1

THE WPD

“We must take great risks….”

“I agree with you. Do your best to save them….”¹

ON THE MORNING OF December 12, 1941, less than one week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dwight Eisenhower received a telephone call on the Third Army’s direct telephone line linking San Antonio to Washington.² On the other end was Eisenhower’s friend, Colonel Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, an assistant at the War Department. “Is that you Ike?” Smith asked. Eisenhower was pleased to hear from his old friend and the two exchanged pleasantries. Then Smith got to the point: “The Chief says for you to hop a plane and get up here right away,” he said brusquely. “Tell your boss that formal orders will come through later.”³ Eisenhower could hardly hide his disappointment. He had missed World War I and then, over the next two decades, was unceremoniously shuttled from one staff position to another. Like every other Army officer, Eisenhower wanted to train and command soldiers, but the opportunity never seemed to come.

Eisenhower’s most agonizing years were spent in the Far East, where he served for five years as “assistant to the military advisor, Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands.” That was a fancy title for serving as the “horse holder” for General Douglas MacArthur, one of the most disagreeable, self-centered, blustering—and brilliant—commanders in the Army. Now, Eisenhower believed, he would be just another one of the innumerable staff assistants in Washington, no more than a “good second” to yet another senior commander or, worse still, “an assistant to an assistant,” even though this time he would be serving the highest-ranking officer in the military—Army Chief of Staff George Catlett Marshall. “Heavy-hearted,” he later recalled, “I telephoned my wife to pack a bag, and within an hour I was headed for the War Department.”⁴

Eisenhower’s commander in San Antonio, the sixty-one-year-old Prussian-born Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, was not surprised by Smith’s call. Krueger, a veteran of both the Spanish-American War and World War I (he had enlisted as a private in 1901), had constantly urged Eisenhower on his colleagues among the senior American leadership, citing his strategic intuition, his willingness to take chances, and his intangible battle instincts.⁵ Just months before, in August 1941, Krueger’s Third Army (the “blue” force) had “destroyed” Lieutenant General Ben Lear’s Second Army (the “red” force) in a series of war games called “the Louisiana Maneuvers,” a field exercise involving tens of thousands of men in nineteen divisions that was monitored closely by Marshall.⁶ The Third Army’s plan was drawn up by Eisenhower, whose bold use of infantry blunted Lear’s armored columns (commanded by Eisenhower’s old friend, tank commander George Patton), pinned them against the Red River, then cut them off from their source of supplies.⁷ The Louisiana Maneuvers were a victory for the irascible Krueger, but the plan was Eisenhower’s.⁸ In their wake, Marshall culled the senior military ranks of those who he deemed had done poorly in Louisiana and promoted those who had done well. Over the next months, literally dozens of senior officers were retired by Marshall, and younger men were moved up in the ranks, including Eisenhower, who became Brigadier General Eisenhower.⁹

While disappointed with Smith’s call from Washington, Eisenhower was relieved that he was at least being given a senior position. Over the years he had seen many of his closest friends take on important assignments while he remained in the background, marginalized or shunted aside. Always, it seemed to him, his requests for a command were somehow ignored, while his closest colleagues were rewarded with the best assignments. While Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, J. Lawton Collins, George Patton, Joe McNarney, “Beetle” Smith, Carl Spaatz, Lucien K. Truscott, and Nathan Twining were charged with training and commanding actual infantry units or rising quickly in the increasingly important Army Air Corps, Eisenhower was busy writing reports or accompanying older and more senior luminaries.¹⁰ Even those in the West Point classes behind him were being promoted faster. Among those now being considered as commanders of combat units were a large number of Eisenhower’s personal friends, many of whom had actually been praising Eisenhower’s abilities—including a lieutenant general named Leonard T. Gerow.

“Gee” Gerow was the head of the War Department’s War Plans Division, the WPD. The WPD was Marshall’s in-house think tank for designing America’s war strategy. Along with Krueger, Gerow had been pressing Marshall to bring Eisenhower to Washington. He knew that Marshall had been impressed with Eisenhower when he first met him in Washington, back in 1930. The Marshall-Eisenhower meeting came about after General John Pershing, the then-head of the American Battle Monuments Commission, asked Eisenhower, who was serving as his assistant, to read and comment on a part of his memoirs, which were based on his personal World War I diaries. Eisenhower read what Pershing had written and suggested that the general abandon the diary style he had adopted in telling about two of the key battles involving American forces in France. Eisenhower advised Pershing to tell about the battle “as seen from his position as the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces.”¹¹ Pershing was not overjoyed with Eisenhower’s recommendation, but he agreed with his criticism. He asked Eisenhower to rewrite the chapters. Eisenhower agreed to do so, and Pershing passed them on to Marshall. Marshall read Eisenhower’s work and huddled with Pershing when Marshall came to Washington. Eisenhower was not invited to the meeting.

“When his conference with the General was done, he [Marshall] came out through my office,” Eisenhower recalled. “For the first time in my life, I met George Marshall. He did not sit down but remarked that he had read over my chapters. ‘I think they’re very interesting. Nevertheless, I advised General Pershing to stick with his original idea. I think to break up the format right at the climax of the war would be a mistake.’”¹² Eisenhower smiled, nodded, but politely disagreed with Marshall. He understood very clearly that continuity was important in the kind of book that Pershing was writing, he said to Marshall. But then he added: “I still think that each of the two battles ought to be treated as a single narrative with the proper annotations to give it authenticity.” Marshall thought about this, but he would not let Eisenhower have the last word: Eisenhower’s idea was good, he said, but General Pershing was happy with his original way of handling the material. Eisenhower nodded and there was a silence. Later in his life, reflecting on the meeting, Eisenhower noted that Marshall did not smile during their conversation and never again mentioned the meeting to him—though there were plenty of opportunities to do so.¹³

There is a sense of puzzlement in Eisenhower’s later reflections on this first meeting with Marshall, an intangible yet uncomfortable feeling that somehow something had gone wrong. Indeed, while it is clear that Marshall regularly rewarded disagreement among subordinates, there can be little doubt that he did not welcome Eisenhower’s views on the Pershing book. It may well have been that Marshall could brook no criticism, implied or direct, of a commander he so deeply admired.¹⁴ Whatever the reason for their obvious discomfort, it was as if this first meeting between the two set the tone for their future relationship. For while Marshall and Eisenhower were to forge a close and successful partnership, an unbreakable professional kinship, neither man would ever have claimed they were close friends.

That was hardly unusual for Marshall. He maintained a strictly cordial relationship with all of his fellow officers, and not just with those whom he outranked. This had nothing to do with Eisenhower, as Marshall’s approach to his colleagues was always strictly and purposely professional, sometimes to the point of being rude. “I have no feelings except those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall,” Marshall once said. And while the first meeting between Marshall and Pershing’s assistant may have been tepid or uncomfortable, it did not keep Marshall from inviting Eisenhower to join his staff at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Eisenhower turned down the invitation, but only because he already had his orders. Nor did the meeting keep Marshall from putting Eisenhower’s name in his famous little black book, alongside the names of other promising officers, such as Mark Clark, George Patton, and Omar Bradley.¹⁵ Even so, it was luck as much as purpose that eventually made the Army chief decide that he wanted Eisenhower on his staff: Marshall was planning to give Gerow a field command and promote a young colonel to replace him, but at the last minute the colonel unexpectedly died. Marshall told Smith to give Eisenhower a call.

 

EISENHOWER ARRIVED at Union Station in Washington on the morning of December 14 and was met by his brother Milton. Milton wanted to take Ike to his home in Virginia, but Eisenhower had no intention of keeping Marshall waiting and had Milton drive him the short distance to Marshall’s office in the Old Munitions Building, an unsightly concrete-and-glass behemoth that bestrode the National Mall facing the White House. Eisenhower waited in Marshall’s outer office for only a minute before being admitted. Marshall barely looked up. He spoke in clipped sentences: The U.S. military position in the Pacific was dire. American forces in the Philippines were in danger of being overrun and at least half of the U.S. Navy was at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. The U.S. lacked men and matériel. Training facilities were in short supply and America’s supply lines were stretched to the breaking point. Everywhere, the powers of Germany and Japan were on the march. The situation was bad and bound to get worse. “We have got to do our best in the Pacific and we’ve got to win this whole war,” Marshall said. He looked bluntly at Eisenhower, unsmiling, his face set. “Now, how are we going to do it?” Eisenhower hesitated for only a moment: “Give me a few hours.”¹⁶

Eisenhower was greeted outside Marshall’s office by Gerow, the deputy chief of staff for war plans, now Eisenhower’s new boss. The two old friends had been students together in 1927 at the Army War College, then located in Washington. In that era, Ike and Mamie Eisenhower and Gee and Katie Gerow had been part of an informal and movable social club of Army officers and their wives that was dubbed “Club Eisenhower.” The group included (depending on their assignments) George and Beatrice Patton, Mark and Maureen Clark, and a CBS executive, Harry “Butch” Butcher, and his wife, Ruth, among others.¹⁷ Like Marshall, Gerow had seen combat in World War I and was known for his exacting staff work. And like Marshall, Gerow was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. But there the similarities ended: the soft-spoken Gerow seemed oddly out of place among Marshall’s more vocal staff deputies; was exhausted by the sixteen to eighteen hours he had spent in his office each day since the Japanese attack; and he seemed distinctly uncomfortable, even intimidated, by the chief of staff.¹⁸ Gerow was hoping that his old friend Eisenhower would lift some of his burden.

After telling Gerow about his meeting with Marshall, Eisenhower was shown to a desk and provided with a pen and several sheets of yellow copy paper. Eisenhower stared at the paper, and his thoughts turned to his old mentor, the imposing and unflappable Fox Conner, under whom he had served in the Panama Canal Zone for two years in the early 1920s. Conner was responsible for Eisenhower’s military education, liberally sharing his library of military treatises with the young major and unceremoniously shearing the military essays he assigned him to write of unnecessary ornamentation. All but forgotten now, Conner was one of America’s greatest military thinkers and the man responsible for shaping Marshall’s and Eisenhower’s approach to warfare. “In the new war we will have to fight beside allies,” Connor had told Eisenhower, “and George Marshall knows more about the techniques of arranging allied commands than any man I know.”¹⁹ Eisenhower admired Conner, who had also served as one of George Marshall’s mentors and whom he described to Eisenhower as “a genius.” Eisenhower stared at his blank sheet of paper and thought for only a moment more: What George Marshall wanted, he decided, was a paper that was “short, emphatic, and based on reasoning in which I honestly believed. No oratory, plausible argument, or glittering generality would impress anyone entitled to be labeled [a] genius by Fox Conner.”²⁰

Eisenhower headed the paper “Assistance to the Far East,” and then under “Steps to be Taken” he began his narrative: “Build up Australia, a base of operations from which supplies and personnel (air and ground types) can be moved into the Philippines. Speed is essential.” Next: “Influence Russia to enter the war.” Then: “Initially, utilize the bombs and ammunition now in Australia and to be carried on carriers and fast merchant vessels with planes. Establish fast merchant ship supply service from U.S. to Australia for maintenance. Ferry from Australia to Philippines.” All of this was quite predictable and could have been seen from simply looking at a map, but Eisenhower knew that his words reflected a larger strategic program that was shaped by the growing pressure of continual Japanese victories. There was no talk of an offensive, of ultimate triumph, of a strike that could suddenly resolve the crisis. The Philippines were lost, and with them thousands of American and Philippine soldiers. It would be many months, perhaps years, before those in Japanese captivity could be liberated. But the effort had to be made, and whatever would be done had to be done quickly. When Eisenhower was finished he had typed no more than three hundred words.²¹

Several hours later, Eisenhower presented his plan to Marshall. Seated before the Army chief of staff, he supplemented his paper with an oral briefing of the deteriorating situation: “General,” he said, “it will be a long time before major reinforcements can go to the Philippines, longer than any garrison can hold out without any direct assistance, if the enemy commits major forces to their reduction, but we must do everything for them that is humanly possible. The people of China, of the Philippines, of the Dutch East Indies will be watching us. They may excuse failure but they will not excuse abandonment. Their trust and friendship are important to us.” Marshall listened without comment.²² Eisenhower continued. “Our base must be Australia, and we must start at once to expand it and to secure our communications to it. In this last we dare not fail. We must take great risks and spend any amount of money required.” Marshall listened closely and finally, after a lengthy pause, spoke: “I agree with you. Do your best to save them.” Eisenhower nodded and turned to leave, but Marshall stopped him: “Eisenhower,” he said, “the Department is filled with able men who analyze their problems well but feel compelled always to bring them to me for final solution. I must have assistants who will solve their own problems and tell me later what they have done.” Eisenhower got the message—he was there to make decisions. With his first full session with Marshall concluded, Eisenhower returned to his desk. He was to learn shortly that he was now, officially, the head of the Pacific and Far East Section of the WPD. He was convinced that the Army chief of staff had simply given him a test and that somehow he had passed: “His tone implied that I had been given the problem as a check to an answer he had already reached,” he later reflected.²³

 

AT THE moment Dwight Eisenhower was directed by George Marshall to write his memo on U.S. strategy in the war against Japan, things could not have looked worse: America’s largest battleships were at the bottom of Pearl Harbor; Guam had fallen and Wake Island had been bombed; Burma and Indochina were occupied; the Philippines, Thailand, and the Netherlands East Indies had been invaded; most of China and north Malaya were lost (Malaya’s defenders, the 10th and 11th Indian divisions, were decimated); the British battleship Prince of Wales and the cruiser Repulse had been sunk; and Japanese troops were moving south into the Admiralty, Bismarck, Gilbert, and Marshall Islands. Australia was threatened and might fall before the Japanese onslaught. The Americans had three aircraft carriers in the Pacific, the Japanese ten. On the morning that Eisenhower wrote his memo for Marshall, the Japanese began their second landing of troops on Luzon in the Philippines. It had been a week since the attack on Pearl Harbor, but the Japanese landings were unopposed.²⁴

The situation was as bleak in Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and France had been conquered. With France went all of North Africa. Poland had been invaded and conquered, and all of Eastern Europe had been lost. The Soviet Union was on the edge of defeat: German divisions surrounded Leningrad, were on the doorstep of Moscow, and had reached into the oil-rich Crimea. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops were already dead or captured, and the Red Army was fighting for its life amid the ruins of Stalingrad. Hungary and Romania had joined the Tripartite Pact. Tons of shipping was being lost in the North Atlantic. Britain was under siege. But for the first time since the fall of France, as a result of the German declaration of war against the United States on December 8, Britain was no longer alone.

Starting in 1939, the United States had begun the slow process of transforming its industries to a war footing and rebuilding a denuded peacetime military establishment. Still, on the eve of December 7, the U.S. military had only 267,000 officers and enlisted men in its army’s ranks and 2,470 aircraft in the Army Air Corps while the Navy had five carriers, eighteen heavy cruisers, nineteen light cruisers, sixty-one submarines, and just hundreds of lighter specialized ships—patrol craft, gunboats, and submarine chasers.²⁵ To defeat the Axis, the United States required ten million men in uniform, and they had to be trained, equipped, fed, and shipped to the battlefield. The combat troops of the U.S. would be supported by thousands of bombers, fighters, and transport aircraft and thousands of ships: from the smallest landing craft to the largest troop transport to aircraft carriers capable of penetrating the Japanese defensive shield and destroying the Imperial Japanese Navy.²⁶ A bomber fleet would have to be created—virtually from scratch. But that would not be enough: the nation would be required to create a second army of engineers and scientists to design the war’s weapons, and manufacturers, suppliers, and workers would have to be found to build them.

Perhaps most important, at least to George Marshall’s mind, the men and women who were recruited or drafted for military service needed to be taken into battle by experienced, intelligent, selfless, and courageous leaders. Marshall viewed this requirement—identifying the right military commanders and putting them in a position where they could succeed—as his most important task. Fortunately, it was one he had prepared for his entire life. Two years before the attack on Pearl Harbor and just days after he became Army chief of staff, Marshall began the arduous task of building a command structure capable of fighting Germany and Japan, the two most well-armed and well-trained military establishments in human history. “I do not propose to send our young citizen-soldiers into action, if they must go into action, under commanders whose minds are no longer adaptable to the making of split-second decisions in the fast-moving war of today, nor whose bodies are no longer capable of standing up under the demands of field service,” he explained to reporter George Fielding Eliot in an interview in his office in 1939. “They’ll have their chance to prove what they can do. But I doubt that many of them will come through satisfactorily. Those that don’t will be eliminated.”²⁷

Marshall could be ruthless. Harry Hines Woodring, who served as Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war from 1936 until succeeded by Henry Stimson in 1940, once observed that Marshall “would sell out his grandmother for personal advantage,” while one officer’s wife bitterly remembered how Marshall had sidelined her husband on the eve of World War II: “He was once our dear friend, but he ruined my husband.”²⁸ Marshall struck many as stiff-necked, remote, unreachable, and quick to judge, but he could also be surprisingly informal, even self-effacing. Marshall disdained officers who used their rank to bully or posture at the same time that he criticized others for a lack of toughness. He was a mass of contradictions and, for even his closest friends, an enigma.²⁹ He was tall for his time, at just under six feet, and rugged—“a magnificent looking man,” as a British military colleague once noted—with intense blue eyes. A man of quirky habits and odd turns of phrase, Marshall constantly misplaced his reading glasses (his orderly at the War Department bought replacements by the handful) and butchered the names of his closest assistants. He called his secretary, Mona Nason, “Mason” and the secretary of his staff, Colonel Frank McCarthy, “McCartney.” When Marshall repeatedly mangled McCarthy’s name, his staff secretary corrected him, then related the story to a Colonel Young, a War Department officer, who responded “While you were about it, I wish you had told him that I am Young, not Maxwell Taylor.”³⁰

Born in 1880, Marshall was the second son of a Uniontown, Pennsylvania, small businessman whose Virginia and Kentucky family was descended from the legendary Supreme Court justice John Marshall. As a young boy, Marshall was regaled by his father with stories of the American Revolution and the Civil War. One summer, he and a close boyhood friend built a fleet of boats at a nearby creek, and boys came from the town to see their matchstick “Great White Fleet”—the pride of the U.S. Navy—fight naval battles. Athletic and precocious but not driven, Marshall worried his parents, who believed the indifference he showed toward his studies would keep him out of college. But when Marshall’s older brother Stuart entered VMI, George determined to follow him, believing he would enjoy the life of a professional officer. Stuart was not so sure. “I overheard Stuart talking to my mother; he was trying to persuade her not to let me go because he thought I would disgrace the family name,” Marshall later recalled. “Well, that made more impression on me than all the instructors, parental pressure, or anything else. I decided right then that I was going to wipe his face, or wipe his eye.”

Marshall was named for his father, a gregarious man who built a company producing bricks for coke ovens. Marshall senior’s partner was Arthur Bliss, an Alabama bookkeeper.³¹ At first Bliss, Marshall and Company was a success and the business expanded; in 1876 the company was one of the largest coke oven manufacturers in western Pennsylvania. Pressed by competition, Marshall’s father sold the company and invested the considerable profits he had made in establishing a land-speculation firm in Luray, Virginia. But that company went bankrupt, and Marshall’s father was responsible for paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.³² The family never recovered. It was a painful time for young George, but the greatest weight fell on his mother, Laura Bradford Marshall. Unlike Marshall’s father, Laura Bradford Marshall was patient and soft-spoken. Marshall was intimidated by his father, but he had close emotional ties to his mother that he maintained throughout his life.³³

The formation of Marshall’s considerable military skills, his ability to communicate confidence and discipline, his talent for making others believe in his vision—in short, his ability to command—came from his experience as a cadet at VMI. The personal traits that were shaped by his years at VMI defined his place in history. Marshall did not stand on ceremony, did not expect flawless behavior or perfect results, but assumed that men would follow him. This self-confidence and self-possession emerged during his last year at the Institute and became the foundation of his stature as a military commander. The two men he admired most, Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, had this same quality: they simply expected that when they gave an order it would be obeyed. Marshall was not a great student, but he drove himself relentlessly, discovering within himself an untapped reservoir of ambition. During his last year at VMI, Marshall was named the Institute’s first captain, the highest cadet rank. He paid a price for his self-discipline and ambition: he found that his inner drive isolated him from others and made close friendships nearly impossible.

Marshall was commissioned an officer in the U.S. Army in January 1902 and one month later married Elizabeth Carter “Lily” Coles, a Lexington native whom he met while attending the Institute. In April he was shipped to the Philippines, then in the grip of a cholera epidemic, where he was “virtually the governor of the southern end of the Island of Mindoro.”³⁴ After nearly two years in the Philippines, Marshall returned to the U.S., was assigned to Fort Reno, and then won an appointment to the prestigious Army Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “I just worked day and night,” Marshall later recalled. “My great trouble was going to sleep at night. I remember I used to get up and shine my boots in order to wake up. So I had very shiny boots at the early period. I finally got into the habit of study, which I never really had had, but I revived what little I had carried with me out of college and I became pretty automatic at the business. It worked out all right because in the end I came out number one.”³⁵ Marshall stayed on at the college as an instructor before being reassigned to the field: with the 24th Infantry in New York and San Antonio, then with the 4th Infantry in Arkansas, and then with the 13th Infantry back in the Philippines. In the fifteen years following his commissioning in 1902, Marshall held nearly every significant staff job in the U.S. Army—he had been a staff assistant, supply officer, paymaster, trainer, and instructor. In that time, he had built a reputation as a competent, even brilliant, officer. But the true test of command comes in war.

In June 1917, Marshall was assigned as the assistant chief of staff for the 1st Division of the American Expeditionary Force in France. In July he was promoted to captain and tasked with putting the first American doughboys into the trenches against the Germans. “I became very much involved with all these things at the start. And I was also involved in locating the first four divisions to arrive in France. I was just given the job of locating them and seeing what they needed. So I had to figure out what was required in the way of mess halls and bunkhouses and headquarters and hospital buildings and everything of that sort. Nobody advised me. They didn’t have time. They just told me to do it,”³⁶ he later recalled. By May 1918, Marshall was America’s premier combat planner, answering directly to General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the commander of the AEF. Marshall’s experience in commanding troops was undoubtedly invaluable, but when asked years later about these experiences, he focused not on the battles with Germany but on America’s struggle to cooperate as a part of a large coalition. The war, he mused, “shows how difficult it is for armies of different nations to work with full harmony.”³⁷ It was a theme he would return to again and again during World War II.

 

ON THE face of it, Dwight Eisenhower was a very different man from George Marshall. Marshall was proper, distant, and matter-of-fact; Eisenhower was talkative, social, and opinionated. While Marshall regularly entertained his colleagues and their wives, he seemed uncomfortable doing so; Eisenhower loved to socialize. Marshall was always viewed as the Army chief of staff—or “the General”—while Eisenhower was thought of as the commander of “Club Eisenhower” and affectionately known as “Ike.”³⁸ Marshall loved to ride and hunt, to be alone for hours with his guns and dogs. He was a crack shot. Eisenhower hunted and fished, but his fondest entertainment was bridge—which he played expertly. Marshall made few close friends, perhaps no more than a handful in his entire life, while Eisenhower was at the center of an expanding network that included his family, his fellow officers, his boon buddies, and his childhood friends. Marshall could be wry and ironic, but he was never described as witty, while Eisenhower regaled his friends with long stories and ribald jokes. Eisenhower was outgoing, effusive, and backslappingly pleased with the success of others, while Marshall seemed incapable of praise. A job well done, he believed, was expected and its own reward. “The nearest that he ever came to saying [anything] complimentary directly to my face was, ‘You are not doing so badly so far,’” Eisenhower once noted.³⁹

Marshall’s sense of propriety, dignity, and self-worth might have been off-putting for those who worked most closely with him, but he was beloved nonetheless. While Marshall seemed impersonal, even peremptory, he rarely forgot to note a staff birthday or anniversary. He had a habit of picking up and chatting with War Department personnel stranded at cold or rainy bus stops, a worrisome eccentricity for his security-minded personal assistants. He became adept at maneuvering training and recruitment bills through the House and Senate, standing for hours engaged in what he viewed as the distasteful requirements of glad-handing and back-patting. He was different among military officers, of course, because he had to be. He was the highest-ranking man in the Army. But despite his stature and rank, Marshall gave a direct order only when deeply angered. These displays, while rare, were unforgettable. “I’ve never seen a man who apparently develops a higher pressure of anger when he encounters some piece of stupidity than does he,” Eisenhower commented.⁴⁰ “Yet the outburst is so fleeting…. he doesn’t get angry the way I do—I burn for an hour.”⁴¹

Marshall’s leadership style was designed to make subordinates feel that they had a stake in their chief’s success. There is no record that he ever publicly upbraided anyone who worked with him, but in private his remarks could be chilling. When a fellow officer he had known for many years told him that he would have to delay his departure for Europe because his wife was gone and the furniture was not yet packed, Marshall was dumbfounded. The officer was suddenly apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he said, to which Marshall responded: “I’m sorry too, but you will be retired tomorrow.”⁴³ To be sure, Marshall was often cold and almost always seemed detached, but for every bitterly disappointed officer that Marshall ruthlessly culled from the ranks, there were dozens of others whom he nurtured and promoted. There is also weighty evidence that his trust, once gained, was conferred unfailingly thereafter, even in the face of sometimes blatant failure. The thousands of telegrams, papers, memoranda, and radio communications that Marshall wrote or dictated during America’s four-year war with the Axis contained few blunt directives. His views were presented as “wishes” and “suggestions” or even more indirectly as expressions of concern. Marshall sprinkled his words with seemingly patronly advice, couching his own obvious disappointment in phrases like “Don’t you think you should” or “perhaps you had better…” or “it was recently suggested that…”

Historians may search the volumes of American war correspondence, memoranda, battle reports, radiograms, and coded cables without finding a single communication from a senior commander to a subordinate that actually takes the tone of an apology. But there is one from Marshall, written in the midst of the European war in the spring of 1944. Marshall’s message, transmitted from Washington to Europe by code, was sent to Lieutenant General Jacob Devers, a man with whom neither Marshall nor Eisenhower ever seemed comfortable. The Marshall message followed months of exchanges between the two men over a number of Devers’s ill-advised combat and staff decisions, which exasperated the increasingly impatient chief of staff. But one day, and quite suddenly, Marshall drew back—as if realizing that his criticisms had only worsened the situation or that he might even have been unfair: “Have just read your letter of April 15th,” Marshall wrote. “I like its tone and I have great confidence in what you are doing. I fear, in fact I feel certain that my radios regarding certain details have given you the idea of lack of confidence on my part and in effect thrown you on the defensive. Disregard such ideas because they are wholly incorrect. Be assured that I have great confidence in you.”⁴³ Marshall’s message had its desired effect; Devers led his army group “efficiently and well” thereafter, solidifying his reputation as a “solid, dependable, and capable general.”⁴⁴

Perhaps Marshall’s greatest talent was his enormous capacity to give his full attention to a single subject for long periods. In the course of a single day, Marshall might dictate thirty separate memoranda, write ten personal letters, study dozens of battle reports, attend half a dozen meetings, and still spend hours bent over maps or poring over industrial-production figures. The pace that he set was physically and emotionally draining. While Marshall was nominally the Army chief of staff, he was clearly the senior officer of the American high command and, as such, became Franklin Roosevelt’s most trusted military adviser.⁴⁵ His colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff—Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest King, Army Air Corps commander Henry “Hap” Arnold, and Roosevelt’s military aide Admiral William D. Leahy—often deferred to Marshall’s judgment. America’s overall strategy for fighting the war was in his hands. As the military’s unofficial coordinator, Marshall was bombarded with demands: for more planes, transports, ships, tanks, trainers, and soldiers. The demands of the war’s first weeks, as the nation seemed to move from catastrophe to catastrophe, took their toll on him, and his close associates feared he would reach the end of his strength.

In fact, Marshall was well aware of his limits and, while working long and intense hours in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, he was also working to lessen his own decision-making burdens. He turned over all Army recruiting and training issues to Lieutenant General Lesley McNair, gave him the staff and resources to do the job, and then left him alone. McNair, an organizational genius, designed the course of study that, in thirteen weeks, would provide men capable of fighting the Germans and Japanese, then established the Army’s specialty schools that trained tank commanders and airborne troopers. McNair, perhaps the most self-effacing officer in Army history (he once read a press release that mentioned his name—and crossed it out), regularly provided Marshall with a list of officers whom he deemed unfit for command, a kind of “little black book” in reverse. Marshall and McNair consulted on most command decisions, producing a skeleton leadership cadre for each new division, then spoke in detail about the qualities of the subordinate commanders they needed to appoint to support them. At the height of the war, the United States was producing four divisions of fourteen thousand men each month and shipping them to England and the Pacific. Marshall rarely questioned McNair’s decisions, never intervened to redo his training regimen, and rarely disagreed with his command judgments.

The roots of this unusual willingness to show confidence in subordinates, to leave decisions in their hands, and to recruit them to his cause as a part of a team, came from the fact that others had done the same for him—even when Marshall’s blunt questioning of authority might have ended with his retirement. The first such incident came in late 1917, when the U.S. military staff in France was conducting a combat exercise for AEF commander John Pershing. Pershing was in “a foul humor,” and after the exercise was completed he asked for a critique from an officer who had arrived late for the demonstration. The critique was not to Pershing’s liking, and he impatiently interrupted the officer and ordered a critique from a subordinate. When the subordinate’s presentation also proved inadequate Pershing “rather contemptuously” dismissed those in attendance and stalked off. Marshall intervened:

He didn’t want to talk to me. He shrugged his shoulders and turned away from me. And I put my hand on his arm and practically forced him to talk. I said, “General Pershing, there’s something to be said here, and I think I should say it because I’ve been here longer.” And he stopped and said, “What have you got to say?” “Well,” I said, “to start with, we have never received anything from your Headquarters. When I was down there two months ago, as a matter of fact, three months ago, I think, I was told about this Platoon Chiefs’ Manual that was coming up. It’s never come out yet.” He turned to one of these officer and he said, “What about that, So and So?” And So and So said, “Well, General, we’ve had trouble with the French printers. You know they are very difficult to deal with.” General Pershing turned to me and said, “You know we have our troubles.” I said, “Yes, I know you do, General, I know you do. But ours are immediate and every day and have to be solved before night. Now we never have gotten the Platoon Manual. We have made the best we can of this thing.”⁴⁶

Marshall remembered the incident years later, citing it as a turning point in his career. “Some of my bosom friends came up to me and said, of course, I was finished and I’d be fired right off. I said, ‘All I can see is that I may get troop duty instead of staff duty, and certainly that would be a great success.’”⁴⁷ In fact, Marshall was rewarded. “General Pershing never mentioned this thing to me until years afterwards, and then he recalled it and his comment on me was that I was pretty hot,” Marshall later remembered. “Well, as a matter of fact, it made quite an impression on me, because instead of ruining me, he sent for me quite frequently…. So far as I could see, it helped me rather than harmed me.”⁴⁸

A second incident has now become a part of U.S. military lore. On November 14, 1938, George Marshall, then the deputy chief of staff, was invited to a White House conference on American war preparations. There were twelve officials at the meeting, including Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins, Secretary of War Harry Woodring, and Army chief of staff Malin Craig. Marshall sat on the sidelines of the meeting, saying little. Roosevelt started the meeting and dominated it. With Germany rearming and Europe moving closer to war, Roosevelt argued, the U.S. must do everything that it could to protect its borders. Building a large strike force of aircraft would do just that and so must be a top priority. Roosevelt proposed that the U.S. commit itself to building seven aircraft plants, adding that building a large ground army could wait until later. Pleased with these expert recommendations, Roosevelt smiled at those in attendance and asked for their opinion. They all readily agreed—building an army could wait.

The meeting should have ended there, but quite unpredictably Roosevelt turned to Marshall: “Don’t you think so George?” he asked. Marshall bridled at Roosevelt’s “misrepresentation of our intimacy,” and the room turned to hear his answer. “I am sorry, Mr. President,” Marshall said, “but I don’t agree with that at all.” As the room went silent, Roosevelt nodded toward Marshall but did not respond. Marshall’s remark ended the conference. “The President gave me a startled look,” Marshall recalled, “and when I went out they all bade me good-by and said that my tour in Washington was over.”⁴⁹ Of course, it was not. Like Pershing before him, Roosevelt was dismayed by Marshall’s open disagreement, but he wasn’t prepared to dismiss someone with the courage of his convictions. Marshall remembered the incident, as he remembered his confrontation with Pershing, for the rest of his life, and while it is difficult to conclude that the Roosevelt-Marshall relationship was ever close, their ability to work together dates from that disagreement. In fact, the disagreement may well have been decisive in Roosevelt’s decision to name him chief of staff in 1939. “I want to say in compliment to the president that that didn’t antagonize him at all,” Marshall later remembered. “Maybe he thought I would tell him the truth so far as I personally was concerned, which I certainly tried to do in all of our later conversations.”⁵⁰

The Marshall-Pershing standoff of 1917, and the Marshall-Roosevelt confrontation of 1938, reinforced in Marshall a belief that the best way to command was to delegate authority and then, having delegated authority, to tolerate disagreements. This ability to reward skepticism was what marked Marshall as an unusually successful commander. In fact, Marshall was so concerned that his subordinates might hesitate to disagree with him that he purposely reminded them to do so: “You may be completely frank with me in expressing your own opinions,” he wrote again and again to his commanders. Even so, Marshall’s command experience in World War II reflects that while he forgave failure and tolerated dissent, he would rarely tolerate a refusal to act—a fear of failure. When the war began, then, Marshall not only culled the Army officer corps of those too old to command; he attempted to identify those commanders who could act independently and make decisions in the sure knowledge that their orders would cost lives. There was only one other requirement that Marshall deemed necessary for an Army officer to ascend to high command, and it came from Fox Conner. In the future, Conner had insisted, Army officers needed to be able to work with the senior commanders of other nations. What would be needed, Conner said, was a new kind of general, a diplomat as well as a fighter. But by late December 1941, Marshall had yet to identify such an officer.

 

MARSHALL’S WILLINGNESS to confront authority when he believed doing so served the truth was a quality he used sparingly. No successful officer could do otherwise. So while historians have focused on this side of his character, a closer examination of his career shows that the primary reason for his climb through Army ranks had more to do with his considerable capabilities and his willingness to take on tough assignments. Marshall first came to the attention of the U.S. high command in World War I, when he seemed to be everywhere at once: not simply making plans but then traveling to the front to implement them. A relative unknown in 1917, by the end of the war Marshall had become one of the most highly respected officers in the U.S. Army. On July 4, 1919, Marshall rode in triumph on the Champs-Elysées as the newest member of General Pershing’s personal staff then returned with Pershing to the U.S. and served at his side. It was Marshall’s relationship with Pershing that marked him for high command, and Pershing’s impact on Marshall was decisive. A man of careful judgment and measured opinions, Pershing served as Marshall’s mentor and supporter.

In July 1921, Pershing was named Army chief of staff and appointed Marshall as his assistant. Marshall’s five years with Pershing were his first in Washington and gave him essential experience in dealing with the nation’s civilian leaders. He briefed Presidents Harding and Coolidge and he rubbed shoulders with the secretary of war. There was no one in the upper echelons of the military he did not know. At the end of his tour, in 1924, Marshall was appointed a staff commander with the 15th Regiment in Tientsin, China—a city that was an island of calm in China’s sea of political instability. Marshall immediately put the regiment on special guard duty, fearful that the war to the north would come south. The next three years were among the most rewarding that Marshall spent in the Army. His counsel that the U.S. should stay strictly neutral in the civil conflict was heeded in Washington—which left Marshall to look after his troops. He built a new recreation hall and planned regimental activities, attempting to keep the 15th Infantry (which had the highest rate of venereal disease of any American unit) as busy as possible. Marshall stayed long enough in China to meet Major Joseph Stilwell, who would later serve as the U.S. commander in China during Marshall’s tenure as Army chief of staff. In 1927, Marshall accepted a teaching post at the Army War College and returned to America.

 

MARSHALL’S WIFE, Lily, was overjoyed by Marshall’s reassignment to the States. She looked forward to decorating her new home at the Washington Barracks with the Chinese vases, rugs, screens, and wall hangings they had accumulated during their stay in Tientsin. But in August 1927, Lily became ill. A heart condition that had plagued her throughout her life worsened. The doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Center told Marshall that his wife needed an operation. On August 22, Lily underwent heart surgery. In its aftermath, her doctors were optimistic and expected a full recovery. Lily agreed, telling her husband that she felt stronger and healthier than she had in many years. On September 15, the doctors at Walter Reed told her she would be released the next day. She sat down at her desk to write her mother the good news. She never finished the letter: a nurse found her, dead, slumped over her desk. Marshall was grief-stricken. John Pershing, who had also lost his wife, immediately sent his condolences: “No one knows better than I what such a bereavement means and my heart goes out to you very fully at this crisis in your life.” Marshall responded honestly: “The truth is, the thought of all you had endured gave me heart and hope. But twenty-six years of most intimate companionship, something I have [not] known since I was a mere boy, leaves me lost in my best effort to adjust myself to future prospects in life.”

Lily’s death focused Marshall’s attention as few other events. He filled his rooms with pictures of her, so that everywhere he turned he was reminded of her. Only his work seemed to keep his sense of loss in check, if only temporarily. “At the war college desk I thought I would explode,” he later reflected. So he moved: first to the Infantry School at Fort Benning (an assignment he had wanted for many years), then to Fort Screvin, Georgia (where he served as the commanding officer of the 8th Infantry), then to Fort Moultrie, South Carolina (where he served as commander and head of District I of Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps), and then to become senior instructor with the Illinois National Guard in Chicago. At each step along this arc of successive commands, Marshall implemented what he had learned from his experiences through thirty years of military service. And at each step that he took he was promoted, from major to lieutenant colonel and then to colonel (in 1933), and then to brigadier general (in 1936). The penultimate promotion came in July 1938, when he headed the War Plans Division of the War Department. Less than three months later, he was named deputy chief of staff of the U.S. Army.

Through the 1930s, with the nation in the midst of the Great Depression, the U.S. Army was nearly last on a list of federal appropriations. But Marshall was able to gain valuable experience in working with young men hired in public works programs for the Civilian Conservation Corps. In many instances, Marshall was supervising the men who would storm the beaches at Normandy, who would come ashore at Tarawa, who would fight the Germans in North Africa and the Japanese on Guadalcanal. The army was given a major role in launching the CCC and implementing its programs: in 1933, the U.S. Army processed nearly three hundred thousand CCC members and organized 1,330 camps. An old colleague from World War I, General Douglas MacArthur, was then Army chief of staff and the CCC’s most vocal supporter. He was also impressed with Marshall’s work with the CCC and thought it a miscarriage of justice that Marshall had not yet held some of the military’s most senior posts. When the army needed a commander to head the 33rd Division, MacArthur reached into the upper officer corps and picked Marshall for the job. “He has no superior among infantry colonels,” MacArthur said at the time.⁵¹

On his trip to Chicago to command the 33rd, Marshall was accompanied by Katherine, his new wife. They had met at a dinner in 1929, when Marshall was at Fort Benning. Katherine Boyce Tupper was the daughter of a Baptist minister and had become a Shakespearean actress touring England and Ireland. She pursued her career in the United States before marrying Clifton Brown, a prominent Baltimore lawyer. They had three children together—Molly, Clifton Jr., and Allen—before Clifton was shot and killed by an angry client. Katherine was devastated by her husband’s death. Like Marshall, she could not reconcile herself to her loss and entered an extended period of grieving. That ended at Fort Benning, where Katherine met Marshall. They were nearly inseparable from the very beginning. The only bar to their marriage, it seemed, was Katherine’s twelve-year-old son Allen, who preferred that his mother not remarry. But when he met Marshall, who proposed to visit his mother at her home on Fire Island, he changed his mind: “I hope you will come to Fire Island,” he wrote. “Don’t be nervous, it is O.K. with me. A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Marshall and Katherine were married in Baltimore on October 15, 1930—with Pershing serving as the best man. Lily’s brother and Marshall’s sister Marie were in attendance.

In the years that followed, Marshall and Allen would become as father and son, with Marshall showing an affection toward the young man that he could never show toward his fellow officers. Katherine, Molly, Clifton, and Allen became his touchstone and support, providing him with the quiet he needed outside of the pressures of the War Department. Marshall was close to all three children but closest to Allen. As with his officers, Marshall allowed Allen the independence needed by a precocious adolescent. Unlike Lily, whose health was a constant concern, Katherine was a vibrant and engaging wife whose ability to support Marshall’s career allowed him to meet the social demands of being a senior Army officer. It helped that she was politically adept. When Franklin Roosevelt appointed Marshall Army chief of staff she, unbeknownst to her husband, wrote him in gratitude. “Ever since your appointment of my husband—as your next Chief-of-Staff—I have wanted to write you. It is difficult for me to put into words what I really feel. For years I have feared that his brilliant mind, and unusual opinion, were hopelessly caught in more or less of a tread-mill. That you should recognize his ability and place in him your confidence gives me all I have dreamed of and hoped for. I realize the great responsibility that is his. I know that his loyalty to you and this trust will be unfailing.”⁵² Marshall took the oath of office as Army chief of staff on the afternoon of September 1, 1939. Some hours earlier, Hitler had invaded Poland.

 

AFTER FIVE DAYS at his new post, Eisenhower found time to write to his old commander Walter Krueger: “My immediate assignment is as an assistant to Gerow to lighten the burden of this office,” he said. “The rapid, minute-by-minute activities of the Army seem to be centered through this place, because no one else is familiar with everything else that has been planned in the past. As quickly as this work can be centralized properly the pressure should ease up some, but there is no prospect of it becoming ‘normal.’”⁵³ Eisenhower lived with his brother Milton and Milton’s wife and children across the Potomac River in suburban Virginia, though he most often arrived at Milton’s home late at night, well after everyone had gone to bed. Years later, Milton remembered that Ike would let himself in and “would go at once to our children’s bedroom, wake them, and have a relaxing chat.”⁵⁴ Eisenhower hoped this would be a temporary arrangement, as he continued to press for a position as a commander of one of the new divisions being formed under the unforgiving gaze of Lesley McNair. Eisenhower might have been lonely—his wife, Mamie, remained in San Antonio, while his son John was at West Point—but he was enthralled by his work in spite of the killing sixteen-to eighteen-hours-a-day pace of the War Department. “Every day the same, 7:45 a.m to 11:45 p.m.,” he wrote in his diary.⁵⁵

Eisenhower saw Marshall every day, and often several times a day, as he put the finishing touches on the expansion of his original “Steps to Be Taken,” memo. On December 17, Eisenhower developed his plan for an Allied buildup in Australia, detailing the numbers and types of aircraft, transport ships, and ammunition that should be used to build the “Australian Base.”⁵⁶ He then wrote coded radiograms to Douglas MacArthur on Marshall’s behalf listing the “pursuit planes, crews, ammunition and other supplies” headed from the West Coast to the Philippines. Many of the coded radiograms were sent out over Gerow’s signature, even if it was now clear that Eisenhower, who had been in the War Department less than a week, was in charge of planning the American war in the Far East. Gerow was being eclipsed, primarily because he remained cautious and uncertain around Marshall. Eisenhower was not. Make the decisions and tell me later, Marshall had said; so Eisenhower shipped men and matériel to Australia, monitored the planned reinforcement of the Philippines, and recommended command assignments to the newly forming Army divisions.

Eisenhower’s apparent ability to make snap decisions involving thousands of troops frightened Gerow, who often sent Eisenhower’s decision memos up the line to Marshall—slugging them as “recommendations.” Eisenhower was nonplussed: “Gee, you have got to stop bothering the Chief with this stuff,” Eisenhower said one day. Gerow shook his head: “I can’t help it, Ike,” he responded. “These decisions are too important. He’s got to make them himself.”⁵⁷ The difference between Gerow and Eisenhower consisted simply in this: although both feared that a wrong decision might cost lives, Eisenhower was able to act in spite of this knowledge, while Gerow wasn’t. It was perhaps this indefinable quality that made Eisenhower so valuable to Marshall, for whom the ability to make life-and-death decisions was a crucial requirement of high command.

One anecdote illustrates this quality in Eisenhower and illuminates how, in just a few months, Eisenhower was promoted by Marshall over 350 senior officers to take his place as the single most important commander in World War II. Within hours of arriving at the Old Munitions Building, Eisenhower was scrambling to find reinforcements for the South Pacific. While it was not difficult to find units that could quickly be shipped to build the Allied base in Australia, it was nearly impossible to find adequate shipping to transport them. After hours of searching, Eisenhower located the Queen Mary, requisitioned her, ordered the boarding of a fifteen-thousand-man division, and sent her on her way—across the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope to Brisbane. Eisenhower was unconcerned with German submarines, because he believed that the Queen Mary could outrun them; then too, of course, the Germans had no idea that the Queen Mary was crossing the Atlantic. But one morning, Eisenhower arrived at his office to find a cable from an Italian official in Brazil to his government in Rome. The cable was decoded, translated, and delivered to Eisenhower’s desk. “The Queen Mary just refueled here,” the cable said, “and with about fifteen thousand soldiers aboard left this port today steaming southeast across the Atlantic.” It was too late for Eisenhower to stop the ship, but he thought about the fate of the fifteen thousand defenseless Americans nearly every day. He dared not tell Marshall and only did so after the ship arrived safely in Australia. Marshall allowed himself one wry smile: “Eisenhower,” he said, “I received that intercept at the same time you did. I was merely hoping you might not see it and so I said nothing to you until I knew the outcome.”⁵⁸

In less than two weeks, by Christmas 1941, Eisenhower had become one of Marshall’s most important staff officers. It was an astonishing accomplishment. Eisenhower had not only proven that he was a talented strategist (he had established an Allied base in Australia, organized the relief effort for the Philippines, and built a command structure for the Pacific); he had shown that he was “one of those assistants” who would, in Marshall’s words, “solve their own problems” and tell Marshall “later what they have done.” In none of this had he shown that other quality so admired by Marshall, the ability to dissent from Marshall’s views, to stand up to authority, to be “completely frank” with him when it came to expressing his own opinions. And as Marshall knew, Eisenhower had to pass one more test as well: Eisenhower had to prove that could work well with Allied commanders—that he was as good a diplomat as he was a soldier.