For George Marshall’s entire army career he’d longed to be a combat officer, but it was not to be. He possessed an uncanny genius for organization and leadership that perennially led him to staff duty. Staff officers solve problems, large or small, day or night, all night long if necessary.
They concern themselves with sticky questions, ones that often involve weighty matters, such as who should or should not be in command and where important military resources should be used. It could even involve a simple thing like trimming a tree while trying to place an artillery battery on an obscure Caribbean island, and therein lies a tale.
Marshall had been sworn in during a 3 a.m. emergency meeting at the War Department on September 1, 1939, a day that by coincidence carried more ominous portent than any U.S. Army chief of staff has had to contend with before or after. It was the day Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. Soon after, the U.S. War Department began to try and convince the Dutch to place a battery of U.S.-made 155mm howitzers on the islands of Aruba and Curaçao, which were in Dutch possession. Because of their proximity to oil-rich Venezuela, these islands contained the world’s largest oil refineries, run by the state petroleum company Royal Dutch Shell. U.S. forces, alarmed by the imminence of war, feared this valuable resource could be cut off, as was certainly threatened when Hitler’s armies conquered and occupied Holland, and German submarines and even a large German raider ship had been sighted in the area. This might be seen as a small factor in the larger scheme of things, but Marshall was never one to avoid details. No good staff man could afford to.
It was on a Sunday in early 1942 when Marshall was looking forward to a leisurely afternoon at Dodona, his elegantly restored nineteenth-century manor house and gardens in Leesburg, Virginia, about half an hour’s drive from the War Department in the capital.
Mrs. Marshall, however, had different plans. There was a large tree on the lawn that had been nagging at her for months. Some of its limbs were growing the wrong way, stunting growth on the other branches, and needed to be cut.
Casual help, such as yardmen, was impossible to get because of the war, “so she took me out there on this Sunday afternoon and sicced me on this tree,” said Marshall, who was sixty-one years old at the time, “and I climbed up there with a saw and started on the limbs.”
It was a grueling climb, Marshall recalled, but no sooner had he begun sawing than there came a telephone call from the War Department, chief of staff’s office. Dutifully, he climbed down to receive it and, sure enough, a German raider had been spotted prowling ominously off the Venezuelan coast, “and they were afraid,” Marshall said, “it was after these Dutch oil refineries.”
Marshall told the officer on the phone to fly up that same afternoon to Hyde Park, New York, where President Franklin Roosevelt was spending the weekend, and see if he would authorize a message to Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands* requesting her to give immediate permission for the United States to set up artillery batteries on the islands.
Then Marshall reascended his tree. “Climbing up was the hardest thing and I didn’t even have on sneakers,” Marshall remembered. But he had only just resumed his sawing when the phone rang again. It was the same officer he had told to fly to Hyde Park to consult with Roosevelt, who had several questions about what he was to tell the president.
That having been dealt with, “I went back up the tree,” Marshall said, when the phone rang once more. This time it was President Roosevelt himself, who had some questions of his own. “So I climbed down out of the tree and went back to the house and got on the telephone and explained the situation and recommended the action I thought ought to be taken,” Marshall said. “Then I went back to my peaceful occupation up the tree,” though by this time he was “a little run down.”
He was not there long, however, when President Roosevelt “thought of something further, and I had to come down out of the tree again.” This time—following his fourth descension of the tree—he gave up, changed his clothes, got into his car, and drove to the office.1
This, and situations like it, are the enduring fate of the staff man. It takes a personality of inordinate composure and equanimity to handle the constant vicissitudes of making decisions that have consequences both grave and great, even while you’re up a tree.
The outcome of the story was rewarding, however. Roosevelt okayed Marshall’s message to Queen Wilhelmina, who herself okayed the establishment of U.S. artillery batteries on Aruba and Curaçao. The batteries arrived and got set up, Marshall said, the very evening before a German submarine surfaced and opened fire on the large refinery on Aruba. But the response from the American 155mm batteries was enough to drive it away, and the refineries continued to supply oil to the United States and other Allies.
Incidentally, Marshall said, he once told the story of the artillery batteries and the tree to England’s King George while having dinner with Winston Churchill in the bombproof cellar of number 10 Downing Street. It “struck the king as very funny,” Marshall said, and on those frequent occasions when the two men were again found in each other’s company, King George would always ask Marshall to retell the ordeal of the tree for the amusement of other guests.
GEORGE CATLETT MARSHALL JR. was born on New Year’s Eve, 1880. He was ushered into the so-called Gilded Age, the Gay Nineties, “la belle époque” of citizens riding around on bicycles with enormous front wheels and of barbershop quartets; when men wore mustaches instead of beards and parted their hair in the middle, and women wore floor-sweeping dresses with bustles and twisted the hair on their heads into buns.
The great American Civil War had been over now for a quarter century, and many of the old animosities between North and South had mostly faded. By then the United States was the most prosperous nation in the world, producing vast amounts of iron, steel, and other manufactured goods and commodities, including a huge trade surplus of food grown on farms in the Midwest. This was the America of muscle, of strong trade, of Irish, Welsh, and continental European immigrants teeming into the country to work for the railroads, steel mills, and shipyards. They worked for men like young George Marshall’s father, who was involved in the iron and steel industry, but lest we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take time now to visit the vestiges of the Marshall clan. In America at least, it traces as far back as the year 1650, when an Irish Anglican cavalier named Captain John Marshall landed at Jamestown, Virginia, to escape the tyranny of Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads.
These worthies included a namesake—the eminent Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall—as well as, down through the ages, a productive gaggle of Revolutionary War heroes, lawyers, preachers, planters, doctors, congressmen, surveyors, ambassadors, military officers, and others a cut above average. Somewhere around the end of the eighteenth century the Marshall line abandoned Virginia for the fertile and lightly settled lands across the Appalachians in Kentucky—just as it became the fifteenth state in the Union.
There, in the port town of Augusta on the Ohio River, they prospered in mercantile trade, the law, and politics, constructing, in due time, a substantial three-story, sixteen-room brick residence that came close to being a mansion. When the Civil War came to a divided Kentucky in 1862, George Catlett Marshall Sr. was a sixteen-year-old member of the Augusta Home Guard, sworn to uphold the Union cause, while his two older brothers were away serving in the Confederate Army.
On September 27, 1862, a Saturday, forces under the Rebel general Basil Duke appeared on a hill south of Augusta. Duke used his artillery to disperse two Federal gunboats, and then marched his 450 cavalrymen down the town’s main street. The commander of the outnumbered Home Guard, which consisted of only one hundred men and no artillery, raised a white flag. Scattered in houses and buildings, most of the guard did not see it and opened fire on the Southern soldiers.
In the ensuing fight some seventeen Confederates and seven Home Guardsmen were killed, and a number on both sides wounded. The Home Guard eventually surrendered and it became but one of hundreds of such skirmishes that marked the backwaters of the war in the Border States, where brothers truly fought brothers and the calamity was profound. Years later Marshall remembered that General Duke himself, a Kentuckian, was also a relative, and family lore had it that after the fighting was over he came to the door of the Marshall home to see if everyone was all right.
When the war ended Marshall Sr. was nineteen and engaged to Laura Emily Bradford, daughter of the town doctor who had commanded (and surrendered) the august Home Guard to General Duke. Young Marshall, seeking his fortune as a merchant, had, it seems, begun at the wrong time. Railroads were quickly surpassing riverboats in carrying the nation’s trade, and Augusta was fast declining as a center of commerce. Through a relative, he got wind of a clerkship at an ironworks in a small town in Pennsylvania called Dunbar, which was in the shadow of the Alleghenies about forty miles south of Pittsburgh.
Once at the Dunbar Iron Company, Marshall Sr. had no intention of making a career out of being a clerk. The earth of western Pennsylvania was already yielding great fortunes for hearty go-getters such as John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company and the iron and steel works of Andrew Carnegie and his partner Henry Clay Frick. After the Civil War there was a rapid expansion of railroads, metal ship hulls, iron bridges, and girder-built constructions that allowed the building of structures many stories high instead of just three or four. In turn, there became an insatiable demand for forged metals and the processes that created them.
One such process produced coke, a pure-burning fuel with a high carbon content derived from cooking coal in an oven at high temperatures until it forms a hard, gray, porous solid block of ash. The coke was then used to fuel the thousands of “beehive” coke ovens† that dotted the countryside of Pittsburgh and its environs, for the furnaces of Carnegie and others ran night and day. Marshall Sr. had been at the Dunbar Ironworks a little more than a year when he teamed with a young bookkeeper from Alabama named Arthur W. Bliss to form a company that manufactured the firebricks with which to build beehive ovens. By 1872 it was reported that “Bliss, Marshall & Company was producing seven thousand brick a day—the beginning of a solid business with wealth perhaps ahead.”2
Meanwhile, Marshall returned to Augusta to marry his fiancée, Laura Bradford, in a society wedding reported in the Cincinnati newspapers. The following year she gave birth to a child and the Marshalls moved from Dunbar. They settled eight miles south in Uniontown, a small city of thirty-five hundred, which sat on the enormous Connellsville vein of coal and was bisected by a watercourse with the unappealing name Coal Lick Run. Founded in 1776, Uniontown had been a stagecoach stop on the old National Road that ran across the mountains. Its history dates back to the French and Indian War and George Washington’s surrender of Fort Necessity to the French.
In due time Marshall and Bliss branched into the coke-producing business, operating their own coke ovens as well as selling lump coal from a mining operation. Not even the depression of 1873 could stop them, and by the middle of that decade Bliss and Marshall expanded dramatically, buying a mining company as well as coalfields. In 1880, the year George Jr. was born, his father was named company president.
Marshall Sr. was a gregarious and friendly personality in Uniontown, where he joined the Masons and the Democratic Party, despite the fact that Democrats were a decided minority in Pennsylvania. He was proud of his family’s history, especially its connection, however tenuous, with Justice John Marshall (a distant cousin). He was scandalized when young George, given a copy of the family genealogy, discovered (and went about telling anyone who would listen) that a Marshall ancestor in the early eighteenth century had married the pirate Blackbeard—the infamous Edward Teach who was beheaded by the British in 1718.
Growing up, the young boy made frequent trips back to the family place in Augusta, Kentucky, where there was a flock of cousins to play with and hideouts and haunts along the tall bluffs of the Ohio that one writer described as “reminiscent of stretches of the Rhine.”3 Here, where the Marshalls had lived for generations, they were gentry, but back in Uniontown the Marshalls were not readily accepted by some of the older families “that dated back almost to George Washington’s day.” There remained in northern states such as Pennsylvania—as it did in the South—vestiges of the old sectional animosities and mistrust. As Marshall recalled long afterward, “Father came up from the South; Mother came up from the South,” and so, “for a long time,” it was mostly the newer residents of Uniontown whom the Marshalls associated with.
But it was the picturesque Uniontown that was formative in the boy’s life, where he spent his childhood hunting quail and grouse in the mountains with his father and fishing for bass and pike on rock-ledged icy rivers. At night his mother would read to the family, by fireside in the cooler months and outside on the wide veranda in summer—mainly, Marshall remembered, the Sir Walter Scott romances such as Ivanhoe. Later, when her eyesight began to fail, she had to hand over the reading duties to George’s father, who favored all the James Fenimore Cooper stories and a long saga by Arthur Conan Doyle called The Refugees.
At Miss Thompson’s School, and away from his literary parents, young George Jr. was a mostly indifferent student, except on Sunday school picnics where they would churn ice cream. In winter there was skating on frozen ponds, sledding, and sleigh rides bundled in straw, and at Christmas a large tree in the dining room lit by candles on its branches just before daylight. On the Fourth of July George took out “several cigar boxes full of firecrackers and rockets.” His nickname was “Flicker,” because of his sandy hair.
Alongside his brother and sister, George would sit by the fireside while his father read, opening hickory nuts with a hammer “for mother’s very famous hickory nut cake.” “I always liked our fires,” he said, “because we had what was called cannel coal and it made a soft, delightful homelike flame … and it was very agreeable to sit in front of. Later on,” he remembered, “when natural gas was piped in, the fireplace lost a great deal of its charm.”
As he grew older the boy became a keen entrepreneur. At the age of ten, with his friend Andy Thompson, he opened a greenhouse and florist shop, selling flowers to the schoolgirls for a penny—until, that is, the girls discovered that they were not actually growing the flowers themselves, but combing the countryside around Uniontown for them. The girls insisted that they shouldn’t be charged for things that were free and the business collapsed. Next the pair set up shop in the basement of the Marshalls’ house selling homemade corn silk cigars and root beer—until the elder Marshall discovered that the enterprise involved selling his own root beer, which he had put into the cellar to age. The illicit funds gleaned from this enterprise were spent at the corner drugstore on penny thrillers and licorice sticks.
After this, the two began a clandestine venture raising fighting chickens—clandestine because cockfighting was illegal in most of the United States. They raised Red Bantams with eggs ordered from Georgia and had an older friend enter them into the fights. But later, when they went to the pits to see their birds fight, the affair was raided by the sheriff and the two barely escaped capture and arrest.
Once he and Andy scooped out a canal on Coal Lick Creek that ran behind George’s house and filled it with “The Great Pacific Fleet,” made of matchbox battleships with matchstick masts, after the same powerful naval squadron Admiral George Dewey would later command when it sank the Spanish fleet in Manila harbor during the Spanish-American War. Soon this became the exhibit of the neighborhood.
So the boy’s life was idyllic, more or less, in a Tom Sawyerish way.
In his teens George was athletically inclined but, in his own words, “not very talented.” He played football and baseball with his school’s teams, developed unsuccessful crushes on several girls, and remained lackadaisical in his scholarship. He grew to be more than six feet tall and gangly, but with a handsome face, probing eyes, and a rather stern countenance except on those infrequent occasions when he smiled, which gave him a warm and comforting expression.
In 1890 the Marshalls’ world changed dramatically. To consolidate operations, Marshall Sr. and his partners had decided to sell most of their coke and coal holdings to Henry Clay Frick, who was busy creating a monopoly in that part of Pennsylvania. Against the advice of his wife, Marshall Sr. put practically all the proceeds of his part of the sale—approximately $150,000‡—into a resort land company in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. When it went sour later that year with the crash of 1890 and the ensuing depression, not only did Marshall lose his investment, as president of the company he had obligated himself for all its debts and he lost his savings as well. Ultimately Marshall Sr. was forced into bankruptcy and the family very suddenly went from comfortable affluence to having practically no money at all.
The boy’s mother had been left some rental properties in Philadelphia and lots in Augusta that contributed a relatively small amount to the family income, and his father still retained an interest in several smaller businesses connected with the coal and iron industries. But financially it was a strain. George suddenly found himself in public school instead of the fashionable Miss Thompson’s. Fifty years later he put it bluntly: “The years of my boyhood, from the 1890 crash until I went away to school, were very limited financially, and only my mother’s modest income from some property she still held in Pittsburgh saved the situation … We had to economize very bitterly.”4
But it was far more than money his mother brought to the boy. Character often springs from diverse, hidden sources, and if you believe in such things as ancestry and breeding that might account for some of it—yet as the years passed there was much, much more. It had become increasingly evident, says Marshall’s biographer William Frye, that young George Marshall “had his mother’s reserve, her great dignity, her steadiness, the same profound moral integrity, tempered perhaps by some of his father’s easy manner and that indefinable quality that gentlefolk call presence.”5
America in the 1890s was characterized by the financial crash at the beginning of the decade and the subsequent depression and recovery; industrial labor upheavals; and the Spanish-American War of 1898. As we have seen, the financial crash created a great burden on Marshall’s teenage years, though he seemed stoic about it, remarking later, “Every boy in a democracy should attend, at least for a period of time, a public school.”
The labor troubles were just then turning deadly, with bitter strikes in the mining and railroad industries; beatings and killings were frequent and often the army, state militia, or National Guard was called upon to keep labor unions at bay. In the previous decade there had been an estimated twenty-four thousand strikes and lockouts; with all the coal mining around Uniontown, Marshall was smack in the midst of the ugliness. In fact, one of his father’s business partners was assassinated by the Molly McGuires, a violent secret society that used murder, arson, and kidnapping to intimidate mine and mill owners and other capitalists. The senior Marshall was likewise on the Mollies’ “black list,” according to George, but somehow escaped harm. As for George himself, he was once struck in the head by a lump of coal thrown by an angry striking miner. Later in life, Marshall noted that miners rarely joined the army, since they considered U.S. soldiers as a kind of enemy.
In those times youngsters often went to college at the age of sixteen, sometimes earlier. Both George’s brother, Stuart, five years older, and his sister, Marie, four years older, were away at school, money having been put aside for this by the elder Marshall before the crash and his financial ruin. George wasn’t so lucky. He wanted to attend West Point both because he fancied a military career and because it was free. Unfortunately, his district’s congressman was a Republican—as were both of Pennsylvania’s senators—and Marshall Sr.’s prominent affiliation with the Democratic Party spoiled that notion. The next best thing was the Virginia Military Institute, where brother Stuart was in his senior year and where generations of the Virginia Marshalls had received their education.
What made George most keen to attend VMI was a conversation he surreptitiously overheard between his mother and his brother, who had been home on leave from the institute. Because of George’s mediocre grades in high school, Stuart urged his mother not to send him to VMI for fear of disgracing the family name. The incident had such a profound effect on Marshall that he remembered it vividly in his later years, saying that it motivated him more “than all the instructors, parental pressure, or anything else,” and “had a psychological effect” on his entire career.
Passing the entrance exam to VMI was dictated in large measure on whether or not the school’s superintendent, General Scott Shipp, liked the applicant. Shipp, known as a straitlaced but kindly man, had been at VMI for nearly forty years. As commandant during the Civil War, he had led the school’s corps of cadets, and he was wounded in its celebrated charge against the Union line during the Battle of New Market in 1864. Fortunately for George, the Marshall name in Virginia lay very high in the estimation of General Shipp, and the fact that George’s brother had excelled at VMI also prepared the road for his acceptance. For reasons that remain inexplicable, George took easily to the harsh military life of the academy; in fact, he thrived in it.
When, in September 1897, he arrived at the imposing and austere-looking campus in Lexington, Virginia, in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, sixteen-year-old cadet George Catlett Marshall Jr. (reporting three days late after having contracted typhoid fever) was in awe. “I will never forget,” he said years later, “walking down the long approach avenue to the barracks and hearing the bugle sound the assembly and seeing the adjutant and the sergeant major strut out to form the line on which the battalion would form. They were wonderful figures to me.”
Discipline at VMI was as strict or stricter than it was at West Point. Hazing of the freshmen cadets (known as “rats”) was severe as upperclassmen “braced” their young charges, shouting harshly in their faces. They were compelled to haul buckets of water from an outside tap up stairs to the upperclassmen’s quarters. Inspections of rooms and personages were rigorous and demerits distributed freely for any offense; these would be marched off on the parade grounds—one per hour—before the cadet was allowed freedom on Saturday afternoons to go into the town of Lexington. During the first few weeks of the hazing, which were the worst, Marshall suffered an injury that might well have been very serious, if not fatal. On the parade ground he was forced to squat over an unsheathed bayonet sticking out of the ground as a foolish and irresponsible endurance test. Probably weakened by the typhoid, he slipped, lacerating his buttock on the weapon. The wound caused him to miss formation for several days, but it would have been far more dangerous by a matter of an inch or so.
Marshall came in for special hazing because of his Pennsylvania Yankee accent. VMI remained a strong Southern institution, the Civil War barely thirty years past. In Marshall’s first year, the final building to be restored after Northern general David Hunter burned VMI nearly to the ground in 1864 was Jackson Memorial Hall, named after the legendary Confederate general Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, who had been brought there for burial following the Battle of Chancellorsville. Each year in May the names of the cadets who had been slain during the Battle of New Market were read aloud at formation. Moreover, the walls of barracks that had not been completely destroyed bore the blemishes of Hunter’s cannonballs during the 1864 incident. Older residents, and not a few VMI cadets, felt themselves well up at the frequent playing of “Dixie.”
Next door in Lexington was Washington and Lee College, of which Robert E. Lee had been president. Following his death in 1870, his body was entombed in what had been renamed Lee Chapel. Marshall was surprised, and on occasion shocked, that the South seemed utterly unrepentant following the war. In those days, the school often presented speakers at morning assembly such as the former Rebel general Jubal A. Early who, Marshall later noted, gave a speech defending the Confederacy “that seemed almost treasonous!”
If Marshall found the hazing annoying he at least took it passively. “I think I was more philosophical about this sort of thing than a great many boys,” he said long afterward. “It was part of the business and the only thing was to accept it as best you could.” Fortunately for Marshall, he lucked into a roommate his first year named Leonard Nicholson, scion of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Nicholson became his closest friend and remained with him until graduation. He was a man of great charm and good humor, as well as generosity when Marshall needed it most. (George’s allowance from home was $5 a month, and Nicholson more than once made up the shortfalls.) Even so, with such little money, Marshall avoided dances and other social functions during his first two years at VMI. He remained a marginal student, somewhere in the middle of his class, but in military studies and on the drill field his performance was such that at the final formation in the spring of 1898 it was announced that he would be first corporal the following term.
About that same time the United States declared war on Spain. The issue was Cuba, where a civil war had been raging for nearly three years because of the despotic behavior of its new Spanish governor Valeriano Weyler. There had long been talk in the United States of annexing Cuba from Spain; southerners had their eye on it for half a century before the American Civil War. In February 1898 the battleship Maine, stationed in the Havana harbor to protect U.S. interests, exploded and sank killing 260 of her 374-man crew. The American press nearly became unhinged—especially the so-called yellow journalism newspapers of William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. They blamed Spain for the incident, saying the ship had been deliberately blown up by a Spanish mine.§ When the United States called for Spain’s immediate removal and self-government for the Cuban Isles, Spain of course refused. In April 1898 both houses of the U.S. Congress declared war on Spain.
Within a week Dewey’s Asiatic Squadron had destroyed the entire Spanish fleet in the Philippines, and the United States claimed that huge piece of island territory. The VMI corps of cadets voted to a man to sign a document offering its services to the U.S. Army.
Shortly after subduing the Spanish officials and military forces in Manila, the United States attempted to establish an administration for the islands until some kind of Philippine government could be organized.ǁ But soon a serious insurrection broke out that taxed the United States’ resources and willpower over this problem-child territory eight thousand miles from its shores.a
By the end of his sophomore year at VMI, Marshall had not only put on weight that enhanced his looks but also improved his grades, bringing himself to the mid-third of his class. He decided to major in civil engineering. At the final formation that spring his name was announced as the first in the new promotion to first sergeants for the upcoming school term. Back in Uniontown, he was stirred by the triumphant return of the local National Guard company that had been fighting the Spanish in Cuba and the insurrectos in the Philippines. He later remembered that this martial spectacle galvanized his “choice of profession.”
That summer he served as a rodman on a surveying crew, and when classes resumed in the fall he went out for the VMI football team. He became a standout left tackle and made the first squad, immortalizing himself with a fifty-yard touchdown run in a victory over next-door rival Washington and Lee.6 It was a seminal year for George Catlett Marshall Jr. for two reasons: he was named first captain, VMI’s highest military honor, and he fell in love.
She was Elizabeth Carter Coles, known as Lily, who lived with her mother in her grandfather’s house, which was almost adjacent to the entrance—or “limit gates”—of VMI. Marshall was drawn by her piano playing, which wafted out of an open window as he passed by one evening. He stopped and listened, remembering years later that she was “the finest amateur pianist I have ever heard.” The next evening Marshall returned with several classmates; the night after that he was invited inside.
If it wasn’t love at first sight it was something close to it: two or three weeks later they were “steadies,” and they were engaged for the last year and a half Marshall was in school. She was a beauty of some renown, and also four years older than Marshall, who, though he was but nineteen years old at the time, cut a fine tall handsome figure in his first captain’s uniform. Lily came from fine old Virginia stock; one of her Pendleton ancestors was a signer of the Declaration of Independence and governor of Virginia. Another had harbored Thomas Jefferson from the British on his plantation during the Revolution.
Unfortunately Lily’s social activities were strictly limited by a bad constitution. She was unable to exert herself, even to dance.b But they found time together riding in her carriage, a stanhope trap, or sitting in her parlor. Even though it was thoroughly un–first captaincy behavior on his part, Marshall frequently went AWOL to see her late at night, sneaking off campus after lights-out—a practice known as “running the block.” “It was a dismissal offense,” Marshall recalled, “but I was very much in love and willing to take the chance.”
He came out fifth in his class in civil engineering, later remembering that by that time “ambition had set in.” At graduation, he was initiated into the Kappa Alpha fraternity, as VMI cadets are not allowed to join fraternities while in school. Then, armed with a college degree, he set out to find a way to get a commission in the U.S. Army, and to select a date to marry Elizabeth Carter Coles.
MARSHALL’S QUEST FOR A LIEUTENANT’S commission in the army was an exercise in persistence and tenacity, traits that had been nurtured at VMI, along with self-control, discipline, honesty, and leadership—the ability to control men. His parents at first resisted the notion of a military career for their son. The army in those days was not held in very high regard, notwithstanding the celebrated victory over Spain. Pay was low for junior officers, promotions slow, and the duty was often onerous. Since the nation’s inception, Americans have opposed having a large standing army. Instead they have opted for a small professional army whose ranks could quickly be swelled by volunteers (or in some cases the draft) in times of crisis. Therefore there were few openings for junior officers’ positions, most of them going to graduates of West Point.
In time, Marshall’s father came around and his mother also reluctantly accepted the idea of an army officer for a son. The elder Marshall, with his tenacious personality, then began to assemble a series of political contacts, beginning with General Shipp at VMI and leading all the way up to Elihu Root, the secretary of war, and ultimately to President William McKinley himself, a Republican. Thus on an April day in 1901, young George Marshall found himself in the waiting room next to President McKinley’s office on the second floor of the White House “without an appointment of any kind,” having been told by “an old colored man” (the head usher) that he would never get in.
After watching more than a dozen people enter the president’s office, Marshall saw his chance. When a man and his young daughter arrived and the usher escorted them in to see McKinley, Marshall “attached [him-] self to the tail of this procession and gained the President’s office,” adding that “the old colored man frowned at me on his way out but I stood pat.”
Marshall stated his case as succinctly as possible while the president listened politely and then he took his leave. Marshall later credited this presidential encounter with his being invited to take the army’s entrance examination for officers, which his principal biographer Forrest Pogue disputes. Whatever the case, he passed the exam and, on January 4, 1902, when he had just turned twenty-one, orders were issued commissioning George C. Marshall as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army with a date of rank from February 2, 1901. His orders further stated that in five days he was to report to Fort Myer, Virginia, and thence to Columbus barracks, Ohio. There he was to assume command of a detachment of recruits and take them by train to San Francisco, where they would board a ship for the Philippines. But, first, he had to get married.
The day after passing his exam, Marshall arrived in Lexington where the wedding was to be held in the bride’s home. The ceremony was performed by an Episcopal priest before Marshall’s parents, brother and sister, and his best friend from boyhood, Andy Thompson, with whom he had raised the fighting chickens back in Uniontown. Lily, dressed in white, was attended by her mother and sister and a number of friends from Lexington. It was reported that as the wedding guests mingled and chatted she turned to the tall, handsome newly commissioned second lieutenant and said, “Come on, George, let’s get married.”7
They boarded the train to Washington the following day to spend a week’s honeymoon at the fashionable new Willard Hotel a few blocks from the White House, which was followed by the sorrow of parting for his two-year tour of duty across eight thousand miles of ocean. On April 12, 1902, Marshall embarked on the troop transport Kilpatrick, bound for Manila.
While the Philippine insurrection would not be declared officially over for another three months, by the time Marshall’s transport arrived the uprising had been largely put down, with its leaders agreeing to take the American loyalty oath. Still, Marshall arrived in the Philippines in the midst of a deadly cholera epidemic and was assigned as a platoon leader with G Company of the 30th Infantry Regiment of the regular army, stationed on the island of Mindoro.c While in transit there, the interisland steamer Isla de Negros, on which he was a passenger, was caught in a terrifying typhoon that nearly wrecked the ship when the captain deserted the bridge for his stateroom and Marshall and another army officer had to take control of the vessel, not only steering it away from dangerous rocks but forcing the engine room crew back to their posts at pistol point.
Safely on land, his company was posted to the town of Calapan, which Marshall found inhabited mainly by women and children. Most of the men were living out in the hills as guerrilla fighters who, he said, “would shoot into the town from time to time.” The regiment was commanded by a colonel who had lost an arm in the Civil War and, Marshall remembered, was composed mostly of former Indian fighters, “about the wildest crowd I’ve ever seen, before or since.”
The sole entertainment in town for the officers was a trio of girls—sisters—one of whom played the harp, and “they played and sang sweetly” in the mornings. Through all his life since, the horror still raised a shiver in Marshall about the cholera attack reaching Calapan. “It broke out in almost a day,” he said, right after he had heard the girls sing. “We had no warning of it there. We thought we were safe. It broke out and the three sisters—I helped bury them all by three o’clock that afternoon.”
The men were immediately confined to quarters. Everything had to be boiled. The fingernails had to be cleaned, Marshall said. The hands and mess kits had to be washed in hot water. “You had to enforce these things very carefully or they would skimp them,” Marshall said. “A very little skimping would cost you your life.” They set up a cholera camp by a spring about two miles outside of town. Marshall went there sometimes as officer of the day. The first time he went up, “I found the soldiers peacefully eating their supper on a pile of coffins. Later there weren’t any coffins. The deaths came too rapidly,” and the victims then had to be buried wrapped only in a sheet and laid in trenches.
Cholera is a bacterial disease with dreadful symptoms. Marshall remembered its victims lying on metal cots, “with their knees almost under their chins and generally shrieking with the agonies of their convulsions. I don’t recall, myself, anybody recovering at that time.”d
By July 4 the epidemic had run its course. Theodore Roosevelt, who had become president after the assassination of President McKinley, officially declared that the insurrection in the Philippines was over. But this was news to large numbers of insurrectos who roamed the mountains, as well as to the hostile Moros, and so the army began sending out patrols to rein in these guerrillas. Marshall was ordered to lead a twenty-six-man detachment to the very southern tip of Mindoro, where he often set up the patrols. In the process he encountered one of the strange primitive tribes that inhabited the Philippines—who frequently greeted unexpected visitors with a flurry of poisoned arrows and blowgun darts. They were Batanganis, a light-skinned race identified with the legend that one woman of the tribe was so beautiful that any white man who saw her once would never return from Mindoro.8
At one point Marshall and his detachment were given the onerous duty of guarding a prison island in Laguna Bay inhabited by “the dregs of the army … the toughest crowd of men I’ve ever seen. You had to count them twice every night.” On one occasion Marshall saw one of these men attack another with a meat cleaver and nearly cut his head off.
But army life is one of contrasts, and he soon found himself posted to the quaint town of Santa Mesa just outside Manila. There he could go to the Army-Navy Club, dine al fresco in the delightful courtyard, and access the club’s riding stables, which was where Marshall developed his lifelong devotion to horseback riding. In the evening there was always a concert on the Luneta where, Marshall said, “everybody in Manila in our social order” would go, paying visits to one another from carriage to carriage while the music played. Frequently there were “insurrection” scares, in which a bugler would blow the clarion call to quarters at all hours of the night on unreliable evidence that a new revolution was at hand.
IN 1903 MARSHALL RETURNED to the United States and his company was posted to Fort Reno in the remote wilds of the Oklahoma Territory. It was garrison duty and fairly routine: close order drill, inspections, reports, spit-and-polish. At last Lily joined him, ending his enforced bachelorhood of nearly two years. Marshall rather enjoyed the routine, noting that the hunting and fishing on the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian reservations were “superb” year-round—quail, ducks, channel catfish in the Canadian River, small game, and deer.
“One morning Mrs. Marshall and I were early for breakfast, and we heard the quail calling in a little sumac grove near us,” he remembered fifty years later. “I went out there and in about thirty minutes I came back for breakfast and I had twelve quail [the legal limit]. Actually I think I had fifteen, but I don’t want to claim that.”
In the summer of 1905 Marshall was ordered to what he called “the hardest service I ever had in the army.” This involved a surveying trip in which he was to map two thousand square miles of the remote south Texas desert between the Rio Grande and the Devil’s River.
First off, he was improperly provisioned. The detachment Marshall led consisted of a wagon, a team of eight mules and a muleskinner, twenty pack mules and a packer, an assistant packer, and a sergeant who was fond of alcohol. As there was no place to resupply in the desert, Marshall would have to husband every morsel of food for both man and beast as they made their way—fifteen or twenty miles a day—over the scorched rocky desert. July was the hardest month, he said, when the thermometer would rise to 130 degrees.
About halfway through the month they were down to nothing to eat but bacon and canned meat—the onions, potatoes, and other fresh vegetables having been exhausted. At times they were out of water for nearly a day. By the end of the month they had come to the settlement of Langtry where they were able to obtain some provisions, but the sergeant predictably took to drink and scandalized the town.e In the end of August, Marshall returned to Fort Clark, Texas, to turn in the animals and wagon, the mapping mission being completed. There he met Captain Malin Craig, whose cavalry troop had lent him his horses, but Marshall recalled being so shabby-looking—“I was burnt almost black and had on an old panama hat which a mule had bitten the top out of—that Craig didn’t think I could be an officer, and talked only to my sergeant. He wouldn’t even look at me.”
In 1906 Marshall was assigned a coveted post to the army’s Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This was a period in which forces within the army and without were trying to change the service’s reputation as a hidebound megalith that—martinet-like—resisted all efforts to modernize it. The agent of much of this change was the secretary of war, Elihu Root, who reopened the then dormant Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, renaming it in 1907 the Army School of the Line, a one-year course whose top graduates would be eligible to attend the Army Staff College.
Root likewise began a reorganization of the army’s staff system. He was convinced that in modern warfare officers needed the highest quality of training and that a military education did not end at West Point (or the Virginia Military Institute, for that matter), but must be continuously evolving. He also concluded that the present staff structure in Washington was an administrative nightmare. The commanding general had virtually no power over the adjutant general or the dozen other bureaucrats who fought with and needled one another. To correct this, Root established the office of chief of staff and gave this officer almost unlimited (save for himself) jurisdiction over every aspect of the army down to and including the precise color of socks that a soldier could wear and what the army would pay for them. Many of the older officers objected to this system, but it proved to work well, with modifications, from that day to this.
MARSHALL FOUND THE COURSEWORK at Leavenworth highly challenging but from the first remained in the top 5 percent of his class. All the discipline and dedication that had been instilled in him at VMI began to pay off and, a year later, when the course had ended, he graduated first in his class and was headed for the prestigious Army Staff College.
Many of the problems there were theoretical and intellectual, designed to inculcate the officers to think on their own, and quickly, in fluid, developing military situations. They delved heavily in the voluminous Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, or OR, in order to reconstruct Civil War battles, some of which they then reenacted on paper to see what could be learned from them. Then they turned to practical matters. A great staff ride was prepared to help understand the complexity of the Battle of Gettysburg. Several dozen officers from the Leavenworth college rode horses along the path that Lee’s army took down the Shenandoah Valley en route to its terrific encounter with the Union Army in Pennsylvania, stopping along the way for lectures at other famous battle sites.
In their study of topography and military art (mapmaking) the student officers assessed tactical situations around Metz during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) using German maps and reports because that was all that was available. They reviewed this material so thoroughly, in fact, that when these students became high-ranking officers in World War I they were utterly familiar with the topography around the town of Metz, a scene of heavy battle action by the American army in France, as Marshall himself recalled: “I found myself [in 1918] familiar with the names of practically every village because they were all on this Griepenkerl map … and were right in the track of these great moves we were making towards the Meuse-Argonne front. I think that of the twenty-nine combat division commanders that got into action in France, some twenty-six or twenty-seven were graduates of Leavenworth during the period [when he was there].”
Aside from the tactical knowledge gained at the school, Marshall remembered that he also took away a sense of “thoroughness” that he might have lacked before, and which “stood me in good stead through all the clamor, excitement, [and] lack of time during the war, particularly in the Meuse-Argonne battle.”
After he graduated, Marshall was invited to become an instructor at the Leavenworth school, and he accepted. Lily had come to be with him most of the time, and with her bad heart she seemed to like the stability of the post. Marshall was still a lieutenant, albeit a first lieutenant, and he had spent much of his spare time riding, hunting, and playing tennis and golf. While there hadn’t been much in the way of social life as a student, now that he was on staff, that world seemed to open up. Much of this was Lily’s doing, for she was a woman of much charm, gaiety, and wit who often organized small dinner parties at the couple’s duplex quarters that were surrounded by “a generous green lawn shaded by noble elms and oaks.”9
(Leavenworth was a venerable old post built at the convergence of the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails, down which sixty years earlier General Stephen W. Kearny had marched his Army of the West to wrest the Santa Fe and California Territories from Mexico during the Mexican War. Later, it became the staging point for many of the expeditions of the Indian wars. But now it was alive with an “enthusiastic intellectual renaissance” striving hard to grasp solutions to the ever more complex military problems of the day.)
During his four years as a teacher, Marshall associated with some of the brightest minds in the army and developed not only an unusually effective ability to impart knowledge, but also a reverence from his students that was long remembered. Once, for instance, on a grueling hot summer mapmaking field exercise that involved many hours in the saddle, Marshall’s students were flabbergasted when at last they returned to their rendezvous to find Marshall waiting there with cases of cold beer for all.
Fifty years later, M. W. Clement, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who in the summer of 1908 had been a lieutenant with the Pennsylvania National Guard, told Marshall’s biographer Forrest Pogue that Marshall “had the ability to make everybody understand,” which must certainly rank among the highest compliments a teacher can accrue.10
IN 1909 MARSHALL SR. DIED. In the two decades since he’d lost his fortune he had redeemed himself from near poverty but the family’s living standards had never approached the level as before. Marshall’s brother and sister had both married and his parents had left their comfortable house in the West End of Uniontown and moved into an apartment building in town known as “the skyscraper.”
When Marshall returned to his old neighborhood, the sights that greeted him were poignant and affecting. His family home had been pulled down, the lot leveled with landfill and a movie house built on the site. The fill now clogged Coal Lick Run where he’d launched his matchbox battleship fleet as a boy. His lone nostalgic encounter came when the aged dog of a boyhood friend who’d long since died recognized him by his scent and “just went crazy.” It was, in Marshall’s words, “the most flattering thing that happened to me on that short visit home.”
Soon after the visit home, First Lieutenant and Mrs. Marshall went abroad. They had to do it on “a shoestring,” but over the course of four months in 1910 they managed to cover six countries “while I was on half pay,” Marshall said. They saw Paris, the château country, Austria, Florence, Rome, and Algiers—visiting ruins, palaces, and so forth—and finally made it to London and then County Surrey, where Arthur Conan Doyle had set the Sir Nigel stories that Marshall heard his father read by the fireside as a child. At one point he rented a bicycle at the military town of Aldershot, thirty-seven miles southwest of London, and followed the British army on its maneuvers. It was to be the last glimmer of the old Europe and its belle époque. “In 1914,” Marshall said, “it blew up. The lights went out, and it never was the same again.”
IN 1912 AND STATESIDE AGAIN, Marshall was posted with the Fourth Infantry Regiment at San Antonio near the Mexican border where there had been trouble from the ongoing revolutions. Marshall was assigned to lead a signal outfit that received what was said to be the first wireless message sent on U.S. Army maneuvers. It came from the commander of the cavalry who, in reporting his position to headquarters, radioed: “I am just west of the manure pile.”
After a year on detached duty instructing various state National Guard units, Marshall was sent back to the Philippines. In August 1913 he and Lily arrived in Manila where he joined the 13th Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort McKinley. Marshall found that the Islamist Moros in the southern islands were still in rebellion, but the main military concern now was of a possible Japanese invasion owing to a rise in Japanese imperialism following their stunning victory over the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.
U.S. relations with Japan had become strained by anti-Japanese immigration legislation and Asian-hostile newspapers in California.f The situation was deemed critical enough that defensive emplacements with heavy artillery were being constructed with a mind to repel invaders from the beaches and harbors. A grand series of maneuvers had also been organized to test the strength of the defenses of the main island of Luzon.g The maneuver to test Luzon’s defenses against an invading force was composed of a nearly 5,000-man “White Force” (the invaders) and a more than 3,000-man “Brown Force” (the defenders). The Whites were to make an amphibious landing and the Browns were to defend Manila against capture.
First, Marshall was assigned as adjutant and chief of staff to the White Force commander, but when the regular chief of staff became ill with malaria George Marshall got his job. The White Force commander, it seems, a soon-to-retire colonel, had been found incompetent by the inspector general; he was told by the commanding general to retire immediately or to let Marshall run the maneuver.h Marshall himself privately objected to this solution on grounds that the next in command was even worse, but an accommodation was reached in which Lieutenant George C. Marshall himself was put in command of the White Force, and neither the first nor the second in command could interfere with any orders he issued.
Each side was briefed on what was expected of them, but the details remained to be worked out and the date of the opening of the maneuver was kept secret by the commanding general. Thus, on the morning of January 22, Marshall was summoned by headquarters from the field “in a soaking wet flannel shirt” and told that the maneuver was on.
The situation was outlined for both White and Brown Forces. Marshall’s job was to get the 4,842-man army, with all its guns and wagons and eighteen hundred horses and mules—scattered all over Luzon—pulled together and loaded onto boats to rendezvous at Batangas at the far southern tip of Luzon. From there, they were to attack seventy-five miles up the peninsula and try to capture Manila.
Marshall immediately realized the difficulties before him, not the least of which was the army’s parochial command system. He was a mere lieutenant ordering around superior officers who, though they had been told to obey him, often did so with the most grudging and hidebound alacrity. On the other hand, the opposing Brown Force was commanded by two full colonels who could make anyone beneath their rank hop. It would be a trying experience.
When Marshall found that he would need to have stalls made on boats for the animals, he was informed he didn’t even have permission to see the department quartermaster, who had refused his request. Marshall threatened to go to the commanding general, adding tactfully, “to ask him what I should do now.”
By January 29 the White Force had landed at Batangas and was making its way up toward Manila, overcoming Brown Forces along the way. At one point Lieutenant Henry H. “Hap” Arnoldi came upon his friend Lieutenant Marshall lying on his back in a stand of snaky-looking brush, surrounded by staff, unit commanders, and maneuver umpires. He was staring fervently at a map tacked to a tree above his head and dictating the order for the final assault on Manila.
It was a long and complex order, but when he stopped speaking ten or fifteen minutes later “the group around him was awed.”11 Off the top of his head, Marshall had dictated the most complete, comprehensible, and tactically perfect order possible without notes or other references—an episode that eventually passed into one of the enduring Marshall legends.j Having witnessed this, Hap Arnold predicted to his wife that Marshall “would one day become chief of staff of the Army.”12
Indeed, Marshall’s White Force prevailed, outflanking the Browns and marching triumphantly into Manila. Marshall received extraordinary praise from the maneuver’s umpires—so much that on January 1, 1916, he was selected to be aide-de-camp to General Hunter Liggett, who had arrived to command an infantry brigade.k
The officer in charge of training and maneuvers in the Philippine Department advanced the opinion in his report on the exercise that Lieutenant George Marshall “was the best leader of large bodies of troops in the entire American Army without regard of age, rank, or previous experience,” and several days later, at a luncheon given for his staff, the department commander, Major General J. Franklin Bell, stated that he regarded Lieutenant Marshall as “the greatest potential wartime leader in the Army.”13
The general’s effusive compliments notwithstanding, Marshall was set to be severely tested. The slaughter that had become the Great War in Europe—indeed the war throughout the world—had been grinding out corpses for nearly two years. In May 1915 a German submarine off the Irish coast sank the British liner Lusitania, once the largest ship in the world, drowning some 1,200 souls, including 128 Americans.
The ensuing uproar in the United States prompted the Germans to abstain for a time from unrestricted naval warfare, but in January 1917, as Germany’s situation became increasingly desperate, the kaiser once again declared that all ships in British waters, armed or unarmed, were fair game. Three months later the United States declared war on Germany.
* The queen and her government escaped The Hague before the Germans arrived and set up a government in exile in London.
† So called because they were shaped like beehives.
‡ Approximately $5 million in today’s money.
§ What exactly happened to the Maine remains a subject of controversy. Shortly after the incident a U.S. Navy board concluded that a mine had caused the explosion. Later investigations by private interests suggested that the forward coal bunker had blown up from an excess of coal dust. In any event, in 1912, following a three-year effort, U.S. Army engineers raised the ship and removed scores of bodies, which were sent for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The Maine was then towed out to sea and scuttled to make an offshore fishing reef.
ǁ Spanish officials, hoping to save face, had secretly arranged with the U.S. Army to surrender after a sham battle was staged.
a The Philippines remained in an almost constant state of insurrection from that time until after World War II when it was granted independence.
b Her condition, Marshall said, was a heart defect called mitral regurgitation.
c Marshall himself estimated there were about five thousand cholera deaths a day.
d A reported 109,461 people died in the Philippines during the cholera plague.
e Langtry was named for the odious Judge Roy Bean’s favorite singer, Lillie Langtry.
f These were the infamous “Yellow Peril” headlines, much of them from the Hearst press.
g Maneuvers, or “war games,” are the method the army uses to test its own effectiveness. Like a full-contact scrimmage in football, they are designed to be as realistic as possible.
h It seems that the colonel drank. As Marshall put it, “He was a courtly gentleman, a very nice fellow. He carried a zinc-lined suitcase with him … and every time we would stop … he would refresh himself against the Philippine heat.”
i Arnold would go on to command the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II.
j This was the “Standard Field Order” recently developed at Fort Leavenworth, whose various paragraphs Marshall had memorized, having only to “fill in the blanks” with pertinent information.
k Liggett in 1917 would rise to become second in command of the American Expeditionary Forces in France.