Brothers, Rivals, Victors

Eisenhower’s other skillet was painfully overloaded with ingredients that probably did not mix—many of which he would never see, because they had been added weeks or months earlier by thousands of nameless cooks somewhere up the line. And it was too late to do anything about those ingredients. Monty’s men were embarked. Brad’s men were embarked. Spaatz’s air crews were standing by. Ramsay’s fleet was ready. Patton had played his part in FORTITUDE, and the supply transports were loaded. Every one of the roughly two million men in Ike’s command knew what he would be doing on the morning of June 5, 1944.

As June dawned, the bright, clear English skies smiled at Ike’s men, veiling a dark storm system crossing the North Atlantic. As a blissfully unaware General Eisenhower informed Marshall that the weather looked good for a June 5 landing, low-pressure fronts rolled like Thor’s hammer toward the North Sea. Picking up the storm system at the beginning of June, the best meteorologists from Newfoundland to Scapa Flow studied every twitch and jig to figure out where the storm would land, when it would land, and whether it would be a puff or a howl. Timing was crucial, since the Allied force had only three days in early June when the tides and moonlight would accommodate the divergent demands of the Navy, airborne, ground, and Air Force: June 5, 6, and 7.²

Late on the third of June, Ike took the twenty-minute drive from his small trailer to SHARPENER, known more familiarly to its owners as Southwick House, a tall, ivy-covered mansion overlooking the Portsmouth Harbor, where ashen-faced weathermen talked pressure drops and Ike’s senior commanders gathered to receive their final “go” order. Sitting in the high-ceilinged library, Ike opened the conference with a flat, businesslike tone.³

The lead meteorologist, RAF Group Captain J. M. Stagg, shambled into the room like a man being led to his own hanging. In his Scotch brogue, Stagg delivered some sobering news: a low-pressure area forming over the Shetland Islands would draw high waves and low clouds to the French coastline during the next few days, creating conditions far short of the minimum parameters for invasion.⁵

The admirals and generals set upon Stagg with questions about wave height, cloud ceilings, winds, and tides. Ike listened to the back-and-forth among them for several minutes. Finally, in a voice weighed down with care, he provisionally decided D-Day would be postponed for twenty-four hours.

Eisenhower’s decision to postpone the mission would remain a tentative one, subject to revision if conditions changed, and he asked his college of cardinals to return at half past four the next morning, June 4, for another reading of the winds. At that time the high command would have one half hour in which to render a decision, so the fleet’s sailing orders could be reliably canceled by six a.m.⁶

At the appointed hour, the soothsayers returned with their consensus: the wind, waves, and low clouds would make air missions impossible on the morning of June 5. Eisenhower paced the great room, hands clasped behind his back, chin set into his chest as he spun the variables to himself. His head would jerk up as he fired off a question to one commander or another, then he would lower his head, frown, and continue pacing. He asked his senior men for their views. The Navy and Air Force, the services most affected by weather, were convinced the show must be postponed. Among Eisenhower’s advisers, only Montgomery was willing to launch the great crusade that day.⁷

As Ike told Butcher afterward, “Probably no one who does not have to bear the specific and direct responsibility of making the final decision as to what to do can understand the intensity of these burdens.” Ike’s besieged mind longed for an end to his ordeal, for himself and for the thousands who struggled under the tyranny of the wait. But the stronger part of Ike admitted that without clear skies for his air force—to say nothing of beach conditions afflicting the Navy—the operation was militarily unsound.⁸

For most of Sunday, June 4, rain lashed the English coast, and as Ike was about to retire for a few precious hours of sleep, he learned from Butcher that the Associated Press had inexplicably issued a statement announcing that Allied forces had landed along the French coast. The AP retracted the story twenty-three minutes later, but not before CBS, Moscow, the Germans, and the rest of the world got wind of it.

It had been Eisenhower’s worst nightmare, or one of them, but by now he was so exhausted, it didn’t seem to matter. He could do nothing about it anyway. “He just sort of grunted,” said Butcher. Then he fell into his bunk to sleep.¹⁰

As he trudged through the fourth of June, the man from Abilene sank into a depression as thick as the clouds blowing in from Iceland. He was killing time, waiting for the next caucus of his commanders, set for that evening. Ike walked the pebble-lined paths of his trailer grounds with NBC’s Red Mueller, murmuring to himself as he squinted into the forbidding, spitting sky. He looked, said Mueller, “as though each of the four stars on either shoulder weighed a ton.”¹¹

As each hour passed, as each tankard of coffee went from pot to cup to stomach, Ike wrecked himself. His headaches ebbed and flowed. He battled an eye infection and high blood pressure. The ringing, the damned ringing in his ears, gave him no peace. “Ike could not have been more anxiety ridden,” wrote Kay, who overheard him muttering, “I hope to God I know what I’m doing.”¹²

As thick raindrops drummed against the tall French doors of Southwick House at half past nine, Group Captain Stagg strode into the dark, heavy library with a surprising announcement for Eisenhower’s commanders. Unbelievable though it might seem, a “bubble” of high pressure had formed over Iceland and was moving toward the coast, carrying a brief window of clear skies. Beginning Monday night, June 5, the storm would abate just enough to make the invasion feasible on June 6. Barely.¹³

Ike’s mind raced over the competing factors. Cloud ceiling, tides, rain, loading schedules. Naval bombardments. Moonlight, breakers, bomber cover. The matrix of conditions swirled through his thoughts like a Kansas twister. He spoke quietly, talking to himself, though others in the room heard him mumble, “The question is, just how long can you hang this operation on the end of a limb and let it hang there?”¹⁴

It would have eased Ike’s troubled soul had he another half day to weigh the variables, but the sand had run out. Admiral Ramsay, the man charged with putting the soldiers ashore, gave voice to the deadline Ike knew was upon him: “[I]f OVERLORD is to proceed on Tuesday, June 6, I must issue provisional warning to my forces within the next half hour.”¹⁵

Eisenhower sat in the Southwick library, among friends, yet a thousand miles distant. “I never realized before the loneliness and isolation of a commander at a time when such a momentous decision has to be taken,” recalled Ike’s unsentimental hatchet man, Bedell Smith. “He sat there quietly, not getting up to pace with quick strides as he often does. He was tense, weighing every consideration of weather as he had been briefed to do during the dry runs since April.”¹⁶

After several moments of silence, the tension in Ike’s face broke. “I am quite positive we must give the order,” he murmured. “I don’t like it but there it is. . . . I don’t see how we can do anything else.” His mind snapped to attention. It was all clear to him now.¹⁷

The laconic message clattered across the Teletype page in the signal center of the U.S.S. Augusta in the early morning hours of June 4. The message, forwarded to the First Army commander, told Brad that NEPTUNE would be postponed for twenty-four hours—a decision he understood but regretted, for it meant another long day of seasickness, tension, dank air, and unbearable waiting. His heart had jumped every time he saw a break in the clouds, only to plunge again as another rank of thunderheads swallowed up the sun’s feeble rays.

Admiral Kirk had assigned Bradley the captain’s cabin—a room occupied by President Roosevelt during his Atlantic Charter rendezvous with Churchill in 1941—but for all its comforts, Omar Bradley, like all infantrymen, felt vulnerable when packed like a sardine aboard a large, slow, floating target.²⁰

To add discomfort to anxiety, just before the invasion Bradley’s sharp nose welled up with a painful boil that forced him into the infirmary. To avoid a potentially debilitating infection, the Augusta’s doctor strongly recommended lancing the swollen welt, and Brad was forced to wear a sterile gauze bandage for the next few days as the wound healed. The man with the false teeth naturally felt a bit ridiculous, but he tried not to let it bother him. His image-conscious aides shunted camera-toting reporters away from their commanding general until his proboscis returned to normal, and Brad kept a show of good spirits throughout the day as the ship’s clock crept forward at a snail’s pace.²¹

Like every other officer, Brad passed the time worrying about details he could not control, and making small talk with the ship’s company and his staff. He and Hansen revisited Patton’s glorious entry into Messina—even on the eve of invasion, George’s pomposity still rankled him.²²

Waiting patiently for new orders to come in, Brad’s mind spun through the countless details he would have his staff check and recheck. His war room, a cramped sheet-metal shed assembled on the afterdeck, lay uncomfortably close to a loud antiaircraft gun that required aides to tape lightbulbs, clock faces, and anything else prone to shatter when the gun went off. A Michelin map of France hung on one wall alongside beach maps featuring ominous red semicircles that showed fire arcs of coastal guns. Web gear littered the floor, typewriters lined one wall, and rags for wiping grease pencil marks off the maps accumulated in the room’s corners in an entirely un-shipshape fashion.²³

Of more concern to Brad than the mess strewn about the war room was his G-2’s assessment of the weather that awaited the argonauts on the Channel’s far side: Low clouds and reduced visibility. Winds at seventeen to twenty-two knots. Choppy water. Five-foot breakers. Four-foot surf.

Twenty-four hours later, Augusta and her sister ships were still bobbing atop the Channel’s waters. Given the forbidding look of the western skies, Brad and his team were convinced Ike would signal a second postponement, to June 7, the last available day until late in the month. But when word reached the ship that Eisenhower had decided to forge ahead on June 6, Brad retired belowdecks. He yanked off his life jacket and fell asleep, uniform and shoes on, his mind slowly releasing its grip on the wind, surf, and cloud cover.²⁵

At 3:35 a.m., Bradley roused himself. As his mind shook off the shallow slumber, he heard the clang of the ship’s bell and the call to general quarters. He slipped a Mae West over his shoulder, buckled his helmet, and hustled up the steep stairs to Admiral Kirk’s darkened bridge, a heavy pair of binoculars swinging from his neck.²⁶

The morning wind bit into the men’s faces as they stuffed cotton wads into their ears, protection from the thunder of the Navy’s big guns. There, off Omaha Beach, the man from Moberly would have a ringside view of the greatest amphibious invasion in history.²⁷

What Brad saw didn’t encourage him. The skies were dark and overcast. The surf was choppy, and the landing craft would have a heck of a time dog-paddling their way to the beaches. Worse yet, at the eleventh hour Monk had learned that the powerful German 352nd Division had been moved up to Omaha Beach, too late for anyone to do anything about it.²⁸

But none of that mattered now. The airborne was already on the ground, and his men were going in, come what may. Brad’s authority was now limited to the reach of his voice, and his job was to encourage everyone around him. So a tight, unfamiliar smile wedged itself onto Brad’s face, concealing his feelings at the impending deaths of hundreds, maybe thousands of young men, and for the families back home who would soon receive a telegram from the War Department and a gold star for their window.²⁹

NEPTUNE was a panorama no man that day would ever forget. Thirteen hundred RAF bombers threaded their way across the indigo sky, a thick, speckled ribbon of aluminum geese returning home after brutalizing the French coast. In the other direction came low-flying Spitfires, the van of a wave of 480 twin-tailed Liberators flying inland to deposit another 2.5 million pounds of explosives. Beneath them sat hundreds and hundreds of ships: landing ships, support ships, battleships, hospital ships, screening ships. Ships to land soldiers, ships to land tanks, ships to land bulldozers, bridging spans, and signaling stations.

It was the smallest of these craft that worried Brad the most, the boxy Higgins boats with their thirty-two sardines, and the experimental dual-drive Sherman tanks that plowed into the sea with only thin canvas walls to hold back the waves. Brad and Tubby shook their heads as they squinted at the breakers.³⁰

Well, no point in worrying too much, Brad reminded himself. His men were far beyond the control of generals milling aboard their command craft. It was up to the men with rifles, men with mortars, men killing, men dying, men hiding behind beach obstacles and men calling the out-of-place challenge “Mickey,” and the response “Mouse,” with deadly earnestness. Those men, not Eisenhower or Montgomery or Bradley, would decide the battle. For the next few hours, Omar would watch and wait while the Navy’s guns pounded the pillboxes and the soldiers did their bloody work. He had called the play, and the game was on.³¹

It was not until about ten that morning that the first reports began crackling in from Gee Gerow’s V Corps. Gerow’s report was not encouraging. It read, “OBSTACLES MINED, PROGRESS SLOW . . . DD TANKS FOR FOX GREEN SWAMPED.”³²

It was the “progress slow” part that worried Brad the most, because the battle raging on the beaches was not to hold Omaha’s sand and shingles, but to reach those four vital exit roads leading to green grass and open country. Something more useful than a beach.

Though he tried not to show it, Brad’s nerves wore thin as he learned of unexpectedly fierce German resistance at Omaha. When he considered how few troops stood between him and the expected German counterattack, his stomach tightened. From the moment the Allied fleet was spotted, time began working against the Americans; some 34,000 men and 3,300 vehicles formed Omaha’s first attack wave, and behind them steamed a second echelon, 26,500 men and another 4,400 vehicles. The follow-up force would be knocking at Omaha’s door by the next tide, and if the first wave didn’t secure the beach by then, a traffic jam like no one had ever seen would clot the dangerous seas.³³

There was little he could see through his field glasses from the Augusta’s deck, but as an infantryman, Brad could envision the foot soldier’s bitter fight for the beach: the assault teams wading through neck-deep water, men staggering onto the beaches, their waterlogged kits, ammunition, and clothing pulling them down to the gritty sand as they entered the killing zone. Mortar shells bursting right and left, spraying steel fragments. The spasmodic zipping of the dreaded MG-42, served by unseen crews who played their bullet hoses across the open sands in methodic, crisscross directions. The din of explosions and the screams. Fountains of blood. Noncoms and junior officers crouching low, looking for men they recognized, trying to establish order. Trying to survive.

By noon Gerow pronounced the situation off Omaha “critical,” and when Chet Hansen returned from a reconnaissance dash with a gloomy report of swamped boats and bodies blown sky-high, Brad briefly considered abandoning Omaha and diverting his second wave to Utah. So worried was he during those critical moments that two days later he confided to Montgomery, “Someday I’ll tell General Eisenhower just how close it was those first few hours.”³⁴

But at one thirty that afternoon, Bradley and his command team learned Gee’s men had broken through to the beach exits and were pushing inland. A firsthand report from Bill Kean confirmed Omaha was in American hands. Brad heaved a sigh of relief, then settled into the business of directing bulldozers, artillery, men, and plenty else onto French soil.³⁵

When he turned in around midnight, Brad could look with satisfaction on his handiwork. He and his lieutenants had put some 50,000 men onto Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” and had pushed them six miles closer to Berlin. It was a great start.³⁶

“If all goes right, dozens of people will claim credit. But if it goes wrong, you’ll be the only one to blame.” That was what Kay Summersby had told Ike the night he approved the invasion. Ike had a long, quiet June 5 to think about how much blame he would shoulder if the landings failed. If the airborne were torn to shreds. If the waves swamped the landing craft. If his intelligence misplaced the Panzer Lehr or 12th SS Divisions. If he fell victim to bad luck.³⁷

Of course, there was no point in speculating. There wasn’t any point in anticipating what might happen, since there were about a dozen echelons between Ike and the private who would have to deal with the problems as they arose. So he paced, smoked, visited soldiers, including the airborne boys Leigh-Mallory had pronounced doomed. He scratched off a draft announcement accepting defeat—a message he hoped he’d never send—and he muttered to himself throughout the evening, as if the answers to his questions were lurking on some desk or behind some bookshelf in Southwick House.³⁸

At six forty on the morning of June 6, the Supreme Commander’s green-handled scrambler phone rang at Sharpener, Ike’s forward command post. Butcher, who was answering Ike’s phone while the general caught some sleep, picked up. The news was good; Leigh-Mallory was calling to tell Eisenhower that the airborne had made land with no serious casualties. Butch sent the irrepressible Mickey McKeogh to wake the Supreme Commander.³⁹

A trepid Mickey cracked the door to Ike’s trailer to find his boss sitting up in bed with a Western novel, awake and haggard, a thin cigarette jutting from his stubble-creased jaw. An ashtray next to his bed spilled over with cold butts, and a pile of delicate ash flecked the ashtray’s base like snow on a miniature train village. Ike looked like a man who hadn’t slept, which made sense, because he hadn’t.⁴⁰

“His face was drawn and tired,” Mick remembered, “and he had only a half smile.” But when Mickey asked him how he felt, Ike croaked, “Not too bad, Mickey.” Mickey passed along some good news that had just come in from the Navy, and Ike, brightening up, emerged from his trailer a short time later, a shave, coffee, another cigarette, and news of the paratroopers buoying his spirits.⁴¹

Well, based on Montgomery’s initial reports, Ike knew those dozens would be lining up to claim their share before long, which was just fine with him. Driving to Montgomery’s command post, he met with his senior ground commander and picked up more good news from the Commonwealth side; Sword and Gold Beaches, the British ones, looked good, although the Canadians were having a tough fight for the high ground behind Juno. Not a bad start.

As D-Day wore on, Ike became enmeshed in the same worries that had shaken him on Gibraltar and Malta: Where were Bradley’s reports? Ike’s closest aides were working feverishly to put together a coherent picture for the Supreme Commander, and his loyal Scotsman, Jimmy Gault, got on the scrambled phone with the Navy while Ike strained to listen in. “God, this must be bad,” Ike surmised as he listened to Gault’s end of the conversation.⁴²

Throughout June 6, a sober cloud hovered over Ike’s crew. “Nobody made any of the silly little jokes we usually made,” remembered Mickey. “We just waited.” As the battle unfolded, Dwight Eisenhower fretted and fidgeted without a peep from the U.S.S. Augusta and her three-starred Army commander.⁴³

Well, Ike thought, he would find out. Late on the morning of June 7, he and his retinue pulled away from the coast aboard H.M.S. Apollo, a three-stack minelayer, for a personal visit to Bradley’s command ship. As the Apollo steamed toward Omaha Beach, the messy scene—landing craft, oil slicks, supply ships, troop ships, battleships, artificial breakwaters, supply dumps, destroyers, barrage balloons, and those lines of tiny, olive-drab ants swarming all over the beaches—amazed even the architect of this great enterprise.⁴⁴

The culprit, Brad later found out, was Montgomery’s overburdened command post, the proper channel for reports emanating from First Army. The British decoding system had broken down shortly after the landings, and Montgomery’s “brass pounders” were running twelve hours behind in their coded messages .⁴⁷

Like George nearly a year before, Brad was chagrined at Eisenhower’s rebuke, and he was more than a little miffed at the petty complaints over his slow reports. Brad was, after all, the general who had put 50,000 soldiers on Festung Europa, and that should count for something.⁴⁹

On June 9, First Army’s advanced command post crashed ashore. Bradley’s industrious headquarters engineers set up a small tent-and-trailer city in an apple orchard just behind Pointe du Hoc, the battleground wrested by Rangers three days earlier. Montgomery’s men, now firmly ashore at Gold, Sword, and Juno Beaches, were having a tough time closing in around Caen, one of Monty’s D-Day objectives. On the American side, Brad remained optimistic, though he knew the area south of Omaha and Utah, the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula, would remain hot for some time.⁵⁰

The gap between Omaha and Utah was closed on June 12, and Bradley rumbled off in a jeep with Chet Hansen to scan the front near the old village of Auville-sur-le-Vey. It was the way he liked to get around—a jeep with a padded seat, a good driver, and a load of K-rations for lunch. No flags, no sirens, none of Patton’s parade of showboats and sycophants.⁵¹

Brad, Chet, and their driver, Alex Stoute, bounced down a worn road toward the village and soon pulled to the roadside to watch an armored car turning its 37mm cannon on a concealed sniper. Amid the noise and smoke, another jeep roared up to Brad’s vehicle, bearing a worried-looking brigadier general.⁵²

Brad, calculating risks to himself and the brigadier, shook his head. “Nope—but thanks anyhow,” he told the general. “I’m not going to go through.” Stoute swung the jeep around and the threesome sped back to the beach.

“All the so-called information we get over the radio is imaginary, as, from my previous experiences in landings, I know that were I on the beach I would not know a damn thing at this time of the operation, so how can the commentators know anything?”⁵⁴

Thinking it over, he sank back into his chair. That day, he wrote Beatrice, “It is Hell to be on the side lines and see all the glory eluding me but I guess there will be enough for all.” He penned in his diary, “I started to pack up my clothes a little bit, always hoping, I suppose, that someone will get killed and I will have to go.”⁵⁵

Many men did get killed that day. Several thousand of them, in fact. But to George, none of the dead men were the right ones. No lieutenant generals, no major generals, not even brigadiers. No one George could reasonably replace. The Nazis would have to aim higher up the chain if Patton were to get to France soon.

As George was listening to the wireless, Bradley was hurrying reinforcements ashore, working them into the line, pressing them toward Cherbourg. His most conspicuous job was keeping the fires lit under his corps commanders—Collins, Gerow, and Major General Charles H. Corlett, commander of the newly arrived XIX Corps—but the jobs that took up most of Brad’s time were logistics and personnel. To Brad, this last duty meant that all combat commanders who couldn’t cut the mustard when the shooting started must be sent back to the minor leagues immediately, and he made his opinions crystal clear to his corps leaders. At the request of Lightning Joe, he sacked the commanding general of the poorly trained 90th Division, even though the general had been in office for only a short time. When that general’s replacement did no better, Brad relieved the whole division and replaced it with the 79th, and less than a month after firing the first commander of the 90th, he fired the replacement commander, too. Shortly after VIII Corps arrived under Troy Middleton, he also relieved the 8th Division’s commander.⁵⁷

It was a pattern that would repeat itself as the war dragged on. As he later summed up his philosophy of responsibility,

There were instances in Europe where I relieved commanders for their failure to move fast enough. And it is possible that some were the victims of circumstance. For how can the blame for failure be laid fairly on a single man when there are in reality so many factors that can affect the outcome of any battle? Yet each commander must always assume total responsibility for every individual in his command. If his battalion or regimental commanders fail him in the attack, then he must relieve them or be relieved himself.⁵⁸

Brad’s was a tough, intolerant approach that many generals thought unnecessarily harsh, and Ike had already lectured Bradley on the need to rehabilitate, rather than fire, deficient commanders. Brad saw it differently. To Bradley, war was an unforgiving teacher, and anything less than immediate replacement of generals found wanting would court failure and create unnecessary Gold Star Mothers back home. And that he was not willing to do.⁵⁹

Tactics were another matter in which Brad played a close, active role. In Corlett, Gerow, and Charles H. Gerhardt, commander of the aggressive 29th Division, Bradley had three commanders itching to dash for St.-Lô, an essential road juncture at the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula. Take St.-Lô, the men urged Bradley, and you open the exit door from the Cotentin.

Bradley, envisioning insurmountable logistical problems, refused to turn his generals loose until Joe Collins captured his assigned port. With his head stuck down a rabbit hole, rooting around for Cherbourg, Brad wasn’t going to let Farmer Adolf come along with a hoe and whack him on the back of a long, exposed neck. As he told his operations man, Tubby Thorson, his corps commanders “want to go like hell. I’ve got to stop them, get them solid and dug in. He’s going to hit us hard and I don’t want a breakthrough.” Corlett and Gerow, he said, would “hold their ground even if we’ve got to take their ammunition away to make them do it. Nobody’s going anywhere until Joe gets Cherbourg.”⁶⁰

Events vindicated Brad’s caution a few days later when a smiling Monk Dickson sauntered into the mess tent with the happy news that the Germans outside Cherbourg were pulling out of the peninsula. Obviously the Hun couldn’t find a chink in Brad’s armor, and Bradley now owned the Cotentin, or most of it, without spreading his men dangerously thin. The next day Joe Collins’s men sealed off Cherbourg, which he expected to fall soon, and Brad decided to make his first big press announcement the next day.⁶¹

First Army’s personnel staff had pulled together casualty figures for the first ten days on the Continent. The classified numbers showed approximately 15,000 killed, wounded, or missing, which was far less than anyone had expected. They validated Brad’s pre-invasion press comments about losses that had gotten him into warm water at home. Why not share the good news with the American people? his staff asked him. It would let the public know that the Normandy landings were not the bloodbath they had been told to expect.⁶²

Not to everyone, however. SHAEF’s intelligence officers, who were paid to piece together enemy strength from a variety of sources, worried that the Germans could make a fair estimate of First Army’s strength based on the casualty figures Brad had released. One of them called Montgomery’s staff to complain, and Monty, Bradley’s superior, placed an icy call to Brad, chiding the junior American about his security lapse as only Montgomery could chide.⁶³

Bradley and Montgomery never spoke of the conversation again. They were too professional to harp on something where the matter was academic or settled, at least so long as a war was on. But the abrupt warning from Montgomery put Omar Bradley on notice that the Englishman in baggy pants was going to run his armies with a tight, unyielding fist.

By mid-June, Eisenhower was beginning to wonder whether the wizard who bounded across the giant relief map of Normandy was ever going to crack the Cotentin Line. The city of Caen, over which the swastika still flew, had been Montgomery’s D-Day objective. The land Caen screened would provide beautifully clear, flat space for airfields and logistical dumps, and its eastern roads led to the Seine, Paris, and Orléans. It would give the Allies room to fire up their tanks, and it anchored the left flank of the Allied line.⁶⁴

Montgomery’s failure to capture Caen on D-Day, or the next week, or the next week, began incubating a virulent strain of anti-Montgomery sentiment at SHAEF. While some of these complaints carried a vague undertone of national prejudice, Monty’s biggest critics were Royal Air Force marshals such as “Mary” Coningham, Patton’s hot-tempered antagonist in North Africa, and Arthur Tedder, Eisenhower’s right-hand man. Montgomery’s penchant for infuriating his colleagues outside Twenty-First Army Group meant there would be plenty of rock throwers waiting for him to stumble.⁶⁵

An unruffled Montgomery concluded that the large German armored force to his front made an assault on Caen impractical for the moment. Instead, he suggested, he would “pull the enemy on the Second Army,” loosening up Brad’s front so the Americans could drive south into Brittany. With Ike’s blessing, Montgomery ordered Bradley to attack toward Coutances, a coastal town at the base of the Cotentin neck.⁶⁶

Ike’s ever-present optimism was dealt a severe blow on June 19 with the unexpected arrival of a torrential gale. The three-day tempest, one of the worst to lash the Norman coast in twenty years, capsized or beached some eight hundred ships and wrecked the artificial harbor engineers and seamen had constructed at Omaha Beach. It would be days, maybe weeks, before Ike and his staff could calculate the impact of this disaster, and Ike quickly realized that this one storm was a setback far worse than anything the Germans had inflicted.⁶⁷

As the strain on Eisenhower was rebuilding, the War Department provided him with a bit of personal relief when it authorized a two-week leave for his son, John, a newly commissioned second lieutenant, and provided the young officer with transportation to England to visit his father. Arriving on the thirteenth, John was greeted at the docks in Scotland and whisked off to Ike’s headquarters at Southwick. For the first time since the previous Christmas, he saw his father, who was, at that moment, cursing J. C. H. Lee over the telephone.⁶⁸

The man John saw that busy day in June was very different from the one who had left the States in the summer of 1942. He was abrupt, almost rude. While Ike would always remain a devoted father, now that John was an officer, Ike’s parental love was tempered by his position as John’s ultimate superior. At Telegraph Cottage, he picked at his son for making poor plays at bridge, and in response to his son’s question about military protocol among officer ranks, he curtly remarked, “John, there isn’t an officer in this theater who doesn’t rank above you and below me.” Before long John would be out of the theater, reassigned to his unit, destined to return the following spring.⁶⁹

As usual, Eisenhower was at his most relaxed over late-night conversations with old friends. It was one way he shook off the stress of the war, and sometimes his official visits were really an excuse to escape his command post and find people who would rejuvenate his spirit. One evening he decided to settle in for a spell with Bradley at First Army’s mess tent. Pulling the blackout flaps as the sky outside darkened, Brad had an orderly bring up a liberated bottle of French wine and the two comrades talked until long after dark. As usual, their late-night conversation was a hodgepodge of business, gossip, and anecdotes that, often as not, went nowhere.⁷⁰

In one conversation, for instance, Ike told Brad how he had run into a soldier from Kansas who was a wheat farmer. The lad said his family’s twelve thousand farm acres produced forty-one bushels apiece, a claim Ike didn’t find credible.⁷¹

“When I was a kid,” he mused, “two hundred fifty acres of Kansas wheat land would have represented an honest ambition for any Abilene boy. Yessir, it would have looked mighty good to me—and I guess to you too, Brad.”

Homilies like this one were one of the many ways Eisenhower, Bradley, and many others in their positions kept life bearable. Ike may have had more history with George, but in Brad he found a comfortable friend, one who didn’t wear him out with the pomp and bombast and when-is-the-next-disaster of a George Patton. Bradley was not a king of the pursuit of warfare, and he did not make life so interesting as George did. But like the Eisenhowers of Abilene, Bradley hailed from Middle America. He was someone with whom Ike could share a relaxed moment, knowing that when there was fighting to be done, the unflappable Omar Bradley would push as hard as military sense would permit. With Ike’s help, the two of them could handle Montgomery, Patton, and the enemy.