West Point 1915 by Haskew Michael E.;

Author:Haskew, Michael E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART IV

True Mettle

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Coming of War

On the afternoon of Sunday, December 7, 1941, Dwight Eisenhower was exhausted. The Louisiana Maneuvers had just been completed, and after returning to Fort Sam Houston, he settled down for a long nap, leaving orders that he was not to be disturbed.

Within a few minutes, those orders were disobeyed with the alarming news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and other American military installations in Hawaii. The United States was at war. As the army leadership swung into responsive action, Eisenhower’s plans for Christmas leave at West Point to visit with son John, who was then a plebe, were dismissed.

Five days after the Japanese attack, the telephone in Eisenhower’s office clanged. “‘Is that you, Ike?’” he remembered the caller asking. “‘The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away. Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.’ The ‘Chief’ was General George Marshall, and the man at the other end of the line was Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, who was later to become my close friend and Chief of Staff throughout the European operations.”100

During the flight from Texas to Washington, D.C., Eisenhower considered the implications of a staff assignment during wartime. Throughout his career, he had endeavored to command troops in the field. Now, just as the United States had entered World War II, he had been ordered away from a troop assignment to the War Department. Years later, he called the message a “hard blow.”

There was little time to contemplate personal preference, though. When Eisenhower arrived at Marshall’s office on the morning of Sunday, December 14, he was ushered in, “and for the first time in my life talked to him for more than two minutes.”

Marshall presented an overview of the bleak strategic situation in the Pacific and the obvious peril in the Philippines. The Japanese were certainly planning to take the islands, and without substantial resupply and reinforcement, the American and Filipino forces there could be expected to put up a spirited resistance that was destined to fail. Marshall inquired matter-of-factly, “What should be our general line of action?”

Drawing on his card-playing experience, Eisenhower was poker faced. He asked for a desk and a few hours to contemplate the question, utilizing his unique understanding of the situation in the Philippines gleaned from his years of service there. He concluded that the islands could not be reinforced sufficiently to hold the Japanese at bay but that everything that could be done to support the troops there should be done.

Eisenhower told Marshall, “It will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than the garrison can hold out with any driblet assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction. But we must do everything for them that is humanly possible. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies, will be watching us. They may excuse failure, but they will not excuse abandonment.”

Eisenhower further asserted

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