War turned invasion's overall commander into a pacifist
John S.D. Eisenhower IHT
Sunday, June 06, 2004
The 60th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy, on the day known in common parlance as D-Day, was once again an occasion to pause and contemplate its significance. Like all Americans, I am proud of the achievements of my fellow soldiers but aware of the ordeal they underwent. To this day, I view those men with respect bordering on awe.
To me, as the son of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the general who commanded that invasion, it carries an added dimension. I find it difficult to believe, even after all these years, that my own father was such a historic figure. Sixty years of repetitive observances of D-Day have not dimmed my wonder.
The observance takes on additional meanings this year. For one thing, it is the last decade in which most of us veterans of that war will still be around. In addition, however, the observances are taking place in times of extreme danger for our country. That circumstance invites many people to compare today's scene with that of 60 years ago. I am asked time and again, "What would your father think if he were alive today?"
At this point, I must emphasize that I cannot with any confidence give an opinion regarding what my father would make of today's scene. He was unpredictable when examining any new problem because he always viewed it in its entirety, totally free of thumb rules and largely independent of tradition. More obviously, the world has changed drastically during the 43 years since my father left the presidency in 1961.
When the British and American landing craft plowed through heavy seas to assault the beaches of Normandy that dreary June morning, General Eisenhower - I'll call him "Ike" for convenience - had no time or inclination to contemplate the social, political and economic consequences of the hoped-for military success in Europe. His mind was full of other things: Were the landings successful? How far had the troops been able to push inland? How heavy were the losses? What is the condition of the artificial harbors and the beaches? It was an experience of the moment.
Yet those worries quickly passed. When I joined my father for a brief visit in London a week after D-Day, the experience of D-Day had virtually disappeared from his mind. The day's dramatic events, with their threat of disaster for the Allied cause but eventual triumph, were gone. D-Day was one event in a sequence of events that culminated in the destruction of the Nazi regime and the German war machine.
The experience of that 11-month campaign, plus Ike's later service as the first military commander of NATO six years later, produced profound effects on him, changing some of his convictions and confirming others. I would like to list some of them, not in the abstract but by the evidence of his later actions.
The most fundamental conviction that the period of Ike's command in Europe and the Mediterranean imprinted on his mind was the cruelty, wastefulness and stupidity of war. He saw at firsthand how war destroyed cities, killed innocent people (in which I include most of the participating soldiers), wiped out national economies and tore up the structure of civilizations. Its wastefulness cut him to the bone, and its specter never left him. As a result, as president he kept the military budget as small as was consistent with the safety of the nation. He expressed his convictions eloquently in April 1953, about three months after his inauguration as the 34th president of the United States:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed….
"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals….
"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed 8,000 people."
Not surprisingly, the war that included D-Day had made a pacifist of the man who bore the responsibility, its supreme commander.
As I consider the effect that D-Day and the war in Europe had on my father, I am struck by the degree to which it convinced him of the value of allies. Ike, in leading an army and air force of five million soldiers and airmen of all nationalities, realized full well that the United States, while providing the bulk of the materiel and manpower, could never go it alone. Though Hitler's Wehrmacht was weakened after five years of war, the vaunted and professional German Army still had a lot of fight left in it when the Anglo-American armada crossed the English Channel in 1944. Later in the campaign, the hedgerows, dense forests and formidable rivers such as the Roer and the Rhine, worked all to Hitler's advantage. The ability to switch German forces back and forth between the Russians in the east and the Western Allies in France, Belgium and Luxembourg gave Hitler's generals great power. They were still a formidable force to defeat.
To Ike, therefore, his British (and later French) allies were no luxury; they were absolutely necessary. But they were no toadies. Dealing with the strong-minded leaders of Britain and France - Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle respectively - was difficult. At times it was frustrating. But always it was rewarding. Ike viewed allies as invaluable assets, not only for their material contributions, but for their wisdom as well. Ike did not consider that giving in to their demands when necessary was any sign of weakness on his own part. Doing so was simply part of a great cooperative effort.
With his detestation of war as a means of settling international disputes, Ike applauded the formation of the United Nations in 1945, even though he had no hand in its formation. Leaving the army in 1948 for private life, he was recalled to active duty in early 1951 to organize the military forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when the military threat from the east seemed to become imminent. In his stay in Paris, Ike developed a strong belief in NATO that he never lost.
It so happens that I was witness to one example of Ike's concern for the opinions and attitudes of his allies during his presidency. In September 1959, Premier Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union served up an ultimatum to the Western allies to get out of West Berlin or else. Ike chose to negotiate while rejecting the ultimatum. In the course of the ensuing talks, a mix-up in signals in the State Department resulted in an unintended invitation for Khrushchev to visit the United States alone, not in the company of all the nations involved in the current crisis.
That unilateral invitation may or may not have turned out to be a good thing, but the incident illustrated Ike's concern that his allies - now Britain, France and the newly emerging West Germany - be assured that he had no intention of representing their interests in his forthcoming conferences with Khrushchev. So Ike took some of his personal staff and boarded a new Boeing 707 on its maiden voyage as Air Force One to visit Konrad Adenauer in Bonn, Harold Macmillan in Britain and de Gaulle in Paris. With all of them he conducted frank talks, and Ike's allies were reassured. He would have it no other way.
Ike totally disapproved of "preventive war," and that conviction was put to the test early in his presidency. Some time in the early 1950s the Soviet development of the hydrogen bomb and the means to deliver it caused many Americans, some of Ike's advisers among them, to advocate launching a preemptive strike against the Soviet Union while the United States still enjoyed a preponderance of atomic power and the means of delivering atomic weapons. It would be preferable, these people argued, to remove the Soviet weapons of mass destruction. No legal or moral justification was required. A few million Americans would be killed, of course, but a far fewer number than if we waited and allowed the "Evil Empire" (not Ike's term) to strike first.
Ike would have none of it. Throughout his presidency he combined a policy of maintaining a military deterrent to war while at the same time extending the hand of friendship. The uneasy peace between the United States and the Soviet Union - the cold war - continued for nearly 50 years. It was expensive and it was dangerous, but civilization survived.
A less apocalyptic event demonstrated to the world that Ike's rejection of force as an instrument of national policy applied to everyone - to America, to America's friends, as well as to America's potential enemies. In the later months of 1956, in the midst of a presidential election, Britain, France and Israel, two of them NATO allies, launched an attack against Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nasser after his seizure of the Suez Canal. The Egyptian action, admittedly, had been an international headache, but Ike refused to condone the use of force, even by his friends. He sponsored a vote of censure in the United Nations, and the governments of those three countries, under the pressure of world opinion, withdrew their forces.
This action on Ike's part did not imply rancor against the offenders. It was simply an expression of principle. This he demonstrated in the immediate aftermath of the episode. In the course of the brief fighting, Nasser had sunk ships enough to close down the Suez Canal. Ike and his experts immediately sat down to plan ways to ensure at least a minimum supply of heating oil to bring Western Europe through the winter of 1956-57.
While the recitation of these events seems remote from the D-Day we are commemorating, I offer them as offshoots of Dwight Eisenhower's experiences in the campaigns of 1944-45. Many of Ike's policies were different from those we see being followed today. But he was the first to admit that situations change, and the policies followed in one generation might be used as guides to future action but never rules. How he would view today's world scene, I repeat that I do not know.
But I wonder.
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