Generals of the Army

by James H. Willbanks

  One preparedness measure that Marshall resisted was the revival of the Plattsburg Camp movement. This was one of the few direct clashes he ever had with Stimson, who was a strong proponent of the idea. With conscription a reality, the Army could not spare officers to train Plattsburg volunteers. Moreover, Marshall preferred the early implementation of Officer Candidate Schools for qualified enlisted men as a way to boost morale and make conscription more palatable.60 After a pointed dispute with Stimson, during which Marshall allegedly threatened to resign, the chief of staff prevailed over the secretary of War.

  As funding and manpower became available, Marshall was able not only to expand the force, but also to modernize it. One of his first measures as chief of staff was to force through the adoption of a new organization for the infantry division that had been under study for years. The new division structure was oriented toward a mobile war of maneuver, rather than trench warfare. He also brought to completion a program to replace all the Army’s draft animals with motor vehicles (though the Cavalry kept their horses for three more years). Through the winter of 1939–40 Marshall brought the Regular Army formations up to strength and inaugurated a program of large unit training.

  In addition to restructuring the infantry division, Marshall established entirely new combat arms formations. Dissatisfied with the slow pace of tank development that had been displayed over previous years, in July 1940 Marshall summarily removed all tanks from the Infantry and Cavalry branches and assigned them to a new Armored Force. Similarly, when the Army’s efforts to create an antitank capability foundered on interbranch squabbling over proponency, Marshall simply assigned antitank development to the War Department Operations Division. These episodes reflect one of Marshall’s great challenges—getting the Army to stop thinking and acting like a business-as-usual peacetime force. He practically had to force the officer corps to move out and get things done, rather than endlessly debating decisions and accounting for every penny.61

  One of the more dramatic such moves that Marshall made was to grant the air service virtual autonomy. In June 1941 the War Department established the Army Air Forces, with its own chief, Major General Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, who continued to report to Marshall and Stimson. Marshall, although a supporter of airpower, did not believe that air alone could win wars. “You’ve got to get down and hold things,” he later observed.62 Nor did he feel that the air service was ready for complete independence. Relatively few air officers had attended the Command and General Staff School or the Army War College in the interwar period, and so there were not sufficient qualified General Staff officers to establish a fully independent entity. Marshall did, however, grant Arnold a large degree of latitude in all matters related to military aviation.63

  As part of the push to modernize the Army, Marshall often became involved in questions of technological innovation. He found that there was no shortage of ideas for new weapons and equipment, but that few of these proposals were practicable. On occasion, though, Marshall did override his staff in support of some new item of equipment. It is part of Army lore that Marshall personally supported the adoption of the one-quarter-ton four-by-four truck, better known as the jeep. When it came to innovation, Marshall believed that the “Ordnance [branch] was conservative, I would say, but at the same time it had to insist on a certain precision that the line officers objected to as too prolonged.”64

  Modernization reached the intellectual sphere as well as the technical. Marshall’s old associate from his 1st Division days, Brigadier General Lesley J. McNair, was commandant at Fort Leavenworth in 1939. Marshall encouraged him to modernize the curriculum there, and he applauded his success in doing so: “You apparently … have vitalized the place and yet in a most harmonious manner…. Anything I can do to assist, you command me, but I want you to feel perfectly free to act, and we all have complete confidence in your judgment, your leadership, and your integrity.”65

  The immediate objective that Marshall worked toward in the period 1939–41 was the creation of the Protective Mobilization Plan (PMP) Army. Laid out in mobilization plans drafted in the 1930s, the PMP Army was intended to provide security for the Western Hemisphere while the nation geared up for war. It consisted principally of the existing Regular Army divisions brought up to full strength, plus the National Guard divisions under federal control. With the mobilization of the Guard and the inauguration of Selective Service in 1940, the PMP Army became a reality. By July 1941 the Army consisted of 1.4 million men. Marshall directed that the elements of the PMP Army embark on a systematic, progressive training program starting at the small unit level and carrying through to higher and higher echelons. Throughout, Marshall continually had to defend the existence of this force and the need to train it: “Well, the hardest thing in the world to train is a ground army of infantry and artillery.”66 The foot soldier has to make the utmost exertions when he is tired, wet, and cold: “The moment when his high courage was necessary was, as a rule, at dawn when he woke up half-frozen to deal with an enemy he couldn’t see … all of which required a very high state of training, higher than that of any other force that I know of.”67

  In the summer of 1941, just as Marshall’s program of progressive training had reached the stage of division, corps, and army maneuvers, the PMP Army stood on the verge of disintegration. The National Guardsmen and draftees inducted in the fall of 1940 were nearing the end of their twelve-month obligation. Efforts to extend the term of service touched off a surge of opposition among isolationists and anti-administration political factions and, unfortunately, within the Army itself. Disgruntled troops adopted the slogan “OHIO”—“over the hill in October.” Marshall argued long and hard in support of the extension. He called it a “struggle for survival,” and he feared that failure to extend the servicemen’s obligation would lead to “the complete destruction … of the fabric of the army that we had built up.”68 In the end, Congress approved the extension of service from twelve months to two and one-half years. The measure cleared the House of Representatives by a single vote.69

  With the future of the PMP Army assured for the time being, Marshall directed that the force embark on the largest and most ambitious training exercises in the Army’s history—the famous Louisiana Maneuvers. Marshall announced that “the present maneuvers are the closest peacetime approximation to actual fighting conditions that have ever been undertaken in this country.”70 Not only did the maneuvers provide an opportunity to train troops, practice movement and supply, and test new concepts, but they also afforded Marshall an opportunity to gauge the abilities of the higher commanders. Following the Louisiana Maneuvers and a comparable set of exercises in the Carolinas, Marshall began to remove a number of senior officers who had passed their prime. Only eleven of the forty-two generals who commanded divisions, corps, or armies in the Louisiana and Carolinas maneuvers went on to hold significant combat commands in World War II.71

  For the first time in the nation’s history, mobilization and training had preceded the initiation of hostilities. The PMP Army was not entirely combat-ready, by any means, but the contrast with earlier conflicts in this regard was dramatic. As Marshall told Congress in April 1941, compared to the 1917 experience, “there has been an opportunity to organize on a very much better basis. There has been more uniformity, more careful inspection, more education, and more logical development.”72 The moving force behind this accomplishment was Marshall himself.

  Even as the great maneuvers were in progress, the General Staff began drafting plans to release the National Guard divisions upon the completion of the training season. President Roosevelt, apparently still unconvinced of the need for a large ground force and, perhaps, unappreciative of the difficulties in training such a force, wished to divert resources into other channels. The American entry into World War II forestalled this drawdown.

  Through the late autumn of 1941 it became obvious that hostilities with Japan were imminent. American cryptographers had broken a secret Japanese communica
tions code, affording Marshall and other top civilian and military leaders an indication of Japanese intentions. By the end of November there was clear evidence that Japanese military might was massing in the direction of Southeast Asia. There was no such unmistakable indicator that the Japanese planned any operations in the central Pacific. On November 27 Marshall warned the Army commanders in the Pacific region that negotiations with Japan had essentially terminated, and that war was imminent. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Harold R. Stark, sent an even stronger message to his subordinates in the Pacific, containing the phrase “war warning.”73 And yet on the morning of December 7 a task force of six Japanese aircraft carriers caught the defenders of Hawaii, both Army and Navy, by surprise. In later years certain authors asserted that Marshall and the high command in Washington knew that the attack was coming and deliberately withheld that knowledge from the field commanders, to ensure the American entry into World War II. Responsible historians have refuted this conspiracy theory. The worst that can be said of Marshall and his naval counterpart is that they were negligent in following up on the actual defense measures taken by their subordinates. In any event, the attack on Pearl Harbor meant that the Army would not be drawn down, but would instead embark on a new phase of expansion.

  Among the first wartime measures that Marshall undertook was a thorough reorganization of the General Staff. “This is the poorest command post in the Army and we must do something about it,” he remarked.74 No fewer than sixty-one officers and War Department officials had, in theory, direct access to the chief of staff. A multiplicity of offices and branches complicated and delayed measures that needed to be executed with urgency. Accordingly, in March 1942 Marshall was authorized to sweep away the existing structure and implement a more streamlined, centralized organization that served to enhance his own ability to control Army affairs. He eliminated the branch chiefs (Infantry, Cavalry, Field Artillery, Coast Artillery) and established a new agency, Army Ground Forces (AGF), to supervise the doctrine, training, manning, and equipping of all the combat arms. He placed his old associate Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair in charge. Major General “Hap” Arnold headed Army Air Forces, which performed similar duties for the air arm, in addition to planning and executing air strategy in the combat theaters. Services of Supply (later redesignated Army Service Forces), under Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, managed logistical and transportation matters. Operations Division (OPD) became Marshall’s command post for supervising combat operations on a global scale. Marshall remained the military adviser to both the secretary of War and the president.75

  Even as the wreckage of Pearl Harbor still smoldered and America’s Pacific garrisons fell one by one, Marshall guided the War Department into a new expansion program. Just as in 1940, when Marshall used the Regular Army as seed corn for the Protective Mobilization Plan force, so in 1942 the PMP Army provided the nucleus for what would become the ninety-division wartime Army. The 1.6 million men in uniform at the time of Pearl Harbor would ultimately expand to over 8 million in 1945, including the Army Air Forces. Whereas the Victory Program, an early projection of wartime requirements, called for more than two hundred divisions to defeat the Axis, Marshall preferred having fewer full-strength, fully trained divisions rather than a larger number of “watered-down” formations.76 Under the direction of General McNair, Army Ground Forces developed a template for establishing new divisions, starting with a commander, 172 officers, and 1,190 enlisted men as a cadre, and culminating, in as little as thirty-five weeks, in a division of 14,000 ready to deploy into combat.77 Above all, Marshall insisted that divisions be fully trained before shipment overseas. He had no intention of revisiting the embarrassment of 1917, when the incomplete and untrained 1st Division arrived in France.

  Among the formations raised were three divisions of African American troops, as well as a large number of similarly constituted combat and support units. Marshall’s staff urged him to establish training bases for these forces in the northern United States, but Marshall refused, on the grounds that construction costs for barracks would be higher and the training season shorter in the colder regions. Unfortunately, these African American units faced harassment and discrimination in some of the southern states where they ended up training. “I failed to visualize what was going to happen,” Marshall later commented, “and it caused us all sorts of difficulties, and I regard it as one of the most important mistakes I made in the mobilization of the army.”78 Although not a civil rights activist per se, Marshall held deep convictions about citizenship that applied to all races: “When you are calling on a man to risk his life in the service of the country, he had every right, it would certainly seem, to demand the same rights [as] the other fellow who was risking his life.”79 Later in the war, when heavy casualties caused a shortage of infantrymen in frontline units, Marshall supported General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to integrate African American replacements directly into previously all-white formations.80 Similarly, the demands of all-out mobilization caused Marshall to lend his personal support to the formation of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. “Women must certainly be employed in the ‘over-all’ effort of this nation,” he asserted.81

  One of the greatest challenges that Marshall faced in mobilizing the wartime Army was the selection of senior leaders. Marshall personally reviewed and approved every appointment to division, corps, and field army command: “Every bit of data we receive from the fighting fronts clearly shows that this is a young man’s war. … We have to be absolutely firm on the question of age for command.”82 In a process that began well before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Marshall persuaded the War Department to lower the retirement age for senior officers, set upper age limits for officers in command of troops, and establish a policy allowing for temporary promotions regardless of seniority. Under these measures, the average age of a new division commander dropped from fifty-nine years in 1939 to forty-nine in 1943.83 The process of moving out the officers who were too old to lead in combat was a painful and difficult one for Marshall, for many of these men were peers, if not friends. He was unsparing, however, noting that the officer corps suffered from “arteriosclerosis,” because most individuals began to lose their “fine qualities” when in their fifties. Few men past the age of sixty were usable.84 He even offered to resign (though several years short of mandatory retirement age) by way of setting an example to the rest of the officer corps.85

  Marshall did not, however, simply discard the men too old to command in combat. Although lacking the vigor and resiliency demanded by frontline duty, they possessed a wealth of experience and administrative skills. He kept many of them in their higher-command positions to supervise mobilization and training. Meanwhile, the younger officers destined to lead in combat passed through a series of developmental assignments, often on higher-level staffs, to broaden their perspectives and prepare them for command. Many of the men Marshall tapped for this track toward high command were young officers whom he knew personally. One of the most prominent of these individuals was Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom he had known by reputation for years. Eisenhower was a protégé of Major General Fox Conner, who, like Marshall himself, was a member of Pershing’s inner circle. Marshall saw through Eisenhower’s unassuming, amiable persona and discerned the logical thinker and natural leader beneath.

  Even as the wartime ninety-division army was taking form, Marshall was called on to participate in strategic decisions at the highest levels. He was largely responsible for establishing principles of strategy that guided not just the American but also the Allied war effort. Foremost among these was the concept of unity of command. He saw clearly that to wage global coalition warfare involving all the armed services, traditional lines of authority had to be replaced. At the first wartime conference with the British leaders held in Washington, D.C., Marshall advocated establishing a single headquarters to command all the arms of all Allied nations in the hard-pressed southwest Pacific. Overcoming resistance from Prime Min
ister Winston Churchill, Marshall persuaded the British to assign Field Marshal Archibald Wavell to command the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDACOM), a headquarters established to defend the Dutch East Indies and Malaysia, which had authority over ground, sea, and air forces from the member countries.86 Although ABDACOM went down to rapid defeat, the precedent of unified joint and combined command was established.

  A second principle of strategy took much longer to achieve. Marshall recognized that the far-flung global conflict offered endless opportunities for the Allies to dissipate their strength in nondecisive operations. He sought to resist such a dispersal of force and instead concentrate the preponderance of Allied power where it would do the most good. In a June 1942 message to President Roosevelt he wrote, “You are familiar with my view that the decisive theater is Western Europe. That is the only place where the concerted effort of our own and the British forces can be brought to bear on the Germans.”87 In this Marshall had the concurrence of the United States Navy—as early as May 1941 the Joint Board, consisting of the Army chief of staff and the chief of naval operations and their key subordinates, approved the concept of “Germany First.”88 Churchill and the British planners, however, held a different interpretation of “Germany First.” To Marshall it meant an assault across the English Channel into occupied France at the earliest possible date. To the British it meant weakening Germany through blockade, aerial bombardment, and Resistance activities, the cross-Channel assault being the coup de grâce against a tottering Nazi regime. Not until 1944 would Marshall’s views entirely prevail.