SOUTHAMPTON, N. Y. — The woman who drove Dwight D.
Eisenhower through the crucible of World War II, who stood beside him on the night of June 5, 1944, when he ordered the great invasion of Europe, and who for three decades maintained an unyielding silence about what passed between them, died this morning of liver cancer in a hospital room here on the eastern end of Long Island.
She was 66 years old.
Kathleen Helen Somersby — known her entire adult life as Kay — was surrounded by memories, not mourners, when the end came at a quiet hour, the 20th day of January. On the bedside table sat a single black-and-white photograph, its corner faintly creased, showing a woman in the uniform of a United States Women’s Army Corps captain standing beside a five-star general in the courtyard of a French palace. The year was 1944.
The palace was Versailles. The general was Eisenhower.
And on the woman’s left hand, on the fourth finger, there remained an engagement ring she had been given 32 years earlier by an American Army officer named Richard Arnold.
A man who never made it home.
A man killed by a German land mine in Tunisia in June of 1943.
The silence, however, will not outlive her. In a locked drawer at a New York publisher’s office, a nearly finished manuscript waits. It was dictated largely into a tape recorder over the last eighteen months with the help of a ghostwriter, and it will not see the light of print until a year after the woman in this bed has been cremated and carried home across an ocean.
The work is titled Past Forgetting: My Love 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with Dwight D. Eisenhower.
For 30 years, this woman said nothing. She broke her silence with a pen and a voice recorder only when the cancer that would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 her placed a deadline on all she knew.
There is a necessary ethical aside that any professional chronicler would be remiss not to state: her claims are disputed by the Eisenhower family. Some honored biographers accept parts of their truth. Others reject them all.
No piece of paper has been yet brought forth — though pieces do exist in archives — that confirms the full measure of the intimacy she describes. That she was there to witness it is not disputed. The paper files do not lie.
Here is what the files confirm.
Kay was born in a county in West Cork, Ireland, in November of 1908, a daughter of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. She was a teenager when the Irish Civil War broke the world of her class forever, a girl who grew up in Britain’s shadow and moved to London. She worked as an extra in the film studios, she modeled for the House of Worth, she married an officer of the British Army in 1936 and took the name Somersby.
Then it was only her true union with her own century that mattered.
At 11:15 in the morning of September the 3rd, 1939 — the hour of Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war — she heard her own future in the wireless’ crackle. The next day, she formally took leave of her modeling career and was in a recruiting office of the Mechanized Transport Corps. She could drive, and that cast her into the center of the world’s most turbulent war.
She drove ambassadors through the fiery confusion of the Blitz. Between raids, in 57 nights of bombardment, there were 43,000 British dead. She learned the alleys and the corridors of brick dust, and she carried her nerve in the cold grip of a woman who refused to surrender.
In May of 1942, she was assigned to an American general named Eisenhower, a man she had never heard of, and it was from that moment forward — for 42 months — that she lived at the hinge of history.
Two weeks after his return to London in June, he asked specifically for her by name. She would be present at the kingdom of his headquarters on Grosvenor Square and at the cottage at Coombe he used to escape it. She fretted through November 1942, traveling to the Africa of Operation Torch.
It was aboard a ship named the Strathallan, on the 21st of December 1942, that her journey nearly ended when a German U-boat sent a torpedo into her middle. She was pulled from the water. She reported for duty in Algiers, and the General was waiting for her.
He gave her a meal and told her not to speak of the ordeal.
Not all truths are ordered to be spoken.
It is important to understand what she was to the war itself. Kay was standing fewer than 15 steps from the ground zero of the operational planning. She witnessed parts of the conflict that changed the modern map.
In Algiers in 1943, she learned of the engagement ring’s meaning — she must have known the coded vocabulary of a battlefront, for it was there she was courted by an American Engineer officer named Arnold.
Her sentence had been passed in June 1943 when a cable arrived at Supreme Headquarters. An officer with a mine-defusal team had triggered a trip wire. The cable said “Arnold” and said his name was nothing but a memory and stone.
She stopped functioning, sleeping, eating. Eisenhower brought her back into the light of work and compassion, refusing to let the grief buy her side’s defeat.
After that grief, this is where the national story will have to leap to June 1944. From a schoolroom at Reims in 1945, she saw the surrender. In the same season, the general she adored wrote to her the only detailed message the historians will never fight over.
The letter, preserved today in an archive at Kansas, contains this line, mixed into the concrete of military logistics:
“I miss you when you are not here. I love you deeply.”
Despite the champions that the family uses to guard him, they cannot burn this letter.
In those final weeks in Germany, and then again before he flew home in June of 1945, he wrote her notes that other women would call a monument. But then, his own country, and his public life — the politics, the “Wire Ticker” — took command of him. The man who had been hers to drive became the property of the world.
The letters, once so exquisitely personal, turned cold.
She never once betrayed that personal taste. She kept the silence like a vow for 30 years.
In 1946 she moved to New York and ghostwritten his memoirs to protect him. In 1948, she published a thin, protective, famously sanitised memoir, Eisenhower Was My Boss, which erased the intimacy. When reporters came and offered her money during his presidents campaign in 1952, she turned them all down.
She watched his inauguration and sobbed on a cheap television as he marched parades.
He died in his bed in 1969. And still, she kept her promise.
Then came the summer of 1973 and the terminal diagnosis. Hanging with the scar of the rumor that was now the truth to occult published sideshows from a Truman confidant, a biographical publisher sought her out. She contacted an editor named Barbara Widen.
Through tapes, she gave the world the truth of her archive.
She said: The general is dead. I am dying. In the book, she claims the 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 was real.
She claims the physical consummation was thwarted only by his heart conditionstress, and the reality of a life that surrounded him.
The world will know. A woman who had never stopped being a soldier will get her final discharge.
Kaye’s body will be cremated and the ashes taken by her only friend and executor, an English woman named Anthea Gordon Sachs, a companion of three decades, to Ireland’s dark soil at the sacred church of Rath. A journey not of 3,000 miles but of 52 years, from a war, through a capital of the empire, to the leaving that she never dreamed was part 30 years, years in which she stood at the edge of the history, and to a man she could hold her silver ring.
She was one woman. In a war of eleven million. She makes only the archives the ones we have.
Most of the 170,00 American women in uniform in Europe during the Second World War are forgotten. Kay Somersby’s testimony is the one that remained. In his archives, the librarian has a forever.
