How Eisenhower’s Granddaughters Learned About WWII
How Eisenhower’s Granddaughters Learned About WWII
5 minute read
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower poses happily on October 14,1956 in the White House gardens on his 66th birthday for a family portrait with (from left) his wife, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower, daughter-in-law, Mrs. John Eisenhower and the Eisenhower grandchildren Mary Jean, 10 months old, Susan Ann, 4, David, 8, and Barbara Ann, 7.Al Muto—AFP/Getty Images
Plenty of Americans have grown up hearing their grandfathers’ World War II stories. But, for Mary Jean and Susan Eisenhower, those stories could have—and actually have—filled many books.
That’s because their grandfather was Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during the war and later President of the United States. Not that he told many war stories to his granddaughters when they were young, though Susan does remember him showing her a large photograph of the invasion of Normandy in his Gettysburg College office when she was 8 or 9 years old.
Mainly, Mary Jean and Susan learned about Eisenhower’s war experience through books—especially his own. They both read At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends when it came out in 1967 (Mary Jean was only in about the fifth grade), and they learned many of his WWII stories in its pages.
Both women went on to work in professions related to their grandfather’s legacy; Mary Jean at People to People, an organization he founded, and Susan in national security, an arena where “many of the issues that are front and center [today] are impacted by decisions he made during his presidency,” she says. Their work gave them a deeper familiarity with his experiences during the war and beyond.
Still, they continued to learn new things about their grandfather’s life throughout their adulthoods. When Mary Jean was in her 30s, she learned about a note that had been found in his trashcan the month after the invasion of Normandy that he’d written to take responsibility in case D-Day failed, saying, “If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” (He apparently carried similar notes during every major invasion he ordered.) “It turned my heart as soon as I saw it,” Mary Jean says.
When Germany officially surrendered on V-E Day, 70 years ago Friday, Eisenhower’s tone was not celebratory—the Pacific battle was not yet won, after all. “The strong overwhelming feeling apparently [held] by everyone at headquarters, starting with the Supreme Allied Commander, was one of exhaustion and a profound sense of sadness,” Susan says. She was moved when she read the statement her grandfather sent to George Marshall and President Truman, which simply said that the mission was accomplished.
World War II: Photos We Remember
In a picture that captures the violence and sheer destruction inherent in war perhaps more graphically than any other ever published in LIFE, Marines take cover on an Iwo Jima hillside amid the burned-out remains of banyan jungle, as a Japanese bunker is obliterated in March 1945.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesIn this and dozens of other, similar pictures made at New York's Penn Station in 1944, LIFE's Alfred Eisenstaedt captured a private moment repeated in public millions of times over the course of the war: a guy, a girl, a goodbye - and no assurance that he'll make it back. By war's end, more than 400,000 American troops had been killed.Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesDuring 1940's Battle of Britain, Luftwaffe bombers tried to destroy British air power ahead of a planned invasion of the UK. When that failed, Hitler resorted to terror attacks on civilians, including the full-scale bombing of London (pictured) and other English towns. The attacks killed tens of thousands of Britons, but "The Blitz" fizzled: the invasion never materialized.William Vandivert—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThree American soldiers lie half-buried in the sand at Buna Beach on New Guinea. This photo was taken in February 1943, but not published until September, when it became the first image of dead American troops to appear in LIFE during World War II. George Strock's photo was finally OK'd by government censors, in part because FDR feared the public was growing complacent about the war's horrific toll.George Strock—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesThe Statue of Liberty, photographed during a blackout in 1942 - an eloquent expression of the nation's mood in the first full year of a global conflict with no real end in sight.Andreas Feininger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMembers of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, commonly known as WAACs, don their first gas masks at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, in June 1942. The female troops were famously praised by General Douglas MacArthur, who called them "my best soldiers."Marie Hansen—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesA photo taken by Hitler's personal photographer (and later acquired by LIFE) shows a 1939 rally in which Hitler salutes Luftwaffe troops who fought with Francisco Franco's ultra-right wing nationalist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesSoldiers goose-step past the Fhrer in honor of Hitler's 50th birthday, April 20, 1939. Less than five months later, on September 1, the Third Reich's forces invaded Poland.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesAustrians cheer Adolf Hitler during his 1938 campaign to unite Austria and Germany. In the rapt faces, straining bodies, and adulation of the crowds swept up in Hitler's mad vision, one senses the eagerness of millions to forge a "Thousand Year Reich" at, literally, any cost.Hugo Jaeger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageIn a photo that somehow comprises both tenderness and horror, an American Marine cradles a near-dead infant pulled from under a rock while troops cleared Japanese fighters and civilians from caves on Saipan in the summer of 1944. The child was the only person found alive among hundreds of corpses in one cave.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageThe home front: At Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, a visiting New York Giant is caught in a rundown in the summer of 1943. At a time when seemingly everything in America - race relations, gender roles, the country's very idea of itself - was undergoing profound change, the national pastime offered an antidote to anxiety and dread. Namely, something familiar. Something unchanging.Wallace Kirkland—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesMembers of the U.S. Army Air Corps' legendary 99th Pursuit Squadron, the Tuskegee Airmen, receive instruction about wind currents from a lieutenant in 1942. The Tuskegee fliers - the nation's first African American air squadron - served with distinction in the segregated American military.Gabriel Benzur—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesA welder at a boat-and-sub-building yard adjusts her goggles before resuming work, October, 1943. By 1945, women comprised well over a third of the civilian labor force (in 1940, it was closer to a quarter) and millions of those jobs were filled in factories: building bombers, manufacturing munitions, welding, drilling and riveting for the war effort.Bernard Hoffman—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImageArmy medic George Lott, wounded in both arms in November, 1944, grimaces as doctors mold a cast to his body. When Lott embarked on a 4,500-mile, seven-hospital journey of recovery, photographer Ralph Morse - astonished by the high level of medical care wounded troops received both at the front and behind the lines - traveled with him, and chronicled Lott's odyssey in a revelatory cover story for LIFE.Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPhotographer W. Eugene Smith's picture of a Marine drinking from his canteen during 1944's Battle of Saipan is as iconic a war picture as any ever made. In fact, when the U.S. Postal Service released a "Masters of American Photography" series of commemorative stamps in 2002, Smith was included - and this image was chosen as representative of his body of work.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. An exemplar of a bitter, grueling land battle, Iwo Jima also saw prodigious air and sea power brought to bear as American and Japanese troops clashed over control of the tiny Pacific island. American forces finally captured Iwo Jima - and its two strategic airfields - in late March, 1945.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. A crew maneuvers an enormous piece of artillery during the Battle of Saipan, 1944. In the waning days of the struggle for the island, thousands of Japanese civilians and troops committed suicide, rather than surrender to American troops. Many leapt to their death from the top of sheer cliffs that fall 200 feet to rocks and surf below.Peter Stackpole—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. American troops chat near a dead Japanese soldier on Iwo Jima. The degree to which the Japanese were willing to fight to the death, rather than surrender, is summed up in one remarkable statistic: Close to 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed during the battle; only around 200 were captured.W. Eugene Smith—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesGIs tramp in review across an English field, 1944, as the long-planned Operation Overlord - the D-Day invasion of France - draws near. With 160,000 Allied troops taking part, the cross-Channel attack was the single greatest air-land-and-sea invasion in military history.Frank Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesUnpublished. An American Marine readies to land on Guadalcanal during the five-month struggle for the island between late 1942 and early 1943. Three thousand miles south of Tokyo, Guadalcanal was a major shipping point for military supplies. The Allied victory there in February, 1943, marked a major turning point in the war after a string of Japanese victories in the Pacific.Joe Scherschel—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesAmerican troops in the Philippines celebrate the long-awaited news that Japan has, finally, unconditionally, surrendered in August 1945.Carl Mydans—Time & Life Pictures/Getty ImagesPeace at last: V-J Day, Times Square, August 14, 1945.Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
“If you see pictures of granddad that day,” Mary Jean says, “and then see him 10 years later as president, 10 years older, he actually looks 20 years younger than he did on the day of surrender. Even thinking of this puts a lump in my throat, to think of what he went through.”
A new exhibit at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans—where the Eisenhowers participated in a panel on Thursday—called “Road to Berlin” highlights stories from the European theater in large part though personal effects, many from soldiers who died. Susan says this way of humanizing the war is “the greatest form of storytelling.” But when the women were children, their grandfather’s own personal effects from the war weren’t necessarily objects they were awed by, at least not much more than any other grandchild is awed by their grandparents’ household items.
They were aware, however, of the wartime connection the President known as “Ike” had to many of the men around him, including a chauffeur, Sgt. Leonard Dry (who had taken him to meet the 101st Airborne Division before the Normandy landings and airdrop) and his valet, Sgt. John Moaney (who was with him from the North African campaign until the end of both their lives). “We were very conscious of the fact that all these people went way back,” Susan says.
The women were taught to compartmentalize their views of their grandfather between the personal and the public. In fact, Mary Jean says she got to know four versions of Eisenhower over the years: “The military one, the presidential one, the knee-slapping one and the People to People one,” with the knee-slapping iteration being the warm man who made her count up coins in a piggy bank. In grade school when lessons about him came up, Susan says this compartmentalized mindset was especially important: “There was a period right after his presidency where his presidency was really misunderstood and getting torn down. He wouldn’t get up and brag and he didn’t draw attention to himself.”
As for Mary Jean, those lessons may have been a bit easier to brush off. “I have to confess I slept through most of my history classes,” she says. “I’d see the war pictures go up on the movie screen and it was like the sand man started beating me to death.”
Correction: The original version of this article incorrectly described Sgt. Moaney’s role for Eisenhower. He was his valet.
