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During the 30 famous months that followed, Eisenhower led the armies, navies and air forces of the allied nations to victory over Germany. Around him there gathered an amazing array of talent, e.g., Montgomery in his beret and sweater, heir to Wellington; Patton with his pearl-handled pistols, heir to Sheridan. Ike was their adjudicator, their catalyst, their guide. Around Ike, too, there hung the thundercloud pronunciamentos and tangled hunches of Roosevelt and Churchill; Ike was their simplifies their interpolator, their acknowledged authority on the spot. "I have not devised any plan on the basis of what individual or what nation gets the glory," the Supreme Commander rasped among allies one day, "for there is no glory in war worth the blood it costs."
Spreading outward from Ike across sandscapes in North Africa, across olive groves in Italy and hedgerows in Normandy, 3,000,000 Americans advanced according to Ike's plans (Glenn Miller records on beat-up phonographs; hands and toes frozen cold in open vehicles; letters from home in the snow and the sun), always learning-like Ike-how to do better next time. Humiliated at Kasserine Pass, Ike shouldered full personal responsibility, insisting to the doubtful and the critical that the green would learn but that the duds must go. "For God's sake," he wrote furiously to a comrade, "don't keep anybody around of whom you say to yourself 'He may get by.' He won't! Throw him out!"
As the big outfit shook down, Ike learned how to take his tremendous decisions with calm. On the night of D-minus-one, Sicily, he went for a walk along a lonely beach in Malta lighted by the moon and whipped by the wind, fingering three good-luck coins. In June 1944, Ike heeded the dour warnings of the meteorologists and held back the Normandy invasion for 24 hours; at 0400 on D-minus-one the meteorologists reported "a gleam of hope"-24 to 36 hours of fair weather to be followed by high winds and rough seas. Quietly, Ike sat there, forbearing to pace up and down, his face tense and drawn in the silence. At last he looked up, the tension gone. "Well," he said briskly, "we'll go."
That day Ike moved quietly among the paratroopers of the 82nd and101st Airborne Divisions as they mustered about their C-475, blackfaced, ready to go. There were those on Ike's staff who had used the word "murder" about Ike's decision to drop the airborne into uncertain weather, but now Ike was there: "Where are you from, son? What did you do back home? Anyone here from Kansas?" One Texan paratrooper perked up his morale by offering the Supreme Commander a job on a ranch after the war; Ike perked up his own morale by kidding with another paratrooper about the blackface camouflage of cocoa and linseed oil-"Taste good?" "Damn good!" Only when the laden men boarded the C-475 and headed into the night did Ike lose his composure, blinking his eyes fast, swallowing hard, but still waving and shouting, "Good luck-Godspeed!"
And that evening with the paratroopers irretrievably bound for triumph or murder or both, Ike lay on his bed reading a western until word came through that most of landings were "unbelievably successful."