Sublime

Montgomery visited every unit going ashore on D-Day, American as well as British and Canadian, encouraging the men to break ranks and gather around while he told them what an honor it was to command them. “General Eisenhower is the captain of the team, and I am proud to serve under him,” said Monty. By his own reckoning, Montgomery estimated that h

The president heeded their advice. On September 1, 1939—the day Germany invaded Poland to trigger World War II in Europe—George Marshall became the Army’s chief of staff. Marshall’s appointment reflected the president’s selection of yet another general in the mold of Fox Conner lead the Army.

Eisenhower may not have been fully cognizant of the ground strategy Montgomery was pursuing, but no one could have handled the political pressures that rained down on the supreme commander better than he.

“There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,” Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. “Severity always,” went the British motto, “justice when possible.”

Eisenhower, his AFHQ staff, and his commanders in chief overestimated the impact of Italy’s surrender, underestimated Kesselring’s ability to mount a spirited defense, and again failed to comprehend the topographic impediments that an army would encounter pressing north.

In late 1953, when Eisenhower learned of Navarre’s plan to lure the enemy into battle at Dien Bien Phu, he was appalled. “You cannot do this,” he told Henri Bonnet, the French ambassador in Washington. “The fate of troops invested in an isolated fortress is almost inevitable.”4 Eisenhower instructed both the State and Defense departments to communi

President Truman and the European heads of government believed that only Eisenhower, the supreme commander in World War II, had sufficient credibility to bring those forces into being—and at the same time to be taken seriously by the Soviets.