Eisenhower on War

After his tumultuous European receptions (see above), "Ike" Eisenhower invited correspondents in for a chat. For nearly an hour he stood, ramrod straight, answering all questions. Like a coach holding a post-mortem on a football game, he explained some plays, straightened out some disputed points.

Power Compounded. There was no such thing in Europe as a separate air war, ground war, sea war, logistic war, said Ike. The war had been an integration of all types of power. "When you put sea, ground and air together the result you get is not the sum of their separate powers. You multiply their power rather than add."

The night he worried most: Nov. 7, 1942, when the Allies invaded North Africa. "I'll tell you that whenever you attack you have got dreams, then you have got hopes, then you have got expectations and then you have got just what you have got to get.. . . One of our great hopes was that the French fleet would sail out of Toulon and say, 'Hello, come on. Let's have a good time.' " (The French fleet had done nothing of the kind.)

If the Germans had thrown the Allies back in the sea at Anzio, said Ike, "it would have been a very, very sad thing . . . [but] I never considered it, because I do not ever let my mind think upon it that way."

Soul-Shaking Decision. General Ike was asked if the Normandy invasion could have been postponed again (bad weather had already delayed the take-off two days). Said he: "We would have had to postpone it for a minimum of twelve days. . . . The prospect of trying to hold up that mighty thing was bad." The decision to go ahead was one of his hardest decisions--"a little soul-shaking, too."

As to the debate on how close the Ger mans came to reversing the tide of war in the Ardennes breakthrough, General Ike said flatly: the professional German soldiers knew the jig was up on the third day of the breakthrough. On that day von Rundstedt found out "he could not go where he intended" (i.e., Liege).

Rommel No Lee. Appraising the opposition, General Ike called Rundstedt "the most accomplished soldier we met." Rommel was "bold and courageous, but he was not a Lee or Marlborough or anything like that." The German professionals did not "respect Hitler's strategic brain very highly," but Hitler ran the whole show during all of 1943.

As to why the Germans kept on fighting. General Ike commented: "I have searched and searched to find their reason for prolonging the agony." He finally decided there were two reasons: Hitler, with his determination to stay on, and the "one hope" that the Allies would split apart. "They had that desperate hope, unquestionably. Otherwise there was no sense in taking the last month of pounding."

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