(4 of 5)
The Runner-Up. Joseph Stalin, Man of 1942, who in that year had started to roll the Hitlerites back from the Caucasus oilfields, was also beginning to look a little different to many Americans in the dawn light of victory—or perhaps more like his pre-1941 self. After dealing Hitler one of his two heaviest defeats of the year, Stalin's central armies had stopped on the Vistula, while those on the flanks pursued secondary aims. Then followed the ill-timed martyrdom of General Bor and his heroic partisans in Warsaw; the Moscow-sponsored Government at Lublin; the methodical destruction of the London Polish Government. At Dumbarton Oaks, Russia's diplomats insisted that, in the framework of postwar security, no great power (e.g., Russia) should be disciplined without its consent.
Any sovereign nation may choose to drug itself with suspicion, cynicism, isolation, and history does not deny a great man his place because his aims and methods are objectionable. "History," someone has said, "is a record of events which ought not to have happened." But Joseph Stalin was not the Man of 1944.
Needed: An Eisenhower? In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met with considerable fanfare at Teheran. There, it seemed, the political and military guidance of the world for 1944 had been charted. As the year wore on, the luster of Teheran began to fade. There was a general cry for another meeting of the Big Three—but there was also a demand for an inter-Allied political command, modeled on the military structure of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, or on the inter-Allied command machinery with which Eisenhower had planned and carried out the greatest achievement of the year. The political world lacked an Eisenhower.
General Marshall had chosen Eisenhower for his brains, imagination and diplomacy when the Chief of Staff sent him first to Britain, then to Africa in 1942. In addition to his natural ability to get along with people, Eisenhower acquired the knack of hitting it off with other nationals, notably the British. In Africa his command structure was a complex but smooth-working mesh of U.S. and British officers, and he carried the same formula back to England when he was chosen to head the invasion. Of the six men on his Supreme Command, four were British.
The two Americans were Bradley, who helped Montgomery lay out the ground tactics, and Walter Bedell ("Beedle") Smith, a bulldog of a man who is perhaps the hardest-working officer in the U.S. Army. It was Beedle Smith who coordinated the entire invasion planning. TIME Correspondent Charles Wertenbaker called him "driving, determined, devoted, and occasionally furious." Eisenhower called him the best chief of staff in the world, and Monty said quite openly that he would like to steal him.