From: Gene McAloon 

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 18:04:52 -0500, Bill Lucy  wrote:

>In article , gauszka{at}hotmail.com says...
>> While many events and
>> people of WWII have always interested me, for some reason anything related
>> with Eisenhower never did. Some of the articles I've read on Ike made me
>> think of him as the utimate bureaucrat and I  thus I never had any desire to
>> do any additional research.
>
>We're in some agreement here. I read quite a few biographies when I was
>in school (probably more than sci-fi). The bio on Ike was not very
>critical, but I always found it odd that he was only a colonel until the
>United States got into the war.
>
>There were a number of US generals who, IMO, were better: Marshall,
>MacArthur, Bradley, Patton, Collins, and Ridgway. I might include
>Middleton and McLain, but I'm not as familiar with them.

Nothing at all odd about it. Once in the war, seniority was pretty much ignored,
sometimes justifiably and sometimes not. With so many generals being dumped
because they were not considered fit for a war time command, many colonels
got sudden promotions to general.

Eisenhower was one of them, not in his case because he was thought a
superior tactician, let alone a strategist, but because he had a reputation
for being a team player who could and did get along with just about
everybody. It was an excellent choice, because not the least of the
problems in that war was keeping the Brit/US coalition together. The Brits
wanted to run everything with the US as a junior partner. But the US had
the men, material and wealth required to win
the war and were determined to run things. Churchill recognized the reality
and went along with it to a remarkable degree, but some of his general
staff did not
and the Brit press, particularly the Beaverbrook press, never acquiesced to
US domination.

It was Beaverbrook who created Montgomery's hero status both during and
after the N. African campaign and later constantly pushed the fool into
challenging Eisenhower at every turn. That almost got Montgomery dumped. On
one occasion, only an abject letter of apology to Eisenhower saved him.

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