foresight and energy on Com Z’s part. In truth, the planners had little choice. It must not be forgotten that Overlord, for all its majesty and might, was a marginal enterprise. Only a phased progress, contingent on the availability of port facilities, had been possible for supply officers to consider, and they had been given no margin of safety; they might have been more flexible but hardly could they have been more generous. Then reality had outrun the plan.

The conservative calculators had figured that by D + 90 (September 4), they could support twelve American divisions at the Seine River barrier; when D + 90 came, sixteen U.S. divisions were already operating 150 miles beyond the Seine, and by D + 98 they had reached a line they were not supposed to get to until D + 350! Neither the Brittany nor the Seine River ports had been opened and the liberation of Paris had imposed a demand for civilian relief (2,400 tons a day) that had not been anticipated until much later. Operational reserves had been exhausted and the whole system was strained to the breaking point. Well aware of this, but equally aware that the initiative had to be tightly held—“we must now as never before,” he wrote Marshall on a critical day, September 4, “keep the enemy stretched everywhere”—Eisenhower had accepted the risk of ordering the advance to continue.¹⁴⁰

For the Allies, late August and early September 1944 were heady times to be alive. Montgomery—as though to dispel his reputation for slowness—was speeding with his British and Canadian armies across the Flanders battlefields of World War I, covering in hours distances that had then taken months and tens of thousands of lives. Hodges’s First (U.S.) Army went over the Seine on August 27 and within a week had taken 25,000 prisoners at Mons. Patton’s Third Army was racing for the Meuse, which he crossed on August 30. Patch’s Seventh Army (U.S. and French) had landed in the south of France and driven north beyond Lyons. Alexander’s Fifteenth Army Group (U.S., British, and other allies) was successfully attacking in Italy north beyond Florence. The Germans had withdrawn from Greece; the Russians had reached Jugoslavia; Rumania had surrendered and Bulgaria was trying to. Those whose memories went back to November 1918, when Germany capitulated with her armies still in the field, could only wonder whether this might not be about to happen again.

In this ambience of all-pervading optimism, during the month between August 15 and September 15 (when the Allies closed along the German border), decisions were made that determined the way the war would be fought, harshly contested, and finally won. August was a climacteric, marking as it did the end of the road for British predominance in the Grand Alliance. “It was in August,” writes the able British analyst R. W. Thompson, “that the unbalance in strength between the U.S.A. and Britain began to assert an overwhelming influence on the campaign. Neither the [British] Chiefs of Staff, nor even the voice of Churchill, could any longer prevail in matters of major strategy or policy. The design, henceforth, was the design of Roosevelt…. In the mid-summer of 1944, Britain, having withstood the siege and contrived at last the springboard into Europe, was denied the chance to be the architect of the victory she had made possible.” These elegiac and autumnal words are profoundly apt.

After five years of war, Britain was harried and worn. For the second time in three decades she had given of her life’s blood and it was ebbing away. The production peak of 1943 had been passed and could not be regained. The labor force was declining and new age groups were not enough to fill the army’s needs; some divisions were two thousand men under strength and the replacement pool was nearly dry; five divisions and four armored brigades would have to be disbanded unless more men could be found.¹⁴¹ In December, Churchill would have to order the last call-up of 250,000 men. If Montgomery was unaware of all this, the War Office regularly reminded him of it.

With the bright victories of July and August a sense of urgency came to prevail: now or never, the last chance for British arms to win the laurels they deserved. With every day the Americans were becoming more numerous, their new divisions queued up in quantity, waiting only to land and fight; with every day the Germans seemed further beyond hope. Victory beckoned: so near, so inviting. It was a moment of destiny and to deal with it Britain made a sorrowful miscalculation: She sent the wrong man with the wrong scheme of action.

♦

The original SHAEF plan—set forth in an internal staff paper a month before the invasion and signed, be it noted, by British officers—had been for a careful advance on a broad front that would push the enemy back to the German frontier by May of 1945. It was considered dangerous to attack by a single route, which would invite concentration against it, and therefore the planners envisaged a main axis from Amiens to the Ruhr, with a second one south of the Ardennes in the direction of Metz and Verdun. The Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, was the one essential goal—Berlin was “too far east to be the objective of a campaign in the West”—but a two-pronged offensive on a wide front would give the Allies an ability to maneuver and shift to exploit opportunities. It was taken for granted that General Eisenhower would assume personal command as soon as there were both American and British army groups in operation.¹⁴²

Montgomery had other ideas; on August 17, he met with Bradley and unveiled them. The two Allied army groups would move together in a “solid mass” of forty divisions toward the northeast, north of the Ardennes, capturing the Channel ports and the V-1 flying-bomb sites, establishing airfields in Belgium, and heading no farther south than Aachen and Cologne. Montgomery came away from this meeting with the impression that Bradley had agreed “entirely” with this conception, as he informed Brooke the next day, though this was not the case. It happened again and again. Montgomery’s self-confidence led him to interpret a vague or temporizing response to his demands as consent. He would deliver a school-marmish lecture that discouraged discussion and then conclude from the absence thereof that everyone agreed with him. Later, discovering his mistake, he would accuse the Americans of bad faith. He further assumed that he would continue to be the ground commander, despite the fact that Eisenhower’s eventual occupancy of that post had long been known to be demanded by Roosevelt and agreed to by Churchill.¹⁴³

Montgomery gave the same lecture to Eisenhower on August 23, at his headquarters in a Normandy apple orchard, and got part—but only part—of what he wanted. Eisenhower made it clear that the command arrangements were settled, and that he would take over on September 1, but he agreed to issue a directive giving Montgomery the mission of clearing the Channel coast, overrunning the Belgian airfields, and taking Antwerp; Bradley’s mission would be to clear Brittany and advance in the center to support the main effort to the north—in short, the original SHAEF plan somewhat modified in Montgomery’s favor.

Bradley objected, as did many SHAEF officers, and the directive as finally issued on the twenty-ninth did not give Montgomery “operational control” of Bradley’s army adjacent to him (the First, under Hodges), but only “authority to effect the necessary operational co-ordination”—a distinction Montgomery considered to be basic. Eisenhower was not willing to abandon entirely the possibility of Bradley—which is to say, Patton—advancing south of the Ardennes on Metz and Verdun.