Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(25)

When he had finished, Marshall said just four words: “I agree with you.”

Now began desperate days, during which they tried to find men, aircraft, equipment, and, above all, ships to carry them to distant garrisons. The news was worse and worse, naval disasters, staggering Japanese triumphs. The days were eighteen hours long and Eisenhower came home exhausted to his brother Milton’s house in Falls Church for a sandwich at midnight. In three relentless months, however, he had Marshall’s confidence and was wearing a second star.

Allied strategy was, Europe first—the defeat of Germany before anything else. The Americans favored a direct, cross-Channel invasion of the continent to which the British agreed in principle but with deeply ingrained reservations. For a nation that had known Gallipoli and would soon know Dieppe, the idea of a seaborne assault against a strongly defended mainland was not something to be viewed with enthusiasm. Ike had been responsible for drawing up plans for the invasion force to be built up in Britain and he offered Marshall a profile of the sort of officer who should be sent to command it, someone who was flexible, whom Marshall trusted completely, and who might further serve as Marshall’s deputy when the former was named to lead the invasion (which was expected). A month later, an officer “then almost unknown,” as Churchill called him, arrived in England and was welcomed at Chequers for the first time by the prime minister, who was wearing a siren suit and carpet slippers. That officer was Eisenhower.

They were to become very close, and it was always Ike’s good fortune to have a supporter on one side as staunch as on the other. For his own part, he had come with the determination to get along with the British. You could call a British officer a bastard, the word was, but you could not call him a British bastard. He became a champion of Allied cooperation. It was not merely a question of the British agreeing to call lorries trucks and the Americans in exchange to call gasoline petrol, it was the task of hammering out an acceptable common strategy and bending difficult and proud commanders to fight side by side. The war was not waged in a spirit of pure harmony. Generals have ambitions. Nations have their goals.

Eisenhower was a major general when he came to England, almost a lowly rank. He was nearly fifty-two years old, he had never commanded troops, never seen a battle. In a matter of a few months, the invasion put aside for the time being, he found himself, quickly promoted, in a damp tunnel in Gibraltar waiting uneasily while fourteen convoys from both sides of the Atlantic, all bearing forces under his command, converged for simultaneous landings at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers.

The invasion of North Africa had been hastily decided upon and planned, with Eisenhower as the logical commander since it was to appear as an American initiative. Actual military command, however, was in the hands of three experienced deputies, all British, for land, sea, and air.

There were problems with the colonial Vichy French, battles with the French fleet, and the usual early disgraces that go with poor officers and green troops. Americans dropped their weapons, abandoned equipment, and fled at Kasserine Pass. Eisenhower had neither the tactical nor strategic experience required, the chief of the British Imperial Staff, Alan Brooke, decided. He was putty in British hands, said Patton, who was also making his first appearance in the war; “I would rather be commanded by an Arab,” Patton wrote in his diary. “I think less than nothing of Arabs.” A depressed Eisenhower kept repeating, “Anybody who wants the job of Allied commander in chief can have it.” Nevertheless, he took full responsibility for the confusion and first defeats, and by spring, the supply situation better, the bad weather past, his reorganized forces had battled through Tunisia to meet Montgomery coming the other way. In the sudden, final collapse in May 1943, almost 250,000 Germans and Italians, many of them driving their own trucks in search of POW compounds, were taken prisoner. These were veterans, and with them went the Mediterranean.

Sicily was next, a less than brilliant campaign. The plan of invasion was uninspired—the Germans never could comprehend why the Strait of Messina had not been immediately seized to cut them off. The fighting was in the heat of summer, fierce and bloody. Patton, now an army commander, revealed some of his dash here and also his impulsiveness. Bradley, more temperate, would rise above him. Neither of them liked Montgomery: “pompous, abrasive, demanding, and almost insufferably vain,” Bradley described him.

The campaign in Italy was more of the same—bad strategy, landings in the wrong places, lost opportunities. As Mediterranean Theater commander, Eisenhower was far from the center of things. Italy was a mere sideshow compared to the immense scale of the Russian front, where literally hundreds of divisions were engaged, and in the course of a battle the opposing armies might lose a division a day. Though assured there would be a second front in the spring, Stalin shrewdly demanded to know who its commander would be. That he would be American was understood, since the bulk of the forces were to be American. That it would probably be Marshall was also understood. But at the last moment Roosevelt decided otherwise. The principal figures had been in their roles too long to change. A deeply disappointed Marshall had the grace to send to Eisenhower as a memento the handwritten note that named him supreme commander.

Generals who do not fail, succeed. From the middle of the pack, past Clark, who was left mired in Italy, past Bradley, who had gotten a star first but was late getting to Europe, past the brash Patton, through all of it, gathering strength, experience, the feel of battles, learning to predominate in conference, perfecting the structure, prodding, cajoling, slowly becoming unchallengeable, Ike made his way.