Eisenhower Page 10
Determined not to spend more time serving as a staff officer or training militias in the United States, he repeatedly looked for support from his network of army friends. Major Mark Clark was already helping.4 Eisenhower was also in contact with his close friend Leonard Gerow and with Brigadier General Thomas A. Terry as well as Colonel George Patton, Lieutenant Colonel Omar Bradley, and others.5 He made it well known that he was available and interested in commanding a regiment. While trying to play the appointments game as Fox Conner had, Ike got a scare when he and his family were on the boat back to San Francisco. He received word that he had been given a staff assignment at Fourth Army Headquarters in San Francisco. The job turned out to be temporary, and he was soon able to take over as executive officer with the 15th Infantry Regiment at Fort Lewis, Washington. He could see, however, that the threat of a staff appointment was not likely to disappear. Regardless of what he did.
As his career to date clearly indicated, the United States Army was not quick to change its mind. He was relentlessly pulled back toward the staff.6 After begging Patton for command of an armored regiment, Ike was assigned as chief of staff with the 3rd Division at Fort Lewis. As he settled into his new job, he was promoted to colonel. His career was accelerating at an astonishing rate for an officer who had spent two decades locked in a stodgy bureaucracy in which seniority was the guiding principle. Shortly after this promotion, he was given another staff appointment with the IX Corps, and then in 1941 he was assigned as chief of staff to Lieutenant General Walter Krueger’s Third Army. Krueger—like his boss George Marshall—was in search of young talent. He saw in Eisenhower an officer who “possessed broad vision, progressive ideas, a thorough grasp of the magnitude of the problems involved in handling an Army, and lots of initiative and resourcefulness.”7 This was high praise from one of the army’s top officers. But it was praise coming from a general in ardent search of a new staff officer. No longer typecast as a football coach, Ike in his fifties was still left squirming—unsuccessfully—to get out of his new role as one of the army’s ideal staff men.8
One can sympathize with Krueger and the other officers who kept pushing Eisenhower into the staff and away from a field command. Ike’s mastery of the staff function was reflected in the memorandum he wrote for his successor when he left for his new job with the Third Army. The memorandum also highlighted the lessons Ike had learned being mentored by Conner and then working with MacArthur in the Philippines. Efficient implementation of the commanding officer’s policies was the primary task. It could be achieved only by carefully communicating both up and down the command and by drawing upon the skills of all of the personnel in the team. Attention to detail was crucial: “In the field as well as in garrison a brief blotter should be kept which will serve you as an aide memoire, in assuring that you overlook no item.” Coordination in the field required daily staff meetings. Orders had to be written in “straightforward, direct English.” When reports from subordinates were not well written, they had to be edited into a “usable form.” The chief of staff should reach out in a cooperative mode to “cultivate” close “relationships.” Cooperation required “constant attention” and “constant training of all subordinates.” With “real discipline” and a “smooth staff operation,” the organization could achieve “teamwork throughout the … Corps.”9 Unity of purpose and action were Ike’s central concerns as he looked backward to MacArthur’s mission for a negative model of leadership and forward to the positive model he would employ in his new post with Krueger’s Third Army.10 Once again he would be a staff officer, but there was solace in his promotion in October 1941 to brigadier general.
The chance for a breakout appointment commanding a regiment increased as the thunder and lightning of war crashed on America’s eastern and western horizons and the army rushed to repair the damage left by two decades of budget cutting. There was much to fear by the summer of 1941. Hitler’s forces seemed omnipotent on land and in the air. Having conquered Norway and Denmark, the German army drove forward in North Africa and then launched a sudden, startling invasion of the Soviet Union. Japan, which was now applying increased military and diplomatic pressure on Southeast Asia, was steadily becoming more of a threat to America’s position in the Philippines.
One part of the US Army’s response was the largest peacetime field maneuver in the nation’s history, and Ike’s new post in the Third Army put him at the center of this military exercise. His friend Mark Clark drafted the scenario for the 450,000 soldiers involved in the Louisiana operations, and Ike’s buddy George Patton was there with his 2nd Armored Division. Eisenhower’s role was to implement the plans that General Krueger had developed with input from his chief of staff. As the contest got under way, three conclusions soon became apparent to Eisenhower and to the army’s top leadership. First, it was obvious that many of the service’s older officers had to be replaced and a new generation of leaders brought to the top. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had framed the maneuvers as “a great college of leadership of the higher officers.”11 Many of the corps commanders failed their courses in Marshall’s “great college.”12 Second, it was also clear that the aggressive plans General Krueger employed and Ike implemented were more successful than their opponents’ more conservative approaches to the exercise. The tank, as Conner, Patton, and Ike had predicted, was changing battlefield tactics in a major way, and the US Infantry could no longer ignore the potential of new weapons and new tactics.
Third, it was evident to all that Eisenhower had for the second time in his career emerged as a media star of sorts. His first experience with the press had been through football during his second year at West Point. His injury had abruptly cut short that interlude of fame.13 But in 1941 nothing happened to cut short the newspaper adulation he received. And such encouraging stories were just what a nation nervous about war wanted to read. General Krueger, a less newsworthy figure, was not entirely pleased to see Eisenhower credited for the two victories his Third Army achieved. But General Marshall was less concerned about headlines than about performance. He had already decided that both Krueger and Ike were going to be important officers in the war for which America was at last preparing.14
Marshall’s Decision
Marshall was not a man to avoid controversy. Recognizing that the seniority rule and the sluggish life of the peacetime army had left him with an aged, underqualified corps of senior officers, he had already set out with great vigor to attack that problem. President Roosevelt supported Marshall in this effort. FDR’s backing was important because Marshall’s initial efforts to transform the army were risky. He was ruffling some military feathers by changing the nature of the army’s divisions in an effort to make them more mobile and effective. Then he went after the older leaders, some of whom had political allies and others of whom had friends in the War Department. But Marshall pushed ahead, determined to give the army a fighting chance when the war began.15 The young officers he promoted over their seniors encountered resentment. But that was a small price to pay to have a younger, more combat-worthy officer corps.
In search of a unified military, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson called a meeting on December 3 to evaluate the maneuvers in Louisiana and North Carolina. The theme of disunity rippled through the discussions. The air and ground forces had found it difficult to work together. Both the military officers and civilian executives agreed “that air-ground communication was poor,” but they could not generate any specific ideas about what to do. Even coordination between the foot soldiers and the artillery and between various infantry units was a problem. Disagreement about mobile tank warfare still existed. Much, the participants concluded, remained to be done to get the army into fighting condition.16
But there was no time left. Four days later, Japan bombed the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. Suddenly a task that had been daunting grew ten-thousand-fold in a day and became at the same time a matter of national survival. It was apparent on December 7 that the United States was going t
o fight a war in Asia as well as in Europe with an army that was raw, poorly equipped, and troubled at every level. As Eisenhower had earlier predicted, the nation now needed a high degree of unity within the military and between the military and the rest of American society. Neither America’s democratic tradition nor the nation’s historical patterns of military development favored that outcome.
When the war started, Marshall was still building the command post he needed to revamp the army. His team included Ike’s close friend Brigadier General Leonard Gerow, who was chief of staff in the War Plans Division, and another Eisenhower colleague, Wade Haislip, who was handling personnel at the War Department general staff.17 At the army’s General Headquarters, Lesley J. McNair was in charge, and his deputy, Mark Wayne Clark, had already pulled strings to get Eisenhower appointed at Fort Lewis. Clark had continued to beat the drum for Eisenhower during and after the Louisiana maneuvers.18
Prompted by Clark and Gerow, General Marshall summoned Eisenhower to Washington to a new post on the general staff. If he passed muster—and he quickly did—he would serve in the War Plans Division as deputy chief for the Pacific and Far East. When he disembarked from his flight to the nation’s capital, Ike was in effect rejoining the group of officers who had served with Pershing in the world war—the so-called Chaumont clique19—and had dominated army policy intermittently since that time. He was pleased with his sudden ascent to the army’s commanding heights but disappointed to be assigned yet again to a staff job. All of his anguished messages to Gerow, Patton, and others seemed to have had no effect. Instead of being in the field with the infantry, he would be behind a desk writing reports. That began, in fact, at his first meeting with Marshall, on December 14, 1941. Marshall asked him bluntly, “What should be our general line of action?” Ike requested a few hours to produce an answer and was able to hand his new superior a concise, thoughtful proposal that same day.20
With his actions having confirmed the strong recommendations the Chief of Staff had been receiving, Eisenhower was securely on board with his new boss.21 The two men had some common ground that helped cement their relationship. Both had established their careers as staff officers. Both had been disappointed in their efforts to get command of troops in the field. Both Marshall, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute (VMI), and Eisenhower, a graduate of West Point, had suffered through many dreary years when they were frozen in rank in the peacetime army.22 Unlike MacArthur and George Patton, neither man was a flashy showman of an officer, the kind of person who is often called a “natural leader” very early in his or her career. Instead, Marshall and Eisenhower leaned toward quiet accomplishment and away from parades. Both had explosive tempers that they struggled to keep under control, often without success.
They had their differences. Marshall had never been in doubt, as Ike once was, about being a career officer and never had problems with discipline. If Marshall had an anti-authoritarian streak, he hid it very well from everyone who knew him. From the beginning of his education at VMI, he had been focused intently and solely on a military career. He was a grinder who finally pushed himself up to finish fifth in his graduating class.23 Unlike Eisenhower, Marshall made it to France in World War I and distinguished himself in a central position planning the American role in the offensives that forced Germany to sign the Armistice in 1918. From that high point, he slid to near exile in the early 1930s, when he spent time as an instructor with the Illinois National Guard.24 As the world edged toward war in 1939, however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rescued him. FDR jumped Marshall over thirty-three senior officers, gave him his fourth star, appointed him Chief of Staff, and soon anointed him as his most trusted military advisor.
Marshall, who had been watching Eisenhower’s development for some years, knew of Ike’s skills as a staff officer. That was why he brought him to Washington to the War Plans Division. Disappointed with his staff appointment, Eisenhower could at least see that he was not working on trivial matters. A few weeks later, he attended a British-American conference in Washington, DC, to map global strategy for the Allies.
He was on the sidelines at the Arcadia conference, watching as Marshall attempted to impose on the Allies his well-defined positions. From a military perspective, Marshall maintained, the United States and Britain needed to engage Germany on the Continent as soon as possible and relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union. The situation on the Eastern Front looked dire. Germany’s twin drives toward Moscow on the north and Stalingrad on the south had produced tremendous Soviet losses of men and matériel.25 In the months ahead, the campaigns in the Soviet Union would continue to have a controlling influence on the war against Germany, on the Allies’ strategy, and, incidentally, on Eisenhower’s career.
Eisenhower could see that the unity of the Allies was all-important and would be incredibly difficult to achieve and maintain. Different goals, different military and political traditions, different values, and different experiences in the war all tugged the leaders apart over strategy and tactics. Even such a straightforward matter as unity of command generated intense discussions and numerous position papers. While the Allies agreed on the need to defeat Germany first and then Japan, they disagreed respectfully but strongly on almost every other aspect of the means to achieve those goals.
Churchill and his chiefs of staff leaned against Marshall, countering the American strategy with a plan to attack in North Africa and mount a Mediterranean campaign that would provide the Allies with an opening toward what the British prime minister liked to call the “soft underbelly” of Europe.26 Churchill seemed initially less concerned than were Marshall and Eisenhower about the Soviet Union’s ability to resist the Nazi invasion. He was naturally more concerned than any of the American leaders were about the future of the British Empire and on occasion appeared to worry about the long-term threat that Soviet communism posed to western Europe. Sensing that FDR would yield to Churchill, Marshall did everything short of resigning to bolster his position.27 But the result of this first major battle over strategy was a convincing British victory.28 Others would follow shortly. Eisenhower, who became head of the War Plans Division in February 1942, had to start planning for a joint British-American invasion of North Africa later that same year.29
Following the Arcadia conference (December 22, 1941–January 14, 1942), Eisenhower understood that he would be spending a good bit of his time countering powerful centripetal forces in the British-American alliance. Unity, if it could be maintained, would call for heavy personal nursing and an occasional touch of Machiavellian shrewdness. Marshall had won a partial victory on unity of command in the Far East. But the ensuing controversies and the work of drafting an elaborate agreement to implement the plan gave Eisenhower a realistic perspective on the difference between the rhetoric of the alliance and the internal tensions it produced.30 Those tensions and the emotions they inspired were a constant challenge to the conciliatory approach to leadership that Ike had acquired from Fox Conner and refined in the years following his Panama experience.
Neither Marshall nor Eisenhower gave up on the proposed cross-Channel attack, but they were thwarted by crucial shortages, by Roosevelt’s tendency to lean toward Churchill’s position, and by adamant British military and political opposition.31 When Marshall visited Britain to discuss strategy, the British seemed to agree to an emergency attack on France if it appeared the Soviets were about to be forced out of the war.32 But that agreement soon collapsed, and the British succeeded in fixing President Roosevelt’s attention on the North African campaign.33
In the spring of 1942, Eisenhower acquired a new role in these Allied strategic maneuvers. He was promoted to major general, and Marshall gave him a new opportunity to work directly with the British.34 Marshall sent Ike to London—accompanied by General Clark—to find out how well the American officers in Britain were doing in laying the foundation for an assault on the German forces in France.35 The answer was depressing. According to Ike, the US detachment lacked a strong sen
se of urgency. It did not have the discipline that Marshall wanted and the task demanded. Clearly, the United States was not prepared for the bold attack on the Continent that Marshall was advocating. The commanding officer, Ike said, had to be replaced.36 Marshall agreed with him, but he rejected the man Ike suggested for the position, General Joseph T. McNarney.37
Marshall’s choice instead was Eisenhower, with Mark Clark as his deputy. This decision marked the second dramatic break in Eisenhower’s career as a leader. The first had followed his service with Fox Conner, when a recharged, professionally intense Ike finally began the difficult task of escaping his label as a talented but limited coach and trainer of recruits. Now Marshall broke decisively with Ike’s solidly established reputation as a staff officer. What accounts for Marshall’s decision? Even Marshall’s biographer writes that the choice “seems remarkably casual.” Marshall later said, “I sent Eisenhower and some others over so the British could have a look at them, and then I asked Churchill what he thought of them. He was extravagant in his estimate of them, so then I went ahead with my decision on Eisenhower.”38
Since Ike had not met with Churchill on the trip, had barely any experience in troop command, and had no experience in combat, Marshall’s choice was stunning.39 He had every reason to believe that Eisenhower would provide solid, well-informed support for the cross-Channel strategy that Marshall was promoting. The Chief of Staff knew firsthand that Eisenhower now had a good grasp of US global strategy. Marshall also believed that Eisenhower would have good personal relations with the British political and military leaders—some of whom could be extremely thorny with Yanks. The thorniest of all was General Alan Francis Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery, Army Commander in the Southeast, was a close second.40