Generals of the Army

by James H. Willbanks

  No matter which direction Allied strategy might go, Marshall understood that the critical factor in success or failure would be the strength of the Allied coalition. He was perhaps the critical figure in forging that coalition. But before Marshall could establish ties with the British military, he needed to build a coalition among the American services—the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The first order of business was to establish a working relationship with Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of naval operations appointed after Pearl Harbor. King was difficult and short-tempered, but he and Marshall recognized that they had to work together. Their relationship was never close, but it was effective. King supported Marshall’s ideas pertaining to the war in Europe, and, in turn, Marshall backed King in the Navy’s strategy for the Pacific war. Marshall gave “Hap” Arnold the de facto status of chief of staff and added him to the JCS on his own initiative, thus including the air service in all joint deliberations. Marshall suggested that Admiral William D. Leahy act as chairman of the JCS, thus balancing the two Army generals with two Navy admirals. Leahy, however, acted more as military aide to Roosevelt than as true chairman of the JCS, leaving Marshall as the first among equals. The American JCS joined with its British counterpart to form the Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS), which constituted the highest-level military body for the direction of the war, and which was answerable only to Roosevelt and Churchill.

  Forging a coalition with the British proved to be more difficult than establishing joint relationships with the Navy and Army Air Forces. Marshall discovered that there was considerable anti-British sentiment within the War Department—he later stated that the Americans were more anti-British than the British were anti-American.89 Beyond that, his greatest difficulty early in the war was that Roosevelt and Churchill tended to make strategic decisions between the two of them, informing their military staffs after the fact. Roosevelt in particular tended to side with Churchill against the advice of Marshall. The head of the British military mission to Washington, D.C., Field Marshal John Dill, salvaged the situation. He took advantage of his close personal relationship with Marshall (one of the few such relationships that Marshall ever formed) to keep the Americans informed about what Churchill and Roosevelt were up to.90

  The most contentious of these strategic decisions in 1942 had to do with a British proposal for the Allies to invade North Africa. Marshall perceived this as being exactly the type of dissipation that he sought to avoid. He preferred an early invasion of France, to relieve pressure on the Soviet Union and to keep the Allied effort focused on a decisive theater. Roosevelt, however, sided with the British. It is most likely that the president saw the operation as a vote of confidence in the British and as a means of maintaining domestic American support for the war.91 In later years Marshall observed that the military “failed to see that the leader in a democracy has to keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought…. People demand action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready.”92 “Both Churchill and Roosevelt suffered because they had to take action. Public can’t sit around and wait. What can you do that won’t ruin you?”93 Marshall could take some consolation from the fact that the commander named for the invasion was Dwight Eisenhower. Code-named Operation Torch, the invasion took place in November 1942.

  In early 1943 the Allied leaders met at Casablanca in Morocco to hammer out the next strategic move. The British pushed hard for a continuation of Mediterranean operations, with invasions of Sicily and then Italy. Once again, Roosevelt sided with the British. Additionally, the heads of state approved Admiral King’s proposal for offensive operations in the Pacific, further diluting Marshall’s cherished principle of “Germany First.” This was to be the last inter-Allied conference that Marshall attended without first informing himself fully about the political pressures operating on military strategy. It was also the last conference at which the American JCS arrived without first establishing a common agenda. Marshall thereafter saw to it that the Americans, including the president, went in with a unified position.

  The next such meeting was the Trident Conference, held in Washington, D.C., in May 1943. Here the Americans acceded to a continuation of Mediterranean operations only with a British guarantee that there would be a cross-Channel assault in 1944. When Churchill resisted, Roosevelt sided with his JCS. The same was true at the Quadrant Conference, held three months later in Quebec. Again the Americans spoke with one voice, and a firm date for the cross-Channel assault, code-named Overlord, was set.

  Roosevelt, Churchill (both seated), and other leaders on board HMS Prince of Wales during the Atlantic Charter Conference, 1941. (Naval History and Heritage Command)

  The final great conference of 1943 involved the British, Americans, and Soviets. This conference took place late in the year in Tehran, Iran. Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union, supported Operation Overlord and promised that the Red Army would launch a summer offensive in 1944 to facilitate the cross-Channel assault. He went on to pledge Soviet participation in the war against Japan once Germany was defeated. At long last Marshall could see his campaign for a coordinated Allied strategy, focused in the decisive theater, bear fruit. Marshall had emerged as the dominant military voice in the Allied coalition.

  The next top-level conference bringing together all three powers took place in Yalta in February 1945. Here the three great leaders laid the groundwork for the postwar world. Of equal importance, the conference ensured that the coalition would remain intact through the end of hostilities, thus robbing Germany and Japan of their last chance to escape overwhelming defeat. By this time Marshall was more than a military strategist. He had risen into the realm of statesmanship.

  In addition to his obligations in the fields of strategy and coalition building, Marshall was responsible for directing the operations of Army forces in all theaters of the war. In keeping with the decisions of the JCS and CCS, Marshall gave priority to theaters and supervised the conduct of campaigns. He often had to contend with a condition he called “localitis”—the tendency of each theater commander to assume that his domain should be the main effort of the war.94 Marshall did not, however, attempt to run battles from Washington, D.C. It was his practice to delegate authority readily to the commanders on the ground, and to allow them considerable latitude, even when he might disagree with some of their decisions. On February 16, 1943, in the midst of the Kasserine Pass debacle in Tunisia, Marshall sent the following words of reassurance to Eisenhower: “You can concentrate on this battle with the feeling that it is our business to support you and not harass you and I’ll use all my influence to see that you are supported.”95

  In one respect Marshall was willing to exert his influence over operations. He sometimes found it necessary to press commanders into action. After the war he remarked: “Everybody wanted things we couldn’t give them. And you had to press them to accomplish the thing without all of the means that might later become available.”96

  Some of Marshall’s greatest challenges in this regard were his dealings with General Douglas MacArthur, commander of forces in the Philippines at the onset of war and the head of the southwest Pacific theater after his evacuation from the Philippines. MacArthur was, in terms of personality and character, the antithesis of Marshall. Marshall diplomatically noted MacArthur’s “very independent nature” and his tendency to be suspicious of everything Marshall did.97 Although he was less than a year older than Marshall, MacArthur had been the senior of the two until 1939. He had ended World War I as a division commander and had been Army chief of staff when Marshall was a lieutenant colonel. During World War II MacArthur undoubtedly had the worst case of “localitis” in the Army. He opposed the cross-Channel invasion of Europe and never saw the merit of the Navy’s “island hopping” campaign in the central Pacific. Accused of being hostile toward MacArthur, Marshall responded: “In the first place, it is damn nonsense. I did everything in the world I could for him.”98 Marshall personally wrote the citation for the
Medal of Honor that MacArthur received in 1942. Marshall clearly perceived that President Roosevelt had to keep MacArthur prominently active in the war for political reasons if for no other. MacArthur was closely linked to the most conservative elements of the Republican Party; thus, his prominent stature in the military was a crucial means of maintaining bipartisan support for the war effort.

  From left: Lieutenant General Krueger, General MacArthur, and General Marshall at a field headquarters, late 1943. (U.S. Army Signal Corps)

  As the Army’s overall director of global operations, Marshall made some key decisions that had a significant influence on the course of the war. One of these was his adherence to the cross-Channel attack that culminated in the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. Another was his refusal to countenance operations in the Balkans. In the spring of 1945 he supported Eisenhower’s decision not to race the Soviets to Berlin. As he told Eisenhower, “Personally, I should be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.”99 Postwar critics seized on this remark as an indication that Marshall and indeed all the American leaders were politically naive in their dealings with the Soviet Union. In fact, Marshall was fully attuned to the political ramifications of this and all his decisions. He recognized that it was not within his purview to overturn the agreements forged at Yalta regarding the postwar world. Moreover, the war was still in progress, and he recognized the folly of risking coalition unity before the last German soldier had laid down his arms. Following Germany’s defeat, Marshall staunchly advocated an invasion of the Japanese home islands, even when the Army Air Forces and Navy argued that an invasion would not be necessary. Finally, Marshall supported the use of the atomic bomb against Japan. He had used his personal influence in Congress to secure funding for the Manhattan Project, which developed the bomb, even though he could not tell Congress what the funds were for.100

  Marshall’s greatest failure as a director of strategy was China. Roosevelt and Marshall hoped that, with sufficient Allied aid, the Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek could mount a serious challenge to Japanese forces on the Asian mainland. Despite mountains of aid, committed over the objections of the British, Chiang’s forces failed to fulfill the role Marshall envisioned for them. Marshall compounded the problem with one of his least successful appointments to high position. Lieutenant General Joseph W. Stilwell, one of Marshall’s contacts from his days at Fort Benning, proved to be unsuited to the complex and delicate task of nurturing the Chinese Nationalist forces. After the war Marshall conceded that the British had been right all along: “You can see how hopeless the whole thing was.”101

  Other than the failure of his China strategy, the greatest disappointment to befall Marshall during World War II was his inability to secure a major operational command for himself. Just as in World War I, his talents as a staff officer precluded his assignment to command. In 1942 and 1943 it was generally assumed that Marshall himself would become the overall Allied commander for Operation Overlord. Following the Tehran Conference, where Stalin pressed the Western Allies to name the commander, Roosevelt remarked to Marshall, “I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.”102 Eisenhower got the Overlord command, and Marshall remained in the Pentagon. On December 16, 1944, in recognition of his selfless service, Marshall was the first man promoted to the rank of five-star general and accorded the title General of the Army.

  By 1945 Marshall was probably Roosevelt’s closest adviser, often drafting messages for the president’s signature. With the death of Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman became president. Truman, who had chaired a Senate special committee charged with investigating national defense, had acquired an enormous respect for the general. Marshall later remarked that President Truman would approve anything that Marshall proposed, which worried Marshall: “There were other facets of the affair that I might not understand.”103

  Despite all his strategic-level responsibilities, throughout the war Marshall maintained a close interest in the well-being of the common soldier. In World War I he had witnessed the vital importance of morale and the way in which unnecessary hardships could degrade the combat performance of the soldier. On his own initiative, Marshall arranged for the Hollywood director Frank Capra to produce the Why We Fight film series. He personally intervened to make sure that frontline soldiers received all possible creature comforts, as well as access to entertainment, reading material, and PX facilities. He was the chief advocate for the establishment of campaign medals and overseas service ribbons. He stifled proposals to ban alcohol on or near military posts, remarking, “It is no time to inflict experiments on this great army.”104 After the war Marshall spoke of the importance of maintaining the morale of the combat soldier: “I was for supplying everything we could and then requiring him to fight to the death when the time came. You had to put these two things together…. I thought it was quite essential—quite essential—that the soldier be convinced that so far as we were concerned in the Pentagon … we were doing everything in our power to help him.”105

  Marshall also took time to think of the families on the home front, particularly those who lost a relative in the war. Early in the conflict, Marshall attempted to write a personal note to the family of every soldier killed in action. When the increasing number of casualties made this impossible, he paid close attention to the wording of the letter of condolence sent out by the War Department, and he took great pains to ensure that the president was fully aware of the conflict’s human cost.106 The full effect of the war struck his own household in May 1944, when Marshall’s stepson Allen Brown was killed in action in Italy, fighting in a campaign that Marshall had opposed.

  As the end of the war drew near, the tributes to Marshall began to pour in. He was named Time magazine’s man of the year for 1944. On May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, Secretary of War Stimson gathered a group of top War Department officials to mark the end of the war with Germany. Of Marshall he said, “I have never seen a task of such magnitude performed by man.” To Marshall he said, “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known.”107

  On November 26, 1945, Marshall retired from military service. President Truman personally awarded him the second oak-leaf cluster to the Distinguished Service Medal he had earned in World War I. (This was the only military decoration that Marshall accepted during his six-year term as chief of staff.) Truman himself read the citation: “In a war unparalleled in magnitude and horror, millions of Americans gave their country outstanding service. General of the Army George C. Marshall gave it victory.”108

  Marshall’s retirement from the Army was by no means the end of his public service. One day later President Truman summoned him to head up a special mission to China, with the task of resolving the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and the Communist People’s Liberation Army under Mao Tse-tung. The task was probably hopeless from the outset—there was nothing that an external power could do to reconcile the contending factions. Marshall’s inability to impose an American solution on China, and Mao’s defeat of the Nationalists in 1949, later provided Senator Joseph McCarthy with all the evidence he needed to fabricate the incredible charge that George Marshall was pro-Communist.

  Early in 1947 Truman recalled Marshall to the United States only to give him a new and even larger job—that of secretary of State. During his two years in that office, Marshall implemented an organizational reform of the department, just as he had reconfigured the War Department in 1942. He brought in a team of brilliant, forward-thinking younger men, not unlike what he had done when he restructured the faculty at Fort Benning in the 1930s, and when he selected younger commanders in World War II. By far the most significant accomplishment of his tenure as secretary of State, if not the most important of his life, was the formulation and passage of the Economic Recovery Act for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Better known as the Marshall Plan, this program was formulated by a small group of individuals within th
e State Department, with the full approval of the president. Marshall announced the plan at the Harvard commencement exercise in June 1947 and then embarked on a campaign to secure its approval. “I worked on that as hard as though I was running for the Senate or the presidency,” he later recalled.109 He succeeded in building a broad base of foreign and domestic support for the policy, attracting adherents from both political parties and all economic sectors. Just as General Marshall’s military strategy saved Europe from Axis domination, Secretary Marshall’s recovery plan secured Europe’s future peace and prosperity. In 1948 he was again named Time magazine’s man of the year.

  Marshall resigned as secretary of State in early 1949, only to be recalled by President Truman yet again in September 1950, this time to serve as secretary of Defense. His main task was to oversee the buildup of military forces for the Korean War. This marked the third occasion that Marshall confronted the problems of mobilizing for war. His one-year tenure as secretary of Defense also occasioned one of the most unpleasant and controversial incidents of his long career—the relief of General MacArthur as commander in Korea and the Far East. MacArthur had attempted to circumvent the national policy in Korea as laid down by the president—an act of insubordination that was anathema to Marshall. He sided with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in recommending MacArthur’s removal, which occurred in April 1951.

  Finally, in September 1951, Marshall retired for the last time. He withdrew to the seclusion of his home and garden for eight years of peaceful retirement. In December 1953 he reemerged in the public eye to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his European Recovery Act. Marshall was the first professional soldier to be so honored.