Eisenhower and Churchill: The Partnership that Saved the World by James C. Humes

Author:James C. Humes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780307555861
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2001-03-15T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

FORT SAM LEWIS, WASHINGTON

The maneuvers fortified my conviction that I belonged with troops; with them I was always happy.

DWIGHT DAVID EISENHOWER

WHEN EISENHOWER’S SHIP, the Cleveland, arrived in San Francisco from Manila on January 5, 1940, it was met by a staff car driven by a major. The major took him a bit south to Monterey Bay. In the car Eisenhower learned that his orders had been altered. His hope and dream of commanding a regiment was on hold. (In the infantry no one advanced to general without commanding a regiment first.)

On the beach at Monterey, Lt. Gen. John DeWitt came bustling to greet him. DeWitt was the one who had changed his orders. With DeWitt, a bald and bulky man wearing round black spectacles, was another general who towered over De-Witt—George Calett Marshall.

Marshall, who had a lugubrious basset hound face, asked, “Eisenhower, have you learned how to tie your shoes again since returning from the Philippines?” Marshall’s query was a dig at the retinue of servants supplied for duty in the Philippines.

Ike smiled. “Yes, sir. I think I can manage that chore.”

Marshall told Eisenhower that U.S. entry into the war was only a matter of time, whether in Europe or Asia. The Nazi army had already blitzkrieged its way across Poland, while the Japanese had bombed and stormed the Chinese cities of Nanking and Shanghai.

The next war, said Marshall, would entail amphibious assaults—something the last war had not witnessed. Marshall had therefore ordered the staging of an amphibious assault by the Fourth Army against National Guard units entrenched at Monterey Bay.

The problem was that the Fourth Army was stretched out from Minnesota to California. Army specifications had already set up one obligatory entry base by rail in California to receive the troops, but there were too few trains. A shuttling back and forth of troop trains would consume too much time. Eisenhower’s solution: set up another entry base. The colonel in charge refused: “I’m accustomed to following orders—there will be no change from specifications.”

Eisenhower went to DeWitt, showed him his plan for two concentrations of troops, and got it approved. The troops reached California in time for the maneuvers. Eisenhower knew when to slice through the Gordian knot of rules.

Although a month late, Eisenhower finally was given his regimented command: Fort Lewis in Washington State. As Eisenhower later wrote, “The stumps, slashings, fallen logs, tangled brush, pitfalls, hummocks and hills made the land a stage setting for a play in Hades.”

Yet Ike was now the happiest he had ever been in his life. He had his command of a battalion. Although he froze at night and sweated through the dust every day in the maneuvers of the Fifteenth Infantry Regiment, he glowed with the satisfaction of being with his troops.

After the comforts of Manila, however, camp life was not for Mamie. She and seventeen-year-old John retreated to Tacoma,Washington, the home of Edgar “Big Ike” Eisenhower. On weekends Ike visited his brother’s home. Sibling rivalry always simmered under the surface with the Eisenhower brothers, but with Dwight and Edgar it sometimes erupted.

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