Dan Snow's History Hit - The Commanders: Eisenhower

Episode Date: March 16, 2026

As Supreme Commander, Eisenhower spearheaded the successful Allied invasions of North Africa, Italy and Western Europe. He's consequently one of the most celebrated leaders of the Second World War - but how much of that success came down to strategic brilliance, and how much came from his skills in managing powerful personalities and coalition building?For the third episode of our "Commanders" series, we revisit the key decisions, rivalries and controversies of Eisenhower's command, to see whether he deserves his towering reputation. To guide us through the story of Eisenhower, we're joined by John C. McManus, professor of military history at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and host of the podcasts 'Someone Talked!' and 'World War 2 Live'.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. It's early morning on 5th of June 1944. At his advance headquarters near Portsmouth, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower wakes for first light. Across Britain, the largest invasion force in history stands ready.

Thousands of ships and aircraft, more than two million Allied soldiers, waiting for a single order. But that order relies on something no commander can control. The weather. The British weather. Conditions in the channel are foul. Gray waves heave in the pre-dorn darkness lashed at by winds that tear up the channel.

It's been this way for days. The invasion has already been postponed once. Eisenhower makes his way to the map room. Inside, the walls are covered with charts of northern France. Topographic maps of Normandy's beaches. There are tide tables there, airborne drop zones, time tables measured down to the minute. Meteorologists cluster around their charts, debating over barometric pressures and weather fronts, searching for the faintest promise of a break in the bad weather.

Eisenhower is painfully aware that every hour of delay risk. giving German forces more time to prepare. And they can't just keep delaying it by a day or two here and there. The tides mean that the next opportunity for the invasion is not for weeks. That will give the Germans more time to build up their defences and lessen the Allies' chances of success. At 4 a.m. that day, he finally gets the break he needs. His chief meteorologist delivers his forecast.

there will be, in his opinion, a brief break in the storm, he says. A narrow window of tolerable weather. Tomorrow on June the 6th. Not ideal conditions, but possible ones. The generals and the admirals around the room give their opinions, but only one man can decide. It's not Franklin Roosevelt. It's not Winston Churchill.

Eisenhower alone can make this call. The room falls silent. as he reaches that decision. Three simple words that will set his so-called Great Crusade in motion. Okay, let's go. Some witnesses had other recollections with a slightly more colourful phrasing. This had to be one of the most important, one of the greatest gambles the second one.

Eisenhower knows that if the landings fail, it will be a disaster of unparalleled proportions. People will want someone to blame. and he begins to plan accordingly. In the afternoon of the 5th, as thousands of troops are moving into their final positions, Eisenhower scribbles down a note. It's meant for release only if this ends in catastrophe.

A stiff determined scrawl, he claims ultimate responsibility for the invasion, but if it fails, the blame should fall on his shoulders alone. In those final hours before D-Day, the weight of that responsibility must have been crushing. The fate of millions rests on his shoulders. His had been the strategy, the negotiations, the wrangling together of a cohesive coalition. He'd put what he thought was the right people in charge of each cog of the machine.

Victory can never be guaranteed. And although Eisenhower must have hoped with every breath that it would come, that act of bravery ensured that in the event of failure, he would take the fall. When people debate the great commanders of the Second World War, the names usually come out thick and fast, they're Jukov, Rommel, Montgomery, MacArthur, Slim, Halsey, that they're men associated with battlefields, with maneuvers,

with moments where the outcomes of a campaign can hinge of moments of personal brilliance, men who seize command, sometimes under fire. Dwight David Eisenhower doesn't really fit into that mole. He never once commanded troops in combat before 1942. He never personally led a charge in the heat of battle. He never devised a battlefield tactical approach that would later be studied alongside battles like Cannae or Austolids.

And yet, by the middle of the war, Eisenhower was the supreme commander of the most potent military coalition in history, overseeing millions of men, vast industrial resources, and a complex alliance structure that encompass some of the biggest and most difficult personalities of the 20th century. To understand Eisenhower's rise as a commander, we need to look not only at the victories, but the man himself, how he learned to command without ever fighting, at the decisions he made and the ones he avoided, and whether he possessed some kind of military genius or something else entirely. This is the third episode in our Commanders series where we dig into the lives

and decisions of five legendary World War II commanders. We cut through the myth to examine what really shaped their styles of command. From daring gambols to meticulous planning, we're going to find out whether their victories were earned through some sort of innate brilliance or luck or ruthless calculation. We're also going to ask, frankly, whether their reputations hold up to scrutiny at all. We've already covered Rommel and Montgomery, so please go back and have a listen to those. But today, we're going to be. We are going to turn our attention to the supreme commander himself, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Joining us for this, I'm very pleased to say, is John C. McMannis, a great friend of the podcast,

Professor of Military History at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, the host of the podcast, Someone Talked, and World War II live, he's just the man for the job. Enjoy. Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in 1890 and raised on a small farm near Abilene, Kansas, a small Midwestern town steeped in the ethos of Protestant discipline. The Eisenhower household was poor, but straight. His father David worked a mechanic. His mother Ida was a religious pacifist.

She often found herself frustrated by her sons growing fascination with military history. Ike was the third of seven sons. He reveled in exploring the great outdoors. He loved hunting and fishing and playing football. Here's John to explain more. Abilene, Kansas is a very small town, like about two and a half. hours west of Kansas City. So kind of out there on its own, basically a railroad town. So for someone like Eisenhower, it's a place to go and knock about and play outside and get into trouble and

just kind of make your own way. I mean, it was a very self, self-entertaining kind of place. And I think it kind of still is. It's nice little railroad town. And so the Eisenhower family, they're not real well off, but they don't necessarily know that they're not so well off because they don't really want for much that's really important. And I think, too, when you look at the Eisenhower boys, they're an example of the kind of upward mobility you could have, especially as a white man in that era, because you would have some opportunities. And Eisenhower is a classic example of it. He goes to public school. And so that's another trend that you see in most of the country by the time Eisenhower comes along. He's born in 1890. So really, he's reared in the early 20th century.

And yeah, so the kind of formal public educational system, he comes up through that. And I think that's a really good interesting point because it's what really kind of creates his background of literacy, of self-education in terms of reading, you know, what interests him and learning math and learning a lot about the world because there's a library and he's a voracious reader. He reads a lot of military history. So that showed you a little bit what he was interested in the long haul. But yeah, he goes through public schooling. in the case of most people, they were lucky to have a high school diploma in that era. So he's a little bit ahead of game in that. And then, of course, he gets the opportunity for a college education at West Point.

It's a pretty big achievement. Yeah. And so the way they did it back then, and this doesn't change too much, is that there were competitive examinations for those who are interested. Now, it's a little bit of a kind of Byzantine system in that anybody in Congress, like a representative or a senator, has the opportunity to appoint local people to the academies, to the service. academies, and then you also have a presidential appointment, so on and so forth. So there's always that hoop to jump through. But the way this usually had resolved, like in Eisenhower's time, is locally there'd be like 10 boys, and it was all boys in that era.

The West Point was not open to women in that era. You would basically have a competitive examination of all the different subjects. So it could be algebra, history, English, you know, so on and so forth. And then usually the top two then would be eligible for the appointment. Now, the way it sometimes went out, too, is that. that Congressman X, Y, or Z had their own, the son of their buddy and would point that person regardless of what happened. But the competitive examinations tended to be fairly above board, and I think I was not

finished second, so that made him eligible for the appointment. He's very much a high flyer in that he's had schooling that really is not quite up to his level of intellect. In other words, he needs a bigger kind of room. He's certainly gone as far as he can go in Abilene. He's not quite sure what he wants to do. He loves sports at that point. He loves being outside.

He's adventurous and he's fun-loving and he's a prankster. He's not necessarily thinking, gosh, I have this lifelong wish to be a great general or to be a soldier. He's thinking, I want to go somewhere beyond this town and find new vistas and I want a free education. And this is going to be my kind of entry point. Eisenhower, when he gets to West Point, it's a little bit of an eye-opener because he tests the military discipline and all that side of it. He's constantly getting demerits and having to walk the yard and he's constantly pushing back against the kind of authoritarian side of West Point. But I think it's fair to say, like the intellectual side really appeals to him. Not that he's like the ultimate

algebra student or something, but he likes that idea of the sort of intellectual buffet. I'm going to take something from here and here and here and I'm going to develop myself. He's very interested, of course, I mentioned in sports and he's on the football team, a very good player. He's a halfback. Then he He has a terrible knee injury, which, of course, later on will flare up during World War II. He gets involved in sports, and he's very well liked, and he finds his command voice. One thing that's interesting about Eisenhower is he more or less refuses to haze the plebs when he's an upper classman. He has one incident where he had started to dress down a guy and had said sort of disparagingly, you look like you were a barber or something, and that guy actually was a barber in civilian life.

And so Eisenhower felt terrible about that because he thought, I just made someone feel badly about what they do for a living. That isn't okay. And he's just like, I'm not going to haze people. And I think that's a little interesting kind of insight into his character, his sensitivity for others. There'll be quite famous later on. I think you're seeing a little bit of the Eisenhower that you're going to have later. And he's extremely well liked at West Point. Eisenhower was full of potential.

But he was not a standout student as the way we might imagine that the future. that the future great commanders might be. Patsky spent so much time on the football field or messing about with his buddies. He had average grades. He graduated in the middle of his class in 1915. The famous Class the Stars fell on, which produced an extraordinary number of generals.

Eisenhower was thought of as dependable, highly sociable, but not especially brilliant. His teachers thought he'd make a good officer. Never a great one. After graduating, he spent the next few years moving from one disappointing peacetime station to another. While at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, the young second lieutenant met and married the love of his life. Mary Mamie Dowd. And then came the opportunity that young officers dream of.

War. The first world war. One of the largest conflicts in history to that point. and one in which, surprisingly, Eisenhower never saw a shot fired in anger. That's the most amazing thing. Some of the most impactful American commanders in World War II actually did not deploy into combat in World War I,

Bradley being another, of course, prime example. So Eisenhower graduates West Point as an infantry officer, which generally meant you were like middle of the pack in your class, but he's also kind of interested in armor. And so as the war goes on, he's going to have these training commands where he's so good at training and preparing people. It's so well organized. It's so well run that his superiors just don't want to let him go.

And I mentioned the armor side because he's basically running an armor school at what was Camp Meade or that should be Fort Mead. And then famously, of course, at Gettysburg, near the old battlefield. There's a military reservation there where he's going to spend a good bit of the war and a training command, really commanding thousands of people at that point. And it creates in him a love of that locale. And, of course, later on when he retires, he's going to have a house on the edges of the Gettysburg battlefield, which is still there today as a national historic site. So, yeah, Eisenhower, of course, was devastated that he didn't get overseas. He had orders to go, I think, late fall of 1918. And, of course, the armistice happens.

And unlike most people who are celebrating worldwide, he's a little bit bummed out in that he says, oh, my gosh, this was the greatest war in human history. I'm a military professional, and I didn't get in it. So that's going to be a dead end for me. And of course, Bradley about the same thing. So did Matthew Ridgeway, too, by the way. He also had not deployed. There's a lot of examples of that. Essential paradox of Eisenhower, I think, that Eisenhower love soldiers.

He loved serving with soldiers and being down in the dirt with them. And, of course, he has this ability to connect with people and to really be liked from a private soldier on up and respected, more importantly. And then he never really has the opportunity to lead people in combat where the bullets are flying. And he would have loved to have. But at the same time, that kind of, you know, of distance from the battlefield allows him to develop a kind of larger strategic domain to his thinking that I think is going to serve him in really good stead. He's often sometimes derided as a quote political general. I think that's a little unfair. I think he's somebody who really

understands the larger strategic dimension of whatever enterprise he's involved in. And I think that's going to be one of his great strengths going forward. So in World War I, his ability to train people, He understood a lot about human nature and about how to have rapport with people and how to motivate them. I think that served him well, but he also, I think, began to study at a higher level warfare. And of course, later on in his career, he's going to go to the Command and General Staff College and the Army War College and absolutely excel in those spheres, which tells you a lot about his strategic acumen. The people of the United States came out of the First World War, I think it's fair to say, deeply disillusioned with their nation's involvement in the conflict. Over 100,000 American soldiers had died in the 19 months of fighting, and some 200,000 had been wounded. The USA turned its back on the world. The armed forces were cut to the bone under the premise that their existence would provoke more war, not deter it.

Men like Eisenhower entered a long period of career stagnation. He spent 16 years as a major. Many officers left the military to get better paying more illustrious careers in the civilian world. but Ike stuck it out through the interwar years. He was still a fair way off from being recognised as a potential high flyer, but in retrospect we can see that Ike was clearly building the foundations for later success. In the 1920s and 30s, he served under some of the most influential military minds of the era, including Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall. He saw what good leadership looked like up close and learned how personality and public opinion

could shape military decision-making. These lessons would sharpen his instinct for command and diplomacy in later years. And perhaps the most formative experience for Ike was serving with General Fox Connor in the Panama Canal Zone. That is like the key relationship at that phase of his career. And this is sort of the field grade phase of Eisenhower's career. He's no longer a junior officer, of course. He's well into his 30s. Now, this is the mid-1920s.

He does that assignment in Panama. and Fox Connor is his main influence and his sponsor. Fox Connor kind of develops him as a soldier and through reading, a lot of reading, to Connor's credit, he told his officers, you know, if you don't read,

you're going nowhere. I think that's a good thing, a hundred years later too. I mean, I think the better officers tend to operate that way. And so Eisenhower's eyes are opened up to so much more than he ever knew. He begins to develop views. about what is good command and bad command.

What is the proper way to operate and not? Connor absolutely is a key influence in getting Eisenhower appointed to the command of general staff college. Those were tough billets to get. And generally, it was maybe about one under every six or seven who wanted to go, could go. So not only does he go,

he absolutely excels. And it's a real pressure cooker of a course, typically two years. And they are just like evaluating people. And it's like, okay, my career is hinging on this, how I do here. That was the sort of mentality. He completely throws himself into it and he finishes first in his class and certainly that raised some eyebrows,

as you might imagine. And so you're seeing him get some of these assignments when like there's the unanimity of opinion. This dude is really competent and he's got a lot to recommend him. But it's always then just a matter of getting the right people to notice you too. He's emblematic of many, many dozens of others who are going to have a really major impact in World War II and beyond, who has something of the same kind of professional road that he does of just not a lot of opportunity in that interwar period, who are willing to hang in and are very dedicated military professionals. Something is clearly working there, that you're able to keep these guys and develop them. And of course, it's obvious what they do

in World War II, that many of them end up as excellent commanders. Eisenhower, though, takes these opportunities and absolutely runs with them whenever he can. And he never really compromises his kind of ethical base, too. That's the other thing. I mean, he doesn't, you know, you learn that at West Point, duty, honor country, you know, all these kinds of things that can go out the window when you're too ambitious. And Eisenhower always has this kind of central core to his character, which I think is really also every bit as important in what happens with him as well. But at the same time, too, you know, if we're looking at it compared with a lot of countries in the world at that point in the 20s and the 30s, many countries had a kind of aristocratic officer tradition and certainly

I don't think that leads any really good place, in my opinion. The U.S. is ahead of that. And they are creating opportunities for people like Eisenhower and Bradley who really would have had no advantage and no opportunity, I think, at another time and another kind of social system, especially if you go farther back, you know, the medieval period of before, they would have been simple peasants and discarded like nothing, you know. So this is ahead of the game in that respect.

By the mid-1930s, Eisenhower was an immensely competent staff officer, working under men like Connor, he'd learned core lessons of military strategy and politics, and perhaps most importantly, how those two intersect. With one eye on the future, I don't know how to spend all the time as well thinking about the next war. How might it be fought? And most importantly, how might it be won? He's constantly thinking about the next war, and he's constantly planning about what

future war is going to be. And one of the key people he's constantly bouncing ideas off is George Patton, who of course had served in combat in World War I as an armorer commander. And really was kind of ahead of the game in that respect to most of his colleagues. So he and Eisenhower talk a lot about future warfare, about future tactics and weaponry. And really they kind of hash out like, well, how big a roller tank is going to have versus infantry? What's going to be the future? And both of them are really military intellectual.

So Eisenhower has a peer there who is really intellectually stimulating for him. He's got a sponsor in Fox Connor. He eventually, of course, is going to be stationed at France with the American Battle Monuments Commission and create a handbook documenting the American battles in World War I and, of course, the burial grounds and become cemeteries to this day. Eisenhower is deeply involved in that. He's a really good writer. That's the other side of Eisenhower. He's an excellent writer. He writes that handbook.

And then later, unlike most generals, he's going to write his own memoirs. And by the way, this is what's so interesting to me. he's like a latter year Ulysses S. Grant, who also was an excellent writer and communicator who wrote his own memoirs. Eisenhower consciously modeled himself after Grant, both in his command style. You know, obviously they're different in terms of personality somewhat. But in the command style and in the communication style,

Eisenhower kind of consciously did that. So Eisenhower is having this mindset, and I think later we see this payoff in World War II, of a guy who really has his eye on the strategic ball as granted in the Civil War. In the mid-1930s, Eisenhower served under another towering figure that would shape his views on leadership. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur. For four years in the Philippines, Eisenhower worked as MacArthur's senior assistant. Unlike his time under General Fox Connor, this period taught him largely what not to do as a commander.

MacArthur was brilliant, but also domineering, self-absorbed and extremely sensitive. Didn't like dissent. He had a flare for drama, which contrasted sharply with Eisenhower's calm judgment and tact. Ike later joked that he'd studied dramatics under MacArthur. The two eventually parted ways when Eisenhower returned to the United States in December 1939 to command an infantry battalion, just as war had erupted in Europe. From there, his rise was meteoric. Within two years, he'd moved from regimental command to Chief of Staff for General Walter Kruger. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the General

Staff in Washington, drafting plans to defeat Germany and Japan. Recognized by General George C. Marshall, he was promoted rapidly and became Supreme Allied Commander in North Africa in November 1942. It's an extraordinary chain of promotions. It had been a truly unprecedented rise from most complete obscurity to one of the most prominent positions in the Allied military coalition. And it created some friction with his colleagues. The Ben Lears of the world, the huge drums, who definitely had more seniority. And that meant something in an army where promotions came slowly and you'd serve your time and you'd paid your dues, all that kind of thing. So all of a sudden have this guy vault over you. That can't happen without significant resentment.

But I think Marshall felt it was worth it to have the best person in there. But that also puts Marshall on the line to make sure that this guy doesn't fail and make him look bad, you know? So obviously he and many others have vetted Eisenhower of a long period of time. There's a fair amount of sympathy in the army for Eisenhower of having endured MacArthur for years and years endured life under him and that to come out of it unscathed on the other side, I think we tend to overlook that. There was a lot of respect for Eisenhower throughout the army. From those in the know, like Marshall, who understood what it meant to deal with McArthur,

all those years so successfully, he had somehow survived that. North Africa was Eisenhower's first combat command. He was in charge of Operation Torch, which were the Allied landings in French North Africa, so that's North West Africa. The plan was they would then advance east along the Mediterranean coast, and all remaining Axis forces would be crushed between them and British and Allied army advancing from Egypt. It was not an easy assignment.

Torch was fraught. It was controversial. The problem was the British had wanted to fight in the Mediterranean theatre. Well, the Americans couldn't understand why they didn't do a cross-channel invasion and march on Berlin. And so Torch was a compromise. And compromises rarely make for keeping everybody in the coalition happy. Leading it would be a tough job, especially when you gave command to a man who'd never been tested in combat. It is a risk, yeah, I mean, for sure.

And of course, as they would have thought of at the time, this is summer in 1942, this is the most important Allied or American command at this stage. That's the way they would have thought of it in Washington. Debatable, obviously, in the big grand scheme. But still, this is the main game. And to put this guy in charge who has no combat experience at all, who doesn't have much command experience in his army career, you'd be forgiven to think of him as a career staff officer at that point. He kind of was that he could somehow succeed. but he had shown enough in the schools, Command and General Staff College,

the Army War College, the way he had worked so effectively for so many people over many years, the relationships he had forged. Eisenhower had pretty wide respect in the Army at that point. And then now the question is whether he can forge productive relationships with our allies. That's what they didn't know at the time,

because he had never done that either, really. And his initial encounter with Montgomery, I think famously represents that. He stands in on a briefing that Montgomery gives when Montgomery is, I think, a two-star and a division commander. Eisenhower lights up a cigarette, and Montgomery, of course, didn't like that and stopped his whole briefing and said, who's doing that? And kind of dresses him down right there, you know, you can see, how's he going to react

to this guy? And Eisenhower, he's angry. That's the other thing we tend to forget about Eisenhower. He had a volcanic temper as a kid, and he had to learn how to control that. And I think that's even true when he's middle-aged in World War II. There's a lot of things that come up that are really going to anger him, especially a lot of things Montgomery does that are going to anger him over the time they know each other. And that begins it.

But you start to see him make pretty good inroads with a lot of the British and Canadians. Of course, in Operation Torch, dealing with G. Rod and the French is a major challenge for him. It's so complicated politically because, of course, it reflects an ongoing civil war in France, created by World War II in the German occupation. The Vichy French government, technically is the legitimate French government, but one that sued for an armistice with the Germans and is often thought about the Allies is a puppet government. They control those colonies in Tunisia and Morocco and Algeria. But remember, too, the local dynamic. This is an imperialist structure here, the French imposing themselves on local people, many of whom didn't really want them there.

So when we come as American invaders and British invaders, how are they going to? going to react to us. Weird deal to be fighting your ostensible allies from a French point of view. But what about the locals too? And then what about the divide between the French themselves? And so when I mentioned dealing with Grod, he has conflicted with Charles de Gaul, who obviously is the main free French leader, over who really controls those anti-vici forces. And Grod feels he ought to be in control of the whole operation. From his point of view, we're going onto French soil. Why would it be anything otherwise? From the American point of view, it's a wait a minute, we're sending about two, three divisions ashore and we're about to take over this whole thing in hundreds of ships.

So no, we're going to be in charge and Eisenhower is going to be our lever man for that. So he has to figure that whole dynamic out, much less not wanting the bloodshed, fighting the vishy forces, because, you know, obviously we've got to fight the Germans and Italians. So how do you handle all that? Now that ways, we'd say there's a lot of balls in the air. I think it's a classic example of that. You listen to Dan Snow's history hit. The best is yet to.

come. Stick with us. From the get-go, torch was fraught with difficulties. American troops were untested in battle, and the British, who'd already been fighting in North Africa for two years, were wary of American inexperience. The Vichy French, for their part, were unpredictable, well, to say the least. No one knew which way they were going to jump when Allied forces landed. And meanwhile, the Axis forces under Rommel were known to be aggressive and capable. The Allied invasion was not going to be easy. So there's two points of crisis that Eisenhower was going to have to deal with.

Okay, the first is, you know, not wanting to expend a lot of blood to fight the Vichy French. So he has to broker a settlement to try and create that strategic end. And that means holding your nose and cutting a deal with a guy named Admiral Darlane, who is the key French power broker there and is basically a fascist. He's a vitiate and a fascist. He's rabidly anti-British, but he's the guy who can stand down all those armed forces for you. So Eisenhower makes that deal, and it leads to a lot of political blowback in both Britain, but especially the U.S., and we wonder, wasn't Eisenhower ever in danger really losing his job? That's the point where it could have happened, and he has enough people in Washington standing up for him, but that just didn't look good.

It's total pragmatism. And then later, of course, the Germans and Italians' and Italian's counterattack at Cassarine Pass in Tunisia, in Tunisia. in February 1943, leading to a significant reversal primarily for the Americans and the capture of about 2,500 Americans, Eisenhower has to salvage that situation and turn it around. That, I think, is another major point of crisis. Here's where his old friend Patton comes to his rescue a little bit. Eisenhower feels that he must replace the Corps commander who was in charge of that battle, a guy named Lloyd Friedendahl, who would perform miserably.

And so Patton becomes the Corps commander there and certainly helps turn the tactical situation. around. Eisenhower then weather those crises. By the time we get to the end of the rainbow here in May 1943, where we capture about a quarter of a million acts of soldiers, Eisenhower by then had really forged a reputation

as a kind of effective alliance, multinational leader, putting together a team. He basically said, it's okay to curse someone out and say, you SOB, just don't say you British SOB, you American SOB, you Canadian SOB. I think there's

a great insight there. After setbacks in the Kasserine Pass, they approached Tunisia, the Allies found their stride. By May 1943, the last of Hitler's Africa Corps had surrendered in Tunisia. The nearly three-year-long campaign in North Africa was finally over. Eisenhower had helped to bring it home. For him, this had been a trial by fire. He now had a better handle on how this vast, complicated alliance worked. Everything from logistics, supplies, through to intelligence gathering and dealing with your allies. As those allies turn their attention to mainland Europe, he would put all these insights to good use. So he's overseen training, future operations and plans, Intel, because you've got ultra in play now, and obviously he's utilizing that,

having to deal with air resources, sea resources, fight about the Atlantic, his supply lines, logistics, strategy, alliance, diplomacy, I mean, on and on, he's dealing with all this kind of stuff. By the time Operation Husky happens, the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, that's the biggest invasion in human history up to that point in time. So he's in command of that. That is just an enormous battle to manage. So again, this isn't the guy who's on the ground leading troops or anything. He's seldom really at the front. That's not his thing. He's a theater commander, and he's most effective in managing other people and forging these relationships that prove productive. And also,

while being sensitive to soldiers and sailors and airmen and circulating around and being seen among them and liked by them. So he's the face of the Allied war effort. Famously, somebody had said that the Eisenhower Grin was worth X number of divisions. I think we tend to forget. This is like a hypermedia age, you know, a visual media. It's pre-television in the sense that very few people have television, but you might as well be in that kind of visual medium with the way things are at that point in time. It's rapid electronic communication, its perception,

it's propaganda. He understands information operations. I mean, so Eisenhower is just a great practitioner of warfare at those various levels, even if he's not like the ultimate strax soldier at every point the way we might want him to be. I mean, it doesn't mean he doesn't make mistakes,

but I think he understands modern warfare pretty well by that point. After the successful invasion of citizens, Italy, Eisenhower, already armed with the experience of two successful campaigns, was appointed Supreme Commander of Operation Overlord, the long-anticipated invasion of Northwest Europe. Now, if you listen to our last episode on the British Field Marshal, Bernard Montgomery, you'll know that this rubbed Montgomery up the wrong way, to put it mildly. This was the prize position. It was coveted.

and there were plenty of ambitious, competent commanders vying for the job. While Eisenhower's selection, well, obviously seems like a given in retrospect, at the time it was entirely possible that someone else might have taken the reins. I mean, it's possible. Of course, there's a lot of talk at the time and study by historians that Franklin Roosevelt had considered George Marshall for the job. I always thought that's a little odd because George Marshall is the chief of staff. He's the head of the whole army.

Technically, there'd be a step down for him, and he had no experience. in that kind of command and amphibious operations. And I think that would have been very awkward. He didn't have the relationships with our allies the way that Eisenhower did. Now, of course, Alan Brooke felt that that command should be his, the chief of the imperial general staff, which also would have been a step down for him, too, by the way. But he said that Churchill promised him twice, and he figured that he should have that. And Brooke had always a very, very high opinion of Brooke and felt he should have that.

But in reality, the truth was there was going to be a U.S. commander. And we'd already seen that as the laboratory was the Mediterranean, where at that point, the U.S. still doesn't have supremacy of military forces, the majority of them just yet. We will by the end of Sicily. But that's for the future. Well, by the time we're in Normandy, there is just no question. The American people would not have been on board with being under a foreign commander for that, not just for the invasion, but the campaign that's going to follow that's going to be predominantly

American, to the point of about two-thirds of the financial power and manpower by the end of the war, not during D-Day. So all that considered, I don't think there was any question had to be Eisenhower, given what had had already taken place in the Mediterranean, and the fact that it just wasn't going to make sense to put Marshall in that billet. So supposedly, FDR asked Marshall, what do you want? And Marshall doesn't let him off the hook and says, I'll serve it, your privilege and your pleasure, Mr. President.

But I don't think that would have made a lick a sense to have him in that job. but that's just my opinion. Let's take through the controversial figures. If you had Montgomery in command or Patent in command, I think there went a lot of inter-internal fighting and a lot of people being rubbed the wrong way, a lot of time and energy wasted on that kind of stuff. I think Eisenhower, as the kind of CEO of this operation, already has these very good productive relationships across the board,

universal respect as a kind of larger commander, if not necessarily a combat commander. what he does is basically refine the planning, which Frederick Morgan deserves a lot of credit, I think, for devising the original plans for the original thinking that they have for the invasion of Normandy. He takes Morgan's original ideas and expands them into a five-division, five-beach invasion plan, and Montgomery deserves a lot of credit for that too. So all of this is to say that Eisenhower is getting a lot of resources now that the allied world has made available, And particularly now that the United States is approaching its potential and capacity as a kind of military superpower,

Isahar is drawing on that and having to coordinate this vast operation on which he and I think many others feel that the outcome of the war will probably hinge. And so the pressure that's building in those months in England in early 1944 is kind of unimaginable, I think, to us all these years later. The pressure that he's under lifestyle-wise, it's an incredibly unhealthy. He doesn't sleep all that much. He smokes five packs of cigarettes a day. I don't know anyone could even live doing that, but somehow he does. He guzzles coffee seemingly by the gallon. He's out and about a lot and he's seen by the soldiers a lot.

I think that's really good. But he's just under stress constantly day after day. It's kind of amazing to think of. Eisenhower wasn't just chosen because he understood the military dynamics of what would be D-Day. He was chosen because he could manage all the people involved. Just think about the personality's got a juggle. He's got Montgomery chafing under his command. He's dealing with French General de Gaulle,

insisting that the glorious sons of France should have a bigger role. Back in London, Churchill is bombarding him with brilliant ideas, like invasions through the Balkans into Southeast Europe, or alternative strategies, or strange bits of kit that he deploy on the battlefield. At times, Eisenhower, must have felt like he was really the only adult in the room. It was a hugely complicated political and military balancing act. Churchill is one of the key players, of course.

And so Eisenhower, he'd already forged a pretty good relationship with Churchill. It's in these months, I think, though, when you really see a strong bond established that's going to last the rest of their lives, which is very significant, too, because I'll be president later and Churchill will come back as prime minister later, too, in the 50s. So, yeah, I mean, how often does that happen that a theater commander deals with a foreign head of government in such a tangible daily kind of one-on-one way, it might almost be thought of as inappropriate in terms of the chain of command. But FDR is totally good with this because he understands a larger productive purpose. And you kind of see, by the way, you kind of see McArthur

do this with Prime Minister Curtin in Australia a little bit in the earlier stages of World War II, but nowhere near as warm and closer relationship as Ike and Churchill are going to have. And yes, of course, Eisenhower has his always difficult subordinate in Montgomery. He doesn't want to be a subordinate and kind of looks down upon Ike in terms of combat experience. Monty has a lot of combat experience from World War I. I mean, he's seen a lot of action and he's commanded a lot of troops. So you can understand his viewpoint. But I think he also doesn't get some of the bigger picture in the purpose of this too.

And he doesn't quite grasp Eisenhower's value sometimes. And yes, DeGall is his own guy. And if we think about it from De Gaulle's point of view, we can kind of understand the whole point is his country, you know, and liberating his country. And the French must be part of this. And he's constantly trying to make the point, we're still a great power here, which is hard to do when other guys are helping to liberate you. But that's the reality of it. It all matters on a lot of levels. So Eisenar has to deal with him. And I think when you talk about these relationships, that's the one he has the toughest time with in a weird sort of way because he can't control him. I mean, he can control Monty in the end. because Monty is a subordinate technically. Tagal? Not really. And yet, you must know that FDR detests DeGal. So I think as I understand it, he can push back because of that maybe. He's fighting the war to a completely different level of diplomacy

and keeping this intact coalition, this team together, towards this unifying purpose, which, I mean, a dozen nations contribute to the Normandy invasion. And really, this is the colonel of what becomes NATO. So Eisenhower is like dealing with these purposes. personalities, and he has to think of the large alliance, but he also has to deal with the nuts and bolts, because he has to make decisions almost by the day about how they're going to proceed in relation to the invasion. Eisenhower's leadership in the run-up to D-Day was a master class. He was pragmatic. He tolerated ego if it produced results. He routinely chose

coalition unity over personal pride. Now, some critics have said maybe he perhaps he was too soft, and he allowed men like Montgomery to dominate the planning for D-Day. But without Ike's patience, without his ability to constantly keep the greater mission in mind, the Anglo-American Alliance could have fractured. And if that had fractured, there would have been no D-Day at all. And so, by the 5th of June 1944, Eisenhower had managed to coax and coerce, this enormous, complex, multinational invasion force into a state of readiness. All they needed now was the green light. and that depended on something as unpredictable as a weather forecast. I mean, most of us have a tough time deciding what to have for dinner.

We temporize over that. Let's think about this a second. You have the greatest invasion in human history on edge now. You have to make decision whether to go ahead with it. It could be a weather disaster. You know all about the Spanish Armada from deeper into history. And the outcome of the war could hinge on this. And then you have to decide.

I believe in that moment at Southwark House. Eisenhower is arguably the most powerful person in the history of the planet. And then the moment he makes that decision, weirdly, the power kind of slips away. It now goes to everybody else to implement it. But to make that decision, can you imagine the stress? And here's an insight into his character, of course. He prepares that failure note saying, you know, our landings have failed. You know, something I'm paraphrasing.

I made the decision and the best information I had at the time and basically says, The responsibility is mine alone. Think about that compared to a lot of leaders we have today or any other epic who are eager to deflect any responsibility or blame on themselves. This is a guy who's going to attract blame on himself if there's failure. I think that tells you a lot about Eisenhower. We all know it turned out great. He doesn't know when he writes that note. Okay.

So I think that's important to step back and think about too. This is Dan Snow's history here. More after this. As we know, in the end, Eisenhower did make the right call, because De Dey was an extraordinary success. Much of the planning was done by others, of course, Montgomery, Bradley, etc., but Eisenhower created the structure that allowed them to work together to function. And with Allied boots now on the ground in France, Eisenhower continued in this vein, retaining overall command, but delegating roles to the people best place to do them, and all the while mediating disagreement. between all the big personalities beneath him. He's the ultimate decision maker in terms of what's possible and what's not.

So a lot of times he's having to kind of broker disputes among his major commanders, his army commanders, Montgomery, Hodges, eventually Patton, once Third Army's activated in August. He's having to figure out, okay, I can give you these resources or not. I can give you the authorization to go ahead for this or that and not. So he's sometimes like the bad guy having to tell you, sorry, no can do. And so there's a lot of tension there that's happening. And there's been the tension, of course, of this grinded out battle in Normandy in the summer of 1944, which was just a horrifying experience and incredibly costly for the Allies and much less the Germans. But there's all these moments of stress, of course, when it seems as though we're going to be bogged down there.

And we're in the middle of another World War I now. What's happening, we know, is that we're kind of a treating the Germans down and wearing them down in addition to what the Soviets are doing to them on the Eastern Front, quite meaningfully there too. So Eisenhower is having to kind of deal with that daily and weekly stress, much less the casualty roles, which matters a great deal in two countries like Britain and the U.S. and also Canada that are suffering most of the casualties. I mean, remember, 1944 is a presidential election year in the United States. So if this thing gets worse and worse and worse, FDR may not be a viable candidate. Who knows? And then what does that mean for our war effort? maybe it intrudes upon the viability of Churchill's war cabinet. But Eisenhower has to think that way.

So he's constantly concerned about that, much less dealing with some pretty restive subordinates in Monty and Patton, the most famous, but they're not the only ones, of course. After the breakout from Normandy, Allied commanders debated how to end the war. There were hopes it would be over by Christmas. Montgomery proposed a narrow, concentrated, needle-like thrust into Germany, commanded by guess who. Eisenhower instead favoured a broad front approach, advancing across a wide line to steadily push the Germans back. Eisenhower did, though, ultimately concede to a version of Montgomery's

plan. It was called Operation Market Garden. Airborne troops would seize key bridges in the Netherlands, while an armored column would smash its way up the road to relieve all these small, scattered, isolated groups of airborne troops, link up all of them and create a corridor into Germany. The gamble failed. The paratroopers met fierce resistance, especially at the Dutch town of Arnhem, and the armoured advance stalled. It was slower than expected. Isolated and outnumbered, the airborne troops in Arnhem were eventually overwhelmed with heavy casualties, and they surrendered. This was a setback. It was a defeat, and it raised the important question about whether Montgomery or Eisenhower bear ultimate responsibility.

I've laid the ultimate responsibility at Eisenhower's feet because it is his call and he is the Supreme Commander. I think personally the decision to go ahead with Market Garden was his worst in the entire war, but certainly in the campaign in Northwest Europe. So what happens is that he meets with Montgomery at the Brussels airport aboard Eisenhower's plan on September 10th, 1944. By then, of course, the Allies have broken out of Normandy. they're moving east, but they're running into serious logistical problems. So the momentum is slowing down. The Germans are recovering a bit. There had been a great deal of hope in the aftermath of the victory in Normandy that the war was about over.

And there's still a belief in some quarters that Germany is on the verge of collapse. Because remember, this generation of senior officers had experienced the fall in 1918 as younger people and had seen the Kaiser Germany just collapsed seemingly overnight. And so it seemed like it was going to be a redo that in 1944. there'd been any attempt on Hitler's life in July. And so there's a hope that maybe we can get this thing over with without having to, you know, have this major conquering type campaign in Germany. And in the meantime, the airborne units that had played such a key role in Normandy had been on the sidelines for weeks and weeks and weeks with a lot of operations canceled.

And these are some of your best troops. You've invested a lot of resources in them. So Monty sells Ike on this idea that we can have this kind of coup domain operation of dropping parriced. troopers to capture bridges over the key river systems in the Netherlands and then link up with armor and then go in a North German plane and somehow live happily ever after and win the war. I think it's a eye in the sky thing in my opinion, but the way Eisenhower sees it, he's like, you know, you got a good point there in that maybe we can develop a bridgehead that will be very useful later.

Here's where I have criticized him, though. Monty, of course, is advocating for that famous single thrust to win the war. You put everything into one of single thrust and you knock out. the Germans that way. Eisenhower and many Americans have more of this kind of broad front view of how to go into Germany. And I think ultimately that's what makes the most sense because it maximizes it's what the North did to the South in the Civil War, by the way. And Eisenhower would have known that. I think he doesn't understand when he gives money to go ahead for Market Garden. He's basically giving up the idea of the broad front in favor of that single thrust. And by the time he realizes

that's what's happened, it's too late. And of course, Mark, Market Garden is a zero defect operation that if anything goes wrong, everything goes wrong. So when it goes sideways, you end up really in this terrible circumstance, unfortunately. So I think that was a bad call on eyes and hours part, much less of course what it means for the wonderful fighting formation, the British First Airborne Division that is more or less destroyed at Arnhem, fights really, really hard. I think it's incredibly tragic what happens there. and then to a lesser extent for the two U.S. Airborne divisions, the 82nd and 101st, which fight their guts out in the Netherlands over that fall in 1944 for unfortunately no great strategic purpose in the bigger picture of it. If we're Dutch living in those areas and we're liberated, that is meaningful. But the bigger picture of what this whole thing was supposed to be for, unfortunately we don't get those results.

By the late autumn of 1944 with the failure of Market Garden, the Allied advanced and stalled a bit. Supply lines were stretched. The front, had lengthened, the German army battered, it just wasn't finished yet. There were still fight left in it. In fact, in December, Hitler launched a surprise counter-offensive through the Ardennes, became known as the battle to bulge. It was an attack that aimed to split the Allied armies in half and capture Antwerp. The attack initially caught the Allies off guard, but Eisenhower responded quickly. He shifted reserves, he reorganised command along the front. American forces held key positions like Bastogne while Allied air power and reinforcements gradually ground down the German advance. By January 1945, the offensive had collapsed. Germany had sacrificed the last of its strategic

reserves. Within weeks, Allied forces crossed the Rhine River, pushing into Germany itself. After the shock of market garden and the crisis of the bulge, the path to final victory now looked finally open. He basically concludes the war within a year of D-Day, which is about what the planners expected, conservatively speaking. He does it with some level of conservation of resources and overwhelming military power by the end. It's a military force of such incredible power and proficiency that I think humanity had hardly ever seen that.

He had developed a lot of great commanders. He had liberated untold millions of people. No, I think there was a satisfaction in that, you know, with all the warts that came along with that. The Hurtkine Forest, of course, it happened in the meantime, too, in the fall of 44. That was a debacle. The bulge led to some pretty serious days, you know, from about

December 16 to about Christmas time in which we're struggling to stop the German advance. Once we do, of course, then it ends up as a pretty major victory. Where I'll take up for Eisenhower, and I think he still gets I think unwarded criticism this day is his decision not

to press on for Berlin. I think it makes great sense. And here's why I believe this. And I know some disagree with me. That's the fun of history, I guess. But at Yalta, the Allied leaders had decided on joint occupation zones in Berlin. So any way you slice it, we were going to have to give up half of Berlin to the Soviets. This was going to be deep within the Soviet zone of occupation in Eastern Germany. Okay. So if we're to press, say, ninth army and elements of First Army and maybe some of Monti's 21st Army group into Berlin, we're going to be fighting for ground, we're going to be giving up.

And we're going to be doing it in a shattered urban landscape of a place that's been bombed to smithereens, which is ideal defensive terrain for the defenders who are fighting fanatically. The casualty numbers are going to probably be in a minimum in mid-five figures of some sort. And we all know who's going to pay most of that blood debt. It's probably going to be the U.S. troops. So is this worth it for a prestige objective, parts of which we're going to have to give up? I don't think so at all. And I know Eisenhower didn't at the time and didn't for the rest of his life.

This could be an apocryphal story, but supposedly this happened. When he later ran for president, of course, the whole Berlin thing was raging that controversy in the Cold War. Oh, you know, we lost that part of the Cold War. We never should have done it. Eisenhower really screwed up. And so he supposedly asked a room of people, well, here's my casualty estimate for what this would have cost if we would have gone and taken Berlin.

Who here tonight wants to volunteer to some of the room? sacrifice a loved one to be part of that casualty list when we were going to have to give up a lot of the city. And supposedly it was like crickets. To me, that encompasses the entire span of this argument. That's why I think you probably did make the right call. By the end of the war in Europe, Eisenhower had become one of the most famous soldiers in the world. What set him apart wasn't the battlefield flamboyance of George S. Patton or the meticulous methodical planning of Bernard Montgomery. His real talent was just leadership. Managing person. personalities, keeping a multinational alliance working towards a common goal. And those skills were transferable.

They carried naturally into the post-war world. Eisenhower would lead NATO in 1952. He'd win an election and become president of the United States. He brought the coalition instincts of wartime commander into the politics of the Cold War. He's been the face of this Western Allied war effort of this new alliance that eventually becomes NATO. It's no accident that later, when NATO comes into being, he's the first NATO commander. Eisenhower has made that happen on so many levels. And so he comes out of the war with enormous prestige and not just in the U.S. globally. And he becomes a political figure in a way that would have been unimaginable, of course, 10 years earlier, but does have its precedence in American history, as we said, like with Grant, like with Jackson, Washington, and

Zachary Taylor is another one we tend to forget. I mean, James Garfield, we've seen this time and time again. And by this point already in the aftermath of World War II, remember FDR has died by this point and Truman has become president, not elected, he has succeeded FDR. Both parties are already courting Eisenhower for 1948. And there's even a conversation supposedly between Truman and Eisenhower sometime around this time. Truman offers to bow out if Eisenhower will take the Democratic nomination in 1948. And Eisenhower says he doesn't have any interest in politics. So he plays coy with that for years. of course, finally committing in 1952, but we can't fail to see the kind of political dimensions of Eisenhower even in that seven-year period. He's become that kind of figure by the end of World War II, not because he's lobbying to become president and plotting and consummating alliances to help him with this voting block or that, just because of who he is and the kind of level he operates on and the kind of decisions that he's made. These are arguably the most consequential events

in human history. And I think he's acquitted himself pretty well. And I think there's a lot of gratitude for that and a lot of trust in his leadership, I guess. Eisenhower is a quintessential example of the involved internationalist American who understood where the United States fits in relation to the rest of the world. What alliances mean, I mean, I think he would have been the first to tell us, because he understood history. Last time this country fought a war without any allies was the Spanish-American law in 1898. So I think that tells us. something. I think Eisenhower understood that. And he also understood, too, kind of what made America tick. I think he understood a lot about his countrymen and women and what they valued and what they

didn't. I think he understood that they demanded as a republic that the individual soldier, sailor, airmen mattered and that any commander needed to be mindful of that. You were kind of led from the bottom in a way, too. I think Eisen understood that kind of two-way leadership, but we nowadays call servant leadership. Eisenhower got that really, very, very. really well. So how should we judge Eisenhower as a commander? He wasn't the most aggressive general of the war. He was not a battlefield genius or an audacious frontline commander. Instead, he excelled at something less glamorous, but probably more important, true command. Through the twists and turns the Second World War, he balanced egos, he resolved disputes, he compromised constantly,

he responded to political leadership, he kept the vital alliance together. always with the end goal of victory at the front of his mind. Without his guidance, the alliance, well, it may have fractured or it certainly may have been a lot more choppy. Who exactly knows how history would have played out? In the end, Eisenhower was exactly the commander that the Allied coalition needed to win. The amazing thing about him is his impact didn't end

with the surrender of Germany. The coalition he'd done so much to forge and shape during the war became a blueprint for the post-war World World, visible in institutions like NATO. Victory in World War II was not just about armies and industry, it was about that cooperation. And Eisenhower's calm diplomatic leadership allowed countries with different interests to function as a single strategic entity. And in doing so, he helped to lay down the foundations for the alliances and the multinational partnerships that still shape global politics, mostly to this day. Thanks for listening, folks. Next week, we're going to spend

and the globe. We're heading all the way to the Pacific. We're going to be looking at Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and Japan's war against the United States, well, against everyone in the Pacific. Make sure you follow the podcast and your podcast player so you don't miss that one. Bye bye for now. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up's history and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England. What it was like to live in the Georgian era. And you can even hear the voice of Richard the Third. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover.

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