WASHINGTON — At 5 a. m. on Sunday, December 14, 1941, a 51-year-old brigadier general named Dwight David Eisenhower stepped off a Southern Pacific train at Union Station and walked through the bitter Washington cold toward a temporary limestone building on Constitution Avenue.
He carried a small overnight bag, wore no overcoat, and was about to meet George Catlett Marshall for the first time in his life.
The two-day rail journey from Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas had given Eisenhower ample time to suspect why the Chief of Staff of the United States Army had summoned him by cable two days earlier. He knew the Philippines. He had spent four years in Manila as senior assistant to Douglas MacArthur.
He had helped draft the American war plans for the islands during that time. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, with Japanese forces driving American and Filipino troops toward Bataan, Marshall needed an officer who understood the Pacific theater better than any other general officer in the army.
Eisenhower, after 26 years in uniform, had never commanded troops in combat. He had never held a general officer’s command. He had been promoted to temporary brigadier general only ten weeks earlier, part of a massive mobilization putting stars on shoulders across the entire army.
He was an obscure staff officer from Texas. But he had graduated first in his class at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth in 1926, and George Marshall had noted something in him.
The meeting at the Munitions Building—demolished in 1970, site now grass on the National Mall—would change the course of the war. Marshall’s office was plain, with a mahogany desk, a world map on the wall, no personal photographs. At about 9:30 that morning, Eisenhower walked in, saluted, and stood at attention.
Marshall did not stand, did not shake hands, offered no coffee, and gave no formalities.
For twenty minutes, Marshall spoke without interruption. He reviewed the catastrophe at Wake. The American Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, six aircraft carriers at sea having escaped, but the battleships destroyed.
The Asiatic Fleet had been withdrawn to the Dutch East Indies. The Philippines were under siege, cut off, losing air power daily. The Japanese offensive across Southeast Asia was rolling faster than anyone in Washington had calculated.
He spoke about the agreements with Britain that ultimately placed the Atlantic and Germany first in the American strategic calculus.
Then the question. Marshall looked directly at Eisenhower and asked: “What should be our general line of action?”
Eisenhower did not answer immediately. He understood that such a question could not be answered honestly in the fifteen seconds a junior officer might have. He looked at the chief and said: “Give me a few hours.”
Marshall nodded. Eisenhower saluted, left, and walked down the hall to the War Plans Division into the office of Brigadier General Leonard T. Jerro, an old friend who studied him in surprise on that Sunday.
“Ike, what the hell are you doing here?” Jerro asked. Eisenhower answered with the specific assignment: “The chief just asked me what our strategy should be in the Pacific.
I need a desk and a couple of hours.” Jerro pointed to a small desk in the corner of his outer office. Eisenhower took off his uniform tunic, hung it on the chair, rolled up his sleeves, produced a legal pad and pencil, and began to write.
For three hours—from 10:00 in the morning to about 1:00 in the afternoon—Eisenhower wrote without getting up, without eating, without drinking coffee, without speaking. He wrote three pages that would become a document known as “Steps to be taken.” When he finished, he put on his tunic, picked up the three sheets, walked back to Marshall’s office, and requested.
Marshall was at his desk, pointed to the chair across from him. Eisenhower handed over three pages. Marshall put on reading glasses, read at his normal pace, giving no visible reaction for about three minutes.
Then he put down the paper, looked at Eisenhower, and said: “I agree with you. Do your best to save them.” A pause.
Then the single sentence that would define their working relationship: “The department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well, but feel compelled to always bring them to be for emergency final solution. Tell them later, will solve their own problems, and tell me later what they have done.”
That was the deal. Eisenhower said, “Yes, sir,” walked out at approximately 2:00 in the afternoon, and ceased to be an obscure staffer.
Eisenhower’s analysis on those three sheets was brutal and correct. He wrote that the Philippines could not be reinforced. The Pacific Fleet held no decisive power off of the sea lanes.
The sea route from the American continent ran through waters controlled by the Imperial Japanese Navy. The American and Filipino forces on Luzon were going to be lost. But Eisenhower understood a psychological thread: those men had to be told reinforcement was coming.
And never had the general line of action that rationalized the American principle of Germany was first.
The Japanese though, could not defeat the United States, did not have industry capacity for sustained offensives against the American homeland. Germany could. Germany, if it defeated the Soviet Union and Britain, could combine with Japan to dominate the Eurasian landmass fatally for America.
Therefore the maximum weight of American power must go to Germany. And the Pacific for the first 18 to 24 months must be a holding action, with enough force to keep Australia secure and the sea lanes open.
That was the American strategy that would win the Second World War. It was the strategy that sacrificed the 78,000 American and Filipino soldiers on Bataan, and the men on Corregidoro. It made for surrender inevitable.
That surrender came on April 9, 1942 for Bataan. For Bataan’s surrender on May 6, Corregidoro, between 5 and 10,000 died in the Bataan Death March—by death of tropical heat, starvation, systematic execution where they fell in the column. A further 26,000 died at Camp O’Donnell in the first months of captivity.
President Eisenhower carried that particular arithmetic his entire life. In 1966 he wrote: “I agreed with the strategy, but the loss—those men on Bataan—never left me.” He had no choice; strategic reality dictated it.
From that day, Eisenhower rose with a velocity that seems almost impossible in the regular army tradition. In March of 1942 he became major general, leapfrogging adjunct rank. In June of 1942, he ran the European Theater, and in 1944 he commanded the Supreme Allied Expeditionary Force for the Normandy invasion that landed on June 6.
In the evening of June 5, 1944, he sat alone at Southwick House and wrote a small note that he folded into his tunic pocket: “Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gaina satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. I, the troops, the Air, and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do.
If any blame or fault attaches to, it’s mine alone.”
He never had to release it. He only carried it for six weeks, folded into his uniform. It is in the library cases.
He won the European war. Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945 at Reims, and he sent her 22-word cable: “The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 2:41 local time, May 7, 1945.” Marshall replied, “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare.
You have commanded with outstanding success the most powerful military force that has ever you have made history, great history, for the good of mankind.”
Dwight Eisenhower would go on to serve two terms, and the 34th president of the United States, from 1953 to 1961, from a farmhouse at Gettysburg, less than a mile from the site where he had trained tanks in 1918. He died at Walter Reed on the morning of March 28, 1969, at the age of 78.
He is buried at the Place of Meditation in Abilene, Kansas, next to his wife Mori, and his infant son Duod Dwight Eisenhower.
Twenty-nine years after that Sunday in 1994, the Munitions Building was demolished. Today nothing stands there except grass. But yards away from the library with his papers, directly across from his grave, the three sheets of yellow legal paper, with a cursive pencil handwriting of a 51-year-old general who had never led troops in combat, still rest in the long-term preserving.
The document is there for any American to view.
Every American service member who lives in those lines in the ardennes and the sands of North Africa, the rocks of Sicily, or who rots in aJapanese prison camp can trace their commander’s line back to that morning, that desk and that pencil. The report are the war began. It began with murder.
General George Marshall asking a question, and a quiet staff officer from Texas saying just give me a few hours.
