I’m not always able to approve his recommendations and history may prove me wrong. But when I disapprove them, I don’t have to look over my shoulder to see … whether he’s going to the Capitol, to lobby against me, or whether he’s going back to the War Department. I know he’s going back to the War Department, to give me the most loyal support as chief of staff that any President could wish.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt98 He would tell the truth even if it hurt his cause. Of every man who ever testified before any committee on which I served, there is no one of them who has the
94 Kirkpatrick, Victory Plan, p. 41.
95 Ibid., p. 38 ff.
96 Ibid., p. 36.
97 Ibid., p. 51 ff.
98 Cited in: Thomas Parrish, Roosevelt and Marshall. Partners in Politics and War (New York 1989), p.
137.
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influence with a committee of the House that General Marshall has. The reason was simple. It is because when he takes the witness stand, we forget whether we are Republicans or Democrats. We remember that we are in the presence of a man who is telling the truth, as he sees it, about the problems he is discussing.
Speaker of the House Samuel Rayburn99 A builder of armies and statesman … the true organizer of victory
Winston Spencer Churchill
Puritanism, sense of duty and responsibility, character, integrity, competence, incorruptibility and tolerance. These Victorian virtues paint a background in the literature on George C. Marshall, acknowledged even today as one of the most important U.S. military leaders and statesmen. The later Chief of Staff of the Army of the United States and Secretary of Defense and State was born December 31, 1880 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Virginia Military Institute in 1901, Marshall rapidly earned a reputation in the Regular Army as an extraordinary officer and teacher. In World War I, he served as G-3100 with the 1st Infantry Division and, after 1918, as Assistant Chief of Planning for the American Expeditionary Forces.
Apart from his war service, Marshall worked both before and after the First World War as an instructor at the Army School101 at Fort Leavenworth and, from 1907 to 1912 and again from 1933 to 1936, as instructor of various National Guard units.
Between 1919 and 1924, he served General John J. Pershing102 as his adjutant,
99 Ibid., p. 137.
100 G-3 – Chief of Operations and Training. In this capacity, Marshall attracted the attention of General John J. Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (see footnote 102). Pershing had criticized the 1st Infantry Division during a visit to the front, and Marshall had rejected the criticism of his senior commander as uninformed. As a result, his fellow staff officers in the 1st Infantry bade their farewells to Marshall, expecting him to be relieved of his duties. However, Pershing was better able to take criticism than they supposed, allowed himself to be convinced of his incorrect evaluation of the division’s performance, and from then on, asked for Marshall’s informal advice on matters involving the 1st Infantry. (Charles F. Brower, George C. Marshall: A Study in Character, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/brower99.htm [most recent access: August 9, 2009].)
101 Now called the Command and General Staff College.
102 John J. Black Jack Pershing is one of the most prominent figures in the mythology of the U.S.
military. In 1917, he was assigned to organize and build up the American Expeditionary Forces, the
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supervised three districts of the Civilian Conservation Corps103 in the 1930s and, as Chief of Instruction, directed the academic division of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Fig. 1 Fifty Fifty104
body of over two million men that in 1917/18 was deployed to the western front of the First World War.
After the war, he served as Chief of Staff between 1921 and 1924.
103 The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was created by President Roosevelt only two days after his inauguration in 1933. At that time, the nadir of the Great Depression, over 13 million Americans were without work. The CCC hired over three million of them to work on public infrastructure projects. No independent bureaucracy was created to organize and operate the CCC, which was subdivided into camps. Instead, the Army was assigned this function. Although Army leadership only accepted the task unwillingly – they believed that it distracted the military from its central mission – many officers profited from their assignments with the CCC because they never would have had the opportunity in the Regular Army in the interwar period to gain experience in coordinating and supervising large organizational units. (Stewart, American Military History II, p. 64.)
104 As District Director of the Civilian Conservation Corps, Marshall adopted the practice of writing reference letters for deserving staff in order to assist them in finding positions in the civilian sector.
When he was posted to the War Department in 1938, the staff of the Vancouver Barracks CCC District reciprocated by publishing a commendation for Marshall in the form of a cartoon in their newspaper.
As two CCC staff members at the right of the image hurry in the direction of an industrial job with a recommendation letter from Marshall, the text over Marshall’s car, heading for Washington, reads:
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Vancouver District CCC Newspaper, June 1, 1938
Aside from the fact that Marshall distinguished himself in all his assignments and displayed the capacity for larger tasks, a specific skill set resulted from the mix of his assignments through the end of the 1930s that, along with his personality, made him the obvious choice to become Chief of Staff. Through his posting to the staff of the American Expeditionary Forces as well as his assignment as the right-hand man of General Pershing, the Army Chief of Staff, he was familiar with the handling of large formations, had deployment experience, and knew first-hand the political and military functions of the Chief of Staff. In his experience as instructor of National Guard units, he developed a reputation as a friend of the guardsmen, a quality that was – as we have mentioned – rarely seen in the Regular Army and that led, more smoothly than expected, to the National Guard’s placement under federal command and its integration into the Army of the United States. Lastly, through his assignments at the Army School and Infantry School, Marshall knew a great many of the most promising young officers in the Regular Army. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar N. Bradley, Courtney Hodges, Mark W. Clark, Walter B. Smith, William H. Simpson, J. Lawton Collins, Lucian Truscott and Matthew B. Ridgeway105 were, without exception, officers who owed their careers in large measure to Marshall’s support, proved their value as commanders of key formations in the ETO, and, apart from that, distinguished themselves through the human qualities they displayed to their subordinates.106
While Marshall had already made a name for himself in Army circles by the end of the 1930s decade as a competent, moral and farsighted officer, he became a
LETTER OF COMMENDATION / DEAR GEN. MARSHALL: WE KNOW YOU ALWAYS PLACED OUR WELFARE FIRST. / SIGNED: ENROLLERS OF VANCOUVER CCC DISTRICT (Vancouver District CCC Newspaper, June 1, 1938, depicted in: Brower, Marshall).
105 Eisenhower was Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces Europe, and W. B. Smith his Chief of Staff. Bradley commanded 12th Army Group in northwestern Europe, with approximately 1.3 million men the largest American force ever commanded by a single individual. Hodges, Clark and Simpson were, respectively, the commanders of the 1st, 5th and 9th U.S. Armies in the ETO. Collins, Truscott and Ridgeway each ended their wartime service as Corps Commanders.
106 Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall. Organizer of Victory. 1943–1945 (New York 1993), p. xii ff.
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national and international institution between 1939 and 1945.107 Roosevelt considered him his closest advisor next to Harry Hopkins, without whose presence in Washington he could not sleep.108 In the Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee,109 he was accepted as primus inter pares. Of the many American and international accolades that were offered him throughout World War II, he declined them all because he believed that he deserved no honors as long as Allied soldiers still had to die. He regularly showed his Commander in Chief photographs of the American dead with the intent of keeping the war from completely degenerating into abstract statistics. His aim was to make the human price of the war quite clear to him (Roosevelt) because you get hardened to these things.110 The Republican Party importuned him to be their candidate against Roosevelt in the 1944 presidential election; Marshall declined in principle, and this action earned him the singular respect of the President, the Congress and the American public.111
By no later than the spring of 1941, the internationalists among Washington’s political and military elites had come to the conclusion that an American entry into the European war could be possibly delayed but by no means prevented. With no statement coming from the President on this issue, however, Marshall could not predict with any specificity what the future would bring for the American forces,
107 Larry I. Bland, George C. Marshall and the Education of Army Leaders (Fort Leavenworth 1988).
108 “I could not sleep with you out of the country.” Cited in: Larry I. Bland, George Catlett Marshall, in:
Peter Karsten (Ed.), Encyclopedia of War and American Society (New York 2005), p. 451.
109 The Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee was the Western Allies’ senior military planning and executive group and the top military advisory body to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The American members were Marshall, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander of Army Air Forces General Henry H. Arnold and the Chief of Staff to the Commander in Chief (Roosevelt), Admiral William D. Leahy. The British members were Chief of the Imperial General Staff Field Marshal Alan Brooke, First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Dudley Pound (after his death in 1943 Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham), Chief of the Air Staff – Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, and the senior British representatives stationed permanently in Washington, Sir John Dill (replaced after his death in 1944 by General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson) and Admiral Sir James Somerville.
110 Cited in: George H. Roeder, Jr., The Censored War. American Visual Experience during World War Two (New Haven / London 1993), p. 99.
111 Pogue, Organizer, p. xi.
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although he was sure that all the Army’s mobilization and expansion plans to that point were insufficient. The 1939 version of the Protective Mobilization Plan still focused exclusively on defending the American continent and the Western Hemisphere, and the strategies of the Armed Forces for industrial procurement and mobilization had been completely disrupted and made obsolete by the unexpected demands of the Lend-Lease Program.112 Instead of continuing to expand the forces on an ad hoc basis, he charged his staff with developing a strategic analysis of the country’s situation on which to base a plan for expansion. Shortly after Marshall’s order, Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, who held responsibility for Army procurement and lend-lease, inquired as to the extent to which the American economy would have to be mobilized in order to satisfy the demands of lend-lease and a superior army. This tasking of the War Plans Division would shortly receive reinforcement from the highest level when FDR’s own request of July 9, 1941 arrived.
The President called for a response by September 10, and insiders asked themselves whom Marshall would entrust with this scarcely achievable task. In the end, the Chief of Staff announced his surprising choice of a completely unknown middle-ranking infantry officer, Major Albert C. Wedemeyer.