A Patriot's History of the Modern World (71 page)

Always mistrustful, Stalin never ceased to look for hidden motives in British and American actions, and when the Casablanca Conference confirmed that Britain and the United States would fritter away a year in the Mediterranean, Stalin used what he claimed was Western perfidy to build resentment in the Soviet Union against the democracies. But he scarcely would have needed it, and in a closed shop such as he ran, no other opinions were possible. Stalin's ideas were everyone's ideas, to the extent anyone wanted to stay alive.

Churchill had endeavored to keep Stalin supplied no matter what. After the destruction of convoy PQ-17 to Murmansk in June of 1942, Churchill had escorted the next convoy, PQ-18, with no less than seventy-seven warships for forty merchantmen, a commitment the Royal Navy could not maintain.
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He therefore wanted to skip PQ-19, scheduled for departure on October 2. Roosevelt begged Churchill to honor their pledges to Stalin, but the best Churchill would commit was to allow eight merchantmen to leave in several groups. Only five arrived safely in the USSR. At the same time Britain and the United States proposed a plan to Stalin to help secure the Russian oil fields in the event the Red Army collapsed. Stalin concluded that if the Western allies had no supplies for his troops in the thick of the fight for Stalingrad and the Caucasus—but could spare forces to secure Soviet oil—that said much about their priorities. Nevertheless, seldom if ever in human history had essentially free peoples done so much to support and strengthen a barbaric, despotic regime, even if out of self-interest.

After capturing Sicily in 1943 and knocking Italy out of the war, Allied troops appeared close to securing Italy in 1944, despite a stubborn defense in front of Monte Cassino. As the Americans had in the Pacific, the Allies attempted an end-run around the Germans' positions in the Cassino line with an amphibious assault at Anzio. After surprising the Germans and capturing a beachhead, the Allied forces moved slowly, allowing German reinforcements to seal off the invasion force. Elsewhere, Axis forces were defeated consistently. The Soviet offensive during the winter of 1943–44 in Ukraine pushed the Germans back, and north of Kiev two German corps comprising nine divisions were trapped by Marshal Konev's forces in the Cherkassy (Korsun) pocket due to Hitler's refusal to abandon part of the Dnieper line. Those formations fought for their lives, and after five
weeks of battle in a pocket “wandering” westward, 40,000 out of the trapped 65,000 escaped to fight another day.
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Germans considered this a victory of sorts because, unlike at Stalingrad, strenuous efforts made by von Manstein to rescue the encircled troops were generally successful. Merely the fact that the men understood they would no longer be abandoned (at least by von Manstein) served as a morale booster. Hitler didn't see it that way, sacking von Manstein for losing so much territory, although prior to departing he also saved the encircled 1st Panzer Army north of the Dniester.

In February, Nimitz's Central Pacific forces assaulted the Marshall Islands, taking Kwajalein and Eniwetok. Japan's huge naval base in the Carolines at Truk, long a thorn in the side of the Americans, was bombed, and the Japanese abandoned the Central Pacific to concentrate on a defense of the Marianas (Guam, Tinian, and Saipan). Everywhere except in Italy and the China-Burma-India Theater, Allied forces advanced steadily during the first half of 1944, but then Polish troops finally took Monte Cassino and the Germans were driven north of Rome, the city falling on June 4. But that momentous news was driven off the wires by the events of June 6—the long-awaited cross-Channel invasion.

Closing in Europe While Advancing in the Pacific

Heading the effort was the Allied Supreme Commander, European Theater, Dwight D. Eisenhower. At fifty-three years old, he had been a general officer for less than three years. Like Nimitz, Ike was born a Texan, but grew up in modest circumstances in Abilene, Kansas. His mother was a Mennonite, then became a Jehovah's Witness, although Eisenhower himself never was. Later he joined the Presbyterian Church, and although he remained largely unattached to any “sect or organization,” as he put it, he called himself “one of the most deeply religious men I know.”
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He graduated from West Point in 1915, then served out World War I in training camps in the United States. Universally liked by other officers and superiors, Ike languished as a major from 1922 to 1936, during which time he held a series of interesting positions, including working on MacArthur's staff in the Philippines where he demonstrated his fine talent for writing. Contrary to popular lore that MacArthur and Eisenhower did not like each other, there had to be some reason for Eisenhower to have remained at MacArthur's side for seven years. MacArthur once turned in a fitness report on Eisenhower that said, “This is the best officer in the Army. When the next war comes, he should go right to the top.”
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From lieutenant colonel (1941) to major general (March 1942), and to Commander, European Theater, on June 15, 1942, Ike jumped over some forty officers senior to him and received extraordinarily fast promotion. General George C. Marshall's secretary, Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, telephoned Ike on December 12, 1941 (he was stationed at the time at Fort Sam Houston), and told him to come to Washington as Marshall wanted his assessment of the Philippines. When Eisenhower arrived on the 15th, Marshall reviewed MacArthur's force levels and asked Ike, “What should be our general line of action?”
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Eisenhower requested a few hours to compose an answer, and when he returned, recommended using Australia as the United States' main base to reinforce and supply the Philippines. He frankly admitted that major reinforcements could not reach the Philippines while the garrison there still held out if the Japanese committed major forces to the battle, but that everything possible needed to be done. “The people in China, of the Philippines, or the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure, but they will not excuse abandonment.”
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Marshall was so impressed that he immediately placed Eisenhower in charge of the Philippines and Far Eastern Section of the War Plans Division. Marshall then turned his cold eyes on Eisenhower and said, “Eisenhower, the Department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well but feel
compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.”
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Eisenhower soon found his main problems were twofold: his old boss MacArthur and Admiral King, chief of naval operations. To Eisenhower, MacArthur was panicking, and King was a bully. He once groused, “One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King.”
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Nonetheless, Ike was able to win the cooperation of both, and that paid big dividends. Just when it looked like he would end his career in Washington as a staff officer, Eisenhower lost his temper with Marshall, only to find a week later that Marshall had recommended him for promotion, telling President Roosevelt that Ike was his operations officer. After Marshall decided the Philippines were beyond help, he had Ike work up a plan for a cross-Channel invasion of France (code name: Roundup), but by March it was obvious the British were dragging their feet. Eisenhower was dispatched to England to unfreeze the bottlenecks.

There, Eisenhower almost immediately ran afoul of the British, most particularly General Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, and Lieutenant General Bernard Law Montgomery, Brooke's arrogant protégé. When Eisenhower lit a cigarette while Montgomery was speaking, the British general announced sternly, “I don't permit smoking in my office.”
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It was not an auspicious start. Neither Brooke nor Montgomery had any use for Americans, Marshall and Eisenhower in particular. Brooke's prejudice bordered on hate, and he described Marshall as “overfilled with his own importance.” The fact that Ike had no combat experience weighed heavily, but to the British it was merely par for the course, and to be expected from colonial amateurs. Eisenhower's continual promotions must have shocked them, all the more so when Marshall appointed him Supreme Commander of all the Allied Forces in Europe.

On June 22, 1943, Eisenhower's “blackest day in history,” Churchill obtained Roosevelt's agreement to cancel the cross-Channel operation. Certainly the insufficient number of Higgins boats contributed to the strategy, but to Ike, it seemed his ally gave him more trouble than the Germans. Indeed, Eisenhower's genius and skill lay in his uncanny ability to hold his American officers in check (they endured slights and disrespect seemingly daily from their British counterparts). Not that his own subordinates were perfect. Few vexed Ike as much as his talented three-star general, George Patton, who had directed a brilliant end-run around Sicily while Montgomery
was bottled up on the coast. But during the campaign, Patton had visited an Army hospital in August 1943 where, amid all those with horrifying physical injuries, he found a soldier, Private Charles H. Kuhl, suffering from what is commonly known as “battle fatigue” or “shell shock,” a condition that includes symptoms like nightmares, excessive startle reactions, depression, severe anxiety, and shaking. At the time, however, it was not well accepted as a legitimate problem by frontline officers, who thought men who claimed to suffer from it were malingerers. Patton slapped Kuhl with his gloves, and threatened to have him sent back to the front. Ten days later, Patton reprised the incident almost identically with a second soldier, Private Paul G. Bennett, at another hospital. (At least one of Patton's biographers suspects Patton himself was suffering from combat fatigue at the time.)
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The press, which on the whole preferred the less aggressive Omar Bradley (“a soldier's soldier,” went the typical report), tended to let the incident slide, but muckraker and Patton enemy Drew Pearson howled for the general's scalp. Eisenhower, of course, hadn't the slightest intention of losing his best field commander and normally would have shown little concern for the wishes of the press, but temporarily removed him to get Patton out of the cross-hairs of Pearson and his congressional buddies looking for publicity. Hollywood later inflated and sensationalized Ike's required apology from Patton, which occurred on a private basis to Kuhl and Bennett. If anything, the Supreme Commander protected Patton from himself until he could be unleashed. In particular, the competition between Patton and Montgomery—Patton was clearly the superior general, but Montgomery with Brooke behind him won all the key commands and decisions—gradually wore Ike down, especially when he had to sideline old “Blood and Guts.”

With regard to the Supreme Allied Commander position, Brooke had expected it to go to him, notwithstanding the fact that Britain was clearly the junior partner with respect to troop strength and resources. A Peter Sellers look-alike without the actor's humor or charisma, Brooke could not understand Churchill's agreement on the selection of Eisenhower, and his relations with Americans became worse than ever.
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Brooke considered himself a military expert who had indeed inaugurated the French concept of a “creeping barrage” into the British Army during World War I—a tactic that epitomized his approach to battle, cautious and scientific. As low of an opinion as he held of the Americans, he held a disproportionately high view of the Germans. And, of course, he disapproved of the American high command,
whom he held in contempt. In dealing with the American chiefs of staff, he said, “all matters have to be carefully and slowly explained and re-explained before they can be absorbed.”
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In London as Supreme Commander, Eisenhower rejected the palatial accommodations provided by the British, complete with liveried footmen, and he soon moved to more modest quarters. With little ground action taking place in western Europe other than the stalemate in Italy, reporters focused on Ike, his grin, his enthusiasm, and his upbringing, if not in poverty, then at least in very economically deprived circumstances. This appealed to the British public, if not the British aristocracy or, especially, the tradition-and perquisite-oriented British military.

The other main protagonist with whom Ike dealt, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, was a small, wiry man who affected a flair by wearing nonregulation sweaters and hats. Jaunty Monty, as he was known, carefully built a MacArthur-like reputation as England's foremost and most successful general, although prior to El Alamein, his main claim to fame was in handling the retreat of his unit to Dunkirk in 1940. He enjoyed the full backing of Brooke, another general who made his reputation during the defeat in France, and had become the master of the “set-piece” battle, one in which he was given overwhelming force by the Americans. Methodical, and without flexibility, Montgomery typified the British officer who always considered himself a good commander. Monty's penchant for thorough planning and plodding execution had been learned during the World War I battles of the Somme and Passchendaele as a staff officer. A bully in his childhood, he even set a fellow student's shirt on fire while at Sandhurst. Montgomery was disliked by many officers for his arrogance and dictatorial style of command.
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