"The Fate of the World"

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The year 1944 was the climactic year of the war against Germany. It was not the last year of that war, as many had predicted and more had hoped. But it was, beyond all reasonable doubt, the last full year.

It was not a year in which the outcome--the question of who would win and who would lose--still dangled precariously in the balance. The trend of the war had been reversed in 1942 at Stalingrad and El Alamein. By early 1944 the U.S. was almost fully armed--thanks mainly to the Man of 1943, General George Catlett Marshall.

The promise of victory was bright. But the path to victory was highly uncertain. And the greatest single element of that uncertainty was the success or failure of the Anglo-U.S. invasion of western Europe, which Soviet Russia had been demanding since 1942, and which Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt now proclaimed as necessary and imminent.

The invasion was the greatest gamble, the most complex operation in the history of war. The design of it was the product of hundreds of brains. The responsibility of it fell on the shoulders of one man--Dwight David Eisenhower.

About two months before Dday, Eisenhower and his top commanders were gathered in a room, beside a sand-table model of the target beaches. After the commanders had spoken in turn, piecing together the total picture of the operation, Winston Churchill stalked on to the platform, clutching his lapels. He said: "I have confidence in you, my commanders. The fate of the world is in your hands."

This slice of Churchillian rhetoric was not necessarily an overstatement. If the invasion failed, the waste of time and effort, of men and material, would be incalculable, almost too staggering even to contemplate. If it failed, Russia might be so discouraged as to seek a separate peace with Hitler. In that case, when the western Allies were ready to mount another invasion, in 1946 or 1947, they would find three or four hundred German divisions manning the Atlantic Wall instead of 60.

To Grips on Land. The purpose of the invasion was not to knock out Germany at one blow. If the mere establishment and holding of Allied beachheads should discourage the Nazis to the point of capitulation, well and good. There were extreme optimists (later developments were to prove how extreme they were) who hoped for that outcome. But in the realistic battle plan, the purpose of the gamble was to bring the forces of the western Allies to grips with Nazi Germany on her western land approaches. When that purpose was completely achieved, affable, incisive, confident "Ike" Eisenhower became the Man of 1944.

A year ago, Eisenhower announced his conviction that Germany would be beaten in 1944. "Many persons of the highest technical attainments, knowledge and responsibility," said Winston Churchill, had shared this feeling. In their extenuation, it might be said that none of them knew that Soviet Russia's main military effort for the year, on the main highway to Berlin, would run its course in six weeks of the summer.

The notable fact about Eisenhower's prediction is not that it was wrong, but that it was based on a complete confidence that the invasion would succeed. In retrospect, his brilliant success made it seem like much less of a gamble than it had seemed before June 6.

Another Gamble. As the year drew to a close, the Germans found their border invaded and themselves in a position where they, in turn, preferred a great gamble to a continued, steady, losing retreat. Adolf Hitler had withdrawn into the shadows and Heinrich Himmler was Germany's Man of 1944. Himmler had held the people and the Army in line while he squeezed them for the last ounces of German strength. Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, the cold, wily Junker who mounted the December counteroffensive, was the Man of the Hour.

Rundstedt's all-out gamble involved the U.S. forces in their gravest and costliest battle of World War II. That savage outpouring of German strength showed clearly enough that the Man of 1944 was not to be found among the idealistic dreamers and crafty politicians who wanted to perform a Caesarean operation on a world at war, to bring the postwar world to birth ahead of its time. Not in three years of war had there been so much mutual recrimination among Russia, Britain and the U.S., nor such alarming cracks in their solidarity. In these cracks lurked the last vestiges of Germany's hope for escape.

The war was still on. The shape of the postwar world still hung on the manner of its winning.

Another War. In 1944 there was also war in the Pacific. It was a year of great achievement for Admiral Chester William Nimitz, top U.S. commander in that theater of tiny land patches in vast reaches of water. For the first time, in 1944, Nimitz took the offensive, as distinguished from the counteroffensive (Guadalcanal, the upper Solomons, the Gilberts). In the Marshalls, the Marianas and the Carolines, Nimitz put his amphibious forces on the fringe of the Japanese inner empire. For the first time the main strength of the Jap fleet was lured to battle, and it was badly beaten, leaving the U.S. with at least temporary dominance in the western Pacific.

Douglas MacArthur kept his promise to the Philippines. "I have returned," he said. But at year's end the total redemption of the Philippines still lay ahead.

On the Asiatic mainland it was a year of tragedy for Chiang Kaishek, China's perennial man of the year. The Japs cut his country in two. The recall of General Joseph W. Stilwell brought down on the Generalissimo's head the most searing criticism he had ever suffered from the U.S. But he strove to put new vigor into his regime and his war effort. Neither Chiang nor China was beaten.

In 1944, the war against Japan stood about where the war against Germany stood in 1943. The strategic bombardment of the enemy homeland had begun; but the battles with the enemy's major land forces were still to come. Soldiers in the Pacific complained that their war was neglected by the U.S. press and public. Yet the people were only following the cue of the Allied leaders; the defeat of Germany had been given priority over the defeat of Japan.

Land of the Free. It was the shifting fortunes of war in Europe that swung the U.S. alternately into optimism and pessimism, and always the pendulum swung too far. When the Allies won and held their first foothold in Normandy, the war seemed all but over. When the first attempts to break out of the peninsula failed, gloom settled down. When the breakout came and the Germans were routed, it was in the bag. When the Allies pulled up in September, back came the gloom. When Generals Bradley and Devers resumed the offensive in November, there were Congressmen in Washington who said it might all be over in 30 days. Rundstedt's amazing winter offensive brought the thickest gloom of the year.

In the midst of war, the U.S. people took time out to elect a President. Franklin Roosevelt's claim as Man of the Year was mainly that he won a fourth term. But the President had already broken the precedent with his third term. And this time he won through by the narrowest margin of any election since 1916.

The man who made the deepest emotional dent in the country was one who died before his time: Wendell Willkie. Seldom in this century had any man been so sincerely and widely mourned. From defeat in 1940 to repudiation by his own party in 1944, Willkie had grown great in vision, forthrightness and courage, and the millions who followed his progress gained a new conception of human freedom.

Two other men made their marks on the year, Sidney Hillman of the C.I.O. and James Caesar Petrillo of the Musician's Union. Whether or not it decided the election, Hillman's Political Action Committee brought labor closer to the balance of power in national politics than it had ever been before. Petrillo, after successfully defying the War Labor Board and the President of the U.S., rammed home the revolutionary principle of royalties paid by corporations directly to union treasuries.

Changing Aspects. In Europe, there were several men of stature whose aspect changed in the shifting light of events. One of these was somber, iron-willed Charles de Gaulle. For four years he had been the symbol and touchstone of French resistance to the Nazi conqueror, but he had lived in the half-light of exile. In 1944 he returned in triumph to his free but prostrate country. In the liberated countries, he was the only exile who went back to a people solidly ranked behind him, and the only man who seemed able to control the revolutionary ferments which liberation had set astir.

Winston Churchill, Man of 1940, had also been a symbol. In Britain's darkest and finest hour, his flaming words and dauntless courage had heartened his country to stand alone against Hitler at the crest of his Blitzkrieg power. As one of the organizers of victory, Churchill had been magnificent. Now in the last weeks of 1944, he was facing--with his usual truculence--the heaviest criticism of his World War II career; his critics charged him with responsibility for the civil war in Greece and for selling out Poland to Russia.

The Runner-Up. Joseph Stalin, Man of 1942, who in that year had started to roll the Hitlerites back from the Caucasus oilfields, was also beginning to look a little different to many Americans in the dawn light of victory--or perhaps more like his pre-1941 self. After dealing Hitler one of his two heaviest defeats of the year, Stalin's central armies had stopped on the Vistula, while those on the flanks pursued secondary aims. Then followed the ill-timed martyrdom of General Bor and his heroic partisans in Warsaw; the Moscow-sponsored Government at Lublin; the methodical destruction of the London Polish Government. At Dumbarton Oaks, Russia's diplomats insisted that, in the framework of postwar security, no great power (e.g., Russia) should be disciplined without its consent.

Any sovereign nation may choose to drug itself with suspicion, cynicism, isolation, and history does not deny a great man his place because his aims and methods are objectionable. "History," someone has said, "is a record of events which ought not to have happened." But Joseph Stalin was not the Man of 1944.

Needed: An Eisenhower? In November 1943, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met with considerable fanfare at Teheran. There, it seemed, the political and military guidance of the world for 1944 had been charted. As the year wore on, the luster of Teheran began to fade. There was a general cry for another meeting of the Big Three--but there was also a demand for an inter-Allied political command, modeled on the military structure of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, or on the inter-Allied command machinery with which Eisenhower had planned and carried out the greatest achievement of the year. The political world lacked an Eisenhower.

General Marshall had chosen Eisenhower for his brains, imagination and diplomacy when the Chief of Staff sent him first to Britain, then to Africa in 1942. In addition to his natural ability to get along with people, Eisenhower acquired the knack of hitting it off with other nationals, notably the British. In Africa his command structure was a complex but smooth-working mesh of U.S. and British officers, and he carried the same formula back to England when he was chosen to head the invasion. Of the six men on his Supreme Command, four were British.

The two Americans were Bradley, who helped Montgomery lay out the ground tactics, and Walter Bedell ("Beedle") Smith, a bulldog of a man who is perhaps the hardest-working officer in the U.S. Army. It was Beedle Smith who coordinated the entire invasion planning. TIME Correspondent Charles Wertenbaker called him "driving, determined, devoted, and occasionally furious." Eisenhower called him the best chief of staff in the world, and Monty said quite openly that he would like to steal him.

Always, however, when the agonizing decisions had to be made, Ike Eisenhower made them. As all the world now knows, the invasion was postponed for one day on account of stormy weather. The forecast for June 6 was anything but promising, but another postponement would have meant waiting two weeks for favorable tides. And that would have involved a grave risk to secrecy and morale. The Germans had been led to expect a landing at a later date and a point farther east on the coast. Eisenhower gambled on the weather for the sake of tactical surprise--and won.

Of Mice & Men. In May, a U.S. correspondent in London had observed: "The most brilliantly conceived and thoughtfully worked out plans may fail utterly if the weather conditions on D-day and several days thereafter should prove unfavorable. . . '."

Hitler had promised his people that he would drive Eisenhower off the beaches in nine hours. The Nazis were not even trying to drive him off after nine days. And that was the story for the rest of the battle of France. Eisenhower was always able to take more than Hitler could give.

In the last six months Eisenhower has not visibly aged (he is 54), but he gives a subtle impression of having grown bigger as a man and as a commander. For lack of exercise, he is slightly thicker around the middle and there are often tired lines under his snapping blue eyes. But he is very fit, has had no cold all winter. Even in times of crisis, he is relaxed, genial and confident on the surface--whatever goes on underneath.

Last week the eyes of the U.S. turned with fear and questioning on Eisenhower as he faced the gravest setback of his career. The invasion was his first great responsibility; this his second. But Eisenhower refused to admit that a battle was lost while it was still being fought. He proclaimed to his troops:

"The enemy is making his supreme effort to break out of the desperate plight into which you forced him by your brilliant victories of the summer and fall.

"He is fighting savagely to take back all that you have won and is using every treacherous trick to deceive and kill you.

"He is gambling everything, but already in this battle your gallantry has done much to foil his plans. In the face of your proven bravery and fortitude, he will completely fail.

"But we cannot be content with his mere repulse.

"By rushing out from his fixed defenses the enemy may give us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat. So I call upon every man of all the Allies to rise now to new heights of courage, of resolution and of effort.

"Let everyone hold before him a single thought--to destroy the enemy. . . .

"United in this determination and with unshakable faith in the cause for which we fight, we will, with God's help, go forward to our greatest victory."

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