Supreme Commander (58 page)

Eisenhower meanwhile sent a stinging letter to Patton. He warned that the incident was filled with “drastic potentialities” and said he was not so upset at the press reaction as at “the implication that you simply will not guard your tongue.… I have warned you time and again against your impulsiveness in action and speech and have flatly instructed you to say nothing that could possibly be misinterpreted.…” Eisenhower said he was forced to doubt Patton’s “all-round judgment, so essential in high military position.” He was waiting for word from Marshall before acting, but warned that if Patton in the meantime did anything that in any way embarrassed the War Department or SHAEF, “I will relieve you instantly from command.”
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On April 30 Smith called Patton and ordered him to report to Eisenhower the next day. Eisenhower had, in the meantime, received Marshall’s
cable giving him the responsibility, and had all but decided to send Patton home. “I will relieve him,” Eisenhower told Marshall, “unless some new and unforseen information should be developed in the case.” He thought Courtney Hodges would do as well commanding the Third Army, and Hodges had the great advantage of not getting his superiors in trouble. Like many soldiers, Eisenhower admired Patton’s dash and daring, but he had about given up on Patton. “After a year and a half of working with him it appears hopeless to expect that he will ever completely overcome his lifelong habit of posing and of self-dramatization which causes him to break out in these extraordinary ways.”
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Marshall told Eisenhower to do what he thought best. “The decision is exclusively yours,” the Chief said. “Do not consider War Department position in the matter. Consider only OVERLORD and your own heavy burden of responsibility for its success. Everything else is of minor importance.”
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At 11
A.M
. on May 1, Eisenhower met with Patton. An old hand at getting out of a fix, Patton let out all the stops. He was plunged into despair, said he felt like death, but he would fight if “they” would let him. He dramatically offered to resign his commission to save his old friend from embarrassment. To Eisenhower, he seemed on the verge of tears. “His remorse was very great,” Eisenhower later recalled, not only for the trouble he had caused but because, Patton abjectly confessed, he had criticized Eisenhower to his aides when he thought Eisenhower was going to relieve him. The outpouring of emotion made Eisenhower slightly uncomfortable, and he did not really want Patton on his knees begging. He ended the interview.

For the next two days Eisenhower mulled it over. As he cooled off, he found it more and more difficult to imagine going onto the Continent and engaging the German Army without George Patton at his side. He finally sent Patton a telegram informing him that he would stay on. Patton celebrated with a drink, then sent a sentimental letter to Eisenhower, assuring the Supreme Commander of his unflinching loyalty and eternal gratitude. To his diary he confessed that his retention “is not the result of an accident”; rather, it was “the work of God.”
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Butcher, a more or less objective witness to the Eisenhower-Patton relationship, was never as taken in by Patton as Eisenhower was. He noted that Patton “is a master of flattery and succeeds in turning any difference of views with Ike into a deferential acquiescence to the views of the Supreme Commander.”
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But if Butcher saw something that Eisenhower missed, there was a reverse side to the coin. Patton bragged
that he was tolerated as an erratic genius because he was considered indispensable, and he was right. The very qualities that made him a great actor also made him a great commander, and Eisenhower knew it. “You owe us some victories,” Eisenhower told Patton when the incident was closed. “Pay off and the world will deem me a wise man.”
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Throughout the period of planning OVERLORD, Eisenhower was constantly forced to turn his attention away from the more substantial issues to concentrate, however briefly, on smaller incidents like the Patton case. Just living in London caused constant interruptions, because the Prime Minister, the American ambassador, and other officials felt free to call him at any hour. He sent his British aide, Lieutenant Colonel James Gault, out into the countryside to find him a more suitable, remote home. Gault selected a large mansion in Kingston Hill that General Eaker had been using. But it was much too grand for Eisenhower, and when he discovered that Tedder and his wife were living in Telegraph Cottage, he persuaded Tedder to switch homes. The Supreme Commander thus had the least pretentious home of any general officer in the U.K., but Eisenhower was happy, for at Telegraph he could work, think, relax, play golf, and read Westerns without being interrupted.
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Eisenhower also insisted on moving SHAEF out of 20 Grosvenor Square in London. The new site, in Bushey Park near Kingston, code name Widewing, was a tented, camouflaged area. Having all the staff together in one place helped build up the team concept on which Eisenhower insisted; a nice touch of international unity was added by serving coffee in the morning break and tea in the afternoon.
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Unity was, as always, a problem. In late January the First Sea Lord, Eisenhower’s old friend Admiral Cunningham, was upset by the methods some American staff officers at SHAEF had used to get information from the Royal Navy. Both Eisenhower and Smith saw Cunningham and apologized, so that “everything is serene,” but Eisenhower knew that such incidents were bound to happen again and feared their bad effects. To avoid this, he made it a policy to take the blame for them himself. He asked Marshall to “please make it appear … that the mistake was made by me since I am always in a position to go and make a personal explanation or apology, even when I and my Headquarters may have had nothing to do with the case.” Eisenhower did not have to add that by taking the blame in all things he received a bonus—members of his staff could take a position without fear. Equally important was Eisenhower’s
belief that the best thing, by far, in such cases was to “apply salve instead of an irritant onto fancied hurts.”
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The behavior of American troops in Britain, as had been the case in the summer of 1942, had a direct effect on the alliance. Eisenhower turned most ETO problems over to his deputy for the theater, Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, who also commanded the Services of Supply, but from time to time he sent memoranda to the field commanders reminding them of their responsibilities. In a typical note, he told Lee to remind all officers to see to it that the troops did not drink excessively in public places, use loud or profane language, show any slovenliness in appearance, or be discourteous to British civilians. He stressed the need for road courtesy on the part of all drivers of U. S. Army cars.
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In another memorandum he told Lee to be especially watchful to see that “extravagance does not characterize the American Army in this Theater,” either in purchases in public places or in housing of officers.
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Lee himself, and SOS generally, posed some special problems. Lee was a martinet who had an overly exalted opinion of himself. It worked to his disadvantage both because he exhibited a strong religious fervor (Eisenhower compared him to Cromwell) and because as head of SOS he dispensed the material. Lee and his organization decided which division got the new rifles or machine guns, which general received a late-model luxury automobile for his personal use, etc. Since he had something akin to a supply sergeant’s attitude and handed out the equipment as if it were a personal gift, he was cordially hated. Field officers and enlisted men gave him a nickname based on his initials, J. C. H.—“Jesus Christ Himself,” they called him. Still, he was a man who got things done and was an effective administrator, so Eisenhower kept him on.

Lee was the cause of one of Eisenhower’s rare outbursts of anger against Marshall. When Eisenhower was in the United States in early January, Somervell had suggested that Lee be promoted to lieutenant general. Eisenhower guessed that Somervell wanted the promotion so that he could then argue that as Lee’s superior he, Somervell, ought to be promoted to full general. Eisenhower refused to make the recommendation, but in March he found that Lee had been promoted anyway. Eisenhower complained to Marshall, since there were supposed to be no promotions in ETO above the rank of lieutenant colonel without Eisenhower’s recommendation. Marshall sent a warm apology, saying he had assumed a recommendation had come from Eisenhower. He explained that he had moved Lee up because when Smith had been promoted to
lieutenant general, MacArthur insisted that his chief of staff, Richard K. Sutherland, also be promoted. Marshall wanted to promote others at the same level at the same time in order to dilute the effect of Sutherland’s promotion, and had seized upon Lee’s name. Lee had been the beneficiary of Army politics, and the situation represented no attempt on Marshall’s part to cut into Eisenhower’s authority as theater commander.
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Eisenhower often escaped the pettiness and politicking by going out into the field, where he would observe training exercises and afterward meet and talk with the troops. His ready grin, warm handshake, and sincere interest in the problems of the G.I.s and Tommies made him a popular figure. In the four months from February 1 to June 1 he visited twenty-six divisions, twenty-four airfields, five ships of war, and countless depots, shops, hospitals, and other installations.
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Bradley, Montgomery, Tedder, Spaatz, Patton, and the other commanders made similar visits.

Montgomery was best at that sort of thing. He would roar up in his jeep and, amid a cloud of dust, climb up on the hood. The troops were usually ramrod straight in formation around the vehicle. Montgomery would shout, “Break ranks and come close,” and the men would rush in upon the jeep. “Sit down,” Montgomery would order to the men’s great approval. “Take off your helmets so I can get a look at you.” He would then tell them that they were a fine-looking bunch, that it would be an honor to command them, and that no one wanted to get the war over with and get home more quickly than he did.

All the visits paid off. On the eve of D-Day Smith reported that the confidence of the troops in the high command was without parallel. Montgomery had managed to visit every American division in the U.K., and Smith said the G.I.s idolized him. They thought he was a friendly, genuine person without any traces of pomposity.
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Eisenhower’s own relations with his principal subordinates, men like Smith and Tedder, were excellent, and there was a warm friendliness in his relationship with the BCOS and Churchill. Indicative of the tone at SHAEF was a small dinner party Cunningham gave for Eisenhower in February. Only twelve Britishers, most of them senior officers at SHAEF, and Smith were present. They presented Eisenhower with a silver salver as a token of their esteem.

In making the presentation, Cunningham began by recalling the days of October 1942, when many of the men present first started to work under Eisenhower. They had all wondered what sort of a man he was. “It was not long before we discovered that our Commander was a man
of outstanding integrity,” Cunningham declared, “transparent honesty and frank almost to an embarrassing degree.… No one will dispute it when I say that no one man has done more to advance the Allied cause.” Eisenhower mumbled a reply. The next day he apologized to Cunningham for not being more eloquent but said that the gift itself, plus the admiral’s remarks, “came so nearly overwhelming me that my only recourse was to keep a very tight hold on myself.”
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The attitudes that Eisenhower insisted upon at SHAEF, and which he helped to bring about through his own bearing, were those of friendship, honesty, and hard work. He did not always get them, but he never quit trying. He had everyone “working like dogs,” he declared with some satisfaction in late March.
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As always, he insisted upon a positive outlook. “Our problems are seemingly intricate and difficult beyond belief,” he noted in April, but he refused to allow anyone even to hint that they would not be overcome.
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When Eisenhower visited Gerow, the corps commander began to complain that he could see no way to solve the problem of the underwater beach obstacles. After Gerow went on in a pessimistic vein for some time, Eisenhower stopped him and said he should be optimistic and cheerful. After all, he would have behind him the greatest fire power ever assembled on the face of the earth. On D-Day there would be six battleships, two monitors, twenty-one cruisers, and an untold number of destroyers pounding the German defenses. In addition there would be the greatest air force in history, plus rocket ships and army artillery firing from the landing craft. Gerow mumbled that he was just being realistic; Eisenhower grinned and told him to keep smiling.
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Eisenhower’s emphasis on the positive was deliberate play-acting. Privately, he was more worried than anyone else, but he never let his subordinates or his superiors in London and Washington know it. Once he explained his reasoning to Somervell. “As the big day approaches,” he wrote in early April, “tension grows and everybody gets more and more on edge. This time, because of the stakes involved, the atmosphere is probably more electric than ever before.” Under the circumstances, “a sense of humor and a great faith, or else a complete lack of imagination, are essential to sanity.”
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Eisenhower had a vivid imagination and he could conceive of all sorts of problems that might emerge. Unless they were situations over which he could exercise some kind of control, however, he never discussed them. It was in that spirit, with the emphasis on hard work and optimism, that Eisenhower and the SHAEF staff approached the great problems of OVERLORD.

Both during and after the war, Eisenhower often complained that men who had limited responsibilities, like Montgomery and Patton, came to conclusions that were narrow, hidebound, and mistaken. They thought of their own armies as the only one that really counted, their own fronts as the decisive ones, and felt that they should have all the supplies and reinforcements AFHQ or SHAEF had available. They never took into account the Supreme Commander’s greater over-all responsibilities or larger areas of interest. Much in the complaint was justified, as was the implication—that Eisenhower took the broader view.