The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (6 page)

On May 13 the last Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered. Eisenhower’s forces captured 275,000 enemy troops, more than half of them German, a total bag of prisoners even larger than the Russians had gotten at Stalingrad three and a half months earlier. Congratulations poured in on Eisenhower from all sides. He told Marshall he wished he had a disposition that would allow him to relax and enjoy a feeling of self-satisfaction, but he did not. “I always anticipate and discount, in my own mind, accomplishment, and am, therefore, mentally racing ahead into the next campaign. The consequence is that all the shouting about the Tunisian campaign leaves me utterly cold.”

Eisenhower knew that the North African campaign had taken too long-six months-and cost too much: his forces had lost 10,820 men killed, 39,575 wounded, and 21,415 missing or captured, a total of 71,810 casualties. But it was over, and his men had won. His own great contribution had been not so much directing the Anglo-American victory, but insisting that they won as Allies. Thanks in large part to Eisenhower, the Alliance had survived its first test and was stronger than ever.

Rommel realized that it was all up for his Afrika Korps. His bold bid at Kasserine Pass had failed and now it was only a question of time.  In March 1943, Rommel called Col. Hans von Luck to come see him at his headquarters near Benghazi. Luck drove up and together they dealt with some of the supply problems. Then Rommel asked Luck to go for a walk. Rommel regarded Luck as almost a second son, and he wanted to talk. “Listen,” Rommel said, “one day you will remember what I am telling you. The war is lost.” Luck protested hotly. “We are very deep in Russia,” he exclaimed. “We are in Scandinavia, in France, in the Balkans, in North Africa. How can the war be lost?”

“I will tell you,” Rommel answered. “We lost Stalingrad, we will lose Africa, with the body of our best-trained armored people. We can’t fight without them.  The only thing we can do is to ask for an armistice. We have to give up all this business about the Jews, we have to change our minds about the religions, and so on, and we must get an armistice now at this stage while we still have something to offer.”

Rommel asked Luck to fly to Hitler’s headquarters and plead with the Führer to execute a Dunkirk in reverse. It was all up in North Africa for the Axis, Rommel said, and he wanted to save his Afrika Korps. Luck went, but did not get past Field Marshal Alfred Jodl, who told Luck that the Fuhrer was in political discussions with the Romanians and nobody wanted to butt in with military decisions. “And anyway,” Jodl concluded, “there’s no idea at all to withdraw from North Africa.” Luck never returned to Tunisia. Rommel flew out. The Afrika Korps was destroyed or captured.

Luck went on to teach at the military academy for half a year. In the late fall of 1943 he got orders to join the 21st Panzer Division in Brittany as one of the two regimental commanders. He had been specially requested by the division commander, Brig. Gen. Edgar Feuchtinger, who was close to Hitler and thus got the officers he wanted. Feuchtinger was reviving 21st Panzer from the dead, but his contact with Hitler made it a feasible task. His officers were exclusively veterans, most from Africa or the Eastern Front. The troops-almost sixteen thousand of them, as this was a full-strength division-were volunteers, young, eager, fit. The equipment was excellent, the tanks especially so. In addition, the new 21st Panzer had an abundance of SPVs (self-propelled vehicles), put together by a Major Becker, a reserve officer who was a genius with transport.  He could transform any type of chassis into an SPV. On the SPVs he would mount all sorts of guns, but his favorite was the multibarreled rocket launcher, the so-called Stalin organ, with forty-eight barrels.  Luck set to with his regiment. Among many other exercises, he began to give the men extended night-training drills. At the end of 1943, Rommel-as commander of Army Group B-took control of the German Seventh Army in Normandy and Brittany.  His arrival and his personality injected badly needed enthusiasm and professional skill into the building of the Atlantic Wall to protect Hitler’s Fortress Europe.

Following the victory in North Africa, the Allies continued offensive operations in the Mediterranean. This came about by default. Eisenhower and Marshall continued to believe that only an invasion of France could be decisive, that nibbling at the periphery of the German empire would never bring the Nazis to surrender, but by mid-1943 it was too late to mount Operation Roundup (the proposed 1943 invasion of France) because the immense buildup of British and American forces in North Africa had come at the expense of a buildup in Britain.  So, with North Africa as a base, the Allies went after Sicily (July) and the Italian mainland, landing at Salerno (September). Eisenhower commanded in each case. It took his forces almost three months to overrun Sicily, while in Italy the Germans were able to impose a stalemate south of Rome.  It had been a year marked by great gains on the map. The forces under Eisenhower’s command had conquered Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Sicily, and southern Italy. The strategic gains, however, had been small at best. Germany had not lost any territory that was critical to its defense. It had not been forced to reduce its divisions in France or Russia. Taken as a whole, Eisenhower’s campaigns from November 1942 to December 1943 must be judged a strategic failure.

By no means was it altogether his fault. In the summer of 1942 he had warned his political bosses about what was going to happen if they turned down Roundup for Torch. But some of the blame was his. The excessive caution with which he opened the campaign, his refusal to run risks to get to Tunis before the Germans, his refusal to take a chance and rush troops into Sardinia, his refusal to relieve Fredendall, his refusal to take a grip on the battle in Sicily, his refusal to seize the opportunity to take Rome with the 82nd Airborne, all contributed to the unhappy situation he left behind in Italy. The Allied armies were well south of Rome as winter set in, with little hope of any rapid advance. The Allies had expended great resources for small gains.

But there was one clear gain from 1943 for the Allies-it gave the high command in general, and Eisenhower particularly, badly needed experience. The troops, too, learned what a tough business war is. Further, Eisenhower learned which of his subordinates could stand up to the strain of battle and which could not. Had it not been for Torch, had Roundup been launched in 1943 instead of Overlord in 1944, the Allies would have gone ashore with an insecure Eisenhower in command of inexperienced troops led by Lloyd Fredendall. The idea of Fredendall in charge at Omaha Beach during the crisis is by itself enough to justify the Mediterranean campaign.

In his first combat experience Eisenhower had been unsure of himself, hesitant, often depressed, irritable, likely to make snap judgments on insufficient information, defensive in both his mood and his tactics. But he had learned how critical it was for him to be always cheery and optimistic in the presence of his subordinates, how costly caution can often be in combat, and whom he could rely upon in critical moments.

In the Mediterranean campaign Eisenhower and his team had improved dramatically.  As they now prepared for the climax of the war, the invasion of France, they were vastly superior to the team that had invaded North Africa in November 1942.  In that respect, the payoff for Torch was worth the price.

3 -      Planning and Training for Overlord

FROM THE TIME America entered the war against Germany, Stalin had been demanding that the Western Allies open a second front by invading France, in order to relieve the German pressure on Russia. Roosevelt had promised to do so in 1943, but Roundup got scuttled in favor of operations in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. By the late fall of 1943, Stalin’s demands had grown irresistible-and anyway invading France was exactly what Eisenhower and Marshall wanted to do. So when Stalin met with Roosevelt and Churchill at Teheran, Iran, in December, Roosevelt assured him that Overlord was definitely on for the spring of 1944.  Stalin wanted to know who was in command. Roosevelt replied that the appointment had not yet been made. Stalin said in that case he did not believe the Americans and British were serious about the operation. Roosevelt promised to make the selection in three or four days.

But the President shrank from making the decision. He wanted to give the command to Marshall, who had built the army that would carry out Overlord, but he also wanted Marshall to continue to serve as Chief of Staff, with worldwide responsibility. In early December, after leaving Teheran for Cairo, Egypt, he asked Marshall to express his personal preference, and thus, he hoped, make the decision for him. Marshall replied that while he would gladly serve wherever the President told him to, he would not be the judge in his own case. Roosevelt thereupon asked Marshall to write a message to Stalin for him. As Roosevelt dictated, Marshall wrote, “From the President to Marshal Stalin. The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord operations has been decided upon.” Roosevelt then signed it.

It was the most coveted command in the history of warfare. It gave Eisenhower his great, unique opportunity. Without it, he would have been only one among a number of famous Allied generals rather than the Great Captain of World War II and, as a consequence, President of the United States.  He got the appointment, it seemed, by default. In explaining his reasoning afterward, Roosevelt said that he just could not sleep at night with Marshall out of the country. Eisenhower was the logical choice because Marshall was too important to be spared, even for Overlord. Since the commander had to be an American, a process of elimination brought it down to Eisenhower.  There were, nevertheless, manifold positive reasons for Eisenhower’s selection.  Overlord, like Torch, was going to be a joint operation, and Eisenhower had proved that he could create and run an integrated staff and successfully command combined British-American operations. No other general had done so. Adm. Andrew Cunningham, now a member of the CCS (he had assumed the duties of First Sea Lord in mid-October), had said it well when he left the Mediterranean. He told Eisenhower it had been a great experience for him to see the forces of two nations, made up of men with different upbringings, conflicting ideas on staff work, and basic, “apparently irreconcilable ideas,” brought together and knitted into a team. “I do not believe,” Cunningham said, “that any other man than yourself could have done it.”

The key word was “team.” Eisenhower’s emphasis on teamwork, his never-flagging insistence on working together, was the single most important reason for his selection, much more important than his generalship, which in truth had been cautious and hesitant. Eisenhower’s dedication to teamwork was, of course, a theme that had characterized his whole life, stretching back to Abilene High School baseball and football games.

Gathering the disparate forces for Overlord, welding them into a genuine team, making the plans for the actual engagement, and directing the action once the conflict began were challenges rather like coaching a football team, albeit on an immensely larger scale. The job required an ability to spot and exploit each player’s strength, and to force each player-many of them “stars,” egotistical and self-centered-to merge his talents with the others in order to fight together in a common cause. Marshall, for all his awesome abilities, did not have the patience required to work smoothly and efficiently with prima donnas, especially British prima donnas. Nor did Marshall have Eisenhower’s experience in commanding amphibious operations. General Brooke, a man who was consistently and scathingly critical of Eisenhower’s professional competence, recognized this truth. “The selection of Eisenhower instead of Marshall,” he wrote, “was a good one.”

Another, related factor in Roosevelt’s choice was Eisenhower’s popularity.  Everyone liked him, responded positively to his outgoing personality, even when they disagreed with his decisions. His hearty laugh, infectious grin, relaxed manner, and consistent optimism were irresistible.  Equally important, he was physically strong enough to withstand the rigors and pressures of a long and arduous campaign. Fifty-three years old, he was tough enough to get along on four or five hours’ sleep a night, to shake off a cold or the flu, to rouse himself from near-total exhaustion and present a cheerful face to his subordinates. It was not that he did not pay a price for all his activity, but that he did not let it show. In September 1943 a friend told him that he was pleased to see from some snapshots taken in Sicily that Eisenhower looked so healthy. In reply, Eisenhower said, “I must admit that sometimes I feel a thousand years old when I struggle to my bed at night.” Nevertheless, the overriding impression he gave was one of vitality. Dwight Eisenhower was an intensely alive human being who enjoyed his job immensely.  That quality showed in his speech, his mannerisms, his physical movements, most of all in his eyes. They were astonishingly expressive. As he listened to his deputies discuss future operations, his eyes moved quickly and inquisitively from face to face. His concentration was intense, almost a physical embrace. The eyes always showed his mood-they were icy blue when he was angry, warmly blue when he was pleased, sharp and demanding when he was concerned, glazed when he was bored.

Most of all, they bespoke his supreme self-confidence, a certainty of belief in himself and his abilities. It was neither a blind nor an egotistical confidence.  As has been seen, he was a sharp and insightful critic of his own decisions.  Like the successful football coach studying the movies of the preceding week’s game, his self-criticism was searching and positive, designed to eliminate errors and improve performance.

He had made, and would have to make, countless decisions, decisions that involved the lives of tens of thousands of men, not to speak of the fate of great nations. He did so with the certainty that he had taken everything into account, gathered all relevant information, and considered all possible consequences. Then he acted. This is the essence of command.  His self-confidence inspired confidence in him. When associates, be they superiors or subordinates, described Eisenhower, there was one word that almost all of them used. It was trust. People trusted Eisenhower for the most obvious reason-he was trustworthy. Disagree as they might (and often did) with his decisions, they never doubted his motives. Montgomery did not think much of Eisenhower as a soldier, but he did appreciate his other qualities. While he thought Eisenhower intelligent, “his real strength lies in his human qualities.  . . . He has the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bit of metal. He merely has to smile at you, and you trust him at once.”