The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s

by William I. Hitchcock

As the military leader of a multinational alliance, Eisenhower faced a preeminently political task: to fuse together the British and American military establishments, with their wholly contrasting traditions, organizations, and operational doctrines, into an effective fighting force. Such an amalgamation proved enormously difficult for, as historian Max Hastings has recently shown, American opinion toward the British in mid-1942 was low indeed. The Americans thought the British were shy of fighting after their licking at Dunkirk in May 1940, and British reluctance to open up a second front in France sustained this opinion. One English visitor in America declared that “anti-British feeling was beyond belief,” especially among senior army officers.27 Eisenhower had to reverse this tide, quickly.