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Dwight D. Eisenhower (view source)
Revision as of 19:16, December 15, 2008
, 19:16, December 15, 2008ww2
Holland (2001) argues that Eisenhower was the best read and trained officer of his age in the interwar Army and possessed a "terrific intellect." Far from being an unknown, his talents and work ethic attracted the attention of some of the Army's most important senior officers, especially Connor and MacArthur, who mentored Eisenhower and boosted his career. Indeed, he benefited from such attention more than any other officer of the era.
Holland (2001) argues that Eisenhower was the best read and trained officer of his age in the interwar Army and possessed a "terrific intellect." Far from being an unknown, his talents and work ethic attracted the attention of some of the Army's most important senior officers, especially Connor and MacArthur, who mentored Eisenhower and boosted his career. Indeed, he benefited from such attention more than any other officer of the era.
==World War II==
===1940-42===
Back in the United States in early 1940, he served as chief of staff of the Third Division and the Ninth Army Corps, and then of the Third Army. In this capacity, he had a large part in the tactical planning of the Louisiana war games of 1941. He won notice and rapid promotion to colonel and brigadier general. Eisenhower became the protégé of Chief of Staff [[George C. Marshall]], serving in the office of the chief of staff as chief of the plans division and was named a major general. His first task was planning the Army's defensive role against Japan. American strategy called for defeat of Germany first, and in early 1942 Eisenhower took charge of planning its implementation. This brought him into repeated conflict with Chief of Naval Operations [[Ernest J. King]], who wanted to shift most of the Navy's resources to the Pacific, stripping Europe of the landing craft Eisenhower needed.
===1942-45===
After a survey trip to Britain, Eisenhower was appointed commander of U.S. troops in Europe. Now a lieutenant general with three stars, he took charge of "Operation Torch," the Allied invasion of French North Africa. The landings there on November 8, 1942, met with merely temporary resistance from the French,
and agreements with French Vichy leaders soon brought about Allied control of French North Africa. Eisenhower had been too cautious and landed too far west, which prolonged the campaign. After an unexpected defeat at Kasserine Pass, Eisenhower's forces crushed the Germans and Italians from the west while British General [[Bernard Montgomery]] mauled them from the east; the enemy surrendered in May 1943. Eisenhower next supervised the Allied invasion of Sicily (July, 1943), in which the enemy escaped with all their soldiers and supplies. Eisenhower then led the invasions of mainland Italy (September 1943), which quickly bogged down. Despite numerous strategic mistakes, Eisenhower was learning, and he was pushing the Germans back. He tended to run his command through committees and distanced himself from day-to-day decisions, delegating responsibility to subordinates and rarely interfering. His genius was in understanding how to make coalition warfare work in both the military and political spheres. Eisenhower proved adept at dealing with the British and French, while wary of a possible German counterattack through Spain (which never happened).
===Supreme Commander 1943-45===
His tactical military successes, and especially his ability to lead and coordinate the efforts of all the Allied forces and to smooth over inter-Allied rivalries, led to Eisenhower's appointment in December 1943 as commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe (SHAEF). This was the command charged with leading the largest, climactic Allied push of the war--the invasion of France. Marshall himself wanted the job, but President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] insisted on Eisenhower.<ref> FDR told Marshall he was essential at home, thus allowing Marshall to save face. FDR felt Eisenhower was the better planner and diplomat.</ref>
Eisenhower molded the giant force that on June 6, 1944, landed on the beaches of Normandy. Although meeting fierce German resistance, his command of the air meant the Germans were immobile and could not be resupplied. Eisenhower's the forces broke through at St. Lo (July 18, 1944), and landed also in southern France (August 15, 1944). The Germans rapidly retreated to Germany, many escaping through the Failaise Gap that the American field commander, General Omar Bradley, had failed to close. The liberation of Paris on August 25, 1944, seemed to herald a quick end to the war. But a German counterattack, called the "Battle of the Bulge" in the Ardennes in mid-December 1944, caught the Allies by complete surprise. This time bad weather grounded the Allied air forces, but the Germans were stunned to discover that Allied artillery used proximity fuzes that made its barrages much more effective. Eisenhower had fought the Pentagon to get those fuzes (which Washington feared would be reverse engineered by the Germans and so should not be used.) The Battle of the Bulge was won when the skies cleared, but cost 77,000 casualties, the highest toll in U.S. military history. Finally on March 6, 1945, the Allied forces crossed the Rhine. They cleared the Ruhr Valley region and reached and bridged the Elbe River. Eisenhower declined to advance on the political target of Berlin, because the casualties would be too high and the Soviets had been assigned that task. He instead focused on destroying Nazi forces in central and southern Germany. This decision was controversial, but led to a quick collapse of Nazi Germany, which surrendered on May 8, 1945.<ref>Donald E. Shepardson, “The Fall of Berlin and the Rise of a Myth” ''Journal of Military History'' (1998) 62(1): 135-153. Issn: 0899-3718 Fulltext: [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0899-3718(199801)62%3A1%3C135%3ATFOBAT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-L in JSTOR] </ref>
===Debate with Montgomery===
[[Image:Eisenhower, Patton, Truman.jpg|right|thumb|350px|Eisenhower (left) with General [[George Patton]] and President Truman, 1945]]
Following the breakthrough in France in August 1944 an argument broke out between the Eisenhower, and the Commanding General of the 21st British Army Group, General Sir [[Bernard L. Montgomery]]. Montgomery argued that a concentrated attack, which he would lead, on the northern line of advance was preferable to Eisenhower's two-pronged broad-front advance. When Eisenhower decided that as of 1 September 1944 he would assume command of the ground troops from Montgomery, the temporary ground forces commander, the debate widened to include command. Except for Operation MARKET-GARDEN, Eisenhower did not take seriously Montgomery's single-thrust proposals.<ref> Chester Wilmot's ''Struggle for Europe'' (1952) told Montgomery's side of the story but focused the debate narrowly on strategy, virtually excluding the arguments over command. Montgomery did not show Wilmot his papers concerning command, only strategy, so Wilmot wrote about what he knew. Politics influenced Churchill's history of the war, published in 1953, which omitted Churchill's reservations over Eisenhower's exercise of ground command, owing to the fact that Eisenhower was now President. See G. E. Patrick Murray, ''Eisenhower versus Montgomery: The Continuing Debate'' (1996)</ref>
===Intelligence===
Eisenhower entered the war ignorant of the intricacies of intelligence gathering; by 1944 he was a highly sophisticated and effective user of massive amounts of secret information from American and British sources. Throughout the European campaign he had almost as good a grasp of German order of battle as Hitler's staff, and sometimes better. He learned from Ultra and other deciphering of German messages; he was also informed by anti-Nazi Europeans outside Germany (although he did not have spies inside Germany). He relied too much on signal intelligence gathered by Ultra's monitoring German radio messages, and thereby was taken by surprise by the Battle of the Bulge, because the Germans used land lines for telephone and telegraph messages. Eisenhower became skilled in deceiving the Germans about Allied strength and possible landing sites. He pretended that the Normandy landing was a feint and that Pas de Calais and Norway were the real invasion sites, and the Germans bought the deception and misdirected their forces. Eisenhower used well the covert operations of the French Resistance.<ref>Stephen E. Ambrose, "Eisenhower and the Intelligence Community in World War II". ''Journal of Contemporary History'' (1981) 16(1): 153-166. Issn: 0022-0094 [http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-0094(198101)16%3A1%3C153%3AEATICI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-M in Jstor] </ref>
==Postwar==
After duty in charge of the American zone in Germany, and a tour as chief of staff of the Army (Nov. 1945- Feb 1948), Eisenhower retired from the service. His war memoir, ''Crusade in Europe'' (1948) was a financial and critical success. He became president of Columbia University in New York (1948-50), but his heart was in world affairs, not academia.
[[Image:Eisenhower Nehru.jpg|right|thumb|350px|Prime Minister [[Jawaharlal Nehru|Nehru]] of India receives an honorary degree while Eisenhower was President of Columbia University]]
The 1951 appointment of Eisenhower as NATO's first supreme allied commander, Europe (SACEUR) was crucial to the alliance's success. Eisenhower was the only individual with sufficient military and political stature to persuade Western Europe to rearm in the face of the Soviet threat. While not completely successful - NATO's combat strength did not reach the desired totals - Eisenhower spent 18 months visiting member countries and organizing available military forces. When he left NATO in 1952 to run for president, the organization was planning an ambitious expansion, including the entry of Greece and Turkey into the alliance and the rearming of the Federal Republic of Germany.<ref> See Bielakowski (2004)</ref>