Eisenhower in London

On 24 June 1942 Major General Dwight Eisenhower, until then head of the War Department’s Operations Division in Washington, flew into Britain. He was to take command of the European Theater of Operations, United States Army (ETOUSA), that is, of all the American ground forces and Army Air Forces assembling in the British Isles. He took over command immediately on arrival, and the War Department announced his appointment on 25 June. On the same aircraft was Major General Mark Clark, commander of II Corps, whose headquarters was moved to England over the following weeks. The 51-year-old Eisenhower was at the time almost unknown in Britain. Two years later he commanded the largest seaborne invasion in history.

Bolero and the dispute over the second front

American troops had been in the British Isles for half a year. In January 1942 the first units of the 34th Infantry Division landed in Northern Ireland, in February the headquarters of the American bomber force began to take shape in England, and in May the 1st Armored Division arrived in Ulster. At the head of these forces stood Major General James E. Chaney, who since May 1941 had led a group of observers in London and, after Pearl Harbor, the headquarters of United States Army Forces in the British Isles (USAFBI).

In the spring of 1942 the purpose of their presence changed. In April, in London, the Army Chief of Staff, General George Marshall, won the British over to a plan under which the United States would assemble a great army in Britain for an invasion of France. The build-up of troops and supplies was codenamed Bolero, and the invasion itself, planned for the spring of 1943, Roundup. In case the USSR was close to collapse or Germany was clearly weakening, a limited landing as early as 1942 was also envisaged: Operation Sledgehammer. The plan was based on a memorandum prepared in March by the Operations Division – that is, by Eisenhower himself and his officers. Eisenhower had headed the division since February, and after the reorganisation of the Army in March it had become Marshall’s real planning staff.

The May inspection

At the end of May Marshall sent Eisenhower and Clark to London to examine how the preparations were going. The two spent about a week there. They talked with the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Alan Brooke, with the Chief of Combined Operations, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and with General Bernard Montgomery, who was then conducting exercises in Kent. Eisenhower came back convinced that Chaney’s headquarters, conceived as an observer mission in a neutral country, was unsuited to directing a great army in wartime, and that the theatre needed a commander with full powers.

He was back in Washington on 3 June. On 8 June the War Department formally established ETOUSA in place of USAFBI, and Eisenhower submitted to Marshall a draft directive for the commander of the new theatre. According to his memoirs, Marshall asked whether he was satisfied with it, because he might be the one to carry it out. A few days later – on 11 June, according to Eisenhower’s diary – the decision was made: he was to replace Chaney. The choice surprised many senior officers. Eisenhower had never commanded in battle and had received his general’s stars less than a year earlier. Marshall, however, valued him for his skill in planning, organisation and working with people, and for half a year had watched him at work every day.

The last days before his departure brought Eisenhower a personal loss: on 17 June his younger brother Roy died suddenly. He did not postpone his departure.

The new commander

Eisenhower and Clark left Washington on 23 June and were in Britain the next day. ETOUSA headquarters occupied a building on Grosvenor Square in London’s Mayfair, where the American embassy also stood. Chaney returned to the United States. From his first days Eisenhower worked to make the American staff work together with the British, not alongside them. He also announced that he would talk openly to journalists and treat them as part of the war effort. His easy manner and his smile quickly won over the British press, and the nickname “Ike” became known on both sides of the Atlantic.

On the day Eisenhower arrived the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was across the ocean: since 18 June he had been holding talks with Roosevelt in Washington, and he returned to London at the end of the month. From July Eisenhower met the Prime Minister regularly at the table in Downing Street and at Chequers. A lasting friendship, though not one free of disputes, grew up between them.

On 7 July Eisenhower received his third star as a lieutenant general. Under him were the commander of the ground forces, the commander of the Eighth Air Force, General Carl Spaatz, and the commander of the Services of Supply, General John C. H. Lee, who since May had been preparing bases, depots and camps in England for hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

II Corps

It is often said that on 30 June the United States assigned II Corps to the European theatre. This needs to be qualified. What was moved to Britain was the corps headquarters, not a large formation with divisions. Clark, a major general since April, had flown in with Eisenhower, and according to the records he took command of the corps in the European theatre on 1 July. The headquarters arrived by sea in July and, according to some sources, on 13 July settled into barracks at Tidworth, near Salisbury. It was to prepare the American part in a landing on the Continent. Later in July Clark was promoted to command all American ground forces in Europe. In Northern Ireland the headquarters of V Corps, to which the divisions that had arrived there were subordinated, was already in operation. The first new divisions for Bolero, including the 1st Infantry Division, reached the British Isles in August.

Place in the war

Eisenhower came to London as commander of a future invasion across the English Channel. Before he could prepare it, the plans changed. The British regarded Sledgehammer as suicide: in 1942 the Allies had too few troops and landing craft in England to hold a bridgehead in France, and the fall of Tobruk on 21 June had shown how hard it was to beat the Germans even in the desert. Roosevelt wanted American soldiers to fight the Germans in 1942. In July, after talks in London by Marshall, Admiral Ernest King and Harry Hopkins, Sledgehammer was abandoned and the President decided on a landing in North Africa, Operation Torch. At the time Eisenhower considered this decision a mistake. In August, however, he became Commander-in-Chief of the Allied forces for the operation, with Clark as his deputy.

II Corps, under General Lloyd Fredendall, landed near Oran on 8 November 1942, and in February 1943 suffered a heavy defeat in Tunisia at the Kasserine Pass. After the victory in North Africa Eisenhower commanded the invasions of Sicily and Italy, and in January 1944 he returned to London as Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force. The build-up of an army in Britain that he had begun in June 1942 culminated in the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944.