His Father's Voice

THE BITTER WOODS by John S. D. Eisenhower. 506 pages. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $10.

The son of a military hero has his problems. Life has given him not only a father to cope with but a commanding officer--and in special cases, not only a commanding officer but a myth. The son has two main choices. He can go AWOL as if his very life depended on it. Or, like the aide-de-camp who is so regularly there that no one notices him, he can play the role of absolutely loyal subordinate.

Few sons have had as big a shadow to live in as John Sheldon Doud Eisenhower. Few sons have seemed so willing to live in that shadow. At 46, young Eisenhower's physical resemblance to his father is, at certain angles, uncanny, and his first book suggests that the son may be almost as much think-alike as lookalike.

The Bitter Woods is a reconstruction of one of the general's finest hours when, as Allied Supreme Commander, he met Hitler's final desperate offensive in the Ardennes forest and bloodily threw it back. As young Eisenhower writes of what came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge, the reader almost hears the father's voice in the slightly formal prose relieved by occasional flashes of good humor.

500 Trainloads. Like Ike, John Eisenhower, retired as a lieutenant colonel after almost 19 years in the Army, thinks first and last as a professional soldier. The Bitter Woods is laid out rather as if it were an exercise at a war college. The questions raised are practical, if not out-and-out tactical:

Why did Hitler feel compelled to launch an offensive at the time he did? Answer: megalomania, plus his dominant military instinct: the best defense is an offense.

Should Hitler have aimed for Antwerp, as he did, in a grandiose dream of rolling back the Allies into the sea ("another Dunkirk")? Answer: probably not. A limited offensive, as his generals advised, would have lessened the risks, though they soberly gave themselves only a one-in-ten chance.

On the other side of the lines, why were the Allies so slow to spot the buildup? How did 500 trainloads of supplies cross the Rhine undetected? Answer: intelligence officers, like everybody else, tend to see only what they are looking for, and they were convinced that the Germans were on the defensive for good.

The judgment Eisenhower arrives at is a kind of professional soldier's consensus: 1) The Germans did all they could and then some, and in the end brought off a small military miracle: "a beaten and demoralized army that was still fighting." 2) The Allies, given their two-to-one power advantage, would have had to blunder badly to lose.

Holdup Bait. Young Eisenhower, who was graduated from West Point the day of the Normandy invasion and who spent his graduation leave in Father's headquarters, has not only pored over the documents but revisited the battlefields. He has interviewed soldiers from both sides and all echelons, from squad leaders up to Field Marshal Montgomery. For the human or Willie-and-Joe side of war, though, the reader will still have to go to the likes of Cornelius Ryan (The Last Battle). Eisenhower earned a master's degree in English from Columbia, while his father was university president, with a thesis on The Soldier as a Character in Elizabethan Drama. But no Pistols or Fluellens emerge here.

Occasionally Ike is shown in closeup, discussing the Ardennes front with Omar Bradley, for instance, with the "easy informality of two men who had played football together." Bradley sat slumped on a couch, holding an oversize pointer "like a fishing rod between his knees." Rather uncharacteristically, one young Ike anecdote does slip in. Back in the early 1920s, when they were bored peacetime soldiers at Fort Meade, Ike and George Patton used to drive back and forth at night along a lonely road where holdups were known to occur. Armed to the teeth, they offered themselves as bait--but in vain.

At other points, as in his treatment of Hitler and even Montgomery ("particularly vociferous--even troublesome"), Eisenhower half develops an essay on military will and the fanatic. But the exaltation and the madness of war are beyond John Eisenhower. What remains is the factual and therefore finally unreal record of rational men doing a skilled job according to the best professional standards. The Bitter Woods has its well-authenticated alarums, but the sound that the reader finally hears is that of chalk on the blackboard.

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