National Affairs: Report from the Boss

The generals’ aides and the traveling newsmen had said their two-bits worth. This week General Ike had his say. Released for publication (though dated July 1945) was General Eisenhower’s report*of his duties as Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force.

General Ike waded right into the debate. He picked the three “episodes . . . most decisive in insuring victory.” The first, obviously, was the battle of the Normandy beaches beginning at dawn on June 6, 1944. Eisenhower soberly notes that if the Germans had rushed their forces from the Calais area to do instant battle in Normandy, they “might well have turned the scales against us.” ‘ His second decisive battle is not, surprisingly, the breakthrough at Saint-Lô, but the buttoning up of the Falaise pocket in mid-August. Here again, Eisenhower appreciates his foe’s mistake: “The enemy showed that fatal tendency to stand and fight when all the logic of war demanded a strategic withdrawal. . . .”

It was the cleaning out of the Germans from the west bank of the Rhine in the battles of February and March 1945 (before the river was bridged) that Eisenhower regards as the third decisive phase The Germans again stood their ground too long; “… the war was won before the Rhine was crossed.” In this phase, General Omar Bradley’s tactical operations were “the equal in brilliance of any that American forces ever have conducted.”

Ike & Monty. Eisenhower has a few words of appraisal on both the strength and weakness of his first lieutenant, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery. His holding of the Caen hinge position was “masterly,” but the old master was slow at the tape—the offensive launched from Caumont did not jump off soon enough. Emphatically, Eisenhower did not want Monty (or anybody else) as commander of all ground forces; he is sure that he did right in retaining that control himself.

Eisenhower’s report was written long before his critics—notably Lieut. Colonel Ralph (Top Secret) Ingersoll—began to attack him as a cautious, “political” general. But by inference, he dismisses attacks on his caution, declaring simply that to continue General Patton’s armored blitzkrieg across the Rhine before Christmas was impossible. Not only had he outrun his supplies, but there were too many Germans in too good positions on the west bank.

When the decision came, Eisenhower had close to 4,000,000 men on the Continent—”a force,” he notes, “30 times as large as the Allied armies which defeated Napoleon … at Waterloo.”

*Eisenhower’s Own Story of the War (Arco; paperbound, $1; cloth, $2.50). Also available for $1 from the U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington.