Roosevelt had met Churchill two decades before, and had begun corresponding with him secretly in 1939. He nodded approvingly. Winston, he told his cabinet, was the best man England had, “even if he was drunk half the time.”11
• • •
Six days later, senators and representatives packing the Capitol’s House chamber stood as the sergeant-at-arms announced the arrival of the President of the United States. Roosevelt, dressed in a blue pin-striped suit, his tie crisply knotted, walked slowly down the aisle, his right hand on a cane, his left on the forearm of a burly Secret Service agent.
Beneath his dark trousers stood ten pounds of steel braces holding his polio-stricken legs erect.* In a sleight-of-foot illusion practiced over twenty years, FDR had trained himself to mimic walking by using his back and side muscles to heave one leg up and forward, and then the other. Painful but passable, all it required was a steady arm to lean on and a strong cane.
Smiling through the discomfort, nodding genially to congressmen he passed, Roosevelt walked to the wooden dais, fully aware of his task: to shock a nation nestled in the comforting cocoon of isolation. To convince a hostile Congress that the time had come to arm America and its allies. To set production goals so high, every industrial leader would think on a scale never before envisioned. The job of the man encased in leg braces was to shake a nation out of a paralysis of the mind and get it running to safety.12
“These are ominous days,” his measured cadence began. “Days whose swift and shocking developments force every neutral nation to look to its defenses in the light of new factors. The brutal force of modern offensive war has been loosed in all its horror. New powers of destruction, incredibly swift and deadly, have been developed; and those who wield them are ruthless and daring. No old defense is so strong that it requires no further strengthening and no attack is so unlikely or impossible that it may be ignored.”
The greatest threat, he explained, was modern airpower. A flight from Greenland to New England took six hours; from West Africa to Brazil, seven; from Brazil to the Canal Zone, less than seven. And the preponderance of airpower lay in Adolf Hitler’s hands. Germany had more warplanes aloft than all its enemies combined, and its assembly lines in the Ruhr, Silesia, and the Saar Palatinate could outproduce all competitors.13
To balance the scales, Roosevelt asked Congress for $1.8 billion in military appropriations. He called for a bigger army. He called for a two-ocean navy. He called for an industrial base capable of turning out fifty thousand warplanes each year.14
• • •
Fifty thousand planes? Every aerospace expert knew it was an impossible dream. The nation’s entire aircraft industry couldn’t turn out ten thousand planes in a year; normal production was about two thousand. Besides, the Army lacked fifty thousand pilots, training fields for fifty thousand cadets, and repair shops to keep fifty thousand planes flying. Roosevelt might just as well suggest that America would send a man to the moon. He had set an outlandish production goal that would have Hitler, Göring, and every other German laughing their kopfs off.15
But Roosevelt had immense faith in his people’s ability to do whatever they were asked, if they understood why they were doing it. When he took office in 1933, he saw a nation ravaged by depression and ruin. Back then, stabilizing the banking, securities, real estate and labor systems seemed impossible. Restoring jobs while holding down ruinous inflation seemed impossible.
But Roosevelt also saw, beneath the dust, among broken cornstalks and idled coke furnaces, a resourceful people who could set things right if properly led.
“There are some who say that democracy cannot cope with the new technique of government developed in recent years by some countries—by a few countries which deny the freedoms that we maintain are essential to our democratic way of life,” he told Congress. “This I reject.”16
•
Franklin Roosevelt may have rejected the notion that democracy cannot cope with a totalitarian state, but the man charged with planning the next war saw a scale tipped heavily in Germany’s favor. In 1920, Congress had demobilized much of the Army, and the Great Depression nearly finished off what Congress did not. By 1939, when Hitler’s panzers rolled into Poland, America was a third-rate power. The Army consisted of fewer than 200,000 men, about a quarter of whom were fully trained. Counting men with modest National Guard training or doughboys of the First World War, America could scratch together perhaps 400,000 men who had marched in straight lines at one time or another.
Across the ocean, Germany boasted nearly seven million active and reserve soldiers, most of whom were veterans of campaigns in Poland, the Low Countries, and France. Goose-stepping alongside were another million Italians under dictator Benito Mussolini, veterans of Il Duce’s Ethiopian campaign.17
Even if the United States enlisted another million and a half men—putting the Army a scant five million behind Germany—those inductees would have nothing to fire, fly, or drive. For a generation, the business of America had been business. The America of 1940 excelled at making automobiles and ironing boards, Corn Flakes and Coca-Cola. Congressmen spent money on projects that would get them reelected, and there were few projects in the military budget that fit that sacred criterion. Electrical plants in Tennessee and dams in Nevada trumped range finders and dive-bombers on the great congressional shopping list.
Lacking reserves of ammunition and gasoline, the Army could scarcely drill its regulars, let alone equip the Guardsmen. The buck private of 1940 wore his father’s helmet, laced his father’s puttees, and shouldered his father’s 1903 Springfield rifle. On maneuvers, trucks played the part of tanks, flour bags replaced grenades, and telephone poles filled in for artillery. “My God, we were carrying some wooden machine guns and all kinds of damn mortars that were nothing but logs,” remembered Colonel Dwight Eisenhower, then a staffer with the Third Army. And Third Army was one of the lucky units.18
If the Army had one thing in its favor, it was a devoted core of well-educated officers. These middle-aged men formed a pyramid of regimental, divisional, corps, and army commanders. And on the apex of this pyramid stood one man whose job was to find the weapons, barracks, vehicles, and money his men needed to fight.
• • •
George Catlett Marshall was sworn in as the Army’s highest-ranking officer on the day German troops crossed into Poland. Distinguished-looking at fifty-nine, his ruddy face had not yet broken irretrievably with the handsome features of his youth. His reddish hair, now a mellowing silver, hadn’t retreated in disorder, and his sharp nose set off a prominent upper lip that gave way to a soft, kindly chin. In manner, he was respectful yet aloof, a straitlaced sphinx who let neither friendship nor enmity supplant his dispassionate judgment.
But when his ice-blue eyes found carelessness, sloth, or stupidity, his temper blazed like a howitzer barrage. He would usually bawl out the offending officer, or turn ice-cold, which, to the career officer, was worse. Marshall spent much of his adult life struggling to keep this lurking fire—a rage that physically rattled his heart—buried within his breast.19
Marshall’s intensity welled from an upper-middle-class childhood in Pennsylvania’s coal country. When he was a boy in the late nineteenth century, his family rode the ups and downs of Gilded Age capitalism from near-wealth to near-poverty. His sister remembered young George as an “ornery little boy” who dumped water buckets on her boyfriends and was apt to throw things like cake tins when he got mad. An indifferent student in high school, in the fall of 1897 Marshall decided to pursue a college education below the Mason-Dixon Line at Virginia Military Institute.20
Twenty years before Marshall’s birth, VMI students had rallied to the colors at the Battle of New Market, and ten cadets had given their lives for the Confederate cause. Southerners who idolized Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee took no liking to the lanky Pennsylvanian from a city called Uniontown. His Keystone State accent mad
e him a natural target for hazing, and officially overlooked abuse took on a vicious character early in his first, “rat” year. During his second week at school, a gang of upperclassmen forced him to squat over a naked bayonet until ordered to stop. He obeyed until his strength gave out and he sank down onto the blade, leaving a bloody gash on his upper thigh and buttock.
Yet Cadet Marshall said nothing to the school’s doctors who patched up his wound, and he kept his mouth closed to school investigators as well. His stoicism earned him a pass from hazing for the rest of the year, and during the next three years his military bearing evolved into a gentility worthy of a General Lee. Astute but not intellectual, he graduated fifteenth in a class of thirty-three. His self-discipline and strict adherence to regulations propelled him to first captain of his senior class, the institution’s highest cadet rank, setting him on the road to a lieutenant’s commission in the United States Army.
As a field soldier, Marshall marked time in common Old Army posts: the Philippines, China, the American West. But Marshall’s superiors recognized his potential as a staff officer, and the Army began limiting his time as a field commander. In 1918, as a staffer with the First U.S. Army, he carved out a reputation as an organizational genius. After the Armistice, he spent several happy postwar years with his beloved wife, Lily, in Washington, where he served as aide to General John “Black Jack” Pershing, America’s hero of the Great War.
Marshall’s bucolic life was shattered in 1927 when Lily died while recovering from a thyroid operation. Heartbroken, Marshall buried his grief by throwing himself into his work. At the Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, Marshall—now a colonel approaching fifty—led a drive to reform the school. He reorganized the infantry curriculum, improved living conditions for the school’s soldiers, and widened his circle of civilian and military acquaintances. One of those new acquaintances was the charismatic founder of the new Center for Infantile Paralysis at Warm Springs, just a few miles east of Benning: New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Another was Katherine Tupper Brown, a widow with three teenage children whom Marshall courted, then married in 1930.21
Three years later, the War Department placed Colonel Marshall in command of nineteen new Civilian Conservation Corps camps. The camps were part of a New Deal public works program to provide employment to young men by teaching them to plant trees, cut trails, and build erosion breaks in national forests. The job of training these young men was repugnant to most regular officers, but Marshall threw himself into the work. The CCC was an interesting, fresh assignment, and Marshall felt his work in training civilians to act in teams would help him diagnose and remedy the growing pains of a large citizen army that one day might be called to defend America’s shores.
By the late 1930s, Marshall, now a brigadier general, found himself back in Washington at the War Department. As head of the Army’s War Plans Department, then deputy chief of staff, Marshall completed his apprenticeship in that mysterious, fluctuating power known as Washington politics. Working the corridors of power in a double-breasted gray business suit, the one-star general meticulously courted legislators, journalists, and movers within the administration.*22
• • •
When the time came for the president to select the Army’s next chief of staff, few Washington insiders would have put money on the horse from Uniontown. For one thing, he was no politician. Marshall was terrible at remembering names, or pronouncing them correctly, and made a point of honor of refusing personal requests of senators and congressmen except when strictly merited.
Marshall also prided himself on straight talk, a practice repugnant to most politicians, including his commander-in-chief. At one White House meeting, FDR proposed a massive aircraft purchase program for the Army Air Corps. Far from being grateful, Marshall bluntly informed the president there was no point in buying planes when the Air Corps lacked pilots, mechanics, spare parts, training fields, and aerodromes to house and service them. Annoyed by the brigadier’s impudence, Roosevelt gave Marshall the cold shoulder and abruptly ended the meeting.
Disagreeing with the president should have ended Marshall’s career. But Marshall had won the backing of Harry Hopkins and the retired General Pershing, whose name commanded respect. The cadet who refused to rat out his upperclassmen had, over the years, built a reputation as honest, closemouthed, and loyal. So in April, FDR summoned him to the White House and told him he would become the Army’s next chief of staff.23
The prospect thrilled Marshall, but he kept his exuberance in check. Sitting before the president, Marshall warned Roosevelt that as chief of staff he would have to tell him unpleasant things from time to time.
“Is that all right?” asked Marshall.
“Yes,” said FDR pleasantly.
Marshall stared at him. “You said ‘yes’ pleasantly, but it may be unpleasant,” he warned.
Unpleasant advice was a condition Roosevelt felt he could live with, for he believed he could trust Marshall to follow orders and keep his mouth shut once a decision was made. “When I disapprove his recommendations,” he told Sam Rayburn, the powerful Speaker of the House, “I don’t have to look over my shoulder to see whether he is going to the Capitol to lobby against me.”
Four days later, President Roosevelt announced Marshall’s appointment as U.S. Army chief of staff, effective September 1, 1939.24
TWO
THREE MINUTES
THE DAGGERS OF WASHINGTON WERE EASILY MATCHED BY THE BAYONETS of Army politics.
Marshall was an old-style patriot, a D’Artagnan who served the Republic, not the party that happened to be in power at the moment. But he was not naive. To do his job effectively, the chief of staff had to be a lobbyist, accountant, lawyer, carnival barker, encyclopedia, and Wizard of Oz. He gave speeches to shore up the Army’s public support. He provided data to Congress and the White House on appropriations and other laws affecting the Army, which were often hot political potatoes. He answered to the secretary of war—a political appointee—whose bailiwick extended to politicized aspects of Army administration, such as weapon procurement and training camp construction.
And some of the time, he was a soldier.1
• • •
If the sinews of war are money, as Cicero claimed, in 1939 America’s sinews were thin and brittle. Congress had grown used to cutting Depression-era budgets, and in ten years Marshall’s paycheck had been cut twice. The Army had 188,656 officers, nurses, and enlisted men the year Marshall took the helm, making it a third the size of the Belgian or Romanian armies. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the legions of Hitler and Mussolini spread over Europe.2
To turn Congress around, Marshall spent the spring of 1940 testifying before appropriations subcommittees and buttonholing committee chairmen. “After the World War,” he told Congress, “practically everything was taken away from Germany in the way of materiel. So when Germany rearmed, it was necessary to produce a complete set of materiel for all the troops. As a result, Germany has an army equipped throughout with the most modern weapons that could be turned out, and that is a situation that has never occurred before in the history of the world.” He warned, “If Europe blazes in the late spring or summer, we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western Hemisphere.”
Now Europe was blazing.3
• • •
To put that house in order, Marshall first had to win over a president who was anxious to stop Hitler, but hesitated, in post-Depression times, to ask Congress to fork over big bales of cash to the military. Marshall, the outsider, would have to find the right way to approach Roosevelt to get things moving at the top.
The logical go-between, so far as the Constitution was concerned, was the secretary of war, Harry Woodring. But Woodring was one of Roosevelt’s isolationist cronies, and Roosevelt had better cronies for Marshall’s purposes. Bypassing Woodring, he made an appointment to see the secretary of th
e treasury.
Henry Morgenthau Jr., a Dutchess County neighbor of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, was one of FDR’s oldest friends. Lacking the financial cunning to take over his father’s real estate business, Henry Jr. took up farming. His friendship with Roosevelt was the rock upon which his fortunes rested, and when FDR was elected president in 1932, Morgenthau hoped his friend would appoint him secretary of agriculture. FDR appointed Henry Wallace, a prominent Iowan, to that spot, but not long afterward, his treasury secretary fell ill and was forced to resign. Roosevelt asked Morgenthau to fill the vacancy.
It did not matter to Roosevelt that, as Gladys Guggenheim Straus joked, he had managed to find “the only Jew in the world who doesn’t know a thing about money.” Roosevelt was used to pulling the important levers himself, and he saw Morgenthau, like Secretary of State Cordell Hull, as a figurehead—a fungible man whose basic loyalty ensured that the New Deal’s dogma would be zealously preached and observed.4
Morgenthau was also a man who could help Marshall.
On May 13, as Hitler’s panzers were crashing through France, Roosevelt summoned Morgenthau, Marshall, Budget Director Harold Smith, Secretary of War Woodring and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson to the Oval Office to discuss cuts in the Army’s $657 million appropriations request. Since Woodring was an isolationist, and Marshall had little influence with Roosevelt, it was up to the treasury secretary to convince Roosevelt to resist any further budget reductions.
Morgenthau made the Army’s pitch, but Roosevelt insisted on additional cuts. Morgenthau pressed his point, then argued with Roosevelt until the annoyed president cut him off. “I am not asking you, I am telling you,” he declared.
“Well, I still think you’re wrong,” huffed Morgenthau.
“Well, you’ve filed your protest,” said Roosevelt, signaling that the meeting was at an end.
American Warlords Page 3