Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

The invasion had to have been launched then. It was simply not possible to delay it another month. Or, at the very least, it would have extraordinarily difficult.

As to the Avranches corridor, that merely exhibits the timidity.

If Ike had supported Patton full hilt, the Germans would have never been able to regroup on the Rhine and Germany would have collapsed before Christmas.

He wasn't a bad general. Montgomery would have been much, much worse. He just wasn't a Patton or Mainstein or a Slim.

After reading Montgomery's comments, two words come to mind: Market-Garden. Now there's some audacity.

In An Army at Dawn he comes across as very passive, allowing commanders to hang on much past the point where it was clear they were killing troops for no reason, and also willling to spend lives to avoid Diplomatic problems. But you can see him start to learn his lessons as the campaign went on.

I don't remember the specifics now, but a former history teacher of mine felt that Eisenhower, once President, was also quite fond of brinksmanship and risk taking.

That would also fit with your thesis.

From watching the movies on Patton and MacArthur, I came out not with extremely high opinion of Eisenhower. Maybe the movies were a bit biased.

At the same time, "audacity" is really not relevant to the business of generals. An "audacious general" -- how that does that sound?

I've seen the surprise the Germans achieved in the Ardennes described as an intelligence failure. By that time the Allies were so used to reading the Nazi's minds via Enigma intercepts that they ignored other indications and were suprised when the attack was not preceeded by radio transmissions. I don't know enough to judge whether this is correct myself, but it sounds plausible.

Read Carlos D'Este's new bio of Ike. D'Este is a fan of Ike, but he makes it clear that Ike hung on to mediocre commanders too long, that he never understood how mediocre some were (Bradley had primary responsibility for the Arennes sector but didn't figure out what was going for nearly a week after the German offensive started. Patton had it figure out immediately. That wasn't the first sign that Bradley wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer) and that Ike was pretty miserable during the Batttle of Normandy. At least until the breakout, which was not planned but happened more or less by chance.

BTW, my read is that the breakout at Avranches was pretty much a done deal by the time it got to Ike and that the stretching of supply lines was a fait accompli on the ground.

Alan K Henderson: good point. How the source can condemn Montgomery's "slowness" and then go on to describe his push for a narrow front strategy (eg in Market-Garden) is beyond me. It's important to remember that in June 1944, 2nd British and 1st Canadian Armies on the east were facing three times as many panzers as were Bradley and Patton on the west - hence the long delays in taking Caen; hence the breakout happening at Avranches rather than at Caen.

One point that some historians have brought out is that Ike was obsessed with logistics. This is not a bad thing in any general, especially one with 2500 mile long supply lines across a U-boat-infested ocean to worry about. But it meant that he felt his main job was simply to create a very large, very smooth conveyor on which the products of US military industry could be transported into contact with the Wehrmacht. Hence his continual choice of broad-front approaches: in autumn 1944 in the advance to the Rhine, and earlier in his support for the Dragoon (?) landings in southern France. A broad front meant more contact, and thus speeded up the attrition war which he was waging. Contrast people like Patton and Montgomery, who were either congenitally impatient or came from a different military tradition in which material superiority was always rare and always transient, meaning that manoeuvre was far more important than attrition.

1. Monty was jealous
2. At least Ike won big time
3. Much more so than the hapless twit in the White House now.

Brad,

Thanks for defending my sixth cousin three times removed. Funny, but my Dad the Democrat hated him.

Adrian

It seems silly on the face of it to blame Eisenhower for all the problems the US Army saw in their first major ground combat of WWII.

Liddell Hart in his "History of the Second World War" attributes the problems in Italy to a combination of reluctance in the US JCS & political snafu's (Chapter 27, especially pp. 470-471). He does not mention any judgement problems with Eisenhower.

Worrying primarily about politics, high-level logistics and strategy and mostly leaving the fighting to the generals closer to the front sounds to me like a pretty good job description for the Supreme Commander of an alliance.

Two words say it all -- Huertgen Forest

The decision to conduct the Battle of the Bulge as an operation to push the Germans back along a broad front, rather than to attempt to cut them off, and isolated them, by a thrust around to the German rear, is enough in my mind to indict Eisenhower as a poor battlefield strategist. Eisenhower's strategy -- and it was his strategy -- cost an enormous number of American lives, creating a meat grinder for infantry, and limited the number of Germans and the quantity of German material captured.

Gore Vidal on Ike :

"If elected in November," the Great Golfer read dutifully from a text plainly new to him. " I will go to ... Korea ?" The voice and choler rose on the word "Korea". No one told him about the pledge . But go to Korea he did, resentfully.

Of course, there is a difference between taking risks and taking worthwhile risks. The latter is a function of skill and courage; the former may merely be a product of incompetence. Overcoming an unnecessary risk in war is like taking an unnecesary finesse in bridge or hitting an unnecessary circus shot in basketball- it may look good to the average viewer, but the knowledgeable fan winces...

Thus the original criticizes Ike for lacking audacity in situations that called for [it], and IMO did so correctly.
(Which isn't to say that I wouldn't enjoy debating that question, just saying that I think you've misstated the case by turning the argument into whether Ike ever took risks at all...)

Wu

I heartily second otey's recommendation on Carlo D'Este's bio of Eisenhower. D'Este also wrote what to my knowledge is the best book on the Normandy campaign 'Decision in Normandy', which does a terrific job of detailing the tactical aspects of that campaign as well as point out the strategic considerations of both the Allies and the Germans.

FWIW, Montgomery was in fact a good general who knew what his men were capable of and what they weren't. The fact was that both he, Bradley and Eisenhower greatly underestimated the defensive tenacity of the Wehrmacht in the bocage of Normandy as well as around Caen.

Finally, the possibility of a lightning like thrust by Patton ending the war in 1944 was never plausible, as the stiff German resistance around the fortress of Metz and in Lorraine later proved.

Yeah, but Brad, all the audacious moves came AFTER North Africa and Italy. And to answer one of the posters - yeah, Market-Garden was pretty daggone audacious, but it was submitted to Ike by Monty in response to Ike's request for an "audacious" plan.

So, while some biographers and generals like Montgomery (in fact, most of the British Generals involved in the North African campaing) hold him in low regard through the early part of the war, the consensus quickly turns toward the positive near the end of the war.

And for all their contempt, with the exception of Monty's successes against Rommel before Torch, the English put choreographed some SPECTACULAR failures of their own devising in North Africa.

And really - was Ike's job to be Supreme Commander or was it to hold the Alliance together? I'm convinced that his most important mission was to keep the allies from flinging apart in so many disparate pieces.

"The invasion of North Africa, and especially the American defeat at Kasserine Pass, revealed that some of the criticism of Eisenhower was justified."

The Kasserine Pass revealed more important things than any personal deficiencies of Eisenhower. The U.S. National Guard division at Kasserine was not well trained nor well led. This would change after the battle.

The German commander was one of the greatest field commanders of all time, Erwin Rommel. Had Hitler placed more decision-making authority in his hands, 6 Jun 1944 might not be remembered the way it is today.

It is interesting to hear Walter Cronkeit discuss Ike in a recent interview on NPR. He mentions that he too took Ike to be slow, indecisive as a general and accepted the general wisdom that Ike was a "do nothing" president. He continues that it was not until doing an in-depth interview (weeklong) with Ike at his Gettysburg home and a later interview in 1962 at the D Day landing sites that he realized the depths of Eisenhower's character and intellect.
It seems his earlier views of Eisenhower grew from his own lack of knowledge of the man.
Interesting, isn't it? But then Cronkite belongs to a generation where journalists actually were in the trenches and foxholes instead of comfortably home punditing away on the latest press releases.

Here is Douglas MacArthur in the summer of 1956 on Dwight Eisenhower, admittedly at third hand:

"If Eisenhower is re-elected...it will be the greatest disaster in American history....He will go off to the golf courses and the trout streams...he will just disappear. There won't be any American government at all."

This is Cyrus Sulzberger quoting George Ball quoting MacArthur. Sulzberger further paraphrases Ball paraphrasing MacArthur:

...[MacArthur] knew Eisenhower well. Eisenhower had been an idle, useless major on his staff....

Sulzberger, C. L., "The Last of the Giants" [New York: Macmillan, 1970], p. 489

Seriously, generals are as bitchy as queers. They're insaenely competitive and almost never say anything good about a contemporary. And since everything military is high-stakes imperfect-information immediate-response-required stuff, it's always possible to say afterwards that some other approach would ahve been better.

D'Este's bio. of Ike should be worthwhile. Someone already mentioned his very good book on Normandy; he also wrote what is, so far as I can tell, the only really good biography of Patton (A Genius for War, currently out of print, I think).

With respect to audacity, who cares? All that matters is whether you win, and at what cost. Rumsfeld's Iraq strategy had audacity in spades and will, I suspect, go down as one of the great modern strategic screwups. The critical points about Eisenhower are that he: (1) arguably did more than anyone else to hold together what was at times an extremely fragile alliance; (2) had the organizational skills to coordinate massive gestures of force by said alliance; (3) learned from his mistakes.

As for what Gen. MacArthur thought: MacArthur rather to the right of Attila the Hun. He was to the right of Patton. MacArthur's (political) diapproval would probably have been worn by Ike as a badge of honor.

Taking MacArthur's word for anything political is the equivalent of evaluating the British monarchy on the basis of Lyndon Larouche's analyses. As a general, MacArthur was addicted to the spotlight, convinced of his own mission and prone to reckless measures that sometimes paid off (Inchon) and sometimes endangered everything he had done (crossing the Yalu). Not for nothing was he given the code name "Sarah" during WWII, a reference to the great actress Sarah Bernhardt.

His political judgment was not only incomparably worse, but, more particularly, always worse than Eisenhower's. Let's remember that it was Eisenhower, then MacArthur's staff officer, who urged MacArthur to show some caution in dealing with the Bonus Army in 1932. MacArthur would have none of it and proceeded to burn down the Bonus Army's tent encampment in Anacostia in direct disobedience of Hoover's orders.

Now that's the sort of audacity that we look for! Truman had to relieve the great man for the same sort of insubordination. While MacArthur may have been a skilled Administrator, as he was in post-war Japan, he could never have led a democratic state.

Eisenhower, in retrospect, looks better and better--the not-so-dumb President who, even if he pronounced nuclear "nukyular," had a deeper understanding of the risks of war and of the threat to democracy posed by the military-industrial complex than any of his successors. Good poker player too, although he switched to bridge when he became President. While the Vidal anecdote may be true, it doesn't close the book on the man.

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