Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1944moy.001

Text File | 1993-07-21 | 15KB | 294 lines

                                                                                January 1, 1945

Man of the Year:Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The Fate of the World"



     The year 1944 was the climactic year of the war against
Germany. It was not the last year of that war, as many had
predicted and more had hoped. But it was, beyond all reasonable
doubt, the last full year.

     It was not a year in which the outcome -- the question of
who would win and who would lose -- still dangled precariously in
the balance. The trend of the war had been reversed in 1942 at
Stalingrad and El Alamein. By early 1944 the U.S. was almost
fully armed -- thanks mainly to the Man of 1943, General George
Catlett Marshall.

     The promise of victory was bright. But the path to victory
was highly uncertain. And the greatest single element of that
uncertainty was the success or failure of the Anglo-U.S. invasion
of western Europe, which Soviet Russia had been demanding since
1942, and which Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt now
proclaimed as necessary and imminent.

     About two months before D-day, Eisenhower and his top
commanders were gathered in a room, beside a sand-table model of
the target beaches. After the commanders had spoken in turn;
piecing together the total picture of the operation, Winston
Churchill stalked on to the platform, clutching his lapels. He
said: "I have confidence in you, my commanders. The fate of the
world is in your hands."

     This slice of Churchillian rhetoric was not necessarily an
overstatement. If the invasion failed, the waste of time and
effort, of men and material, would be incalculable, almost too
staggering even to contemplate. If it failed, Russia might be so
discouraged as to seek a separate peace with Hitler. In that
case, when the western Allies were ready to mount another
invasion, in 1946 or 1947, they would find three or four hundred
German divisions manning the Atlantic Wall instead of 60.

     To Grips on Land. The purpose of the invasion was not to
knock out Germany at one blow. If the mere establishment and
holding of Allied beachheads should discourage the Nazis to the
point of capitulation, well and good. There were extreme
optimists (later developments were to prove how extreme they
were) who hoped for that outcome. But in the realistic battle
plan, the purpose of the gamble was to bring the forces of the
western Allies to grips with Nazi Germany on her western land
approaches. When that purpose was completely achieved, affable,
incisive, confident "Ike" Eisenhower became the Man of 1944.

     A year ago, Eisenhower announced his conviction that Germany
would be beaten in 1944. "Many persons of the highest technical
attainments, knowledge and responsibility," said Winston
Churchill, had shared this feeling. In their extenuation, it
might be said that none of them knew that Soviet Russia's main
military effort for the year, on the main highway to Berlin,
would run its course in six weeks of the summer.

     The notable fact about Eisenhower's prediction is not that
it was wrong, but that it was based on a complete confidence that
the invasion would succeed. In retrospect, his brilliant success
made it seem like much less of a gamble than it had seemed before
June 6.

     Another Gamble. As the year drew to a close, the Germans
found their border invaded and themselves in a position where
they, in turn, preferred a great gamble to a continued, steady,
losing retreat. Adolf Hitler had withdrawn into the shadows and
Heinrich Himmler was Germany's Man of 1944. Himmler had held the
people and the Army in line while he squeezed them for the last
ounces of German strength. Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von
Rundstedt, the cold, wily Junker who mounted the December
counteroffensive, was the man of the Hour.

     Rundstedt's all-out gamble involved the U.S. forces in their
gravest and costliest battle of World War II. That savage
outpouring of German strength showed clearly enough that the Man
of 1944 was not to be found among the idealistic dreamers and
crafty politicians who wanted to perform a Caesarean operation on
a world at war to bring the postwar world to birth ahead of its
time. Not in three years of war had there been so much mutual
recrimination among Russia, Britain and the U.S., nor such
alarming cracks in their solidarity. In these cracks lurked the
last vestiges of Germany's hope for escape.

     The war was still on. The shape of the postwar world still
hung on the manner of its winning.

     Another War. In 1944 there was also war in the Pacific. It
was a year of great achievement for Admiral Chester William
Nimitz, top U.S. commander in that theater of tiny land patches
in vast reaches of water. For the first time, in 1944, Nimitz
took the offensive, as distinguished from the counteroffensive
(Guadalcanal, the upper Solomons, the Gilberts). In the
Marshalls, the Marianas and the Carolines, Nimitz put his
amphibious forces on the fringe of the Japanese inner empire. For
the first time the main strength of the Jap fleet was lured to
battle, and it was badly beaten, leaving the U.S. with at least
temporary dominance in the western Pacific.

     Douglas MacArthur kept his promise to the Philippines. "I
have returned," he said. But at year's end the total redemption
of the Philippines still lay ahead.

     On the Asiatic mainland it was a year of tragedy for Chiang
Kai-shek, China's perennial man of the year. The Japs cut his
country in two. The recall of General Joseph W. Stilwell brought
down on the Generalissimo's head the most searing criticism he
had ever suffered from the U.S. But he strove to put new vigor
into his regime and his war effort. Neither Chiang nor China was
beaten.

     In 1944, the war against Japan stood about where the war
against Germany stood in 1943. The strategic bombardment of the
enemy homeland had begun; but the battles with the enemy's major
land forces were still to come. Soldiers in the Pacific
complained that their war was neglected by the U.S. press and
public. Yet the people were only following the cue of the Allied
leaders; the defeat of Germany had been given priority over the
defeat of Japan.

     Land of the Free. It was the shifting fortunes of war in
Europe that swung the U.S. alternately into optimism and
pessimism, and always the pendulum swung too far. When the Allies
won and held their first foothold in Normandy, the war seemed all
but over. When the first attempts to break out of the peninsula
failed, gloom settled down. When the breakout came and the
Germans were routed, it was in the bag. When the Allies pulled up
in September, back came the gloom. When Generals Bradley and
Devers resumed the offensive in November, there were Congressmen
in Washington who said it might all be over in 30 days.
Rundstedt's amazing winter offensive brought the thickest gloom
of the year.

     In the midst of war, the U.S. people took time out to elect
a President. Franklin Roosevelt's claim as Man of the Year was
mainly that he won a fourth term. But the President had already
broken the precedent with his third term. And this time he won
through by the narrowest margin of any election since 1916.

     The man who made the deepest emotional dent in the country
was one who died before his time: Wendell Willkie. Seldom in this
century had any man been so sincerely and widely mourned. From
defeat in 1940 to repudiation by his own party in 1944, Willkie
had grown great in vision, forthrightness and courage, and the
millions who followed his progress gained a new conception of
human freedom.

     Two other men made their marks on the year, Sidney Hillman
of the C.I.O. and James Caesar Petrillo of the Musician's Union.
Whether or not it decided the election, Hillman's Political
Action Committee brought labor closer to the balance of power in
national politics than it had ever been before. Petrillo, after
successfully defying the War Labor Board and the President of the
U.S., rammed home the revolutionary principle of royalties paid
by corporations directly to union treasuries.

     Changing Aspects. In Europe, there were several men of
stature whose aspect changed in the shifting light of events. One
of these was somber, iron-willed Charles de Gaulle. For four
years he had been the symbol and touchstone of French resistance
to the Nazi conqueror, but he had lived in the half-light of
exile. In 1944 he returned in triumph to his free but prostrate
country. In the liberated countries, he was the only exile who
went back to a people solidly ranked behind him, and the only man
who seemed able to control the revolutionary ferments which
liberation had set astir.

     Winston Churchill, Man of 1940, had also been a symbol. In
Britain's darkest and finest hour, his flaming words and
dauntless courage had heartened his country to stand alone
against Hitler at the crest of his Blitzkrieg power. As one of
the organizers of victory, Churchill had been magnificent. Now,
in the last weeks of 1944, he was facing -- with his usual
truculence -- the heaviest criticism of his World War II career;
his critics charged him with responsibility for the civil war in
Greece and for selling out Poland to Russia.

     The Runner-Up. Joseph Stalin, Man of 1942, who in that year
had started to roll the Hitlerites back from the Caucasus
oilfields, was also beginning to look a little different to many
Americans in the dawn light of victory -- or perhaps more like
his pre-1941 self. After dealing Hitler one of his two heaviest
defeats of the year, Stalin's central armies had stopped on the
Vistula, while those on the flanks pursued secondary aims. Then
followed the ill-timed martyrdom of General Bor and his heroic
partisans in Warsaw; the Moscow-sponsored Government at Lublin;
the methodical destruction of the London Polish Government. At
Dumbarton Oaks, Russia's diplomats insisted that, in the
framework of postwar security, no great power (e.g., Russia)
should be disciplined without its consent.

     Any sovereign nation may choose to drug itself with
suspicion, cynicism, isolation, and history does not deny a great
man his place because his aims and methods are objectionable.
"History," someone has said, "is a record of events which ought
not to have happened." But Joseph Stalin was not the Man of 1944.

     Needed: An Eisenhower? In November, 1943, Stalin, Churchill
and Roosevelt met with considerable fanfare at Teheran. There, it
seemed, the political and military guidance of the world for 1944
had been charted. As the year wore on, the luster of Teheran
began to fade. There was a general cry for another meeting of the
Big Three -- but there was also a demand for an inter-Allied
political command, modeled on the military structure of the
Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, or on the inter-Allied
command machinery with which Eisenhower had planned and carried
out the greatest achievement of the year. The political world
lacked an Eisenhower.

     General Marshall had chosen Eisenhower for his brains,
imagination and diplomacy when the Chief of Staff sent him first
to Britain, then to Africa in 1942. In addition to his natural
ability to get along with people, Eisenhower acquired the knack
of hitting it off with other nationals, notably the British. In
Africa his command structure was a complex but smooth-working
mesh of U.S. and British officers, and he carried the same
formula back to England when he was chosen to head the invasion.
Of the six men on his Supreme Command, four were British.

     The two Americans were Bradley, who helped Montgomery lay
out the ground tactics, and Walter Bedell ("Beedle") Smith, a
bulldog of a man who is perhaps the hardest-working officer in
the U.S. Army. It was Beedle Smith who coordinated the entire
invasion planning. TIME Correspondent Charles Wertenbaker called
him "driving, determined, devoted, and occasionally furious."
Eisenhower called him the best chief of staff in the world, and
Monty said quite openly that he would like to steal him.

     Always, however, when the agonizing decisions had to be
made, Ike Eisenhower made them. As all the world now knows, the
invasion was postponed for one day on account of stormy weather.
The forecast for June 6 was anything but promising, but another
postponement would have meant waiting two weeks for favorable
tides. And that would have involved a grave risk to secrecy and
morale. The Germans had been led to expect a landing at a later
date and a point farther east on the coast. Eisenhower gambled on
the weather for the sake of tactical surprise -- and won.

     Of Mice & Men. In May, a U.S. correspondent in London had
observed: "The most brilliantly conceived and thoughtfully worked
out plans may fail utterly if the weather conditions on D-day and
several days thereafter should prove unfavorable. . . ."

     Hitler had promised his people that he would drive
Eisenhower off the beaches in nine hours. The Nazis were not even
trying to drive him off after nine days. And that was the story
for the rest of the battle of France. Eisenhower was always able
to take more than Hitler could give.

     In the last six months Eisenhower has not visibly aged (he
is 54), but he gives a subtle impression of having grown bigger
as a man and as a commander. For lack of exercise, he is slightly
thicker around the middle and there are often tired lines under
his snapping blue eyes. But he is very fit, has had no cold all
winter. Even in times of crisis, he is relaxed, genial and
confident on the surface -- whatever goes on underneath.

     Last week the eyes of the U.S. turned with fear and
questioning on Eisenhower as he faced the gravest setback of his
career. The invasion was his first great responsibility; this his
second. But Eisenhower refused to admit that a battle was lost
while it was still being fought. He proclaimed to his troops:

     "The enemy is making his supreme effort to break out of the
desperate plight into which you forced him by your brilliant
victories of the summer and fall.

     "He is fighting savagely to take back all that you have won
and is using every treacherous trick to deceive and kill you.

     "He is gambling everything, but already in this battle your
gallantry has done much to foil his plans. In the face of your
proven bravery and fortitude, he will completely fail.

     "But we cannot be content with his mere repulse.

     "By rushing out from his fixed defenses the enemy may give
us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat. So
I call upon every man of all the Allies to rise now to new
heights of courage, of resolution and of effort.

     "Let everyone hold before him a single thought -- to destroy
the enemy. . . .

     "United in this determination and with unshakable faith in
the cause for which we fight, we will, with God's help, go
forward to our greatest victory."