George Marshall’s gravest concern of the war revolved around Overlord, the vast Allied amphibious invasion of Europe that almost everyone knew would be necessary for victory.* Not only was there constant friction with the British over the timing of the plan, but no one it seemed in the British government or its army could decide if they wanted to try it in the first place. The Americans had hoped to invade France in 1942, when the operation was code-named Sledgehammer, mainly to keep Russia in the war after Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin had warned his country might lose to the Nazis unless the Allies opened a “second front” to draw off German troops.
But the British, ever cautious, didn’t feel the Allies could concentrate enough strength at that period and British officials—principally Winston Churchill—talked Marshall out of Sledgehammer until it was abandoned. Instead, at Churchill’s behest the U.S. and British armies launched Torch, the amphibious invasion of North Africa to take Tunisia, drive the Axis from the Mediterranean, and secure the Suez Canal. The landings, as we know, were successful, with George Patton leading the American contingent, but operations then bogged down and, instead of reaching Tunisia in a matter of weeks, it was nearly a year before the Germans and Italians were forced to surrender.
While Torch played out, Marshall once more began pushing for the big Allied invasion across the English Channel—now code-named Roundup—but again he was thwarted by Churchill, who pressed instead for an Allied assault to clear Sicily of Axis forces. Roundup was shelved, and the invasion—now, and forever, code-named Overlord—was rescheduled for 1944. Marshall was determined there would be no more postponements.
Incidental to Overlord was the question of American strategic bombing, which also produced friction with British planners. Early in the war, the Royal Air Force began attacking Germany with its long-range bombers, but it was soon discovered that between enemy fighters and antiaircraft fire the British were losing planes at an alarming rate. They switched from daylight to nighttime bombing and insisted to the Americans that daylight bombing was doomed to failure. Marshall and his colleagues in the U.S. Army Air Forces disagreed. They claimed that the new U.S. B-17 “flying fortress” was so heavily armed—ten to twelve .50-caliber machine guns—and well armored that the heavy bomber could fight off most enemy planes.
The argument went on, with Churchill “paint[ing] such vivid pictures of the ghastly casualties in store” that the British were gaining the upper hand. Until the Casablanca Conference, that is, when Marshall summoned the U.S. Eighth Air Force commanding general Ira C. Eaker from England to come to Morocco. When Eaker’s plane arrived, air force commander Hap Arnold was waiting for him with news that they had lost the argument and the Eighth Air Force was going to have to fly its missions at night. Eaker asked for one last try and a meeting was arranged with Churchill.
“What torpedoed Churchill was a phrase,” according to William Frye, an early Marshall biographer. Churchill was a master phrasemaker, Frye explained, “and was vulnerable to them too.” Eaker had come up with a doozie: “Bombing around the clock,” with the Eighth Air Force by day and the RAF by night. Eaker asked the startled prime minister what could be better to put the Germans off balance. Churchill thought for a moment, and then roared, “You haven’t convinced me you can do it! But you have convinced me you ought to have a chance!”1
While the resulting bombing campaign might not have shortened the war, it certainly proved highly destructive to Germany; 160,000 Allied airmen were killed and 33,700 Allied planes were lost, but as a consequence the principal German cities were destroyed and the main German manufacturing plants wrecked. Yet, even so, the Germans fought futilely on.
AFTER SICILY FELL TO THE ALLIES came the question of whether to invade Italy. The dictator Mussolini had been deposed and he’d fled to Germany, and the Italians essentially surrendered to the Allies, but the Germans retained a strong military presence in Italy and Hitler was not disposed to give it up. Churchill and the British were all for invading Italy, partially on the notion of being able to bomb Germany from bases in the north once the Germans were evicted. Churchill even argued that the Allies might be able to send an army through Italy into southern Austria—his hoary strategy of attacking Germans through Europe’s “soft underbelly.”
The British, nevertheless, had a reason to proceed very carefully with any cross-Channel invasion of the French coast; in 1942 they sent a 7,000-man amphibious force, consisting mostly of Canadians, to assault the French village of Dieppe along Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The operation was a total disaster with half the men shot, drowned, or captured. Marshall, therefore, understood Britain’s reluctance to undertake a cross-Channel invasion, but he still believed that attacking the Germans in France was the most effective strategy. It was a constant worry of his that the British might again try to postpone Overlord, even though a hundred thousand American soldiers had poured into England, with more to come.
There was also reason to believe, however, that Churchill’s opposition to invading through France wasn’t purely rational. His personal physician informed Marshall, “You are fighting the dead on the Somme” (the 1916 battle in World War I in which 50,000 British soldiers were killed). The physician said Churchill thought half a million Allied soldiers would be lost invading France and that the English Channel would be “littered with floating bodies.” (Churchill had an obsession with the Channel, his doctor said.) Marshall came to believe that because of their horrendous experiences in the First World War the British simply did not want to fight in France—ever.
Still, as the proper time for Overlord approached, it was assumed that Marshall would personally command the operation—which would become the largest amphibious assault in the world. He had been in the army more than forty years and on only a handful of occasions had he commanded troops. There is no doubt that Marshall craved the assignment.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson had personally gone to Churchill in the summer of 1943 to secure his blessing for Marshall as commander. At first, Churchill was reluctant, not because he mistrusted Marshall’s abilities—“he regarded Marshall as the greatest military figure of the war”—but because he believed that he could do more good in his present position. Stimson weighed his options carefully, and during the Allied conference in Quebec in August, with Churchill’s blessing, he named Marshall commander of the greatest military operation of the war.
After the Marshall decision was made, highly placed individuals began discussing it “with long faces and shaking heads.” Admirals King and Leahy, and air force chief Hap Arnold—privately and separately—urged Roosevelt to reconsider the nomination. They argued that Marshall was too much needed as head of the Joint Chiefs. When Roosevelt asked King for an alternative, he replied, “Eisenhower is a natural.”
Others involved with the Joint Chiefs or with army affairs worked behind the scenes to scuttle Marshall’s assignment. A letter to the president signed by none other than the aged General of the Armies John J. Pershing warned that Marshall’s absence from Washington “would be a fundamental and very grave error in our military policy.”2
Marshall apparently knew nothing of these intrigues and never told a soul—unless it was Mrs. Marshall—how he felt about the issue, which came to a head several months later when Roosevelt sent for him.
The president wanted to know if Marshall thought he could better help the war effort by going to England for Overlord or by staying in Washington with the Joint Chiefs. Marshall demurred, telling Roosevelt that “personal preferences were of no account in war,” and that whatever the president’s decision it would be “all right.” That constituted one of the most selfless acts of the war and of Marshall’s career as well.3
AS THE WAR PROGRESSED, Marshall relentlessly contended with matters great and small. He was pleased with the way MacArthur was going about his business in the South Pacific but aggravated by his constant sniping at the navy, which Marshall feared would foster noncooperation between the services. MacArthur allowed reporters to hang around his headquarters and did not stoop to scruples in using them for his purposes. Stories would be printed charging that the navy had refused carrier escorts to one of MacArthur’s invasions, or that the navy was more worried about losing ships than winning the war. MacArthur wouldn’t necessarily say these things himself, but had allowed them to “leak” from one of his staff members.
Inevitably the stories would be printed in Honolulu newspapers, setting off Admiral Nimitz with a full head of steam; then Admiral King and others in Washington would receive angry cables and the whole thing would eventually wind up in Marshall’s lap. The chief of staff in turn sent MacArthur everything from polite requests that he refrain from criticizing his fellow service to stern reprimands, but it did no good. The sniping continued throughout the war and what in hell could Marshall do? Relieve MacArthur for talking to the press? MacArthur was a great hero to the American people and, most important, he was winning battles. There were limits to what a chief of staff could do, and first and foremost Marshall was for winning the war.
To make matters worse, MacArthur did not limit his depreciatory complaints to the navy but also often referred in the press to “that bunch in Washington,” usually Marshall and the War Department staff, but it could have included everything and everyone from Congress to the president himself. Supplies and ammunition were short, or defective, MacArthur complained, or the wrong kind was sent. MacArthur used the press as if it were a part of his command.
Despite the enormous pressure of his daily duties, Marshall was not above tackling the kinds of problems that could be handled at lower levels. Early in the war a rumor got back to Washington that U.S. fighter planes in MacArthur’s theater were taking a beating from the lighter and faster Japanese Zeros because the Japanese fighters could get above the American planes to shoot them down. Marshall was always keen on correcting those kinds of issues and dispatched an air force general to New Guinea with instructions to “talk to the individual pilots, and the first thing you tell them is that if there is anything they want done to their planes, I will have it done.”4
In fact, when he first learned of the problem, Marshall had ordered one type of plane in the United States stripped of everything to get its weight down, but it was found that the greatest item of weight that could be safely removed was the armor plate around the cockpit seat. When Marshall’s emissary met with the pilots and gave them the option of removing the armor and weighing similar to the enemy Zero they turned it down. “Their clamor out there,” Marshall said, “boiled down to one thing—they wanted girls. I sent word to the pilots that I was sympathetic, but I couldn’t supply them with girls.”5
There were other headaches. Malaria was a constant issue in the southwestern Pacific, particularly for air corps ground crews who had to work throughout the night on the planes to keep them in flying condition. Toiling under electric lights and without mosquito netting, they were either eaten alive by mosquitos or beginning to turn yellow from “terrible doses of Atabrine” (a malaria preventive, taken as a pill). The pilots were afraid that the mechanics “were so dopey they weren’t certain they were putting in the cotter pins and things of that sort,” Marshall said. When this came to his attention, it was evident to Marshall that these men would have to be relieved first and sent back to recuperate, but the snag was that the staff had not anticipated such problems and were training far too few mechanics and ground service crews as replacements.
The subject of replacements wasn’t of course limited only to mechanics. Marshall always tried to keep his units up to full strength, he said, for morale as well as for fighting purposes. In one instance, fighter pilots flying out of England and other theaters of the war needed to have replacements in a way that kept the mess table always full. “If they fail to come in” (meaning they were shot down), “the [replacement] had to take their place because to sit down and find half the mess table empty was very depressing to the men.”6
PATTON HAD FOR MUCH OF HIS CAREER been a trial to his superiors and his behavior continually aggrieved Marshall—the more so because he knew Patton and liked him. He’d known him in World War I, roomed with him at Fort Myer, sailed with him on the Chesapeake, and written in his little black book that “Patton will take a unit through hell and high water.”
“Give him an armored corps when one becomes available,” he’d added. “But keep a tight rope around his neck.” Marshall thought Patton was one of the finest, brightest tacticians in the army and had great admiration for his ability to whip a body of troops into shape. But slapping an enlisted soldier—and a hospital patient to boot—was outrageous. It appeared to Patton that Eisenhower and Marshall were deliberately letting him wither on the vine, with his Seventh Army being dismantled piece by piece—some units going to Mark Clark’s Fifth Army in Italy, others to England to prepare for Overlord.
In fact, the Allies had concocted various ruses under the code name Operation Fortitude to mislead the Germans about where and when the Overlord invasion would occur, and Patton figured prominently in these schemes. Eisenhower, meanwhile, was content to keep Patton guessing as to what his role in the great invasion, if any, would be.
First, Patton was sent around the Mediterranean areas, including the island of Corsica, ostensibly for ceremonial purposes but the notion was to make the Germans believe his presence signified an Allied invasion somewhere in that region. When Patton was finally called to England in January 1944, Eisenhower told him he was going to command the U.S. Third Army, as yet on its way to England.
Meanwhile, due to his prestigious military reputation among the German High Command, Patton was given the additional assignment of commanding the First Army Group, a purely fictitious entity under Operation Fortitude, designed to fool the Nazis into thinking the Allies were preparing to invade France at the Pas-de-Calais—the shortest distance between England and France—in mid-July 1944. The actual invasion was to take place several hundred miles south, and a month earlier, on the Normandy coast.
The First Army Group consisted of several imaginary field armies, complete with bogus radio traffic and dummy landing craft at English ports close to Calais. Soon after its formation, Allied intelligence in the form of ULTRA—the British code-breaking project corresponding to the United States’ MAGIC operation in the Pacific—revealed that the Germans were swallowing the bait and that Field Marshal Rommel was holding his 15th Panzer Army in the Pas-de-Calais in anticipation of an invasion by Patton.
Patton played along, making his presence known in the small town of Knutsford, England, where the Third Army was headquartered, and where he committed a political indiscretion that nearly did him in.
On April 25, scarcely six weeks before Overlord was to commence, at the behest of the British Ministry of Information Patton made an appearance at a club for women, whose purpose it was to welcome American soldiers. It was not his intention to speak but merely to be present to acknowledge the group for helping entertain his men.
When Patton arrived three press photographers were waiting for him outside wanting to take his picture. He agreed, remarking that he was there unofficially and stipulating that the pictures could not be published, to which the photographers agreed. After several introductions and addresses, a Miss Foster Jeffery, head of the British Women’s Volunteer Services, suddenly turned to Patton and asked him to “say a few words.” Then a Mrs. Smith arose and introduced him, reminding the audience of about two hundred that he was there unofficially and his “presence was not to be disclosed.”
Thus on the hook, Patton took to the stage and began telling the audience:
Until today, my only experience in welcoming has been to welcome Germans and Italians to the “Infernal Regions.” In this I have been quite successful …
I feel that clubs such as this are of very real value, because I believe with Mr. Bernard Shaw, I think it was he, that the British and Americans are two people separated by a common language, and since it is the evident destiny of the British and Americans, and of course the Russians, to rule the world, the better we know each other, the better job we will do.
A club such as this is an ideal place for making such acquaintances and for promoting mutual understanding. Also, as soon as our soldiers meet, and get to know the English ladies, and write home and tell our women how truly lovely you are, the sooner the American ladies will get jealous and bring this war to a quick termination, and I will have the chance to go to the Pacific and kill Japanese.7
Several lengthy speeches ensued, followed by the singing of “God Save the King” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” after which Patton departed. The next day all hell broke loose.
Around noon, Eisenhower’s headquarters reached Patton asking what he had said about the Americans and British ruling the world. Patton replied that he had included the Russians, but apparently some British newspapers had omitted that part. It was certain to create a great commotion within the suspicious Soviet Union.
Worse, the British Press Association had released the story on the wire where it was immediately picked up by practically every newspaper in the United States and given front-page play. It didn’t help much when the BPA later issued a correction including “the Russians” in Patton’s address. The damage had been done.
Marshall had cabled Eisenhower that American newspapers were carrying “lurid” stories about Patton’s speech, and that official Washington was in an uproar. It was the business about “ruling the world” that inspired the most reactionary outrage. A senator from South Dakota denounced Patton for “stepping out of bounds” in overriding diplomatic prerogatives. Letters to the editor poured in condemning Patton as a “Fascist” and for being “insulting to other nationalities.” Newspaper editorials widely pronounced Patton’s remarks “irresponsible.” One described Patton as “Chief-foot-in-Mouth” and a congressman even compared him to Hitler.8
Coming on the heels of the slapping incident, Patton’s latest gaffe became vastly overblown, and the Senate even held up his confirmation for promotion to the regular army rank of major general. A livid Eisenhower again sought Marshall’s consent to fire Patton, and once more it was tactfully refused. The chief of staff told the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe that if he felt Overlord could succeed without Patton then he was free to relieve him. However, if he had any doubts about Overlord not succeeding in Patton’s absence, he ought to keep him. Then Marshall pointed out “the unmistakable fact that Patton is the only available Army commander for his present assignment [Third Army] who has actual experience in fighting Rommel and in extensive landing operations followed by a land campaign of rapid exploitation.”9
Eisenhower’s reaction to this heavy hint was to call Patton onto the carpet and then let him stew for several weeks worrying whether Eisenhower or Marshall was going to fire him. Though he had already made the final decision on his fate, the notion of Patton dangling in perdition for all the trouble he had caused gave Ike no small amount of satisfaction. Knowing full well how Patton craved battle, and most especially this one, it was the cruelest cut of all and, evidenced in his personnel correspondence, Patton suffered grievously.
To his daughter Ruth Ellen Totten, Patton wrote, “Jesus only suffered one night but I have had months and months of it, and the cross is not yet in sight, though probably just around the corner. At least I have the When and If [his eighty-three-foot sailing schooner].” And to Beatrice he said, “My final thought on the matter is that I am destined to achieve some great thing—what, I don’t know …”
It wasn’t until the following week that Patton received a telegram from Eisenhower: “I have decided to keep you … Go ahead and train your army.” Patton immediately wrote back, thanking Eisenhower, and to his diary said, “He [Ike] called up in person and was very nice. Sometimes I am very fond of him, and this is one of the times.”
Two days later Patton wrote a paper on the use of armored divisions and told his diary, “I have completely gotten back in the swing of things, thank God.”10
Eisenhower had warned Patton about saying anything publicly, which Patton initially interpreted as forbidding him to speak openly even to his infantry and armored divisions. When that was straightened out he made a series of speeches to these units as they arrived in Great Britain, telling them, among other things, “DO NOT TAKE COUNSEL OF YOUR FEARS.” To his officers Patton said, “The only worry I have about this show is how I’m going to get the Army across [the English Channel] and assembled on the other side. For the fighting I have no worry.” He’d instructed his commanders to visit the front daily, to observe, not to meddle, that issuing an order is only 10 percent of the problem—the rest is ensuring it is properly carried out—and to visit their wounded personally and frequently.
An army historian noted that Patton rarely cursed when speaking to his staff but was highly profligate with military billingsgate for the edification of his troops. He talked their turkey and they loved him for it. He would make speeches to division-size audiences—20,000 to 30,000 men, who would gather in a sea of brown uniforms before a stage decorated with bunting and an army band playing martial marches and popular tunes. “His speeches became galas in themselves,” writes biographer Carlo D’Este, noting that Patton would arrive in a black Mercedes driven by a sergeant behind an MP escort with sirens blaring.
“He would emerge in his buff-and-dark-green uniform, helmet, and highly shined cavalry boots, and march through the crowd to the front of the platform,” from which he intoned such sentiments as “A man must be alert at all times. If not, some German sonofabitch will sneak up behind him and beat him to death with a sockful of shit!” The men roared and clapped and slapped their thighs. One of his more famous speeches went:
Everyone has a job to do. Every man serves the whole. The Ordnance is needed to supply the guns. The Quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us, for where we are going there’s not a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man in the mess hall, even the guy that heats the water to keep us from getting diarrhea, has a role to play. Even the Chaplain is important, for if we get killed and he is not there to bury us we would all go to hell. We don’t want yellow cowards in the army. They should be killed off like flies. If not, they will go back home after the war, goddamn cowards, and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. One of the bravest men I saw in the African campaign was the man I saw on a telegraph pole in the midst of furious fire … I stopped and asked him what in hell he was doing up there and he answered “Fixing the wire, Sir.”
“Isn’t it a little unhealthy up there right now?” I asked.
“Yes sir, but this goddamn wire has got to be fixed.”
That was a real soldier … I’m not even supposed to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. Some day I want them to raise up on their hind legs and howl “Jesus Christ, it’s that goddamn Third Army and that goddamn sonofabitch Patton again!”
The troops ate it up and when he’d finished one had the impression, according to numerous accounts, that to the last man they would have followed him to hell and back.11
A WEEK BEFORE THE ALLIES’ ARMADA embarked for Normandy, Marshall returned to his home on General’s Row at Fort Myer with an expression of deep sorrow on his face. He had come to tell Mrs. Marshall that her son, Second Lieutenant Allen Tupper Brown, had died that morning as his tank unit moved toward Rome.
Allen was Marshall’s favorite stepson. He had volunteered for the army even though he was married with a young son, and he graduated from the Armored School at Fort Knox. He had survived the bitterest fighting in North Africa, Sicily, and in Italy around Monte Cassino. He was approaching the Alban Hills when a German sniper’s bullet struck him in the head as he rose up with binoculars through the turret of his tank.12
“He came in, closing the door behind him,” Mrs. Marshall wrote years afterward, “and told me Allen was dead. He had given his life … in a tank battle on the road to Rome.”
In one of his last letters Allen had written his wife, “Today is a beautiful day. It is warm out and the feel of spring is in the air. It is hard to believe that men are killing and being killed all around us. The noise of the artillery is a reminder, however, and no matter how beautiful it is, it is bound to be a sad day for many people as it is every day of this war.”13
Marshall was heartbroken, but with Overlord looming on the horizon he made every effort to block the family tragedy from his thoughts.
OVERLORD GOT OFF TO A DUBIOUS START when Eisenhower, on June 4, postponed the invasion scheduled for the following day. Despite continued threatening weather on June 5, Marshall’s office was notified that the invasion was on for June 6. It was a terribly agonizing condition for old-time sailors who knew the English Channel. They shook their heads and clamped their jaws at the prospect of landing in high winds and surf. But the weather forecaster had told Eisenhower there was reason to hope for a brief period of calmer weather between approaching fronts.
Marshall notified Secretary Stimson of the decision and went to bed. He has left no record of his reactions, although one might assume he would have been a bit wistful, knowing that the greatest command in history had eluded him. He got up the next day as he always did and went to the office where messages from Ike began informing him that the operation apparently was successful. To cap it off, the previous day, Mark Clark’s army had marched into Rome.
Marshall, along with Arnold and King, chiefs of the air force and navy, respectively, decided to fly to England the day after Overlord to be on hand in case anything went wrong, and also one might fairly suspect to at least get a look at this greatest of all invasions—the one they had argued over, planned over, sweated over, and often anguished over—that would anticipate the liberation of Europe and the end of the war.
Once in England, on June 8, the American service chiefs briefed their counterparts on the British general staff as to their plans for the rest of the war, including Pacific operations. It was also then decided to dust off the long-shelved Operation Anvil (its new code name: Dragoon), a plan to invade southern France along its Mediterranean coast. Its aim was to both further confuse the Germans about Allied intentions and employ the more than 250,000 Free French soldiers currently languishing in North Africa.
The American chiefs joined the ebullient Prime Minister Winston Churchill in his private train for an expedition to the battlefront. That night as the train chugged toward Portsmouth, the chiefs enjoyed a sumptuous dinner in the prime minister’s dining car where they celebrated Overlord with many toasts of champagne.
At Portsmouth they were met by a glowing Eisenhower and split up for the Channel crossing—the Englishmen boarding a Royal Navy destroyer that would carry them to the British zone (where Churchill insisted he was going to take a shot at the enemy) and the Americans boarding the USS Thompson to take them to the U.S. Army sector of Normandy. Once on French soil, the distinguished visitors were greeted by General Omar Bradley, who had been chosen to command the ground forces of Overlord. It was George Marshall’s first return to France since he’d left it twenty-five years earlier as an aide to General Pershing, when they said their goodbyes to Field Marshal Foch and his staff.
From the beaches, the party moved inland past a large sobering temporary cemetery where at least a portion of the several thousand Americans killed in action had been lain. One of Marshall’s aides carried a bag full of medals with which to decorate men for acts of bravery. Having served in World War I he recognized the value of high-ranking general officers going among the fighting troops and personally presenting honors for acts beyond the call of duty.
It was hot and dusty and the roads were crammed with thousands of American soldiers, German prisoners, and vehicles—tanks, trucks, jeeps, ambulances filled with wounded and dead—in a continuous stream going to and from the battle area. This was the bewildering “flow of battle,” which, as biographer Pogue points out, “could never be envisaged by use of even the most sophisticated visual aids in the Pentagon.”
It was not long before General Bradley called a halt to the proceeding, stressing the catastrophe that just a single German sniper could cause, and took everyone to his headquarters in an old apple orchard where they lunched al fresco on army C-rations washed down by water in tin canteen cups.
Marshall cabled Roosevelt that “Conditions on the beachhead are generally favorable.” The German army, he said, did not appear able to launch a counterattack of any consequence, at least for “some days to come.” He commended the morale of the troops and their officers and was especially impressed with the confidence and aggressive attitude of the commanders. Overall, he told the president, he was highly impressed with the development of “a remarkable scale of efficiency.”
AFTER TWO WEEKS IN ENGLAND, Marshall visited the Italian front where Fifth Army commander General Mark Clark gave him a tour of the battle area, then a hundred miles north of Rome along roads littered with the twisted and burned remains of German vehicles, tanks, and guns. Approaching the town of Grosseto, close to the fighting front, the windshield on Marshall’s jeep was lowered “to avoid reflecting the sun which would have attracted the attention of the Germans.”
Near the end of his trip, Marshall took time to visit the gravesite of his stepson Allen. It lay near the flagpole on the main pathway through the seven-thousand-grave cemetery. Afterward he took a small plane and flew low over the terrain where Allen had been killed. With the help of Clark, he met with a lieutenant who had been in the tank immediately behind Allen’s, and with the driver and gunner of Allen’s tank. The lieutenant produced Allen’s map, “a much rumpled paper with the various lines and objectives noted in crayon.”
Using the map, the lieutenant described Allen’s last battle in detail. Still not satisfied, the general again took a plane and, using the map, had the pilot circle slowly at 300 feet above the scene of the action, which lay about twenty miles southeast of Rome. That done, he returned to Rome and wrote Allen’s widow of three weeks that he had both visited the gravesite and been able to pinpoint the place where her husband fell. It wasn’t much, but it was something he alone could do in wartime; other widows hadn’t even that small comfort and grieved never knowing where their loved ones had fallen.
AFTER A MONTH OF TERRIFIC FIGHTING, the Allies broke out of their bridgehead in Normandy and, led by the U.S. Army, began to sweep across France with breathtaking success. In the Mediterranean, Operation Dragoon was successfully launched as well, spearheaded by the U.S. Seventh Army and an army of Free French, which fought its way up the valley of the Rhône, clearing southern France of Germans and linking up with the main Allied force near Paris.
Meanwhile, the Russians, who had been so badly tried by the German attack in 1942, had reversed their fate and were now counterattacking all along the Eastern Front. All of this as Allied bombers continued to reduce German cities, including the capital, Berlin, to rubble.
As the Allies were clearing the last Germans out of France, in the Pacific Douglas MacArthur had made good on his promise to return to the Philippines, having established a bridgehead on Leyte, in the middle of the archipelago. Marshall was profoundly satisfied with these developments, for all the hard work and burning of midnight oil seemed at last to be paying off after the years of consternation, disappointment, and fret.
Just as Marshall was feeling good about the progress of the war, however, a bugaboo arose to once again break him into a sweat. The Allies in Europe—particularly the American armies—had raced across France so quickly they had outrun their supplies.
Toward the end of September, Field Marshal Montgomery launched Operation Market Garden, in which a large part of his army—including 41,000 paratroopers—aimed for the town of Arnhem in Holland to secure a bridgehead across the Rhine into Germany.
But stronger-than-expected German defenses and overstretched supply lines caused the operation to be aborted with 17,000 Allied casualties. In turn, Eisenhower had been compelled to halt the powerful American offensive led by Omar Bradley in order to transfer supplies—principally tank fuel—to the British. This left everyone in a huff, especially George S. Patton, whose Third Army was spearheading the drive.
To see what could be done, in October, Marshall made another trip to the fighting front. On the seventh, he visited Patton after having his pilot fly low over the World War I battlefields in the Meuse-Argonne sector. Patton was straining at the leash with no fuel, no replacements, and a lack of other supplies; Marshall soothed him, saying these would arrive all in good time, and the meeting was amicable. When Marshall got to the British headquarters, however, Bernard Montgomery was in a snit.
He complained about Eisenhower’s running of the war, saying Eisenhower had gotten his army “into a real mess.” Marshall later stated to an interviewer that he “came pretty close to blowing off out of turn,” and he condemned the field marshal’s “overwhelming egotism.”
Marshall couldn’t accomplish the impossible and the war would have to wait until the reinforcements and supplies caught up with it. To a friend, General Frank McCoy, he highlighted his trip: “I went through five armies, army corps, sixteen divisions, and also saw the commanders and staffs of eight other Divisions.” After returning to the United States he informed Beatrice Patton that her husband “looked in splendid health and in fine fettle and full of fight.”14
MACARTHUR, HAVING JUST INVADED LEYTE, wrote Marshall asking for more supplies for the Pacific, adding, “These frontal attacks by the Navy [marines], as at Tarawa, are tragic and unnecessary massacres of American lives.” Marshall agreed but it was a navy decision. As the two American prongs of the road to Tokyo began to intersect, new dangers arose. Combat planes from Japanese-held islands could reach out farther than the planes from U.S. carriers but, again, it was the navy’s problem to solve.
In June, the navy nearly annihilated the fast carrier fleet of Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa, sinking three Japanese aircraft carriers and downing more than five hundred enemy planes. As a consequence, MacArthur wanted to take his invasion force north to attack the big island of Luzon, location of Manila, the Philippine capital, as well as 250,000 Japanese soldiers. He had come this far, so Marshall gave MacArthur the nod.
In Europe that December the Germans launched a surprise, all-out attack on Eisenhower’s army in the Ardennes Forest on the Belgium-Luxembourg border that threatened to split the Allied armies in two. After a week of ferocious fighting, however, the Germans were forced to withdraw. Three months later, the Americans crossed the Rhine into Germany with astonishing success, capturing more than 350,000 enemy soldiers in the Ruhr. That broke the back of German resistance in the West and, led by the armies of Patton and General Courtney Hodges, the Americans pushed into central and southern Germany with unparalleled speed.
Meanwhile, the Soviet army was overrunning German forces in Poland and eastern Germany in its advance toward Berlin and Prague, leaving in its wake an orgy of rape, looting, and other unmilitary marauding violence.
The question of postwar politics now became intense. The British asked Eisenhower for permission to seize Berlin before the Soviets arrived there. Churchill, in particular, was highly suspicious of the motives of Soviet Premier Stalin, believing the Russians were anxious to acquire the formerly Nazi-occupied countries to enhance the spread of international communism. But Eisenhower refused, and Marshall agreed with him on grounds that such operations were political, unjustified, and that the focus of the Allied armies should be first to put the German war manufacturing enterprises out of business. In the meantime, the Soviets were establishing tightly held “zones of occupation” in the conquered countries, leaving no doubt that they intended to grab as much land as possible.
For Germany, it was only a matter of time. Most of the vast Nazi empire that had stretched from the English Channel to the outskirts of Moscow had been reconquered and the German economy was wrecked. Three and a half million German soldiers had been killed thus far. The principal German cities lay in rubble from the Allied bombing campaign, and a million and a half civilians were dead. Still, Hitler had vowed to fight to the death.
Even this was becoming nearly impossible after the Allies captured the Romanian oil fields that had fed the Nazi war machine. Allied intelligence noted an increased use of horses and cattle as dray animals by German soldiers at the fighting fronts.
That suited the U.S. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. just fine. For his part, Morgenthau was recommending to Roosevelt that Germany be turned into a permanent agrarian enterprise policed by the Allied powers, with no significant manufacturing of any sort—a land of grain farmers and goatherds—the better to ensure there would be no repeat of Nazi-style rule.
BACK IN THE PACIFIC, MacArthur was charging into the Philippine Islands to establish bases from which U.S. planes could attack Japan directly. At the same time, navy task forces were driving westward across the ocean, closing in on Japan, expelling enemy military forces from the islands that would also be used by the Allies as permanent, unsinkable aircraft carriers.
Like the Germans, the Japanese were severely handicapped by a lack of oil after the Allies had cut off the petroleum supply from the East Indies. And like the Germans, all major Japanese cities were in ruins from Allied bombing. Trade was nonexistent and the Japanese economy was exhausted. Two million soldiers were dead as were several hundred thousand civilians. But again, like the Germans, the Japanese leaders refused to surrender and vowed to be wiped out to the last man—and woman—as a matter of national honor.
The Allies had come a long, hard way since the early 1940s. George Marshall, as U.S. Army chief of staff, had shepherded the tremendous effort with what would later be regarded as a calculated ease, although it was anything but.
Now he was on the crest of a great victory, with the Allied armies on the outskirts of the enemies’ homeland. The two predator nations lay like wounded, exhausted beasts in their lairs—panting, furious, ferocious, and on their own terrain, their sacred soil. The trick now, Marshall knew, was a final conquest without the terrific bloodbath that both Axis nations had vowed in spades.
* Some high officers in both the U.S. and British air forces believed that Germany could be brought to its knees by heavy bombing of its cities and industrial sites.