The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (2 page)

Marshall was not an easy man to impress. He was a cold, aloof person-“remote and austere,” Eisenhower called him-a man who forced everyone to keep his distance.  President Roosevelt had tried at their first meeting to slap him on the back and call him George, but Marshall drew back and let the President know that the name was General Marshall, and General Marshall it remained. He had few intimate friends. When he relaxed he did it alone, watching movies or puttering in his garden. He kept a tight grip on his emotions and seldom displayed any sign of a sense of humor. His sense of duty was highly developed. He made small allowance for failings in others, but to those who could do the work, Marshall was intensely loyal. He also felt deep affection toward them, though he seldom showed it.

Hardly anyone, for example, could resist Eisenhower’s infectious grin, and he was known throughout the army by his catchy nickname, but Marshall did resist.  In all their years together, Marshall almost always called him Eisenhower (except after November 4, 1952, when he called him Mr. President).  Marshall slipped only once, at the victory parade in New York City in 1945, and called him Ike. “To make up for it,” Eisenhower recalled with a smile, “he used the word ‘Eisenhower’ five times in the next sentence.” For his part, Eisenhower always called Marshall “General.” After ten years with MacArthur, he found Marshall to be the ideal boss, both as a man to work for and as a teacher. In October 1942 he told an assistant, “I wouldn’t trade one Marshall for fifty MacArthurs.” He thought a second, then blurted out, “My God!  That would be a lousy deal. What would I do with fifty MacArthurs?” As he later wrote more formally, Eisenhower conceived “unlimited admiration and respect” for Marshall, and came to have feelings of “affection” for him. Marshall came to have the dominant role not only in Eisenhower’s career, but also in his thinking and in his leadership techniques. He was the model that Eisenhower tried to emulate; he set the standards Eisenhower tried to meet.  The two men, although ten years apart in age, had much in common. Marshall had the build and grace of an athlete, was about Eisenhower’s height (six feet), and was equally well proportioned. He had been a football player in college. Like Eisenhower, he loved exploring the Civil War battlefields and habitually illustrated his points or strengthened his arguments by drawing on examples from past battles and campaigns. The way he exercised leadership coincided nicely with Eisenhower’s temperament. He never yelled or shouted, almost never lost his temper. He built an atmosphere of friendly cooperation and teamwork around him, without losing the distinction between the commander and his staff-there was never any doubt as to who was the boss.

Marshall headed a stupendous organization. To do so effectively he needed assistants he could trust. In picking them, he took professional competence for granted and concentrated on personality traits. Certain types were, in his view, unsuited for high command. Foremost among these were those who were self-seeking in the matter of promotion. Next came those who always tried to “pass the buck.” Officers who tried to do everything themselves and consequently got bogged down in detail were equally unsatisfactory. Men who shouted or pounded on the desk were as unacceptable to Marshall as men who had too great a love of the limelight. Nor could he abide the pessimist. He surrounded himself with men who were offensive-minded and who concentrated on the possibilities rather than the difficulties.

In every respect, Eisenhower was exactly the sort of officer Marshall was looking for.

Worn-out, angry at his country for not having prepared for the war, angry at MacArthur and the navy for the way they were fighting it, angry at being stuck in Washington, one day Eisenhower almost lost his temper completely with Marshall. It happened on March 20 in Marshall’s office. Marshall and Eisenhower had settled a detail about an officer’s promotion. Marshall then leaned forward to say that in the last war staff officers had gotten the promotions, not the field officers who did the fighting, and that he intended to reverse the process in this war. “Take your case,” he added. “I know that you were recommended by one general for division command and by another for corps command. That’s all very well. I’m glad that they have that opinion of you, but you are going to stay right here and fill your position, and that’s that!” Preparing to turn to other business, Marshall muttered, “While this may seem a sacrifice to you, that’s the way it must be.”

Eisenhower, red-faced and resentful, shot back, “General, I’m interested in what you say, but I want you to know that I don’t give a damn about your promotion plans as far as I’m concerned. I came into this office from the field and I am trying to do my duty. I expect to do so as long as you want me here. If that locks me to a desk for the rest of the war, so be it!” He pushed back his chair and strode toward the door, nearly ten paces away. By the time he got there he decided to take the edge off the outburst, turned, and grinned. He thought he could see a tiny smile at the corners of Marshall’s mouth.

Whether Marshall smiled or not, Eisenhower’s anger returned full force after he left the office. He went to his desk and filled his diary with his feelings. The thought of spending the war in Washington, missing combat again, was maddening.  It seemed so unfair. Marshall’s cold, impersonal attitude just added to the anger. He cursed Marshall for toying with him; he cursed the war and his own bad luck.

The next morning Eisenhower read what he had written, shook his head, and tore the page out of his diary, destroying it. Then he wrote a new entry. “Anger cannot win, it cannot even think clearly. In this respect,” he continued, “Marshall puzzles me a bit.” Marshall got angrier at stupidity than anyone Eisenhower had ever seen, “yet the outburst is so fleeting, he returns so quickly to complete ‘normalcy,’ that I’m certain he does it for effect.” Eisenhower envied Marshall that trait and confessed, “I blaze for an hour! So, for many years I’ve made it a religion never to indulge myself, but yesterday I failed.”

A week later Marshall recommended Eisenhower for promotion to major general (temporary). In his recommendation to the President, Marshall explained that Eisenhower was not really a staff officer but was his operations officer, a sort of subordinate commander. Surprised and delighted, Eisenhower first reacted, “This should assure that when I finally get back to the troops, I’ll get a division.” Decades later, in his memoirs, he wrote that he “often wondered” if his outburst and the way in which he had been able to control his emotions and end the session with one of his big lopsided grins had led Marshall to take a greater interest in him.

Perhaps, but unlikely. Marshall had already been pushing Eisenhower ahead, increasing his responsibilities at a rapid pace. In January he had taken Eisenhower along as his chief assistant to the first wartime conference with the British, and had given Eisenhower the task of preparing the basic American position on organization and strategy for global war. In mid-February he made Eisenhower his principal plans and operations officer. This steady progress surely indicated that Marshall, with or without the display of what MacArthur called “Ike’s damn Dutch temper,” thought Eisenhower’s potential unlimited.  By the beginning of April, Eisenhower had 107 officers working directly under him. As his responsibilities included both plans and operations, he was concerned with all army activities around the world, which gave Eisenhower a breadth of vision he could not have obtained in any other post.  Working in daily contact with the units in the field, as well as preparing plans on grand strategy, gave Eisenhower a realistic sense of the scope of modern war.  In late February he had been complaining in his diary about both MacArthur and Adm. Ernest J. King, Chief of Naval Operations. He called King “an arbitrary, stubborn type, with not too much brains and a tendency toward bullying his juniors.” The outburst led him to write a sentence that described the essence of Eisenhower’s leadership style, both as a general and as president. “In a war such as this, when high command invariably involves a president, a prime minister, six chiefs of staff, and a horde of lesser ‘planners,’ there has got to be a lot of patience-no one person can be a Napoleon or Caesar.” Of all the generals, Eisenhower himself came closest to a Napoleonic role, but he would never make such a comparison. Having been a staff officer for so long himself, he was acutely aware of the importance of his staff to him; he was just as acutely aware of the indispensability of the subordinates in the field commands who carried out his orders. He had no false modesty, was conscious of the crucial nature of the role he played, but he never thought of himself as a Napoleon. Always, his emphasis was on the team. He was not self-effacing but realistic, aware that there were definite limits on his powers, and keeping his self-image in perspective.

While the Americans badly needed Marshall, Eisenhower, and other generals to ram their feet into the stirrups and take command, they needed even more desperately to build and equip an army. This was done through conscription and the tremendous output of American industry, which had been flat on its back in 1939 but was by the beginning of 1942 turning out the tools and weapons of war in an ever-increasing, record-setting pace. But weapons without soldiers are useless.  The creation of the U.S. Army in 1942-43 was one of the great achievements of the American Republic in the twentieth century. How it was accomplished is a long story, one part of which is told in this account of the beginnings of a company of elite volunteers who were part of the 101st Airborne Division.  The men of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, U.S. Army, came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country. They were farmers and coal miners, mountain men and sons of the Deep South. Some were desperately poor, others from the middle class. One came from Harvard, one from Yale, a couple from UCLA. Only one was from the Old Army, only a few came from the National Guard or reserves. They were citizen soldiers.  Each of the 140 men and seven officers who formed the original company followed a different route to its birthplace, Camp Toccoa, Georgia, but they had some things in common. They were young, born since the Great War. They were white because the U.S. Army in World War II was segregated. With three exceptions they were unmarried. Most had been hunters and athletes in high school.  They were special in their values. They put a premium on physical well-being, hierarchical authority, and being part of an elite unit. They were idealists, eager to merge themselves into a group fighting for a cause, actively seeking an outfit with which they could identify, join, be a part of, relate to as a family.

They volunteered for the paratroopers, they said, for the thrill, the honor, and the $50 (for enlisted men) or $100 (for officers) monthly bonus paratroopers received. But they really volunteered to jump out of airplanes for two profound, personal reasons. First, in Pvt. Robert Rader’s words, “The desire to be better than the other guy took hold.” Each man in his own way had gone through what Lt.  Richard Winters experienced: a realization that doing his best was a better way of getting through the army than hanging around with the sad excuses for soldiers they met in the recruiting depots or basic training. They wanted to make their army time positive, a learning and maturing and challenging experience.

Second, they knew they were going into combat, and they did not want to go in with poorly trained, poorly conditioned, poorly motivated draftees on either side of them. As to choosing between being a paratrooper spearheading the offensive and an ordinary infantryman who could not trust the guy next to him, they decided the greater risk was with the infantry. When the shooting started they wanted to look up to the guy beside them, not down.  They had been kicked around by the Depression and had the scars to show for it.  They had grown up, many of them, without enough to eat, with holes in the soles of their shoes, with ragged sweaters and no car and often not a radio. Their educations had been cut short, either by the Depression or by the war.  “Yet, with this background, I had and still have a great love for my country,” Lt. Harry Welsh declared forty-eight years later. Whatever their legitimate complaints about how life had treated them, they had not soured on it or on their country.

They came out of the Depression with many other positive features. They were self-reliant, accustomed to hard work and to taking orders. Through sports or hunting or both, they had gained a sense of self-worth and self-confidence.  They knew they were going into great danger. They knew they would be doing more than their part. They resented having to sacrifice years of their youth to a war they never made. They wanted to throw baseballs, not grenades, shoot a .22 rifle, not an M-1. But having been caught up in the war, they decided to be as positive as possible in their army careers.

Not that they knew much about airborne, except that it was new and all-volunteer. They had been told that the physical training was tougher than anything they had ever seen, or that any other unit in the army would undergo, but these young lions were eager for that. They expected that when they were finished with their training, they would be bigger, stronger, tougher than when they started, and they would have gone through the training with the guys who would be fighting beside them.

“The Depression was over,” Pvt. Carwood Lipton recalled of that summer of 1942, “and I was beginning a new life that would change me profoundly.” It would all of them.

First Lt. Herbert Sobel of Chicago was the initial member of E Company, and its commanding officer. His executive officer (XO) was 2nd Lt. Clarence Hester from northern California. Sobel was Jewish, urban, with a commission from the National Guard. Hester had started as a private, then earned his commission from officer candidate school (OCS). Most of the platoon and assistant platoon leaders were newly commissioned graduates of OCS, including 2nd Lts. Dick Winters from Pennsylvania, Walter Moore from California’s racetracks, and Louis Nixon from New York City and Yale. S. L. Matheson was an ROTC graduate from UCLA. At twenty-eight years of age Sobel was the old man in the group; the others were twenty-four or younger.