Marshall, never an enthusiastic student, may have started at a disadvantage, but he made up for lost time very quickly: “I knew I would have to study harder than I had ever dreamed of studying before in my life. I just worked day and night…. I finally got into the habit of study, which I never really had…. I taught myself to study very, very hard and I took nothing for granted…. It was the hardest work I ever did in my life.”12 Hard work brought forth what may not have been evident before—Marshall was a man of great intellectual ability. He graduated first in his class and was selected to attend the Staff College. He also won a promotion to the rank of first lieutenant. The commandant of the Leavenworth schools for the remainder of Marshall’s tenure there was Brigadier General Frederick Funston, hero of the Philippine-American War and President Woodrow Wilson’s first choice to command the American Expeditionary Forces at the time of Funston’s sudden death in 1917.
The second-year school was less competitive and more academic in nature. Marshall became better acquainted with a group of faculty who, under the inspired leadership of an earlier commandant, Brigadier General J. Franklin Bell, constituted the forefront of an intellectual revolution in the Army. He was particularly impressed by Major John F. Morrison, head of the Department of Military Art, a true intellectual and a gifted instructor: “Morrison was outstanding. … He spoke a language that was new to us and appealed very much to our common sense.”13 Morrison was an advocate of the “applicatory method,” under which students were presented with various command challenges and were required to formulate courses of action to address those challenges. These exercises included both map problems and field maneuvers. The Staff College curriculum culminated in the spring of 1908 with an extended historical staff ride, on horseback, to Civil War battlefields from the Shenandoah Valley to Gettysburg, where the students applied their newfound knowledge and insights to the battles of a past war.
The Leavenworth experience was a landmark in Marshall’s professional development: “Leavenworth was immensely instructive; not so much because the course was perfect—because it was not— but the associations with the officers, the reading and discussion that we did and the leadership … of a man like Morrison, had a tremendous effect on me.”14 At Leavenworth, Marshall was imbued with a new sense of professionalism and a talent for study, not to mention the skills of the staff officer. He also formed acquaintances with many of the men who would lead the Army in the next war. Among these were First Lieutenant Stephen O. Fuqua, First Lieutenant Charles D. Herron, and Captains LeRoy Eltinge, Harold B. Fiske, James W. McAndrew, Campbell King, and John McAuley Palmer, all of whom Marshall would meet again as prominent staff officers in France. Captains Robert Alexander and Charles Farnsworth would command divisions in the Great War. First Lieutenant Benjamin D. Foulois, who attended the Signal School at Fort Leavenworth during Marshall’s Staff College year, would become known as one of the founding fathers of American military airpower.15 Not least, at Leavenworth young Lieutenant Marshall began to make a name for himself in the Army at large.
The Leavenworth experience did not end with Marshall’s graduation from the Staff College. Upon the enthusiastic recommendation of his instructors, he was assigned to the faculty for a two-year tour in the Department of Engineering. Once again this constituted an assignment normally reserved for officers of greater rank. As a lieutenant, Marshall was one of the junior members of the faculty, outranked by almost all his students. Nonetheless, he excelled as an instructor. Doubtless he modeled himself after Morrison, couching his instruction in logical, commonsense terms that his students could embrace. Like all successful teachers, Marshall continued learning, deepening his understanding of the military art.
One of the duties of the Leavenworth instructor was to visit National Guard encampments during the summer, in an attempt to bring these citizen-soldiers closer to the standards of the Regular Army. Marshall’s assignment was to assist the Pennsylvania National Guard, which “built up [a] very agreeable association for me, and also a very valuable one because I could try all these things experimentally on these Pennsylvania fellows and they didn’t always know I was trying.”16 Thus began Marshall’s long association with the National Guard, an association that fostered a profound understanding of, and empathy with, the citizen-soldier that few Regular Army officers possessed.
In fact, Marshall’s very next assignment after Leavenworth was to serve as an inspector-instructor with the Massachusetts National Guard. Marshall’s gifts as a teacher were invaluable there, as he explained the arcana of Army regulations to part-time soldiers. He came to the realization that the instruction and regulations employed by the Regular Army were too extensive and detailed for the National Guard officer who had only his weekends in which to master them. Accordingly, Marshall sought ways to reduce and simplify. During his time in Massachusetts he also had opportunities to exercise authority far beyond the level commonly associated with the rank of first lieutenant. He planned large-scale field maneuvers, demonstrating a gift for staff work. On one occasion he actually took temporary command of a regiment in the field.
In 1913 Marshall returned to the Philippines with an assignment to company command. His gifts as a staff officer became readily apparent, and he found himself planning higher-level field maneuvers just as he had with the Massachusetts National Guard. During one exercise in 1914 Marshall became the de facto commander of a 5,000-man force when the colonel in command was indisposed by alcohol and the chief of staff fell ill. A fellow lieutenant and future five-star general who witnessed the affair, Henry H. Arnold, remarked, “That man will one day be the Army Chief of Staff.”17 Marshall completed this second tour in the Philippines as the aide-de-camp to Brigadier General Hunter Liggett, commander of the Philippine Department.
Marshall returned to the United States in 1916 and won promotion to the rank of captain. In that year he also acquired one of the more remarkable officer efficiency reports ever seen. The evaluation form included a question concerning the rater’s willingness to have the rated officer under his command again. Marshall’s rater, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson Hagood, responded: “Yes. But I would prefer to serve under his command.” “He should be made a Brigadier General in the Regular Army and every day this is postponed is a loss to the Army and to the Nation.”18
In July 1916 Marshall became the aide-de-camp to Major General J. Franklin Bell, who had been commandant at Leavenworth before Marshall’s tenure there. Bell commanded the Department of the East, which included several “Plattsburg Camps.” Named for the town in upstate New York where one of the camps was located, the Plattsburg Camps were an outgrowth of the preparedness movement that swept the United States when Europe went to war in 1914. At these camps college students, businessmen, and professionals assembled at their own expense to learn the rudiments of officership and to gain an Army Reserve commission. The Army provided officers to run the camps, which ultimately generated 90,000 Reserve officers, at the cost of seriously impeding the Regular Army’s own efforts to prepare for war. As Bell’s aide, Marshall was involved with the problems engendered by the Plattsburg Camps, one of which, once again, was the need to tailor doctrine and training for citizen-soldiers.
Curiously, Marshall’s sterling reputation, staff skills, and ability to function well above his rank began to work against him. Troop command, and not staff work or aide-de-camp billets, was the path to promotion. Much as he was honored by such assignments, Marshall would undoubtedly have preferred more troop time. Indeed, when the United States entered World War I in 1917 and embarked on a massive military buildup, Marshall did not receive the troop command he coveted. Instead, he was assigned to be the Operations officer for the 1st Division, the first combat element to be sent to Europe. His cabinmate on the voyage to France was Major Lesley J. McNair, who would be Marshall’s chief deputy in organizing and training the Army for another world war.
The 1st Division was a division in name only. It was understrength and consisted largely of raw
recruits. Weapons and equipment were similarly absent or inadequate. The division was truly an embarrassment when it arrived in war-weary France. Marshall was largely responsible for getting the division ready for war. Virtually everything involved in creating a combat division had to be improvised on the fly. The divisional structure was brand new. Trench warfare was unknown to the Americans. Most of the troops were untrained. Few of the officers had ever seen a formation larger than the regiment. Marshall secured training facilities, developed training programs, coordinated the American training efforts with those of the British and French, and did all of this with little guidance from above. In the process, it also fell to him to develop doctrine and tactics for the American divisions, which differed markedly in structure from those of the other belligerents.19
On one occasion Major General John J. Pershing, overall commander of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), inspected a 1st Division training exercise and did not like what he saw. He began to berate the division commander in front of his staff. The commander, Major General William L. Sibert, took his criticisms in silence, but when Pershing started in on the division chief of staff, who had just arrived on the job, Marshall could stand no more: “General Pershing, there’s something to be said here, and I think I should say it because I’ve been here longer.” He then proceeded to instruct the general in all the difficulties that had to be overcome in training the division, and he went so far as to point out that Pershing’s headquarters had not been particularly helpful in dealing with those problems.20
Marshall’s military career could have ended on that day. It was Marshall’s good fortune that Pershing was one of those rare individuals who can accept candid, constructive criticism, regardless of its source, without animosity. “I never saw another commander that I could do that with,” Marshall later observed.21 In fact, during subsequent visits to the 1st Division, Pershing sought out Marshall and solicited his opinions. Rather than ending Marshall’s career, his outburst undoubtedly fostered it.
Pershing remembered Marshall in 1918 when the time came to plan the American force’s first major combat operations. Promoted to the temporary rank of colonel, Marshall joined the Operations section of Pershing’s AEF headquarters in June, and he was detached to First Army to participate in the planning for the Saint-Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne offensives. The task was truly monumental. The Saint-Mihiel operation, which commenced on September 12, involved seven American and four French divisions. The Meuse-Argonne offensive, which began just two weeks later, involved fifteen divisions, including seven of those involved at Saint-Mihiel. These divisions had to travel forty miles to reach their new jump-off points. Marshall was largely responsible for the plan that successfully moved 600,000 troops into position for the latter offensive—a marvelous accomplishment for an army in its first major operation. Marshall finished the war as First Army’s deputy chief of staff for Operations, with a recommendation for promotion to temporary brigadier general. The Armistice on November 11, 1918, resulted in a freeze on all promotions, however, and it would take Marshall eighteen years to get his first star. In fact, he reverted to his Regular Army rank of captain in 1920.
Undoubtedly, Marshall’s great talents as a staff officer had actually retarded his career. Promotions went first to line officers. He had clearly demonstrated a mastery of tactics and logistics on a large scale, and nobody doubted his ability to lead troops, but his repeated requests to be assigned to line duty were all denied. His lack of command time would continue to plague Marshall in the postwar years, as his peers who had led troops in combat edged ahead of him in rank. Although he was never a combat commander, he was no stranger to combat. His duties as staff officer took him to the front on numerous occasions. A careful observer and shrewd analyst, he derived a wealth of insights regarding troops in combat. Among the most significant of these was that he developed a profound understanding of the importance of troop morale. He saw firsthand how the privations of frontline duty, including the violence and fatigue inherent in combat, could rapidly erode the fighting man’s effectiveness if the leadership did not look closely to the welfare of the troops. To the end of his career, he never lost sight of the fact that combat calls on men to make the greatest conceivable exertions under the worst possible circumstances, and that the leader who failed to ease the burden of the frontline soldier, or added to that burden through arbitrary strictness, was negligent in his duties.
In addition, Marshall learned the art of high command through observation of a wide cross section of senior officers. He learned the difference between commanders who were stern and those who were unduly severe, recognizing that a higher commander had to be understanding of the challenges his subordinates faced. Pershing he found to be an “almost implacable executive” at work, but delightful company, “almost boyish” after hours.22 (Marshall himself would later be an “implacable executive” at work but unlike Pershing was a private and reserved person off duty.) Marshall particularly admired Major General Charles P. Summerall, commander of V Corps, as an “iron man,” and a “Jackson type,” probably an allusion to Lieutenant General Thomas S. “Stonewall” Jackson of Civil War fame. Once, when his headquarters party came under artillery fire while near the front, Summerall remarked, “Every shell that comes here is one less over our devoted infantry.”23 Marshall found General Peyton C. March, the Army chief of staff whom he came to know after the war, to be a great administrator, but “very arbitrary, tactless.”24 In addition to the Americans he observed, Marshall interacted with a number of French commanders and staffs, to the extent that he picked up a working knowledge of French military vocabulary.
In May 1919 General Pershing summoned Marshall to be his aide-de-camp, an assignment that lasted five years, during which he was promoted to major and then lieutenant colonel. Although duty as an aide was not the most desirable assignment for an ambitious officer, this experience did serve to cement Marshall’s standing within the Army’s most important power bloc. Moreover, it brought him into contact with a wide variety of powerful individuals. While still in France, Marshall associated with a number of French political and military leaders, including Premier Georges Clemenceau and the generals Joseph Joffre, Philippe Pétain, and Maxime Weygand. When Pershing moved his headquarters to Washington, D.C., Marshall accompanied the general on tours and to congressional hearings, which afforded him a firsthand education in top-level political and military affairs. He also witnessed the damage done to Pershing’s standing in the eyes of the nation when Pershing allowed his name to be mentioned in connection with the presidential election of 1920. Marshall, who had no political affiliations, became even more rigidly apolitical.
Another unfortunate episode that Marshall witnessed during this time was the Pershing-March controversy. At the heart of the dispute was a struggle over who held precedence—Pershing, the commander of field forces, or March, the chief of the General Staff. The dispute, which nearly tore the War Department apart, was not really resolved until 1921, when Pershing himself became chief of staff. (Army regulations later stipulated that the chief of staff was superior to all other officers.) The fight went public in a “battle of the books” in which the protagonists and their various supporters presented their arguments in the form of memoirs and accounts of the war. This is why Marshall himself never authored any memoirs after he retired and consented only reluctantly to having an “official” biography produced. The hero of this sad episode, in Marshall’s eyes, was Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, whom Marshall credited with holding the War Department together. Marshall thought Baker “the greatest American—or, I will put it—the greatest mind—that I came into contact with in my lifetime…. I admired him beyond any other man that I have known.”25 Baker was a penetrating observer and a master of the English language, from whom Marshall learned to appreciate the power of communication.
The immediate issue over which Pershing and March clashed was the form that the postwar Army would assume. Clearly, the mobilization for Wo
rld War I had left much to be desired. March proposed a greatly increased Regular Army as the answer to the need for better readiness. Pershing, on the other hand, promoted the proposals of Colonel John McAuley Palmer, who asserted that readiness could best be attained by establishing universal military service for all young men and by enhancing the role of the National Guard and Reserves. Marshall assisted Palmer in preparing his arguments before Congress. In the end, the National Defense Act of 1920 embodied the Palmer concept, though without universal military training. A small Regular Army would be distributed about the United States, its principal peacetime responsibility being the training of the Reserve components. The National Guard formations of the various states, organized into divisions, would be the nation’s first line of defense. Reserve divisions under the control of the federal government would fill out the Army in time of war. In practice, lacking universal military training, the Reserve formations evaporated over the years as the pool of World War I veterans, enrolled in the Reserves, passed beyond the age of military duty. Nonetheless, this was essentially the framework within which Marshall spent the interwar years, and which he activated as the nation mobilized for World War II.
Understandably, many Regular Army officers were uncomfortable with the role mandated for them in the new National Defense Act. In a 1923 lecture to the Army War College, Marshall spelled out the ramifications of the new defense policy, and he warned his audience that a change in attitude was necessary. Whereas before World War I 80 percent of the Regular Army’s officers had been assigned to troop duty, only 25 percent were so employed under the 1920 legislation. “By every dictum of the law and plan of the War Department we [the Regular Army] are frankly engaged in creating a citizen force to fight our battles, rather than a small, highly trained professional army,” said Marshall. “If we fail in the development of a citizen army we will be impotent in the first year of a major war.”26
Generals of the Army Page 4