Prologue:
"An Astonishing Man"
Dwight D. Eisenhower endured many dramatic, tension-filled days, but nothing ever exceeded the events leading up to his courageous decision to launch the greatest military invasion in the history of warfare on June 6, 1944. The outcome of the war hinged on its success. Failure was unthinkable but nevertheless entirely possible, as Eisenhower knew only too well.
More than 150,000 Allied troops, nearly six thousand ships of every description, and masses of military hardware were crammed on ships and landing craft, and on airfields, awaiting Eisenhower's "Go" order to commence what he would later term "the great crusade," the cross-Channel operation that was the necessary overture to victory in Europe.
At the last minute the forces of nature intervened when a full-blown gale swept in from the Atlantic Ocean, and on June 4 Eisenhower was forced to postpone D-Day, originally scheduled for June 5, for at least twenty-four hours while the weathermen consulted their charts and received new data before the next weather update. At 4:15 A.M. on the morning of June 5, 1944, the Allied commanders in chief met to learn if the invasion could take place or would have to be postponed indefinitely. When the meteorologists predicted a break in the weather just sufficient to mount the invasion, Eisenhower made a historic decision that set into motion the most vital Allied operation of World War II -- the operation that would decide the victor and the vanquished. To go or not to go based on this small window of acceptable weather became the basis for a decision only Eisenhower himself could make. And make it he did, deciding that the invasion must be launched on June 6.
In public Eisenhower exuded confidence; in private, however, he was a seething bundle of nervous energy. "Ike could not have been more anxiety ridden," noted his British chauffeur and confidante, Kay Summersby. His smoking had increased to four packs a day, and he was rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand. "There were smoldering cigarettes in every ashtray. He would light one, put it down, forget it, and light another." On this day, June 5, he drank one pot of coffee after another and was once heard to mutter, "I hope to God I know what I'm doing." Time dragged interminably, each hour seeming as long as a day.
Early that evening, with only his British aide, Lt. Col. Jimmy Gault, for company, he had Kay Summersby drive him to Newbury, Wiltshire, where the U.S. 101st Airborne Division was staging for its parachute and glider landings in Normandy's Cotentin Peninsula that night to help protect the landings on Utah Beach. Beginning that afternoon, the division had marched to its loading sites to the strains of "A Hell of a Way to Die" -- also known as "He Ain't Gonna Jump No More," the song was actually 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic" with lyrics appropriate to paratroopers -- played by the division band. Arriving unannounced, he ordered the four-star plate on the front of his automobile covered, and permitted only a single division officer to accompany him on a random stroll through the ranks of the paratroopers, their faces blackened, full combat packs weighing an average of 125 to 150 pounds littering the ground around them, as they awaited darkness and the signal to begin the laborious process of loading. Although Eisenhower never spoke or wrote much about the experience, he cannot have forgotten the ominous warnings of his air commander in chief, Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, that he fully expected casualties among the men of the elite airborne to be prohibitively high.
In total informality Eisenhower wandered from group to group, as men crowded around him, anxious to meet the general known as Ike. As he moved among the ranks he would ask repeatedly, "Where are you from, soldier?" "What did you do in civilian life?" Back came replies from young men from virtually every state in the Union. Some joked with Eisenhower, others remained somber. One invited him to Texas to herd cattle at his ranch after the war. "They went crazy, yelling and cheering because 'Ike' had come to see them off."
Possibly the most famous photograph of Eisenhower taken during the war depicts him surrounded by "Screaming Eagles" (the 101st's nickname), as he questioned one of the jumpmasters, Lt. Wallace Strobel, who assured him that he and his men were ready to do the job they had been trained for. Strobel would later say of his brief encounter with the supreme Allied commander, "I honestly think it was his morale that was improved by being with us." Others interjected remarks such as, "Don't worry, General, we'll take care of this thing for you." As twilight settled over southern England, the men of the 101st began the tedious process of loading aboard their C-47s and gliders. Eisenhower went to the runway to see them off, wishing them good luck. Some saluted and had their salute returned. One paratrooper was heard to announce, "Look out, Hitler. Here we come!"
In some respects the scene was surreal: brave young men, many of whom would be wounded and perish in the coming hours and days, camouflaging their natural fears with bravado; and their commander in chief, deeply cognizant of what he had wrought, concealing his apprehension with smiles and small talk. "It's very hard to look a soldier in the eye when you fear that you are sending him to his death," Eisenhower later related to Kay Summersby. Yet those who had seen or spoken with him that fateful night carried into battle a conviction that their top soldier cared personally about each of them.
By nightfall Eisenhower had visited three airfields, at each of which the cheering was repeated. "I found the men in fine fettle," he said, "many of them joshingly admonishing me that I had no cause for worry, since the 101st was on the job and every-thing would be taken care of in fine shape." The last man to embark was the division commander, Maj. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor, who would shortly parachute into a Normandy cow pasture. Eisenhower saluted Taylor's aircraft as it moved off to join the enormous queue awaiting takeoff.
The noise was deafening. Eisenhower and the members of his party climbed onto the roof of the division headquarters to watch in silence as hundreds of planes and gliders lumbered into the rapidly darkening sky, again saluting as each aircraft passed by. For Eisenhower, a man unused to expressing his emotions publicly, it was a painfully moving yet exhilarating experience, and the closest he would come to being one of them. NBC correspondent Merrill Mueller stood nearby and noted that Eisenhower, his hands deep in his pockets, had tears in his eyes.
Eisenhower remained after the last aircraft had taken off and their sounds had faded away in the night. Watching him stroll back to his staff car, deep in thought, his shoulders sagging as they did whenever he was troubled, Kay Summersby thought him the loneliest man in the world at that moment. The knot of apprehension in his gut can only be imagined, but the expression on his face revealed more than words. "Well, it's on," he said somberly, again looking up at the night sky. "No one can stop it now."
His birth name was David Dwight Eisenhower, but he was best known simply by his nickname, "Ike." Well before he became president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower was already a national hero and one of the most universally respected Americans of his time. As his son, noted historian John S. D. Eisenhower, would later write of Gen. Winfield Scott, Dwight Eisenhower was "an astonishing man, one of the most astonishing in American history."
His life was an amazing saga of the American dream come true. He came from humble, undistinguished Midwestern roots, yet rose to a position undreamed of during the most destructive war in the history of mankind. The son of pacifists, he became a soldier whose life and career were shaped by the very wars his parents despised; yet he decried war as "the most stupid and tragic of human ventures." Had he followed the destiny predicted for him when he graduated from high school in Abilene, Kansas, in 1909, Eisenhower would have taught history instead of making it.
In 1941, as the United States was being drawn into a world war with Japan, Italy, and Nazi Germany, Eisenhower's aspirations were modest. An earlier biographer has observed that the first fifty-two years of Eisenhower's life were not only unexceptional, but in complete contradiction of the notion that a heroic life is one filled with dramatic and noteworthy feats." He would have considered himself successful to have served as a mere colonel in an armored division under the command of his longtime friend, the flamboyant Gen. George S. Patton, Jr.
Instead he rose to the highest command accorded any soldier in the Western Alliance of World War II. The fate of the war against Germany fell on his shoulders in June 1944, a responsibility of awesome and terrifying potential for failure -- one faced by few military commanders in history.
By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945 Eisenhower's name was known and acclaimed throughout the world. "He came home with the cheers of millions from London, Paris, New York, and Kansas City ringing in his ears, heavily laden with medals, citations, decorations and honors such as had been bestowed on no other American in history" Yet, at a huge welcome ceremony, he said humbly to the citizens of his beloved hometown, "The proudest thing I can say today is that I am from Abilene."
How much do we really know about Eisenhower? A great deal has been written about him, but surprisingly little of it reflects the anguish of high command or of the two decades of behind-the-scenes toil, study, and apprenticeship that helped to prepare him. Or of his debilitating health problems, any one of which might have ended his career. One of the questions this book seeks to answer is what it was like to have been the supreme Allied commander; to face problems that would have crushed a lesser man; to deal with the likes of Winston Churchill, George C. Marshall, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a host of British military men, more experienced than he was, including three field marshals -- Harold Alexander, Alan Brooke, and the controversial Bernard Law Montgomery.
More than a half century later, it is still difficult to grasp fully the enormity of his responsibilities, and the pressures placed upon him, first in the Mediterranean and then later in England, where he faced the greatest test of all, the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. As the story of his life through 1945 is unveiled, it will become evident that no amount of training or experience could fully have prepared Dwight Eisenhower for his role in World War II. That he was equal to the task is now virtually taken for granted; however; during those desperate and bloody years nothing was certain. Indeed, on the basis of Eisenhower's first experiences in North Africa, many expected him to fail.
He may not have fitted the mold of the warrior hero or of a battlefield general in the tradition of Robert E. Lee, J. E. B. Stuart, Stonewall Jackson, or George S. Patton, yet he was every inch a soldier. His legacy is based on his molding an alliance of two prickly, independent-minded allies with fundamentally disparate philosophies of waging war. Many have been misled by Eisenhower's easygoing manner and charming smile, a disarming facade behind which lay a ruthless, ambitious officer who thirsted to advance his chosen career by answering the call to war, which eventually led him to the pinnacle of his profession as a soldier. Eisenhower's well-concealed but towering ambition, his lifetime of study and drive to succeed was, like Patton's, one of the best-kept secrets of his extraordinary success. His infectious grin may have been "worth an army corps in any campaign," as his wartime British subordinate Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Morgan has said, "but mostly," notes historian Eric Larrabee, "it was a quality that Eisenhower himself went to some lengths to conceal from the public: intelligence, an intelligence as icy as has ever risen to the higher reaches of American life."
The path from the poverty of turn-of-the-century Abilene, Kansas, to supreme Allied commander was as improbable as it was spectacular. Certainly the advent of the new millennium is an auspicious occasion to introduce Dwight Eisenhower to new generations of Americans who know too little of this remarkable man. In chronicling his life through World War II, I am mindful of the observation by Gen. Claire Chennault's biographer, Martha Byrd: 'To write an individual's biography is a joy, a privilege and a sobering responsibility."
*Endnotes were omitted
Copyright (c) 2002 Carlo D'Este
From Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life, by Carlo D'Este, Carlo d Este. © June 2002 , Henry Holt & Company, Inc. used by permission.