The general fell into step beside the young infantryman and together they plodded toward the Rhine.
"How are you feeling, son?"
"General, I'm awful nervous ... I don't feel so good."
Said General Eisenhower: "Well, you and I are a good pair then, because I'm nervous too . . . Maybe if we just walk along together to the river we'll be good for each other."
The date was March 23, 1945. By next morning the massive crossing of the Rhine in the Wesel sector was a fact, and jubilant Winston Churchill stood on the west bank exclaiming repeatedly to Ike: "My dear General, the German is whipped. We've got him. He is all through." But sweeter, perhaps, to Eisenhower, was the fervent comment of Field Marshal Brooke, Churchill's army chief of staff: ''Thank God, Ike, you stuck by your plan. You were completely right . . . Thank God, you stuck by your guns."
For General Eisenhower to stick by his guns was a tougher job than has ever been told until now. This week, in the 559 pages of Crusade in Europe, Ike explains just how tough it was. Written in the brisk and serviceable monotone of West Point English, it is Ike's own indispensable record of the war in Europe and Africa.
5,000 Words a Day. Eisenhower wrote Crusade in Europe after four years of prodding from friends in & out of the Army. Once he decided to do it, he made a quick, sharp campaign of it. On Feb. 7 of this year, in his quarters at Fort Myer, Va., he started to dictate at a clip of 5,000 words a day, pacing steadily as he talked. After his shorthand expert had left for the day, he corrected the first draft, began to add to it in longhand, and soon found himself working on until 3 a.m. By March 24—46 days later—he was finished.
Crusade in Europe may well be, as its publishers claim in an awed voice, the "largest non-fiction-book publishing venture in history." In syndicated (and ineptly cut) form it went to newspapers in the U.S. and 18 foreign countries before publication, is being published in ten countries. In the U.S., over 110,000 copies have been sold to retail dealers before publication, and it is the December Book-of-the-Month Club choice (750,000 members). * It is also the apparently final answer to many of the bitterest controversies of World War II.
Ike Was Boss. Not the least of these controversies involved Eisenhower's own role as the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces. Those who have thought of him as primarily a placator or referee of jealous, bickering commanders, a benevolent military chairman of the board, will have to revise their estimate. A lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army when the infantry waded ashore in Africa (though a lieutenant general by wartime rank), Ike really ran the show.
Eisenhower was the choice of both President Roosevelt and of General Marshall (of whom he writes with near veneration), and Marshall gave him the power, then backed him to the hilt. Says Eisenhower flatly: "Commanders in the American Army were all of my own choosing." He also fired them on his own responsibility, including General Lloyd R. Fredendall in Africa, and an unnamed corps commander in Italy.