Brothers, Rivals, Victors

As for the first major operation, the Americans proposed an invasion of France in the spring of 1943, code-named ROUNDUP, to be preceded by a buildup of U.S. forces in England, later given the code name BOLERO. They also proposed, as a contingency measure, an emergency cross-channel invasion for the fall of 1942, which was intended to pull some of Hitler’s divisions off the Eastern Front if it looked as though the Soviet Union were going down for the last time. It was code-named SLEDGEHAMMER.²

As a matter of geography, the quickest way to Germany was through northern France. But the British insisted that the first Allied invasion, wherever it took place, must enjoy a high likelihood of success, since failure in their first joint effort would deal a severe blow to Anglo-American morale, it would boost the myth of German invincibility, and it might dishearten the Soviet Union to the point of suing for peace. The western Allies needed to launch their operation before the end of the year, for neither Stalin nor the voting public would stand for a year’s inactivity. ROUNDUP, they argued, was patently infeasible in 1942. In lieu of an invasion of France, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposed SUPER-GYMNAST, an Anglo-American invasion of North Africa. SUPER-GYMNAST—later shortened to “GYMNAST”—was sent to Ike’s planning department as another option for 1942.³

In the wake of ARCADIA, Ike’s work piled up like a Montana snowdrift. He rarely saw his home while the sun was shining. He substituted cigarettes and blackstrap coffee for food and sleep, and he described his daily routine to a friend in the waning hours of 1941: “Just to give you an inkling of the kind of mad house you are getting into, it is now eight o’clock on New Year’s Eve. I have a couple hours’ work ahead of me, and tomorrow will be no different from today. I have been here about three weeks and this noon I had my first luncheon outside the office. Usually it is a hot dog sandwich and a glass of milk.” He also complained to his diary, “Tempers are short! There are lots of amateur strategists on the job—and prima donnas everywhere. I’d give anything to be back in the field ! ” ⁴

As Marshall feared, the pressure was getting to Eisenhower. It only grew worse when Ike’s father died on March 10; owing to the press of work, the mourning son had to miss his father’s funeral. Something seemed like it would have to give way.⁵

But Ike persevered, contenting himself with small-scale outbursts that collectively forestalled a complete collapse. In his diary, he called MacArthur “as big a baby as ever,” and he wrote of Admiral Ernest P. King, the Navy’s incoming chief of operations, “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King.” Despite his friend Patton’s wider reputation for profanity, Eisenhower could send up a cloud of curses as thick and blue as the cigarette smoke that filled his office.

But apart from occasional outbursts in his diary, or howitzer blasts directed at staffers who turned in shoddy work, Ike swallowed his frustrations like a good soldier, put his head down, and bulled through his work. In an introspective diary entry in March, he compared his outbursts to Marshall’s:

Marshall puzzles me a bit. I’ve never seen a man who apparently develops a higher pressure of anger when he encounters some piece of stupidity than does he. Yet the outburst is so fleeting, he returns so quickly to complete “normalcy,” that I’m certain he does it for effect. At least he doesn’t get angry in the sense that I do—I blaze for an hour!⁶

Amidst the stress, the long hours, and complaints from seniors and subordinates, Ike, a man who prided himself on putting duty first, finally lost his temper with Marshall. In mid-March, having sensed Eisenhower’s desire for a field command, the Chief casually told him one afternoon, “I want you to know that in this war the commanders are going to be promoted and not the staff officers.”

Marshall let the message sink in for a moment; then he drove the point home. “Take your case. I know that you were recommended by one general for a division command and another for a corps command. That’s all very well. I’m glad they have that opinion of you, but you are going to stay right here and fill your position, and that’s that!”

The way the snide old general spoke to him, looked at him, finally got to Ike. His bald head turning crimson, Ike shot back through gritted teeth: “General, I’m interested in what you have to 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 am trying to do my duty. I expect to do that as long as you want me here. If that locks me to a desk for the rest of the war, so be it!”⁷

There was no mistaking the bitterness behind Ike’s words, and he started for the door. “Already I was feeling sheepish over my outburst,” he wrote. “[Marshall’s] office was long, and every step I took toward the door I felt more ashamed of myself.”

In his flustered state, Ike didn’t understand that his chief’s loaded statement was not browbeating or bullying, for Marshall intended to promote him in the near future. He was giving Ike another test of character. The basic point of Ike’s bitter reaction—that he would serve wherever Marshall wanted him, to hell with the rest of the war—wasn’t refined or even articulate, but it was exactly what Marshall wanted to hear. Ike was committed to the good of the team, even at the expense of his own career. He had passed his second test.⁹

About three days after Ike’s tirade, the Chief promoted him to major general. It was a temporary appointment, of course—Eisenhower would hold the permanent rank of lieutenant colonel until late in the war—but the twin stars made an eminently satisfying badge of office, particularly since staffers were not supposed to rate above brigadier general. And more important, it meant that if he ever knocked off the shackles of staff duty, he would probably get a division, or perhaps even a corps.¹⁰

In late spring, word reached Marshall that the Americans in London charged with organizing BOLERO were not doing their jobs, and the Chief dispatched General Eisenhower to kick some urgency into the American contingent. Ike packed his bags and brought along Wayne Clark, whom Marshall was sending to build a training infrastructure in England. On May 23, Ike and Clark drove to Bolling Field, kissed their wives good-bye, and boarded their plane for the first of many visits as Marshall’s emissaries.¹¹

After a long flight to Prestwick, Scotland, and a train ride to London through the obligatory rain, the two major generals commenced several grueling days of dawn-to-dusk conferences with their American and British counterparts. The meetings brought Ike into contact with many players in the transatlantic drama, including General Sir Alan Brooke, Marshall’s opposite number in the Imperial General Staff, and the dashing Lord Louis Mountbatten. As he got to know his allies, Ike found the Britons warm, pleasant, and helpful—with two exceptions.¹²

Alan Brooke, nicknamed “Colonel Shrapnel” by those unfortunate enough to work for him, had a temper that easily matched Marshall’s. The staccato-voiced Briton with the long, drooping face felt his sense of duty to country every bit as deeply as did Marshall, though added to his regular duties was the Herculean burden of reconciling Churchill’s grand schemes with the art of the possible.¹³

But while Brooke had to bite his tongue with Churchill more or less stoically, he reserved a quiet, patronizing contempt for his Yankee cousins. He had a great deal of respect for the German foe, and he saw in the Americans an inexperienced, reckless bunch of newcomers whose ideas, if not checked by a veteran hand, would bring disaster to the Allied cause.

Ike tried his best to warm up the Imperial General Staff chief, but Brooke’s furrowed brow and persistent look of displeasure, magnified by horn-rimmed glasses and an abrupt manner, stymied even Ike’s considerable charm. Throughout the war Brooke would look upon Eisenhower as a well-meaning chap who was patently unfit to hold high military command. Eisenhower, for his part, found Brooke too wedded to the Great War approach—a view that, he felt, afflicted too many of those generals fortunate enough to have served in the First World War.¹⁴

Another meeting on Ike’s agenda was with a short, wiry lieutenant general named Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of a British Army training center in southeastern England. Ike and Clark drove to Sussex, where “Monty” and his staff were giving a lecture to an assembled group of American officers on lessons learned from fighting the Germans. It was in Sussex where Ike got a taste of the Englishman’s “house rules.”¹⁵

Montgomery opened the meeting by remarking, “I have been directed to take time from my busy life to brief you gentlemen.” He launched into a rather patronizing lecture, and after some minutes, Clark remembered, “Ike quietly fished around in his pocket, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes.” Before Ike could get three puffs into his smoke, Montgomery, his dachshund-like nose wrinkling, halted the briefing and demanded, “Who is smoking?”

On the ride back to the hotel, Ike’s driver overheard the words “Montgomery” and “son-of-a-bitch” billowing from the backseat in a harsh American dialect. As the driver later recalled, Ike was “furious—really steaming mad. And he was still mad. It was my first exposure to the Eisenhower temper. His face was flaming red, and the veins in his forehead looked like worms.”¹⁷

By the time the car rolled up to the hotel, Ike’s prodigious temper had simmered. He had done what he came to do; he had listened to Montgomery’s lecture, and that was all that was required of him. With any luck, he and the condescending Briton would never cross paths again.

Returning to Washington in early June, Ike drafted a report to Marshall about the state of U.S. preparations in England. The central point of his draft report was that American officers in London, lacking both leadership and a sense of urgency, were wasting valuable time. Soon afterward, Marshall called Ike into his office to discuss the Washington side of the operations. The forbidding Chief looked at his lieutenant and asked him in his monotone, “In your opinion, are the plans as nearly complete as we can make them?”¹⁸

It was one of those ironic moments General Marshall—a man whose sense of humor was as dry as a the desert—loved to construct for his favored soldiers. With no fanfare, no ceremony, just a seemingly offhand comment, he had propelled Dwight D. Eisenhower into the highest American command in Europe. Whatever happened in England, Ike would be at the center.

While Eisenhower was organizing the American buildup in Europe, his friend George Patton was fighting for his ticket to the battlefield. As he scurried about the desert by scout car, jeep (or “peep,” as he called it), and light observation plane, Patton kept his Indio, California, desert training center running smoothly under the scorching summer sun. His personal staff now included youthful aide Captain Richard N. Jenson from southern California, and Sergeant Alexander Stiller, a stoic, heavily armed Texan who, one aide remarked, “looks as if he were made of solid hickory.”²¹

George’s reputation as a training commander grew, which was important to men like Generals Marshall and McNair. But so did his itch to get into an overseas combat command. In the early summer of ’42 he heard rumors that “Eisenhower and Clark will have the big jobs” in Europe, and George figured Ike’s patronage couldn’t hurt his chances at being the first general to hit the beaches—wherever those beaches might be.²²

The Patton-Eisenhower friendship bore fruit that June, when the British bastion of Tobruk in eastern Libya fell to General Erwin Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika. The loss of Tobruk was a disaster of the first magnitude, for the collapse of Tobruk’s defenses left much of North Africa open to German conquest. Roosevelt asked Marshall to do what he could to help the British, and Marshall asked Ike for his recommendation on the best man to lead a one-division expeditionary force. Without missing a beat, Ike replied, “Patton.”²³

Over the next few weeks, George and Ike caught up with each other, dashing off quick notes when the crush of work permitted. Ike, resigned to his staff position, told George he didn’t see much chance of getting into a combat outfit. Reflecting on the way their paths had diverged since their Camp Meade days, he ruefully commented, “You see what’s happened to our dream team of twenty years ago, of going to war as a team. I’m slated to stick here to do a lot of heavy planning and operating on a global scale, but I wish you all the luck in the world.”

On June 21, General Marshall summoned Patton to Washington. George hopped the next plane to the capital, and the next day he found himself sitting quietly in Marshall’s office while the Chief succinctly outlined the situation. The British were on the ropes, he said. From his perch in Libya, Rommel threatened the Suez Canal, and with it, the Empire’s lifeline to the Far East. President Roosevelt wanted something done to help the British, but the U.S. Army could spare only one reinforced armored division, about 18,000 men. If it did, that division would be commanded by Patton. Marshall quietly sent the old cavalryman to the nearby War College to assemble maps and make preliminary plans.²⁷

Turning the picture over in his mind, George concluded that the old man had it all wrong. The advantage of armor, of course, was its mobility. But one division—four armored regiments, or “combat commands”—would not be enough. With a second division, he could envelop the enemy with far greater destructive power. Do what the Carthaginians had done to the Romans at Cannae. Smash, not merely blunt. So the next day, he sent word to Marshall’s office that two divisions, not one, would be required for his operation.

When Marshall’s aides passed along the message, the Chief erupted. Patton had a hell of a lot of nerve asking him to double his command to a two-division corps. The precise General Marshall had specified that Patton could have ONE division, because MORE THAN ONE division would take away forces needed for other, BIGGER plans. Plans in theaters Patton knew nothing about.

“Localitis,” as Marshall called it, was exactly the sort of thing he wouldn’t stand for from Patton or any other man, and he decided to set Patton straight in a way he wouldn’t forget. He grunted to his aides, “Send him back to Indio.”

George boarded the plane for California, chilled and mortified. He had just offended the Chief of Staff by presuming to change the Army’s basic plans. Who knew where that would leave him? Had he just consigned himself to training duty, stateside, for the rest of the war?

As the plane bumped its way across the continent, a desperate feeling spread across George’s chest. He had spent a lifetime getting to where he was—or rather, where he had been yesterday—and he had just tossed away his best, perhaps only chance at getting in on the ground floor of the greatest war in history.

Maybe it was a misunderstanding, he thought. Maybe Marshall didn’t get the message right. Maybe he didn’t realize it was only a suggestion, not a demand. But George knew he had to do something quickly, before Marshall’s icy judgment became a professional death sentence.²⁹

George was aghast. Dejected. Dumfounded. Marshall would never again trust him with a combat command. It was stupid George again—the same boy who had such a beastly time learning in school. The same George who blew it because he was “too damed military.” That George Patton had blown it for the other George Patton, the Patton who could have been the war’s greatest battlefield general.

Had he known the truth, he wouldn’t have lost much sleep. True, Marshall didn’t cotton to demands from subordinates. And George’s appointment had rankled several War Department staffers, who disliked Patton’s eccentric showmanship and his unpredictability.

But the real reason Marshall didn’t use him was because the mission was infeasible. As Marshall was meeting with Patton, the War Department’s planners were concluding that any U.S. assistance would not be ready until October or November at the earliest, far too late to do the British any good. The only thing Marshall could offer Churchill at the moment was a shipment of three hundred tanks and some artillery pieces, which a grateful Churchill accepted. Marshall decided to shelve the Patton mission.³⁰

Marshall did not see any reason to enlighten Patton about the Department’s reasons for canceling the mission, at least not yet. He knew George was an oddball fighter whose towering strengths were mitigated by exasperating weaknesses. He also knew Patton was a good soldier who sometimes needed a strong reminder of who was boss. So Marshall refused to take George’s calls for several days while George stewed in his own profane juices. As Marshall wryly told his deputy chief of staff, Lieutenant General Joseph T. McNarney, “That’s the way to handle Patton.”³¹

After several days squirming in purgatory, Marshall let Patton off the hook. Brigadier General Floyd Parks wrote to assure Patton that he had not offended the Chief. George, heaving a sigh of relief, replied, “I was very glad to get your letter and find that I had not completely destroyed my opportunities. If the question ever comes up, you can tell all and sundry that I am willing to take anything to any place at any time regardless of the consequences.”³²

Eisenhower considered the duties of “The Guy”—or more formally, Commanding General, European Theater of Operations, United States Army (ETOUSA)—as he stared at a mountain of fresh responsibilities. He had to set up a new headquarters. He had to build an invading army from scratch. He had to plan three possible invasions, all of them amphibious and all of them tremendously complex. He had to integrate an American military staff with a British military staff, and he had to do it all to the exacting requirements of General Marshall, who would answer to Secretary Stimson and President Roosevelt for Eisenhower’s performance.³⁴

The title “commanding general” had an impressive ring, but Ike was painfully aware of the narrow confines within which “The Guy” would have to operate. A supreme commander, Ike quickly learned, was rarely supreme, at least in a coalition environment. As he wrote to his diary, “In a war such as this, where high command invariably involves a Pres., a Prime Minister, 6 Chiefs of Staff and a horde of lesser ‘planners’ there has got to be a lot of patience—no one person can be a Napoleon or a Caesar!”³⁵

Ike knew he would need help, and lots of it, to handle the mounting stress of his immense jobs, and he knew this help would have to come from someplace other than a cigarette pack or an officers’ club bar. Ike would need some personal companionship, and he asked Admiral King if the Navy could spare a “naval aide” for him. The man he had in mind for the job was Lieutenant Commander Harry C. Butcher, a longtime golfing buddy from CBS who had returned from the Naval Reserve to active duty. Commander Butcher, Ike explained, would be his “naval aide.”

A slightly puzzled Admiral King gave his assent—it never hurt to place a Navy man in Army headquarters—and Ike gave the tall, affable “Butch” his new naval assignment, which, fortunately for Butch, had nothing to do with the Navy. Butcher’s real job would be to drag Ike to a field to whack golf balls, toss a baseball with him, get him to sketch or paint (which, often as not, pushed Ike’s blood pressure up), and organize long, unwinding bridge sessions with aides, deputies, Red Cross girls—anyone who could keep Ike’s mind from going dull with overwork and despair.

Butcher was to provide Ike the companionship and good humor he desperately needed. As Ike wrote to his brother Milton, “It is a rather lonely life I lead; every move I make is under someone’s observation and, as a result, a sense of strain develops. . . . At home, a man has his family to go to. Here there is no one except a fine friend like Butch. . . .” As he told several friends, “There are days when I just want to curl up in a corner like a sick dog, but Butch won’t let me. That’s why I need him. To keep me from going crazy.”³⁶

A second man Ike tapped for his inner circle was Colonel Thomas Jefferson Davis, an old friend from the dark days working for MacArthur in Manila. The mild-mannered South Carolinian, whom Butch described as “roly-poly, with bright, flashing brown eyes,” blended Old South gentility with a quiet efficiency. T.J. would become Ike’s adjutant general, the man who kept track of personnel, rode herd on the headquarters staff, and issued orders in the name of the commander. As in Manila, T.J. was a tonic in rough times, as well as a good public relations man to have in a pinch.³⁷

Then there was Ike’s office aide, the tall, bespectacled Captain Ernest R. “Tex” Lee. Tex’s job was to ensure Ike’s memoranda, correspondence, orders, and filing flowed smoothly in and out of ETO headquarters. Gifted with a booming voice and a good sense of fun, Tex rode a magic carpet of paperwork that made sure, somehow, that everyone knew what they were supposed to be doing. Like Harry Butcher, however, Tex’s value was more than the sum of his duties. Though his obsession with paperwork would annoy Ike to no end, Tex was a regular face at Ike’s bridge and dinner tables, and he became another of those personal friends on whom Ike would lean for support and energy during the trying times ahead.³⁸

Taking Wayne Clark, who would train a corps in England, plus Tex Lee, Butch, and his orderly Mickey McKeogh, a former New York bellhop, Ike boarded a Pan Am Stratoliner on June 23 and left Bolling Field a second time for England. Mamie and Maurine Clark came to see their husbands off, and as they prepared to mount the plane’s steps, Ike assured Renie Clark, “Don’t worry about Wayne, I’ll take good care of him.” The wives watched the plane take off, then milled back to their cars. Ike and his men were on their own.³⁹

The Combined Chiefs of Staff, the august body to whom Ike now reported, consisted of some of the most strong-willed, ruthless, calculating men the two nations had produced. On the British side, they included General Brooke; Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, Britain’s First Sea Lord; and Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal. Their American counterparts included General Marshall, Admiral King, and Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold of the Army Air Force, all members of the nascent U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. In addition, both Roosevelt and Churchill had their personal representatives on the Combined Chiefs, Admiral William D. Leahy for Roosevelt, and Marshal Sir John Dill, a former Chief of the Imperial General Staff, for Churchill. Their job was to set grand strategy for the China, Pacific, Mediterranean, and European theaters. As Ike would later put it, satisfying this headstrong group was like “trying to arrange the blankets smoothly over several prima donnas in the same bed.”⁴⁰

Beyond his immediate bosses—Marshall, the Joint Chiefs, and the Combined Chiefs—Ike also had to arrange the blankets over the heads of state. Roosevelt was far too removed to see Ike regularly, and didn’t meddle in operational matters much anyway, so Ike had little direct contact with him. But Ike’s London residence placed him squarely within the orbit of the exasperating, brilliant, pugnacious, eccentric dynamo Winston Churchill, a man to whom meddling was second nature.

The most obvious difference between Eisenhower and Churchill, both military leaders, was their respective rank. Ike, a mere major general, held a tightly circumscribed field of authority. The Pacific was off-limits. Politics was off-limits. Industrial output was off-limits. Eisenhower was an executor, and his job was to organize whatever units and equipment the Allied governments gave him and carry out whatever operations the Combined Chiefs directed. Churchill, by contrast, had no such constraints, and he was not the sort of man to impose any upon himself. He was a politician, a head of government, and his own Minister of Defense. His authority was coextensive with the power of the Empire, and he thoroughly relished wielding it.

Throughout the war, Ike would see the many contradictory sides of Churchill: a bully, joker, historian, warrior, charmer, philosopher, storyteller, egomaniac, and political strategist of the highest order. He was a romantic whose allegiance, above all else, was to the British Empire, and this was what Ike would have to guard against.

Working with Churchill, the Combined Chiefs, Marshall, the ETO staff, and the field commanders would have exhausted a young man. But for a man of fifty-two, Ike’s job was nearly lethal. The stress of conferences, requests, memoranda, personnel problems, inspection tours, press demands, social invitations, and decision making took a heavy toll on Ike’s strong Kansas constitution. His front parlor and bedroom at London’s stately Dorchester Hotel became office annexes, so he rarely escaped the press of business. Exhaustion began to set in.

The punishment Ike’s body withstood from his hard-riding schedule was aggravated by his notoriously poor diet. Ike’s lunch would frequently consist of nothing more than peanuts, or raisins, washed down with coffee or tea with milk. He increased his cigarette intake to four packs a day, which gave his doctors fits and irritated his uncomplaining orderly Mickey, who had to clean up the ashes Ike blithely tapped onto the carpet or tossed into the fireplaces, real or false, that ornamented his suites.⁴¹

The converging pressures of work, homesickness, and incessant meetings left Ike with chronic insomnia, bursitis, and an exceedingly bad temper. “The wrinkles deepened in his face,” his driver later wrote. “He showed increasing signs of impatience and nervousness.” ETO deputy chief of staff, Colonel Al Gruenther, who had last seen Eisenhower at the Louisiana maneuvers, was shocked at his old friend’s appearance when he arrived in England; Ike looked as though he had aged ten years during that ten-month interval. He was no longer the smiling, vibrant Ike Eisenhower of 1941. He looked careworn; he showed signs of exhaustion. He needed help.⁴²

In July Ike’s spirits received a lift when he learned the Senate had confirmed his promotion to temporary lieutenant general. Soon afterward, he received a congratulatory letter from one Major General George S. Patton Jr., addressed to “Lieutenant General Eisenhower.” George told Ike, without a hint of professional jealousy, “We know each other so well that I guess you know with out my saying it how truly delighted I am at your success and how earnestly I wish you all good fortune for the future.”⁴³

Ike, glad to hear from his old friend, wrote back:

Dear George:

If I were not perfectly sure that you were merely indulging your perverted sense of humor in addressing me as “Lieutenant General” I would tear up your damn letter and never answer it. As you well know, there is no one else whose good wishes mean more to me than do yours. It does look like for the past Eight or nine months I have been riding the crest of a huge wave of luck—I hope it will hold together at least until we get this war won. . . .

He continued to stoke their mutual hopes:

It is entirely within the realm of possibility that I will need you sorely: and when that time comes I will have a battle with my diffidence over requesting the services of a man so much senior and so much more able than myself. As I have often told you, you are my idea of a battle commander, and if the fates decree that battles by big formation are to come either wholly or partially within my sphere of influence, I would certainly want you as the lead horse in the team. . . . I truly thank you for your thoughtfulness in sending me congratulations. I particularly appreciated it because you and I both know that you should have been wearing additional stars long ago.⁴⁴

That summer, Ike acquired a chauffeur named Kay Summersby, a woman who had driven Ike on his first trip to London. Born in Ireland’s County Cork to a wealthy family, Kay worked as a model in London in 1938 and won some bit parts in films before driving ambulances during the London Blitz. Tall and attractive, she naturally stood out in drab army circles. A Red Cross worker who knew her described Kay’s eyes as “rather heavily lidded, they appeared sexy . . . they were slate blue and could blaze with scorn and anger befitting her Irish ancestry.” Having married a British Army officer who was serving in India, she carried on an affair with a U.S. Army officer prior to Ike’s assignment to England.⁴⁵

Courageous but somewhat cliquish, Kay joked that she was qualified to do little else besides ride a horse and pour tea properly. But as a veteran ambulance driver during the London Blitz, she knew her way around the city better than any other driver in the Motor Transport Corps pool. Ike and Kay instantly took to each other, and before long “Skib”—the staff’s nickname for the girl from Skibbereen—became a close, integral part of Ike’s Army family.⁴⁶

It didn’t take long for rumors of an affair between Ike and his chauffeuse to make the rounds at ETO headquarters, and from London those stories naturally worked their way through the wider Army grapevine. But for now, the pleasant company of Mrs. Summersby provided Ike with a measure of relief from the grim faces that permeated wartime London. Throughout the war, Ike valued her skills as a driver above every other member of the staff motor pool. With Kay, Butch, Mickey, Tex, and several other friendly faces among his subordinates, Ike’s life would be as bearable as his wartime duties would allow.⁴⁷

Despite the obstacles to a cross-Channel invasion, Marshall, Ike, and Admiral King clung to the belief that if action had to be taken in 1942, SLEDGEHAMMER, an invasion of northern France, would provide the greatest succor to the hard-pressed Soviet Union. For 1943 the chief goal, the Americans agreed, was to get into France and over the Rhine as quickly as possible, bypassing Africa, the Balkans, or any other scenic detours along the periphery that Churchill and his generals seemed enamored with. Marshall feared the Mediterranean would become a bottomless pit, one that would swallow up so many men and machines that an invasion of France would not be feasible in 1943. For this reason he vehemently opposed the GYMNAST landing in North Africa. Eisenhower wholeheartedly backed Marshall’s conclusion, and in mid-July he wrote in his diary, “GYMNAST is strategically unsound as an operation.”⁴⁸

But it was Roosevelt, not Marshall, King, or Eisenhower, who was calling the shots, and Churchill had persuaded Roosevelt to throw his support to the North African landings. The American generals flew to London to wage a rearguard action to salvage an early cross-Channel attack. But given Roosevelt’s insistence on a major operation in 1942, GYMNAST appeared to be the only feasible project, and they had little logic to support any other plan. After two days of heated arguments with their counterparts, the Americans surrendered. Marshall and Ike had lost, at least until 1943.⁴⁹

Before Marshall and King left England, however, the British threw them a bone. Two bones, actually. First, in return for American acquiescence to GYMNAST in 1942, the British tentatively agreed to ROUNDUP in 1943. Second, they agreed to an American commander for both operations.⁵⁰

At the conclusion of the London meetings, Marshall summoned Ike to his elegant suite at Claridge’s Hotel to discuss one important detail. When Ike arrived, the august chief of staff was reclining in his bathtub, and through the lavatory door the two commanders nonchalantly discussed high-level strategy. One item splashed around by the soaking general was of particular interest to Ike; Eisenhower, the Chief said, would be the deputy Allied commander for planning GYMNAST, now renamed TORCH. Moreover, Marshall said, he and King would push for him to command the entire invasion of North Africa.⁵¹

From his crowded desk, Ike stared at a tremendous problem. He had just been ordered to merge two large, bureaucratic armies to fight a long war, a struggle that would embroil him in at least two amphibious invasions, perhaps more. He couldn’t know how many mountains he would have to climb to complete his mission, or how many young men would die fighting under his command. But he did know there would be a lot more graves if he lost his nerve or made a mistake.

History, to which Fox Conner had taught him to look for guidance, offered little help to a man welding a modern coalition army. Page after disheartening page filled Conner’s history books with legends of bickering allies: Spartans and Athenians, Orthodox and Latins, Prussians and Austrians, to name but a few. During the Napoleonic wars, coalition troops were either swallowed up by a dominant army—as when German, Italian, and Spanish divisions served in Napoleon’s Grande Armée—or simply collaborated on a battle or two, as with the Prussian march to the guns at Waterloo. In World War I, the closest analogy to which Ike could look, “Black Jack” Pershing famously kept his American forces out of the European framework, but this approach wouldn’t work against a skilled, well-integrated enemy.

On top of his bewildering organizational problems, there was the nagging sore of Anglo-American distrust. From the chauvinistic British standpoint, the apple-green Americans were a bumbling militia of loudmouthed, overfed citizen soldiers, while Britain’s veterans had been fighting the Germans for nearly three years on the Continent, in North Africa, and in the Middle East. From the chauvinistic American standpoint, the British had been beaten on the Continent, in North Africa, and in the Middle East; thus, for all their practical experience, they had little to teach the Americans except how to lose. The U.S. Army had done things its own peculiar way since 1775, and the British Army had been doing it far longer. As Ike later recalled, the two groups “came together like a bulldog and cat.”⁵²

As with other thorny problems, like censorship and race relations, Ike felt the best way to sort out the problem was to drag it into sunlight and address it plainly with his colleagues. In the case of nationalistic prejudices, this meant preaching—and practicing—the gospel of Allied unity. He staffed his headquarters with American deputies to British section heads, and vice versa. He demanded, and received, complete cooperation from his officers, at least as far as he could police them. Americans who insulted their British counterparts were promptly sent home “on an unescorted boat,” as Ike liked to put it. He had little direct control over his British subordinates, however, so he depended largely on the British to keep their own nationalism in check.⁵³

Ike knew his Swiss-like neutrality would inflame a lot of hard-nosed Britons and Americans. American officers in particular began grumbling that Eisenhower bent over backward to favor the British. Ike even struggled to make Wayne Clark, his best friend in England, toe the line. But he ignored whatever criticism might fly his way. He surrounded himself with a cadre of men and women who were able to see past their prejudices and think of themselves as members of a unique, multinational team. There would always be the Clarks and Brookes who could see only their country’s military reputations, he knew, but there would also be the Mountbattens and the Eisenhowers, and their persistent voices would grow louder in the Allied councils of war.⁵⁴

Ike spent the early part of August assembling his senior staff for TORCH. His planning group, known as Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ), was a fairly even mix of British and American officers covering the air, land, and naval services, and the group set up shop at Norfolk House, a large office building in London’s St. James’s Square. But to keep an eye on the details as he managed the big and medium pictures, he needed a right-hand man, a motivator whose planning abilities he trusted. Casting his eye north, to the Army’s English training center, Ike asked its commander, Wayne Clark, to serve as his deputy commander.⁵⁵

Ike’s old friend accepted, albeit with a good deal of reluctance. Clark was currently commanding the II Corps, a fighting outfit, and the ambitious general had little interest in the ill-defined job of second fiddle on a bloated, half-British staff. But Clark also knew that an outstanding job in TORCH would put him in the running for combat command in the next big invasion, so he accepted Eisenhower’s offer, making sure Ike fully appreciated the sacrifice he was making.⁵⁶

Clark proved a godsend to Eisenhower. He deftly handled overwhelming but vital details such as shipping schedules, ammunition stockpiles, assembly logistics, and a myriad of other problems that he neatly summarized for Ike each day. But even with Clark’s help, Ike’s life became one long, blurred trail of conferences, telephone calls, paperwork, more calls, and more conferences. He put in twelve-hour shifts at Norfolk House, shuttling from one meeting to the next, handing out assignments and coordinating details with a host of headstrong commanders. He smoked a lot, ate little, and had precious little time to sleep. He held conferences in his private suite at the Dorchester Hotel. When he did get a moment to relax—usually when spirited away from London by an insistent Harry Butcher—he found he could not sleep more than five hours before his brain began spinning again, winding itself like a mainspring for the next day’s problems.⁵⁷

His eyes drooped, his wrinkles deepened, his temper shortened. But through his baptism of paper, Ike learned to make quick decisions and erase bottlenecks, to know when to delegate and when to demand the impossible—or accept an obstacle and move on. With his overarching guidance, AFHQ ran as efficiently as a combat brigade under fire.

The TORCH plan, so far as any of his planners understood it, was an aggressive one, and it turned on the central assumption that control of Northwest Africa belonged to the side that controlled its ports. These coastal jewels, all held by Vichy French forces, ran from Morocco, on the Atlantic Ocean, to Tunisia’s Gulf of Gabès.

Initial Allied plans called for assaults against the Moroccan port of Casablanca, the Algerian port of Oran, and the Algerian capital of Algiers. Secondary ports, such as Bône and Philippeville, might also be included in the first wave, depending on available landing craft. Once the seaports were in Allied hands, supplies of ammunition, fuel, and food could sustain the drive east as the invaders rushed toward Tunisia.⁵⁸

Victory in Tunisia would clinch the African campaign; trapped between the Allied army in Tunisia and the British Eighth Army under Montgomery in Libya, Rommel would be compelled to evacuate the continent. Or capitulate. At least, that was what Ike’s planners hoped.⁵⁹

The plan left two major Tunisian ports, Bizerte and Tunis, under Axis guns. That worried Eisenhower, for it would not take long for Hitler to send heavy reinforcements into Africa through those ports. Unfortunately for the Allies, Italo-German air cover from Sicily and Sardinia ruled out amphibious landings east of Algeria. The Allies, therefore, would have to take Algeria, race overland through Tunisia—Rommel’s back door—and capture the thinly screened ports before the Nazis could fortify them.

At the end of July, Ike sent Marshall a list of candidates to command the American TORCH forces, and he included Omar Bradley and George Patton among his four top choices. Ike wanted men he trusted leading his first divisions into combat. As he told an old football teammate, “[I have] developed almost an obsession as to the certainty by which you can judge a division, or any other large unit, merely by knowing its commander intimately.” He believed any outfit led by Brad or George would perform well under fire if given a chance.⁶⁰

While Ike was welding two creaky frameworks into a single Allied force, George Patton was girding for battle. Summoned to Washington on July 30, he learned that the grapevine was on target: He would lead the Western Task Force in Operation TORCH under Ike’s command. The Patton-Eisenhower team that had dreamed of fighting a big, pitched war was finally going to have its chance on the battlefield.⁶¹

As he considered his mission, George knew his force would grow to huge proportions, and like Ike, he picked his senior headquarters staff from men he had known before the war. First among equals was his chief of staff, Colonel Hobart R. “Hap” Gay, a jocular cavalryman whose prejudices and style mirrored Patton’s own. Gay, a plain, bald man who looked more like a small-town church deacon than a corps commander, was appalled to learn he would be working for the hotheaded George Patton, and when he heard the news he frantically tried to attach himself to another boss. But after recovering from the shock of being shanghaied onto George’s staff, Hap grew to admire the old general, and he would serve George faithfully until the end of Patton’s days.⁶²

As head whip cracker, Gay would provide direction to a core group that included Lieutenant Colonel Paul Harkins, Gay’s assistant chief of staff; Colonel Percy Black, Patton’s G-2 intelligence officer; Colonel Kent Lambert, his G-3 operations officer; and his resourceful G-4 logistician, Colonel Walter “Maud” Muller. In addition to his deputy, Major General Geoffrey Keyes, and his fine corps staff, George ran a personal staff that included his driver, Sergeant John Mims; his orderly, a Buffalo Soldier from Alabama named George Meeks; and his aides, Captain Dick Jenson and Lieutenant Alex Stiller.⁶³

In early August, Patton received orders to report to his new commander in London, Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He caught the next Stratoliner and arrived in London on the sixth of August. Checking into Claridge’s that evening, he spent the next day working on his part of TORCH, then rang up his old friend.⁶⁴

George came straightaway, storming into Ike’s office for a warm reunion over a bowl of soup that was exactly as Ike had advertised. The two men jawed from dinnertime into the early morning hours, musing on their chances of victory, agreeing on personnel assignments, and discussing potential flaws in the draft plan.

Looking at it from every angle, the two men agreed the mission did not seem promising. “Ike said he would be goddamned glad if someone would give him some good news, as every step in the planning process disclosed obstacles,” Butcher wrote. Ike and George felt the Allies would have a better shot by cutting out the Casablanca landings and putting George down at Oran, leaving Algiers to the British, and George scribbled in his diary, “Had supper with Ike and talked until 1:00 a.m. We both feel the operation is bad and is mostly political. However, we are told to do it and intend to succeed or die in the attempt. If the worst occurs, it is an impossible show, but with a little luck, it can be done at a high price; and it might be a cinch.”⁶⁶

Although no one mentioned it at the time, it had worked out just as George had predicted. Ike was commanding wings of the Allied army, like a latter-day Robert E. Lee, and George was donning the calfskin gloves of Stonewall Jackson. A benign fate had thrust upon them roles tailored to their personalities, roles each had dreamed of playing since the end of the Great War. They would make a hell of a team.

A happy and energized George Patton scurried about London reviewing maps, reports, and studies of his future battlefield. He remained focused on the daunting obstacles ahead, though in his long talks with Ike, he vaguely detected what he thought were subtle changes in his longtime friend. Ike didn’t quite seem to be the same old single-minded radical of their Camp Meade days; he was “not as rugged mentally as I thought,” George mused to his diary. “He vacillates and is not a realist.” George commented, as if to reassure himself, “It is very noticeable that most of the American officers here are pro-British, even Ike. . . . I am not, repeat not, Pro-British.”⁶⁷

Their friendship, an affinity in which George had played the role of mentor for so long, was also not as rugged as Patton had thought, for it had been supplanted by a commander-subordinate relationship, which is a very different thing indeed. Sitting around the Dorchester eating soup, smoking, cursing, and plotting, the two men were still close friends. But each understood that the distance imposed by the military command chain placed invisible limits upon their intimacy. For a man in Eisenhower’s position, as Butch observed, “Although friendship has a place, this is cast aside for merit and ability to get things done.” Listening to Ike give directions—orders—rather than suggestions or requests, George began seeing his new boss through the jaded eye of a veteran subordinate, rather than the forgiving eyes of an unconditional friend.⁶⁸

George’s doubts sharpened when Ike brought General Clark aboard as Deputy Supreme Commander. Though he had known Wayne since he was a boy—Wayne had lived at Fort Sheridan, Lieutenant Patton’s first post, when Clark’s father was a major there—George neither trusted nor liked the young general, whose rise was far too rapid, and who seemed a bit slick for George’s comfort.

George’s private concerns growing over the junior half of the “Sacred Family,” as he dubbed the Eisenhower-Clark team, grew stronger the more of Clark he saw. As he told his diary, “I had a drink with Clark at his flat. I do not trust him yet but he improves on acquaintance. Ike is getting megalomania.” A month later, George decided that Clark did not improve on acquaintance after all. He groused, “[Clark] seems to me more preoccupied with bettering his own future than in winning the war.”⁶⁹

Ike had fewer reservations about George. He felt George brought a bolt of needed energy into the campaign, and he knew from his long history with the cavalryman that he could be trusted to execute his mission professionally, obediently, and perhaps even fanatically. Ike reported to Marshall that his friend had rapidly digested the essential problems of the TORCH plan, and worked with AFHQ staff in a “very businesslike, sane but enthusiastic” manner.⁷⁰

On the seventeenth of August, T. J. Davis arranged a whimsical dinner to commemorate a 1933 meeting between Ike, George, and J. Walter Christie, the designer of a revolutionary tank suspension and well-known hater of most Army officers—Ike and George being two rare exceptions. Over dinner, drinks, and an evening of smoking, joking, and reminiscing about their sports days, the two generals and their aides talked until late in the night, bringing a badly needed glow of warmth into Ike’s pressurized life.

Butcher reflected on the charming, quixotic friend Ike had brought into the war’s equation: “Patton is a rugged man. Don’t doubt his statement made some days ago that he can mesmerize troops into a high state of morale. His language is salty, to the point, and colorful. His swear words are frequent and expressive. No wonder Ike’s so pleased to have him.”⁷¹

The undertaking, as the Chiefs laid it out, would be one of the most complex in military history, prescribing three large landing operations, each of which required the capture of several subsidiary objectives. General Patton’s Western Task Force would sail from the United States with 58,000 men, of whom 35,000 would take part in the initial assault. Patton’s immediate objective would be Casablanca, and from there he would subdue French Morocco, safeguarding the Allied supply pipeline. Major General Lloyd Fredendall would command the Center Task Force. This force would sail from Scotland and land 25,000 U.S. troops at Oran, to be followed by another 20,000 in subsequent waves. From Oran the soldiers would seize control of the Tafaraoui Airfield, which would allow Wildcat and Spitfire fighters to cover the skies above Algeria. Finally, Major General Charles “Doc” Ryder, one of Ike’s classmates, would nominally command 33,000 mostly British troops for the assault on Algiers. An American was designated the task force commander, as Allied experts believed the Stars and Stripes would receive a better welcome from the Vichy defenders than the Union Jack.⁷²

The final directive gave Ike a definable cluster of targets, which meant his staffers could stop chasing their tails with contingency plans for Philippeville, Bône, and other possible landing sites that had been bandied about for the past month. An encouraged Ike wrote to George,

[Y]ou can well imagine that my feelings at the moment are merely those of great relief that a final decision and definite plans now seem assured. The past six weeks have been the most trying of my life; had it not been for the fact that I had in this thing, as my two principal mainstays, you and Clark, I can not imagine what I would have done.

But thinking of the dangers facing Patton’s men in the treacherous waters off Morocco, he added, “I am searching the Army to find the most capable Chaplain we have in an effort to assure a fairly decent break in the weather when the big day comes!”⁷³

George frowned as he considered the plan from the relative seclusion of the Munitions Building. He was dubious about an operation stitched together by a patchwork quilt of Anglo-American committees, staffers, and—most horribly of all—civilian advisers. But he, like Eisenhower, had set aside his pessimism, for the lumbering enterprise had passed beyond the time to object and complain. He fired off a personal letter to Ike, reporting on a visit to Mamie and Mrs. Butcher, assuring his friend, “It is quite useless for me to express my sincere appreciation for all you have done for me. The only way I can and will repay you is with assurance that the job you have given me will be accomplished.”⁷⁴

This last drew a quick reply from Ike, who told him,

I feel like the lady in the circus that has to ride three horses with no very good idea of exactly where any one of the three is going to go. However, there is one mighty fine feature of this whole business and that is that you are on that end of it.

Ike also admitted to the strain he was feeling:

I think both Wayne and I are standing up pretty well under the load, although this morning I am in somewhat of an irritable mood because last night, when I hit the bed, I started thinking about some of these things all over again and at two-thirty I was still thinking. I suspect that I am just a bit on the weak-minded side when I allow myself to do that, but any way it doesn’t happen often. We are keeping our tails over the dashboard and looking forward to meeting you one of these bright fall days.⁷⁵

George, master of one of Ike’s three circus horses, had precious little time to figure out how to crack Casablanca. He knew the invasion would take place on November 7 or 8—the first moonless nights after the invasion force could be trained, loaded, and transported to Africa. If everything worked smoothly, the Navy would pick his men up from Hampton Roads, Virginia, during the third week in October, carry them across the submarine-infested Atlantic, and dump them on the African coast at H-hour. For the assault force, Patton would command the 3rd Infantry Division, most of the 9th Infantry Division, the 2nd Armored Division, and two unattached tank battalions, a total of about 35,000 men and 250 tanks.⁷⁶

It was a good corps, but like the rest of the American army, Patton’s men were a deep shade of green. They were unknown quantities in a fight, and with thousands of regular French troops, a big French battleship, and rough, boat-swamping surf waiting for them at Casablanca, George wasn’t about to dump everyone on Casa’s bristling doorstep. That would entail too great a risk.

Instead, he broke his force into three teams that would land along the coast, capture the local airfields, and converge on Casablanca from the landward side. On the north end, Task Force GOALPOST, under Major General Lucian K. Truscott, would land just over 9,000 officers and men above Rabat, French Morocco’s capital. A sort of modern-day Marshal Murat, the handsome Truscott shared George’s fetish for fine military dress bordering on the outlandish; he would wade ashore in Morocco sporting a red leather jacket, a silk scarf, and riding jodhpurs. Truscott’s team would capture the critical airfields at Port Lyautey and Sale, take the nearby town of Mehdia, and move south to Casablanca.⁷⁷

Major General Jonathan Anderson would command Task Force BRUSHWOOD, consisting of 19,000 infantrymen, plus tank, artillery, and reconnaissance battalions from Patton’s old Hell on Wheels Division. Anderson’s men would land at Fedala, an old fishing port about twelve miles north of Casablanca, then wheel south.⁷⁸

Task Force BLACKSTONE under Major General Ernest J. Harmon, a hard-swearing, gravel-throated armor man—the “Poor Man’s Patton,” some tankers called him—would command Patton’s largest division, a task force from the 2nd Armored Division under Brigadier General Hugh J. Gaffey and a regiment of the 9th Infantry Division. Blackstone’s objectives were four beaches around the old Portuguese trading town of Safi, some 140 miles south of Casablanca. Though far from the principal target, Safi provided the most accommodating beach for the critical LCTs, or “Landing Craft, Tanks.” Patton had reasoned that the inherent mobility of tanks would allow Harmon to move his men up from Safi rapidly in time to join Anderson’s men for the final assault on Casablanca.⁷⁹

Patton’s naval support was to include one aircraft carrier, four escort carriers, three battleships, seven cruisers, and thirty-eight destroyers, as well as dozens of transports and cargo vessels. This immense fleet would steam to Africa under the guiding hand of Rear Admiral H. Kent Hewitt, a highly respected commander with a long service record going back to Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. But as schedules were drafted and landing rehearsals began, Patton’s faith in the Navy withered. He found the Navy’s officers “very pessimistic,” and his open distrust of the fleet, bordering on contempt, came to a head during his first meeting with the genteel admiral who would command the invasion flotilla. George, being George, let his complaints about schedules, logistics, and fire support escalate into a tirade of curses better directed toward a cavalry sergeant than to a rear admiral. Hewitt, a former altar boy whose kindly features concealed an inner core of iron, didn’t take Patton’s tongue-lashing and bluster lying down. He remonstrated with George, then argued, then finally gave up reasoning with him and went to see Admiral King.⁸⁰

It was George’s first brush with interservice rivalry since his Academy days, when West Point played Annapolis, and this time he was in over his head. Just as George had patrons among the Army’s highest ranks, Hewitt was well connected among the Navy’s brass, and the Navy, in turn, was better connected with FDR’s White House than was the Army. Few men could match Ernie King when it came to bare-knuckles military politics, and the admiral, exploding like a sixteen-inch shell, called Marshall to demand Patton’s head.⁸¹

Marshall valued General Patton, but he didn’t need interservice friction at a delicate time like this. He asked Eisenhower, Patton’s boss, to weigh in on the cavalryman’s dismissal. Ike stuck by his friend and convinced the Chief that Patton was their best hope for success at Casablanca.

To Marshall, that settled the matter. Success trumped personal burdens, whether his or the Navy’s, and Patton’s head would not be served up on an olive drab platter. Marshall told King that Patton had become indispensible to TORCH, and he pointed out that Patton’s loud, bull-in-a-china-shop manner was the very quality that made him an effective battle commander.

King, a bull among his own china shelves, understood. Concluding that he had made his point with the Army, he didn’t press the Patton matter further. The ax was put back in its rack, and George’s career remained a going concern.⁸²

Ike and Marshall had backed Patton this time, but the cavalryman’s antics wouldn’t do for a dicey operation in which air, sea, and ground forces had to work together smoothly. It was fine for George to curse the Navy when his tanks were rolling across the Moroccan desert, but for now they needed fleet officers to do a job without precedent in the history of amphibious warfare.

As the London summer lost its edge and fall crept over the horizon, the French and Spanish questions rose like twin storm clouds in Ike’s life. Both nations were dominated by fascist tyrants, and both maintained large forces in the African theater. In the air, the Vichy regime had some five hundred planes on the North African coast, while the Allies had only 166 available aircraft to stop them. On the ground, Vichy fielded around 120,000 men from Morocco to Tunisia, so anything more than token French opposition on the first three days would doom the plan.

Multiplying the risk was the geographic fact that any air cover beyond the first wave of Spitfires and Hellcats would have to fly from Gibraltar, which lay under the guns of Spain’s fascist regime. If Spain entered the war on the side of the Axis, or even allowed Germany to cross Spanish soil, then Gibraltar, with its tiny, crowded airfield, would be obliterated within minutes.⁸⁴

The combined pressures of irreconcilable demands, his political tightrope act, and the great political, meteorological, and military unknowns built up inside Ike as predictably as steam in a boiler pipe. He confided to Marshall,

I do not need to tell you that the past several weeks have been a period of strain and anxiety. . . . The real strain comes from trying to decide things for which there is no decision—such as, for example, what is to be done if the weather throughout the whole region simply becomes impossible about the time we need calm seas. If a man permitted himself to do so, he could get absolutely frantic about questions of weather, politics, personalities in France and Morocco, and so on. To a certain extent, a man must merely believe in his luck and figure that a certain amount of good fortune will bless us when the critical day arrives.⁸⁵

Ike’s handlers—Butcher, Mickey, and his driver, Kay—grew alarmed at his drawn look and tired, snappish, un-Eisenhower manner. They knew something had to be done to give the boss a respite from the journalists, servicemen, socialites, politicians, and petty royalty that littered Ike’s calendar. Otherwise, that bursting steam pipe might be Ike’s aorta.

So they decided to find him a secluded place in the country. After some snooping around the English countryside, in August Butch found the perfect oasis, a hedge-lined, ivy-covered Tudor house named Telegraph Cottage. “Telek,” as Eisenhower’s staff called the place, was a quiet three-bedroom home nestled about forty minutes west of London near Kingston upon Thames and located adjacent to two golf courses. Sheltered from the prying eyes of Londoners, Telek was the perfect retreat from the cauldron of Norfolk House.⁸⁶

On those precious days when he could shake loose from the Dorchester and Norfolk House, Ike kept life at the cottage in line with his simple Midwestern tastes. He padded around the house in old GI slacks, a well-worn shirt, and a pair of straw slippers left over from Manila. His waiting staff served up a basic repertoire of middle-class foods—chicken, baked beans, fried egg sandwiches, beef, pork, Brussels sprouts, hominy grits—anything but the “gourmet stuff.” In the evenings, he might enjoy a “sundown highball” with personal guests. He whacked golf balls, shot his .22 pistol at cans in the backyard, played bridge, and tossed the baseball with his staff. One of his pleasures, common to every man in uniform, was the occasional package from home; Mamie’s regular parcels included Ike’s favorite noodle soups, Old West dime novels with eye-catching titles like Way of the Lawless or Gunman’s Reckoning, and socks, fresh toothbrushes, and toothpaste.⁸⁷

One of Ike’s favorite diversions arrived with four legs and a tail. He had hinted to his friends that he wanted a dog for his birthday, and he explained to Mamie, “You can’t talk war to a dog, and I’d like to have someone or something to talk to, occasionally, that doesn’t know what the word means!”

After Ike expressed a vague preference for a Scottie, Butch and Kay obtained a couple of likely-looking candidates, and a delighted Ike settled on a rowdy, strutting male whom he named Telek, after his slate-roofed hideaway. On October 14, Clark, Butch, Tex, Kay, and Mickey threw a “surprise” birthday party for Ike at the cottage. There they formally presented him with Telek, who sauntered into the room wearing a miniature parachute and harness made for him by the Eighth Air Force. Ike beamed with delight.⁸⁸

Telek, who was to accompany Ike throughout the war, had few military qualities about him, and like most puppies, he was a mixed blessing for his handlers. He had a hair-trigger bladder, an abject fear of air raids, and a fondness for dragging unlit kindling from the fireplace, snaking black trails of soot for his nominal masters to sweep.

A second and more substantive member of Ike’s circle arrived in early September: AFHQ’s much-anticipated chief of staff, Brigadier General Walter Bedell Smith. Bedell Smith—“Bedell,” “Beedle,” or “Beetle,” as he was variously called—was a model chief of staff, which meant he was the model of ruthless efficiency. The grandson of a Prussian soldier, the tall, gaunt Hoosier had clawed his way up from buck private in the Indiana National Guard to permanent brigadier general. A master in military black arts, Beetle could be suave and persuasive on a diplomatic mission, and he could break a man’s career without a second thought. He had, Kay later wrote, “all the sentiment of an S.S. general,” and as one staffer recalled years later, “he was a great chopper-off of heads, I want to tell you. And he’d go off half-cocked lots of times.”⁹⁰

A combination of coxswain, consigliere, schoolyard bully, hatchet man, and diplomat, the chief of staff took care of the commander’s dirty work, and Beetle was very good at his job. His duties required him to keep everyone moving in the right direction, and that meant he would fire, reprimand, punish, banish, or cuss any man or woman who stepped out of line. He would negotiate personnel and logistics matters with field and service commanders, attend meetings when Ike was unavailable, and act as his chief’s gatekeeper and interpreter. Every now and then, Ike’s instructions on a thorny problem involving the State Department, Navy, Air Force, or some other group would be simply, “Bedell, tell them to go to hell, but put it so they won’t be offended.”⁹¹

Ike once remarked that every senior commander needs a son-of-a-bitch, and Beetle was Ike’s son-of-a-bitch. Beetle summarized his management philosophy to Ike’s intelligence chief in plain Indiana terms: “We’ve hired you for your knowledge and advice. If you’re wrong too often we’ll fire you and hire someone else in your place.” Because he was bad-tempered, abusive, dyspeptic, and highly volatile, Beetle’s subordinates learned to stay out of his way whenever they could. As his secretary, WAC Captain Ruth Briggs, recalled: “He was terrifying. He would rattle off questions and orders with the speed of a machine gun. And the air would be blue with profanity.” When the unfortunate Briggs poked her head through the blue air at one high-level meeting, Smith screamed at her, “Get the hell out of here!” He then explained to his colleagues, within earshot of the beleaguered woman, “You’ll have to excuse her, gentlemen. She’s an idiot.”⁹²

Yet for all the terror he inspired in his subordinates, this American Cerberus was highly respected by his American and British peers. He could be likable, even charming, when off duty, and he was a known commodity among the Combined Chiefs, for he had once served as secretary to that Olympian body. Most of all, he was prized by the men who commanded him, including General Marshall and Winston Churchill, who both fought Eisenhower for Beetle’s services. As Ike later told a friend, “I wish I had a dozen like him. If I did, I would simply buy a fishing-rod and write home every week about my wonderful accomplishments in winning the war.” He later remarked, “They say there’s no such thing as an indispensable man, but Beetle Smith comes very close to being one.”⁹³

After spending an introductory day at Telegraph Cottage throwing a handball with Ike, and discussing personnel and operations over lunch, Eisenhower’s indispensible man dived into his work. Within days Beetle proved himself not just a capable chief of staff, but an outstanding global strategist who could grasp the broad political and logistic pictures in addition to the operational minutiae. Amid a hurricane of details, studies, and memoranda, Beetle sorted out the immediate details and allowed Ike to train his worried mind on strategy, coordination, and the challenge of managing personalities as the clock ticked down to zero.⁹⁴

In late August the lumbering pieces of Ike’s machine were rolled into place like blocks of Cheops’s pyramid. Immense stores of equipment were trucked across America and England by thousands of teamsters and railway workers, sorted by thousands of quartermasters, loaded by thousands of stevedores. Long columns of GIs and Tommies shuttled from bivouacs to training grounds to assembly areas. Trucks, tanks, food, and ammunition were “combat loaded” to ensure the first box needed on the beach would be the last box loaded onto the ship. Convoys received rendezvous dates; officers were issued embarkation schedules.

But Ike’s plans, as complex, as mountainous, as meticulous as they were, would account for only half the battle. Politics was the other half, one he could not control. The French and Spanish questions particularly worried him. Nothing in his long career had prepared him for a fight like the one that would commence around one o’clock on the morning of November 8.

In the 1941 Louisiana maneuvers, Ike’s closest experience to a great battle, it had all been military, like some problem typed out on purple mimeographed Leavenworth stationery. Red Army invaded; Blue Army defended. No allies, no treachery, no Navy, no unknowns. The tactics were complex, but in Wayne Clark’s dress rehearsal, the big questions were elegantly simple.

Africa was a long boat ride from Louisiana. There a Red Army (Eisenhower’s) would attack a Blue Army (Hitler’s) and perhaps a White Army (Pétain’s), which might join the Blue Army or it might join the Red Army. Or it might do nothing. The invasion might even pull in a Brown Army (Franco’s), which might attack Gibraltar from both sides of the Strait. Or it might invade French Morocco. Or it might do nothing.

When Ike squinted at the situation maps, he saw clearly that if the leaders in Madrid, Vichy, or Algiers decided to throw in with the Nazis, his own men might be pushed into the sea, regardless of how carefully he planned the operation. So French and Spanish intentions were, in all likelihood, the key to the conquest of North Africa.

Over dinner at Telek one evening, the State Department’s expert on North Africa, a tall, balding career diplomat named Robert Murphy, briefed Ike, Beetle, and Clark on the tangled web that was French North Africa. The French resistance, Murphy explained, was fragmented. The largest faction was General Charles André Joseph Marie De Gaulle’s Free French movement, operating from Africa’s west coast. In less complicated circumstances, Murphy said, De Gaulle might be the horse to back, because he had the largest antifascist following of the bunch. The problem was, De Gaulle was considered a traitor by the Vichy government, so the Allies might stand a better chance of rallying the French Army if they backed someone less controversial. One such candidate was General Henri Honoré Giraud, the former commander of the French Ninth Army. Giraud, Murphy said, had been captured by the Germans in 1940, and had escaped from Königstein Castle in Dresden after two years in captivity. Although he opposed the current French government, his honorable war record gave him, Murphy claimed, the quiet support of many French Army officers.⁹⁵

Among Vichy’s proconsuls in Africa, the leading power figure was Admiral Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan, commander of the French armed forces and deputy to the venerated Vichy leader, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. Admiral Darlan, Murphy said, was also the key to neutralizing the powerful French fleet. He was, on the other hand, an outspoken anti-Semite, and openly sympathetic to fascist aims. That was a problem, Murphy acknowledged, but the admiral was also a base opportunist. He had quietly cooperated with Roosevelt’s ambassador to Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, and he intimated that he might come over to the winning side, even if it meant throwing in his lot, and that of the French Navy, with the Allies. The short, dumpy Darlan—“Popeye,” Leahy privately called him—would therefore hold the trump card if things got hot. Churchill, who was considerably more worried about French ships than French garrisons, was less equivocal; in his slurpy lisp he advised Ike, “Kiss Darlan’s stern if you have to, but get the French Navy.”⁹⁶

Ike, Clark, and Murphy pondered their choices. Giraud influenced the army, Darlan the navy. But after the first few hours, perhaps a day at most, the fighting would be conducted on land. Giraud was the kind of French patriot who might rally the French officer corps, and unlike Darlan, he had no fascist dirt under his fingernails. Consequently, the State Department’s expert on North Africa advised Ike that Giraud, rather than Darlan or De Gaulle, represented the best hope for a quick end to Allied–French fighting.

In the final, accelerating weeks before Patton’s flotilla left the Virginia coast, Ike had to umpire trade-offs over shipping tonnage, plead with service chiefs for support, and deal with problems raised by his field commanders. In many cases, he could delegate matters, but in some he had to make the final decision. Four weeks before the invasion, for instance, when Patton asked Ike for permission to bombard Casablanca with Hewitt’s battleships, Ike refused to give him carte blanche to pound the city into rubble. While he did not rule it out under the right circumstances, he knew he would have to evaluate those circumstances personally when the time came. He forcefully told Patton that “no, repeat, no bombardment will be executed without prior authority from me.”⁹⁷

At the same time, Ike overruled Patton’s vehement objection to a planned D-Day broadcast to the people of North Africa by President Roosevelt and the Supreme Allied Commander. AFHQ had scheduled the broadcast to run at 1:30 a.m. local time—the time of the Oran and Algiers landings, but some four hours ahead of the Casablanca H-hour. George was furious with Ike, damning the pre-Casablanca broadcast as a glaring danger to his men’s security. It was, he emoted, a “breach of faith.”⁹⁸

Ike refused to be moved by Patton’s histrionics. Word of the Oran and Algiers landings would surely put French forces in Morocco on alert; it was hardly reasonable for George to expect tactical surprise when the Allies were landing thousands of men to the east. Like everyone else working for Eisenhower, Patton would have to make do with the cards he had been dealt.⁹⁹

During the last week of October, Ike’s staff prepared to move him to the Rock of Gibraltar, the promontory from which he would command the invasion. To the public, and to those of his inner circle who knew he was leaving, General Eisenhower walked about London with the confident smile, resolute shoulders, and unquenchable spirit of a general who knows he cannot fail.

But beneath his cheerful countenance, Ike’s nerves frayed under the oppression of a mind wrestling with thousands upon thousands of “what-ifs?”—any of which might turn out badly. For all his intrinsic optimism, Eisenhower’s fast-moving brain could spin scores of permutations on the central theme of disaster. If even only a small percentage of these doomsday scenarios played out, what chance, he wondered, did the men on the beach have?¹⁰⁰

As the pieces of the invasion dropped into place with emphatic thuds, Ike felt his power to influence events draining. As ships were loaded and schedules were distributed, Ike became less of a commander and more of a spectator, mediator, politician, errand boy, and cheerleader. It was a helpless feeling; the lives of hundreds, possibly thousands of men would come to an abrupt end in just a few days, and as Ike’s freedom of action shrank to virtually nothing, the black gulf of anxiety that had followed him since June yawned wide. He could sit and wonder, squirm and pray, but in the end, there was nothing for him to do but wait.¹⁰¹

Before leaving London for Gibraltar, Ike, not a sentimentalist by nature, indulged a small measure of superstition. He collected six coins, representing the Allied nations, and he carried them in a little zippered bag in his pocket for good luck, rubbing the coins like rosary beads when nervous energy got the best of him.

On his last evening in England, a jittery, chain-smoking General Eisenhower, grounded by storms before the big show, sat helplessly at Telegraph Cottage with his inner circle, waiting for the weather to break so he could depart for the Rock. November’s early dark fell upon London, and with nothing else to do Ike and his group donned civilian overcoats and drove incognito to Wardour Street, where they passed a few hours watching a private screening of the new Bob Hope–Bing Crosby comedy The Road to Morocco.¹⁰²

George paid his final round of courtesy calls before embarking on his transport ships, relishing the violent adventure that was to come. On October 18 he had a sentimental, at times teary-eyed dinner with Secretary Stimson, Marshall, Dill, and their wives. He paid his respects to an ancient, nearly blind Pershing, and had a short farewell conference with President Roosevelt.¹⁰³

Reporting to the White House with Admiral Hewitt, at two p.m. the men were ushered into the Oval Office. Greeting “Skipper and the Old Cavalryman” with his broad, jutting smile and cocked head, Roosevelt talked boating with Hewitt in the same blithe voice he’d used to woo congressmen, precinct bosses, industry leaders, and constituents so many times over the course of his long political career. George, placing more substance upon the meeting than did the president, tried to steer the conversation toward the overriding need to get his men ashore—a not-so-subtle dig at Admiral Hewitt. But his effort fell flat. Tossing off a noncommittal nod, Roosevelt airily asked George “whether he had his old Cavalry saddle to mount on the turret of a tank and if he went into action on the side with his saber drawn.”¹⁰⁴

George realized, to his disappointment, the meeting had been intended as a nice chat, an “atta-boy” for the team before kickoff, and nothing more. They exchanged pleasantries for a few more minutes, and as Roosevelt wished the two commanders an effervescent “Godspeed,” the general and the admiral left the White House and went back to work.¹⁰⁵

On the morning of November 5, 1942, six B-17 bombers rumbled off the runway at Bournemouth’s Hurn Aerodrome carrying Ike and several staff members to Gibraltar, the temporary headquarters of AFHQ. The weather was miserable, and Ike’s pilot, Major Paul Tibbets—a man who would be remembered for a more famous flight—advised against going. But Ike ordered him up, weather be damned, and after a bumpy ride, Ike’s Flying Fortress, dubbed the Red Gremlin, touched down on one of Britain’s most prized possessions.¹⁰⁶

The Rock of Gibraltar commands the thin jugular of water that separates the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa, and divides the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. Perched atop the Rock, one could see Europe and Africa in the same glance. The ancient monolith, mottled with vegetation and an odd mixture of migratory birds, sundry vermin, and small tailless monkeys (Macaca sylvanus) was, then as a hundred years before, the western cornerstone of the British Empire.¹⁰⁷

Beneath the flora and fauna, Gibraltar’s limestone hulk was perforated with caves and tunnels first bored by laborers around the time of the American Revolution. Since then the underground network had been enlarged to about thirty miles of tunnels some eighteen hundred feet below the mountain’s peak. By 1942 His Majesty’s subjects had equipped the island with communications networks, rudimentary living quarters, and a small airfield. Ike’s headquarters complex was a bizarre merger of modern office suite and medieval cellar, its cramped quarters illuminated only by a string of lightbulbs. Condensation dripped down the sides of the gray walls while electric fans struggled to push the heavy, damp air through the bronchi of the cave network. “Damned well protected,” a grateful Butcher noted in his diary, though Ike would remember Gibraltar as “the most dismal setting we occupied in the war.”¹⁰⁸

But the Rock was Ike’s assigned post for now, and like everyone else, he would make the best of it. When his paperwork experts determined that enough files had made their way into the island’s cramped offices, General Eisenhower opened the Rock for business. Word went out over radio and Teletype lines:

COMMAND POST OPENS GIBRALTAR, 2000 ZULU, 5 NOVEMBER. NOTIFY ALL CONCERNED.¹⁰⁹

As pushpins representing Allied convoys inched their way across the Supreme Commander’s map, Ike paced, smoked, and rubbed his lucky coins. The drip, drip, drip of condensation from the Rock’s arched ceilings ticked off the seconds as time slowly lurched toward H-hour, the moment of decision. The moment, Ike had told Marshall, when his chances would rate about fifty-fifty.

Relieving his mind by telling the Chief what Marshall already knew, Ike wrote to Washington, “If Patton encounters any real resistance, he is going to have a tough time of it because landing problems alone are Enough to occupy his full attention. . . . We are standing on the brink and must take the jump, whether the bottom contains a nice feather bed or a pile of brickbats!”¹¹⁰

While Ike and Clark waited for H-hour, they did what soldiers often do in the hours leading up to a risky operation: They joked, made small talk, tried to slough off the stress that wrapped them like a thick, stifling overcoat. As Butcher described the scene:

Ike and Clark were “opining” in our bull session that it wouldn’t be long until they were either lions or lice. . . . Clark, who now plans to fly to Algiers with the advanced headquarters setup, said that if things go badly, he might just keep on flying into Central Africa, land or parachute, and keep the gobs of gold he is carrying for any contingency, including bribes to natives, if necessary. Will be a gentleman, however, and let Ike know where he is, but he’d better bring his own share of the gold swag with him.¹¹¹

At last, Eisenhower was snatched from nervous inactivity by news that all naval task forces were approaching the African coast. Butcher described Gibraltar on the night of the invasion: “Hubbub and bustle around the place like Election Eve . . . We’re definitely going in as planned.”

As staffers scurried about, readying radios, typewriters, pens, and encryption keys for battle, a final outgoing message clicked off the cable machines in the bowels of the AFHQ signal room. It read:

WARNING ORDER. H-HOUR CONFIRMED NOVEMBER 8. FOR EAST AND CENTER 1 A.M. FOR WEST ABOUT 4:30 A.M.¹¹²