EISENHOWER: AT WAR, 1943-1945 by David Eisenhower (Random House: $29.95; 1,024 pp., illustrated)

The author of this book is the son of John Eisenhower, soldier-diplomat and military historian; grandson of the soldier-President; and son-in-law of Richard Nixon. The author turned to his grandfather’s career as “a kind of refuge” when the Watergate crisis came to its climax in 1974. Twelve years later, this book emerges as the first of three volumes on “The Eisenhower Years.” The author concluded that he could not understand Eisenhower as President without coming to terms with his intense experience as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

The book’s more than 1,000 pages cover just about 18 months: from the opening of the first meeting between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin at Tehran, on Nov. 29, 1943, to the Guildhall address in London, on June 12, 1945, in which Eisenhower defined his posture as a statesman as well as a victorious general. It was at Tehran that the Western leaders committed themselves to Stalin to invade the Continent in mid-1944 (OVERLORD) and to land in the south of France (ANVIL); and, in the wake of the meeting, Roosevelt appointed Eisenhower rather than George C. Marshall to command the invading forces.

The story of the 18 months that followed has assumed the status of a tribal saga in the Anglo-American world. It is clearly one of the great military-political sequences in modern history; it cast a long shadow down to the present, stretching as far into the future as any of us can perceive; it has been told from the perspectives of virtually all the major participants. Their conflicting views are reflected in the more than 100 volumes cited by the author in his Select Bibliography, as well as in the oral histories, diaries, letters and other records he brings to bear. And as this book and the controversy around it attest, the conflicts are destined to be carried forward into the next generation.

David Eisenhower has faithfully absorbed most of the vast literature now available, and he interviewed a long list of those who observed Eisenhower at the time. The author’s purpose is to evoke how the flow of events and options were perceived by Eisenhower; the rationale for his decisions; and then to address directly the major persistent controversies centered on a few of those decisions. Stripped of their details, they reduce to these two questions: Could a different, less compromised military strategy in the wake of D-Day have brought about a German defeat in 1944, leaving the U.S. and British governments in a much stronger position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union in shaping postwar Europe and avoiding the Cold War? Could the Western Allies have captured Berlin before the Soviets in 1945, and would that event have strengthened significantly the hand of Anglo-American diplomacy?

The author gets at these and a great many other matters by breaking the story into three parts:

--The period of preparations for the invasion and of military operations down to the breakout of Allied forces from the Normandy bridgehead (August, 1944).

--The period down to the end of the German last gasp offensive in the Ardennes (January, 1945).--The Allied offensive down to the link-up with Soviet forces in Central Germany, the Soviet capture of Berlin, and the German surrender (May, 1945).

From beginning to end, Eisenhower was at the center of a formidable array of politico-military controversies. In fact, he was atarget; for the major protagonists understood that his views would greatly influence the decisions of the two men in the background who quietly held the whip-hand: Gen. George C. Marshall, without whose assent the Combined Chiefs of Staff could not agree on an order to Eisenhower; and Roosevelt, ultimately the senior partner in the post-Tehran period, weakening physically and greatly reliant on Marshall.

In the first period, Eisenhower had to deal with major controversies on command arrangements and the use of air power before and immediately after D-Day; a shortage of landing craft; whether the ANVIL decision should be reversed in favor of a more decisive campaign in Italy and Southeast Europe; how to deal with Charles de Gaulle and the French. In addition, there was much ignorance and debate over what Soviet military intentions were in general and, quite specifically, with respect to parallel offensive operations timed to the Allied invasion of Normandy. Tactically, there was no agreement on how to deal with a Soviet government increasingly confident and assertive after the victory at Stalingrad.

In the second period, British Field Marshal Montgomery became Eisenhower’s central problem: Montgomery’s tactics before the breakout from Normandy; his failure promptly to clear the port of Antwerp; his claim to lead an Anglo-American single thrust across the plains of northern Germany to Berlin; his combination of posturing and sluggishness as commander of the northern flank defending against the German thrust through the Ardennes.

In the third period, there is once again the question of a single decisive thrust versus a broad-front allied movement to the east; but this time, the earlier roles of Montgomery and Gen. Omar Bradley are reversed as Americans beat Montgomery across the Rhine and streak across southern Germany south of the Ruhr.

The participants press Eisenhower up to a point where they suggest a willingness to resign if they do not get their way; they draw back if Eisenhower stands firm, but he reads the threat of resignation as a signal of deadly seriousness and tries to find a compromising gesture or solution. At various times, the author describes Montgomery, Bradley, George S. Patton and even Churchill using this nerve-wracking method in dealing with Eisenhower. Eisenhower himself used it with the Combined Chiefs of Staff over the command arrangements for air power before D-Day. And--not recorded in this book--Air Force Gen. Carl Spaatz used it successfully with Eisenhower at that time to gain permission for two good weather days’ bombing of oil targets.

The author’s method in recounting this complex, high-level soap opera is to acquire, mainly from diaries and letters, a day-to-day sense of how things unfolded, and then to move the story forward, issue by issue, broken by interludes evoking what Eisenhower’s round of life was like, letters home, and other human details.

The narrative is also broken by occasional brief passages of analysis or asides that, in their compression and insight, elevate the author’s performance as a whole; for example, the multiple effects of the Soviet victory at Stalingrad; his observation that “Eisenhower would have given a great deal for the privilege of having been shot at”; the shared awareness of institutionalized cross-purposes and ultimate interdependence between Montgomery and Eisenhower; Eisenhower’s method of “reconciling the British first” and deferring long-range problems as long as possible; a lucid contrast between Marshall’s and Eisenhower’s responsibilities; Marshall trying to instruct Eisenhower on how to deal with the Soviets in “simple Main Street Abilene style”; the “yearning” of the American military commanders for Marshall’s approval; the author’s contrast of Eisenhower’s defense of the military operations on the Continent with Churchill’s foreboding.

As some of these illustrations suggest, the text of the book is not an uncritical defense of Eisenhower’s discharge of his responsibilities. It captures well the extraordinarily severe pressures Eisenhower confronted--notably, between the British and Americans; and the difficulty of holding the alliance in harness. It explains the basis for Eisenhower’s view that, given the uncertainty of U.S. policy toward postwar Europe and the commitment already made to the Soviets on the zonal arrangements for occupied Germany, he should conduct a strictly military campaign in the final months of the war. This meant he left Berlin to the Soviets, only 35 miles away.

But the text as a whole does not quite provide the evidence to support the slightly forced argument in the introduction. The author implies there that Eisenhower’s real enough awareness of the interdependence of the Eastern and Western fronts, his desire to defend the decisions he took, and “to draw the Russians out of their dangerous isolation” explain his later entrance into politics. The roots of that understandable move and his quite conventional postwar international objectives are better suggested at several points in the text; for example, in discussing postwar challenges, he tells an aide that he might enter politics to support adequate military appropriations, universal military service, continued Anglo-American cooperation, and a “decent modus vivendi” with the Soviets. Those were understandable objectives, but they were by no means unique or necessarily a product of Eisenhower’s command experience.

On the whole, I have no doubt that David Eisenhower’s first volume on his grandfather will assume a respected place in the mountainous literature on World War II without quieting once and for all the controversies that surround Eisenhower’s wartime decisions.

The author exhibits, notably toward the end, an awareness that the reasons for the unsatisfactory postwar settlement in Europe lie in a terrain far removed from the controversies that initially concern him and that flow from his close attention to diaries and other contemporary sources; but he did not budget the time to round out his story. For example, he asks, in effect, why the Allies had not checked Germany earlier in the 1930s. He does not, however, get at the fundamental question more deeply embedded in American history. The United States did not have in 1914 or in 1939 or, indeed, in 1945 a stable consensus defining our national interest in Europe. At several points, which the author notes, the British were acting to defend their postwar interests in Europe, whereas the Americans were acting “to win the war.” What he doesn’t articulate is that the criterion of “winning the war” was a way of evading dangerous unsettled issues in American political life. The only effective consensus was that this time the United States should undo its folly of 1919-1920 and join the postwar world organization. F. D. R’s emphasis on the United Nations baffled both Churchill and Stalin, who tended to think of the postwar in terms of real estate and political power. I am inclined to think that the most influential U.S. position taken on the postwar was in Roosevelt’s opening statement at Yalta when he said the United States was incapable of keeping troops in Germany for more than two years--a statement that shook Churchill and no doubt heartened Stalin.

The main story told in this book is that of Anglo-American relations. There is immense and vivid detail; but for one who was in London in 1942-1945 and a working member of the British Air Ministry over virtually all of the 18 months covered in this book, there is something missing. In 1942 and 1943, the British were the senior partners in the war, having held the ring since 1939 and become thorough professionals. They were gracious hosts and tutors. With the January, 1944, arrival of Eisenhower in London from the Mediterranean to take command of preparations for OVERLORD, and the subsequent buildup of American aircraft, tanks, artillery and Army divisions, the balance of power palpably shifted. It was clear to one and all that in peace as in the climax of the war, the United States would emerge as senior partner.

Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, senior British officer on the Combined Chiefs of Staff, referred in January, 1945, with bitterness, to “the all-powerful Americans.” On the spot, Americans--including, I suspect, Eisenhower--understood with sympathy the pain of this transition. It explains the stubborn British struggle, with Churchill in command and Montgomery as spearhead, to end the war with British prestige and postwar leverage at maximum possible levels. The author does not quite capture the full dimensions of the British sense of demotion.

What he does capture superbly is the human strain imposed on Eisenhower by the effort to keep the Anglo-American team in harness. His portrait of Eisenhower’s pre-D-Day life at Telegraph House, his London retreat, is memorable: “a remote dilapidated, drafty English cottage . . . weary but comfortable.” There he could relax with a small, loyal entourage, read Westerns, eat chocolate, go for walks; but he smoked four packs of Camels a day, was chronically hoarse, and his ears rang as his blood pressure sky-rocketed, and he found sleep difficult.

In short, the author does provide a vivid portrait of these 18 months as seen from Eisenhower’s perspective, and his insight on some of the larger issues is sometimes shrewd and not necessarily parochial. This is not the definitive history of the period, but it is a distinguished debut for a young historian.