Free The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II by Stephen Ambrose Page B

been with him.” It would get worse as D-Day got closer and innumerable problems came up each day, many unsolved and some unsolvable. Still, Butcher felt that all would turn out all right, that Eisenhower could take it.  “Fortunately he has the happy faculty of bouncing back after a night of good sleep.”
    Unfortunately, such nights were rare. Eisenhower’s tension and tiredness began to show in his face, especially when he was inspecting training exercises, watching the boys he would be sending against Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The anxieties also showed in his letters to Mamie. Almost without exception, every letter he wrote her in the pre-Overlord period had a fantasy about his retirement plans when the war was over. The emphasis was on loafing in a warm climate.
    Writing to Mamie was practically the only time he was free to think about issues that went beyond Overlord. He took the opportunity to express some of his deepest feelings. He loathed war and hated having to send boys to their death.  “How I wish this cruel business of war could be completed quickly,” he told Mamie. He was the man who had to total up all the casualties, bad enough in the air war, with worse to come when Overlord began. Counting the human costs was “a terribly sad business.” It made him heartsick to think about “how many youngsters are gone forever,” and although he had developed “a veneer of callousness,” he could “never escape a recognition of the fact that back home the news brings anguish and suffering to families all over the country. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives and friends must have a difficult time preserving any comforting philosophy and retaining any belief in the eternal rightness of things. War demands real toughness of fiber-not only in the soldiers that must endure, but in the homes that must sacrifice their best.” “I think that all these trials and tribulations must come upon the world because of some great wickedness,” he said in another letter, “yet one would feel that man’s mere intelligence to say nothing of his spiritual perceptions would find some way of eliminating war. But man has been trying to do so for many hundreds of years, and his failure just adds more reason for pessimism when a man gets really low!”
    The contrast between Eisenhower and those generals who gloried in war could not have been greater. Small wonder that millions of Americans in the 1940s felt that if their loved one had to join the fight, Eisenhower was the general they wanted for his commander. Patton, MacArthur, Bradley, Marshall, and the others all had their special qualities, but only Eisenhower had such a keen sense of family, of the way in which each casualty meant a grieving family back home.  Eisenhower’s concern was of such depth and so genuine that it never left him. In 1964, when he was filming with Walter Cronkite a television special entitled “D-Day Plus 20,” Cronkite asked him what he thought about when he returned to Normandy. In reply, he spoke not of the tanks, the guns, the planes, the ships, the personalities of his commanders and their opponents, or the victory.  Instead, he spoke of the families of the men buried in the American cemetery in Normandy. He said he could never come to this spot without thinking of how blessed he and Mamie were to have grandchildren, and how much it saddened him to think of all the couples in America who had never had that blessing because their only son was buried in France.
    One reason, more rational than emotional, that Eisenhower was concerned about his troops was his realization that while he, SHAEF, the generals, and the admirals could plan, prepare the ground, provide covering support, ensure adequate supplies, deceive the Germans, and in countless other ways try to ensure victory, in the end success rested with the footslogger carrying a rifle over the beaches of Normandy. If he was willing to drive forward in the face of German fire,