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Eisenhower's Lieutenants EISENHOWER'S LIEUTENANTS: The Campaigns of France and Germany, 1944-45. By Dr. Russell F. Weigley. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1981. 799 pp. $22.50. (Member $20.25)
In Eisenhower's Lieutenants, Dr. Russell Weigley has endeavored to do for Eisenhower and the European Theater of Operations in World War II what D.S. Freeman did for the Army of Northern Virginia in Lee's Lieutenants. Professor Weigley states at the beginning that this volume is modeled on Freeman's, with the caveat that he focuses less on Eisenhower than his predecessor did on Lee because many detailed analyses of the Supreme Allied Commander and his headquarters have already been published. Within this context, he, like Freeman, postulates that an army's success or failure rests, first, upon "the capability, fair mindedness, and diligence of the supreme command, and, second, dependent upon the first, the search for competent executive officers at the level below the supreme command." Eisenhower's Lieutenants thus is an analysis of the supreme American effort in World War II, of the leadership of the U.S. Army and, where appropriate, of allied commanders in leading the Western Allies against the Germans from Normandy to V-E Day.
But this is not "court history." Dr. Weigley, distinguished historian of the U.S. Army, Professor of History at Temple University, and a former Harold K. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Military History at the Army War College, has written a detached, analytical evaluation of the performance of the U.S. Army in Europe. This is evident from the initial two chapters. He immediately raises one essential question: how well prepared was the Army to engage in a war against the armed forces of Europe's foremost military power of the previous 70 plus years? Although the Army's historical traditions were rooted in the frontier constabulary endeavors of the Indian wars and the high mobility required therein, the U.S. Army also had an approach to war inherited from U.S. Grant and the Civil War: a war of annihilation achieved through simultaneous advances evenly distributed along an entire front. Victory would be secured through overwhelming mass and attrition. As Dr. Weigley notes, the U.S. Army was neither materially equipped nor organized to implement a combined approach in a war that would require both superior firepower and mobility. And,...