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Overview
"An excellent book . . . D'Este's masterly account comes into its own." —The Washington Post Book World
Born into hardscrabble poverty in rural Kansas, the son of stern pacifists, Dwight David Eisenhower graduated from high school more likely to teach history than to make it. Casting new light on this profound evolution, Eisenhower chronicles the unlikely, dramatic rise of the supreme Allied commander.
With full access to private papers and letters, Carlo D'Este has exposed for the first time the untold myths that have surrounded Eisenhower and his family for over fifty years, and identified the complex and contradictory character behind Ike's famous grin and air of calm self-assurance.
Unlike other biographies of the general, Eisenhower captures the true Ike, from his youth to the pinnacle of his career and afterward.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781627799614 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 1604 |
| Sales rank: | 56,880 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Carlo D'Este, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and a distinguished military historian, is the author of Patton: A Genius for War and three other books on World War II, all of which received high praise. He lives in New Seabury, Massachusetts.
Read an Excerpt
Eisenhower
A Soldier's Life
By Carlo D'Este
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2002 Carlo D'EsteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62779-961-4
CHAPTER 1
"Say Eisenhauer for Ironcutter."
They were believers in the doctrine of Menno Simons, who preached no authority outside the Bible.
Dwight D. Eisenhower's first ancestor in America was Hans Nicholas Eisenhauer, who emigrated from Germany's Rhineland to Pennsylvania in 1741. As the name was then spelled, it meant "iron hewer" or "iron cutter."
According to family lore, some of the earliest Eisenhauers may have been medieval warriors, dating possibly to the time of Charlemagne, who lived in Bavaria's Odenwald farming region. Over time the Eisenhauers evolved from warriors into pacifists. Many German Protestants at the time were followers of the doctrine of Menno Simons, the Swiss founder of the Mennonite movement, who preached in 1528 that no authority, either religious or political, existed other than the Bible and personal conscience. Simons advocated pacifism and urged his followers to reject the evils of materialism, proclaiming that "the true Christian should make no compromise with the world ... [but] follow the dictates of his own conscience, inspired and guided by the Word of God."
Among the disciples of the Mennonite movement were Dwight Eisenhower's ancestors, who were undoubtedly among those victimized during the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) for their beliefs. The movements of the Eisenhauers during this time are unclear, but the family is thought to have fled to Switzerland for sanctuary at some point. By the eighteenth century, religious persecution, lawlessness, plagues, and pestilence had become the stimulus for a great many Europeans to seek a better life in the British New World colonies. Many were persuaded to emigrate by William Penn, the founder and first governor of the Quaker colony called Pennsylvania, which had also become a haven for all other persecuted religious sects. Although Penn's new colony had a great deal to offer, it was populated mainly by craftsmen and merchants and seriously lacked the skills of farmers to till the land and produce the food needed for survival. In the 1740s this void led Penn to Germany's Rhineland, where he gave speeches encouraging German Protestant farmers to emigrate to Pennsylvania with glowing tales of its spiritual riches and its arable lands. "The result was a flood of emigration from Germany to Pennsylvania, of which the Eisenhauers were to become a part."
The earliest identifiable ancestor was Hans Peter Eisenhauer of Elterbach in the Rhineland. His youngest son was Hans Nicholas Eisenhauer, who left Rotterdam aboard the sailing ship Europa, arriving in Philadelphia on November 20, 1741. After swearing the required oath of allegiance to both the British Crown and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the Eisenhauer family settled in Bethel Township, near Harrisburg. On January 20, 1753, Hans Nicholas purchased a 168-acre farm, which "was recorded under the name of Nicholas Ironcutter. The clerk wrote on the draft: 'Say Eisenhauer for Ironcutter.'" It would be two hundred years later to the day that Hans Nicholas's great-great-great grandson was inaugurated as the thirty-fourth president of the United States.
Upon his death, Hans Nicholas deeded the farm to his eldest son, John Peter Eisenhauer, also known as Peter Ironcutter, who became a successful farmer and merchant in nearby Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania. John Peter Eisenhauer died in 1802 at the age of seventy-eight, the same year Frederick, the youngest of his seventeen children, was born. The second of Eisenhauer's sons to be named Frederick, he was the great grandfather of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Frederick was both a farmer and a weaver, and breaking with the tradition of large families, he and his wife, Barbara Miller, produced a mere six children. Before Frederick, little is known of the religious practices of the first Eisenhowers in America other than that they were predominantly Lutheran. Barbara Miller, who brought a generous dowry to their marriage, belonged to the church of the River Brethren, which Frederick joined in 1816.
The River Brethren, officially organized in 1862 as the Brethren in Christ, were a fundamentalist sect of the Mennonites, who had broken with their order as a result of religious quarrels.
One of Frederick's sons, the Reverend Jacob Eisenhower, was Dwight Eisenhower's grandfather, and the most dynamic and admired of his ancestors. A devoutly religious farmer, Jacob purchased one hundred acres of prime land outside Elizabethville, in the lush Lykens Valley, some twenty-five miles northwest of Harrisburg in an area that was home to many of the River Brethren.
Practicing what they preached, the Eisenhowers graciously opened their spacious, nine-room manor house to travelers, vagrants, and anyone in need of food and shelter. The large living room also doubled as a place of worship and communion for members of the Reverend Mr. Eisenhower's flock. It was here that Eisenhower, an acclaimed orator who sported a beard around his chin but had his upper lip clean-shaven in the manner of the Puritans and the Pennsylvania Amish community, delivered his sermons in German, which was still the mother tongue of most of Elizabethville's citizenry. Years later, his grandson, Edgar Eisenhower, would remember how Jacob spoke "with a broken Pennsylvania Dutch brogue."
Several Eisenhower relatives are known to have served the Union during the Civil War, but Jacob Eisenhower himself took no part. The war posed a troubling dilemma for Jacob, who neither condemned nor endorsed the Union but so greatly admired President Lincoln that he named one of his sons Abraham.
Before Kansas became a state, most maps showed the region west of the town of Manhattan as uncharted territory. On some maps it was marked the "Great American Desert." In 1877, some of the River Brethren, no doubt lured by advertisements that promised bountiful crops and newspaper articles praising the richness of the land and its open spaces, ventured to Kansas to see for themselves. They arrived at the peak of the harvest season and found an area of rich soil capable of producing large crops, orchards, grass for cattle, unspoiled rivers, and stands of adequate timber along the creeks and rivers. Their reports of life in Kansas were so encouraging that within the River Brethren community there was discussion of relocating the entire sect to Dickinson County, considered the best of the sites investigated. This led to a momentous group decision by many of the Brethren voluntarily to give up their homes and farms in Pennsylvania and move en masse to a promised but largely unknown land in Middle America.
The westward expansion of the United States was spurred by the explosive growth of the railroads. Between 1865 and 1880, the American railway system grew from thirty-five to ninety-three thousand miles, and in 1869, the transcontinental railway was completed in Utah with the symbolic ceremony of the golden spike.
The lure of the great American West was bolstered by Lincoln's major land reform, the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160 acres of land to each new settler and hastened the demise of the traditional Indian lands. Inexorably the tribes were forced into reservations as white ranchers took over the fertile land and erected fences, while farmers began to make use of new farming machinery pioneered by John Deere. The subjugation of the western Indian tribes may have been inevitable, but their shameful mistreatment was also one of the great tragedies of American history.
With the age of the railroad in Texas still some years away, the only means Texas cattlemen had of reaching a market was via the trail drive along the dusty Chisholm Trail into Kansas, across what is now Oklahoma but in the 1860s was still called Indian Territory.
Between 1867 and 1885 Kansas became the ideal location to which the Texas herds could be driven and sold to livestock brokers. Among the first to realize the profit potential of buying and selling cattle to the lucrative eastern markets was a young Springfield, Illinois, livestock entrepreneur named Joseph G. McCoy, who sought a suitable location in Kansas "undisturbed by mobs or swindling thieves." McCoy chose the tiny village of Abilene, where an extension of the Chisholm Trail terminated, as did the Kansas Pacific Railroad, which reached the town in March 1867.
When McCoy established residence in 1867 he described Abilene as a "small, dead place consisting of about one dozen log huts" with dirt roofs, and a single saloon keeper who maintained a colony of prairie dogs with which he supplemented his income by selling them as curiosities to eastern tourists. Nevertheless McCoy deemed Abilene an ideal site, not only for its location but also for its grasslands and excellent water supply. Determined to turn Abilene into a thriving railhead cattle town, in a mere sixty days McCoy built stockyards large enough to hold a thousand head of cattle. Soon cattlemen began diverting their herds to Abilene.
Abilene quickly numbered some three thousand inhabitants as the trappings of a busy trading post sprang up almost overnight, bringing to the burgeoning town traders, merchants, gamblers, cardsharps, outlaws, assorted riffraff, and most of all, cowboys anxious, after the hardships of the trail, to enjoy home cooking and to patronize the saloons, dance halls, and whorehouses. Most of Abilene's commerce was situated on Texas Street, which ran parallel to the Kansas Pacific tracks. Later, the action shifted to sin-filled districts called by various names, such as "Hell's Half-Acre," "Texas Town," and the "Devil's Addition," where about one hundred prostitutes plied their trade. One Abilene resident described the garishness of the "Devil's Addition" as "rightly named, for Hell reigned there. ... in that damned Valley of Perdition." In July 1868 a Topeka newspaper observed, "Hell is now in session in Abilene."
The term "Wild West" was coined in Kansas, and there was no cattle town wilder than Abilene in its heyday. In its infancy Abilene was a thoroughly inhospitable place: dusty and hellishly hot in summer and forbiddingly cold in winter, its streets a sea of mud whenever it rained. From the time that Joseph McCoy had put Abilene on the map, the town had endured a reign of terror by unruly roughnecks who jeeringly defied the town's attempts to control them. Its first lawmen either quit or were hounded out of town. No one paid the slightest attention to a new city ordinance banning guns, and as soon as a jail was constructed, it was torn down by a group of carousing cowboys. Killings and violence became so commonplace that even by the town's pinnacle in 1871 the founder of Abilene's first newspaper characterized the place as having more desperadoes than any other town of comparable size in the United States.
In 1870, in an attempt to bring Abilene's lawlessness under control, the mayor hired a soft-spoken, fearless marshal named Thomas J. "Bear River Tom" Smith, a former New York City cop turned frontier lawman. Smith quickly lived up to his lofty reputation and during his brief tenure there were no more killings in Abilene. What made Tom Smith so unique was that he used his fists rather than guns to tame the town. In November 1870, Smith was brutally executed near Abilene while attempting to arrest two farmers. Tom Smith was followed for a short time by the notorious Wild Bill Hickok, who kept the peace in Abilene and killed his share of lawbreakers who dared to challenge his authority.
In the post-Civil War period Abilene represented the best and worst of a growing and expanding America. Both Billy the Kid and Wyatt Earp are known to have passed through Abilene (without incident) during its brief reign as the West's wildest town. "Abilene was corruption personified," wrote one historian. "Life was hectic, raw, lurid, awful."
In September 1867 the first cattle were shipped from Abilene to Chicago and put Abilene on the map. During Abilene's heyday, between 1876 and 1879, 1,046,732 head of cattle were shipped east. In the end, however, McCoy lost money in Abilene, and moved on. The ultimate irony was that the strongly religious McCoy utterly detested the violence and wickedness he had helped create in Abilene.
Abilene's tenuous monopoly as a cattle town and sin city lasted barely four years, and by 1872 it had fallen victim to the westward extension of the railroads, and the opposition of its now largely farming citizenry, who declared that "the inhabitants of Dickinson [County] ... will no longer submit to the evils of the [cattle] trade." Other sites, such as Wichita, Salina, and Ellsworth, soon flourished as cattle towns, their proliferation fueled by the emergence of a powerful rival to the Kansas Pacific: the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway. By 1875 Dodge City had superseded Abilene in notoriety thanks to such colorful Western characters as Wyatt Earp, Billy Tilghman, Bat Masterson, Buffalo Bill Cody, John Wesley Hardin, and Doc Holliday.
In the aftermath of its glory days, Abilene had, by the early 1880s, evolved into a typical Kansas agricultural town that catered to farmers and ranchers. Dickinson County began attracting land speculators; they bought up parcels of unimproved land, divided them into lots, and advertised in eastern newspapers to attract settlers anxious to find new lives in the West. An 1887 brochure luridly proclaimed that "Abilene is to be a city of ten thousands in a few years," with "factories, fine business blocks, beautiful homes," and even a streetcar line. Another advertised that Abilene "has all the right stuff." Dwight Eisenhower would later write, "Civic pride, in many American towns of that period, was the most flourishing local industry." Although Abilene ultimately turned out to be a bad investment for the speculators (who outnumbered buyers by the late 1880s), it brought settlers keen to take advantage of the Homestead Act. So rapid was Abilene's evolution from Wild West town to agrarian center that the River Brethren, undeterred by its violent reputation, began to settle in Dickinson County less than a decade after Joseph McCoy had turned Abilene into "America's first great cowtown."
CHAPTER 2The Promised Land
They were good people.
— MILTON S. EISENHOWER
In the year 1878, Jacob Eisenhower and his family were part of a migration to Dickinson County, Kansas, that numbered several hundred Pennsylvania River Brethren. The Eisenhowers arrived in Abilene in April in the first group and settled some twelve miles southeast of Abilene, where he purchased 160 acres of prime farmland. For nearly a year the Eisenhowers lived in a covered wagon while Jacob built a spacious new home for his family.
It did not take long for the River Brethren to validate the wisdom of their decision to leave Pennsylvania. Even during the depression years of the late 1880s and the 1890s, they prospered in Kansas. Corn, hay, wheat, barley, and oats were staples, and their large herds of cows almost always produced a surplus of milk. Their cooperative religious spirit also extended to economic matters, in which the River Brethren proved to be shrewd businessmen.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Eisenhower by Carlo D'Este. Copyright © 2002 Carlo D'Este. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Prologue: "An Astonishing Man",
I. THE EISENHOWERS, 1741–1909,
1 "Say Eisenhauer for Ironcutter.",
2 The Promised Land,
3 "A Good Place for Boys to Grow into Men",
4 A Young Man's Education,
II. THE ACCIDENTAL SOLDIER,
5 Abilene to West Point,
6 The Long Gray Line,
7 "Popular but Undistinguished",
8 "1915 — the Summer Dwight Came Back from West Point",
9 Miss Mamie Doud,
III. WORLD WAR I,
10 Roses Have Thorns,
11 "I ... Will Make Up for This",
12 "A Journey Through Darkest America",
13 A Friendship Forged,
IV. THE INTERWAR YEARS, 1920–39,
14 "The Man Who Made Eisenhower",
15 "A Watershed in My Life",
16 Fort Benning, Washington, and France, 1926–29,
17 "Nothing Short of a Genius",
18 The Indispensable Staff Officer,
19 "Shame! Shame!",
20 Toiling for MacArthur,
21 Mission Impossible,
22 "I'm a Soldier. I'm Going Home.",
V. THE UNITED STATES PREPARES FOR WAR, 1940–42,
23 "This Work Is Fun!",
24 Third Army Chief of Staff,
25 Marshall's Protégé,
26 "I'm Going to Command the Whole Shebang.",
27 The Architect of Cooperation,
28 An Unlikely Friendship,
29 Sailing a Dangerous Sea,
VI. A GENERAL'S EDUCATION: THE MEDITERRANEAN, 1942–43,
30 "I Am Nothing but a Soldier.",
31 "The Dreariest Chapter in the History of Allied Collaboration",
32 Four Stars,
33 "Ikus Africanus",
34 Monty and Alex,
35 "What in Hell Does Eisenhower Command?",
36 "Everything That Planning Should Not Be",
37 "A Grinding War of Attrition",
38 "Who Will Command Overlord?",
VII. THE INVASION OF EUROPE, 1944,
39 Supreme Allied Commander,
40 "A Monument to the Imagination of British and American Planners",
41 "O.K., We'll Go.",
42 "I Thank the Gods of War We Went When We Did.",
43 The Battle for Normandy,
44 "Dear Ike, To-day I spat in the Seine.",
45 Triumph and Controversy,
VIII. CRISIS IN COMMAND: NORMANDY TO THE ELBE, 1944–45,
46 "A Tactician's Hell and a Quartermaster's Purgatory",
47 Which Way to Germany?,
48 "Coins Burning Holes in SHAEF's Pocket",
49 The Autumn Stalemate,
50 "There Will Be Only Cheerful Faces at This Conference Table.",
51 "If I Can Keep the Team Together, Anything's Worth It.",
52 The Invasion of Germany,
53 All Roads Lead to Berlin,
54 Armageddon,
Epilogue,
Notes,
Sources and Selected Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
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