Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Eisenhower and his PRO wizards should have forecast this typhoon from the time Ike first met with Bess and Reynolds, but for some reason AFHQ was caught flat-footed. In a press statement, Army headquarters categorically denied that General Eisenhower had reprimanded General Patton over the incident, though when the press corps demanded a detailed explanation, Beetle admitted that Eisenhower had written Patton a “personal” though not “official” reprimand. As one reporter quoted “a high-ranking officer,” Beetle, “General Patton was mercilessly berated by General Eisenhower,” though nothing had been placed in Patton’s official personnel file.²

This too-clever game of Army semantics gave the press fresh meat to latch onto, and before long public outrage shifted from Patton’s slappings to Eisenhower’s ham-fisted attempt to cover for his high-strung friend. Congressmen, newspaper editors, and, most important, senators, who were considering Roosevelt’s military nominations, began calling for Patton’s court-martial. A beleaguered Secretary Stimson, one of Patton’s oldest and strongest protectors, ordered Eisenhower to prepare a full report of the incident, and the press began beating down Ike’s doors for further comment. As domestic news reports forwarded by the Office of War Information began flooding Algiers, Ike publicly distanced himself from his old friend while doggedly insisting George was too valuable to discharge from the service.³

To Ike, it was like the Darlan Deal all over again, and to make matters worse, General Joseph T. McNarney, an officer whom Marshall had called “a merciless man, a true hatchetman,” began firing off cables to Algiers demanding a explanations of Eisenhower’s actions on a variety of subjects. Added to Patton’s personal humiliation over the incident was the feeling that he was bringing down his friend. Watching events unfold from distant Sicily, a glum George concluded, “I seem to be the means by which McNarney is trying to hurt Ike so as to become Chief of Staff in the event that General Marshall leaves.”⁴

Sticking by his convictions, Ike refused to send George to the scaffold. He wired Secretary Stimson a full report that did not excuse Patton’s conduct, which he called “unseemly and indefensible,” but it expressed his firm conviction that Patton’s personal drive—a drive inseparable from his other, more destructive instincts—had been the key to Seventh Army’s swift conquest of Sicily. Eisenhower had to weigh “losing to the United Nations his unquestioned value as a commander of an assault force” against the damage to the Army’s public image, and he told Stimson the Allied cause was best served by retaining General Patton for future operations. Putting his own neck alongside George’s, Ike signaled that he would not willingly part with him. His corrective measures were adequate, Ike felt, and he was not going to sacrifice his best ground-gainer to appease shortsighted congressional demands or assuage momentary public fury. Stimson agreed.⁵

From his villa in Algiers, Ike had sensed what his old friend was going through. Exiled to Sicily, pacing the volcanic island uselessly from one end to the other while his army was cannibalized, a “KICK ME” sign pinned to his back, George was on the ropes, and Ike felt the time was ripe for another Eisenhower pep talk, which in Patton’s case meant assurances of more fighting. Eisenhower understood George needed pep talks, just as he needed, for his own good, an occasional jacking-up. On October 4, before the Pearson broadcast, Ike had assured George, “You have lived up to every one of the expectations I have held for you during the past 25 years, and I know that every job the government may give you during this war will be performed with the same dash, energy, and determination that have characterized all your action during the past 10 months.” ⁶

But the Drew Pearson report was a stark reminder that Ike needed to keep George on a very short leash, for his own good as well as the Army’s, and in November, he sent another “eyes only” letter to Palermo:

The flood of newspapers accounts in Washington concerning incidents . . . has continued today. It is my judgment that this storm will blow over. . . . I must stress again to you the necessity for acting deliberately at all times and avoiding the giving way to impulse. . . . If any inquiry is made of you by the press, I insist that you stick to the facts and give a frank Exposition of what occurred. In addition, you could, I think, invite any such press men to the units still under your command to determine for themselves the state of morale. I do not desire that you make a formal statement for quotation at this time.⁷

The near miss to his career left the idled horseman feeling lower than ever, and each new cable informing him of the loss of another division was a crisp, shiny nail in his psychological coffin. Unable to resist stories about himself—most of which excoriated him—he felt acutely the stabs of newsmen and politicians who didn’t even know him. Worse, he darkly suspected, one of those blades might have Bradley’s fingerprints on the knife’s grip. Perhaps even Ike’s.⁹

Self-pity and depression, two demons he regularly banished in the rush of battle, returned, made themselves at home, and became his unwanted houseguests. He spent his days fidgeting, reading history, ambling about the island, writing letters, and searching for ways to occupy a mind that begged to be occupied. He moped, slept late, cursed and brooded, twisting the knife deeper into his own wound. At one point, an engineer walked into George’s imposing office and was astonished to find his commander “literally cutting out paper dolls” with a pair of scissors.¹⁰

George’s friends pleaded with him to be patient, but they might as well have been telling a bull not to snort. On his fifty-eighth birthday, George told Bea that Everett Hughes had advised him to “keep my shirt on and sit tight.” Feeling that Everett gave Ike the benefit of too many doubts, George replied, “hair shirts scratched,” and “I had been kicked in the tail so much that I had a hard time sitting at all.”¹¹

But George had one thing to be supremely thankful for: Eisenhower’s loyalty, a loyalty based on cold, military calculation that dovetailed with his personal feelings. The two men may no longer have been Huck and Tom, but so long as there was fighting to be done, Ike would see something in George few others could discern: that beyond the staged scowl, beyond the riding crop and the outlandish command cars, lay a man to whose judgment the Allies could entrust men’s lives.

Deep down George knew Ike was not going to throw him to the wolves. But to play it safe, in late November George sent Ike a wildly obsequious letter promising to write a history book grandly entitled The Greatest Conquest , covering Eisenhower’s military campaigns from November 1942 to November 1943.

His bootlicking was entirely unnecessary. Ike had sent Beetle to Washington to boost George’s chances for future command, and if George needed another augury of Ike’s support, he received it on the first of December, when a personal letter from the Kansan reassured him,

The furor at home over the incidents of last August is, I think, dying down a bit; however, we may yet have a lot of grief about it. I want you to know that I think I took the right decision then and I stand by it. You don’t need to be afraid of my weakening on the proposition in spite of the fact that, at the moment, I was more than a little annoyed with you. ¹³

By mid-December, the wave of indignation over the slapping incidents seemed to have receded in Washington officialdom as well as in the papers, just as Butcher had predicted. Ev Hughes noted in his diary a Gallup poll that showed four out of five Americans favored keeping General Patton in the ranks. In the end, Ike passed off the matter philosophically, telling his former division commander that the slapping incident was “just another one of those irritating and needless things that occur to make everybody’s job a little bit harder.” Patton, he reiterated, “is a gorgeous commander when the going is tough. He has more ‘drive’ on the battlefield than any other man I know.” ¹⁴

Before setting up shop in England, Omar Bradley flew to Washington for two weeks of planning and briefings. His itinerary included a short meeting with President Roosevelt, who, to Brad’s amazement, casually discussed an extraordinary bomb project that used nuclear fission rather than explosives. Brad spent several hours riding with General Marshall on a plane to Omaha, Nebraska, during which he briefed Marshall on his Sicilian experiences—and pulled no punches as he unloaded the many sins of George’s headquarters.¹⁵

Bradley returned to England in October, about the time ETOUSA activated the First U.S. Army Group. He immediately took the helm of FUSA and FUSAG, even though Devers failed to issue any written orders appointing General Bradley to either post. As Group headquarters was filled with men from ETOUSA chosen by Devers—men whom he didn’t know well enough to trust yet—Bradley set about cleaning house. He liberally raided his old II Corps headquarters staff, even stripping the headquarters of its nicer furniture, and before long he had a fine skeleton team working on the invasion’s details. ¹⁶

FUSAG commenced its work in a row of West End flats with ornate rococo interiors and blackened windows guarded day and night. Though FUSAG had no armies, no mission, and, courtesy of a subsequent Luftwaffe raid, few intact offices, Bradley was perfectly happy to oversee the nascent organization, since acting command of the army group would give him a leg up when Marshall cast around for a permanent commander. Working from a hideously painted office with a large dent in its floor—the result of a dud bomb, courtesy of Hermann Göring—the businesslike Bradley brought together the infrastructure of an organization that would govern at least two American armies, the First and Third, and perhaps others. When not working at FUSAG, he wore his First Army hat. He lived with his top lieutenants at a large country home outside Bristol with Chet Hansen and the remainder of his personal staff, while work proceeded at nearby Clifton College.¹⁷

Looking at his fine new command posts, Brad knew he had finally made it. His little egg had finally hatched, and the bird inside had grown into an eagle that would land in France in about five months and astound the military world.

Among the many blessings of his new assignment, Omar Bradley didn’t have to stand in anyone’s shadow, least of all George Patton’s. In fact, it was unlikely he would ever see Patton again, since Ike, like most everyone else in the American command, seemed pretty sour on old Georgie right now. With no distractions from a blowhard cavalryman who had little appreciation for logistics and teamwork, Bradley could get down to the business of running his war by method, rather than by impulse.

While Bradley assembled the nucleus of the First U.S. Army, the Allied High Command struggled over critical points of grand strategy. Stalin, hardened by two and a half years battling four million Axis soldiers, castigated the Americans and British over their failure to open a true second front. The Red Army had chewed up Hitler’s mammoth tank offensive at Kursk in early July, then launched its own counteroffensive. In that slaughterhouse, the Soviet Union had lost 800,000 men, three thousand tanks, and two thousand aircraft. Now, Stalin insisted, was the time for the Allies to step forward and open a second front. An invasion of France.¹⁸

The Western powers agreed in principle, though British consent came with strings attached. In Churchill’s mind the Balkans, the Aegean, and the Italian boot all competed for priority with OVERLORD. On the American side, Marshall and Admiral King prepared for Anglo-American conferences in Cairo, as well as a “Big Three” conference to begin on November 28 in Tehran, on the assumption they would have to fight like devils to hold OVERLORD’s May 1, 1944, target date.

To the surprise of the U.S. chiefs, the British joined the Americans in assuring Stalin they were serious about opening a true second front in the spring. The cagey dictator, unwilling to put much faith in Anglo-American promises, insisted that his allies name a supreme commander for OVERLORD. Roosevelt promised to announce the appointment within a few days, after he and his advisers conferred in Cairo.¹⁹

Ike played no role in the Tehran discussions. He spent his days sitting on a pincushion of anxiety at Amilcar. He later compared himself and Marshall to “two pieces in a chess game, each compelled to await the pleasure of the players.”²⁰ But as far as Ike could see, in the next round he wouldn’t be the rook, knight, or bishop. Or even a pawn. Instead, he would be pushed off to an entirely different board: Marshall would get the top spot in the OVERLORD invasion, and because Roosevelt had promised Churchill that a Briton would command the Mediterranean theater, Eisenhower would probably be sent to Washington around the first of January. It was a prospect he considered with the enthusiasm of a condemned man scanning the calendar.²¹

Before his swan song, Ike had to play host to another bevy of VGDIPs making their way to the Cairo and Tehran conferences. On November 19 he flew to Oran, where President Roosevelt arrived the next day in grand style aboard the battleship Iowa. From there, he accompanied FDR’s entourage—Marshall, King, Harry Hopkins and the rest—to Amilcar aboard a C-54 Skymaster, nicknamed the Sacred Cow.²²

During FDR’s stopover, Eisenhower took the president on a driving tour of the Tunisian battlefields, Kay at the wheel. As they rode past the detritus of wars recent and ancient, of battles joined in space but separated by millennia, Roosevelt’s mind began to wander to the legacy of his own generals. Generals who one day would elicit comparisons to Scipio, Hannibal, and Caesar. Generals who fought their wars from behind desks with pen and telephone instead of gladius and musket. Turning his aged face to Eisenhower, he mused, “You and I know who was Chief of Staff during the last years of the Civil War, but practically no one else knows, although the names of the field generals—Grant, of course, and Lee and Jackson, Sherman, Sheridan and the others—every schoolboy knows them. I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was. That is one of the reasons why I want George to have the big command. He is entitled to establish his place in history as a great general.”²³

Marshall and King billeted at Ike’s villa outside Tunis. As Eisenhower was getting ready to leave for a private dinner with the president, the top brass lounged around the living room, sipping glasses of sherry. Walking Ike to the door at the appointed hour, Admiral King, puffing away on a cigarette, casually remarked, “I hate to lose General Marshall as Chief of Staff.” Ike looked at him, saying nothing. King continued, as if Marshall were not in the room, “My loss is consoled by the knowledge that I will have you to work with in his job.”²⁴

Marshall stood with them, silent as the Sphinx while King insisted that Marshall’s place was in Washington. “You, Eisenhower,” he declared, “are the proper man to become the supreme commander for the Allies in Europe.”²⁵

Ike, taken aback at the way this delicate issue had been lobbed at him, simply mumbled, “The President has to make his own decisions,” hoping it would end the matter. But King, trying to be polite in his rough way, ignored the invitation to drop the subject. After a moment Marshall in his usual brusque manner, shut down the discussion. “I don’t see why any of us are worrying about this,” he growled. “President Roosevelt will have to decide on his own, and all of us will obey.”²⁶

Marshall was correct, as usual, and Ike’s heart sank lower, if that were possible. He always knew he might be recalled to Washington. After all, four-star generals could not be easily wedged into a tight command structure, even in Europe. Ike’s own letters had reflected his assumption since early autumn that Marshall, not Ike, would be running the European show in 1944. But to suspect bad news was one thing; to hear it from the mouth of a four-star admiral was another.²⁷

It was a blue season for Ike Eisenhower, and he bitterly told his close friends that if he were sent back to Washington, “I’ll be carried up to Arlington Cemetery within six months.” Remaining a field commander was all he was asking for in return for eighteen months of thankless work under the criminally misleading title of Supreme Commander. Was it too much to let him serve where the fighting was raging, where he knew the staffers, the generals, the leaders better than any other man in uniform? How was he going to handle the personalities and issues that Marshall had mastered in four years on Mount Olympus—Congress, MacArthur, Stilwell, Chiang, the Joint Chiefs, the Central Pacific, appropriations, the draft, production, and who knew what else? And, at a personal level, how would he adjust to life back in the States?²⁸

But inside his small, half-veiled box of emotion, Ike knew he was being selfish. The War Department had given him unprecedented opportunities. He had led the two greatest amphibious invasions the world had ever seen, and he had ordered the most decisive tactical bombing operation in history. Like the good soldier he was, if the War Department wanted him in Washington, that’s where he’d go. He only hoped Marshall would let him bring Beetle back, though he knew he’d probably have to fight both Churchill and the Chief to get him.²⁹

As staffers in England began moving Marshall’s personal effects to London, Ike made plans to come home. He gave valedictory statements to his staff stressing his gratitude for their services, and he began outlining plans for a Far East tour to confer with MacArthur and Lord Mountbatten. He quietly offered Kay Summersby to Everett Hughes, “with the [Cadillac] thrown in,” and he heeded Marshall’s advice to take a few days off—a sightseeing trip to Luxor, the Valley of the Pyramids, and the Holy Land with Kay and a few close associates.³⁰

Winging its way back from the Tehran conference, the Sacred Cow touched down on the dusty Tunisian airfield on the second anniversary of Pearl Harbor. The Skymaster was stopping to refuel on its return flight to Oran, where President Roosevelt would reboard the Iowa for his journey home. General Eisenhower dutifully saluted the president’s party as it emerged from the big plane, and he walked alongside the president as the Secret Service escort wheeled him into the backseat of Ike’s Caddy.