Eisenhower, General of the Army Dwight D.

Eisenhower, General of the Army Dwight D. (1890–1969),US Army officer who served as supreme Allied commander in the Mediterranean and then throughout the fighting in north-west Europe.

One of seven sons of poor Mennonite parents, Eisenhower was born at Denison, Texas, and was commissioned into the infantry from West Point military academy. Despite all his efforts to obtain a posting to France during the First World War he remained in the USA and was given the task, as a 28-year-old major, of building from scratch the army's first tank corps. By 1918 he was commanding 10,000 men. After serving in Panama, he passed top of his class from Leavenworth, the US Army's staff college, attended war college in Washington, and served on the staff of General John Pershing (1860–1948) before joining MacArthur's staff in the Philippines.

When war broke out in Europe in September 1939 Eisenhower, whose relations with MacArthur were less than cordial, insisted on returning to the USA, and after a short stint as a regimental executive and then as a battalion commander became, in quick succession, chief of staff of 3rd Infantry Division, of 9th Army Corps, and then of Lt-General Walter Krueger's Third Army. He was promoted colonel in March 1941 and brigadier-general that September, and within a week of Pearl Harbor he was summoned to Washington by Marshall to be deputy chief of the War Plans Division. After a reorganization this became the Operations Division which he headed with the rank of maj-general until June 1942 when he was appointed commanding general of the European Theatre of Operations (see ETOUSA). Once in London he quickly assessed that the British were right in refusing to launch a cross-Channel operation that year and when the invasion of French North Africa (see North African campaign) was agreed upon instead, Eisenhower became the obvious choice to lead it.

What immediately marked Eisenhower out as a military supremo was his ability and determination to make the Alliance an everyday working reality. He demanded, and received, a harmony amongst his Anglo-US staff at his Allied Forces HQ which reflected his own cheerful, outgoing disposition. He did not mind somebody being called a son-of-a-bitch, he remarked on one occasion, but he was damned if he would have them being called a British son-of-a-bitch or an American son-of-a-bitch.

He survived his political baptism of fire in dealing with the complex situation that confronted him in Algiers after the North African landings in November 1942, but then barely survived his military one in Tunisia. Before the landings he had hardly heard a shot fired in anger, his US forces were inexperienced, his command structure was uncertain—and made more so by French intransigence—and his front nearly came unravelled at Kasserine Pass in February 1943. But incompetent commanders were fired and the right ones appointed, and in May 1943 the Axis forces in Tunisia surrendered.

Still only a substantive lt-colonel, Eisenhower was promoted four-star general in February 1943 and served as the Allied commander for all the major operations in the Mediterranean theatre throughout that year. He made his mistakes—both the Sicilian campaign and Salerno showed the cautiousness of Allied strategy and the failure to grasp opportunities when they were offered—but his experiences there, he wrote later, ‘reaffirmed the truth that unity, co-ordination and co-operation are the keys to successful operations.’

In December 1943 the Mediterranean became a unified command and Eisenhower was appointed its supreme commander, but in January 1944 he was appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces for the Normandy landings that June (see OVERLORD). Roosevelt picked him for this task because he was, the president believed, the best politician among the military men.

One of Eisenhower's most critical battles was fought before the invasion of occupied Europe even took place. He insisted against opposition from the commanders of the two strategic air forces that their aircraft be diverted from the strategic air offensive against Germany to bomb German lines of communication in France, and he noted in his diary on 22 March 1944 that if the matter was not resolved to his liking immediately, ‘I will request relief from this command.’ A compromise was achieved and by 6 June, the date of the landings, French rail traffic in the area had been cut to one-third of its January 1944 level; after the landings the strategic air forces, still under Eisenhower's direction, helped to minimize German counter-attacks, and then paved the way for the break-out that eventually came in August.

The Normandy campaign was fought by Montgomery, Bradley, and Patton. But it was Eisenhower who accepted the risk of launching the US airborne divisions on the invasion's right flank against the advice of his air commander, Leigh-Mallory, who predicted 70% casualties; it was he who, once the Allies had broken out of their Normandy bridgehead, ordered the pursuit of the retreating Germans as far as possible as quickly as possible despite the problem of supplying his armies (see Red Ball Express); and it was he who insisted on the broad-front strategy (see OVERLORD) that is now almost universally accepted as having been the correct one. But he erred in his judgement when, after taking personal control of the land battle on 1 September 1944, he endorsed Montgomery's strategy to seize a bridgehead beyond the lower Rhine at Arnhem (seeMARKET-GARDEN) instead of insisting that the approaches to Antwerp were cleared first (see Scheldt Estuary). The conception of MARKET-GARDEN was Montgomery's, but the ultimate responsibility for it lay with Eisenhower. That their ideas of what it could achieve were so markedly at variance is perhaps a reflection of the intense temperamental and professional differences that divided the two men, differences which brought Montgomery perilously close to being dismissed. Yet it was Eisenhower who unwittingly brought about this state of affairs with his passion (not too strong a word) for trying to find—indeed insisting upon—a consensus, the middle view. It was a stance that infuriated not only Montgomery but at different times Bradley and Patton, too.

The crisis created by the German Ardennes campaign, launched in December 1944, was also Eisenhower's responsibility in that he had failed to predict it. He acknowledged this, but he reacted quickly to the situation and made the right decisions to counter it: hold Bastogne, launch Patton northwards, give Montgomery temporary command of the battle. At this time his determination that ‘my mannerisms and speech in public speech would always reflect the cheerful certainty of victory’ was shown to best advantage. At a meeting to discuss the crisis he remarked that ‘the present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.’

‘As a strategist,’ one of his biographers, Stephen Ambrose, has written (Parameters, June 1990), ‘the highest art of a commander, he was far more often right than wrong. He was right in his selection of Normandy as the invasion site, right in his selection of Bradley rather than Patton as First Army commander, right in his insistence on using bombers against the French railway system, right to insist on a Broad-Front approach to Germany, right to see the Bulge as an opportunity rather than a disaster, right to fight the major battle west of the Rhine. Eisenhower was right on the big decisions. He was the most successful general of the greatest war ever fought.’

Promoted five-star general in December 1944, Eisenhower succeeded Marshall as US Army chief of staff after the war. He retired in 1948 but subsequently commanded NATO forces between 1950 and 1952, and then served as US president between 1953 and 1961. The image sometimes portrayed of him as a simple, pleasant, Midwest farmhand is a partial one. He was simple in the sense of being without guile and in having a rigorous code of honour, but his famous grin—which one British general calculated was worth an army corps in any campaign—disguised a formidable intelligence, just as his amiability hid an inner toughness and self-assurance.

Bibliography

Ambrose, S. , The Supreme Commander (New York, 1970).
Butcher, H. , Three Years with Eisenhower (London, 1946).
Eisenhower, D. D. , Crusade in Europe (New York, 1948).