I’ve been gradually listening to Eisenhower in War and Peace as an audio book. The author, Jean Edward Smith, is a professor of political science.
It turns out that the Eisenhower family confirms the thesis regarding a genetic basis for family success put forward in The Son Also Rises. The Eisenhower boys were descended from successful German immigrants on both maternal and paternal sides. Their father, however, was unsuccessful as a provider and as a father, providing virtually no emotional or financial assistance. Yet, according to the book, all of the Eisenhower brothers achieved significant career success. (The Son Also Rises suggests that an unsuccessful family will have the occasional outlier who is successful and that a successful family will have the occasional outlier, e.g., Eisenhower’s father, who is unsuccessful, but that a next generation is likely to achieve more in line with the family mean.)
Are you dismayed that our current crop of politicians is dishonest if not always outright corrupt? The author, who is sympathetic to both his subject and to FDR, characterizes Roosevelt as a habitual “dissembler” and Eisenhower as, while ostentatiously taking “buck stops here” responsibility for small mistakes, pinning the blame for his biggest mistakes on others by rewriting (military) history with some lies built in. Upset at the lack of decorum during campaigns? Eisenhower’s opponents spread rumors that he was Jewish and chanted “Ike the Kike”. Adlai Stevenson, Ike’s opponent, had been sued by his wife in 1949, thus making him the first divorced presidential candidate. This opened the door to opponents insinuating that Stevenson was homosexual. (The ex-wife went on to sue her mother in 1958 in order to obtain possession of a lakefront mansion.) Harry S. Truman and Robert A. Taft are the only politicians who are portrayed as having complete integrity. One anti-partisan act by Truman described in this book is the destruction of a letter from George C. Marshall to Eisenhower that revealed the affair with Kay Summersby (see below).
The book describes nearly all of the senior American military officers stationed in Europe as having had local sweethearts and little attempt was made to disguise these sexual relationships. Eisenhower’s was Kay Summersby, a source of some gossip back in D.C. Divorce was a career-ender, however, so these women were generally abandoned when it was time to return home to the U.S. and the wife. This was prior to the era of statutory cash profits for out-of-wedlock children (quite limited even today in most of Europe) and the women behaved in apparent accordance with the economic incentives of the day, not producing any children despite the comparatively primitive nature of contraception at the time.
When these American officers were not having sex with their mistresses (sometimes in luxurious Mediterranean villas on 5-day vacations from the war) they turned their attention to matters military. The standard story here seems to be that we were incompetent in the early parts of the war, e.g., getting beaten by heavily outnumbered German forces in North Africa (and even French forces, who refrained from fighting the Germans, nearly beat us), but that we learned to fight. This book says that our senior generals, including Eisenhower, never learned anything about fighting other than “Let British officers plan the actual fighting.” According to the book, with the exception of those made by George Patton, in-the-field decisions by American generals were almost always disastrous. This was true during the Normandy invasion, for example, when the American-led assault on Omaha beach was nearly thrown back while the Canadian- and British-led attacks on other beaches went more smoothly. Patton summarized his friend Eisenhower’s qualities with “I hope he makes a better president than he was a general.”
According to this biographer, Eisenhower is responsible for the division of Germany. Under British command the ground war was basically won in the fall of 1944. The Germans expected that any day the Allies would concentrate their forces, punch through the German lines, and drive to Berlin. This didn’t happen because Eisenhower wanted to assume battlefield glory for himself. He took over command and applied the American doctrine of “attack on a wide front,” which was regarded as inappropriate in modern warfare by British, French, and German generals. Smith says that this extended the war by at least six months and cost the Allies 500,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. It also gave the Russians time to conquer eastern Germany and Berlin. It gave the Germans time to kill 100,000+ Jews in various death camps (see deaths-by-year chart in Wikipedia).
If this author is correct, the American military is essentially unable to learn from its mistakes and, even with a 10:1 advantage in soldiers and equipment, is at risk of losing any fight.
[Note that Jean Edward Smith describes Eisenhower as being exceptionally competent at high-level coordination and some big picture stuff. As a military officer he opposed the decision to use atomic weapons against Japan, which he considered to have been very nearly defeated via conventional means. As President he twice rejected advice from subordinates to use nuclear weapons (against China and Vietnam). Eisenhower correctly predicted that the U.S. could not maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons technology and favored giving all nations equal access to such technology. (i.e., he failed to foresee that states such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Syria, would lose central government control and thus that their military weapons would fall into the hands of non-state groups). As president of Columbia University, a position in which he exerted little effort, he was an advocate for open debate (proponents of speech limits then were trying to exclude Communist points of view). One big area where the jury may never come back is whether Eisenhower was correct to favor maintaining a U.S. military presence all around the world and fighting the anti-Communist fight. His principal Republican opponent, Robert A. Taft, advocated a military and foreign policy more like China’s today: trade with everyone, restrict military activities to one’s immediate neighborhood. Presumably there have been some benefits to us from the World Police role, but can they offset the costs of the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars?]
Readers: Has our military gotten a lot better at fighting and at learning since World War II? Or does our track record since then show that we still aren’t the military geniuses we imagine ourselves to be? (Or we do correctly perceive our incompetence and inefficiency and therefore spend way more than anyone else in order to avoid having Mexico and Canada take us over?)
From Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/bruce.mchenry/posts/10154836292672571?pnref=story
Philip Greenspun started blogging about twenty years ago. His writing was my first real inspiration to learn to write properly myself. (We both went to MIT when MIT still did not have a core writing requirement.)
While historical, this post is as fresh as ever. Here’s the excerpt that made me laugh:
The book describes nearly all of the senior American military officers stationed in Europe as having had local sweethearts and little attempt was made to disguise these sexual relationships. Eisenhower’s was Kay Summersby, a source of some gossip back in D.C. Divorce was a career-ender, however, so these women were generally abandoned when it was time to return home to the U.S. and the wife. This was prior to the era of statutory cash profits for out-of-wedlock children (quite limited even today in most of Europe) and the women behaved in apparent accordance with the economic incentives of the day, not producing any children despite the comparatively primitive nature of contraception at the time. When these American officers were not having sex with their mistresses (sometimes in luxurious Mediterranean villas on 5-day vacations from the war) they turned their attention to matters military. The standard story here seems to be that we were incompetent in the early parts of the war, e.g., getting beaten by heavily outnumbered German forces in North Africa (and even French forces, who refrained from fighting the Germans, nearly beat us), but that we learned to fight. This book says that our senior generals, including Eisenhower, never learned anything about fighting other than “Let British officers plan the actual fighting.” According to the book, with the exception of those made by George Patton, in-the-field decisions by American generals were almost always disastrous. This was true during the Normandy invasion, for example, when the American-led assault on Omaha beach was nearly thrown back while the Canadian- and British-led attacks on other beaches went more smoothly. Patton summarized his friend Eisenhower’s qualities with “I hope he makes a better president than he was a general.”
From Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/bruce.mchenry/posts/10154836292672571?pnref=story
Philip Greenspun started blogging about twenty years ago. His writing was my first real inspiration to learn to write properly myself. (We both went to MIT when MIT still did not have a core writing requirement.)
While historical, this post is as fresh as ever. The excerpt that made me laugh were the two paragraphs that started with, “The book describes nearly all of the senior American military officers stationed in Europe as having had local sweethearts…” (Not to be pedantic, but I tried to post the whole quote for ease of scanning but an error message informed me that I was repeating myself. I wasn’t, and a lot of people skip to the comments looking for highlights so…)
Phil, while your summary of the book may be correct. (I did not read the book and have no plans to.) Your selective summary leaves the reader with a different understanding of Smith’s evaluation than Smith’s own words here:
Jean Edward Smith: 2012 National Book Festival —
Start at time 6:05:
1. “Eisenhower, one of the most underrated figures in American history.”
2. “FDR’s first choice to command D-Day invasion (of Europe).”
3. “Eisenhower’s generalship was incomparable.”
More glowing compliments….
===========
Military Track Record
President Of The United States gives the orders. Military executes. U.S. military is best in the world. And has been since WWII. Room for improvement? Yes. But war is hard.
===========
fyi… If anyone asks, it was Russia that “won WWII.” US and allies practiced on the “soft underbelly of Europe,” while Russia killed millions of Germans. And lost many millions of Russian soldiers. This was a deliberate strategy of the allies and Stalin knew it. Let Russia bleed Germany before we invade. Russia earned East Germany and the Eastern Bloc. Bought and paid for with Russian blood. There was no way Eisenhower –or anyone else– was going to deny Stalin’s Russia its war booty.
As noted above, like most biographers Smith admires his subject. And Smith chronicles Eisenhower’s many achievements as president, e.g., keeping us out of a bunch of wars, desegregating everything touched by the Federal government and appointing the Justice behind the Supreme Court’s 1954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education , balancing the federal budget by resisting calls to spend a lot of extra money on various things (but spending freely on the Interstates, which are actually useful).
Smith seems to divide “generalship” into two categories: Supreme Commander strategic stuff; Tactical Commander where to put the chess pieces stuff. He characterizes Eisenhower as a successful Supreme Commander and a terrible Tactical Commander (but no worse than any other American general except Patton).
I always thought that Stalin and Roosevelt divided Europe (and Germany) at Yalta in February 1945 and that’s why Eisenhower stopped without reaching Berlin. Roosevelt was a gentlemen, he wanted to keep his word. 😀
The U.S. and the Axis powers were in very different strategic situations. The US was still giving people draft deferrments for being deaf in one ear or flat-footed. Germany was sending children into battle because they didn’t have enough adults who could hold a gun. There was a shortage of certain industrial metals in the US. In Germany and Japan people were starving in the streets.
From the US perspective, we wanted to win the war without losing too many men. The US preference for “attacking on a wide front” was probably to avoid getting encircled and wiped out– something which is a very real possibility if your supply lines get overstretched. Why spend American blood just to win the war a little faster? Time was obviously on our side, and we could just wear down the Axis powers.
With hindsight we can see that getting to Berlin earlier might have prevented a lot of grief. It’s clear that we probably could have moved the Iron Curtain to the East, at least a little bit, by speeding up our advance. But at the time, nobody expected there to even be an Iron Curtain. At the time, the USSR was our ally and “Joe” Stalin seemed like a pretty OK guy. The great and the good of Hollywood were still sympathetic to the Communist cause– often openly members of Communist organizations. Some Americans got tours of the USSR where it was presented as a workers’ paradise.
It wasn’t until after the war that Communism became a dirty word in the US. And it wasn’t until at least the 60s or 70s that word began leaking out of Communist atrocities– millions starved in disastrous agricultural programs, worked to death in gulags, shot after show trials. In the 1940s this was all quite unknown– very little information got into or out of Russia at the time. In a hyper-connected world, it’s easy to forget how slowly news travelled in the old days. If the USSR was good at anything, it was propaganda and burnishing its own image.
Former KKK member Harry Truman, a paragon of integrity?
Inept or misguided as they may have been, these men (sorry, ladies) won that truly global war in and out by unconditional surrender in 69 months. The relative efficacy of today’s military and civilian leadership is pretty obvious.
Reach for your globe and take a close look at Afghanistan, then consider how we could be there 15 years to such little effect.
I don’t know whether Smith is an Anglophile or something, but the idea that the British won the war despite the Americans holding them back from an early victory is laughable. Britain was like the well bred cousin who has fallen on hard times – he remembers the glory days when his family was much richer and better educated than yours, but nowadays he’s living in a rented condo and you’ve got the mega-mansion and the summer house.
Jackie: Smith doesn’t downplay the importance of American manufacturing capacity and the American wealth that made that possible. The U.S. built the landing craft that enabled the troops to get to the beaches at Normandy, for example, and Smith credits Ike with making sure that the air, land, and sea forces were coordinated. But he says that the same landing craft were used in different ways under different commands. The British and the Canadians drove the big ships close to the beach and sent the troops on a comparatively short ride in the small landing craft so that they weren’t seasick and tired when they hit the beach. The Americans wanted to protect the big ships from coastal guns so made the troops endure a three-hour ride in the small boats before hitting the beach. The Americans also skimped on naval bombardment of Omaha Beach. Those two factors are principally what Smith says contributed to the near-disaster at Omaha under U.S. command (whereas the British- and Canadian-organized beach landings went smoothly).
This is a hilarious post and actually mostly correct, but it gets one important thing incorrect, so that is what I will address.
The Allied forces on the western front (Americans, Canadians, British, and French) couldn’t have gotten to Berlin in 1944 or beaten the Soviets there. This is brought up in popular history alot, and keeps getting debunked by historians.
There are the issues that the agreements on the division of Europe, which were pretty much made in 1943 and 1944, promised the Soviets, who in fact had done most of the fighting, that they would get to capture Berlin (with part of the city later given to the western Allies), so actually having American soldiers fighting their way into the city would have been completely pointless. There is also the issue, as one of the other commentators pointed out, that the Americans were in the position of being pretty much guaranteed to win the war unless they did something really risky that backfired, so the generally idea was to play it safe, and the broad front strategy fit in with that.
But the critical problem was logistics. Van Crevald’s book “Supplying War” is still the go to book on this. Since the railroads and ports took time to be repaired as they were captured, essentially supplies had to be trucked from the beaches of Normandy until well into 1944. Since operating the trucks themselves requires supplies, there is a limit to how far modern armies can go relying exclusively on truck transport, which we know well since the historical World War 2 armies on both sides ran into it repeatedly. The Allies in the West literally ran out of gas in September 1944. The Red Army in the East, which was under competent and ruthless direction, stalled about the same time for the same reason.
To address Jackie’s point, “the British did the planning” remark is an exaggeration, but this was pretty much the case. The overall strategic plan was produced by Brooke and Churchill, and Normandy was planned and directed by Montgomery and some earlier British generals. The British staffs and American staffs intertwined at the most senior levels, and the planning was pretty much left to the British, who had more experience.
But given the limitations I’ve addressed, Ike did pretty well.
Well said, Ed.