The King’s visit was so hush-hush that we drove to Maison Blanche airport just as usual, with only the motorbike escort to clear our way. No special guards were provided. At the field, we moved down to a distant corner and joined the British High Brass, including Admiral Cunningham and Air Chief Marshal Tedder. Butch whispered he would open the door for His Majesty.
Chapter 7
The huge converted Lancaster came in almost immediately, taxiing down to our end of the field. Smiling and a trifle awe inspiring to even the most sophisticated of his welcomer, the King stepped down to a volley of British, French, and American salutes. The British seemed to have trigger-arms; every time he turned his head, they responded with salutes which vibrated as vigorously as palm fronds in a gale.
On the trip through Algiers Butch and I pretended to be ear less machines. But we couldn’t help eavesdropping on the King of England. He was buoyant and friendly with General Ike, the first to admit his downright excitement at getting out of embattled England for the first time since war started. He and the General talked about the Tunisian campaign and the scheduled invasion of Sicily. The King displayed a unique familiarity with even the most technical points, obviously up to date on all developments. Butch, I noted, sat back stiffly and drove himself into a tizzy trying to decide whether he should return the salutes of British troops who recognized their King in our car. After twitching hesitantly several times, he gave in and returned the salutes steadily. The General later confessed to being just as troubled as Butch. I was probably the least worried of the three of us, long hardened to the responsibility for VIP’s in the back seat and to concentrating upon the job of driving. At the same time, and as a Britisher, I found a certain little thrill in driving the King of England through Algiers, observing the respectful “high-balls” he garnered from surprised Tommies. And I looked forward to speaking with him a few minutes, just as I had with all visiting front-pagers. But after we arrived at the British villa and pulled up before a parade-ground guard of honor with fixed bayonets, my anticipation collapsed. Butch let His Majesty out, beaming happily as General Eisenhower presented his Naval Aide. I gasped as Ike then motioned to me and made an informal presentation. It was a moment of confusion : as a civilian, I couldn’t salute; in uniform, I couldn’t curtsy, as one does in formal court presentations. So I shook hands boldly, murmuring quite incorrectly, I’m sure : How do you do, Sir ?
There was no reply. ‘Your Majesty’ General Ike prodded helpfully, ‘this is Miss Kay Summersby, who’s one of your British subjects and now on duty at our headquarters as my personal driver.’ The King smiled briefly in dismissal, then moved on into the house, leaving behind a very frustrated British subject.
That same afternoon, Gen Eisenhower shocked his staff by unveiling to press correspondents AFHQ’s secret plans for the Sicilian invasion. He took the step to choke off speculation on the next Allied move. His gamble and his faith were justified; not one newsman broke the pledge of secrecy.
Before leaving on his Mediterranean tour, the King gave our Boss that most coveted decoration, the Grand Cross of the Most Honorable Order of the Bath; General Ike was as dose as a foreigner could come to an outright title. His pride in this honor was such that he never appeared in public without the thick maroon ribbon among his growing collection. He was similarly impressed when Gen Giraud presented him with the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest military award, and, in this case, the same medal Gen Giraud himself had received for combat action.
After a three-day inspection of 5th Army troops engaged in realistic battle training, General Eisenhower found himself again embroiled in the seething politics of North Africa, Washington, apparently, insisted that he take on the near-impossible task of explaining to General Giraud and General de Gaulle just how the British and American governments insisted the two leaders get together, stabilize the murky political situation, and get on with the actual war. Above all, I learned from office gossip, he was to insist that Gen Giraud retain command of the French military. The end result of these instructions was a conference one Saturday morning with the two generals. And the end result of that was inevitable : General de Gaulle left the villa conference within an hour after the three-way meeting started. (This touchy situation eased up a bit with Giraud’s confirmation as chief of the French forces in North Africa, De Gaulle being head of the French Committee of National Liberation, as well as Governor of Algeria.
General Ike never discussed these affairs in public. In private, though, it seemed to all of us he was pretty fed up with the political end of his job. During this period in June he escaped such by-products of command by inspecting more troops, from those in landing exercises to those in formal review, from those at Division CP’s to those at overworked airdromes. About this same time, the King returned to Algiers from visits to Tripoli, Tunisia, and Malta, no longer the bright, enthusiastic visitor we had met a fortnight before. His entourage explained His Majesty was a victim of the most disrespectful enemy in North Africa, that scourge of the Mediterranean which Yanks derided as “the GIs.” The King was so morose when I drove him and the General out to Maison Blanche that the latter abandoned all attempts at conversation. And I was definitely hurt that the King, leaving for London, didn’t utter a word or offer to shake hands in farewell to a homesick Briton surrounded by Americans.
The Advance Command Post at Sidi Athman had been unsatisfactory in every respect. In the beginning, we all lived in tents when stopping there; daily life was a depressing round of mosquitoes, dust, mud, heat, great swigs of paregoric, and weary drives to Tunis. The narrow highway, clogged with speeding convoy drivers who refused to give right-of-way to our siren, our flags, our motorbike escort, and our star-studded tags, seemed again a regular obstacle course. Butch and Tex convinced the General of what I knew all along, namely, that the forty-five minute drive over the highway to Tunis was tiring, trying, and dangerous. Consequently, Tex toured the countryside and found the ideal spot for a new advance CP : Amilcar. It was a welcome change, with Tunis only fifteen minutes away via a road mercifully clear of convoys.
Gen Eisenhowers ‘White House’ was just that, an attractive white structure with a beckoning terrace, a view of Cape Bon across the bright Bay of Tunis, and steps right down to the water. Furnished extravagantly by an Italian moved to a bleak cell block, it was large and comfortable in everything but sleeping space. The General’s bedroom was the only one worthy of the name; the other three or four were so tiny they must have been servants’ quarters.
From Amilcar we traveled to nearby La Marsa virtually every other evening, to visit either Tooey Spaatz in his plush villa or Air Chief Marshal Tedder in his caravan. The first few visits with Tooey set hot fires under Air Force discipline. Until Ike blistered the Spaatz headquarters, the “fly-boys” greeted his impressive car and even the General himself with a bored nonchalance which would have been incongruous in civilians, let alone the military. Strict orders, however, soon brought hands out of pockets and goaded them into salutes; sometimes, even a semblance of attention.
Three or four times weekly we visited Bizerte, some fifty minutes away, where the British operated their headquarters in rather primitive fashion amidst all the debris. That trip required a ferry ride across the harbor a grim mass of half-capsized vessels, masts, and other flotsam of war. I hated that trip through the narrow, mine-bordered channel. But it was part of the job. My personal mail’s getting so heavy it’s almost a full-time job in itself the General complained one day. Then, as though struck by an afterthought, he added : How would you like to take it over, Kay ? I jumped at the opportunity. Nevertheless, this was no haphazard offer; General Ike thoughtfully believed the work might brush away some of my gloom and fill up the empty hours between motor trips.
Gen Eisenhower probably is the one great military leader in history who felt humble enough, even during crucial campaigns, to answer all personal mail. These letters began to trickle into AFHQ soon after the North African landings, numbered thirty to fifty a week by the time he reached Tunis, and attained the proportions of a paper tidal wave by the time he was on the Continent. He first attempted to answer only those from GI relatives; then, after I took over, insisted that each and every letter receive a reply. ‘They have something important to say’ he once remarked, ‘or they wouldn’t take the trouble to write. So it’s my job to answer them’.
The mail was a constant delight. One letter might be from an Arkansas mother worried about her son wearing his long underwear. One might ask, in careful finishing-school script, that a certain young man be transferred from the wicked city of Algiers. Another might suggest a Rube Goldberg invention to win the war at one Superman stroke. Still another, stained with tears and written laboriously, would simply and movingly offer God’s blessing. Quite a few noted the slowness of promotions. The range of problems and subjects was greater than that faced by any priest at confession, for it seemed half the Western world regarded Gen Eisenhower as father, son, boss, friend, and a sort of male Dorothy Dix. Their letters poured in from each of the United States, from Canada and the United Kingdom, written in everything from a sharecropper’s scrawl to an executive’s stiff but touching dictation.
Peculiarly, no writer ever blamed the General personally for a particular grievance, whether it be the Darlan fiasco or the Kasserine Pass tragedy, a wounded husband or a sadistic CO. The far-flung correspondents seemed to sense his staggering load of problems and usually wrote apologetically, ‘Tin sure you’d take care of this, if you knew about it’. Very few wrote him with awe; they were respectful but informal, in the style of correspondence with a favored uncle or a city councilman.
Requests for autographs were an increasing problem. Ike decided to comply, if the writer were engaged in some sort of war work, no matter how small. Those who mentioned such activity blood donations, bandage work, Red Cross service, USO aid, paper or fat collection received a signed letter in reply. In this way, even the General’s autograph was put to work for the war effort. I got the most fun out of the letters from the youngsters, who reported tremendous feats of home-front war work and wrote all about it, often in unconsciously humorous fashion, to win that autograph of Gen Eisenhower, which they prized more than any box-top gift.
Naturally, the mail included scores of parcels of every shape and description. They contained cigarettes, hand-knitted scarves and gloves and socks, sun glasses, Western magazines, books, food, piles of home-made fudge. Although meant as personal presents, they were far too many for the General’s use. We saw that they went to the spots where they were most needed, the hospitals and the rest centers and the front-line troops. Handling this flood of mail drew me into the small office, where I soon became part of the real official family. Before, I had been among the outside, after-hours intimates; now I was in the ‘paper world’ the official inner circle. And I acquired three new friends, Sue Sarafin, Margaret Chick, and Nana Rae, WAC’s with whom I was to be associated for the remainder of the long, mobile war.
Meanwhile, all routine office work took second place to one priority objective : the gigantic build-up for ‘Husky’, the invasion of Sicily. Patton’s Seventh Army and Montgomery’s Eighth trained in the field until their men were almost stale with fatigue. Headquarters became increasingly tense. Five days before the actual operation, official observers began to arrive. Among them, I met one of the war’s most glamorous men, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Sitting beside him at dinner that night, I found the Combined Ops chief as engaging, interesting,
and handsome as the gushing press described him. Very few men live up to the “dashing” tag, but Lord Louis Mountbatten is dashing a tall, noble, intriguing man with a romantic background which began back in the days when he was a distinguished London playboy. He got along splendidly with the General, to whom he referred as Ike; the latter immediately called him Dickie. Lord Louis, an obvious admirer of the General, often got so excited during conversation that he almost moved into his listener’s lap; as one of his own staff put it, ‘Dickie could talk the leg off a race tout’. All in all, I found him very handsome especially in Navy whites and refreshingly charming.
Before that week was out, our war flamed up in full fire again. On July 9, General Eisenhower flew to Malta to supervise the assault upon Sicily which began early the following morning. The Germans had sworn to make a bitter battlefield out of every inch of the island and we all watched the news apprehensively.
Sicily may have been a side-issue campaign back home but on the scene it was a huge, vital operation; none of the Big Brass bothered to hide his worry. After all, the staff planners had ordered about one thousand naval craft of every description and at least 150,000 men to take part in the invasion more than assaulted North Africa itself. We all breathed easier when the landing went off all right. But the Americans at headquarters cursed that Gen Patton, who had the tough job in ‘Torch’ operation, also ran into the stiffest opposition in this show.
Sicily, in fact, brought out more Anglo-American differences than anything since Kasserine Pass, when the British had made barbed remarks about cocky Yanks who couldn’t win a simple tank battle, while the Americans themselves, hurt and shocked by their first real defeat, blamed it all on their irate Ally. Sicily was more of an American campaign and now there was widespread resentment at the way the press played up the accomplishments of the well-publicized Montgomery, although Patton was bashing through much stiffer opposition than Monty and later ran circles around him. This conflict reached a crisis when the Prime Minister announced several victories even before AFHQ knew about them. The heaviest blow at international and inter-service unity came with rumors around Algiers that the Royal Navy had shot down twenty-three American planes loaded with paratroopers.
I mention all this only as an indication of what Gen Eisenhower was up against, constantly, in directing the first truly Allied command in all history. He handled these and other back-breaking problems with direct diplomacy. In this case, correspondents were given an exact picture of the fighting, which showed the true relation between the celebrated Eighth Army, which was, in fact, bogged down, and Patton’s Seventh Army, which covered ground with a wild boldness later to be hailed in Europe. And press dispatches began to give a more rounded view of Sicilian combat, an Allied view.
As for the story that RN guns had shot down US paratroop planes anti-British feeling became so intense in some areas that Ike had to release the true facts : these troop carriers came over Sicily just at the end of an enemy air raid and, mistaken for unfriendly planes, were shot down by both the British and the American Navies. He also took immediate steps to make certain that no such horrible error could ever take place again.
The Churchill incident was straightened out at top levels and this is an important clue to the General’s welding of nationalities into a cohesive staff the British at AFHQ were the first to decry the undue emphasis on their own troops, the first to batter London with loud protests. The men at AFHQ were like that, so filled with Allied esprit they often apologized for their own government’s action.
Perhaps I don’t explain this phenomenon clearly. It might be better to say, simply, that men at AFHQ were a sort of ‘One World’ group. Their ‘One World’ was the war. And they battled militantly for that single cause, even against occasional opposition from their own respective governments. Historians probably will agree that this was Gen Eisenhower’s greatest achievement in World War II this ability to submerge national pride into an international determination to win the war.
The most encouraging evidence of success came when Europe’s senior dictator, Benito Mussolini, quit. Only homesick, weary troops felt the end was near. Everyone at headquarters warned the Germans intended to save their holy Reich by battling for every kilometer of Italian soil; the Nazis backed up that threat by sending a solid stream of divisions down from the North. Still, collapse of the Fascist government in Rome brought new problems. And our next VIP was there to discuss the Italian situation; he was the aging American Secretary of War, seventy-five-year-old Henry L. Stimson.
On the lighter side, I found it amusing that Gen Eisenhower, soon after this important conference with the Secretary of War, went to the dispensary for a physical examination a checkup for his promotion to the rank of colonel. He seemed to find it no more than whimsical that the Army was just getting around to making him, an officer already accustomed to his fourth star, a colonel in the Regular Army. Within a month, however, the Army cast caution out the Pentagon windows and made Dwight D. Eisenhower a major general, a permanent major
general. Meanwhile, the spotlight turned to another general : Georgie Patton.
It was the middle of August and Dick’s old 3rd Division was in Messina. The Sicilian show was over. The curtain was going up on the Italian campaign. But, in the field and in all headquarters, talk centered upon Patton. The factual details remained foggy; correspondents still hadn’t broken the story. Yet everyone in the Mediterranean knew Gen Patton had slapped a soldier at 93rd Evacuation Hospital. Even his staunchest admirers declined to justify the incident. Enemies pointed out that slapping a soldier is a court-martial offense for any officer, let alone a general, let alone a general as famous as Patton. His friends agreed, but argued that ‘Blood and Guts’ undoubtedly was the most valuable fighting general in America’s European armies; would it serve the war effort to junk him, just to satisfy regulations and one soldier’s pride ? Hundreds of soldiers’ lives not just their pride and military rights were frequently sacrificed for the bigger goal, winning of the war. Shouldn’t this same principle apply here ? Patton’s enemies counter-attacked this argument by charging his retention would cause an angry storm of protest so overwhelming it might destroy public faith in the Army.
Besides, they added, there weren’t enough high-ranking officers in the area to try a lieutenant general; a trip home and the resultant stench of court-martial, Patton’s friends contended, might very well result in an international scandal damaging to the Allies and their war.
After Drew Pearson cracked the story, these problems boiled over into the American press; in our own sector they were fought from headquarters to squad level. Gen Eisenhower, probably Patton’s best friend and yet saddled with the responsibility for correction, wrote to his Seventh Army commander the last severe reprimand he ever had to compose in Europe. He also ordered a direct apology to all the men involved as well as to the assembled officers of their regiment. (Funny enough, none of the letters Gen Eisenhower received at this time blamed him for the incident; every writer, without exception, including those who waxed hysterical in indignation, expressed a belief the Supreme Commander would handle the matter appropriately.)
Not long afterward, I got a chance to ask Gen Patton about the whole thing. He was at Amilcar for lunch and a discussion of forthcoming operations. By the time I arrived, he and Ike apparently had concluded any talk on the subject and the lusty Seventh Army chief was well into his great warehouse of risque stories. As usual, he exiled me for the moment by remarking : How about mixing me a highball, Kay ?
At lunch, he suddenly turned to me and asked, ‘Why don’t you get Ike to bring you over to Sicily on one of his trips ?’ I murmured that Gen Eisenhower was a whirlwind of business whenever he visited Sicily; also, a woman would be very out of place with a general inspecting troops. ‘Nonsense’, Patton replied. ‘You should know American soldiers well enough by now to know you’d be damned good for morale !’ He turned to the General. ‘Ike, it’s only a hop, skip and a jump over there how about it ?’
The next day Ruth Briggs and I piled into a C-47 and traveled to Sicily for a command luncheon with General Patton. He provided a nice touch by having his chief of staff, Hobart (Hap) Gay, at the airfield to meet our plane; after almost a year of greeting VIP’s, I enjoyed being welcomed by a general.
The drive to headquarters revealed heavy damage to Palermo; the harbor was as bad as that at Bizerte, jammed with half-sunken ships, their masts spiking through the water. As for the Sicilians along the way we agreed they were dirtier, if possible, than the Arabs. They also treated their animals with an Arab-like brutality. The overall filth, which seemed natural among the down-trodden Arabs of North Africa, was an unpleasant surprise in Sicily, Neither Ruth nor I had any desire to go sightseeing.
We found Gen Patton enthroned in a palace once occupied by the King of Sicily. The building was huge, ornate, and rambling; although only a few rooms were in use, they gave a grand, palatial air to the GI equipment strewn around. Ruth and I turned down the famous Patton 75, a suicidal highball of champagne, brandy, and possibly other disastrous mixtures. Lunch consisted of GI food and shop talk. And most of that shop talk centered around the distantly burning ears of Bernard Law Montgomery. Gen Patton blamed Monty for the worst military sin in the Patton book of land warfare : caution. And he used every word in a docker’s vocabulary apologizing to us women with humorous regularity to condemn that caution.
Afterward, he called us up to his room and remarked with a smile, ‘Here’s something you can probably use’. Each of us grabbed, most unladylike, at a thin box obviously ‘liberated’ somewhere in Sicily. Tearing at the wrappers, we found a treasure more priceless than steak, diamonds, or perfume : silk stockings. Before sending us back to Tunisia, the General acted as our guide to an old, old, medieval church and, religious soul that he was beneath that flamboyant exterior, prayed humbly for his troops and his family.
As we parted; I simply had to ask him about the slapping incident. Gen Patton sadly remarked, ‘I always get in trouble with my gawdamned mouth !’ At the same time, he shouted at the top of his squeaky voice, ‘But if this sort of thing ever comes up, I’ll do it again !’
Back from lunch in Sicily, we learned that Beetle Smith and the AFHQ Intelligence chief, Brigadier Strong, were on a mission as secretive and dramatic as that of Gen Clark’s submarine visit to North Africa before the invasion. The pair flew to Gibraltar, changed into civvies, and then boarded a plane for nearby Lisbon to discuss peace feelers put out by a Gen Castellano, Badoglio’s chief staff planner and himself an incognito visitor to Lisbon. The tireless and conscientious Beetle handled all negotiations.
Soon, with September only eight days old, there was a joint announcement of Badoglio’s surrender. Well, Kay, General Ike said to me two days later as we drove to Adm Cunningham’s for lunch, ‘this is our first big surrender : the Italian government’s is out of the war. One down and two to go Germany and Japan !’
After lunch, he and Adm Cunningham were going out into the Mediterranean to witness the Italian fleet’s surrender procession. I couldn’t go aboard the destroyer, being a woman. ‘Besides’, the Adm explained, ‘I’ve already refused some of the WREN officers’. Later, I broke that tradition about women aboard destroyers at sea; this time, however, I saw the General and the Admiral off, then drove over to the shore near Bizerte to join Gen Alexander and the other ‘Red Tab’ brass in watching the spectacle through binoculars. It was a real spectacle, too : two battleships, five cruisers, and five destroyers, all trailing meekly behind our escort vessels.
The next two months were a hodge-podge of the present, the future, and an incessant parade of VIP’s.
The present, despite the Italian surrender, was dreary. Our campaign in Italy, off to a bang-up start and smoke screened by a false optimism which discounted German determination to keep the fighting in Italy, bogged down. Salerno was only a black prelude to bigger tragedy in the offing at Anzio. The future moved into our present in the form of the first talk about an operation to be known as ‘Overlord’, the long awaited invasion of France. After a visit to the Italian beachhead, Gen Eisenhower was little cheered by the report that he might be sent back to the United States to become chief of staff; Gen Marshall, it was said, was to head the new AEF now slated to hit Hitler’s Europe by the following Spring.
General Ike never talked about these rumors as far as I know, but the rest of us did. We felt it would be a slap at Gen Eisenhower’s official face, after his molding of an Allied team at AFHQ and his successes in the Mediterranean. Moreover, he wasn’t cut out for the diplomacy required in the chief of staff ’s job in Washington; he revolted against politics, heatedly. Selfishly, all of us hated the thought of leaving the cosmopolitan, veteran, one-purpose atmosphere of AFHQ; we wanted General Ike to run an AFHQ for the French invasion and we wanted to be in on it. Most of this speculation about the future and the gloom over the combat picture, however, was washed away by a deluge of VIP’s. The Big Brass flood started with a visit on October by the American Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox. He was followed the next day by Mr. Donald Nelson, head of America’s war production, and Mr. James Landis, the Harvard Law School dean who was handling American civilian defense.
The next day, it was Lord Louis Mountbatten again, en route to India. Then came the Ambassador to Moscow, Mr. Averell Harriman; his arrival gave me a chance to renew acquaintance with his daughter Kathy, whom I had known in London. The day after their appearance in North Africa, we met Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau in the morning, had him and Ambassador Harriman to lunch, met Secretary of State Cordell Hull in the afternoon, had him to dinner that evening, and saw him and the Harrimans off for Moscow that night.
It was a typical day in that VIP period, and, I must admit, a trifle heady.
About the same time the war in Italy ground to a near-halt, we had to say farewell to our old friend, Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham. Although steeped in Royal Navy tradition and outranking the Supreme Commander himself, old ABC had been Gen Eisenhower’s staunchest naval supporter and a close personal friend. As he left to become Britain’s First Sea Lord, we welcomed his successor, who bore the same surname; Sir John came to dinner just a fortnight after Sir Andrew left, a night when another guest was Gen Brehon Somervell, the American supply chief, then on his way to India for conferences with Mountbatten and Gen Stillwell.
If these were pleasant visitors, the nomadic politicians were real burdens. They made a point of collaring every GI in sight, bellowing, ‘Where you from, Son ? Ill be sure to tell your Ma I saw you when I get back to the United States of America !’ Some of this was friendly and natural. But all too often it was brazenly political, nauseating not only the accompanying Brass but the soldiers themselves. They all knew a vote-grabber when they saw one. Butch tried to talk Gen Eisenhower into having one group of Congressmen up for dinner; Ike blew his top, refused to have a formal dinner party, and reluctantly agreed to a luncheon. ‘I’m fighting a war’ he yelled, ‘and a damned tough war. I’m not a politician, I’m a general’. That same day, he went to the dispensary for a routine checkup; the doctors postponed his physical exam because the politicians had sent his blood pressure sky rocketing.
The third contingent of VIP’s consisted of show people, most of them big-hearted troupers anxious to give soldiers a little relaxation and quite good-natured over the difficulties in both transportation and staging. For example, there was Bea Lillie, who charmed the General with several impromptu after-dinner sketches at the villa. General Ike liked to have the headliners up for an evening, to show his appreciation of their efforts. Other welcome guests included Vivian Leigh, so lovely and petite one felt in the presence of an exquisite, fragile, Dresden China doll; Fredric March, who, unlike some of the male film and stage stars, was reserved, respectful, and well acquainted with the war; Noel Coward, who executed a few fancy dance steps at AFHQ one day to show us he could do something more than write witty, sophisticated drama; Bob Hope, greatly admired by the General for his natural wit and his never-ending tours of battlefields all over the world; and a host of other fine persons.
Some of the USO people were quite different, ignoring the GIs they were sent to entertain and concentrating upon the High Brass. Their chief concern was publicity. Their tag line usually ran, ‘It was little enough for me to do, to give them a few moments of smiles before they went off into battle’. The phonies and the politicians soon hurried back to America, though. And November of 1943 brought us the biggest VIP of them all.
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