The Generals

by Winston Groom

  As a lieutenant colonel, Marshall was actually designated as the thousand-man regiment’s executive officer, but in fact he became its commanding officer for nearly three months until a more senior full colonel arrived to take charge. Not only that, but when the new officer was relieved for neglect of duty, Marshall again assumed regimental command.

  The regiment occupied quarters in a compound on Kaiser Wilhelmstrasse, which before the war had belonged to Germany, and was now renamed Woodrow Wilson Street. In the same area were troops from England, France, Italy, and Japan—all, like the Americans, there to keep order over the fractious Chinese ever since the bloody days of the Boxer Rebellion. While the Chinese attempted to establish a republic under Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Bolsheviks and other Communists were even then making inroads, and warlords of all descriptions continued to rule, fight, and commit depredations in the vast hinterland.

  The basic mission of the regiment was to keep open communications with the American consulate in Peking and the sea, 135 miles away. It was also to serve as a sort of fire brigade, protecting American interests at a variety of points along the northern Chinese coastal region.26 The 15th was a proud regiment, comprising old army hands, many of whom had been solid enlisted men during the war—but there was nothing of which it was prouder than its reputation for having the highest rate of venereal disease in the entire United States Army. “Today is pay-day,” Marshall began a letter to his old boss General Pershing, “and we are up against the problem of cheap liquor and cheaper women.”27

  One of the first things Marshall did was begin taking Chinese-language instruction. It was not required but he thought it would be useful. One day he tried numerous times in his newfound Chinese to instruct his Chinese driver to bring around his car, but the man simply looked at him dumbfounded. “Oh hell,” Marshall said in exasperation. “Just send my car,” at which the man promptly left and returned with the automobile. A regimental chaplain overheard the incident and the story “got all over the army” within a month or two.

  The Marshalls and other officers lived in “sumptuous” quarters, where a ten-room house that Lily described as “awfully nice,” with ample servants’ quarters, rented for $15 a month.28 Marshall also acquired a Mongolian pony, which was considerably smaller than a horse, but he wanted to blend in more with the native population. He made a point of riding a dozen miles in the morning and twice that on weekends, and he also began playing squash and tennis with members of the U.S. legation. And, as a matter of great satisfaction for him, Marshall completed the two-and-a-half-year regimental Chinese-language course in only eleven months and found himself able to carry on casual conversations in Chinese so as to understand “even the wranglings and squabbles of the rickshaw men.”29

  Lily spent her time shopping, and in addition to “exquisite clothes,” she acquired numerous furnishings of the finest sort—Chinese rugs, linens, lacquers, screens, silver tableware, and other larger fittings for the home she hoped to make for them in America at the end of her husband’s tour in China.30

  The Chinese seemed continuously in a state of uprising, with various “armies” operating ever closer to the compound that Marshall and the other foreign entities occupied. This led to incidents and tense armed confrontations between the American and European forces and the Chinese militarists. Marshall himself was involved in several that might have ended badly had it not been for his cool penchant for persuasion and psychological bluff. Toward the end of his tour of duty in China, Marshall wrote to Pershing, “There has been so much wrongdoing on both sides, so much of shady transaction between a single power and a single party; there is so much of bitter hatred in the hearts of these people and so much of important business interests involved, that a normal solution can never be found.” Marshall anticipated that some kind of “evolution” of the people and culture might provide an answer, but predicted a “trying period that is approaching.” That was in 1926. China’s long agony was about to begin.

  THE MARSHALLS RETURNED to the United States in May 1927, but Lily soon fell ill from a flare-up of her old heart condition, so serious that an operation was called for. She was, at the time, too weak to stand the surgery so Marshall kept her at the home she had longed for all those years—one of the stately three-story brick white-columned officers’ quarters on “Colonels’ Row” at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, while he lectured at the Army War College. There, amid her fine collection of Oriental furnishings, Lily attempted to regain strength, but her condition worsened, and in August she entered Walter Reed Hospital. Surgery was performed the following day but she remained in serious, sedated condition. After five days she seemed to improve, however, and Marshall was able to visit every afternoon for the next two weeks. “[It] helps me so,” she wrote her aunt Lottie. “It puts heart and strength in me.”31

  On the morning of September 15, the doctor came in to tell her she could go home. She began writing a letter to her mother with the news when she slumped over, dead. The last word she wrote was “George.”32

  Marshall was in class lecturing when a guard called him to the phone. The guard stood by as Marshall took the call. “He spoke for a moment over the phone, then put his head on his arms on the desk in deep grief,” the guard said. “I asked if I could do anything for him and he replied, ‘No, Mr. Throckmorton, I just had word my wife, who was to join me here today, has just died.’ ”33

  Pershing wrote him immediately when he got the news. “No one knows better than I what such a bereavement means and my heart goes out to you very fully at this crisis in your life.” Marshall replied that Pershing’s handling of his own tragedy, the fire that took his wife and children, gave him inspiration and hope, but he added, heartbroken, “Twenty-six years of intimate companionship, since I was a mere boy, leaves me lost in my best effort to adjust myself to future prospects in life … However, I will find a way.”

  INDEED GEORGE MARSHALL FOUND A WAY. Even with the emptiness and sorrow left by Lily’s death, he remained an extremely bright, energetic personality with an indomitable spirit that required military challenge. He felt hemmed in by his work at the War College and even the army understood that under the circumstances Marshall needed to find himself elsewhere. He was presented with a choice of several assignments, one of which impressed him—assistant commandant of the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia.

  Fort Benning, in the western middle part of the state near the Alabama line, comprised nearly a hundred thousand acres including some of the area’s old Southern estates that the government had purchased. Marshall moved into one of these homes, a circa-1850s building that was “as old as the hills,” by Marshall’s telling, surrounded by flowers, a grape arbor, and stately magnolias. It was “the nicest [house] I’ve ever had,” he said.34

  As assistant commandant and head of the school’s academic department, Marshall aimed to inculcate young infantry officers in the arts of combat and leadership, basing his lessons on his own experiences of the past few years, particularly his time in France. As his chief biographer Forrest Pogue observes, Marshall “was one of those rare teachers who make a difference, who open minds in such a way that they never quite close again or forget the excitement of a new idea.” He kept what he called “my little black book,” into which he recorded, “for future reference,” the names of young officers whose talents impressed him. Once someone asked if his little black book was to take down the names of officers who were the opposite of talented. “There wouldn’t be room,” Marshall replied.35 Pogue ticks off scores of names of Marshall’s students in his five years at the Infantry School who would become the best generals in high command during World War II, including Omar Bradley, Matthew Ridgway, J. Lawton Collins, and Walter Bedell Smith. Marshall’s classes were those from which the stars fell.36

  He set up difficult field problems to challenge the young warriors’ abilities to react in rapidly changing circumstances. When a blue force that had been in mock battle all day, for example, encountered a red
force in retreat during the late afternoon, the blues would naturally assume that the problem was nearly over. Then suddenly, from an entirely different direction, another red force sent by Commandant Marshall would vigorously attack. Marshall drummed it into their heads: plan how to deal with whatever happens—think three or four steps ahead.

  “We have to expunge this bunk,” Marshall said when handed a copy of laborious field orders that required young officers to march their men from paragraph C to paragraph H. “To mobilize for war,” Marshall insisted, “we must develop a technique and methods so simple and so brief that the citizen officer of good common sense can readily grasp the idea.” What he was talking about was mechanized war, with tanks, armored cars, and planes. Everything would be much faster and the army must learn to fight faster, fire, and maneuver in the open. There would be no trenches in future wars, he believed.37

  He set up a tank force at the school because of his view that tanks would play a far greater role in future combat than they had in the First World War. He set up air demonstrations from nearby Army Air Corps fields. He chose his instructors carefully, from the very best the army had to offer. Marshall refined training in the various infantry weapons and published a handbook, Infantry in Battle.

  Marshall encouraged reserve and National Guard officers to attend the school and, on one occasion, two black reserve officers appeared at Fort Benning. This being the 1930s, a petition was circulated demanding their withdrawal. Marshall not only ignored it, he denied it. One of the black officers wrote him long afterward, “Your quiet and courageous firmness in this case has served to hold my belief in the eventual solution of problems which have beset my people in their ofttimes pathetic attempts to be Americans.”38

  Life was good for Marshall in many ways. He enjoyed his work at the Infantry School, and took long horseback rides on the Benning reservation or joined in foxhunts. There was good duck and quail hunting near Columbus and tennis at the officers’ club and country club in town. He also organized theatricals and exotic horseback scavenger hunts, and during one of the latter it was heard-tell he rode up to the finish line wearing a Japanese kimono, a Filipino hat, and carrying a birdcage.39

  Yet there was the inevitable absence in his life after Lily’s death and he was miserably lonesome. He told a visiting Rose Page, now a young woman of nineteen, “I hate to let you go. I dread returning to an empty house.” Then, in the spring of 1928, Marshall accepted an invitation for dinner at the home of a friend in Columbus. There, he met an out-of-town guest, Mrs. Katherine Tupper Brown of Baltimore, a recent widow, who had come with her sixteen-year-old daughter, Molly.

  Marshall, on his doctor’s advice, had quit smoking and given up liquor. Standing next to the handsome, sandy-haired army colonel Mrs. Brown remarked, “You are a rather unusual army officer, aren’t you? I have never known one to refuse a cocktail before.”

  “Well, how many army officers have you known?” Marshall asked.

  “Not many,” was the answer.40

  Throughout the evening the two found conversation easy and became increasingly comfortable around each other. “I will never forget,” she wrote, “George had a way of looking straight through you. He had such keen blue eyes and he was straight and very military.” At the end of the evening Marshall offered to take her to the house of friends where she was staying, assuring her he knew where it was. However, for what seemed like hours he drove her around, talking, until at one point she remarked that he didn’t seem to know his way around Columbus very well. Marshall replied that he knew his way around well enough to keep off the street where he was supposed to deliver her. Next day he invited her to a reception on the post and sent a car and driver for her. Before she returned to Baltimore they agreed to write.41

  Katherine Brown was a tall, striking woman from a distinguished line of Baptist ministers in Virginia, with an “unusual” story to tell, according to biographer Pogue. After graduating from staid Hollins College she scandalized the family by going to New York to become an actress. After completing two years at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, in 1904 she went to London where she tried to get on stage in Shakespeare productions, only to be told she had to learn “English.” Undaunted, Katherine found work in a traveling stage company, staying in cheap boardinghouses and chaperoned by her sister, an art student. Her first speaking role was offstage as the ghost in Hamlet.

  When not on stage she worked on her diction and by her second season she not only was playing Shakespearean roles but had parts in The Rivals, She Stoops to Conquer, and School for Scandal. She was able to summer with her parents and sister in Lucerne and then signed a seven-year contract with the distinguished Shakespeare touring company of Sir Frank Robert Benson.

  But as she began the new season, Katherine started experiencing severe abdominal and shoulder pain that was eventually diagnosed by British doctors as “tuberculosis of the kidney.” When she returned brokenhearted to Baltimore a specialist gave a more favorable diagnosis—exhaustion. Recuperating in the Adirondacks, she reacquainted herself with a childhood friend, Clifton S. Brown, an important Baltimore lawyer, who asked her to give up the stage and marry him. She declined and found work with the National Theater in Chicago. But no sooner had she returned to the theater than the pain began again; at one point she found herself paralyzed and had to be carried off the stage after the curtain dropped. When she returned to the Adirondacks for more recuperation, who should be waiting there but Clifton S. Brown, once more asking for her hand. This time, after much agonizing, she acceded.

  It was not an easy transition. For years Katherine could not bring herself even to go inside a theater, but in time she reconciled herself to the life of a Baltimore socialite and, eventually, a mother. Then all that came crashing down when a deranged client shot and killed her husband outside his office and a few months later the bottom dropped out of the stock market, leaving Katherine Brown a forty-seven-year-old widow with three children to care for. She had just returned from a trip to Hawaii with Molly, who was taking the death of her father very hard, and was returning to Baltimore when she “stopped fatefully” on the way in Columbus, Georgia, to visit college friends.

  A relationship between Marshall and Katherine developed nearly immediately. They wrote and visited frequently and on October 5, 1930, they were married at the Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Baltimore with General of the Army John J. Pershing as best man.

  The newlyweds entrained directly for Fort Benning as the Infantry School was already in session, and by all accounts the new Mrs. Marshall adjusted splendidly in the transition to army wife. Her two young boys adored the tall, witty man they called “the colonel,” and daughter Molly became his companion for morning horseback rides. George Marshall had not only acquired a loving wife, but a family as well.

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1924, at Avalon, the Ayer family estate, Beatrice gave birth to George Smith Patton IV, at last giving Patton the son he’d always wanted. The following year, Patton graduated with honors from Leavenworth, while Beatrice, meantime, wrote Aunt Nannie that, “George is having a grand time here and busy every minute. He seems like his old self again—he is so changed since the war I feared it was permanent! But this summer he is just like a kid again—every stern line has gone out of his face.”42

  Soon orders came posting Patton to Hawaii, where he arrived at Schofield Barracks in April 1925. Beatrice and the children followed soon afterward and, like at the towns prior, she and her husband soon became enmeshed in the Honolulu social scene, including friendship with the wealthy sportsman Walter F. Dillingham—who became “Uncle Walter” to the children. Patton organized a first-rate polo team at Schofield and Sunday afternoons were given to chic luncheons and polo matches.

  In August 1926 Patton’s regiment was called to attention to witness his decoration with the Treasury Life Saving Medal for rescuing the three boys whose boat had capsized. Unbeknownst to her husband, Beatrice had collected statements from the boys and sent them to the Treas
ury Department. Even though she had done as much as he had in saving the boys, Beatrice was ever thinking of her husband and his career advancement.

  PATTON DEVELOPED A GREAT and lingering suspicion during this period that the Japanese not only sought war with the United States—noting their stunning victory against the czar’s fleet in the Russo-Japanese War—but also intended a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Patton noticed that Japanese migrant farmers had established shacks near important inlets and installations. Whenever Japanese ships arrived for visits, reported Patton’s daughter, the officers would visit the little farm shacks ostensibly because they would have relatives there. It was a poor reflection on U.S. military at the time that such information wasn’t forthcoming from intelligence personnel.

  Patton was incredulous because he knew that under the Japanese caste system naval officers were highly unlikely to have peasants for relatives. “All these things he reported to Military Intelligence from where it disappeared into the vast maw of Washington unnoted.”43

  In June 1927 Patton’s father died from tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver “from drinking more than was good for him.” Patton could not find a liner to get him home to California from Hawaii in time for the funeral and arrived three days afterward in a state of “almost unreasonable grief.” Upstairs Aunt Nannie had been screaming hysterically for a week for her “beloved George to come and take her with him,” and that “it was she he had always loved and not Ruth.” According to Patton’s biographer Carlo D’Este, “The death of his father was the most traumatic event of Patton’s life. He had lost the best friend he ever had.”44