'Eisenhower': The Hardest Job on the Longest Day nytimes.com
[ meanwhile, back on the Cohen watch, this somewhat contrasting review showed up. This review is interesting on a broader front too, of course. One thing that struck me originally was that Cohen's examples of Lincoln, Clemenceau, and Churchill were not entirely consistent with my understanding. Everybody knows that Lincoln had trouble getting McClellan to do anything. But as near as I can see, the Civil War was also the basis for classic American grind-it-out with overwhelming force military doctrine. Fancy strategies came from Robert E. Lee and the south. Plus, however avidly Lincoln followed the operations, I don't know how he could do much one way or the other to influence Grant's and Sherman's operations in the west. Modern generals could only dream of having the free hand those guys had. No real time video links to the White House in those days. Clemenceau, well, I've never heard WWI associated with brilliant grand strategy by anybody. Then there's Churchill, who shows up peripherally in the Eisenhower review. WWII was, in my understanding, consistent with this review, another grind-it-out, overwhelming force exercise by the US military. Churchill was certainly a great wartime leader, and had better background than most to manage military operations, but it's not clear if he did. If he did, it's not clear if he was any good at it. And if you want to compare leadership, I'd say Roosevelt actually pulled off a harder and trickier job, managing US aid to England and Russia and building up US capacity while officially staying out of the fray. Text in full, relevant quotes highlighted.]
Dwight Eisenhower had the most impressive resume of his generation and perhaps of any American generation since the early Republic. His two terms in the White House followed an outstanding military career. As a four-star general, Eisenhower commanded Allied forces in the Mediterranean theater in World War II. With his fifth star came supreme command of the Western offensive into Germany. It was Eisenhower, not Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle, who had the responsibility to decide when to launch the D-Day landings in Normandy, and how the West would defeat Nazi Germany.
The German surrender should have sealed his reputation as one of the greatest military commanders of the 20th century. But it didn't. The man Churchill seemed to view as ''a sort of constitutional monarch'' never enjoyed the unequivocal respect of fellow generals. ''Eisenhower held conferences to collect ideas,'' Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery said; ''I held conferences to issue orders.'' Sniping did not just come from the British. The irrepressible George C. Patton called Eisenhower's handling of the final phase of the conflict the ''momentous error of the war.''
Carlo D'Este's new book about Eisenhower's military career is a refreshing attempt to understand the soldier at the center of these controversies. The author of a number of well-regarded campaign histories and a biography of Patton, D'Este brings to his subject both a deep understanding of World War II and an unusual set of historical allegiances. In ''Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life,'' Ike, Monty and Patton all get a measure of respect.
The third son of David and Ida Stover Eisenhower, David Dwight (his mother later switched the names) was intensely ambitious and self-confident, with a vivid personality. An incorrigible prankster with a fiery temper, he nearly got himself thrown out of West Point. But when a blown knee cut short what might have been a brilliant football career, he exhibited toughness of character. His success as a team leader despite his injury marked him as a perfect football coach or drill instructor. For a time Eisenhower viewed this recognition as a drag on his career, especially when his skill as a training officer kept him out of action in World War I. Bitterly disappointed, he vowed in 1918: ''By God, from now on I am cutting myself a swath and will make up for this.''
With few opportunities to command in peacetime, Eisenhower had to make his name during the interwar period on his strengths as a staff officer. Inspiring the trust of commanders and subordinates alike -- even the imperious Douglas MacArthur -- Eisenhower rose to become the ''chief planner'' for the great career maker George C. Marshall in the War Department in December 1941. Universally regarded as smart, efficient and well organized, he was not noted for tactical or strategic initiative. He and Patton were among the first American officers to write about the tactical promise of the tank. But when the hidebound Army threatened a reprimand, Eisenhower withdrew the article and was never heard from again on mobility in battle. Thereafter he associated himself with traditional American military ideas about employing overwhelming force to grind down an enemy.
Eisenhower's interwar training was fine preparation for coalition warfare. D-Day posed the most difficult organizational problem in military history, and Eisenhower proved adept at presiding over the mammoth undertaking with confidence and an eye for detail. Similarly, his no-nonsense approach to military operations helped steer the alliance clear of some Rube Goldberg ideas. Roosevelt harbored quaint notions of international politics. He was convinced that de Gaulle could be ignored in the liberation of France. Churchill's foibles were military. Not having learned from the disaster at Gallipoli when the British tried to open a back door to the German Empire in World War I, he insisted on trying to defeat Nazi Germany through the mountains of Yugoslavia and Austria. Marshall acted as a partial screen on Roosevelt's bad ideas, but in 1944-45 Eisenhower often had to contend with the indefatigable Churchill on his own.
D'Este is at his best in showing where the final campaign on the Western front tested the limits of Eisenhower's abilities. So long as Allied strategy was straightforward and each field commander used the same playbook, the fact that Eisenhower was neither a strategist nor an especially gifted tactician was unimportant. Although D'Este sidesteps the argument that better Allied decisions might have ended the war in the West sooner, he faults Eisenhower for not seizing opportunities inherent in the rapid collapse of German resistance in France in August and September 1944. Eisenhower rigidly adhered to a strategy of using all Allied armies to attack along a broad front from the Rhone valley to the Pas de Calais. But had he sent his armies to capture additional ports on the English channel in August, he might have eased the fuel crisis at the front -- each allied army consumed over 300,000 gallons a day -- and been able to smash the German line more quickly. The one bold stroke Eisenhower did authorize in that chaotic period was Market Garden, an ill-fated British-led airborne operation into the occupied Netherlands. He approved it over the misgivings of his staff and in the face of intelligence showing that the Germans had enough tanks nearby to wreck the assault.
There was a seductive political quality to the broad-front strategy that reinforced Eisenhower's preference for slow envelopment of the enemy. The nature of the Grand Alliance argued for a master plan that ensured British and American generals a share of the glory. Although the overwhelming majority of his troops were Americans, Eisenhower was sensitive to the fact that Britain had been fighting the Nazis since 1939 and was a strategic partner of the United States. He believed he could not accept any campaign that favored Bradley or Patton over Montgomery, or vice versa. Later, cold-war critics of Eisenhower blamed this strategy for preventing the West from beating the Soviet Army to Berlin in 1945. D'Este rightly dismisses this as a canard. By Allied agreement in 1944, Berlin, like Germany as a whole, was to be divided among the four powers. Had the Western allies occupied Berlin first, they would have had to give some of it up to the Russians anyway. ''Why should we endanger the life of a single American or Briton,'' Eisenhower sensibly asked, ''to capture areas we will soon be handing over to the Russians?'' Moreover, Washington would have been out of its mind to pick a fight with Moscow before the Japanese had been defeated. The key flaw in Ike's strategy was military, not political. Inevitably, given the supply situation and the lack of sufficient manpower as losses mounted, gaps developed in the broad Allied front. So long as the Nazis continued to retreat, the risks were small. But in December 1944, the Nazis surprised the Allied command by launching a huge counterattack at one of these gaps in the heavily forested Ardennes. Although Hitler was still defeated, the Battle of the Bulge was costly.
This book is a little untidy. D'Este draws on many other historians and at times the resulting analysis is not smooth. The problem of integration also colors D'Este's discussions of the private Eisenhower. While painting a persuasive picture of a man long beset by stress-induced illnesses, D'Este makes little effort to relate this to Eisenhower's performance as a soldier and commander. Was Eisenhower's evident fatigue in September 1944, for example, a factor in the Market Garden mistake? Equally unsatisfying is the discussion of the women in Ike's life. The portrait of a self-absorbed Mamie Eisenhower seems one-dimensional, and the repeated references to Eisenhower's special relationship with his female driver in the war, Kay Summersby, strike the reader as more defensive than enlightening. Does it really matter whether Ike had sex with her or not? D'Este is sharpest when he is alongside the general in the field. There he evokes the realities of command, the constraints and the unknowns. He reminds us that the Germans fought hard to the end and that no one Allied general, no matter how imaginative, could have beaten them alone. Even a general's biographer has to admit that ultimately the war was won by men who don't have biographers. |
