General Eisenhower and Kay Summersby: a love affair that helped win the war

Kay Summersby and General Eisenhower were ‘as close as two coats of paint’

The pressure of supreme allied command almost broke Eisenhower. What kept him sane was his secret liaison with his driver, an Irish former model, writes the author of a new novel about the couple.

In the climactic months of the Second World War the allied commander, Dwight Eisenhower, came close to a breakdown. It was March 1945 and allied forces were preparing to cross the Rhine for the final assault on Nazi Germany. After almost three years of high command, seven-day working weeks, little sleep and 60 cigarettes a day, the 54-year-old commander was mentally and physically exhausted. His superiors in Washington persuaded the baggy-eyed, vile-tempered general to take a break.

Ike, as he was known to his troops and adoring public, reluctantly accepted a short spell of recuperation at a lavish villa near Cannes in the south of France. A select group of five, including General Omar Bradley, was chosen to accompany him. Kay Summersby, Ike’s driver, personal assistant and the centre of swirling gossip about their relationship, was not among them.

The US army chief of staff in Washington, General George Marshall, had made it clear that Kay should not accompany her boss to the Riviera. He had long urged Ike to replace his driver with someone more suitable. Ike refused. Kay joined him and moved into the villa, the only member of the party to do so. Ike didn’t give a damn what Marshall or anyone else thought.

He needed Kay with him and that was the end of it. The woman he nicknamed “Irish” remained at his side during the five-day break, just as she had throughout the war and would do until Eisen- hower left Europe for America in the autumn of 1945.

This had been the pattern since Eisenhower, a two-star general, arrived in London in May 1942 to assess the prospects for a cross-Channel invasion. Kay Summersby, then 34, had driven an ambulance during the Blitz, a searing experience of taking the dead and dying to overflowing hospitals and mortuaries. The transfer to the role of a government driver was a relief. Her first assignment was to drive an unknown American junior general with a strangely Germanic name.

Local drivers were vital for the visiting American military. London was blacked out at night and all central street signs had been taken down in case of invasion. For 10 days Kay drove Ike around the battered streets from 9am until well after midnight. On his departure he gave her a box of chocolates, a rare wartime luxury.

Ike returned two weeks later to take charge of US forces. Kay found a large basket of tropical fruit on her desk with a signed note. She was driving a senior US air force officer at the time. Eisenhower pulled rank. Kay resumed her role as his driver. The secret affair at the heart of the allied command had begun.

The relationship that developed over the following years between the married general and his driver, a divorcee, was not a secret to the circle of senior officers around Ike nor to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Indeed, Ike went out of his way to introduce Kay to both the president and prime minister on their visits to north Africa in 1943.

In her memoir, Past Forgetting, dictated as she was dying in 1975, Kay said Roosevelt had beckoned to her at a grand desert picnic and said: “Come sit beside me, child.” She found him flirtatious and untroubled by his wheelchair concealed under a table flap. He asked her to be his driver during the visit rather than the secret service. Not to be outdone, Churchill visited Eisenhower in north Africa for an even grander lunch. He took Kay aside afterwards and said: ‘Make sure you look after our general.”

The assumption behind Roosevelt’s charm and Churchill’s words was shared by those in the high command; Ike, who by now was supreme allied commander in north Africa, was having an affair with Kay, and if that is what it took to keep him sane under the burden of command, then so be it.

Eisenhower insisted Kay be given pride of place at official dinnersGETTY

British journalists, who knew what they could see with their own eyes, printed not a hint of the relationship. Critics who dared raise the propriety of the relationship were dismissed in words that undoubtedly echoed opinion in the White House and Downing Street. “Leave Kay alone, she’s helping Ike win the war.” It was Ike’s deputy chief of staff, General Everett Hughes, who said that, but it might just as well have been Churchill or Roosevelt.

In the summer of 1942 the feelings between Ike and his driver became clearer to his inner circle. He loathed living in the grand hotels of London. Again and again he told his staff that he needed somewhere he could think in peace and quiet. The answer was a small Hansel and Gretel cottage on the edge of Richmond Park in west London. Telegraph Cottage had three small bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, dining room and kitchen. The cottage was hard to find at the end of a narrow lane. There was no phone. For Ike, this was ideal.

Until the end of the war he would return to the cottage every night he was in London except on those occasions when he was forced to spend weekends with Churchill at Chequers. That summer Kay moved in with him along with two close aides. Kay became the cottage’s hostess — welcoming guests, mixing Ike’s whisky cocktails, partnering “the boss”, as she called him, at bridge and riding with him on borrowed horses in the morning.

Ike’s attachment to Kay was such that he even named his cherished black Scottish terrier after her. Kay had given him the puppy as a present on his 52nd birthday in October 1942.

Ike named his adored puppy Telek — saying these were two things in life that gave him most happiness. The reference to the cottage was obvious. Churchill, a regular visitor to Telegraph Cottage, was one of the few who grasped the meaning of the K at the end of the name — Eisenhower had added his driver’s initial to the abbreviation for the cottage. To those around the commander, this seemed an extraordinary indiscretion.

At this stage the relationship was not sexual, according to Kay. But as an aide to her remarked, the pair were “as close as two coats of paint”. Naturally the gossip did not escape Mamie Eisenhower in Washington, who was patiently waiting out the war in a stuffy apartment. Frequent press and magazine photographs of the general with his driver told a story amplified by rumours. Mamie’s letters to Ike were destroyed after the war, quite by whom is unclear. But it is a fair assumption that they rebuked her husband for his attachment to Kay and demanded her dismissal.

Ike’s response was to write long, loving letters to his wife. It was not enough.

The only time Eisenhower returned to America during his 3½ years in Europe he twice used Kay’s name when addressing his wife. Their brief break together in January 1944, around the time he was being made supreme allied commander in Europe, was not a success.

Historians have long speculated as to why Ike risked the wrath of his superiors, the anger of his wife and the nudge-nudge gossip of his commanders. Kay was very attractive, with the slender figure of the fashion model she had been before the war. She came from an Anglo-Irish family in Co Cork with a long pedigree. Ike, born poor across the tracks in Denison, Texas, was impressed by both.

More importantly, Kay made things happen around her boss. When Ike needed a confidential letter typed or advice on placement for a dinner, Kay was there. She was the only woman in a select group of aides Ike called his family and the only one who could deal with his occasional raging temper.

The real truth about Ike’s obsessive relationship with Kay probably lies in the loneliness of supreme command. Millions of men awaited his orders. Bitter rivalries and strategic arguments dominated the daily briefing sessions. Feuding generals sought his favour. Churchill demanded constant attention. Roosevelt was always there in the background, enigmatic but supportive.

Ike must have felt that he carried the weight of the war and the whole world on his shoulders. At the end of the day Kay was always there, often to massage his twisted back muscles, or soothe him with quiet conversation. Ike had no one else to turn to. He could not and would not do without her.

When Ike moved to north Africa in late 1942 he insisted Kay join him as his driver. This was against regulations and made no sense. There were plenty of drivers available and all were combat trained. Ike would have nobody else but Kay.

It was during the 1943 campaign in north Africa that the affair became more intense. In Kay’s memorable words: “We found ourselves in each other’s arms . . . Our ties came off. Our jackets came off. Buttons were unbuttoned. It was as if we were frantic. And we were.”

Her account of the affair in her book was dismissed by most of Eisenhower’s biographers, and his family, as the fantasy of a dying woman. In his memoirs Ike mentions her just once. Kay was to be airbrushed out of history just as she had been in the famous photo of Ike holding up the pens with which the German surrender had just been signed. The original shows Kay smiling just behind him. The official photo released by the Pentagon was doctored to remove her.

There is little question Kay was telling the truth. Her memoir reveals that the relationship with Ike, although passionate and sexual, was never fully consummated. The pressure and exhaustion of high command were too much. The admission is hardly likely to have been made by a woman fantasising about an affair. Ike’s own behaviour points to the truth of Kay’s side of the story. The new uniforms he ordered for her, the gift of a silver-plated Beretta pistol and Ike’s insistence that she was given pride of place at all his official functions and dinners can hardly be explained as the generosity of a grateful boss.

More telling still is the fact that at the height of the war, Ike arranged for Kay to have American citizenship, thus allowing her to join the US army as a second lieutenant. Roosevelt himself raised the issue when he met Kay at the desert lunch in 1943. From then on she was regarded as an American, although the final papers were not signed until just after the war. The intention was obvious. As an American citizen and member of the US army Kay would have every right and reason to join him in Washington after the war.

The controversial heart of Ike’s wartime affair is whether he wrote to Marshall in May 1945 asking permission to divorce with the obvious intention of marrying Kay. Marshall reportedly responded with a scathing cable threatening to destroy his career in the military and beyond.

President Harry Truman in retirement confirmed “the divorce letter” and said he had ordered that it be taken from Pentagon files and destroyed before he left office. The noted historian Jean Edward Smith in a biography of Eisenhower lent credence to the story and to Kay’s account of the wartime affair.

What is not in doubt is the brutal way Ike ended a relationship that had carried him through the war. Kay was waiting at the US military headquarters in Frankfurt in November 1945 for the promised call to join him in Washington. The call never came. Instead she received a typewritten letter regretting that “It has become impossible to keep you as a member of my official family”. At the end Ike had written in his own hand: “Take care and retain your optimism.” As one historian noted: “General Patton would not have said goodbye to his horse like that.”

Kay briefly saw her old boss and lover again at the Pentagon. She took Telek with her. The meeting aroused no flicker of emotion on Ike’s part and sagged into silence under the weight of platitudes.

Kay left the US army, settled in New York and married a stockbroker. She died in 1975, asking that her ashes be scattered in her birthplace in Ireland. She left behind a book that carries the stamp of truth about a relationship which helped Eisenhower, and the allied cause, more than he, his family and many historians have cared to admit.

James MacManus’s historical novel Ike and Kay will be published by Gerald Duckworth & Co on Thursday (£16.99)