As Pershing’s aide, Marshall accompanied the AEF commander to Washington, where his chief would serve for the next five years, first as General of the Army and then, after July 1, 1921, as army chief of staff. In the fall of 1919, now reduced to the peacetime rank of major, he settled in with Lily at 2400 Sixteenth Street, N.W., an apartment hotel. Their fellow tenants were mostly transients—diplomats, academics, military officers, and members of Congress who retained their permanent residences in their home districts. The Marshalls took their meals most evenings in the hotel dining room, where, like other residents, they had their own special table and assigned waiter.
We get a rare glimpse into the Marshalls’ years at Sixteenth Street because it was where the major met Rose Page, the eight-year-old daughter of a University of Virginia economist serving a term in Washington on the U.S. Tariff Commission. As a middle-aged woman Rose would publish a memoir of her friendship with Marshall, a friendship that would last until his death forty years later.
Rose—later Rose Page Wilson—was a lively, curious, intelligent little girl who met the thirty-eight-year-old major when she hailed him by name as they rode down the hotel elevator together. Marshall was enchanted by her. He and Lily would never have children, though they enjoyed their company, and they virtually adopted Rose. The perky little girl and Marshall took walks in Rock Creek Park, went horseback riding together, and talked endlessly, with Marshall recounting his years at VMI, his service in the Philippines, his courtship of Lily, and advising Rose on proper decorum and soothing her small discomforts after childish misadventures. Rose preferred Marshall to her own distant and inaccessible professor father. Detecting his by-now perfected persona, she remembered Marshall’s dashing manner and, at the same time, his great poise and dignity. The major was a man of “incorruptible honor,” the adult Rose wrote, chivalrous and meticulously courteous to women, who admired him as an amusing dinner partner.1
Rose provides one of the few insights we have into the Marshalls’ day-to-day domestic relations. The major, she reported, was extra-attentive to his wife’s needs and wishes. “He delighted in indulging [Lily] in every way he could. . . . [He] showered Lily with a hundred little attentions; he fetched and carried; he planned little surprises. He was ever solicitous about her health and comfort. He relieved her of mundane financial budgeting and any like chores and decisions; and if he teased her, he paid her innumerable little compliments. . . . In short, he gave her his unremitting consideration, smoothed the path before his queen and led her by the hand.”2 Though Rose did not record it, as we shall see, he was also at times her overseer and executive director.
The years in the nation’s capital would be an especially happy period for the Marshalls. The hotel was full of congenial people, and Washington was still sufficiently Southern and gracious enough to please Lily. There were also friends nearby, some made before the war in Marshall’s peacetime postings, and newer ones he had acquired in France. During these months Pershing became more than a respected superior; he became a mentor and a warm friend to both George and Lily. In a December 1920 letter to the general the Marshalls would sign off: “We both send you our love.”3
The early years of the postwar decade were an unsettled time for the military services. True, America had won its war, but its performance as a combatant had not been outstanding. The nation had been unready for war. The United States already possessed the world’s most productive economy, but its mighty industrial machine had been unable to gear up in time to produce the guns, ships, planes, and tanks required by twentieth-century warfare and it had been forced to borrow much of the doughboys’ equipment from its French and British allies. Moreover, as the experience of the First Division in France illustrated, American troops were raw, unprepared for combat. Not until the last months of the fighting in France did the AEF earn the respect of their British and French compeers. Marshall himself, writing soon after the war, noted that the experience of 1917–18 “taught one great lesson”: that “the unprepared nation is helpless in a great war unless it can depend upon other nations to shield it while it prepares.”4 Now, after Versailles, as the American military and their civilian masters in Congress considered the war’s lessons, they knew they must avoid repeating the mistake of too little, too late.
But any program of prudent change was undermined by the American public’s disappointments and disillusionments with the peacemaking process at Versailles, and its reversion to the deep-rooted American inwardness and disdain for supposedly corrupt Europe. It was in these years of the early 1920s that the term “isolationism” would be first widely used for the mood of determined detachment from Europe’s problems. Concentrated in the country’s Midwestern heartland, it would remain a powerful force throughout the interwar years. In the view of its proponents, Americans could take refuge behind its two great ocean moats, ignoring threats and dangers from abroad. We might need a powerful navy for this purpose, but there would be little use for a large land army.
Serious discussion of the army’s future course and shape had been initiated by Secretary Newton D. Baker in the War Department soon after the Armistice. At the department’s request Pershing sent Col. John McAuley Palmer, Marshall’s former student and old friend from Leavenworth, to Washington to contribute his knowledge and expertise to the discussion. Palmer had long advocated a small core military to be used in emergencies, but also a National Guard capable of converting into a large citizen army to meet any needs of an overseas expeditionary force as in 1917. This view was assumed to represent Pershing’s preferences as well.
In any event it clashed with the plans of Chief of Staff Peyton March, a fine administrator but an irascible man who, Marshall later said, had “a great weakness of antagonizing everybody.”5 General March disdained the guard and preferred a large peacetime army of regulars that in time of war could absorb draftees directly into its ranks. March and Pershing did not get along. Though he was theoretically Pershing’s superior, in fact March held permanent rank inferior to General of the Armies Pershing, who treated him as a subordinate. The conflict of egos exacerbated their differences over the pending Army Reform Bill, jointly sponsored by March and Secretary Baker, that called for a substantial regular army of five hundred thousand. The clash worsened when Pershing endorsed a Palmer-like bill. Testifying before a joint congressional committee on military affairs in October–November 1919, he proposed a three-hundred-thousand-man army that could mobilize and train the National Guard if needed, along with a provision for universal military training (UMT), in effect, a peacetime draft.
Marshall approved of his chief’s plan. These expressed his faith in UMT for the nation and his own confidence in the utility of the guard based on his experience as a guard trainer during prewar summers. He accompanied Pershing to the congressional hearings, where, though only an observer, he learned much about congressional processes and about managing the nation’s elected representatives. But Marshall personally refused to take sides in the dispute. “They had it out, and I’m not an umpire on such things,” he later told an interviewer.6 Yet he did not approve of Pershing’s unrestrained and public feuding with the chief of staff. Both men, he believed, were at fault. The unpleasant publicity, perpetuated by the later published memoirs of both officers, would make a deep impression on Marshall. Ever after he would make it a point never to allow his personal judgment of generals and prominent civilians to become public knowledge. (His reticence, unfortunately, would impoverish his own recorded oral memoirs for historians and laymen alike.)
Pershing’s congressional testimony reinforced the public’s related moods of parsimony and isolation. The Republican Congress passed the National Defense Act of 1920 roughly on the Palmer-Pershing model. The law provided for a regular army of only 280,000, backed by a National Guard totaling 430,000 additional men, It dropped the UMT provision both Marshall and Pershing supported, but strengthened considerably the power of the general staff. The structural features of this imperfect measure remained in force through the remaining two decades of peace and formed the military framework within which Marshall had to work when he became chief of staff in 1939.
Paltry as were the authorized dimensions of the new army under the 1920 law, the actual numbers grew progressively worse as Congress became more and more stingy. In January 1921 it reduced the number of authorized troops to 175,000 and soon thereafter to 150,000. In 1922 the number declined further: 12,000 officers and 125,000 enlisted men. The decay also affected funding. During most of the 1920s the War Department’s annual appropriation plateaued at about $300 million, with the ground forces increasingly forced to compete for resources with the air corps, then a division of the army. Meanwhile, the National Guard dwindled as well from its authorized strength, stabilizing at roughly 180,000.
Soon after his decisive congressional testimony Pershing, at Secretary Baker’s behest, embarked on a tour of army posts and munitions factories to determine which should be retained and which closed in peacetime. Accompanied by Marshall, the general was greeted by lavish banquets and adoring audiences. By now Pershing had caught the presidential bug. His hero status as AEF leader and his acquiescence in the parsimony of the Republican congressional leadership made Pershing for a time seem a possible GOP candidate in the 1920 presidential race. Marshall disapproved of the move. “Some of his friends,” he later observed, had “deluded him.”7 In the end Pershing proved to have little political savvy and his presidential boomlet quickly fizzled out. Marshall believed it had diminished Pershing’s reputation, and the episode confirmed one of his basic precepts: Generals and politics should not mix.
In July 1921 Pershing superseded March as army chief of staff and moved to Fort Myer, Virginia, just across the Potomac from Washington and connected to the city’s downtown by a short streetcar ride. Marshall remained his aide, and he and Lily now ended their idyll at Sixteenth Street and moved to Fort Myer’s Quarters No. 3, close to Pershing’s own house. There their comfortable lives continued relatively unchanged. Lily remained socially inhibited by her heart condition; she could not tolerate the cigarette smoke that usually enveloped the parties and balls they were invited to. But she occasionally was able to fill in for her husband at gatherings he could not attend. Living nearby, in Washington, was the captain’s aged mother, Laura, now a widow and largely bedridden. Marshall dutifully visited her once or even twice a day, sometimes bringing General Pershing along to please the old lady.
Marshall’s years in Washington, as personal aide to Pershing, were invaluable for his future. He accompanied the general everywhere, sitting in on discussions with the president and congressional leaders. He got to know Washington’s movers and shakers from both parties. Among them was Charles Dawes, director of the newly created Bureau of the Budget, former AEF chief of supply procurement during the war and a future Republican vice president of the United States. Another influential friend was the New York financier Bernard Baruch, an adviser to President Wilson and a major financial contributor to the Democratic Party. During the war Baruch had headed the War Industries Board, the federal agency that coordinated the production and shipping of vital war matériel. In later years he became an influential adviser to another Democratic president, Franklin Roosevelt.
Pershing’s retirement from the army in 1924 marked another pivot point in Marshall’s career. He had by now grown tired of staff positions and serving as an assistant to high-ranking officers. In August he was promoted to permanent lieutenant colonel, but further advance depended on command of troops. With the world at peace, he could not expect to lead men in combat, but he needed experience as a leader of soldiers if his career was to prosper. Even if he had wished to remain in Washington, moreover, army rules did not allow him to continue. Marshall’s solution was to seek an overseas posting, and in April 1924 he was assigned to the Fifteenth Infantry in Tientsin, China, effective July 1. He would not be leading soldiers into enemy fire, but at least he would not be buried under paperwork in some obscure domestic corner.
Though a very long way from home, Tientsin was considered a cushy post, one whose amenities would allow Lily to accompany him. Lily herself looked forward to a three-year posting in China. “A lot of our friends are over there,” she wrote to her aunt, “& all are wild about it—One of my friends now in Tien Sien . . . says she has nine servants, for the price of one in the States—Everyone over there lives in the most unbelievable luxury. Beautiful houses—wonderful food & tremendously gay and interesting.”8 An added bonus for Lily was that her mother could come and stay with them. On July 12 the Marshall party boarded the army transport St. Mihiel in New York and, after stops with friends in San Francisco and Honolulu, landed at Ch’in-huang-tao, China, on September 7, reaching Tientsin regimental headquarters soon after.
Tientsin was a city on the North China coast, not too distant from the Chinese capital, Peking (now Beijing). The Fifteenth Infantry post had been established in early 1921 in response to the persistent turmoil that swept across China following the 1911 revolution, which had replaced the corrupt and incompetent imperial Qing Dynasty with a republic on the Western model. Though the Chinese republican ideal assumed a unified nation, the country soon collapsed into civil war, with a multitude of ruthless, tyrannical warlords vying for pelf and power. Other Western nations had long-established “concessions” in Tientsin, Western islands in the midst of an alien culture where the institution of “extraterritoriality” (judicial self-rule by the foreign residents) prevailed. There were as many as seven of these foreign enclaves in Tientsin, but none was American. In the interests of economy the U.S. government was content to limit its presence to a small troop contingent to protect its citizens’ lives and property. It was this community that Marshall—and Lily—now joined.
Marshall’s job was not onerous. He was officially only regimental executive officer, though for a time, until the arrival of Col. William Naylor in November, he was in de facto charge of the approximately 850 officers and men of the Fifteenth. Having inherited the abandoned former German enclave with its fine brick barracks, the regiment had pleasant physical accommodations. The troops’ mission was well defined: They were in China to guarantee the safety of American citizens and protect the railroad connecting the coast to the capital, where the American Embassy was located. The major difficulty the regiment faced was the disunity and turmoil in this “warlord period” in twentieth-century Chinese history. The armed forces mustered by these freebooters were ill equipped and ill led, but they far outnumbered the foreign troops. It required tact more than brute force to keep their clumsy clashes with one another from spilling over into the foreign enclaves and endangering foreign lives and property.
For the women, however, life in Tientsin lived up to its reputation in army circles. A ten-room house rented for fifteen dollars a month. Servants were plentiful and cheap: The typical officer employed five (not nine, like Lily’s friend) at a total cost of some forty or fifty dollars per month. Since Marshall’s lieutenant colonel’s pay ran to about $6,800 a year, he could easily afford them. Yet there were reasons for complaint. While it was true that living costs were low compared with those in the United States, army families, warned one writer for the Infantry Journal, would find that they had little money to spare after raising their sights to equal their Western military peers’ in China. If nothing else an officer’s wife would “inevitably” accumulate “a rather impressive store of rugs, silver, linen, lingerie, embroideries, and other impedimenta, that would be utterly beyond his means if priced on Fifth Avenue.”9 Lily appreciated the amenities. “We quite adore it over here,” she wrote one of Pershing’s former aides, “and find life so easy. Many servants and much liquor make things so simple.”10 She seems also to have acquired the standard complement of household furniture, rugs, and assorted bric-a-brac.
While immersed in regimental desk work, keeping a careful eye on the likes of warlords Chang Tso-lin, Wu Pei-fu, and Feng Yu-hsiang, and monitoring growing antiforeign feeling among Chinese students, Marshall diverted some of his energies to recreation and self-improvement. He took his personally trained Mongolian pony on eight- to ten-mile jaunts followed by a top-speed run around the Tientsin racetrack. He organized an informal regimental cavalry troop mounted on the local ponies. Besides satisfying his equestrian passion, riding was how Marshall kept in physical—and also psychological—shape. He supplemented the riding by playing squash and tennis at the American country club.
Self-improvement also took the form of learning Chinese, a difficult language for Westerners unused to bewildering vocal tonalities atop a vocabulary without European cognates. Despite his poor performance at VMI as a student of French, Marshall made good progress in Chinese at the regimental language school. On July 18, 1925, he reported to a friend back home that “I can now carry on a casual conversation in Chinese with far less difficulty than I ever could manage in French. And I can understand even the wranglings and squabbles of the coolies and rickshaw men.”11 It is hard to believe that Marshall ever became truly fluent in Mandarin, but he apparently did learn enough to engage in useful dialogue and negotiations with Chinese officials and military leaders.
Marshall also came to understand the Chinese mind and sympathize with Chinese grievances against the West. He did not “go native,” of course. He scarcely knew any Chinese men or women of his own class. Typically for his set, his social life was confined to European venues, including the Race Club (that is, riding club) and the luxurious Tientsin Country Club, with its pool, tennis courts, and pavilions. Few if any who enjoyed these facilities—as opposed to working staff and servants—were Chinese. Nevertheless he came to understand the feelings of the Chinese people, especially their deep sense of humiliation at foreigners’ hands, and to grasp how difficult it would be to settle the tangled relations between China and the West. “How the Powers should deal with China is a question almost impossible to answer,” he wrote to Pershing in late December 1926. “There has been so much of wrong doing on both sides, so much of shady transaction between a single power and a single party; there is so much of bitter hatred in the hearts of these people and so much of important business interests involved, that a normal solution can never be found.”12 His remarks would be prophetic.
In this letter to his former chief Marshall mentioned the intrusion of a new force into his own North China neighborhood. “At present,” he wrote to Pershing, “the Cantonese troops are waging very successful warfare in central China and are threatening Shanghai. Officials in Peking have their wind up pretty badly fearing the Southern part will leap into North China any month.” Though Marshall did not note it, the “Southern part” referred to was led by a young officer named Chiang Kai-shek, who had recently assumed leadership of the Kuomintang, the southern-based Nationalists, following the death of Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China. Chiang was not content to govern the country’s south and was, as Marshall wrote, threatening to move against the northern warlords who ruled in Peking and the northern provinces, and unite all of China under his Nationalist rule. The American lieutenant colonel could not know it, of course, but the events he described were a foreshadowing of China’s history for the next generation, a history in which he would eventually play an important role. The two and a half years in Tientsin did not make Marshall the expert on China that influential people in later years, including the president, would believe. But it did provide an important context for his crucial diplomatic mission just after World War II. He would at least understand the depth and complexity of the problems then at hand.
With his Tientsin posting about to end, Marshall once again had to consider his future and again he found himself faced with the realities of the peacetime army: small size, slow promotion, and the tyranny of seniority. “Administrative desk jobs have always been my pet abomination,” he wrote to VMI superintendent William Cocke just after Christmas 1926. “But with so few regiments and so many lieutenant colonels, one has little choice.”13 Under the circumstances, he told Cocke, he had already accepted the position offered by Gen, Hanson Ely, an infantry colonel friend from AEF days, as instructor at the Army War College in Washington.
The Marshalls sailed for home in May 1927. Lily’s health was not good, and their trip by car from San Francisco to the East Coast was unavoidably by slow stages. They stayed two weeks in Lexington and then moved into the unoccupied Washington apartment of Marshall’s old friend General Palmer, who was away on duty in Panama.
Lily’s health soon deteriorated further, and in August she entered Walter Reed Hospital for diagnostic tests. The doctors determined that her heart condition had been aggravated by a thyroid malady that required an operation. But given her coronary problems, the surgery would have to wait until her strength had been enhanced by rest and better nutrition. In the meantime the Marshalls moved from their temporary quarters to an attractive house on the War College grounds, where Lily gained weight to the point where the doctors believed a thyroidectomy safe to perform. The operation on August 21 at Walter Reed proved difficult but successful. Lily remained in the hospital for three weeks slowly regaining strength, being cheered by her husband’s visits. “George is so wonderful and helps me so,” she wrote to her aunt. “He puts heart and strength in me.”14 A week later, about to be released to return home, Lily slumped over and died while composing a letter to her mother.
Marshall was devastated. The austere, laconic officer had truly loved her. Lily had been more than his partner. Though in poor health throughout their marriage, she had been in many ways at the core of his life. She, and her family and friends, had helped to define who he was. If he had developed a male “club life,” as so many military men did, he might have been better able to endure this blow, but he had not, he wrote to General Pershing; Lily had filled all his emotional space. Rose Wilson, who had attended the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery with her mother, visited Marshall several days later. He found Rose a comfort and asked her to join him for a car ride as in the old days. She later wrote that as they drove she could see that “his face was haggard and drawn with grief; his eyes lifeless, clouded by such utter sadness.” His “sorrow” seemed to her “as profound and awesome as is possible for a man to bear.” When she took his hand to comfort him, he murmured: “Rosie, I’m so lonely, so lonely.”15
Still, grief is seldom endless, and the army was quick to help its own. Chief of Staff Charles Summerall offered Marshall several job choices, including the option of staying on at the War College. Finding Washington a stifling place after Lily’s death, Marshall accepted the post of assistant commandant at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. There he would head the Academic Department, with control over the curriculum. At Benning he would be able to try out ideas about infantry tactics he had long favored, and could exercise his strong teaching instincts. Marshall explained the appeal of the Benning assignment to Gen. Stephen Fuqua, a former classmate at Leavenworth, soon after leaving Benning. He would “always have a soft place” in his “heart for Benning,” he declared. “It caught me at my most restless moment, and gave me hundreds of interests. . . . At a War College desk, I thought I would explode.”16 Marshall was pointing here to the pull of the wide-open outdoor life of the extensive Benning post, but he was also alluding to its power to cushion him from his bereavement.
Marshall’s four and a half years at Benning, then, promised emotional refuge. Unfortunately it did not promote his physical health. At Benning, Marshall remained trim, but he developed a thyroid condition that triggered an irregular pulse and coronary arrhythmia that would periodically flare up. It also provided valuable experience for the middle-aged lieutenant colonel. But, most important, it made a difference to the U.S. Army, for the Marshall regime would leave a deep imprint on the Infantry School.
The core of the Marshall approach to training officers was an extension and reinforcement of the realistic tactics—as opposed to rote, “set-piece” exercises—that he had learned under Morrison at Leavenworth. He preached the need for simplicity and flexibility. Army orders, he taught, had always been too detailed and complex, slowing down movements and responses. They must be made brief and clear. Though he could not foresee that the tank and the airplane would negate the trench warfare of World War I, he worked to undercut the static “war of position” doctrine that had clamped its deadly hand on the Western Front in 1915–18, and sought to replace it with a “war of movement” creed, of “fire-and-flank” maneuver, that would prevail in the later and greater war. He also sought to compel trainees to improvise, to “think on their feet.” In one instance, a student later wrote, he led a class on horseback on a seventeen-mile cross-country jaunt and at the end, “without previous warning,” told them to draw a sketch map of the terrain they had covered.17 He placed high value on originality and encouraged and rewarded the officer who thought of novel ways to achieve a tactical goal. According to Capt. J. Lawton Collins, later himself army chief of staff, Marshall helped create “the spirit at Benning” that “if anybody had any new ideas he was willing to try them instead of saying, ‘Why don’t you let the thing alone instead of stirring things up.’”18
Among many of the officers who were exposed to Marshall’s principles, his success at Benning was widely acknowledged. An instructor who taught during his first year later wrote that in his “opinion Col. Marshall did more for the Infantry School than any one who ever served there. We were in a ‘slump’ and he pulled us out.”19 Omar Bradley, who served as a tactics instructor at Benning under Marshall, noted in 1964 that Marshall had “really established the standards of instruction as we know them today,” insisting “that a maximum of our training take place on the ground, not in the classroom.”20 A later scholar has noted that under Marshall the Infantry School represented the army “school system at its best.”21
Time and often bitter experience would show that even under the Marshall regime, the school failed to instill in its pupils the aggressive leadership qualities required of officers in the war to come. And indeed some later officers would question its timid focus on flanking tactics. But his stint at Benning would exert enormous influence on the men who led the army ground forces in World War II. All told, during Marshall’s tenure, 150 future generals were students at Benning, and an additional 50 served there as instructors; many of these—including Omar Bradley, Joseph Stilwell, J. Lawton Collins, Walter Bedell Smith, and James Van Fleet—would attain high rank in World War II.
During the years at Benning, Marshall filled his leisure time with strenuous activities, especially “riding to hounds.” These hunts on horseback appealed particularly to Anglophile upper-class Southerners and suggested how much of the “Virginia” identification remained in Marshall’s persona. Beginning early in the fall and into early spring, twice a week several score officers and their wives rode out from Benning in pursuit of the gray or red fox. Marshall was often the inspirer of these outings and shared in the thrill of the exuberant chase. He also enjoyed quiet solo canters across the Georgia countryside.
If the Benning interlude was intended to foster emotional “closure” for the grieving widower, it did not fully work. Besides his duties Marshall sought consolation in the young. As with Rose, he doted on children and now often invited them to his house for refreshments or took a colleague’s borrowed son or daughter to a theatrical or musical performance on the post. Apparently these contacts did not fully assuage the desolation he felt. Marshall’s sister, Marie, made several long visits to Benning during her brother’s posting and was dismayed to find that he had made his house a shrine to Lily, with photographs of her displayed in every room.
Then, in the fall of 1929, his ordeal came to an end. One evening while dining with friends Tom Hudson and his wife in Columbus, the town adjacent to Benning, he met Katherine Tupper Brown, a rich widow with three children: Molly, fifteen, Clifton, thirteen, and Allen, eleven. Katherine was forty-seven at the time, a year younger than Marshall. She was a vivacious and intriguing woman with an unconventional background. Though the daughter of a Baptist minister, after college in Virginia she trained as an actress in New York. She later joined an English repertory company, playing Shakespeare and the Restoration playwrights in the British provinces. She returned to America after two years, married a successful lawyer, Clifton Brown, and settled down in Baltimore as a wife and mother. In 1928 a disgruntled client shot and killed Brown at his law office, leaving her devastated. Fortunately her deceased husband had invested his money well, and she and her children were provided with a comfortable income to live on.
Katherine later recalled her first glimpse of Marshall. “My first impression was of a tall, slender man with sandy hair and deep-set eyes.” She remembered that he had attracted her interest when he refused a cocktail at a party they both attended. These were Prohibition times, but most worldly people, including military men, drank—and, in fact, the Volstead Act had made bathtub gin and bootleggers prime conversational topics in such circles. “You are a rather unusual Army officer, aren’t you?” Katherine exclaimed when he refused the drink.22 Marshall asked her how many officers she had known. The ice was broken. Conversation at dinner flowed easily, with Marshall telling amusing stories about Southern hospitality. He drove Mrs. Brown home that evening, and by then both parties seemed to know that more was to come.
Katherine had not expected to marry again, but the meeting with Marshall undermined her resolve. During the summer of 1930 the colonel spent five weeks with Katherine and her offspring at their vacation cottage on Fire Island on Long Island’s South Shore. There he got to know the children and discovered that he and they were compatible. In fact, in the years ahead, Marshall would come to consider Molly, Clifton, and Allen his own children, growing especially attached to Allen, the youngest, who accepted him most comfortably as surrogate father.
Katherine and George were married on October 15, 1930, in Baltimore’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church. The affair was intended to be simple, with a few family members and a small number of invited guests. Attendance would have been modest, but the local papers reported that General Pershing was to be best man, and his presence drew crowds of onlookers who filled the chapel and spilled over on to the sidewalk. After the ceremony the newlyweds boarded a train to Atlanta and arrived at Fort Benning the following afternoon.
That evening, at a reception on the lawn of Commandant Campbell King’s home, Katherine ran the gauntlet of all the Benning brass and most of George’s friends and colleagues. Marshall instructed his new wife how to greet particular individuals as they passed her on the reception line. Nevertheless it was an ordeal. As she later wrote, “It was with fear and trembling that I took my place in the receiving line, praying to make good. I shall never forget that night.”23 After the first five hundred or so greeters, Katherine felt that her face had frozen into a permanent smile. Still, George believed she had done well overall, though she was, he noted, a little slow to pick up the signals he gave her regarding topics to mention to individuals as they passed by. In the days and weeks that followed Katherine learned more and more about the idiosyncrasies of army social life. She apparently met all the challenges. “At the end of our two years at Fort Benning,” she later wrote, “I was a fair Army wife.”24
Marshall’s four-and-a-half-year tour of duty at Benning ended in the spring of 1932, just as the nation, and much of the Western world, approached the grim nadir of the Great Depression. In America the economic crisis would soon elevate Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Party to power in Washington. A Wilsonian internationalist and former assistant secretary of the navy, FDR, though initially constrained by falling federal revenues, would be less frugal about military spending than had been his Republican predecessors. Eventually he would also surmount the nation’s self-imposed isolationist posture toward the foreign world. The military as a whole would benefit from his policies, though the navy and air corps more than the army. Marshall himself would be a prime recipient of Roosevelt’s favor. The two had met briefly when, as New York’s governor-elect, Roosevelt had visited Fort Benning in 1928. Though they never became close personally, it would be FDR who would finally end Marshall’s long career drought and raise him to the status his talents deserved.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the same economic crisis that brought Roosevelt to the White House also made Austrian-born Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Determined to rearm his adopted nation and establish its preeminence in Europe, Hitler soon destroyed Germany’s fragile post-Armistice democracy and replaced it with a brutal, totalitarian, racist regime that horrified democrats everywhere and threatened the delicate European balance of power established by the Versailles Treaty of 1919. Marshall was never attracted to the thuggish barbarity of the Nazi regime and ideology, as were a few American military men—but by making Americans feel vulnerable the Nazi menace would be a professional godsend.
For the army as a whole, however, things got materially worse before they got better. Fearing to antagonize the nation’s military personnel in the face of rising social unrest in the nation’s cities and farms, President Herbert Hoover had dissuaded Congress from mandating a 10 percent across-the-board pay cut for the military services. Yet, in its effort to offset mounting budget deficits, Congress authorized payless furloughs for soldiers and a wage freeze for both officers and enlisted men. In the case of junior officers this policy reduced their income to a fifth below the level of 1917; the salaries of privates plummeted almost 45 percent; those of sergeants more than 20 percent.
Marshall observed the dire effects of these cuts on his men and their dependents at his next assignment, Fort Scriven, Georgia, where he took command of a four-hundred-man battalion of the Eighth Infantry Regiment. The post was on Fort Tybee Island near Savannah, and, though small, he wrote to Pershing, it allowed him to escape the tedium of “office work and high theory.”25 As post commandant he sought to help his men and their families cope with the current hardships. He encouraged military families to plant vegetable gardens and build chicken coops and hog pens to supplement their diets. He ordered the base mess sergeants to prepare large extra servings of the lunch meal to be sold to enlisted men for ten cents to take home after duty to their hungry wives and children. In May 1933 Marshall’s promotion to full colonel finally came through, and in June he left Scriven to take over command at historic Fort Moultrie in Charleston Harbor, where the bulk of the Eighth Infantry Regiment was stationed.
At both Scriven and Moultrie, Marshall distinguished himself as an organizer and administrator for the Civilian Conservation Corps. A New Deal agency created by Congress in early 1933 to provide useful work and income for unemployed young men from the cities, the CCC established military-style camps in national forests and on other public lands, where the recruits, receiving thirty dollars a month, cleared brush, built roads, trails, and bridges, stocked fish, erected ranger stations, planted trees, and performed other heavy outdoor work to preserve and enhance the country’s rural infrastructure and develop its natural resources. All told, some three million jobless, undernourished, and predominantly ill-educated young men, aged eighteen to twenty-five, passed through the CCC, leaving behind an awesome number of rural “improvements.” The program ended in 1939, after the economy, stimulated by growing defense outlays, began to contract the pool of unemployed young men. The CCC would prove to be the most popular of all New Deal work programs.
The army played a large role in its success. Under the law the Labor Department would recruit the personnel; the Agriculture and Interior Departments would define the work. But the army would provide the housing and camp facilities, administer discipline, and oversee the lives and work of the participants. Not all professional military men welcomed the task of supervising thousands of unemployed civilian youths, many undisciplined and ignorant of proper hygiene. In late May 1933, as the program got under way, Col. Laurence Halstead wrote to Marshall that the work assigned the army by the CCC program was “onerous and probably distasteful” to military men. But, he noted, it had also silenced much recent talk of reducing the army by a further four thousand officers.26
For Marshall, if not for others, the CCC project was a exhilarating and worthy challenge, however. His long and successful association with the National Guard had given him an understanding of and respect for citizen soldiers. These CCC boys were not so different from the young National Guardsmen he had met in Pennsylvania, California, and Massachusetts on summer encampments. The experience also reinforced his interest in universal military training—a peacetime draft—as a solution to the country’s evil cycle of military boom and bust: unpreparedness followed by hasty mobilization, followed by complacency once again, and then another hurried, and imperfect, mobilization.
Marshall’s work with the CCC was an impressive performance. In the first few months he helped establish a flock of camps in Florida and southeastern Georgia, housing 4,500 men. When transferred to Moultrie, he inherited another “forestry district” that covered all of South Carolina. During his stay at Moultrie he twice visited all fifteen CCC camps of his district, where he focused on orienting the camp commanders in the unfamiliar work of running a post composed primarily of civilians. As early as mid-July the new full colonel had concluded that “this CCC affair” was “a major mobilization and a splendid experience for the War Department and the army.”27 In a speech to a local civic club in the Charleston area, he called the project “the greatest social experiment outside Russia.”28
In the end it probably, indirectly, also advanced Marshall’s career. The CCC was a particular favorite of FDR’s, meeting both the nation’s urgent need to help the jobless and the president’s long-term devotion to conservation and natural resource development. Though Marshall’s definitive biographer, Forrest Pogue, emphasizes his subject’s scrupulous avoidance of partisan politics then and later, Marshall’s enthusiasm for the CCC program and his enterprise in making it a success could not have gone unnoticed in the White House. And yet, if his enthusiasm for the “Forestry work,” as Marshall called it, had been noted, it was not immediately rewarded. Marshall and Katherine had enjoyed Fort Moultrie and, expecting to spend at least two years at the post, had gone to the expense and trouble of redecorating a large house. Katherine had brought in from Baltimore a load of expensive furniture to refurbish the new quarters. Now, unexpectedly, Marshall received orders to report to Chicago as senior instructor to the Illinois National Guard. True, Marshall liked working with civilians, and the guard brought civilians and the military together, but once more he would be removed from command of troops, once more deprived of a career-promoting experience. Though a full colonel as of September 1, 1933, he might be denied that all-important step to brigadier-general rank—without which all further advance was impossible.
The instigator of the transfer was Douglas MacArthur, with whom Marshall had first crossed paths at Fort Leavenworth and later in France with the AEF. Son of a Civil War hero, first in his class at West Point, reputed to be the second-most-decorated U.S. officer in World War I, a brilliant, flamboyant soldier, MacArthur had risen far more quickly through the ranks than had Marshall. In 1930, already a major general, he became army chief of staff, the youngest man to hold the job. Like most professional soldiers, MacArthur was politically conservative, a law-and-order man. But unlike many officers, certainly unlike Marshall, he was also overtly political. In 1932 he had commanded his troops to oust the needy, unemployed World War I veterans—the so-called Bonus Army—from their makeshift encampment at Anacostia, near downtown Washington, D.C., where they had squatted for two weeks, waiting for Congress to provide early payments under a proposed 1924 veterans’ bonus plan. Convinced that most of the protesters were communists, MacArthur exceeded his orders. On June 28 he led the Twelfth Infantry Regiment, bayonets and gas canisters at the ready, on a sweep into the encampment. Halfway through the attack President Hoover ordered it halted, but MacArthur ignored him and completed the job of dispersing the protesters. Hundreds of veterans were injured in the attack, and several died. Though the Bonus Army incident hurt MacArthur with many moderate and liberal citizens, it heightened his popularity with conservatives. Thereafter the flamboyant general never ceased to harbor presidential ambitions or failed to attract the hopes of citizens who yearned for a charismatic, Napoleonic figure to save them from the forces of disruption and unwelcome change.
It is not clear if, in reassigning Marshall to the Illinois National Guard, MacArthur was seeking to injure him. Yet the two men, destined to cross paths many times in the future, were scarcely natural allies. Markedly different in temperament—Marshall reserved, scrupulous, unassuming; MacArthur showy, freewheeling, egotistical—they were also separated by differing allegiances. In MacArthur’s eyes Marshall was part of a hostile cabal, one of the “Chaumont crowd,” the circle of loyal former aides and staffers around Pershing at AEF headquarters in France. At one point he himself had described Marshall as having “no superior among infantry colonels,”29 yet when Marshall protested the new posting he was rebuffed. The order, MacArthur noted, would stand. If it cannot be shown that MacArthur was biased in any way toward Marshall, it is hard to believe that—despite denials—the colonel for his part did not resent MacArthur’s act and, given their troubled later relationship, that he was not swayed at times by that disheartening assignment of October 1933.
Marshall was well aware of the implications of the posting for his professional future, as Rose Page would later note. After the Marshalls settled into their Chicago apartment, Rose, now an observant college student, visited them several times. The visits did not go smoothly. Katherine was polite but cool, as if she resented Rose for reminding her husband of Lily and his life before her. For her part Rose admitted that her “personal feelings about Mrs. Marshall . . . were never very warm.” When Rose once stayed overnight in the apartment, Marshall revealed his fears for his future. When she asked him how long it would be before he became chief of staff, he replied with a laugh, “Well Rosie, it looks now as if I never will. . . . If I don’t make Brigadier General soon, I’ll be so far behind in seniority I won’t ever be in the running.”30
Yet Marshall did not abandon hope. He would now have to make the best of the new assignment. Fortunately the guard appointment was not necessarily a dead end. In Chicago his sponsor was the Thirty-Third Guard Division head, Maj. Gen. Roy D. Keehn, a Democratic activist, who was currently under attack by the archconservative Chicago Tribune for mismanagement of the guard and failure to deploy them when needed against strikers. It was Keehn who had solicited names from MacArthur for a regular army officer to reinvigorate the division and restore its reputation. The role of the Illinois State Guard seemed particularly important in 1933. Chicago was deep in the Depression, with thousands out of work, and lurking beneath the surface the possibility of dangerous civil disorder. Nor was the city’s ominous atmosphere much improved by the Century of Progress world’s fair, which brought thousands of visitors to the Windy City from all over the country and from around the world.
Despite the fair the Marshalls did not find the city to their liking. They had arrived in Chicago in late October and, after much hunting, found an apartment in the Near North Side, close to the Drake Hotel. Marshall never liked cities or apartment living, and in Chicago he could not avoid either. “Those first months in Chicago, I shall never forget,” Katherine later wrote. “George had a grey, drawn look which I had never seen before, and have seldom seen since.”31
By the second year, according to Katherine, things had improved. Marshall’s spirits perked up as he got to work reorganizing and retraining the Thirty-Third Division. His success soon became widely known and widely praised by the media and influential men. The Marshalls also found new friends when Gen. Frank McCoy of the Sixth Corps and his wife moved into an adjacent apartment in their building. The two couples were soon spending many evenings in each other’s company; the two wives went to auctions together in quest of bargains in furniture, lamps, mirrors, and other household items.
Meanwhile, Marshall never lost sight of the career difficulties ahead: He would first have to make brigadier, itself a formidable hurdle. But besides, the promotion would have to come soon enough for him to be eligible for the army’s top post. He was already fifty-four, and the prevailing rule required that the chief of staff have at least four years left to serve before he reached retirement age at sixty-four.
Marshall would always deplore the use of influence and self-praise in military career advancement. But he found he could not avoid pulling strings himself. He felt uncomfortable, he wrote to Pershing in November 1934, trying to “exert political influence in my effort to be recognized.” He did not want to solicit letters of support from fellow officers since the “War Department is flooded with them.” Feeling that his record spoke for itself, he asked Pershing to forward to the War Department his efficiency reports since 1915.32 Pershing went an important step further: He telephoned FDR on Marshall’s behalf. Roosevelt waited a while and then in late May 1935 sent Secretary of War George Dern a memo: “General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (infantry) be promoted to Brigadier. Can we put him on list of next promotions?”33 Even this endorsement did not work, however: Marshall did not make the 1935 promotion list, perhaps because MacArthur, though still outwardly friendly, did not push it. But then, in October 1935, MacArthur retired as chief of staff to take the job of military adviser to the newly formed Filipino army. His successor was Malin Craig, an old Marshall friend from both Fort Reno and AEF Chaumont headquarters days. The path to brigadier and beyond now seemed open. But even General Craig seemed unable to break through the sclerotic seniority system, and the promotion stalled, throwing Marshall into a funk: “I have possessed myself in patience,” he wrote to Pershing in late December 1935, “but now I’m fast getting too old to have any future of importance in the army. . . . This sounds pessimistic,” he admitted, “but an approaching birthday . . . rather emphasizes the growing weakness of my position.”34
And then abruptly the dam broke. In April two of Marshall’s friends, Gens. Charles Herron and Frank McCoy, arranged a private meeting between Marshall and Dern. The secretary had already heard of Marshall’s brilliant work in Chicago and elsewhere and, after his talk with the colonel, approved the promotion. In August 1936, after a sixteen-year-wait, Marshall received notice that he had been promoted to brigadier general. He was also reassigned to command the Fifth Brigade of the Third Division at Vancouver Barracks, in Washington State.
Located on the north bank of the Columbia River, close to Portland, Oregon, the post dated from the early nineteenth century when it was headquarters of the British-owned Hudson’s Bay Company. With the Oregon Treaty of 1846, the United States acquired from Britain the part of the immense Oregon country that included the fort. In 1849 the U.S. War Department established Columbia Barracks adjacent to the existing trading center. It was soon renamed Vancouver Barracks.
Arriving at the post after a cross-country drive in their new Packard, a replacement for their old Ford, the Marshalls, including stepdaughter Molly (whose brothers were in boarding school) and their Irish setter, were greeted by the barracks band and a guard of honor. “Thus began,” Katherine later wrote, “two of the happiest years of our life.”35
For both Marshalls the months at Vancouver Barracks were a delightful interlude. The Marshall home on post was a two-and-a-half-story Queen Anne house with a view of majestic, snowcapped Mount Hood. Nearby Portland offered many social amenities for the wife of the commanding general at Vancouver. Katherine was impressed with the beautiful gardens Portlanders maintained, and, as she wrote, “their clubs are excellent and their hospitality informally lavish.”36 The new post offered many attractions for the newly minted brigadier as well. He was once more commanding troops, his first professional love. He was also now in charge of thirty-five CCC camps in the Washington-Oregon area, a task he had come to relish. Living conditions in the Northwest, despite the incessant winter rains, were also congenial. He had left behind the big Midwestern city, with its abrasiveness, noise, and congestion, and could now hunt, fish, ride, and generally enjoy the great outdoors. Yet he remained close enough to a substantial urban center where he could continue to meet men of parts and influence. Marshall already knew Oregon’s governor, Charles Martin, and through him soon got to know many members of the state’s power elite.
During the Fort Vancouver posting he also improved his health. By 1936 the effects of the thyroid disorder first detected at Benning—rapid and irregular pulse and general irritability—were becoming severe, and he had it checked out, first in Portland and then at Letterman General Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco. At the latter a diseased lobe of his thyroid gland was removed and, after five weeks in the hospital, he returned to duty. In some ways he was a new man. For the first time in years he began to gain weight. More significant, he seemed less jumpy and irascible. Friends noticed that not only was his general health better but also “that the old nervous intensity had been replaced by an unfamiliar calmness.”37 Nevertheless his health remained a problem if for no other reason than that it was a potential peril to professional advancement. Rumors that he was a sick man would have to be denied if he was not to be passed over for future assignments and promotions.
The Marshalls’ comfortable stay in Vancouver ended in June 1938, after twenty months. He had already rejected by letter a proposal from his VMI classmate John L. Cabell that he accept the institute’s superintendency since it would entail taking a pay cut of two thousand dollars a year. In another letter to Cabell in April 1937, Marshall hinted at a more significant consideration: “the question of abandoning the possibilities of the next eight or nine years, so far as that pertains to a professional soldier.” As he explained, “With the world in its present turmoil no one can prophesy what the outcome will be, and as I made my life occupation that of a soldier I hesitate to take any decision which might leave me eliminated at the critical moment.”38 In a word, the general would gamble that the burgeoning world crisis of the late 1930s would make his final goal a reality.
And well he might. Within the administration, and abroad in the country, opinion regarding the nation’s future military needs was growing more positive. Overseas, militaristic, antidemocratic regimes had turned to brute force to achieve national ends. In 1933 a Depression-torn Germany had elevated to power a charismatic, fanatical hater of democracy, communism, Jews and other “inferior” beings—a man dedicated to restoring Germany’s preeminence in Europe. Adolf Hitler soon abrogated the detested Versailles treaty and began the rapid rearmament of Germany. In 1935 Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator who had destroyed Italian democracy in the 1920s, ordered an invasion of Ethiopia, Africa’s last independent nation, and despite timid League of Nations sanctions, brutally conquered and occupied it. Italy and Germany had already signed treaties of friendship in 1936. In 1939, recognizing the natural affinity between their regimes, the two dictators signed the “Pact of Steel,” allying their nations’ militaries and creating the Rome-Berlin Axis. Meanwhile, in Spain, another strongman, Francisco Franco, rebelling against the existing democratic republic, was turning Spain into a battleground between a Far Right supported by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and a broad Left pro-Republican coalition supported by the Soviet Union and, less effectively, by many Western democrats and far left and liberal intellectuals.
The story in the Far East was similar. After a period of relative nonbelligerence following World War I, Japanese leaders, driven by hunger for natural resources and markets, had launched a series of aggressive moves against the Republic of China, still weakened by political divisions and crippled by poverty and chronic underdevelopment. In 1931 Japan occupied Manchuria, a weakly held northern province of the Chinese republic, turning it into a puppet dependency called Manchukuo. China asked the League of Nations to condemn Japan. After an on-site investigation it did so but with little effect. Instead, Japan simply quit the league as a gesture of defiance. Then, beginning in July 1937, following a contrived shooting “incident” at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, Japan launched a military campaign that sought to turn all of China into a Japanese satellite that could provide the manpower and resources the “have-not” island nation coveted and felt it needed to become a world power.
Japanese behavior in China probably offended more Americans in the 1930s than did the Nazi-Fascist aggression in Europe and Africa. For generations China had been viewed by Americans as an object of solicitude and a field for Christian missionary labors and benevolence. The United States had refused to join the late-nineteenth-century European scramble for special privileges in China. In 1900 Secretary of State John Hay had announced the Open Door policy, renouncing any desire for an exclusive American sphere of interest in China and asking other nations to respect China’s territorial integrity. In early 1932, on the occasion of the Manchuria attack, President Hoover’s secretary of state, Henry L. Stimson, announced that the United States would not recognize any act that impaired the “territorial and administrative integrity of the Republic of China.” Steeped in isolationism and enfeebled itself by economic crisis, the United States did nothing more, however. For years Americans had been lectured by the Hearst press and other xenophobic opinion molders that Japan represented a “Yellow Peril” in the Pacific. Then, by the end of the decade, recognizing their shared expansionist goals, the three aggressor nations formed a military alliance, making the German-Italian pact into the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis. The events of the 1930s confirmed and reinforced American fears, but for the moment few citizens could imagine taking effective action to counter the aggressors’ threats.
Initially, in fact, the world turmoil drove the American public deeper into its shell. Impressed by the plausible revelations of the Senate’s Nye Committee in 1934–36 that the United States had been misled into an unnecessary European war in 1917 by greedy, mendacious bankers and munitions manufacturers, many Americans concluded that the current quarrels of nations abroad were none of their business. Isolationist sentiment soon took legislative form in the passage by Congress of the Neutrality Acts, a set of measures designed to avoid the supposed mistakes that had led the country to join the Allies in the Great War. Enacted between 1935 and 1939, the laws imposed an embargo on all arms shipments to belligerents in both international and civil wars, forbade U.S. citizens from traveling on belligerent vessels, and made illegal all loans and credits to belligerents. The 1937 measure made one concession to President Roosevelt’s fear of aggressors by permitting “cash and carry”: Belligerents willing and able to pay cash on the barrelhead and transport the purchased goods in their own ships were permitted to buy arms and other matériel in the United States. This proviso, however, would expire after two years.
Yet no matter how xenophobic and isolationist the American public in this period was, the unfolding events in Europe and Asia could not fail to awaken widespread anxiety about the nation’s safety. The president himself had no illusions that America could avoid entanglement in the emerging world crisis. In October 1937, in a brief speech in Chicago, he reminded his audience that the world political situation had “of late . . . been growing progressively worse.” The “unjustified interference in the internal affairs of other nations” and “the invasion of alien territory in violation of treaties” had reached a “stage where the very foundations of civilization” were “seriously threatened.” The “peace-loving nations,” he continued, “must make a concerted effort in opposition to these violations of treaties and these ignorings of humane instincts which are creating a state of international anarchy and instability.” He went on to insist that he would “pursue a policy of peace.” But to stop the “epidemic of world lawlessness” the peace-loving nations should impose a “quarantine” on the aggressors. However, if Roosevelt hoped to rally the American people behind some version of “collective security,” he was disappointed. After several initial days of applause, the speech came under severe attack. As FDR wrote to a friend soon after the speech, “As usual we have been bombarded by Hearst and others who say that an American search for peace means, of necessity, war.”39 The response confirmed to the president and his advisers—if confirmation was needed—that public opinion was deeply averse to any entanglement in foreign affairs that threatened strict American neutrality.
The stormy international climate of the mid- to late-1930s affected the military services at home in profound ways. To some isolationists, military preparation was anathema; it would only encourage overt bellicose actions. Others, however, saw modest rearmament as an alternative to intervention. No matter what happened abroad, they claimed, a rearmed United States could feel secure behind its two ocean moats. This attitude tended to favor the navy over the army, but it spilled over to the land-based service as well. Slowly, but with gathering momentum, the nation began to rearm. Military appropriations in 1934 had dropped to an abysmal $541 million. By 1936 they were up to $916 million; by 1938 to just over $1 billion, and in 1940 would reach $1.57 billion. As for personnel, between 1934 and 1940 the number of army enlisted men would grow from 138,400 to almost 270,000; the number of officers from 13,761 to 18,326.
Marshall could not help but gain by this expansion and he would work hard to encourage it. Yet his rise to the very top command still remained problematic. In May 1938 Chief of Staff Malin Craig asked the general to come to Washington as chief of the army War Plans Division, to take the place of Stanley Embick. Craig had told him that the job was a stopgap, that he would soon appoint him deputy chief of staff. Marshall’s doubts were not assuaged, however. The post of deputy had only once in the past been the road to the apex. He knew that Craig himself intended to retire in a year and wanted Marshall to succeed him. Yet Marshall remained skeptical. For one thing, it made him uneasy that in the new post he would be outranked by a flock of generals to whom he would be giving orders. He also still craved “command work.” As he wrote to Pershing, “I am fond of Craig personally, but I loathe a desk.”40 Deputy chief of staff was still a desk job.
In fact the position promised to be unusually challenging and problem laden in the months ahead. Marshall would be walking into a bureaucratic hornet’s nest in the War Department. The new secretary was Harry Woodring, the successor to George Dern, who had died in 1936 of influenza complications, His assistant secretary was Louis A. Johnson, former head of the American Legion. The two men were natural adversaries with different temperaments, personal styles, and opinions. In the emerging debate over the way to treat the “aggressor nations,” they deeply disagreed. Woodring, a Kansas isolationist, opposed any aid to nations resisting the bellicose policies of the Axis. Johnson favored universal military training to prepare the country for war and was an outspoken advocate of aid to Britain and France, the guardians of the European status quo and the natural enemies of the Axis nations. Fortunately both men supported Marshall, but inevitably, as the general moved up the command chain, he would be compelled to confront seriously discordant voices in the War Department.
Marshall arrived in Washington in early July to take up his assignment in the War Plans Division. Katherine detoured to her summer home on Fire Island, only to be caught in the ferocious hurricane of September 1938 that devastated Long Island and New England. Reading in the press that Fire Island had been “wiped out,” Marshall commandeered a small plane at Bolling Field and flew to the South Shore of Long Island. Fortunately Katherine and Molly had been taken in by a neighbor whose house was a concrete structure, and they were safe. But as she later wrote, “I was blown into Washington in the autumn of 1938.”41
The U.S. Army was at an important juncture in its evolution when Marshall returned to Washington that summer to take up his new job. Since the end of World War I military minds had pondered the meaning and future of air power. Led by the maverick colonel William (“Billy”) Mitchell, one group of younger army officers believed that the advent of the airplane had transformed the art of war. Mitchell’s famous demonstration in the early twenties of the vulnerability of naval vessels to aerial bombing was not, in fact, a fair test of airpower under realistic combat conditions. But it convinced the American public, already beguiled by heroic World War I aerial combat and disillusioned by the meat-grinding trench warfare of 1914–18, that the airplane deserved a high priority in any future military planning. Though never a disciple of the “victory through air power” doctrine that some military gurus purveyed, Marshall himself endorsed expanded army investment in its air arm. But he opposed the group of younger army officers—backed by a substantial portion of the general public—pushing hard for massive commitment to pilots, bombers, and pursuit planes at the expense of badly needed personnel and equipment for the anemic and technologically backward traditional ground forces.
The most consequential partisan of airpower, besides Mitchell, was the president himself. FDR was a navy man. He had served before and during the First World War as assistant secretary of the navy under Josephus Daniels. He loved the sea and was an enthusiastic sailor who spent much of his summer vacation time before and after the war navigating a small sailboat on Passamaquoddy Bay, at his vacation home on Campobello Island, between Maine and New Brunswick, Canada. But, like many of his countrymen, he had also succumbed to the airpower romance and the desire to avoid in the next war the heartbreaking infantry casualty lists of the conflict two decades before.
As promised, Marshall did not stay long at the War Plans Division. One of five general staff sections,* it was sometimes reckoned the most important since it was charged with planning for future wars against potential enemies. War Plans was the source of the array of secret “color plans,” in effect blueprints for virtually every possible international conflict between the United States and a foreign power or powers. Especially prominent was “Plan Orange,” the military scenario for a potential war in the Pacific against Japan. Three years later it would also be the source of the important “Victory Plan,” authorized by Marshall as chief of staff, that laid out the economic and manpower requirements for winning a war against the Axis. However important a post—in which he was supported by Woodring, Johnson, and Craig, each for his own reasons—Marshall left it after three months to become, as promised, deputy chief of staff.
His quick elevation coincided with rapidly escalating American fears of a major European war. In September 1938, following months of tension between the democratic Czechoslovak government and the pro-Nazi leaders of the country’s Sudeten German minority, Hitler demanded that the German population be given “self-determination,” that is, autonomy within the Czechoslovak republic. The British and French governments feared that these demands, following close on the German annexation of Austria, would be a first step in Hitler’s eventual dismembering of Czechoslovakia and its absorption into a greater Reich. But they also were terrified that Europe might be drawn into a general war that would duplicate the horrors of 1914–18. Though France was bound by treaty to protect Czech independence, and Britain in turn was committed to backing France, neither democratic nation was prepared, militarily or psychologically, for war. In a series of September meetings with Hitler and a final conference in Munich, which included Italy but not the Czechs themselves, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and French premier Édouard Daladier pledged not to oppose German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten region in exchange for Hitler’s agreement to desist from future European aggression. Denied support by the democratic European powers, the appalled Czechs were forced to accept the crippling Munich terms. Returning to Britain after this act of dishonorable appeasement, Chamberlain famously (or infamously) waved the Munich document to cheering London crowds and was roundly applauded when he delivered his “Peace for Our Time” speech in the House of Commons. In March 1939, the Munich pact notwithstanding, German troops marched across the new Czech-German border and occupied the rump of the small democratic republic. Feeling betrayed and now fully alert to the German expansionist threat, Britain and France pledged to aid the Reich’s neighbor, Poland, in the event of an attack by Germany. Since Hitler had made demands on Poland, too, the fuse was now lit for a major European war.
Despite their own aversion to war, Americans were alarmed by the cascading developments in Europe. A survey in Fortune magazine showed that a large majority condemned the Munich pact and almost as many believed their country could not avoid being sucked into a general European war. The events of the fall of 1938 and spring of 1939, the editors concluded, “had shattered our sense of . . . reliance upon the sentiment: ‘Thank God for two wide oceans!’”42
For FDR, and for Marshall, a major lesson to be learned from the debacle was how French-British weakness at Munich derived from military unpreparedness. Both European nations had long neglected their military forces and were now lagging dangerously behind the Germans, particularly in airpower, the new weapon’s effectiveness already so woefully demonstrated by the devastating Luftwaffe attacks on civilians in the civil war raging in Spain. Something must be done by the United States to fill the gap and done quickly, the president believed. It was vital not only to bridge the chasm in American airpower but, more immediately, to enhance the country’s ability to supply planes for the British and French. On October 12 FDR told the press that he wanted another $500 million in defense funds to beef up the Army Air Corps. He also asked Secretary Johnson to prepare for an air corps of fifteen thousand planes.
Roosevelt’s push for airpower conflicted with the War Department’s own plans. Marshall and his colleagues were not averse to more planes. But even the Army Air Corps head, Gen. Henry (“Hap”) Arnold, believed the needs of his branch of the service must be balanced against the army’s overall requirements. And what about the needs of the now rearming European democracies? How would these conflict with America’s? On November 14 the president called together his military and civilian advisers, including Craig, Arnold, and Deputy Chief of Staff Marshall, along with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Solicitor General Robert Jackson, WPA administrator Harry Hopkins, and a group of assorted White House military aides. The United States must have an air force strong enough to deter any potential aggressor against the Western Hemisphere, he told them. Some twenty thousand planes would suffice, although Congress would probably not pay the bill for such a large increase in aircraft strength. Listening from a back row, Marshall recognized that FDR was at this moment thinking primarily of the needs of Britain and France faced with Hitler’s belligerence. That presented the army with problems. Marshall had no argument with the efforts to check the German dictator, but he feared that the president’s plans would deflect resources from America’s own military needs. Whatever he himself believed, it seemed that all the others at the meeting agreed with the president or were unwilling to differ openly with him. When, at the end of his presentation, the president asked his listeners for their opinion they all either praised his views or deftly evaded criticism. Finally FDR turned to Marshall and said, “Don’t you think so, George?” Marshall bridled. He objected to the familiarity of the first-name address—even from the president of the United States. And besides, he did not agree with FDR’s conclusions. “Mr. President,” he responded, “I am sorry, but I don’t agree with that at all.” As Marshall remembered the incident, “The President gave me . . . a startled look, and when I went out they [the other conferees] all bade me good-bye and said that my tour in Washington was over.”43
What could in fact have been a career stopper may have turned out to be, like the confrontation with Pershing in 1918, a career maker. Were both challenges unpremeditated? Were they merely impulsive acts by a man with a hair-trigger temper? Or were they in some sense calculated? Did Marshall instinctively grasp that he needed some propellant to accelerate his career? Whether Marshall deliberately used “speaking truth to power”—in the cliché of sixties political rebels—as a contrivance to get the attention of a man in whose hands rested his fate, or whether the response emerged spontaneously from his deep trait of honesty, is unclear. But the effect was positive. As Marshall later noted: “It didn’t antagonize him at all.”44 More significantly, it may have been the inspiration for the president’s approval of Marshall as chief of staff.
There was more to that appointment than catching the boss’s attention, however. Marshall was competing against a field of at least five officers with greater seniority. At the top of the list was Maj. Gen. Hugh Drum, the former chief of staff of the First Corps in France, former army inspector general, and currently commander of the prestigious Second Corps on Governors Island in New York. Drum was an active campaigner for the post and the leading candidate in the spring of 1939. He had the support, moreover, of the president’s chief political adviser, Postmaster Gen. James Farley. But Drum was a puffed-up blowhard who was too full of himself to please FDR. Besides, the president had little respect for Farley’s judgment of men, whatever his skill in political maneuvering and infighting.
Marshall had behind him more impressive endorsers than Farley. He, of course, had Pershing on his side, and the former chief of staff at one point early in the selection process had written to the president for support of his protégé. William Frye, Marshall’s first biographer, also mentions a Pershing visit to the White House on his behalf. “Mr. President,” he is reputed to have said to FDR, “you have a man over there in the War Plans Division who has just come here—Marshall. He’s Chief of Staff material. Why don’t you send for him and look him over? I think he will be of great help.”45 Other significant sponsors were the feuding Woodring and Johnson, each of whom, curiously, saw Marshall as a potential ally against the other.
But above all Marshall had won the support of Harry Hopkins, the man whose opinions FDR considered more valuable than virtually anyone else’s. A tall, skinny, habitually profane former social worker from Iowa, Hopkins had met FDR at the onset of the Depression, when the future president was governor of New York. Brought to Washington when FDR moved into the White House, he had administered some of the largest New Deal work programs, including the massively funded Works Progress Administration. Hopkins offended the president’s opponents, who depicted him as a sinister figure, the hidden real power behind the throne. But FDR considered him indispensable and consulted him on a range of matters far beyond issues of unemployment relief. During the war soon to come he would serve as the president’s eyes and ears abroad and chief intermediary with Winston Churchill, the leader of Britain’s war effort against Germany.
Hopkins was an impassioned enemy of Hitler and his Axis allies, and a man who strongly supported the rearmament policies that Marshall favored. Undoubtedly he also had taken note of Marshall’s good work at the CCC, one of the New Deal’s signature programs. Well before generous congressional appropriations arrived, he and the deputy chief of staff conspired secretly to divert funds from the WPA for machine tools to produce ammunition for army rifles. At the very end of 1938 he and Marshall met to talk over the army’s proposal for a military budget better balanced than the president’s air force–heavy plan. Hopkins soon took the balanced budget proposal to the president himself and helped persuade him to scale down the proportion allotted to the air arm. Thereafter Hopkins and the deputy chief of staff met and talked frequently, in the process becoming close friends and confidants. Marshall even allowed Hopkins to call him “George,” a favor he never extended to the president of the United States.
The suspense over Marshall’s professional future ended in the early spring, just as the great powers were about to plunge into the greatest war in history. On April 23 FDR summoned Marshall to the White House and, in his second floor study, offered him the post of chief of staff. At the presidential desk, disordered by the paraphernalia of the president’s stamp collection, the two men talked for half an hour. Marshall sketched briefly some of his ideas of how to defend the country in dangerous times. He also told FDR that he always expected to be able to be direct and honest about his views though some of them might not be pleasant to hear. Was that acceptable? Roosevelt tersely responded, “Yes.” Marshall then rose. “I feel deeply honored, sir,” he announced, “and I will give you the best I have.”46
Actually Marshall was to be only acting chief of staff until Craig’s resignation took effect on September 1. But as the promotion announcement was sure to create a hullabaloo, Marshall asked the White House to delay the press release until he had left Washington on a scheduled West Coast inspection tour. In fact he did not even tell Katherine, who only learned of the appointment when, as she lay in bed with an acute case of poison ivy, he came to say good-bye. “The papers will probably have it in a day or two,” he remarked, “and now I must be off.”47
The interview with the president at the White House had been a low-key affair, but with war imminent in festering Europe, the new chief of staff knew that both he and his country now faced the challenges of their lives.