By: Ella Sutherland & Lauren Kottke

Dwight D. Eisenhower was known as one of the most masterful army generals of his time. He was a major contributor to WW2 and the Allied victory. He never gave up on his troops and always gave them credit for all of the fighting they endured. He was also known for being very strategic. After the war, when he went home, he was proclaimed a hero.

Dwight Eisenhower became involved in the war when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December, and the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, made Eisenhower go to Washington D.C. to work as a planning officer. He was already listed in the army because in WW1, he served as a military aide to General John J. Pershing. He was stationed in the Philippines at the end of WW1 and stayed there until WW2 began. He then left the Philippines after Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Throughout the war he had many accomplishments. Eisenhower got a general star in September 1941, and was promoted to brigadier general. In November 1942 Eisenhower led Operation Torch, it was a successful Allied invasion of North Africa. The operation began on November 8, and ended on November 16, 1942. The reason for the attack was to try to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union.

Then, in February 1943, he led his troops to face the Germans in Tunisia. His troops were getting destroyed in the battle of the Kasserine Pass, before he surrendered. There were over 6,000 casualties. The Kasserine war was the start of an attack against an Allied defensive line in Tunisia, North Africa. The loss of this battle was one of the Allies worst moments, and they suffered a major loss.

After that extreme loss he started becoming very strategic. He figured out that the problem was that the troops were not working together and that he wasn’t being a good leader. He figured his way of going about these battles was wrong in the sense that he was treating it like every man for themselves, so he changed his way of leading and they started winning more battles.

After that, he directed the invasion of Sicily and the Italian mainland in 1943, that led to the fall of the Italian regime and the fall of Mussolini in June 1944. In this battle, the U.S. and Great Britain successfully attacked and made German and Italian troops leave Sicily, and then planned to attack the Italian mainland.

Later, in 1943, Eisenhower was made Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and he was in charge of leading U.S. troops into Europe for the battle of D-Day. D-Day took place on June 6, 1944, when many U.S. troops landed in Normandy, France trying to free Western Europe from Nazi Germany.

After the war ended Eisenhower became president of the United States of America, and while he was serving as president he prevented America from going into any more wars. Also, while he was president he worked on making peace with Korea and ended up making a truce with them. He started trying to ease the after effects of the Cold War and was for the most part, successful.

All throughout the war Eisenhower led the U.S. through many battles and won a great amount of them. In the end, his contribution to the war, and the U.S., helped the Allied powers win the war. Every battle he helped lead, that won, put the Allied side at an advantage and helped lead to the end of the war when the Allied powers won.