The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (5 page)

The “matters of general interest” the two men discussed included Ultra, the British system of breaking the German code and thus being able to read German radio messages. Next to the research on building an atomic bomb, it was the most closely guarded secret of the war. Only a handful of the British high command even knew of its existence; among the Americans, only Marshall, Roosevelt, and now Eisenhower knew about it.

Although the British and Americans were starting the process of creating the closest alliance in history, they had sharp disagreements. In the summer of 1942 they were engaged in a fierce argument over where they should launch their first offensive. Marshall and Eisenhower were insistent on waiting until 1943 and then invading France; the British, led by Churchill and Field Marshal Alan Brooke, wanted to invade French North Africa in the fall of 1942. For a number of reasons, but chiefly because the American armed forces were still more a potential than an actual force and thus the British would provide the bulk of the troops for the first offensive, the British won the argument. Reluctantly, the Americans agreed to a fall 1942 invasion of North Africa. In a nice twist of fate, the Combined Chiefs of Staff, or CCS (consisting of the British and American high commands), appointed Eisenhower to command the operation he had so strenuously opposed. The code name was Torch.

It was Eisenhower’s first command (he had not gotten to Europe in World War I and had never been in combat). Necessarily, it was a learning experience for him.

Eisenhower planned to go to Gibraltar on November 2, to take command of the Rock, the best communications center in the area, and direct the invasion from there. Bad weather prevented the flight on November 2 and again on the third; on the fourth Eisenhower ordered his reluctant pilot, Maj. Paul Tibbets (by reputation the best flier in the Army Air Force; he later flew theEnola Gay on the first atomic-bomb mission), to ignore the weather and take off. Six B-17 Flying Fortresses, carrying Eisenhower and most of his staff, got through safely, but only after engine trouble, weather problems, and an attack by a German fighter airplane had been overcome.

After a bumpy landing Eisenhower went to his headquarters, which were in the subterranean passages. Offices were caves where the cold, damp air stagnated and stank. Despite the inconveniences Eisenhower got a great kick out of being in actual command of the Rock of Gibraltar, one of the symbols of the British Empire. “I simply must have a grandchild,” he scribbled in his diary, “or I’ll never have the fun of telling this when I’m fishing, gray-bearded, on the banks of a quiet bayou in the deep South.”

He had little time to gloat or enjoy. British and American troops under his command were about to invade a neutral territory, without a declaration of war, without provocation, and with only a hope, not a promise, that the French colonial army would greet them as liberators rather than aggressors. He hoped he could find a high-ranking French officer who would cooperate, but was frustrated. Disgusted, he exploded, “All of these Frogs have a single thought-‘ME.’ “ General Patton was leading an invading force that had loaded, combat-ready, in Norfolk, Virginia, thousands of miles away from its destination at Casablanca, where to add to the worries the surf was one of the highest in the world. The British contingent had to sail past Gibraltar, where the Spanish might turn on them. What the French would do, no one knew.

In short, Eisenhower, in his first experience in combat or in command, faced problems that were serious in the extreme, and as much political as military.  His staff was at least as tense as he was, and looked to him for leadership. It was a subject he had studied for decades. It was not an art in his view, but a skill to be learned. “The one quality that can be developed by studious reflection and practice is the leadership of men,” he wrote his son John at West Point. Here was his chance to show that he had developed it.  In the event, he not only exercised it, but learned new lessons. It was “during those anxious hours” in Gibraltar, he later wrote in a draft introduction to his memoirs that he finally decided to discard, “that I first realized how inexorably and inescapably strain and tension wear away at the leader’s endurance, his judgment and his confidence. The pressure becomes more acute because of the duty of a staff constantly to present to the commander the worst side of an eventuality.” In this situation, Eisenhower realized, the commander had to “preserve optimism in himself and in his command. Without confidence, enthusiasm and optimism in the command, victory is scarcely obtainable.” Eisenhower also realized that “optimism and pessimism are infectious and they spread more rapidly from the head downward than in any other direction.” He saw two additional advantages to a cheerful and hopeful attitude by the commander:

First, the “habit tends to minimize potentialities within the individual himself to become demoralized.” Second, it “has a most extraordinary effect upon all with whom he comes in contact. With this clear realization, I firmly determined that my mannerisms and speech in public would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory-that any pessimism and discouragement I might ever feel would be reserved for my pillow. I adopted a policy of circulating through the whole force to the full limit imposed by physical considerations. I did my best to meet everyone from general to private with a smile, a pat on the back and a definite interest in his problems.”

He did his best, from that moment to the end of his life, to conceal with a big grin the ache in his bones and the exhaustion in his mind.  There was a great deal more that went into Eisenhower’s success as a leader of men, of course. As he put it on another occasion, the art of leadership is making the right decisions, then getting men towant to carry them out. But the words he wrote about his learning experience on the Rock, words that he was too modest to put into the published version of his memoirs, are a classic expression of one of the most critical aspects of leadership, perfectly said by a man who knew more about the subject than almost anyone else.  On November 8, American troops went ashore in Morocco and Algeria, while British troops landed near Oran. The initial opposition, consisting of French colonial troops, was light, but as the Allies moved east into Tunisia, they ran up against German troops rushed in from Italy. Resistance stiffened. Further, the winter rains turned the roads into quagmires. The first great Allied offensive of World War II came to a dispiriting halt.

Eisenhower, who had serious political problems to deal with in his relations with the French, paid too little attention to what was happening at the front.  He delegated his command to Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, an officer who had come highly recommended by Marshall. But in the event, Fredendall proved incapable of meeting the test of combat. Despite his serious and well-placed misgivings, Eisenhower allowed Fredendall to stay in command, merely giving him an occasional pep talk.

Rommel, meanwhile, having been driven out of Egypt and across Libya by General Montgomery’s Eighth Army, in the offensive that had begun in November at El Alamein, arrived in Tunisia. He decided to counterattack the Americans. His object was to divide the American and British forces in Tunisia, and even more to inflict a stinging defeat on the Americans in their first encounter with the German army. Rommel’s aim was to give the Americans an inferiority complex. On February 14 he began the attack. By the sixteenth he was at the Kasserine Pass and had inflicted major losses on the green American troops. Fredendall all but collapsed. It appeared that Rommel was about to drive the Allies out of Tunisia.  Despite the embarrassing and costly losses, Eisenhower was not disheartened. He realized that all his lectures on the need to eliminate complacency and instill battlefield discipline among the American troops had had little effect, but he also realized that the shock of encountering the Wehrmacht on the offensive was accomplishing his objectives for him.

“Our soldiers are learning rapidly,” he told Marshall at the height of the battle, “and while I still believe that many of the lessons we are forced to learn at the cost of lives could be learned at home, I assure you that the troops that come out of this campaign are going to be battle wise and tactically efficient.” The best news of all was that American soldiers, who had previously shown a marked disinclination to advance under enemy fire, were recovering rapidly from the initial shock of Rommel’s attack. The troops did not like being kicked around and were beginning to dig in and fight.  Nevertheless, on February 21, Rommel got through Kasserine Pass. Eisenhower regarded this development as less a threat, more an opportunity, because by then his efforts had produced a preponderance of American firepower at the point of attack, especially in artillery. Rommel had a long, single supply line that ran through a narrow pass, which made him vulnerable.  “We have enough to stop him,” Eisenhower assured Marshall, but he expected to do more than that. He urged Fredendall to launch an immediate counterattack on Rommel’s flanks, seize the pass, cut off the Afrika Korps, and destroy it. But Fredendall disagreed with Eisenhower’s conclusion that Rommel had gone as far as he could; he expected him to make one more attack and insisted on staying on the defensive to meet it. Rommel, accepting the inevitable, began his retreat that night. It was successful, and a fleeting opportunity was lost.  In a tactical sense Rommel had won the victory. At small cost to himself, he had inflicted more than five thousand American casualties, destroyed hundreds of tanks and other equipment. But he had made no strategic gain, and in fact had done Eisenhower a favor. In his pronouncements before Kasserine, Eisenhower had consistently harped on what a tough business war is and on the overwhelming need to impress that fact on the troops.

But the man most responsible for American shortcomings was Eisenhower himself, precisely because he was not tough enough. Despite his serious and well-founded doubts he had allowed Fredendall to retain command. Eisenhower had allowed a confused command situation to continue. He had accepted intelligence reports based on insufficient sources. And at the crucial moment, when Rommel was at his most vulnerable, he had failed to galvanize his commanders, which allowed Rommel to get away.

Kasserine was Eisenhower’s first real battle; taking it all in all, his performance was miserable. Only American firepower, and German shortages, had saved him from a humiliating defeat.

But Eisenhower and the American troops profited from the experience. The men, he reported to Marshall, “are now mad and ready to fight.” So was he. “All our people,” he added, “from the very highest to the very lowest have learned that this is not a child’s game and are ready and eager to get down to . . .  business.” He promised Marshall that thereafter no unit under his command “will ever stop training,” including units in the front line. And he fired Fredendall, replacing him with Patton.

When Patton arrived Eisenhower gave him advice that might better have been self-directed. “You must not retain for one instant,” Eisenhower warned Patton, “any man in a responsible position where you have become doubtful of his ability to do the job. . . . This matter frequently calls for more courage than any other thing you will have to do, but I expect you to be perfectly cold-blooded about it.”

To his old friend Gen. Leonard Gerow, then training an infantry division in Scotland, Eisenhower expanded on the theme. “Officers that fail,” he said, “must be ruthlessly weeded out. Considerations of friendship, family, kindliness, and nice personality have nothing whatsoever to do with the problem. . . . You must be tough.” He said it was necessary to get rid of the “lazy, the slothful, the indifferent or the complacent.” Whether Eisenhower could steel himself sufficiently in this regard remained to be seen.  Patton tightened discipline to a martinet standard while his whirlwind tours in his open command car, horns blaring and outriders roaring ahead and behind him, impressed his presence on everyone in the corps. His flamboyant language and barely concealed contempt for the British created pride in everything American.  When British officers made slighting remarks about American fighting qualities, Patton thundered, “We’ll show ‘em,” and then demanded to know where in hell the Brits had been during the crisis of Kasserine. But British Gen. Harold Alexander told Patton to avoid pitched battles and stay out of trouble.  Not being allowed to attack, forced to stand to one side while Montgomery delivered the final blow to the Afrika Korps, was galling to Patton. He asked Eisenhower to send him back to Morocco, where he could continue his planning for the invasion of Sicily. Eisenhower did so, replacing Patton with the recently arrived Gen. Omar Bradley, his old West Point classmate. Then Eisenhower told Alexander that it was essential that the Americans have their own sector in the final phase of the Tunisian campaign. Alexander replied that the Americans had failed at Kasserine and thus their place was at the rear.  Eisenhower held his temper, but his words were firm. He told Alexander that the United States had given much of its best equipment to the British. If the American people came to feel that their troops would not play a substantial role in the European Theater, they would be more inclined to insist on an Asia-first strategy. But most of all, Eisenhower insisted, Alexander had to realize that in the ultimate conquest of the Nazis, the Americans would necessarily provide the bulk of the fighting men and carry most of the load. It was therefore imperative that American soldiers gain confidence in their ability to fight the Germans, and they could not do so while in the rear. Alexander tried to debate the point, but Eisenhower insisted, and eventually Alexander agreed to place II Corps on the line, on the north coast.

Having persuaded the reluctant Alexander, Eisenhower turned his attention to Bradley. He told Bradley that he realized the sector assigned to II Corps was poorly suited to offensive action, but insisted that Bradley had to overcome the difficulties and prove that the U.S. Army “can perform in a way that will at least do full credit to the material we have.” He instructed Bradley to plan every operation “carefully and meticulously, concentrate maximum fire power in support of each attack, keep up a constant pressure and convince everyone that we are doing our full part. . . .” He concluded by warning Bradley to be tough.  Eisenhower said he had just heard of a battalion of infantry that had suffered a loss of ten men killed and then asked permission to withdraw and reorganize.  That sort of thing had to cease. “We have reached the point where troopsmust secure objectives assigned,” Eisenhower said, “and we must direct leaders to get out andlead and to secure the necessary results .” Eisenhower spent the last week of April touring the front lines, and was pleased by what he saw. Bradley was “doing a great job,” he concluded, and he was delighted to hear a British veteran say that the U.S. 1st Infantry Division was “one of the finest tactical organizations that he had ever seen.” By the first week in May, the German bridgehead was reduced to the area immediately around the cities of Bizerte and Tunis. On May 7, British troops moved into Tunis itself; that same day Bradley sent Eisenhower a two-word message-“Mission accomplished.” His II Corps had captured Bizerte. Only mopping-up operations remained to clear the Axis completely out of Tunisia.  Eisenhower spent the last week of the campaign at the front, and it made a deep impression on him. In February he had told his wife, Mamie, that whenever he was tempted to feel sorry for himself he would think of “the boys that are living in the cold and rain and muck, high up in the cold hills of Tunisia,” and be cured.  In May he heard about a story in the American press on his mother; the story stressed Ida’s pacifism and the irony of her son being a general. Ike wrote his brother Arthur that their mother’s “happiness in her religion means more to me than any damn wisecrack that a newspaperman can get publicized,” then said of the pacifists generally, “I doubt whether any of these people, with their academic or dogmatic hatred of war, detest it as much as I do.” He said that the pacifists “probably have not seen bodies rotting on the ground and smelled the stench of decaying human flesh. They have not visited a field hospital crowded with the desperately wounded.” Ike said that what separated him from the pacifists was that he hated the Nazis more than he did war. There was something else. “My hated of war will never equal my conviction that it is the duty of every one of us . . . to carry out the orders of our government when a war emergency arises.” Or, as he put it to his son John, “The only unforgivable sin in war is not doing your duty.”