Ike Eisenhower: From West Point Through World War II

Eisenhower accepted an opportunity at West Point in 1911 and did well: He finished 61^st in a class of 164 graduates. He was a great football player - he played two years for the varsity and led the team. He also played baseball on the same team as Omar Bradley, a future general. He graduated in 1915 and was appointed Second Lieutenant to Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

There he met his wife, Mamie Geneva Doud of Denver, Colorado. They married in 1916 and had a child in 1917, Doud Dwight, who tragically passed away in 1921.

During World War I, Eisenhower served at Fort Houston and other bases in Texas and at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia. He transferred from Infantry to Tank Corps and was assigned to Fort Meade in Maryland in 1918. He was scheduled to serve in Europe but the war ended a week before his planned departure date.

Eisenhower continued with the Army after the war, and in 1925 he entered the Command and General Staff School. He graduated at the top of a class of 245 officers. He obviously had the necessary abilities to lead as a general. From 1933 to 1939, he was an assistant to General MacArthur in the Philippines.

Although he was only a lieutenant colonel when America entered World War II in December 1941, he quickly demonstrated his ability to lead. He went to Washington to serve with the General Staff. He was promoted to Major General. After serving on the staff of General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff, he was sent to London, where he was promoted to Commanding General of the European Theater. He continued earning promotions until he became Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe.

He commanded the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944, the successful attack that signaled the end for Nazi Germany. It was the largest amphibious invasion in history.

As the war ended, Eisenhower liberated a concentration camp (photo above), and what he found was shocking. He wrote to General George Marshall, "The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda'." (April 15, 1945)

At this level, Ike's record of history has become critical because there is a tendency from the other side to underestimate the number of people killed in the holocaust. Had Eisenhower and others not documented the horrors of the camps, the holocaust denials of modern times might be plausible, but because of the efforts to document the atrocities, the historical record has been preserved.