Ike & Men

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One day last spring General George C. Marshall summoned Dwight David ("Ike") Eisenhower to his office and said to him: "You're going over to command the European divisions. When can you leave?" Eisenhower's blue eyes widened. "Tomorrow morning," he gulped.

U.S. troops were already arriving in the United Kingdom in a stream that steadily grew bigger. Eisenhower arrived in London on June 24. Less than five months later he led his army into combat.

It was a tough summer for Eisenhower and his staff, quartered in a neighborhood of hotels and flats in London, on a square dubbed "Eisenhower Platz." The job of preparing this U.S. Army for an invasion was no sinecure. The E.T.O. (European Theater of Operations), official tag for the 1942 A.E.F., was an amateur army of mechanics, salesmen, bartenders, boxers, bond salesmen, cowboys, lawyers. How many there were was always a guarded secret, but convoys dumped thousands upon thousands on Britain's shores. They had learned something about tactics in maneuvers back home, but they were still far from ready for combat. Their officers sent them slogging on forced marches through the hills of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, put them on iron rations, made them practice under actual gunfire. Booted parachute troops dropped from planes. Rangers practiced landing assaults and commando-style mayhem. A few of them went with the Canadians to Dieppe.

Early in August Major General Mark Clark, in charge of ground troops, figured that his troops could use another six months of training but that the time might be "considerably" shortened.

Training was not the only problem for Eisenhower and his staff. A big army of raw soldiers who had not yet learned all about discipline, who were spoiling for a fight, who were homesick, young and frequently rowdy, posed a problem in itself.

In their pockets this week U.S. soldiers carried written instructions on how to behave in Morocco, where women must never be spoken to, no matter how courteously, no matter what the pretext. Said the orders: "Regarding Moslem women, you must put aside all your own preconceived notions and ideas. You must remember, your conduct in this matter may decide the fate of the campaign." U.S. boys from Pleasant Valley, Spencerville and The Bronx were discovering that soldiering had a lot of complications to it that no one had ever told them about at home.

Abilene to Tizi-Ouzou. Commander of this hard, tough, if slightly bewildered army, undertaking the greatest military invasion in the history of the U.S., is Texas-born, Kansas-bred. Fourteen months ago, big, powerful Ike Eisenhower was only a colonel. Forty years ago, he was tending his old man's chickens in Abilene, Kans. This week he was in command of a hatful of crack U.S. generals, at least one admiral and all the expedition's allied ground, sea and air units. Under his shrewd, blue eyes was a country bristling with such names as Tizi-Ouzou, Bougie and Ksar es-Souk, steeped in an ancient, bloody history written around such figures as Hannibal and Hamilcar.

But the fact of the matter is that both the strange and ancient names are as familiar to corn-fed Ike Eisenhower as Wichita and John Brown. To the student of military history that he is, Hannibal is an open textbook. To Lieut. General Eisenhower, who for months had been poring over maps, even Tizi-Ouzou is well known.

When he was a boy in Kansas, Ike picked his future. Five other brothers (there were no sisters) became: the vice president of a trust company, a lawyer, a druggist, an electrical engineer, a journalist (Milton, now Elmer Davis' chief assistant in OWI). But out of this peaceful Midwestern family, Ike emerged as a soldier.

There was nothing about the Eisenhower tradition to suggest this choice. In a dim past the Eisenhowers were Swiss and the name was Eisenhauer. Ike's father and mother met at a small religious college in Kansas, married and raised their brood of boys. Mother Eisenhower still lives in the old white house in Abilene.

Ike went to West Point. There he got good marks in hydraulics, history and steam heat, broke his leg playing football, became a gymnast and performed giant swings. Then he went to Texas to join the 19th Infantry, met and married a Denver girl named Mamie Doud.

In World War I he served as a lieutenant colonel at the tank-training center in Pennsylvania. He would have liked to join the Air Corps but Mamie Eisenhower had objected. The war was scarcely over when Colonel Eisenhower became convinced that a new world conflict was brewing and he set himself to studying modern warfare with the assiduity with which some men study storms, trying to figure out what is coming so that they can handle it.

Off & on for the next 15 years he applied himself in officers' schools, became known respectfully as a "brain" in the Army and a top-drawer junior officer. When Douglas MacArthur became Chief of Staff, Eisenhower for a time was his aide. Mechanization was a fetish with MacArthur, and so it was with Eisenhower. He was a tank man.

When MacArthur went to the Philippines, Eisenhower went with him. There he learned to fly and got a pilot's license. For his administrative work he earned the admiration of Manuel Quezon, who subsequently pinned a D.S.C. of the Philippines on him. But it was when he came back to the U.S. in 1940 that the hard-working Kansan began to zip.

Though the friendly Eisenhower was well liked, he shot ahead on the basis of his ability as a tactician and staff man. That ability was demonstrated at maneuvers in the fall of 1941, when, as chief of staff of the Third Army he helped to plan the operations of 220,000 troops. Eisenhower was then elevated to the temporary rank of brigadier general. Five days after Pearl Harbor he was made chief of the War Plans Division of the General Staff, later the Operations Division in the reorganized Army. As such he laid out with General Marshall the whole global design of attack and defense.

Eisenhower was one of the first to start talking of a second front. He submitted details for operations that impressed his superiors. That might have been one reason why Eisenhower was picked for his present post. Obviously the War Department had long had its eye on him. Said Ike: "Oh, I guess somebody must have told General Marshall that I was a hot shot."

The Young Men. Eisenhower is a young general (52), and under him, in vital points of command, are young men. Youngest is 45-year-old Brigadier General James Harold Doolittle, the weather-beaten little man who led U.S. bombers over Tokyo and won a Congressional Medal of Honor for his exploit. Daredevil flyer, Jimmy Doolittle has a long list of aviation "firsts." He was first to span the continent in a single day, first Army pilot to do the hazardous outside loop, first to try an experimental kind of blind flight. Jimmy Doolittle is in command of Eisenhower's air force.

Deputy commander of the expedition is Major General Mark Wayne Clark, 46. A graduate of West Point, tall, poker-stiff Mark Clark fought in France in World War I, is known as a strict disciplinarian and a thoroughgoing soldier. His creed: every U.S. fighting man should be taught to fight with any weapon, and from a tank, a truck, a boat or on foot--especially on foot. Clark's grouse is that the army is becoming road-bound. Offensive-minded, he has talked often and pointedly about a second front. "The sooner the better," he summed it up. "We are not here to sit on our back ends."

In command of the operations against the west African coast is roaring, gimlet-eyed Major General George Smith ("Georgie") Patton, 57. A hell-for-leather cavalryman before World War I, Patton emerged finally as chief of the I Corps of the Armored Force. Behind his back he is known to his men as "Flash Gordon" because of the helmet he wears and the grim face he sticks out of a turret as he bounces hell-for-leather across country in his tank. Succinct and profane, Patton once asked a private what he was shooting at during maneuvers. "A concealed machine gun, sir," said the private. "That's not a machine gun," Patton roared. "It's a dirty Nazi bastard."

Chief of the landing operations at Oran was quiet, 58-year-old Major General Lloyd R. Fredendall, expert at military details. During World War I he served as a staff assistant to General John J. Pershing. His last job before this one was as chief of the XI Army Corps, at Chicago.

Boss of the attack on France's Algiers was a rangy man with a face, according to his friends, that looks as though it was carved by a hatchet: Major General Charles W. Ryder, 50. He was a hero of World War I. As if with foresight the Republic of France then pinned the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre with palm on "Doc" Ryder.

Commander of the U.S. invasion fleet: 55-year-old Rear Admiral Henry Kent Hewitt, who won the Navy Cross for distinguished service during World War I. He has been commander of a destroyer division, was skipper of the cruiser Indianapolis in 1936 when it took President Roosevelt to South America.

Soon the world would know better the mettle of Ike Eisenhower and his men.

Simultaneously with the attacks on west and north Africa came word that Lieut. General Frank Maxwell Andrews had been sent from the Caribbean Defense Command to command U.S. forces in the Middle East. Air-minded Andy Andrews, who bagged several records for long-distance flying, once remarked: "I don't want to be one of those generals who die in bed." His choice for the command of U.S. forces mobilizing in Egypt indicated the strategic conception of the operations last week. The U.S. and Britain were determined to invest the whole African coast for offense.

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