Free Supreme Commander by Stephen E. Ambrose Page A

First Two Years

Part I
WASHINGTON TO LONDON
[
December 1941–June 1942
]

    O N December 12, 1941, five days after Pearl Harbor, newly promoted Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, chief of staff of the U. S. Third Army in San Antonio, Texas, received a telephone call from the War Department in Washington. Colonel Walter Bedell Smith, Secretary of the General Staff, asked, “Is that you, Ike?” “Yes,” Eisenhower replied. “The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away,” Smith ordered. “Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.”
    Eisenhower had no idea what the War Department wanted with him, how long he would be in Washington, or what his duties would be. But “the Chief” was Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, so Eisenhower asked no questions. He abandoned his plans to visit his son at West Point at Christmastime, packed a single bag, and boarded the next airplane leaving San Antonio for Washington. Mechanical failure forced the craft down at Dallas. Eisenhower shifted over to a train, which got him into Union Station, Washington, on December 14. He immediately reported to Marshall, whose office was in the old Munitions Building. 1
    The two men had met twice before. In 1930, when Eisenhower was working with the American Battle Monuments Commission in Washington, they had talked. Marshall was so impressed with Eisenhower that he asked the young major to join his staff at the Infantry School at Fort Benning. Another assignment made it impossible for Eisenhower to accept, and they had only one additional brief meeting before 1941. 2
    Marshall had ordered Eisenhower to Washington because he wanted him on the War Plans Division of the General Staff to handle the Far East, especially the Philippines, where Eisenhower had served under General Douglas MacArthur for four and a half years. The Chief of Staffwasted no time. He quickly outlined the situation in the Pacific. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had rendered the Navy impotent for some months to come. Although the aircraft carriers were intact they had few supporting vessels. The garrison in Hawaii was weak and an amphibious Japanese landing there was a possibility. The islands had to be strengthened. In the Philippines the ground force consisted primarily of Filipinos and Eisenhower knew full well that their training had not proceeded far enough to make them capable of stopping the Japanese. Marshall had increased the air strength during 1941, giving MacArthur 37 B-17s and 220 fighters, but they had been hit at Clark Field. Marshall did not know the exact extent of the damage but, given the Japanese successes in other areas, he feared the worst. There were serious supply shortages, the Navy was already indicating that it was unwilling to try to break the increasingly tight enemy blockade and was going to write the Philippines off, and the Japanese intended to overrun the islands as soon as possible.
    Marshall took about twenty minutes to describe the situation. Suddenly he looked straight at Eisenhower and quietly demanded, “What should be our general line of action?”
    Eisenhower was startled. He had just arrived, had not unpacked his bag, knew little more than what he had read in the newspapers and what Marshall had just told him, was not up to date on the war plans for the Pacific, and had no staff to help him prepare a general policy line. Still, he immediately recognized that the assignment was important, not so much because the Chief of Staff had decided to hand over Pacific strategy to a new brigadier general (Marshall, as Eisenhower probably guessed, had already decided upon his policy), but as a personal test. After a second or two of hesitation, Eisenhower asked, “Give me a few hours.”
    “All right,” Marshall replied. His Army had just suffered a humiliating defeat, bad news continued to come in from around the globe, he had problems with expansion, training, supply, strategy, and a hundred other