I just finished Stephen Ambrose’s The Victors–Eisenhower and His Boys (abridged and on tape but Ambrose benefits from chainsaw editing). It is a love song to Ike and his brilliance as a commander and military politician in WWII, picking his way through the minefield of conflicting national interests and personal desires to lead the Allies to victory. Despite the occasional “possibly criminally stupid” and “Patton and Bradley believed Ike agreed with the last person he spoke with” comment one gets the impression that Ike was a demigod and Ambrose’s lust for him could not be satisfied by mere physical means.
Was Eisenhower really that good militarily or was his job to keep Montgomery, Patton, and a bunch of other primadonnas fairly happy while the grunts did the real work?
You say that as if it were a small thing! You think keeping a coalition together and functioning is easy?
I don’t think Eisenhower was a tactical genius for the ages, but then, who was? Most of the generals who ARE hailed as tactical geniuses have all kinds of seemingly idiotic blunders to their “credit.”
Under difficult circumstances, he helped piece together and maintain a colaition that succeeded. Was it all his doing? Of course not. Was a lot of sheer dumb luck involved? Sure- just as it is in any war.
Well, that’s Stephen Ambrose. His career has been built on a series of books placing the U.S. forces in Europe on a pedestal. Not that they don’t deserve to be, but I question how much of a historian he is, as opposed to being a guy who deals in hero worship.
Having said that, a lot of the praise is deserved. Eisenhower’s job is sort of unusual in military history; he was not a general in the sense that Patton or Rommel or Grant or Shaka Zulu were, leading a formation in the field. He was a manager of generals - actually, closer to a CEO, a job for which his particular talents were eminently suited. His job went way beyond keeping prima donnas happy; he was the organizer of probably the most complex military force ever fielded. Some think his only job was to assuage the egos of his subordinates mainly because
It’s the easiest part of his job to grasp, and
Patton, Montgomery et al. were really famous and we tend to judge famous people by their interactions with other famous people.
But that’s an absurd oversimplification of his position and role. Eisenhower had to bring together HUNDREDS of organizations to perform the same tasks. Imagine being CEO of General Electric, Ford, Microsoft, Philips, Sony, Bombardier, Hyundai and BASF all at the same time and trying to get all of them to cooperate on a line of products, while at the same time having to deal with the federal governments of five or six nations. In other words, you’d have to be the mother of all staff officers and then some.
Absolute agreement on Ambrose. The guy’s insufferable and the only reason I listened to this is because a friend lent it to me. That, and it’s a compelling story even without Ambrose gang-fellating Easy Company. Considering how much was left in this version that was also in his other books it was almost like a clip episode on TV, 50% previously broadcast material.
Is there a GOOD book out there about Ike and Marshall and the war as a cooperative, corporate effort? And a GOOD book about the ground war that DOESN’T paint the Brits as nearly as bad as the Germans–unless they WERE, of course. Shit-oh-dear, Ambrose does dislike the British!
That is like asking of Casey Stengel was a good baseball manager.
The United States was the most powerful country in the world, we had factories back then. We could manufacture more weapons than any other country in the world, and we had lots of people living here to draft into the army. We also cracked the secret communication code of the germans, and we knew what the germans were planning and what their situation was most of the time while the germans were fighting “blind”…
Ike would have had to have been pretty(very) inept to have lost the war. It is possible, but very unlikely, esp if you have men like Patton and my own relatives serving under you.
Disclaimer: I’m sure there’s a circle of hell I could be headed for recommending something I haven’t actually read.
That said, I share the same view of Ambrose and avoid him like the plague, he’s more a cheerleader than a historian. Carlo D’Este has a biography out on Eisenhower called Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life . Again, while I haven’t gotten around to reading it, I’ve read pretty much everything else he’s written, which includes a bio on Patton, a book on Normandy and several on the Mediterranean. He doesn’t hero worship the US, doesn’t denigrate the British, and his bio on Patton was very good so I’m assuming the one on Eisenhower likely is as well.
“Six Armies in Normandy” by John Keegan is a good, accessible, balanced view of the campaign in Normandy. A great starting point. Keegan’s account of the Second World War - called, surprisingly, “The Second World War” - also has great, balanced accounts of the France campaign, though not super-in-depth.
Ambrose hates the British - and no, it is not justified - because the guys he interviewed hated them. Of course, every Allied country was convinced it was the only competent one in the bunch and the others were all goobers. Ambrose, however, can’t see beyond the subjective opinions of the men he’s lionizing.
I would agree that manager of generals was Ike’s role for the later portion of the war when he was the overall commander of the European forces.
However, prior to this he was the commander of the Torch invasions of North Africa, which was much more of a field role. Of course he commanded several layers of generals below him, but I’d still say it qualifies as “formation in the field” generalship. It was his success there (in no small part due to his coordinating his subordinate generals) that propelled him to overall European command.