I respect Ike to a degree Ike, but he was always a mushy moderate. Hell, he would have fired Patton if Roosevelt, Marshall, and Churchill had not liked Patton so much. Ike also fired Patton for not kissing Russian Arse and for using former-low ranking nazis (the non-murdering ones) to keep critical services going. Ike did not even attend Patton’s funeral. If you read any books about Patton (and love and respect the man like I do), you get a real ambivalent feeling for Ike and a deep hatred for Beadle Smith. Ike was a political CEO type and was not a warrior.
Frankly I think Ike had a bit of an inferiority complex when it came to officers who ranked him in the Regular Army. Patton would have been at the top of that list since he was the nearly the oldest general officer retained by the Army at the outset of the war. MacArthur was a former Army Chief of Staff and Ike didn’t like him either.
Patton outranked Eisenhower in the Regular Army almost to the end of WW2. It was only in late ‘44 or early ‘45 that permanent RA rank was conferred on Eisenhower. Had he been cashiered (say the Normandy Landings had failed) Ike would have gone stateside as a BG. Patton was a MG in the RA having commanded the 2nd Armored in the 1940 Maneuvers.