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By nightfall more than 156,000 Allied soldiers -- 57,000 of them Americans -- were on the ground in Normandy. The total number of killed, wounded and missing was estimated at fewer than 5,000. It was a much lower toll than the 75,000 some planners feared would become casualties. There might have been far more if the Germans -- who were without their commander, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, or any air cover -- had not waited 10 hours before sending the first tanks of the veteran 21st Panzer Division into action against the invaders.
It was August before the Allied forces were able to break out of Normandy and speed toward Paris. Yet some of Eisenhower's trickiest battles were not with the Germans but with British military leaders who tried repeatedly to take away his control over strategy, troops and supplies. The British complained that Eisenhower lacked military finesse in battle, that he was a "mass- production general" who thought too much about logistics.
Americans who remember Ike at all tend to recall a do-little President or a mangler of sentences at press conferences. Military writers sometimes portray Ike the General as a genial and soothing Alliance board chairman at best, or at worst a glad-handing bumbler. Eisenhower the Supreme Commander was none of those. He was a driving, demanding man of terrific energy: up before dawn, to bed after midnight, chain-smoking four packs of cigarettes, drinking 15 cups of coffee a day. He was a military perfectionist, impatient with his subordinates and a peerless, lucid briefer. He had a volcanic temper he struggled to control but sometimes used as a tool. He was naturally friendly, with a famous grin, and he inspired trust. But he was patient only when he had to be: to keep peace among the Allies, since he believed the war would be won only if the Americans and British worked together.
He made the coalition work, and some of his ablest and most loyal deputies were British. But the two top British generals -- Sir Bernard Montgomery, who commanded the Allied ground forces on D-day, and his boss, Chief of the Imperial General Staff Sir Alan Brooke -- ridiculed Eisenhower and conspired against him, sometimes with Churchill's compliance. Brooke and Montgomery argued that Ike was "no real director of thought, plans, energy or direction." Montgomery told Brooke: "He knows nothing whatever about how to make war or to fight battles. He should be kept away from all that business if we want to win this war." But Eisenhower brought to his job a modern sense of its management responsibilities: how to equip and move millions of men in large-scale campaigns that showed a mastery of the mass-production arsenal.
What really lay behind the complaints of Montgomery and Brooke was their belief that Britain was the senior partner in the Alliance and ought by rights to command its armies, even though American troops soon outnumbered their own. Britain's generals longed to preserve the waning strength of the Empire and postpone America's rise to dominance. But by the end of the war, the U.S. had 61 combat divisions -- more than 1 million men -- in Europe; the British, who had been fighting for five years and exhausted their reserves, never had more than 20.