What Eisenhower’s Own Staff Really Thought of Him

The chief meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, stood in the library of a country house south of Portsmouth and told six of the most powerful officers in the Western Alliance that the weather over the Channel would break for roughly thirty-six hours beginning on the morning of June 6, 1944. It was a quarter to ten on the night of June 4. The man who had to decide was smoking his fourth cigarette in twenty minutes. He was sleeping two hours a night. He had never commanded a rifle company in combat. In the diaries of the men around him he had already been described as “a very limited brain from a strategic point of view.” He sat in an armchair, asked two questions, and said the words that put 156,000 young men into the water. The man in the armchair was Dwight Eisenhower. (0:00)
What follows is what the people who worked beside him actually thought when they closed the door. On June 11, 1942, George Marshall chose Eisenhower to command the European Theater and passed over 366 officers who outranked him. Eisenhower had spent the First World War training tank crews in Pennsylvania and considered it the humiliation of his life. In early 1941 he was a lieutenant colonel. Twenty-three months later he wore four stars. Torch was forced on him. To stop Vichy French fire he authorized a deal with Admiral Darlan. The press called for his removal. Roosevelt shielded him. In Tunisia, Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps came apart at Kasserine. Eisenhower hesitated two weeks before he relieved him. Field Marshal Alan Brooke wrote that the Supreme Commander was, in the military sense, a beginner. (1:35)
The invasion command was meant for Marshall. Roosevelt could not spare him from Washington. Eisenhower inherited a three-division plan, widened it to five beaches and three airborne divisions, and postponed D-Day a month to find the landing craft. On the night of June 4 the weather split his commanders. At 4:15 the next morning Stagg confirmed the window. Eisenhower said, very quietly, “OK, we’ll go.” (11:10)
This is the story of the man his own staff called limited—and of the alliance that held because he was in the chair.
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