Authors: Jim Newton
MacArthur processed their time together somewhat differently. Asked years later what he thought of Ike, MacArthur replied: “Best clerk I ever had.”
It was December 1941. Ike and Mamie had just returned from a few days’ vacation in a cabin near Brownsville, Texas. They had enjoyed highballs, dancing, and Mexican food at a club in Matamoros, just across the border. They returned to the base in San Antonio relaxed and looking ahead to the holidays. They thus were home when, on a quiet Sunday that no American of that generation would ever forget, men and women, boys and girls, reeled at the news from Pearl Harbor.
General George Catlett Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, summoned to Washington officers who “will solve their own problems and not bring them all to me.” One of those to whom he turned was Mark Wayne Clark. Marshall asked Clark for the names of ten capable brigadier generals who might be able to serve as chief of war plans. Clark replied with the name of an old West Point schoolmate a few years older than himself: “I’ll give you one name and nine dittos: Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
Ike got the call on December 12, placed to him by Walter Bedell Smith, who, like Clark, was to become a central player in Eisenhower’s war and beyond. “The Chief,” Smith told Eisenhower, “said you get on a plane and get up here.” Ike alerted his troops and hustled around the base preparing to leave. He returned home that evening. To settle his nerves, he cooked. He made vegetable soup.
Eisenhower arrived in Washington two days later. His brother Milton met his train at Union Station and offered to take him home to freshen up. Ike asked instead for a ride to the War Department, then housed in Washington’s Munitions Building. He entered, was directed to Marshall’s office, and was quickly ushered inside. (Mamie followed a few weeks after that, stopping to visit John at West Point and then arriving in Washington to supervise the family’s hunt for a place to live.)
Ike and Marshall had met twice before. After graduating first in his class from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Eisenhower was offered the chance to help compose a guide to World War I battle monuments, a post without much inherent appeal but for one thing: it was supervised by the revered general John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, America’s most worshipped military leader of his generation. Ike accepted the job, which also offered him and Mamie their first tour of Europe, a luxurious and romantic period in their marriage and in young John’s life. In those treasured months of 1928 and 1929, Ike and John would rise together, John bathing while his father shaved; Ike took his boy to school. Mamie studied French. They traveled to Italy, sunbathed at the beach, and played cards with friends while John napped in the afternoon. They were, Mamie wrote to her parents, “spoiled rotten.”
Late in his association with Pershing, Ike was asked to review a section of the old general’s war diaries in preparation for their publication as a memoir. Eisenhower immersed himself in the notes and reported back to Pershing that he believed sections dealing with the war’s crucial battles would be best written narratively, departing from the diary form, which he felt distracted from the story. Pershing seemed to appreciate the suggestion but said he wanted to confer with a trusted aide, Colonel George Marshall. Marshall, the same colonel who had helped Eisenhower land his spot on Conner’s staff, read the passages and preferred Pershing’s original approach. Eisenhower was so surprised that he nursed the insult for years and insisted that friends often told him they found Pershing’s version hard to decipher. (Others disagreed. Pershing’s memoir won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932.) What mattered most about the literary squabble between Eisenhower and Pershing, though, was that even in resolving it in Pershing’s favor, Marshall recognized the talent behind Ike’s work. As with Conner years earlier, a brilliant Army leader had just spotted the flash of excellence in a promising officer.
Their other encounter was passing, but Ike remembered it well. Eisenhower had just returned from the Philippines, and the two were observing military exercises on the West Coast. Remarking on Ike’s recent posting, Marshall remembered the ease of life in the Philippines, where he too had served and where servants were supplied to senior officers in abundance. Now that he was back in the United States, Marshall asked Ike, was he relearning to tie his shoes? Eisenhower’s reply: “Yes, sir.”
So while it was not a complete stranger who greeted Eisenhower that morning in 1941, nor was it someone he knew well, other than by reputation. And yet what a reputation it was. George Marshall was terse, taciturn, exquisitely restrained. He was absentminded, often confusing the names of subordinates, but deeply dignified. Rarely did Marshall ever issue an order. Instead, he suggested and selected. His work ethic was legendary, and his disapproval was feared. Once, when an officer apologized for having to delay his departure to Europe because his wife was out of town and their home needed to be packed, Marshall replied: “I’m sorry, too, but you will be retired tomorrow.”
Marshall and Eisenhower had grown up differently, Ike in the modesty of his Kansas home, Marshall in the boom-and-bust household supplied by his father, a prosperous coal executive who suffered in the Depression of the 1890s. If anything, young Marshall had been an even more indifferent student than young Ike. Marshall eventually graduated respectably from Virginia Military Institute and secured his commission by passing the examination that West Point alumni were allowed to skip. From that point on, Marshall’s military career bore some resemblance to that of his new aide. Both served in the Philippines; both were graduates of the staff college at Leavenworth (Marshall, too, graduated “One”); both had served under Pershing, though Marshall in wartime and Eisenhower during the peace between the wars; both were well acquainted with Conner, whom they greatly admired. Both were handsome men, Eisenhower an inch or two taller; both possessed striking blue eyes, Marshall’s a shade deeper.
When Eisenhower entered Marshall’s inner office that morning, the chief of staff barely looked up. Sitting behind his desk, he briefed Eisenhower on the crisis facing the Philippines. MacArthur had inexplicably allowed American planes to sit on their runways in the hours after Pearl Harbor, and as a result Japanese bombing had destroyed much of America’s airpower in the region. An invasion seemed imminent, and the United States was frightfully overmatched. Marshall relayed those facts squarely, speaking for about twenty minutes, then suddenly stopped. “What,” he asked his new aide, “should be our general line of action?”
Surprised to be asked such a direct question of such immense consequence on such short notice, Eisenhower smartly declined a glib answer. “Give me a couple of hours,” he requested. “Of course,” Marshall replied.
Eisenhower went to his office and worked. “I have never pondered in my life like I did then,” he said later. He returned to Marshall that afternoon. The defense of the Philippines might prove impossible, Eisenhower acknowledged. If the Japanese were determined to invade, reinforcements might well not arrive in time. The garrison on the islands might be overrun, lives and prestige lost. And yet America must fight anyway, Ike insisted. If not, the world—and especially America’s allies in the region—would lose heart and confidence. “They may excuse failure,” he told Marshall, “but they will not excuse abandonment.” It was “seemingly hopeless [but] we have got to do our best.”
“I agree with you,” Marshall replied. “Do whatever you can.”
Eisenhower had grasped the larger strategic context of the question. It was not merely about arms and supplies but also about nations and confidence, the imperatives of leadership, the limitations of democratic governments in conflict with authoritarian regimes. He passed his most crucial test.
Ike knew he was privileged to land a spot on Marshall’s senior staff, but he still was, in one sense, anxious. Here was his second war, and at its outset it appeared he would fight again from an office, not the field. Conner counseled patience and urged Ike to trust Marshall. “Here’s the man who can fight the war because he understands it,” Conner once told Ike. So Ike settled in and went about raising an army.
Eisenhower was well suited to the task—comfortable with detail, proficient in training, committed to planning but open to improvisation. He had proved himself during a national training exercise in 1941, when Clark had been just one of those impressed by his work. The columnist Drew Pearson remarked on Ike’s “steel trap mind” at the conclusion of those exercises, and Eisenhower’s performance was recognized for his “marked ability and conspicuous success.” Now Eisenhower tended to preparations on a national scale.
Men who worked for Marshall were expected to devote their lives to the task, and Eisenhower did. On March 10, 1942, Ike received word that his father had died. He recorded the news with two sentences in his diary: “Father died this morning. Nothing I can do but send a wire.” The next day, he allowed himself a few more moments to grieve, confessing, “I loved my Dad,” and adding, “I think my Mother the finest person I’ve ever known.” He quit early that night, leaving at 7:30, and the following day, while his father was buried, Ike closed the door to his office and spent half an hour reflecting. “He was a just man, well liked, well educated, a thinker. He was undemonstrative, quiet, modest, and of exemplary habits—he never used alcohol or tobacco.” Ike admired his father’s reputation in his community and appreciated the lessons of his youth. “My only regret,” he concluded, “is that it was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him.” With that, Ike returned to work.
Marshall was meticulous in all things, but none more than the selection of subordinates, an area to which he “gave long and earnest attention,” rejecting the importuning of others. He kept a book in which he listed names of promising men, adding some as he heard new information about them, striking those who disappointed him. He had plucked Eisenhower off that list at Mark Clark’s suggestion in 1941. Now, as armies trained for Europe and men died in the Pacific, as American industry stepped up to its role as the “arsenal of democracy” and the Depression subsided, Marshall made a fateful decision: he dispatched Eisenhower to Britain. There, Eisenhower took charge of coordinating an invasion by two armies, thankfully of shared language but of different strategic traditions, intelligence capabilities, technological advancement, and even rank structures. The melding of such armies was of paramount necessity, and Ike, still a novice, relied heavily on his chief deputy, Bedell Smith, whose sour willingness to say no balanced and permitted Eisenhower’s cheerier disposition.
On July 25, after what Ike described in his diary as “tense and wearing” days, the Allies chose North Africa as the site for the Allied landing against the Axis powers—in that decision, FDR overruled his military commanders, who wanted a more direct strike on Europe—and agreed that they would fight beneath an American leader. The following day, Marshall picked the leader for the attack, known as Operation Torch. He named Eisenhower. In his official diary, Ike recorded the moment with dispassion that almost, but not quite, masked his unmistakable pride. “According to General Marshall’s understanding of the agreement,” he wrote, “I am to be that … commander.”
The last hours before American forces entered the European war were agonizing, and Eisenhower had few to whom he could confess his anxieties. He shared them with Marshall. “We are standing, of course, on the brink and must take the jump—whether the bottom contains a nice feather bed or a pile of brickbats,” he wrote. Hours later, with Eisenhower commanding from a headquarters in Gibraltar, American and British forces landed along the coast of North Africa. It was November 8, 1942.
Tens of thousands of young men flopped onto beaches near Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers; many died in ports or sank with ships, burned in oil, drowned in surf, their bodies cast into the waters of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, drawn by currents across thousands of miles of African coast. Those who survived the landings pressed inland off the beaches and harbors and turned left to confront Rommel and his German forces, then being pursued from the east by the British Eighth Army.
As soldiers poured from landing craft, Eisenhower paced and smoked and allowed himself a brief moment of wonder. “I have operational command of Gibraltar,” he wrote. “The symbol of the solidity of the British Empire, the hallmark of safety and security at home, the jealously guarded rock that has played a tremendous part in the trade development of the English race! An American is in charge, and I am he.”
If the landings at last put Allied troops in combat under unified command, the initial efforts also demonstrated America’s rustiness and the enormous complexity of the task at hand. Poorly packed supplies were hard to unload, landing craft failed and sank, tanks turned out to be too wide to ship on some North African rail lines. Ike displayed some rookie failings as a commander. He was distracted by politics; he sometimes dawdled when quick and decisive action might have sped along the Allied advance. General Alan Brooke, chief of the British Imperial General Staff, sized up Eisenhower early in the war and dismissed him with a sniff: “Deficient of experience and of limited ability.” Marshall may have harbored private worries as well. Still, he stood behind Ike.
The campaign for control over North Africa intermingled military and political strategy as the Allied forces confronted the vexing problem of how to deal with the French armies in the region. French soldiers yearned for liberation by the Allies, but the Vichy government was expected by its German masters to fight those same Allies. To face French resistance while embarking on a campaign to liberate Europe—including France—exasperated Eisenhower, and occasionally he let his temper boil over. “If we had come here merely to whip this French Army, I would be registering nothing but complete satisfaction at this moment,” he wrote to Marshall. But he conceded he was “irritated” at the thought that every bullet fired at a French soldier was one that could not be used against a German, every lost minute on the way to Tunis was time for Germany to regroup. “I find myself getting absolutely furious with these stupid frogs,” he fumed.