HISTORICAL NOTES: Kay’s War

When Kay asked the General about it, he said: “Go ahead, I don’t mind. Everybody else has written a book.” So next week Kay Summersby’s Eisenhower Was My Boss will be published. It is the story of her life from 1942 to the end of the war as chauffeur, aide and secretary to General Ike. Written from notes and memory, and whipped out with the help of a professional writer, it is a lively, garrulous, gossipy addition to the war’s memoirs.

The Patton Mouth. Kay survived the torpedoing of the troopship Strathallen to arrive in North Africa a few weeks after the Allied landing. She saw the bitter days of Kasserine Pass. She gave Ike concern because of the “grins, whistles, wolf-calls” which followed her “in this exclusively male territory.”

Apparently everybody wanted to meet the tall, lean, animated County Cork girl who was Ike’s chauffeur. That summer General George Patton invited her and WAC Ruth Briggs (General “Beetle” Smith’s secretary) over to Sicily to lunch.

“We found General Patton enthroned in a palace once occupied by the King of Sicily. Ruth and I turned down the famous Patton 75, a suicidal highball of champagne, brandy and possibly other disastrous mixtures. Lunch consisted of G.I. food and shop talk … I simply had to ask him about the slapping incident., General Patton sadly remarked, ‘I always get in trouble with my gawddamned mouth.’ At the same time, he shouted at the top of his squeaky voice, ‘But if this sort of thing ever comes up, I’ll do it again.’ “

She recalls her introduction to Franklin Roosevelt when he arrived for the Cairo Conference. “The President spoke in a tone I hadn’t heard since childhood: ‘See you tomorrow, Child.’ Elliott and Franklin stepped up as I moved away to drive General Eisenhower back to the Hopkins villa. “Come on back, Kay,’ Franklin whispered. Elliott nodded, ‘We’re having a little party tonight and it might take your mind off things.’ “

Kay went back but she only stayed until midnight. She had to drive the Boss and the President on a tour of the battlefields on the next day. When she left the party was “just shifting into high gear.” She thought the President “must be a very sound sleeper as well as a very tolerant father.” Kay cornered Mike Reilly, boss of the Secret Service contingent guarding Roosevelt. “Here you are on duty,” she chided, “and half of your men are tiddly.” Mike replied: “We’re tough, Kay. Have to be.”

There were other visitors to headquarters. Writes Kay: “The nomadic politicians were real burdens. They made a point of collaring every G.I. in sight, bellowing, ‘Where you from, Son? I’ll be sure to tell your Ma I saw you when I get back to the United States of America.’ “

Prisoner at Versailles. Back in London while the Normandy invasion was on, she watched her boss, “beset by a thousand worries . . . Always the General had Monty gnawing at his nerves . . . As a SHAEF staff member, as part of the official family and as secretary-driver to General Eisenhower I grew to dislike the very name of Montgomery. In my personal opinion, he gave the Supreme Commander more worry than any other one individual in the entire Allied command.”

After the liberation of Paris, Ike and his staff settled down at Versailles. While Ike directed the critical Battle of the Bulge, Kay discloses, he was a virtual prisoner of his own security officers in his headquarters. Army Intelligence had captured a German officer dressed in a U.S. uniform. He confessed that he was one of a band of 60 Nazis heading for Versailles to assassinate Ike. Kay apprehensively recounts: “The normal guard was doubled, trebled, quadrupled. The sound of a car exhaust was enough to halt work in every office, to start a flurry of telephone calls to our office to inquire if the Boss were all right.” Ike was not allowed to stick his nose outside the compound. Finally he did, grumbling, “Hell’s fire, I’m, going out for a walk. If anyone wants to shoot me, he can go right ahead.”

Ike’s Broadest Grin. On May 7, 1945, Jodl and his colleagues arrived at Supreme Headquarters to surrender. As Kay recalls the scene: “I felt a shiver of excitement. I shoved Telek [the General’s Scotty] under the desk, commanding him not to bark. [The Nazis] marched straight by without as much as a glance . . . sour-faced, glum, erect and despicable. They came to a parade-ground halt, clicked their heels and saluted . . . General Eisenhower stood stock-still, more military than I had ever seen him. His voice was brittle.” When it was over, and “the Germans half-bowed, saluted, did an about-face and marched back past my desk and out of the office . . . General Ike’s face stretched into the broadest grin of his career.”

Woman’s Cruelest Weapon. During the war, Kay got to Washington. Some of the things she saw there (orange juice and fresh vegetables) she liked. But other things she did not like. Some Army wives she met “left a bad taste in my memory.” She was “hurt, then angered at the slander of WACs overseas . . . How, I wondered, how could these Washington gossips . . . lump all overseas service women into one dirty group and then jab it with woman’s crudest weapon against woman: moral slander? I was even more upset at learning my own reputation was lost. I was a foreign woman—and I traveled with the High Brass. Therefore, I was a Bad Woman … Nothing I could say or do would change this attitude. I was classified, labeled and filed.

“A small, wicked voice inside cries out: ‘Next war, My Girl, you may as well do all these things of which you’re accused; they’ll say you did anyhow!”’

After the war Kay came to the U.S., stayed in the WAC (in which she had been commissioned despite her British citizenship). She had already applied for U.S. citizenship. Demobilized last year, she now lives in Manhattan, is planning radio broadcasts and a two-year U.S. lecture tour.