On the day after his arrival at Gibraltar he wrote a hurried letter to Mamie telling her about his new title, “’Allied C-in-C’ in this region,” and two days later he dictated a longer one, explaining why it had been necessary to leak to the American press that he was coming home on leave as a blind to deceive the Germans and explain his absence from London – he was aware of how deeply she would be disappointed, and apologized for not being able to let her know the truth. He longed to write to her about where he was, what he was doing, and why, but “in war this can’t be done,” he pointed out, and censorship “made letter writing a terrible chore.”
Michael Korda, Ike: An American Hero
