I like Ike

Today in 1890 the future 5 star general and
President of the United States was born in
Dennison, Texas.
Before the war began then Colonel
Eisenhower served as General MacArthur's
chief of staff in the Phillipines.
In an officer fitness report Mac stated
that Ike had the makings of a leader of the
highest order.
He was right and Ike went on to supplant
even his old boss.
Ike

MacArthur also is quoted as having said that Eisenhower was the best aide that he ever had.

That said, I have nothing against Ike. He was clearly a good politician.

Dean

Faint praise?

Yesterday on Cspan they had an hour lecture on Ike and his fascination with the Gettysburg campaign during the Civil War. Ike at one time resided in Gettysburg.

I believe that Macarthur said that Ike was "the best clerk I ever had" He also said that George Marshall could not be recommended for any thing greater than command of a regiment!!!

One wonders if Marshall ever commanded a regiment.

Nothing against Marshall either.

Some, like Ike, are better sitting behind desks, some, like Patton, better in the field. Few performed well in both areas.

Dean

One could say that.

Dean

I'm just about finished reading Ghost Mountain Boys by James Campbell.
It's a great read about the 32nd Division's trek across the Owen Stanley range and subsequent battle at Buna in New Gunea.
The book does little to endear a guy to Mac...

I think Ike was given a Cockshutt tractor for his farm near Gettysburg.
Richard in NW SC

When they wake me up at the hospital and ask me who is president I ask them is Ike still in there before I laugh.

Some of them can't see it is a joke and ask me again.

I've read it, UD.

It's a very good account about what those men and boys endured in the "war at the end of the world."

Its also one of the books that I donated to my local small town library in memoriam of my Mother who was an Army Nurse in New Guinea and the Philippines.

Dean

From the Stan Wolf collection / museum near Gettysburg, PA.
All of it auctioned off a few years ago. $32,500 for the General's tractor. Was supposed to stay local, I think.

"On Nov. 30, 1955, President Dwight David Eisenhower was presented with a new and one-of-a-kind Cockshutt Black Hawk 40 tractor along with a Cockshutt chisel plow, field cultivator and moldboard plow. Stan Wolf, one of Eisenhower's neighbors, was there to see it delivered. 'It was probably the highest horsepower tractor in all of Adams County, Pa., at that time,' Stan explains, saying the 46 PTO-hp tractor raised considerable interest among the local farmers".

My mother liked Ike to the day she died. She even had a bumper sticker on her car. "I still like Ike. Hell,I even miss Harry!"

Ike had a tough as president with all of the race trouble
I'm thinking some people thought he would start a second civil war.
I remember seeing some of this stuff on news being 8 ? years old I didn't understand what all of the fuss was about.

I have a really large 'I Like Ike' campaign button my grandmother gave me.

1956 was the first presidential election that I can vaguely remember.

I remember my Father voted for Ike but my Mother voted for Adali Stevenson. She later learned the error of her ways.

Dean

UD I like a bunch of the stuff you post but IMO Ike was over his head as a general and lackluster as a president.

Mac claimed that "Ike was the best clerk I ever had". Problem with that statement is that it was made about Ike as his chief of staff. A Col. Clerks are enlisted personnel. Basically that should have stopped Ike from from any more promotions. Had WWII not come along when it did Ike would have retired without ever wearing stars.

"Although his administrative abilities had been noticed, on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II he had never held an active command and was far from being considered as a potential commander of major operations."

He didn't make general (first star) until Sep 1941 and had never been in combat. Hardly a reason to make him the supreme allied commander. There are many, myself included that think he was too ready to cave into Churchill's demands. I don't think that because of the Patton/Monty issues. I think his willingness to go along with "Churchill's soft underbelly" in Italy was darn near criminal. There was nothing of military significance in Italy to justify the loss of life there much less the expenditure of arms and ammunition. There were also times when he should have relieved both Patton and Monty for failure to follow orders and or insubordination.

Ikes decision to go ahead with the Normandy invasion when he was was bold! And a decision he was willing to take the blame for if it had failed. That has to be respected.

But for the rest of it? I'm not impressed.

Rick

I'm with you. Giving the go ahead to Monty instead of Patton likely added 6 months to the war. Ike always tried to compromise.

Many of his decisions weren't really his I'd imagine a lot came directly from DC.

Pretty close to the situation TF. Ike was in charge because he understood and agreed with Marshall's plan for the war. As a result of his experience in WWI, Marshall thought the failure in that war was the lack of cooperation among the allies. So in WWII he pushed for a coalition under one overall commander to keep everyone on the same page. Ike had the self discipline to deal with the over-sized egos of Churchill, Montgomery, and Patton, and keep those primma-donnas on the same page. It wasn't easy. At different times he came close to dumping both Patton and Montgomery. Both times he decided that there was nobody at their level of ability to replace them. He kept the end goal in mind, and retained them.

About Italy. The U.S. started off pushing the idea of D-Day taking place in 1943. Churchill was pushing his "soft underbelly of Europe" Italy scheme. They argued a long time about which way to go. In the end it came down to logistics. In 1943 there were not near enough landing vessels for an operation of the size that Normandy needed to be to succeed. At the same time, Russia was on the verge of collapse. Stalin was screaming for the allies to open a front somewhere, anywhere, to draw German troops and resources away from Russia. So the options in 1943 were: Stage a not-large-enough invasion of Normandy that would probably fail, or put that off to 1944, do nothing and let Russia fall, or invade Italy. Ike was never happy with the Italy operation, but it was the least bad of the options.

PARTNERS IN COMMAND by Mark Perry, is a book that goes into the working relationship between Ike and Marshall, and gives a lot of background on the decisions that were made.

(quoted from post at 08:25:20 10/15/18) Pretty close to the situation TF. Ike was in charge because he understood and agreed with Marshall's plan for the war. As a result of his experience in WWI, Marshall thought the failure in that war was the lack of cooperation among the allies. So in WWII he pushed for a coalition under one overall commander to keep everyone on the same page. Ike had the self discipline to deal with the over-sized egos of Churchill, Montgomery, and Patton, and keep those primma-donnas on the same page. It wasn't easy. At different times he came close to dumping both Patton and Montgomery. Both times he decided that there was nobody at their level of ability to replace them. He kept the end goal in mind, and retained them.

About Italy. The U.S. started off pushing the idea of D-Day taking place in 1943. Churchill was pushing his "soft underbelly of Europe" Italy scheme. They argued a long time about which way to go. In the end it came down to logistics. In 1943 there were not near enough landing vessels for an operation of the size that Normandy needed to be to succeed. At the same time, Russia was on the verge of collapse. Stalin was screaming for the allies to open a front somewhere, anywhere, to draw German troops and resources away from Russia. So the options in 1943 were: Stage a not-large-enough invasion of Normandy that would probably fail, or put that off to 1944, do nothing and let Russia fall, or invade Italy. Ike was never happy with the Italy operation, but it was the least bad of the options.

PARTNERS IN COMMAND by Mark Perry, is a book that goes into the working relationship between Ike and Marshall, and gives a lot of background on the decisions that were made.

Click to expand...

Actually if you do a little research Roosevelt was against action in Italy. The only reason that we went with at all was to try to take some pressure off the Russians. Stupid plan. Germany dumped a minimum of assets in Italy because the terrain was terrible! And Italy wasn't Churchill's first choice for the soft under belly. Italy would have to be secured to go with Churchill's first pick. And it would have been worse than Italy as far as terrain goes. And all of those plans were designed to preserve England's colonies. Roosevelt had already made it plain to Churchill that England was going to eventually give up it's colonies. But Churchill understood that for England to be a major player on the world stage they had to retain the colonies. England had no colonies in Europe but they did in North Africa, the Mid East and India among other places. So they needed the Mediterranean basin secure. It would also be advantageous to England to curtail the Germans ability to attack shipping there.

Considering the losses suffered in Italy Marshal was wrong. What happened is Roosevelt wanted to keep Stalin in the war. He wanted to make the cross channel invasion in 43. BEFORE Rommel took over the "Atlantic wall". Considering that we had the assets to invade Italy they most likely would have been successful in France at the time. They had about 189,000 troops going into Italy and another 800,000 or so in England. In the time that elapsed between then and 1944. Other than the port areas the Germans didn't start on the Atlantic Wall until after the invasion of Italy. That extra 7 or 8 months they gave the Germans in France cost a lot of lives. They built fortifications like mad using slave labor and dramatically increased the number of troops.

What happened was that Marshal who liked and respected the Brits allowed himself to be convinced by the British military and intel that a cross channel invasion would fail in 1943 and he helped convince Roosevelt to go along with Churchill. Ike went with the flow. Had they listened to US intel and insisted perhaps the war in Europe would have been over a year earlier. Because of those decisions of which Ike was part of somewhere between 60 and 70 THOUSAND allied servicemen died in Italy and another 37,000 in the battle of Normandy. In Italy the Germans employed less that 439,000 soldiers at the peak. The allies 1.3 million. And total? About 800 more allies died than did those fighting for the axis. The terrain in Italy is an attackers nightmare.

Churchill wanted the invasion to to be into present day Solvenia then for it to fight through what was then the Yugoslavian, Austrian and German Alps to get into Germany. Keep in mind to make the "2nd front" work Italy had to be taken to prevent a German assault on the invasion forces from air bases in Italy. What that plan would have done was draw German forces in preventing a possible attack on the Mid East. It would have also failed IMO. The terrain like in Italy would have made it a disaster!

Rick