Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery

Two books more divergent in spirit, content, and style than Captain Harry Butcher’s My Three Years with Eisenhower and Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Ingersoll’s Top Secret would be difficult to find. Paradoxically, though, they have a good deal in common. Both authors were civilians-in-uniform and both entered the service from journalism — Butcher from the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Ingersoll from the daily newspaper PM. Both were highly placed staff officers at top-echelon headquarters: Butcher as naval aide and diarist to General Dwight D. Eisenhower; Ingersoll as a member of the plans section, operations division, of the ETO and subsequently of General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group. Both had access to much the same military information but, of course, viewed it from different perspectives and prejudices. They share an admiration for General Bradley and a tolerant affection for Patton, and are highly critical of Winston Churchill and frankly contemptuous of Field Marshal Montgomery. In some important respects they confirm each other’s judgments.

But these similarities are superficial compared to a great many basic differences. Essentially, Mr. Butcher’s book is an unconscionably long military and political gossip column. You may learn here about such esoteric matters as how Churchill eats soup, and what it cost General Mark Clark to patronize a Mayfair “hairdresser.” You will also become acquainted with the poker sharks at Spaatz’s headquarters (and what sharks they were!), with Eisenhower’s fondness for Westerns and dogs, with the snoring capabilities of certain multi-starred generals, and with a wide variety of other trivia. But you will find few disclosures of military secrets, almost no criticism of American military heroes, and little discriminating appraisal of the strategy of the war.

Occasionally Mr. Butcher demonstrates flashes of real reportorial competence — notably in the descriptions of the underground headquarters at Gibraltar when the North African invasion was launched. Mr. Butcher would not have been the author of this book had he not been a great admirer, almost an idolater, of Eisenhower; but the fact that he was these things limits the book’s usefulness as history, however entertaining it may be as a diary. You will come away from these pages with a genuine affection for both the Supreme Commander and Mr. Butcher, but you will not know the full story of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHIAEF).

This is not to imply that there is nothing of permanent historical value in Mr. Butcher’s volume. On the contrary. There is to be found in these pages, for example, the first account of Eisenhower’s side of the Darlan controversy, as well as certain valuable sidelights on the Casablanca Conference. There are telling references to the complicated story of the Italian campaign. Eisenhower considered the long-drawnout and costly Italian operation his most serious failure. In fairness to him, however, it must be pointed out that the decision to fight in Italy was made on the political rather than the military level, and that Eisenhower was merely the agent of higher authority. The complete story of the Italian campaign is so involved that a final judgment must be postponed until much more evidence is available. It is a great tribute to Eisenhower that, characteristically, he assumes sole responsibility for questionable decisions which were not altogether his own.

The serious reader will be materially aided by an exceptionally complete index, a glossary of military terms and abbreviations, and a running commentary on world affairs by Lieutenant Colonel Frank Monaghan.

On the whole, Mr. Ingersoll’s volume is made of sterner stuff. His idol is Bradley, not Eisenhower, but he is more concerned with acidulous criticism than with high encomium. He is an old hand at viewing-with-alarm, and this volume is in some respects as strident and bilious as a PM editorial. On the other hand, Ingersoll is a superb reporter. In his earlier books, Report on England and The Battle Is the PayOff, he proved that he could handle the raw stuff of which combat narratives are made. Top Secret contains some of the most exciting military journalism of the war. The story of the development of our great military base in Britain, of the long and painstaking and complicated preparation for the invasion, and of the anxious days at the end of the long period of waiting, recaptures the elusive mood of that historic time.

The account of D Day itself — the embarkation, the perilous crossing of the Channel, the thrill of setting foot on French soil, the first precarious hold on the coast, and the tenuity of the beachhead — is full of suspense, emotion, and color but devoid of rhetorical pyrotechnics. The tribute to the Allied air forces is the most reasonable and the most eloquent yet written by a ground officer. And Ingersoll’s high praise of the French and Belgian undergrounds for their role in the Allied victory is a much needed corrective to some of the carping criticism which has been directed at them.

But Ingersoll is concerned more with headquarters than with the battlefield, with the staff rather than the shooting soldier, with strategy rather than tactics. And there is abundant evidence in this book that he knows how things are done and are not done in the higher echelons of command. Captain Butcher may have known, too, but his book does not demonstrate as much. The reporter in Mr. Ingersoll is irrepressible, but it is as a military critic that he is trying to establish a reputation.

The controlling thesis of his book is that the capabilities of General Eisenhower as a strategist and commander have been vastly overrated. He thinks that, in his deep-rooted desire to create a unified Anglo-American force, Eisenhower conceded entirely too much to British concepts of strategy and showed marked favoritism to certain British commanders. (Butcher reports that among the personnel of Patton’s Third Army Eisenhower was described as “the best general the British have.”) Ingersoll considers that from the very start Eisenhower was a semipolitical figure, “elevated to so high an altitude that he would have little effect on strategy in the field.” He was compelled in North Africa to handle a number of “hot political pokers”; and “when he succeeded without fatal scandal, he was made.”

But, says Ingersoll, Eisenhower was essentially a “front man” or “chairman of the board.” “By nature he was a conciliator and arbitrator” and lacked the initiative and courage to make decisions and to make them promptly. He gradually lost the confidence of his associates in the American Army, says Ingersoll, because of his own shortcomings and because of his “cold disinterest” in anything but serving General Marshall and “the strange British characters” whose advice he so often took. Had General Eisenhower had the firmness and ruthlessness of other great captains in history, the war would have been over in the autumn of 1944; this, in essence, is Ingersoll’s general indictment.

To all the foregoing Mr. Butcher would enter a general denial. He hotly resents the charge, so frequently made, that Eisenhower was a high-level coördinator and little more. He asserts, on the contrary, that Eisenhower was the “master and director of the grand strategy" of the war in Western Europe and quotes with approbation Marshal Zhukov’s toast at a victory banquet in Berlin: —

General of the Army Eisenhower has given the most magnificent performance of any general in the current time. His great strides in the West helped me in the East. I raise my glass to the greatest military strategist of our time — General Eisenhower.

And Butcher’s record of the day-to-day activities of SHAEF indicates that Eisenhower was not the procrastinator and compromiser which Ingersoll accuses him of being. On the contrary, he showed initiative and boldness and did not avoid making decisions. “He has had to do things,” says Butcher, “which were so risky as to make some of his subordinates think him overbold, if not crazy.” And some of the responsibility devolving upon him was terrifying in its ramifications — such, for example, as postponing D Day in Europe for twenty-four hours and then gambling on the weather rather than risk a further postponement of two weeks or a month. There was no timidity or shirking here.

Ingersoll’s principal grievance against Eisenhower grows out of what he considers the Supreme Commander s coddling of Montgomery at the expense of Bradley. In Ingersoll’s opinion — which will probably be confirmed by the unfolding of military history — Bradley was the ablest field commander of the Allied armies in Western Europe. At the head of the Twelfth Army Group, he won victories which would have done credit to Napoleon and which outshine the German conquest of France in 1940.

Bradley’s “opposite number” on the British side was Montgomery, the victor of El Alamein and the man who had run Rommel out of Egypt and Libya. Beginning with the Sicilian campaign, however, Montgomery began to show signs of excessive caution and, as a result, lost the imagination and dash of his North African days. He knew how to use armor in the desert, but not, apparently, in the hills of Italy or in the bocage country of France. As his successes became fewer, less spectacular, and more costly, his sense of personal grandeur became more highly developed, so that, as Churchill is quoted as having said, he became insufferable.

Mr. Ingersoll does not point out the obvious parallels with George B. McClellan — an earlier general who was brilliant but vain, flamboyant, bad-mannered, opinionated, arrogant, insubordinate, and overcautious (qualities which Ingersoll, with a good deal of justification, attributes to Montgomery). Although Montgomery had personal qualities which frequently suggest Patton, he was not Patton’s equal as a tactician, especially in the exploitation of armor. Nor was he Patton’s equal in dash and daring.

Ingersoll is scathing in his denunciation of Montgomery, whether as a man or as a soldier. Although Butcher is more restrained in the use of adjectives, it is apparent that he, too, holds Montgomery in low esteem and considers him perhaps the principal cross Eisenhower had to bear. And he points out that high-ranking British officers (especially Air Marshal Tedder, Eisenhower’s deputy commander) became fed up with Montgomery before the Normandy campaign was well under way. And since Butcher’s views usually mirror Eisenhower’s, it would appear that the latter likewise became increasingly suspicious of Montgomery’s behavior and dubious concerning his value to the Allied armies. Ingersoll cannot understand why Eisenhower so frequently favored Montgomery over Bradley. He will understand even less after reading Butcher’s book.

Specifically, Ingersoll is bitter because Eisenhower lost what he calls the Great Opportunity of midAugust to early September, 1944, to destroy the Wehrmacht and thus to end the war. What the situation called for at that time, he says, was undivided support of Bradley’s victorious forces, by giving them all the supplies, transport, and air cover available to the Allies. No matter how fast Bradley’s command moved, it could have been fed from the air — the Air forces having demonstrated unforeseen ingenuity in flying supplies to the front lines. The Germans were demoralized. On the other hand, “the morale of the American troops at the front was almost exuberant. This was [for them] the end of the chase, the kill — this was the quick way home.”

Here was the opportunity, says Ingersoll, for a Supreme Commander of bold, forceful, and inspired leadership. But with the German armies disintegrating, “General Eisenhower reacted as consistently with his character as any chemically pure reagent acts in a chemical formula. His job was to be cautious and open-minded — and he remained cautious and open-minded on the subject of what to do next.”

The devil in the piece was Montgomery. He also saw the Great Opportunity, but as beckoning to him, not Bradley. He demanded all the available support, so that he could drive on Berlin. Now, as Butcher conclusively shows, Eisenhower never considered Berlin his primary military objective, and he resisted all representations from Churchill and others to make it such. The mission of the Allied armies was to destroy the Wehrmacht. And, by any set of criteria (such as prisoners captured), Bradley had demonstrated superior ability at cutting German armies to pieces and rounding up the remnants.

Montgomery, on the other hand, was the cautious slugger the perfectionist who never considered the conditions quite propitious for an attack — again recalling McClellan. Montgomery’s case for all-out support looked weak — very weak — and Bradley’s case strong — very strong. In these circumstances, says Ingersoll, Eisenhower violated basic military principles: he divided his resources between Montgomery and Bradley so that neither had the strength to deal the coup de grace. As far as the facts themselves are concerned, Butcher confirms Ingersoll, although he does not draw conclusions from them. He simply records that Eisenhower rejected Montgomery’s demand for all the supplies and transport.

Ingersoll thinks, also, that Eisenhower made a similar mistake in the “Battle of the Bulge,” by assigning part of Bradle’s forces to Montgomery’s operational command. As it was Bradley, rather than Montgomery, who fought the fight and reduced the salient, the error seems all the more egregious to Ingersoll. Thereafter, he says, Bradley — and his subordinates Hodges, Patton, and Simpson — lost confidence in the Supreme Commander and considered themselves on their own. They virtually ignored SHAEF, taking pains only to report what they did ex post facto.

According to Ingersoll, Bradley seized and exploited the bridgehead at Remagen without previously consulting Eisenhower. On the other hand, Butcher reports a telephone conversation between Bradley and Eisenhower on March 11, 1945, during which Bradley apparently asked and received permission to “get right on across with everything you’ve got.”But Butcher heard only Eisenhower’s end of the conversation. And he says he was so excited listening that it was difficult for him “to record Ike’s exact words.”(Future historians are going to tear their hair at Butcher’s inability to distinguish between the trivial and the vital. A man trained in the use of historical evidence would not place dogs and poker on a par with material of this sort.) If Ingersoll is correct in asserting that Bradley misinformed Eisenhower and sabotaged his directives, explanations are required from them both. It would be the part of wisdom to remember, however, that all the evidence is not yet in hand and that Mr. Ingersoll is given to subjective judgments.

There is, of course, another side to all this. Coalition wars are the most difficult of all wars to wage. They require the nice balancing of a great variety of forces and interests — economic, political, moral, psychological, as well as military. They cannot be won without mutual concessions; and in waging them, the better must sometimes give way to the worse reason. Coalition armies cannot be ruled with an iron hand, without regard to considerations of national prestige and personal sensitivities. The qualities of an Eisenhower are of necessity those of a diplomatist or statesman, not those of a drill sergeant or a conventional brass hat. (Mr. Ingersoll, indeed, grudgingly admits as much en passant.) Nor can conflicting national strategies be easily reconciled. As both Mr. Ingersoll and Mr. Butcher emphasize and reiterate, there were fundamental and deeprooted differences between Britain and the United States concerning the means by which Germany might be laid low — differences which were exacerbated by the eloquence and tenacity with which Mr. Churchill defended every British contention.

The wonder is not that Eisenhower conceded so much to the British, but that he conceded so little. The British were reluctant, for example, to invade Germany by way of France. They suffered from recurrent nightmares which recalled the Dardanelles and the Somme and suggested that the Channel might run red with English blood. They looked down into the awful chasm of possible defeat and naturally enough recoiled. Being relatively young and fabulously rich, we could afford to risk more; we felt that, come what may, we would somehow recover. We were confident that the invasion of the Continent would succeed. The British were not sure. Hence they were more easily deluded than we by such escapist slogans as “the soft [shades of the Apennines!] underbelly of Europe.” But once they accepted an invasion of France as a regrettable necessity, the British supported it loyally, as both Ingersoll and Butcher agree.

Mr. Ingersoll’s depreciation of General Eisenhower should not, then, be accepted without, strong reservations. The pitiless processes of history will doubtless reveal that Eisenhower made mistakes, and he probably would be the last to deny the possibility. But Eisenhower obviously was not the genial incompetent, the procrastinator, and the trimmer which Ingersoll adjudges him to be. Nor was he quite the paragon portrayed by Butcher. He was indisputably a great commander, probably one assured of a permanent place in the military hall of fame. To borrow and paraphrase one of Mr. Ingersoll’s chapter headings, “The Victory Is the Pay-Off.” After all, under Marshall and Eisenhower we did win the war.