CHAPTER 1
General George C. Marshall
The leader
It is not mentioned much nowadays that for the United States, World War II began with a series of dismissals across the top ranks of the military. Less than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Adm. Husband Kimmel and Army Lt. Gen. Walter Short were jettisoned from their posts atop the American military establishment in the Pacific, along with Maj. Gen. Frederick Martin, Short’s air commander. Even less remembered is that Kimmel, who once had been an aide to Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, held the post only because his predecessor, Adm. James Richardson, had been fired by the president a year earlier. The following year, the commander of one of the first Army divisions to fight the Japanese, the 32nd Division’s Maj. Gen. Edwin Harding, was relieved by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, along with many of his regimental and battalion commanders. When Lt. Gen. George Kenney arrived to take over the air operation in the Pacific in mid-1942, his first act was to remove five generals he deemed to be “deadwood,” along with forty colonels and lieutenant colonels. Adm. Harold Stark, the Navy’s top officer, was ousted from his post in March 1942. He was hardly alone: One-third of the Navy’s submarine captains were relieved during the first year of the war. On the North African front, where American soldiers first fought the Germans, the senior tactical commander of those forces, Maj. Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, was fired.
The officer presiding over this dynamic and ruthless system of personnel management was Gen. George C. Marshall, who back in Washington was winnowing the ranks of the Army, forcing dozens of generals into retirement because he believed they were too old and lacking in energy to lead soldiers in combat.
“I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was,” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt remarked to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower one day in Tunisia during World War II. FDR was correct. Though rarely memorialized by the public today, George Marshall not only was the senior American general of World War II; he was, effectively, the founding father of the modern American armed forces. Under him, the United States for the first time developed a superpower military, a status it has retained for the past seven decades. Far more than George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, or even Dwight Eisenhower, this “coolly impersonal” man (as his subordinate Albert Wedemeyer called him) shaped the military of his time so profoundly that his work lives on into the twenty-first century, sometimes evident in the way Army leaders have operated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, Marshall’s unusual and very American concept of what sort of person constitutes a good general still influences the promotions today’s leaders bestow on younger officers. It would be difficult to understand today’s Army without knowledge of Marshall’s career—and especially his powerful sense of duty and honor.
Marshall formally became chief of staff of the U.S. Army on September 1, 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland. “Things look very disturbing in the world this morning,” he wrote in a thank-you note to George Patton’s wife. Such understatement reflected the man. It is not unfair to call Marshall colorless. He might have taken it as a compliment, as an implicit recognition that he did his duty even at the cost of personal advancement. He intentionally left no memoir of his service leading the military during the nation’s greatest war. There is no weapon or installation named for him, as there is a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and an Abrams tank. Indeed, in the snowy reaches of remote northern New York, there is even a Fort Drum, honoring Gen. Hugh Drum, the “stubborn, pompous, occasionally ignorant” officer who inexplicably had been Marshall’s leading rival for the Army’s top slot. There is no Fort Marshall.
George Marshall was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. In 1901, he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, where he marched before Stonewall Jackson’s widow. He soon joined the Army, which then was recovering from its low ebb of the 1890s, the decade when the frontier officially closed and the last of the Indian wars ended. The Army expanded rapidly in the wake of the Spanish–American War of 1898, almost quadrupling in size to 100,000. As part of that growth, George Marshall received his commission. In this newly energized force, he stood out as a young officer. Marshall was temporarily posted to Fort Douglas, Utah—originally placed on a hillside overlooking Salt Lake City to keep an eye on Brigham Young’s nascent and hostile Mormon empire. One of his commanders there was Lt. Col. Johnson Hagood. When asked in an evaluation form if he would like to have Marshall serve under him, Hagood, who himself would rise to major general, wrote in December 1916, “Yes, but I would prefer to serve under his command.”
Marshall and the Great War
The formative event of Marshall’s life would be World War I. Several years after that conflict began, the United States sent into it a constabulary military whose sole experience with large-scale industrial-era combat had been the Civil War, a conflict the Europeans—correctly or not—perceived as a generally amateurish domestic brawl. The U.S. Army was unprepared at the outset of the Great War and was not much better at its close, when, as historian Conrad Crane put it, “foreign leaders still considered the American Expeditionary Forces poorly organized and ignorant of modern warfare.”
The United States declared war in April 1917, when the war had been under way for more than thirty months, and the first large groups of draftees reported for duty only in September of that year. The initial American casualties came in November, and it took many more months after that first foray to get large numbers of American troops into combat. The American buildup may have been key to the outcome of the war, because it encouraged the Allies to hold on, but the first solely American offensive was not launched until September 1918. The armistice was declared just eight weeks later. For the Army as a whole, the war was too brief a venture to be transformative, but it was a life-changing experience for some officers in the middle of it, notably George Marshall.
Marshall’s first memorable encounter of the war in France came in October 1917. It was not the Germans he confronted, but rather the man who would become his mentor, Gen. John “Blackjack” Pershing, the senior American commander in the war. Reviewing American soldiers training in France for trench warfare, Pershing blew up at what he perceived to be a shambles of an operation, with ill-trained soldiers and leaders apparently ignorant of how to train effectively or even how to follow Army directives. In front of a group of officers, Pershing chastised Maj. Gen. William Sibert, the commanding general, as well as Sibert’s chief of staff, who had arrived only two days earlier. “He didn’t give General Sibert a chance to talk at all,” Marshall recalled.
Marshall walked up to Pershing in an attempt to explain the situation. The irate commanding general shrugged and turned away. Marshall, a mere captain, then did something that could have cost him his promising career, laying his hand on Pershing’s arm and insisting that he be heard out. “General Pershing, there’s something to be said here, and I think I should say it because I’ve been here longer,” he said. He then let go with a torrent of facts about the hurdles the division had faced in training its soldiers. Confronting the commander of the U.S. Army in France was a risky move, but it also showed moral courage. After Pershing departed, several comrades consoled Marshall in the belief that he had just destroyed his military career. Pershing’s opinion of Sibert remained unchanged—the next day Sibert’s name headed a list of eleven generals Pershing sent to Washington, D.C., describing the group as ineffectual. By the end of the year, Sibert, the first commander of an American division ever sent overseas, had been relieved.
Sibert’s successor, Maj. Gen. Robert Bullard, began his command by emphasizing to subordinates that the dismissals did not necessarily end with Sibert’s departure, “telling them they’d be ‘relieved’ without any hesitation upon the part of General Pershing if they did not ‘deliver the goods’; they must succeed or lose their commands.” Bullard noted in his diary that Pershing was “looking for results. He intends to have them. He will sacrifice any man who does not bring them.” This was not an idle observation, as Bullard, Marshall, and others would see. Maj. Gen. Clarence Edwards, the commander of the 26th (“Yankee”) Division, composed of National Guard units from New England, was popular with his men but considered irascible by others, and he was removed from his command by Pershing.
Pershing often used a two-step process to remove generals, first shunting them off to a minor post in France and then, after a short interval, shipping them home. In this way he ousted two division commanders on the same day. On October 16, 1918, he removed the 5th Division’s Maj. Gen. John McMahon and the 3rd Division’s wonderfully named Maj. Gen. Beaumont Bonaparte Buck. One possible reason for the removal of Buck was a rumor that he intended to lead a bayonet charge. Buck apparently did not lead that attack; he survived the war and did not die until 1950, at the age of ninety, after doing a “vigorous foxtrot” on a dance floor with his thirty-four-year-old wife. All told, Pershing relieved at least six division commanders and two corps commanders during World War I. Lower-ranking officers were also judged severely, with some fourteen hundred removed from combat positions and sent to the U.S. Army officers’ casual depot at Blois, France. (American soldiers often pronounced the town’s name “Blooey,” giving rise to the slang expression, popular in the 1920s, of “going blooey”—falling apart.)
In his policy of swift relief, Pershing was perhaps more sweeping than some other commanders in American wars, but he was well within American military tradition, as demonstrated as far back as the Revolution and the Civil War, when relief of generals was common. During the War for American Independence, Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler was relieved after the fall of Fort Ticonderoga, New York, in July 1777, and was accused of dereliction of duty by Maj. Gen. Horatio Gates. An inquiry cleared Schuyler of the charge, but he resigned from the Army and went home. Gates himself went on to disastrous defeat near Camden, South Carolina, which then led to his own relief. During the Civil War, Stonewall Jackson famously fired a brigade commander who told him something could not be done. President Lincoln also relieved a series of commanders of the Army of the Potomac—Irvin McDowell, George McClellan, John Pope, McClellan again, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker, and George Meade. Pershing was also acting consistently with his French allies: In the first weeks of the war, Marshal Joseph Joffre, the French commander, relieved two army commanders, nine of twenty-one corps commanders, thirty-three of seventy-two infantry division commanders, and five of ten cavalry division commanders. “These changes weeded out the higher commands and rejuvenated the list of general officers,” Joffre wrote.
Marshall was one of the younger men who rose swiftly during the war. After their first confrontation, Pershing kept an eye on Marshall. Marshall impressed his fellow officers with the central role he played in organizing U.S. military operations in the war, simultaneously planning the two great American offensives: in Saint-Mihiel on September 12, 1918, and, beginning two weeks later, in the Meuse-Argonne sector, which involved moving 200,000 troops out of the front line and 600,000 fresh troops into it. Marshall also played a key role in the formation of the first division ever fielded by the American Army in Europe. Initially, it was simply called “the combat division,” because at that time it was the only one of its kind. That unit later became the 1st Infantry Division, also known as the “Big Red One.” “Colonel Marshall’s greatest attribute was his ability to reduce complex problems to their fundamentals,” remembered Benjamin Caffey, who served under him as a young staff officer and would later become a general himself. James Van Fleet, another World War I soldier who went on to become a general, simply remembered that Marshall emerged from that war with a reputation as a “brilliant planner.” After the war ended, Pershing asked Marshall to become his aide, a post the younger man filled for five years, the longest tour of duty he would have in his Army career until he became chief of staff himself.
Perhaps the key lesson of World War I for Marshall came from observing Pershing in March 1918, when the outcome of the conflict was still much in doubt. The French army appeared near collapse after the previous year’s mutinies. The British were in shock after seeing a generation of young men lost in the mud of Belgium and northeastern France. The Germans were resurgent after the Russian collapse had enabled them to transfer some fifty infantry divisions to the Western Front, and they were pushing deeper into France. “The French and British had no reserves,” Marshall remembered in a lecture he gave six months after the war ended. American firepower had not yet been brought to bear, and many doubted how an American force experienced mainly in chasing Indians and bandits on the Mexican border would perform when fighting among the armies of the great powers of Europe. Amid the resulting mood of imminent disaster, Pershing stood out as calm, cheerful, and determined. “In the midst of a profound depression he radiated determination and the will to win,” Marshall wrote in his little-known memoir of World War I. That lesson would become key to how Marshall thought of generalship and especially how he selected senior leaders. In observing Pershing, Marshall learned to one day look for an Eisenhower.
Marshall’s list
Scholars disagree over whether or not Marshall actually maintained a “little black book” of promising young officers to keep in mind for future promotions or whether that is just an Army myth. No such booklet or list has ever been found, nor even documents indicating that it existed.
Yet Marshall did have a very clear sense of the qualities he looked for in promoting officers. His ideas about what makes a good leader would go a long way toward determining who would become a general in World War II—and toward determining how the Army would think about generalship for decades afterward. In a letter he wrote in November 1920, not long after he became aide-de-camp to Pershing, he listed the qualities of the successful leader, in the following order:
At first glance, this list might seem unexceptional, even Boy Scoutish. Yet it merits closer examination. Heeding a lesson of World War I, Marshall placed a premium on vigor, implicitly excluding the older officer from promotion, especially the “château general” who rarely left the comforts of his headquarters to fight in the trenches with his troops. Marshall instead valued the man who wanted to be in the middle of things.
Marshall’s list emphasizes character over intellect. He did so consciously, tailoring his template to fit the particular circumstances of the United States. The quiet pessimist might be effective in other militaries, he argued, but not in a democratic nation that, protected by the world’s two great oceans, tended always to pursue a “policy of unpreparedness” for war. Given that tendency, which inevitably meant leading ill-trained and poorly equipped units into demoralizing battles, he decided that the American military needed the
optimistic and resourceful type, quick to estimate, with relentless determination, and who possessed in addition a fund of sound common sense, which operated to prevent gross errors due to rapidity of decision and action.
The opposite sort of leader, the man prone to looking at the negative side, must be excised promptly. The units led by these “calamity howlers,” he wrote with evident distaste, were “quickly infected with the same spirit and grew ineffective unless a more suitable commander was given charge.”
Marshall also was solidly in the American tradition in valuing effectiveness over appearance. He was a reserved man, but not a fussy one. During a 1933 inspection tour, he walked into one Army post and found the commander and another officer asleep. He then went into a supply room and surprised a lieutenant who was working in his undershirt. “You may not be in proper uniform,” Marshall reassured the embarrassed man, “but you are the only officer I found working here.”
Marshall’s list is significant for what it omits. He was ambivalent about the brawler and the adventurous cavalryman. He wanted generals who would fight, but not men who would command recklessly or discredit the military with their personal behavior. “You can sometimes win a great victory by a very dashing action,” he once said. “But often, or most frequently, the very dashing action exposes you to a very fatal result if it is not successful. And you hazard everything in that way.” He trusted even less the outlier, the individualist, the eccentric, and the dreamer—all well represented in the nineteenth-century American military, especially by heroes of the Union such as Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, and more so by those of the Confederacy, such as J. E. B. Stuart and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, whom Marshall had studied “religiously,” according to his official biographer.
In contrast to those two latter-day cavaliers, Marshall called for steady, levelheaded team players. He wanted both competence and cooperativeness. The biggest difference between American commanders in World War I and World War II would be that in the latter war, they were adept at coordinating the efforts of the infantry, artillery, armor, and aviation branches, especially in breaking through enemy lines and then exploiting that penetration. As German field marshal Gerd von Rundstedt put it after being captured in 1945, “We cannot understand the difference in your leadership in the last war and in this. We could understand it if you had produced one superior corps commander, but now we find all of your corps commanders good and of equal superiority.”
Yet Marshall was not looking for conformists. He believed in the respectful, confidential expression of dissent, as he had demonstrated by bluntly confronting Gen. Pershing during World War I.
Marshall and President Roosevelt
Marshall’s willingness to be blunt with President Franklin Roosevelt about military matters was a major reason he eventually was chosen to be chief of staff of the Army. On the afternoon of November 14, 1938, well before he had become chief of staff, Marshall and eleven other senior government officials gathered at the White House. It was two months after British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s meetings with Adolf Hitler in Munich and just five days after Kristallnacht, in which Nazi mobs launched nationwide attacks on the Jews of Germany and on their shops and synagogues. The issue at hand at the White House meeting was whether to commission the construction of ten thousand warplanes. That was a heady number, given that at the time the Army Air Corps possessed about 160 fighter aircraft and just 50 bombers. In Marshall’s view, the proposed program was wildly unbalanced, overemphasizing machines without properly considering everything else that must be done in order to create a modern air force, such as the time and the huge amount of funding required to recruit and train aircrews, to build and staff the bases they would need, and to manufacture the ammunition and bombs they must have if war came. But no one else at the White House meeting seemed concerned. When Roosevelt polled the room, Marshall later recalled, the others present were agreeable and “very soothing.” Marshall said nothing until he was asked.
“Don’t you think so, George?” Roosevelt inquired, in what may have been the sole instance of his using Marshall’s given name. (Marshall took offense at the usage, thinking that it misrepresented their relationship. He would find ways to make it clear that he preferred to be addressed as “General Marshall.”)
“I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all,” Marshall responded. He recalled that “the president gave me a very startled look.” Roosevelt likely thought that Marshall, who had been pushing for military readiness, would be pleased with the move. But Marshall wanted balanced preparation, not an aircraft construction program he saw as likely to cause huge problems. He may also have suspected that Roosevelt privately intended to manufacture the aircraft and ship them to the British and the French instead of building up the American force. Marshall’s approach to generalship was to speak truth to power. His relationship with Roosevelt was not intimate, but FDR was learning that Marshall would tell him what he thought.
At this time, Roosevelt viewed military mobilization from two distinct perspectives. He would say later that he felt he had been walking a tightrope between keeping American isolationists in the camp of his New Deal happy while he tried to counter the rise of foreign fascism. His public statements showed no inclination to go to war. On September 3, 1939, three days after the Nazis invaded Poland, he pledged in a “fireside chat” that the United States would remain neutral in the new European war. He remained wary of rapid expansion of the military, especially as the 1940 election approached. Seeking an unprecedented third term during that year’s presidential campaign, he promised not to send American boys into foreign wars.
On May 13, 1940, Marshall would again have occasion to confront the president. This time it was in a tense meeting on whether to rapidly expand the size of the Army. It was three days after the Germans had ended the “Phony War” period by invading France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. Just that morning, the Luftwaffe had conducted the largest air strike in history, carpet-bombing French units near Sedan and enabling three Panzer divisions, led by Heinz Guderian and Erwin Rommel, to punch a hole through the French line. French troops were running from the battlefield, and their commanders were paralyzed and panicky. On the same day, Queen Wilhelmina and the Dutch government had fled to London, where Neville Chamberlain had resigned as prime minister three days earlier, a victim of his own failed policy of appeasement. His successor, Winston Churchill, in his first speech as the new prime minister, told the British people, “I have nothing to offer you but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.”
Marshall spent the morning with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., explaining the nature and rationale of a major increase in the size of the military. Then, joined by War Department officials, the two walked over to the White House to see the president, who made it clear to Marshall and Morgenthau that he “was not desirous of seeing us,” as Marshall recalled. Roosevelt disliked the Army expansion proposal and tried to quell dissent by calling an end to the session prematurely. Morgenthau said he supported the manpower increase, but “the president was exceedingly short with him,” Marshall said. When Morgenthau finished, FDR shrugged him off: “Well, you filed your protest.”
Morgenthau asked if the president would hear out Marshall. Roosevelt responded that he didn’t need to listen to the new Army chief, because, he said airily, “I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me to hear him at all.” Marshall’s two civilian overseers—Secretary of War Harry Woodring and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson—sat mutely, offering Marshall no support. For Marshall, that dismissal was almost a repeat of his confrontation with Gen. Pershing decades earlier. But this time the stakes were infinitely higher—this involved not just the reputations and careers of a few officers, but possibly the future of the nation and, indeed, of the world.
Roosevelt ended the meeting. Marshall stood, but instead of leaving the room he walked over to the president and looked down on him. “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?” he asked.
“Of course, General Marshall,” Roosevelt said. He did not invite Marshall to sit back down. When the president started to say something else, Marshall interrupted him, fearing that otherwise he would never get another word in. Marshall spoke in a torrent, spewing out facts about military requirements, organization, and costs. “If you don’t do something . . . and do it right away, I don’t know what is going to happen to this country,” he told Roosevelt. “You have got to do something, and you’ve got to do it today.”
He finally had the president’s attention. “We are in a situation now where it’s desperate,” Marshall continued. “I am using the word very accurately, where it’s desperate. We have literally nothing, nothing, and unless something is done immediately, and even then it takes a long, long time to get any return on it, we are caught in a dreadful position of unpreparedness. And with everything being threatened the way it has been, I feel that I must tell you just as frankly and vehemently as I can what our necessities are.”
Morgenthau wrote in his diary that Marshall “stood right up to the president.” It worked. The next day the president asked Marshall to draw up as soon as possible a list of what the military needed. Marshall would later recall this meeting as a turning point in FDR’s military policy.
Marshall’s attitude toward his dealings with Roosevelt provided a model of civil-military discourse. It was, most of all, frank—at least on Marshall’s side. Yet it was not close. As chief of staff, Marshall would insist on remaining socially and emotionally distant from the president, seeing it as necessary to maintaining a professional relationship. Nowadays, most senior officers would leap at the chance to spend time with the commander in chief during his more relaxed moments. For example, before the Iraq war, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of the U.S. Central Command, overseeing the Middle East, visited President George W. Bush at the latter’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, as Marine Gen. Peter Pace would do later as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Marshall was wary of such intimacies. “I found informal conversation with the president would get you into trouble,” he later explained. “He would talk over something informally at the dinner table and you had trouble disagreeing without creating embarrassment. So I never went.” He refused even to laugh at the president’s jokes. The first time he ever visited Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, New York, was for the president’s funeral. But he and the president were perhaps the best wartime civil-military team the nation has ever had.
Marshall prepares for war
Even before he became chief of the Army, Marshall was thinking about how to oust the nonperformers in the Army’s senior ranks. In the spring of 1939, war was on the horizon. Marshall had been told he would be the next Army chief, but he had not yet taken that office. He embarked on a sensitive mission to South America to secure agreements to freely move American forces by air and sea across the South Atlantic. The trip was spurred by American worry about growing pro-German sentiment within the Brazilian military, most notably evidenced by a German invitation to the chief of the Brazilian army, Gen. Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro, to lead Nazi troops on a parade in Berlin. Accompanying Marshall was Col. Matthew Ridgway, a rising young officer.
It is difficult to imagine nowadays, but for ten days during the voyage to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Nashville, Ridgway and Marshall sat on the forward deck of the light cruiser and simply talked. More or less cut off from the world, they discussed the future of the Army, about which Marshall held two great concerns. The first was the need to get more money out of Congress to expand, equip, and train the military. The second was how to find and promote good officers to lead that growing force. “He knew from his own experience in WWI and from his extensive reading of our military history of the political and other pressures which had resulted in the appointment to high command in past wars of so many mediocre and even incompetent officers,” Ridgway recalled.
The South American mission was a success, with landing and port rights secured, even though Gen. Góis Monteiro went on to accept the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle the following year. For a spell during World War II, the American air base that was established at Natal, in northeastern Brazil, would become one of the busiest airports in the world, used as a ferrying point into Africa, whose coast was about eighteen hundred miles to the east, and also for antisubmarine patrols over the mid-Atlantic.
Marshall returned to Washington with a battle plan for rapid change in the ranks of the Army’s senior officers. “The present general officers of the line are for the most part too old to command troops in battle under the terrific pressure of modern war,” Marshall said in October 1939, a month after being sworn in as chief of the Army, in an off-the-record comment to a journalist. “Most of them have their minds set in outmoded patterns, and can’t change to meet the new conditions they may face if we become involved in the war that’s started in Europe.” At Marshall’s behest, in the summer and fall of 1941, 31 colonels, 117 lieutenant colonels, 31 majors, and 16 captains were forced into retirement or discharged from the active-duty force. In addition, some 269 National Guard and Army Reserve officers were let go. All told, Marshall estimated that, as chief of staff, he forced out at least 600 officers before the United States entered World War II. “I was accused right away by the service papers of getting rid of all the brains of the army,” he said. “I couldn’t reply that I was eliminating considerable arteriosclerosis.”
Marshall removed officers in part to convey a sense of urgency. When the commandant at Leavenworth, Brig. Gen. Charles Bundel, told him that updating the complete set of Army training manuals would take eighteen months, Marshall offered him three months to do the job. No, it can’t be done, Bundel responded. Marshall then offered four months. Bundel again said it was impossible. Marshall asked him to reconsider that statement. “You be very careful about that,” Marshall warned.
“No, it can’t be done,” Bundel insisted.
“I’m sorry, then you are relieved,” Marshall informed him, in an exchange that evoked Stonewall Jackson’s relief of a colonel in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, an episode Marshall almost certainly knew about. (While on the march in the Shenandoah, Jackson had ordered a colonel to pull together his brigade, which had divided into two or three parts. “It’s impossible, General; I can’t do it,” the officer said. Jackson responded, “Turn your command over to the next officer. If he can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can.”) Marshall replaced Bundel with Brig. Gen. Lesley McNair, who went on to play a major role during the war, overseeing all Army training until he was killed by an Army Air Force fragmentation bomb that fell six miles short in Saint-Lô, France, in July 1944.
Marshall rarely let slip his fierce temper, but he did so when politicians questioned his efforts to get new men into the leadership of National Guard divisions. At one meeting at which his judgment about moving a general was questioned, he gave members of Congress an ultimatum: “I am not going to leave him in command of that division. So I will put it to you this way: If he stays, I go, and if I stay, he goes.” When Justice Felix Frankfurter passed along a criticism he had heard from a friend in the Army Reserve about the relief of Guard officers, Marshall tartly replied that “most of our senior officers on such duty are deadwood and should be eliminated from the service as rapidly as possible.”
The United States had not yet entered World War II, but Marshall had determined that most of the top generals in the Army were too aged for combat, and that just below them were many officers who were also far past their prime. Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that one of the beneficial side effects of the big Louisiana Maneuvers, staged in August and September 1941 with several hundred thousand troops in two opposing forces, was their demonstration that “some officers . . . had of necessity to be relieved from command.” Only eleven of the forty-two generals who commanded a division, a corps, or an army in those maneuvers would go on to command in combat. Just one of the prewar Army’s senior generals, Walter Krueger, would be given top command in World War II. Decades later, Eisenhower said that those removals had been key steps to victory in World War II. In his old age, he listed the names of a series of officers who, because they were discarded, are now forgotten by history: “a whole group of people . . . There was Marley, Charley Thompson—what’s his name—McKieffer, Daily, Benedict . . . By God, he [Marshall] just took them and threw them out of the room. . . . He got them out of the way, and I think as a whole he was right.” The corollary to swift relief is, of course, rapid advancement of others, usually younger officers. “I was the youngest of the people that he pushed up into very high places,” Eisenhower continued.
Today’s officers sometimes fret about “personnel turbulence,” but their lives look unruffled compared with the first two years of Marshall’s leadership. He took over an Army of just 197,000 people, a number that included the infant Air Force. Under Marshall, the Army grew in just two years to 1.4 million in the summer of 1941, and two years after that it had reached nearly 7 million, finally peaking in 1945 at 8.3 million. The newcomers were overseen by a new generation of commanders who were being pushed hard. Once those new leaders were in place, Marshall told military journalist George Fielding Eliot, he would put them through their paces to gauge who among them was really capable. He elaborated:
I’m going to put these men to the severest tests which I can devise in time of peace. I’m going to start shifting them into jobs of greater responsibility than those they hold now. . . . Then I’m going to change them, suddenly, without warning, to jobs even more burdensome and difficult. . . . Those who stand up under the punishment will be pushed ahead. Those who fail are out at the first sign of faltering.
Those who passed the tests moved quickly. At one point Marshall, irked by the erratic quality of staff work in the Army Air Force and wanting to reward talent and maturity when he saw it, promoted a major directly to brigadier general, skipping altogether the ranks of lieutenant colonel and colonel.
The nature of the force was changing rapidly. The U.S. Army not only leaped into the front ranks of the world’s armed forces but in just a few years would be transformed into the premier mechanized military on the planet. The unprecedented mobility that the Americans developed carried deep implications for personnel policies. Most notably, the speed at which the Army could move would make mental flexibility in leadership even more valuable. As manpower ran short, this suppleness enabled the American military to get by with far fewer divisions than had been planned. As military historian Russell Weigley explained, “If there was a justification for the risk of raising only 89 divisions, much of the justification must be that divisions could be shifted wherever they were needed with a promptness that no other army could match. In combat, too, they could move with unparalleled rapidity.”
Marshall’s inclination to remove unsuccessful officers intensified once the United States had entered the war. At one point he ordered a general to France immediately but was informed that the man had declined to leave so quickly, because his wife was away and his household furniture was not packed. Astounded, Marshall called the general, whom he had known as a good friend for years. “Was that a fact?” Marshall recalled asking.
“Yes, I can’t leave here now,” the general responded.
“Well, my God, man, we are at war and you are a general,” said a puzzled Marshall.
“Well, I’m sorry,” the officer said.
“I’m sorry too,” Marshall concluded, “but you will be retired tomorrow.”
This take-no-prisoners attitude was instilled in subordinates. To understand just how wide and broad the cuts were, consider the swift decline of the career of Maj. Gen. James Chaney, Eisenhower’s forgotten predecessor in Britain. A veteran pilot, Chaney had been sent to England as an observer of the Battle of Britain. When the United States entered the war, he was named the commander of American forces in the British Isles.
Eisenhower, visiting England, found Chaney “completely at a loss” in understanding the state of the war. Chaney and his staff were working peacetime hours, and British officials did not seem to know what the American general was supposed to be doing in their country. Eisenhower reported back to Marshall, who soon informed Chaney that he was being replaced. “I deem it of urgent importance,” Marshall told him, “that the commanding general in England be an officer who is completely familiar with all our military plans and affairs and who has taken a leading part in the military developments since December 7.” Hence, Marshall informed Chaney, “I am assigning Eisenhower to the post.” Marshall’s cold-bloodedness was evident when Chaney returned to the United States and Marshall declined to meet with him. In May 1943, less than a year after his removal from London, Chaney was stuck overseeing a boot camp outside Wichita Falls, Texas. Chaney’s aide in England, Charles Bolte, received a similarly brisk dismissal. One day, Ike said, “Well, you better go along, too.”
Though Marshall and his commanders were quick to punish incompetence, they believed in second chances. The system of relief during Word War II could be forgiving. Bolte, for example, recovered from his earlier setback. During the war, he commanded a division in Italy and eventually rose to four-star rank. Indeed, at least five Army generals of World War II—Orlando Ward, Terry Allen, Leroy Watson, Albert Brown, and, in the South Pacific, Frederick Irving—were removed from combat command and later given another division to lead in combat.
• • •
Teamwork was a core value for Marshall. Simply failing to show a spirit of cooperation was, for him, reason enough to remove a senior officer. Early in the war, he seriously considered relieving Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. as the Army commander in Alaska for failing to get along with his Navy counterpart. Buckner was the son of the Confederate general of the same name, who was most noted for surrendering Fort Donelson to Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862. He was sent to Alaska in 1940 as an aging colonel. When a new Navy admiral, Robert “Fuzzy” Theobald, showed up a few years later, the two soon clashed. In August 1942, Buckner unaccountably chose to read aloud to his hot-tempered counterpart a poem mocking the Navy’s fears of operating in the wild Bering Sea. The performance provoked a wave of naval indignation that soon reached Marshall. (Marshall was long familiar with Buckner’s tendency to shoot off his mouth, having cautioned retired Marine Maj. Gen. John Lejeune a decade earlier against hiring Buckner as commandant of the Virginia Military Institute for “fear . . . that his habit of talking a great deal might involve him in difficulties.”) Perhaps because he had expected such behavior, Marshall ultimately decided against relieving Buckner from the Alaska post. However, the Navy sacked Theobald early in 1943, relegating him to running a Boston shipyard.
In 1944, ironically, Buckner would go on to lead a board that looked into the most controversial combat relief of the war: the firing on Saipan of Maj. Gen. Ralph Smith, commander of the Army’s sluggish 27th Division, by Marine Lt. Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. (“The interesting question,” observed retired Army Lt. Col. Wade Markel, “is not why Holland Smith relieved Ralph Smith, but why it took him so long.”) Marshall later dispatched Buckner to Okinawa, where at the front line in June 1945 he waved off a Marine officer’s warning to remove his helmet because its three shiny stars were likely to provoke Japanese artillerymen. Minutes later, as Buckner stood arms akimbo, a Japanese shell exploded next to him, making him the highest-ranking American officer to be killed by enemy fire during World War II.
Perhaps the most significant point about Marshall’s approach to generalship in World War II was that it tended to create an incentive system that encouraged prudent risk taking. “A flexible system of personnel management that rapidly identified proven leaders and placed them in appropriate positions of responsibility helped accelerate the process of change during World War II,” concluded Markel, a specialist in personnel policy. “The temporary promotion system and its accompanying culture . . . offered unlimited advancement to those who could produce success, and summary dismissal to those who couldn’t. Confronted with these stark options . . . the capable found a way to succeed and were accordingly rewarded; the incapable were, of course, replaced by the capable.”
In other words, while sometimes mistaken and occasionally brutal to individual officers, the Marshall system generally achieved its goal of producing military effectiveness. To understand how, the best place to begin is with Dwight D. Eisenhower, who just a year before the start of World War II was still a lieutenant colonel, not even in command of a regiment, let alone the armies of millions he would oversee a few years later.