The Integrity of "Top Secret"
by RALPH INGERSOLL
1
THERE is nothing so reassuring to the author of a book which touches on history as to have a Professor go to work on it with a microscope, looking for factual flaws, misplaced minutiae, and so on, and have him come up with an unqualified endorsement of one of the author’s major themes! The conclusion of Professor Taylor’s study on Top Secret is an agreement that “General Bradley is the great field general of the war in Europe.”
It feels good to one who entered the campaign in Europe by the landing craft route on D-Day to find that even the men who stayed in headquarters and rustled papers came to this same conclusion.
As to the unkind things that Professor Taylor has also written about Top Secret, in view of his conclusion, it would be ungenerous of me to engage him in a battle of commas. Besides, Professor Taylor has more commas than I. Probably he is heavier-armed in colons and semicolons, too.
When I wrote Top Secret, I had only an intimate knowledge of the strategy, tactics, and personalities of the campaign gained from a little over two years of 7-day a week work with the men who were making, commanding, and executing the plans. I did not have the files of the Historical Branch, European Theater of Operations. Neither had I the services of a staff of fellow historians. I had only the advice of a score or more of other officers who, like myself, were participants in the actual campaign. Although most of them were professional — and several of them were general — officers, only one of them had been a Professor at a University. And he not even from Harvard. So, it should not be too difficult for Professor Taylor’s comma-tipped rapier to draw my blood!
But let us see how he made out.
Obviously, the Professor attacked what he considers my book’s most vulnerable passages. The first clinking of foils is over my secondhand account of what happened at Omaha Beach. It is “secondhand” because I was reasonably busy on the beach called Utah at this time. Professor Taylor certainly gives me a case against the Commanding Officer who told me he had been “pinned there for six hours before the destroyer screen swung in.” Obviously, the account my friend gave me was not as authentic as Professor Taylor’s. Possibly the wound my informant received while leading his troops up the cliff distracted him a bit and he failed to note in his diary that units near-by had gotten through in two hours whereas it had taken his men six.
But, when Professor Taylor tells me that no clean break-through was made from the Omaha sector, he will have to take that up with the First U.S. Infantry Division. Officers and men of the First are still convinced that they had pierced the crust beyond Caumont when they were ordered by Field Marshal — then General — Montgomery to stop in their tracks. This may seem like buck passing on my part, but the plain fact is that I haven’t the nerve to try to tell them that a Professor knows more about what actually happened out there in the woods than they, who were there. Their feeling is still very strong on the subject of the orders which halted them. These orders permitted the Germans to re-form on their front, and to sow the mines, and to site the mortars that were to kill and maim so many Americans when the attack had to be resumed.
Nor will I stand up for Professor Taylor in his argument with the terrain experts who gave me their description of hedgerow country — and whose understanding was good enough, at least, to provide them with a basis for planning and executing successful operations against the Germans.
Rickey Harrison, my map maker, however, I will turn over to the Professor, bound hand and foot, if, in his simplification of the official battle maps (which had just been released by the War Department), he did — as alleged by Professor Taylor — ink in a big, black arrow a whole quarter of an inch from where it was supposed to go.
I also deliver to him, in appropriate fetters, the German noncom from whom, after interrogation, I got the story of what happened in German Headquarters the night before D-Day. I wasn’t there. I may, however, suggest to the Heinies’ Defense Counsel that a good answer to Professor Taylor’s charges might be that events in the field are not always recorded for historians in higher headquarters in the way they actually happened. Some people, he might add, prefer to believe the firsthand reports of men who were there.
I deliver myself, in sackcloth and ashes, if I put the First Army’s engagements, which broadened the base of the American peninsula salient, on the wrong side of the fall of Cherbourg! Professor Taylor just says I omitted all mention of these battles — and then goes on to quote the very words with which I described them, to prove that I had the date wrong. Well, the conscientious professional soldiers who checked my narrative before publication caught me in a number of other places and I know I was a trial to them. The sense of the whole always seemed more important to me than whether the scene I pictured took place on the moonless night of Friday, the 13th, or actually happened on the cloudy night of Saturday, the 14th. And my choice, of course, was whether to let the book go to press or hold it up a year or two until, say, the Nuremberg Trials were over, and I could get from such affairs enough supporting detail to choke a scholar.
But I didn’t care then about scholar-choking and still don’t. The important thing about the truth is its telling — and one of the standard ways to keep it from being told at all is to insist that it cannot be printed until its significance has only academic interest. So, I went ahead, knowing full well that there were Professor Taylors in the world and that one day they’d be picking at me with itching fingers.
2
As to the Professor’s case that misplaced commas destroy the validity of the conclusions in Top Secret, it seems to me a little like a man standing on the shores of the Mississippi, studying carefully the swirling of eddies at his feet and concluding that because a few straws float north, there must be something wrong with other people’s observations that the river, as a whole, is actually flowing south.
Top Secret was not written to chart eddies. It was an attempt, first, to tell the story of a campaign which every American should know and be deeply proud of, in terms which most Americans could understand. Secondly, it tried to do this at a pace that would hold the reader’s interest and give him a real appreciation and understanding of the measure of the American victory. Far from challenging such scholarly works as Professor Taylor will no doubt one day write, one of my principal objectives was to encourage such works.
Professor Taylor is, quite obviously, a sincere servant of the truth. Approaching it by quite a different route than mine, he comes, in the end — and by his own words — to the same conclusion that I did, to wit: that Omar Bradley was the military genius of the campaign. Yet, Professor Taylor knows perfectly well that this great truth is not generally accepted. He knows that during the war the diplomatic General, Dwight Eisenhower, had the authority to paint any picture of General Eisenhower’s accomplishments he pleased. He knows that General Eisenhower’s Headquarters — ably assisted by the British Ministry of Information — used that authority, freely. Therefore, I cannot feel that Professor Taylor’s implicit endorsement of the Public Relations version of the eampaign becomes him as a Professor of History.
Professor Taylor knows very well — for he studied General Eisenhower’s and General Marshall’s reports
— that Field Marshal Montgomery was stubborn, vain, and uncoöperative. He knows very well that General Montgomery’s own British Army failed at Caen in the opening days of the campaign — and failed again when General Eisenhower bet all the chips he had on him at Arnheim — and grossly and insultingly exaggerated his contributions to the American victory in the Ardennes. Yet, in the Professor’s attack on Top Secret, he appears to deny these facts. The position he takes is in defense of their suppression.
Professor Taylor refers to Top Secret’s narrative of General Eisenhower’s and Field Marshal Montgomery’s roles as “a build-up [of General Bradley] at the expense of his commander, his allies, his fellow generals, and — above all — of the facts.” It is a very sad commentary when a bona fide Professor of History at one of America’s foremost Universities becomes so partisan, and loses his objectivity so completely, that he sees in Top Secret’s narrative of the campaign only an attempt to “build up” one man at the expense of others — even though the Professor’s own conclusions about that man’s worth are identical with the conclusions of the book.
I sincerely hope that time will return to Professor Taylor his lost sense of perspective. With the return of his sense of perspect ive, I hope he will devote himself to seeking the true facts of the campaign with as much zeal as he displayed in attacking my right to seek them. May he start with the story of Omar Bradley and see if he can write an honest history of Bradley’s campaign without including and commenting on General Bradley’s historic differences with the Supreme Commander and the Field Marshal.
If he tells the facts, I will offer, in advance, to defend him when he is attacked by other Professor Taylors, who would have the record of history altered for personal, political, or other considerations
— as it would be by a denial that command complications existed or that they had historical significance. I guarantee I will put up a good show for him, for it will warm my heart to welcome so distinguished a convert back to the ranks of those who believe it is holier to seek the truth than to plead for its suppression.
It also occurs to me that Professor Taylor teaches history to the students of Harvard University. Is he going to tell future students the history of the campaign as put out by the Public Relations Office, SHAEF, and the British Ministry of Information? Or, is he going to tell them the truth? Professor Taylor knows very well that the two versions are not the same. It is commonly agreed that during the war facts may legitimately be withheld — even from one’s own people — for fear the general knowledge might aid the enemy in his conduct of the war. But, does Professor Taylor agree, say, with Soviet purists who preach that history should serve only the interest of the State? The war has been over for a year now. Professor Taylor had better begin making up his mind what kind of history he is going to teach at Harvard.
The monolithic facts that tower over Professor Taylor’s defense of what isn’t so are, of course, available to everyone. It is certainly not necessary to read Top Secret — although I like to think that it helps. The big, important facts are in General Marshall’s official report. They are documentated again in Commander Butcher’s highly personalized account of his life as an Aide to Supreme Commander Eisenhower. No official account of the war in Europe — however carefully prepared to serve the subtle purposes of propaganda — can omit them entirely. They are too huge and solid.
These towering facts — each a mountain in itself — run together into a single range marked by a succession of peaks. The first few peaks are the record of postponements of the trans-Channel invasion. Then comes that great fact mass which has to do with the way the legal command was established over our forces in the European Theater. It is silhouetted against the skyline, sharp and clear. Although we were, eventually, to contribute overwhelmingly the largest part of the effort — the lives, the material, the money — American forces were not even to have fifty-fifty representation. The three Commandersin-Chief, who held our fate in their hands, were all British and the American “Supreme” Commander was required to turn over his authority in the field to them. Originally, this Commander-in-Chief was to have been General George Marshall, but the British rejected him because they felt his character was too strong and his emotions too truly American. (This last has come to light since Top Secret was written.) The mountain range of inescapable fact stretches on. The significance of the political campaign in Italy is unavoidable. There is no way of arranging Field Marshal Montgomery’s operations around Caen to spell Victory — nor can any words, however cunningly strung together, blot out the truth that it was Bradley’s genius at St-Lô that broke the German defense of the Continent.
Attempts to make it all seem otherwise appear, in perspective, as no more than damp mist clinging to the base of these facts. It can only obscure them until the sun of truth rises to burn away the fog. Montgomery’s long campaign to buy British victory with American men and American material, his failure at Arnheim, his tragicomic crossing of the Rhine after Hodges and Patton were both on the other side, and finally, Churchill’s last minute attempt to alter American strategy — all these are of too solid substance to be permanently hidden behind a propagandacreated smoke screen.
Better men than Professor Taylor have been trying ever since the war ended to hide the pushing around we got from the British while the war was on. In Top Secret I didn’t even attempt to tell the whole story. Top Secret is an outline of the campaign’s factual geography — written in the hope, for one thing, that it would make it easier for the Professors to understand the minutia when it came to them for study.
In this sense, even though Professor Taylor is gracious enough to say he agreed with me about General Bradley’s role, I am disappointed in him. Take his reaction to my charges that the British used us for their own ends throughout the war. No one has a right to blame the British for this and I, specifically — and repeatedly — in Top Secret stated that I didn’t. The British were simply looking out for themselves — not always at our expense — and on their side of the fence, the Russians were looking after themselves, too. But Professor Taylor is no Englishman. His self-chosen role of apologist seems to me unbecoming — first because, as I have noted above, his primary allegiance should have been to the truth for its own sake; and second, because he has not the extenuating circumstances my British friends can claim. He has not, to the best of my knowledge, ever sworn allegiance to the King. He should not even feel any compunctions about admitting truths favorable to the American cause.