"Ike: An American Hero" (Michael Korda)
Unfortunately, it is not online, but the December 2007 issue of The Smithsonian contains an excerpt from Michael Korda's new biography of General Dwight Eisenhower. Perhaps my memory is for shite (wait, don't answer that), but I don't recall reading about generals crying before. In the published excerpt, both Winston Churchill and Ike purportedly wept thinking of all the soldiers who were being sent to their death. Compare and contrast to The Dauphin, George Bush, famously deliriously happy when the invasion of Iraq was about to happen (can't find the video clip, but I've seen it a couple times, maybe on the Daily Show and Fahrenheit 9/11).
(p. 50): All the same, late on the evening of June 5, when the great fleet bearing almost 170,000 men was already at sea, and the paratroopers were already on their way through the dark night sky to their drop zones in Normandy, and the midget submarines were rising to the surface to mark the boundaries of the invasion beaches, Winston Churchill, getting ready to go to bed with tears running down his cheeks, said to his wife, Clementine, "Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, 20,000 men may have been killed?"
[snip]
(p. 58):
[Kay] Summersby drove Eisenhower to two more of the 101st Airborne's airfields, but then there was no time left to continue, so she drove him back to Greenham Common to watch the aircraft there take off. It was dark now, but an American correspondent saw tears running down Eisenhower's cheeks as he watched, one after another, the C-47s roll down the runway and vanish into the night.
On the way back to Southwick in the car, he said to Summersby, "I hope to God I know what I'm doing."
[From Smithsonian Magazine | Issue | December 2007]
