Ike vs. the Desert Fox at Normandy

By Flint Whitlock

One of the supreme ironies of World War II was that the outcome of the Allied invasion of France, and ultimately the fate of the European Theater, would be decided by two men—one a highly decorated veteran, the other untested in combat—and it would be the latter that eventually triumphed.

German Field Marshal Erwin Johannes Eugen Rommel faced U.S. General Dwight David Eisenhower across the English Channel in 1944 as distant adversaries, each trying to outguess the other, each attempting to anticipate and counter the other’s moves.

The two men had much in common. They were born a year apart to lower middle-class parents, had decided at an early age to pursue military careers, and had earned the respect of their peers and superiors for being level-headed and driven in the pursuit of excellence. They were both moral, highly principled soldiers.

There was also a significant difference. Rommel had had considerable combat experience in two world wars, had distinguished himself under fire, had numerous scars from wounds received, and had earned his country’s highest military decorations—all things Eisenhower lacked. Eisenhower’s claim to fame was as a dutiful staff and training officer.

Dwight David Eisenhower was born to hard-working parents David and Ida Eisenhower on October 14, 1890, in Denison, Tex. His family had established itself in Abilene, Kansas, in the 1800s, where David had owned a general store before it failed due to an unscrupulous business partner. The family moved to Texas in search of work, then came back to Abilene in 1891 where David found a job as a mechanic at a creamery.

Dwight and his five brothers were raised by their authoritarian father and caring mother to be honest, religious, obedient, self-reliant, responsible, and competitive. “Little Ike” (as he was known to differentiate himself from older brother Edgar, or “Big Ike”) was a good athlete and an average student, except for spelling and math, in which he excelled. But it was military history that really intrigued him, and in 1911 he earned an appointment to West Point. His big, infectious grin, athletic talents, and ability to shrug off the physical and mental rigors of West Point helped him make friends easily.

He graduated in 1915 with 164 others, 59 of whom would reach the rank of brigadier general or above. It is said that his class was “the class the stars fell on,” for among the graduates that year were many whom World War II would make famous, such as Omar Bradley, James Van Fleet, Charles Ryder, and Joseph McNarney. In 1915,, he was made supply officer of the 57th Infantry Regiment at Fort Sam Houston, near San Antonio, Tex. Here he met Mamie Doud, a young lady from Denver, whom he married on July 1, 1916.

In 1917, after the United States entered the Great War, Lieutenant Eisenhower was promoted to captain. Hoping to be assigned to a unit going overseas, Ike was instead assigned to train officer candidates. In February 1918, Eisenhower received orders to report to a tank unit at Camp Meade, Md., where he quickly saw the potential of armor. Although the tank battalion went “over there,” Ike stayed “here,” in command of Camp Colt, on the Gettysburg battlefield. In October 1918, he was promoted to the temporary grade of lieutenant colonel, but his pride in receiving the promotion was tempered by the disappointment of the war ending without his having taken part in it.

By 1920, the American Army had shrunk from a wartime high of over 2.7 million officers and enlisted men to only 130,000 active-duty soldiers. The interwar period saw Ike revert to major and remain in that rank for 16 years. He watched his brothers succeed in their civilian professions and thought seriously about quitting the military, but a sense of duty compelled him to stay in.

Over a two-decade span, he attended numerous service schools and was posted to various locales—Panama, Washington, D.C., Paris, and Manila. From 1922 until 1942, Ike learned his craft at the side of a succession of forceful, charismatic officers who would become legendary: Generals Fox Conner, John J. Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, and George C. Marshall. He learned much from each and they, in turn, saw his sterling qualities. By the time World War II broke out, he was an amalgam of all their virtues and was considered by MacArthur and Marshall as “the best officer in the Army.”

In December 1939, Ike returned stateside after four years at MacArthur’s headquarters in Manila and became a battalion executive officer in the 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division, at Fort Lewis, Wash. In March 1941, he was promoted to full colonel. Three months later, he became chief of staff for the Third Army, where he received a hands-on education in large-scale operations during the huge Louisiana maneuvers in the autumn of 1941. War was on the horizon and it was clear the United States was woefully unprepared.

Erwin Rommel was 13 months younger than Eisenhower, having been born on November 15, 1891, in the Swabian town of Heidenheim, north of Ulm. While Ike’s military career, until the start of World War II, could best be described as “plodding,” Rommel’s was brilliant. Overcoming the stigma of being born to a humble school teacher rather than a career officer of the aristocratic Prussian junker class, he quickly impressed his superiors in the Württemberg 124th Infantry Regiment, in which he enlisted in 1910 as an officer-cadet. He then attended the Kriegsschule in Danzig and received his commission in 1912.

Second Lieutenant Rommel was a hard taskmaster, but never ordered a subordinate to do anything he was not willing to do himself. Like Eisenhower, he had high personal standards and showed little tolerance for those under him who failed to demonstrate the same type of commitment. Upon the outbreak of World War I, his commitment was put to the test.

On August 25, 1914, while leading a patrol near Longwy during Germany’s advance to the Marne, Rommel launched an audacious assault. In this, his first combat experience, he demonstrated the type of decisive, quick-thinking leadership that would mark his career. Wounded in September, he returned to his unit in January and led his platoon in another heroic action that earned him the Iron Cross, First Class.

He was promoted to first lieutenant, was wounded again, and then transferred in April 1915 to the Württembergische Gebirgs-Bataillon (Württemberg Mountain Battalion), part of the newly created elite Alpenkorps (Mountain Corps). With this unit he would see action in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace-Lorraine, as well as in Romania and Italy. Leading two companies in a ruthless battle against a much larger Italian force at Caporetto, Rommel and his men overcame the enemy, then climbed the key high ground, Monte Matajur, to take its defenders prisoner. Rommel’s actions, which led to the rout of the Italians at Caporetto (and 250,000 prisoners subsequently taken), won him the Pour le Mérite (Blue Max) and a promotion to captain and sealed his reputation as a fearless warrior and tactician. Not wishing this valuable resource to become a combat casualty, the Reichswehr then transferred Rommel to a staff job.

After the war ended in 1918, Rommel was one of only 4,000 officers allowed by the Treaty of Versailles to be retained on active duty. As in the American Army, promotions in the German Army during the interwar years were slow; Rommel spent eight years as a company commander in the 13th Infantry Regiment at Stuttgart. But his uncompromising standards and unyielding devotion to duty impressed his superiors, who marked him as someone worthy of higher rank and command.

In 1929, Rommel began a four-year tour as an instructor at the Infantry School in Dresden, and a book he wrote based on his combat experiences—Infantry Attacks—went on to sell an astonishing 400,000 copies.

Once Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933 and began beefing up the military, promotions came rapidly. Elevated to major that year, Rommel became a battalion commander within a Gebirgs regiment. He was promoted two years later to lieutenant colonel, and became an instructor at the War College in Potsdam. In 1937, he received the rank of full colonel and was made the director of the War College at Wiener Neustadt.

From time to time, Rommel was detailed to head Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, where he became a devotee of the German dictator because of Hitler’s boldness in rebuilding the German military machine in spite of international prohibitions. In turn, Rommel became one of Hitler’s favorite generals, partly because he was not one of the Prussian aristocrats around whom the former corporal felt uncomfortable.

Rommel was promoted to major general in late August 1939 and transferred to Hitler’s headquarters; war with Poland followed a week later. To reward his loyalty, Hitler gave Rommel, a great advocate of mobile warfare, his choice of combat commands; Rommel chose the 7th Panzer Division.

The 7th Panzer suited him perfectly, and he whipped the unit into fighting shape in a matter of three months. On May 10, 1940, Rommel led his men (the so-called “Ghost Division,” for its seeming ability to materialize out of thin air where least expected) as part of the spearhead of the invasion of France. The daring, hard-driving Rommel was dubbed the “Knight of the Apocalypse,” for he was usually with his advance elements as they crashed through enemy defenses.

In less than 10 days, 7th Panzer had advanced all the way to Cambrai and helped drive a wedge between the French and the British Expeditionary Force, thus forcing the British to head for Dunkirk—and evacuation. With the British hors de combat, Rommel turned his division westward and rushed toward Cherbourg, traveling more than 200 miles in two days; the city surrendered to him on June 19; France capitulated on the 22nd.

During the six-week campaign, Rommel’s division captured nearly 100,000 prisoners and his fame grew to almost mythic proportions. Some regarded him as a throwback to the days of chivalry; he fought honorably and always treated his captives decently. In January 1941, he was promoted to lieutenant general.

Described as being without fear, Rommel possessed an uncanny ability to inspire his troops to strike boldly even when the odds were against them. When Germany’s ally Italy got itself hopelessly bogged down in Africa, Hitler came to the rescue with a unique, two-division group of desert warriors named the Afrika Korps, with Rommel at its head.

When Rommel arrived in Africa in February 1941, the Italians were facing certain defeat. By June, the elusive Rommel and his outmanned, undersupplied Afrika Korps had not only saved the Italians, but were ranging across the vast spaces of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, tangling with the British Army’s finest units and often beating their superior numbers.

With the Wehrmacht plunging deeply into the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Nazi Germany seemed to be unstoppable. It was Japan’s attack on the United States in December of that year, and America’s subsequent entry into the war, that would prove to be the undoing of the Axis powers.

A week after Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, Eisenhower was summoned to Washington, DC, where he became Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall’s operations officer and most trusted advisor. His first assignment was to determine if the Japanese invasion of the Philippines could be turned back. It was an impossible task, and MacArthur only barely escaped to Australia before the enemy closed in on his Corregidor headquarters.

Although Japan had struck the first blow, President Franklin Roosevelt realized that Germany represented the greater threat, for if Britain and the Soviet Union fell the United States would be forced to face the Axis powers alone. But it would take time before Americans would be capable of taking on the Germans. In 1941, the United States was a third-rate power with a small military and obsolete equipment. Invasions against Japanese-held islands in the Pacific would have to be America’s sole combat contribution to the war effort until millions of men could be drafted, trained, and sent to face Hitler’s legions.

Meanwhile, Rommel’s Afrika Korps and the Italian divisions attached to it, despite being hampered by a shortage of men and materiel, dashed along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, creating havoc among the British. By the end of January 1942, the “Desert Fox,” as the wily Rommel became known to his British adversaries, had fought the British to a stalemate. The British began pouring more resources into the desert campaign, which Hitler was unable to match because of the meat grinder his war with Russia had become.

In February 1942, Marshall made Eisenhower head of the War Plans Division. Ike immersed himself in the job, often putting in 14- to 16-hour days, six or seven days a week. As the Americans began working closely with the British to formulate a strategy for taking the war to Hitler, Marshall saw that Eisenhower not only had brains but also the ability to work smoothly with the haughty British high command, which viewed the Yanks as little more than amateurs when it came to all things military.

Moreover, Ike had the “big picture” in mind—how to win the war—and refused to allow petty details to distract him or deflect his focus. As early as March 1942, he and his staff had drawn up the broad outlines of an operation for the invasion of northwest Europe called “Roundup,” which would later be revised and expanded to become “Overlord.” It was assumed that Roundup would be under Marshall’s command, with Eisenhower as his chief of staff. Marshall, however, had other ideas.

In May 1942, he sent Eisenhower to England to observe British maneuvers and develop relations with the British brass. The following month, Marshall informed Ike that he would command the European Theater of Operations and the buildup of American forces in Britain. It was a wise choice. With the exception of the irascible General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff (who disliked Americans in general and judged Eisenhower to be affable but ineffective and wholly unsuited for the top job), the British were enthusiastically impressed by Ike.

The war in North Africa had sapped Rommel’s strength and spirit. In the fall of 1942, suffering from exhaustion and severe intestinal problems, Rommel was recalled to Germany by Hitler. While recuperating at home, Rommel began to have his first doubts about Germany’s ability to win the war and Hitler’s fitness as commander in chief.

Taking advantage of Rommel’s absence, the British forces launched a new offensive aimed at destroying Panzerarmee Afrika, under Jürgen von Arnim. The situation became so serious that Hitler personally requested that Rommel return to the front. The Desert Fox was appalled at what he found at the end of October: The barest trickle of supplies was reaching Africa from Italy and his men were in deplorable condition. In early November, the British hurled back his counterattacks and broke through his defensive lines, forcing Rommel to do something he had rarely done before—withdraw. Although the British knew of Rommel’s plans, thanks to the secret Ultra intercepts of the enemy’s messages, Montgomery was unable to trap the wily Desert Fox.

Time was not on the Allies’ side. Fearing that the Soviets would soon collapse under the German onslaught, Marshall and Eisenhower campaigned for an invasion of France in 1943 to relieve the pressure on the Russians, while Brooke argued for an invasion of French North Africa. Brooke won, and in November 1942 Operation Torch was mounted. Under Eisenhower, some 67,000 Americans landed at three points along the Moroccan and Algerian coasts.

The American introduction to combat did not go well. Ike exhibited signs of indecision, and Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall’s II Corps was severely mauled at Kasserine Pass, Faid Pass, and Gafsa by von Arnim’s 100,000-man Panzerarmee Afrika and Rommel’s 70,000-man Afrika Korps. Ike replaced Fredendall with the more aggressive George S. Patton, Jr., who had led the task force that landed in Morocco.

Despite heavy casualties and serious errors in execution over the next six months, the North African campaign turned out to be a successful laboratory for Ike, who learned how to command a large force, and for the green American units and their commanders, who learned that the Germans were not supermen. By May 1943, working in sometimes hostile cooperation with each other, the Americans and British cornered Rommel’s Axis armies into northeast Tunisia and pummeled them into defeat.

But Rommel was no longer there. In November 1942, with his armies in North Africa crumbling, Hitler recalled the ill and despondent Rommel. He had a new, even more important assignment for him: preventing an Allied invasion of Fortress Europe.

Despite the Allied victory in North Africa, Eisenhower’s work was not finished. The British and Americans decided to knock Italy out of the war, and the island of Sicily was the stepping-stone the Allies needed. With one successful operation under his belt, Ike was tabbed to orchestrate the Sicily operation, code-named “Husky.”

In July 1943, in the biggest air-sea assault to date, eight Allied infantry and two airborne divisions stormed Sicily. It took a month of hard fighting to secure the island. Eisenhower and the American troops were gaining confidence in their abilities.

Just as Rommel had been plucked out of North Africa to prepare a defense against an Allied invasion of Europe, so Eisenhower was whisked off to England to head up the organization that would face Rommel: the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The invasion of Italy at Salerno would be left to Lt. Gen. Mark Clark.

Ike faced a daunting challenge once he arrived in London. Not only was he tasked with eventually inserting over a million men into France, but SHAEF had to plan for supplying the force with every bullet, shell, rifle, howitzer, jeep, truck, tank, tire, bandage, C-ration, drop of gasoline, and countless other items the troops would need once they got there.

If anything was more imposing than the strategic, tactical, and logistical headaches, it was the challenge of engendering a spirit of cooperation between the brash Americans and the cantankerous British, who often seemed more like enemies than allies. The British were naturally resentful of America’s late arrival to the war and disdainful of the Yanks’ less-than-stellar combat performances in North Africa. Forging a coalition between the two sides would tax Eisenhower’s patience to the limit, and he would, on more than one occasion, threaten to quit unless the bickering and rivalries ceased.

By September 1943, with the German U-boat menace in the Atlantic at last neutralized, men and supplies began to flow unchecked from the United States to Britain. Huge supply depots and Army camps sprang up in the bucolic British countryside. Special equipment, such as swimming tanks, artificial harbors, and underwater pipelines, was developed. The initial assault wave of some 175,000 heavily armed, highly motivated U.S., British, Canadian, and Free French soldiers—some that had seen action in North Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere—practiced the craft of war incessantly on the beaches and in the hills of southern England.

To confuse the Germans as to the point of invasion, a dummy army—complete with dummy tents, tanks, trucks, and landing craft—was assembled near the southeastern tip of England, where the English Channel was the narrowest and where Hitler and his generals were convinced the Allies were most likely to cross. Heading this dummy army was a real general, George Patton, whom the Germans regarded as their most formidable foe. Eisenhower, they thought, was too cautious to attempt an invasion anywhere else along the French coast. They also believed Eisenhower would launch the invasion only if perfect weather conditions prevailed.

Rommel, as commander of Army Group B, could not afford to put all his defensive eggs in the Pas de Calais basket; he had over 300 miles of coastline along the English Channel from Cherbourg to Calais to defend. Even before the invasion, he warned his subordinate commanders to be aware that the Allies might use unconventional means to breach the coastal defenses—means such as swimming tanks, artificial harbors, and swarms of parachute and glider-borne troops. To defend against them, he wanted 200 million mines planted; hundreds of reinforced concrete pillboxes, bunkers, and tank traps constructed; thousands of anti-landing craft obstacles erected; and uncountable kilometers of barbed wire uncoiled.

He wanted thousands of machine guns, mortars, flamethrowers, and artillery pieces placed and pre-registered to cover every square foot of coastline. He wanted hundreds of thousands of skilled, fanatical soldiers to man the weapons and guard every conceivable landing spot. He wanted vast, mobile reserves of panzers standing by near the coast, ready to repel the invasion at a moment’s notice. He wanted the Luftwaffe’s planes on alert, and the Kriegsmarine’s ships and sailors at battle stations.

What he got was far less than what he wanted or needed.

Furthermore, he was handcuffed by the Nazis’ cumbersome command structure and the fact that certain units, mainly the panzer divisions, were under Hitler’s personal control. Rommel could not order the panzers to move without the Führer’s direct approval. Other units that Rommel needed to throw the Allies back into the sea were also not available to him; they were either controlled by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler; General Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzer Group West; or General Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Commander in Chief, West. Neither were the Navy and Air Force at his beck and call. Because every commander had his own pet theory on where and when the Allies would strike and how best to employ their units, no one was willing to give up control of their limited resources to Rommel.

Adding to Rommel’s worries, few of the troops manning the Normandy bunkers and trenches were “crack” soldiers, ready to die for the Fatherland. Many were old, out of shape, or recuperating veterans from other fronts. Many were not even German, but conscripts picked up on the Russian front who had decided that holding a rifle for Hitler was better than being incarcerated in a hellish POW camp.

Rommel faced another obstacle, perhaps the biggest one of all. He had built his reputation on the boldness of his attacks, the swiftness of his mobile forces, and the surprise of his tactics. Now he was being asked to become a master of static, defensive warfare, an assignment that went against the very grain of his aggressive nature.

Growing despondent over his lack of control in the event of invasion, Rommel confided his deepest fears to Fritz Bayerlein, commander of the Panzer Lehr Division: “We have lost the initiative, of that there is no doubt … total victory is now, of course, hardly a possibility.” He began to lend tacit support to plotters who were planning to assassinate Hitler.

As the unannounced date of the invasion drew near, Rommel constantly inspected the coastal defenses and found fault with the slow progress of the work and the troops’ state of readiness. He endlessly criticized and berated the men.

By contrast, Eisenhower spent much of his time (when he could extract himself from his crushing schedule) visiting the troops, encouraging them, and beaming at their eagerness for battle. One day, after he told a unit not to worry, a sergeant piped up: “Hell, we ain’t worried, General. It’s the Krauts that ought to be worrying now.”

In his Southwick House headquarters near the great naval base at Portsmouth, Eisenhower and the SHAEF staff set the date of invasion as June 5, 1944. Only on that date, and the following two, was the combination of tides and moon ideal. Any change in the weather could seriously disrupt the timetable, postponing the invasion by two weeks or more and risking its detection by German spies.

The weather did change, and for the worse. June 5 saw a terrible storm raging across southern England, the Channel, and Normandy. Troops were crammed into their transports, listening to sheets of rain pelting down, feeling the ships rocked by wind and waves. There seemed to be no way the invasion could begin.

Across the Channel, Rommel saw and felt the same storm at his palatial headquarters at LaRoche-Guyon, northwest of Paris. Informed that the storm would last for several days, he made a fateful decision. He would fly back to Germany for his wife’s birthday, June 6, and then go on to meet with Hitler to discuss the situation in Normandy. Also planned for the 6th were war games at Rennes, some 90 miles southwest of Normandy, where unit commanders and staff officers were already gathering.

The absence of so many key commanders would seriously undermine the Germans’ ability to counter the invasion. It was almost as though Providence were taking a hand in the coming battle.

Even while the storm was battering Southwick House, RAF Group Captain J.M. Stagg, SHAEF’s chief meteorologist, gave Ike and the SHAEF brass a startlingly optimistic forecast. A brief window of opportunity was approaching, and for a few crucial hours the storm would let up long enough for the invasion to begin. The agonizing decision, one that would change the course of the war and world history, was made by a much-conflicted Ike. Was he sending the minutely planned, carefully crafted, and endlessly rehearsed invasion to its doom? Or would launching the invasion in the teeth of a gale take the enemy by surprise? Despite his deep misgivings, Ike gave the order to proceed.

At home in Germany when he received the news that the invasion had begun, Rommel knew that his decision to absent himself from Normandy had been a terrible blunder. He saw that defeat for his beloved Fatherland was inevitable, for it was Eisenhower, not Rommel, who had made the audacious move, who had pulled off the surprise.

Victory, however, did not come easily. The invasion came out of a rough sea and cloudy sky, but very little went according to plan. At Utah Beach, the 4th Infantry Division landed in the wrong place. At Omaha Beach, the Air Force and Navy badly overshot their targets, leaving enemy positions virtually untouched.

Most of the swimming tanks foundered and sank, the airborne units were impossibly scattered, and most of the seaborne infantry troops, besides being horribly seasick, were landed far from their assigned sectors. Those who made it to shore were subjected to hours of unrelenting gunfire and shelling. Only the British-Canadian beaches (Gold, Juno, and Sword) were without serious mishap.

Despite all the problems and errors, within the span of a morning all of Rommel’s carefully constructed defenses from the base of the Cotentin Peninsula to the mouth of the Orne River had been breached by the initial wave of Allied soldiers, and none of Rommel’s or Hitler’s subsequent actions could throw back the invaders.

In one day, the Allies had deposited over 23,000 airborne troops behind enemy lines, and some 57,500 American and 75,000 British and Canadian troops, along with a small contingent of French commandos and men from other nations, had waded ashore at Normandy and were driving inland.

Given the size of the landings, all the things that went wrong, and the magnitude of the German defenses, it seems surprising that Allied casualties were not considerably heavier. All told, some 2,500 men were killed or wounded, most of them at Omaha.

Chess experts say that the first move, the “opening gambit,” will often decide the eventual outcome. With Eisenhower’s and Rommel’s opening moves, the outcome of the giant chess match that was Operation Overlord was sealed. Ike, the normally cautious commander who had never led troops in battle, had made a bold, spectacular move and had won; Rommel, the battle-hardened commander famous for his dash and daring, had lost. Although it would be 11 months before checkmate was declared, the end result was determined on the chess board of Normandy on June 6, 1944.

Epilogue

Rommel’s fortunes swiftly plummeted. On July 17, 1944, he was gravely wounded in Normandy when his staff car was strafed near Vimoutiers by British aircraft. Three days later, a bomb planted by a German officer to assassinate Hitler at his East Prussia headquarters only wounded him; a vengeful Hitler and his henchmen rounded up and executed the plotters.

Implicated in the plot, Rommel was forced to commit suicide on October 14, 1944. In exchange for taking poison, the lives of his wife and son were spared, and Rommel, whose suspected disloyalty was not revealed to the general public, was given a hero’s state funeral.

Since the war, his failure to throw back the irresistible Allied tide at Normandy has not dimmed the consensus that Rommel was a military genius; the atrocities of Nazism that tainted other German generals have not stained his reputation as a fierce and noble warrior. As historian Martin Blumenson wrote, “His devotion to the profession of arms was in the best tradition of the gentleman…. With his eye constantly on victory, he refused to be deterred from action by obstacles that more reasonable men deemed were too great to overcome.”

After the war, Eisenhower became the Army’s chief of staff, retiring in 1947 to become president of Columbia University. Riding the crest of his success as Supreme Allied Commander, the immensely popular Ike was swept into the American presidency in 1952, served two terms, and became a champion for peace while simultaneously attempting to counter the aggressive moves of the Soviet Union, Red China, and North Vietnam.

A heavy smoker since his cadet days, Ike lost the battle against heart disease and died on March 28, 1969. He was laid to rest in the Eisenhower Chapel in Abilene, Kan., and remains today one of America’s most beloved leaders.

As his biographer Stephen Ambrose noted, “It can be argued that no man elected to the Presidency was ever better prepared for the demands of the job than Eisenhower. The man who organized and commanded Overlord was confident that he could organize and run the United States as it faced the challenges of the Cold War.”

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