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History lay on Major Eisenhower as he packed his bags and moved on to the Army's famed Command and General Staff school at Fort Leavenworth. Never before had he slogged so hard, and in the summer of 1926 Ike graduated at the top of the class of 275 of the most promising officers of the U.S. Army. Two years later he graduated at the top of the Army War College, too. After the siege of Fort Leavenworth was won, there was a grand celebration at the Hotel Muehlebach in Kansas City, with Ike roaring out Casey Jones and Abdul the Bulbul Ameer and receiving a note of congratulation from another officer upon whom the hand of history lay. The Command and General Staff school must be good, opined Major George Smith Patton Jr., if "A he-man can come out No.1."
Through the next 13 years, history moved on through hypernormalcy, depression and isolation while Hitler rose, taunting, to turn Europe into a horror of fear. Eisenhower, born one year after Hitler, remained a major through the Army's lean, hungry years. Much of this time Ike was a staff officer in the War Department learning the beginning of statecraft-interservice and interclique. For four years (1935-39) he served in the Philippines as senior aide to Douglas MacArthur, and there he learned something of Filipino politics and a lot about how to control his frustration when MacArthur (whom Ike admired for his military thinking, disliked for his dramatics) pigeonholed his repeated requests to serve with troops. Throughout, Ike kept at his studying. Finally he was posted to Fort Lewis, Wash, as executive officer of the 15th Infantry Regiment, was promoted to chief of staff of the IX Corps with the temporary rank of full colonel.
Pegged as a comer, Ike was yanked away to serve as chief of staff to General Walter Krueger's Third Army in the big Louisiana Maneuvers in the fall of 1941. There he handled the movements of 270,000 men so brilliantly that the rival Second Army was "annihilated" (except George Patton, who turned up with a force of Second Army tanks in Eisenhower's rear). This stunning victory opened the eyes of Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall, and soon Ike began moving surefootedly upward through the stars of generalship. Right after Pearl Harbor, Marshall made him assistant chief of war plans, then chief, then ordered Ike to draw up an organization plan for the European Theater. So well was it drawn that, on Marshall's urging, Franklin Roosevelt reached far down through the ranks to appoint Ike the ETO's Commander in Chief.
On the eve of North Africa, the soldier with iron in his soul showed something of the gee-whiz of Abilene. "I have operational command of Gibraltar," he wrote, "the symbol of the solidity of the British Empire-the hallmark of safety and security at home ... I simply must have a grandchild or I'll never have the fun of telling this when I'm fishing, grey-bearded, on the bank of a quiet bayou in the deep south."
Tne Calm Before Normandy