The View From Supreme Command Eisenhower: At War 1943-1945 by David Eisenhower Random House; 977 pages; $29.95

By Paul Gray

The public first noticed him as Ike's apple-cheeked grandson and occasional fishing partner, the boy whose name was given to the presidential retreat in Maryland. Years later, David Eisenhower surfaced as the husband of Julie Nixon and a member of the tight family circle that drew around his father-in-law during the siege of Watergate. Given the tempers of those times, the young man seemed hopelessly out of it: clean-cut, unashamed of his hitch as a Navy officer, and about as relevant to the presumptive radicalizing of America as Howdy Doody. When Nixon resigned in 1974, David faded from view again. Few could have predicted that he would reappear as the author of a massive and major history of his grandfather's role in World War II.

For that is what has happened. The fame of its subject and, to a lesser extent, its writer practically guarantees best-sellerdom, but Eisenhower: At War 1943-1945 hardly qualifies as a popularized book. Those seeking scandals or secrets will be disappointed. Author Eisenhower notes, for example, rumors of a wartime affair between Ike and his chauffeur-secretary Kay Summersby. The matter is then quickly dropped: "Eisenhower was under tremendous pressures and in need of company. Beyond this, the truth was known only by them, and both are gone." Instead of titillating, David is interested in seeing the war through his grandfather's eyes. The question is unstated but visible on every page: What did Ike know and when did he know it?

The answer offers an absorbing new way of looking at events that have long since been submerged in myth and hindsight. In 1943, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, his mission seemed well-nigh impossible. Not only did he have to create an effective means of commanding a mixture of U.S. and British armed services, but he was also compelled to walk a narrow line between the differing objectives promoted by Roosevelt and Churchill. The decision to launch a huge invasion of Nazi-occupied France, on which the Allies uneasily agreed, implied a shifting of resources from the offensive in Italy, which the British vehemently opposed.

The question of manpower allocations was not academic: "It is essential to emphasize that Eisenhower's Allied army, though backed by tremendous air superiority, was vastly outnumbered by the German army as a whole." In order to establish a firm western battle line in Europe, the Allies needed a coordinated assault by the Red Army in the east. "Without a resurgent Russian front an Allied invasion of Europe would have been impossible."

Obviously, the political and strategic constraints placed on Eisenhower dictated the way he waged the campaign. But never before have these problems been spelled out in such day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour detail. The D-day Normandy invasion of June 6, 1944, code named OVERLOAD, was plagued by foul weather, shortages and doubt up to the moment that Ike said, "O.K., we'll go." Churchill called this operation "undoubtedly the most complicated and difficult that has ever taken place," which sounds like understatement in the context of David Eisenhower's meticulous reconstruction of the event.

The rest of Ike's European campaign proved controversial then and has been ever since. Critics charged that he was too deferential to the British, % particularly to the flamboyant Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. General George Patton complained to his diary: "Monty does what he pleases and Ike says 'yes, sir.' " A more serious complaint: Eisenhower's conservative "broad front" invasion of Germany delayed until 1945 a victory that might have been grasped earlier with a quick strike on Berlin. Such caution, the argument runs, ceded much of Eastern Europe to Soviet domination.

The author does not directly refute such accusations but defends his grandfather by setting out the facts known to Eisenhower at moments of decision. Ike felt throughout that he had been entrusted solely with a military objective. What he called his "single-minded devotion to the one cause of winning the war" had enormous consequences. Among them, David argues, was the inevitable entry of his grandfather into American politics, in order to manage the vast political repercussions of his battlefield decisions.

That story awaits the two additional volumes the author has planned on Ike's years in the White House. The first step in this ambitious trilogy has its flaws. It is often repetitious and padded with material beyond or peripheral to Ike's knowledge at the time; the three-power conferences at Tehran and Yalta, for example, are rehearsed in great detail, even though Eisenhower did not attend either one. As a writer, David Eisenhower displays some of the qualities that won Ike damning faint praise: caution, circumspection, patience, restraint. But the end result of such perseverance, like the outcome of the war, is victorious.