Pennsylvania: About the Battle

For Old Soldier Dwight Eisenhower, no battle holds more lasting interest than a three-day conflict in which he never fought. Ike first visited Gettysburg as a West Point cadet assigned to traipse the fields and trace the engagement's moves and countermoves. As a World War I lieutenant colonel, he was stationed there at a temporary Army post called Camp Colt. In 1950, as a retired general, he bought a farm on the battlefield's edge. As President of the U.S., he entertained such guests as Viscount Montgomery. Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and even Nikita Khrushchev with fragmentary accounts of...