World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF ITALY: Ike's Way

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G-2 (Intelligence) must gather, evaluate and disseminate all essential information (notes about the enemy's armor, defenses, equipment, facts about the terrain, everything that needs to be known before the start of a combat). Head of Eisenhower's smooth-working Intelligence is Brigadier Kenneth W. D. Strong, at 43 one of the British Army's bright young men. Strong's receding chin and horn-rimmed glasses make him look like an American caricature of an Englishman. He is a leading authority on the German Army, an able military thinker. At work he religiously wears the tartan trousers of his regiment, the Royal Scots Fusiliers; he has been accused of wearing plaid pajamas. His deputy: U.S. Colonel Thomas E. Roderick, onetime executive officer of the U.S. War Department's G-2 in Washington.

Top man in G-3 is U.S. Brigadier General Lowell Rooks, former head of the U.S. Ground Forces' Training Division. On G-3 (the Operations Section) devolves the job of reviewing all possible future operations, submitting likely battle plans to the commander in chief. During actual combat there is constant liaison between G-3 and the "agents for conducting battle." Explains Rooks's deputy British Brigadier C. S. Sugden: "We continually discuss our problems just to make sure we're fighting the same battle." Sugden is a brilliant, spectacular, fantastically tall, long-nosed Briton who messes with twelve Americans and regularly complains : "I'm picking up all their bloody habits."

Handling the incredibly complicated British-American supply job in A.F.H.Q.'s G-4 are 47-year-old Brigadier General Clarence Adcock and his British deputy, 47-year-old Brigadier R. R. Lewis. Also concerned with U.S. supplies and personnel is Major General Everett Hughes, head of a separate U.S. administrative staff. Drawing supplies 1,900 miles from Britain, 4,100 miles from the U.S., these officers must work at least three months ahead of battle schedules. At least once they vetoed an invasion plan because the supplies could not be promised in time. Says Brigadier Lewis: "Someone just has to sit with a crystal ball and try to contact the future."

Ike. It was this stout staff that helped him on his road to Rome and the ultimate goal, Berlin. For the harmony that prevails throughout, Ike Eisenhower has his own tact and diplomacy to thank. On October 14, General Eisenhower will be 53. Since last February, when he was temporarily commissioned a full general, he has been the youngest of that rank in the U.S. Army. This does not surprise the officers with and under whom Eisenhower has served. Since graduating from West Point in 1915, he has always shown a marked capacity for getting ahead, always worked and studied more than he played.

But he has warm qualities, too, and they, as much as his sterner attributes, have had to do with his eminence and effectiveness today. In the prewar years, when he had the time, he played a notable game of bridge or poker. He liked to cook outdoor meals for his guests. He was, even to his wife, an engaging conversationalist. One woman said that Ike Eisenhower was the handsomest bald man she had ever met.