Months before Sextant adjourned, the Western Allies had launched the first stage of Churchill’s “underbelly” strategy: Operation Husky. On July 10, 1943, two Allied armies came ashore in Sicily, the large, populous island off the toe of the Italian boot. The American Seventh Army, led by Patton, landed near Gela on the island’s south-central coast. The British Eighth Army, under Montgomery, came ashore on the east coast, a short distance away. The invasion was the second-largest amphibious operation of World War II, eclipsed only by the Normandy landings a year later. Yet the Sicilian invasion, as well as the drawn-out Italian mainland campaign that followed,* would expose once again serious flaws in American military leadership and failings in American combat performance, now less excusable following the harsh experience gained in North Africa.
Husky was mismanaged from the outset. Eisenhower and his deputy, Gen. Harold Rupert Leofric George Alexander, Churchill’s beau ideal of a professional British soldier, failed to provide a coherent overall plan for conquest of the island. Meanwhile, as in North Africa, lacking confidence in his own judgment, Ike dithered and delayed the planning process to the point where a disgusted Montgomery, no speedy facilitator himself, had to step in to end the impasse and allow the operation to go forward. The brief campaign in Sicily that ensued was no better conducted than the operations in North Africa. It repeated the pattern of Anglo-American rivalry, with Patton and Montgomery clashing over military objectives and routes of attack and in the end allowing the crafty German commander, Marshal Kesselring, to evacuate his troops and equipment across the Strait of Messina to fight another day. The conquest of Sicily was not a famous victory. Carlo D’Este, one of Eisenhower’s biographers, calls it an operation “beset by military blunders, controversy, and indecision.”1 In the five weeks of battle, notes the historian Douglas Porch, “sixty thousand Germans had managed to hold off eight times their number of Allied troops as they organized a successful evacuation from the island.”2
Marshall was more positive about the Husky campaign than are the scholars, however. Despite his initial reservations he deplored the badmouthing in the press of American troops’ performance and was lavish in his praise for virtually every high officer involved in the mishandled campaign. In a message to Ike from Quebec on August 17, as Patton’s troops rolled into Messina just behind the departing Axis soldiers, the chief of staff wrote: “Congratulations and my profound thanks for the brilliant success with which you have brought another tremendous job to a victorious conclusion. You have carried your vast responsibilities in a most impressive manner in the preparation, coordination, and direction of the Sicilian operation.” He also had fulsome praise for Patton. His role, he said, was “a grand job of leadership,” and he concluded by even expressing his “admiration” for “the manner” in which Montgomery, Alexander, and their British colleagues had “combined to carry HUSKY through to a triumphal conclusion.”3
Marshall’s tribute was outrageously hyperbolic, but the invasion of Sicily did achieve one undeniably happy result: the fall from power of the brutal Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
The landings in Sicily made a mockery of Mussolini’s grandiose promises to Italians that the war would prove the virtues of Fascism, convert the Mediterranean into an Italian lake, and establish Italy as ruler of “a new Roman empire.” Disillusioned with Il Duce, whose decision to join Hitler in the war had led to such grief for his people, on July 24 the Fascist Grand Council, with the support of King Victor Emmanuel III, voted to depose him in favor of the Italian chief of staff, Marshal Pietro Badoglio. The aging marshal soon opened negotiations with the Allies for Italy to leave the war, and in September, after Allied troops had landed on the southern Italian mainland, the new government concluded an armistice with Britain and the United States that soon became a formal alliance. In the end Italy as a cobelligerent contributed relatively little to the Allied cause. Still, the downfall of the dictator, Adolf Hitler’s close partner, bolstered Allied morale at a time of uncertainty and continuing doubt.
Unfortunately from Marshall’s perspective, the surrender of Fascist Italy tipped the balance inexorably toward further Mediterranean operations. With Italy officially out of the war Churchill foresaw a rapid occupation of the Italian boot followed by an attack on the core of Hitler’s Europe, either through the Balkans or across the Alps that bordered Italy to the north. But the expectation of Churchill and a few other optimists that mainland Italy would fall like a ripe plum into Allied hands would be cruelly dashed. On September 12 Mussolini was rescued by the Germans from incarceration and set up as the head of the puppet “Salò republic” in northern Italy. Then, rather than abandon the Italian mainland to the invading Allies, the Germans poured veteran combat divisions into the boot and, under Kesselring’s brilliant command, fought a tenacious defensive campaign that took advantage of every Apennine peak and valley and every swift-flowing Italian river to keep the Allies from capturing Rome and sweeping into the Po Valley, Italy’s industrial and economic heart.
Kesselring’s nimble defense of the Italian boot was abetted once more by Allied ineptitude. On September 3 British troops under Montgomery had come ashore on the toe of the boot in the far south of mainland Italy, three hundred miles from Salerno on the west coast, where Mark Clark’s American Fifth Army landed six days later. Instead of rushing to join the besieged Salerno invaders, the British Eighth Army, afflicted by Monty’s usual timidity and overpreparation syndrome, spent days slogging cautiously up the Adriatic coast while the Americans barely held on to their beachhead on the west coast. Montgomery, however, was Churchill’s and Brooke’s concern. The feckless Clark was Ike’s and Marshall’s.
Clark was another protégé of Marshall’s, an officer he respected and had slated for future high command. For his part Eisenhower considered Clark “the best organizer, planner, and trainer of troops” he had ever met.4 But Clark was also a publicity and glory hound, a man ruthless toward subordinates and, during the Italian campaign, a commander obsessed with the capture of Rome, at best a dubious strategic goal. The tall, hawk-nosed general was also an Anglophobe, driven by a ferocious rivalry with Montgomery and the British to reach the Eternal City first. One historian has suggested that “Clark saw the Italian campaign as being fought as much against the British as against the Germans.”5
Blaming others for his failures, Clark never found a way to overcome the inspired Kesselring. After finally breaking out of the Salerno beachhead on September 19, he tried frontal assaults against Wehrmacht bastions at Monte Cassino and the successive fortified German defensive “lines” across the peninsula. He also launched an end run around the Germans at Anzio, south of Rome. None of these worked, and meanwhile losses among his multinational forces mounted shamefully. Several of the Fifth Army’s engagements became bywords for bloody mismanagement. In mid-January, Clark sent hundreds of Texans of the Thirty-Sixth Infantry to their deaths in a fruitless, botched effort to bypass the German “Gustav Line” by fording the Rapido River south of Rome. At Anzio soon after, Clark’s subordinate Maj. Gen. John Lucas, another officer favored by Marshall, allowed the enemy to seal off the beachhead, keeping the Allied landing forces from quickly taking Rome. At Monte Cassino, a key spot on the Gustav Line tenaciously held by the enemy, Alexander, supreme commander in Italy following Ike’s transfer to head Overlord, ordered the bombing of the revered ancient abbey, a move that only turned sacred architecture into impassable rubble that further delayed the attackers.
Clark’s troops finally marched into Rome on June 4, 1944, to be greeted by rapturous Roman citizens shouting “Americano! Americano!”—overjoyed to finally see an end to their war. From Washington, Roosevelt cabled Clark: “You have made the American people very happy. It is a grand job well done.”6 It was a precious moment that Clark had craved for many weary months, but the “American Eagle” was soon deprived of his Roman triumph. Two days later the news of the Eternal City’s conquest was wiped off the front pages of the Allied press by D-Day, the long-delayed Anglo-American cross-Channel landings in Normandy. When informed of the landings Clark blurted out: “They didn’t even let us have the newspaper headlines for the fall of Rome for one day.”7
Marshall avoided interfering with the operations in both Sicily and mainland Italy. Though he had opposed the Churchillian “peripheral strategy,” in January at a Combined Chiefs meeting held during the Casablanca Conference, he had finally accepted the logic, or at least the inevitability, of a campaign against Italy. Once more the threat of troop idleness proved telling. Given the number of Allied troops left with nothing to do in North Africa after the anticipated victory, “operations against Sicily appeared to be advantageous,” he acknowledged.8 But Marshall never liked the Italian campaign and avoided taking any significant part in its conduct. He was never able to pursue a complete hands-off policy, however. To his credit, during the planning stage for Husky, he proposed—fruitlessly—a preemptive attack to capture Messina before it could be used as an evacuation port for a retreating enemy. At another point during the planning period, when Ike asked for alternatives if the Sicily operations should go awry, he suggested several options but carefully noted that these “are not in keeping with my ideas of what our strategy should be”; the “decisive effort must be made against the continent from the United Kingdom sooner or later.”9 If he intruded at all during these preparatory months he did so diffidently. On March 1, for example, while suggesting how Ike might deal with the fatigue and inexperience of American troops under his command, he concluded with the remark: “I offer this in a purely personal manner and wish you to feel no necessity for explanation of why you do not consider it practical.”10
Though shunning the day-to-day details of the Italian campaign, the chief of staff could not ignore the fiasco at Anzio. Churchill’s brainchild, Marshall had not condoned the operation. He had, however, approved of its ground commander, Major General Lucas, one of his circle of favorites. Lucas, he believed, was a man of “military stature, prestige, and experience.”11 Now, after the disappointment at Anzio, admitting that “Washington estimates” were “long range and therefore weakly based,” Marshall radioed Gen. Jacob Devers, Ike’s successor at Algiers, the Mediterranean theater headquarters, that he agreed that Lucas’s leadership appeared “below stern standard[s] required in existing situation.”12 With Marshall’s approval, Devers relieved Lucas and replaced him with Lucian Truscott, who proved to be a far more able combat officer.
And the Italian operation did not even cease after the capture of Rome. The fighting in Italy would stagger on for another eleven months, not ending until the final unconditional general German surrender to United Nations forces on May 8, 1945.
The butcher’s bill for Husky and its mainland successor was appalling. The twenty-month-long campaign to evict the Axis from Italian soil inflicted 312,000 casualties on the Allied forces, about 40 percent more than the far more extensive operation in northwestern Europe that began with the Overlord landings in Normandy. Some 750,000 U.S. troops fought in Italy and would alone sustain 120,000 casualties, including more than 23,000 killed.
Whether the lives of these Americans and Allied troops, not to speak of many Italian civilians’, were sacrificed in vain or the campaign in Italy advanced appreciably the destruction of Nazi Germany, and if Marshall was right to have resisted the “underbelly” campaign are issues that have divided both participants and scholars. Looking back on the campaign from the perspective of later years, several historians have denied that the Allied investment in the Italy hastened the defeat of Hitler or helped the embattled Russians. Rather, to appease the juvenile urges of an incurable romantic who happened to head a world empire, it squandered lives, resources, and energies that might have been better deployed directly to defeat the most evil tyranny in modern history. But other scholars have disagreed, though not necessarily along lines of nationality.* As for contemporaries, Marshall apparently considered the entire Mediterranean theater an unfortunate distraction. Churchill, needless to say, gave his ardent support to the Italian operation, even on the eve of D-Day, when its disappointing progress and unexpected costs had already become abundantly clear. Writing to Ike in mid-April, he proposed a revised strategy for the campaign and noted that whatever the setbacks, it was tying down thirty-four German divisions in the “Western Mediterranean Theater” and would “make an immense contribution to Overlord.”13 As for those high-level experts on Axis fortunes, Stalin and Hitler, they agreed the Italian campaign indeed made a difference. Stalin was happy to see British and American troops engaged anywhere on the European continent in 1942 and 1943, though he would eventually cry “Enough!” to the delay it caused for the cross-Channel attack. Hitler, too, apparently confirmed the strategic impact of the Allied operation when, in July 1943, during the ferocious German Kursk offensive in Soviet Ukraine, he would order the withdrawal of two powerful SS panzer divisions from the eastern front to bolster the Axis forces in Italy. But perhaps, on the credit side of the ledger, the British historian Max Hastings deserves the last word. All told, he writes, “the Italian front occupied the attention of one-tenth of Hitler’s ground forces, which would otherwise have deployed on the Eastern Front or in France.”14
Marshall seems never to have passed judgment on the entire Italian campaign. But as head of the American army, once under way he inevitably hoped to see it succeed and discovered pluses along with the drawbacks. In late December, after months of stagnation on the peninsula following the fall of Rome, he defended the operation as providing “the containment and attrition of the enemy in the greatest possible numbers.” “The issue,” he added, was “not one of territory.”15 Yet after Rome the continuing grind came under increasing attack in the press at home, with the emphasis on the deteriorating morale of American troops.
Marshall laid much of the blame for the negative view of Fifth Army morale at the door of Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright-celebrity-congresswoman from Connecticut and wife of the press lord Henry Luce. In early 1945, following a visit to the Italian theater with the House Military Affairs Committee, Mrs. Luce charged that American troops in Italy felt neglected and abandoned. When the American press, prodded by her and similar critics, began to call Italy the “forgotten front,” Marshall reacted with anger. As he later noted, these claims were a “dreadful blow” to military morale. But Marshall would confirm Clare Luce’s claim that the troops’ state of mind was, in fact, negative. “Corps commanders” had told him, he later recalled, that they “didn’t know what to do about their troops. They had gotten obsessed with the fact that we had forgotten them entirely.”16 At the time, to reinforce troops’ morale, Marshall induced FDR to include a special tribute to the soldiers in Italy in his 1945 State of the Union message, and arranged to have that portion circulated in the Italian theater.
One event that cannot have failed to affect Marshall’s view of the Italian campaign as a whole was the tragic death of Allen Brown, his younger stepson, near Rome. Both in army uniform in southern Europe, Allen and his brother, Clifton, had spent three wonderful spring days of leave together before Allen, a “tanker,” left for the Anzio beachhead with the First Armored Division. On May 29, 1944, shortly before the Fifth Army finally entered Rome, Marshall received a radio message from General Clark that Lieutenant Brown had been killed in action. The childless Marshall had emotionally adopted his stepchildren and followed their lives and careers with paternal interest. Of the three, Allen was his favorite. Marshall’s grief was real and deep. Needless to say he sought to comfort Katherine, but in his own sorrow he also felt driven to speak to friends—Hopkins, Dill, British ambassador Lord Halifax—who had also lost sons in the war. Months later, after D-Day, Marshall made an unscheduled trip to Italy to visit Allen’s grave at the Anzio cemetery and spent a solemn, contemplative half hour alone by the grave site.
Sorrow, then, undoubtedly, but it would not be surprising if Marshall also felt guilt over Allen’s death. In a sense he had put Allen in range of peril. When Allen prepared to enlist in the army in September 1942 his stepfather had recommended the tank corps and had, after his stepson graduated from the Armored Force School at Fort Knox, facilitated his transfer to North Africa. In the fall of 1943 Allen’s division was reassigned to Italy. It was while he was standing on the turret of his tank near the Alban Hills south of Rome to survey the terrain ahead that a sniper’s bullet ended his life. Whether or not Marshall made the emotional association suggested here, stoicism and respect for patriotic duty were intrinsic parts of a soldier’s values—perhaps Marshall’s in particular—and it can be assumed that they served him as comfort on this tragic occasion.
Well before Rome fell, Overlord had eclipsed the Mediterranean as the main strategic concern of the Western Allies. The needs of men and equipment for the Italian campaign had clearly impacted the larger strategy of the war in Europe. In early 1944, as agreed at Quadrant, Marshall was able to withdraw from Italy five combat divisions, three British and two American, along with a collection of scarce LST landing craft, for the Bolero buildup in Britain. Yet he had to fight the disgruntled Churchill all the way. It would not be until the Eureka meetings of the Big Three at Tehran that Churchill finally acquiesced in the decision to launch the great cross-Channel attack, and even then he would try to run out the clock to prevent his rivals from actually getting possession of the ball.
Marshall and the president arrived at Tehran for the Eureka Conference after a seven-hour flight from Cairo, accompanied by FDR’s civilian advisers Harry Hopkins and Averell Harriman, along with Generals Arnold and Somervell and Admiral Cooke. The British delegation included the heads and staffs of the senior services as well as Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. Confident that he could manipulate Stalin by his charm and powers of persuasion, Roosevelt was initially lodged at the American legation. Then, warned by Stalin of a plot against his life, he moved happily into the supposedly safer Russian compound. Marshall and the other Allied military personnel settled in with their bags at the headquarters of the U.S. Persian Gulf Command several miles away.*
The Tehran meetings were held against a background of soaring American confidence. Roosevelt and his advisers were now fully aware of the shift of resource balance between the two English-speaking nations, and intended to deploy that advantage in the discussions with Stalin. At a mid-November meeting just before the Cairo Conference the president had proposed making whoever headed Overlord the commander of the entire Allied transatlantic theater, including the Mediterranean and the Middle East. This would expand the reach and power of the supreme commander, who, it was by now acknowledged, would be an American. To defend his proposal Roosevelt asked the military planners for the projected figures of total U.S. and British forces on January 1944. The numbers were conclusive. The British Commonwealth would be able to deploy about 5 million men, they told him. The comparable American total was just over 10.5 million. Marshall and Arnold concurred when the president observed: “We are definitely ahead of the British as regards the number of men we have overseas at the present time and will soon have as many men in England for Overlord as the total British forces now in that place.”17 At the conference itself, though never verbalized, this view was clearly detectable: The United States would now have a louder voice than at any preceding conference of the two English-speaking nations.
At this preliminary November meeting Roosevelt also raised the matter of Churchill’s fascination with Balkan operations following success in Italy. He would veto it if it came up, he declared. Speaking for the Joint Chiefs, Marshall made his aversion even more emphatic. “We do not believe that the Balkans are necessary,” he said. It would prolong the war in Europe and also in the Pacific. The Americans now had “a million tons of supplies in England for Overlord,” and it “would be “going into reverse to undertake the Balkans.” To block Churchill, Marshall was prepared once again to play the Pacific card. If the British insisted on “any such proposal,” he noted, “we could say that . . . we will pull out and go into the Pacific with all our forces.”18
The Big Three focus at Tehran would be to define the road ahead against the common European enemy. As a secondary goal, the Americans hoped to induce the Soviets to commit themselves to the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat. But whatever the agenda, Tehran would expose the new balance of forces. Not only had Britain become the junior partner in the Anglo-American alliance, the Soviet Union, with the might of 330 combat divisions and spectacular victories to its credit at Stalingrad, Kursk, and the Orel Salient, had in some ways become the senior partner in the larger anti-Axis UN coalition. Stalin now possessed enormous leverage over both Western powers and would not be reluctant to deploy it. The discussions at Tehran would expose the persistent differences between the American and British approach to defeating the Wehrmacht and effectively make the Russians the arbiters between the two. At Tehran the Western Allies would allow the Soviet dictator to define their overall European military strategy for the remainder of the war. “Uncle Joe” would, incidentally, also help define Marshall’s future role in the war and decide his historical legacy.
FDR opened the first plenary session of the Big Three on November 28 with a jocular reference to his relative youth among the three heads of state and hence his fitting role as the first meeting chairman. “We are sitting around this table,” he continued, “for the first time as a family, with the one object of winning the war.” Churchill responded that in the hands of the participants rested the “future of mankind.” Stalin followed the feel-good remarks with an impatient proposal that they all “get down to business.”19
FDR started the discussion with a brief description of America’s Pacific involvement, but soon moved to the issues of greater concern to the Soviet leader. He apologized for the delay of the second front, blaming it in part on the imperatives of the Mediterranean strategy and in part on the all-embracing excuse: the chronic shortage of landing craft. But Overlord, he promised, would not be postponed beyond May or June 1944 as agreed to by both Western Allies at Quebec. Put on the spot by Roosevelt’s pledge, the still-skittish prime minister was now compelled, in Stalin’s presence, to second the president. There were “no differences,” Churchill insisted, between Great Britain and the United States except in “ways and means”; he, too, hoped to launch a cross-Channel offensive against Hitler’s Festung Europa. Later in the discussion, with more than a touch of mendacity, the PM claimed that he had never “regarded the Mediterranean operations as more than a stepping stone to the main offensive against Germany.” But then he waffled. He “could not, in any circumstance,” he added, “agree to sacrifice the activities of the armies in the Mediterranean in order merely to keep the exact date of May 1 for Operation Overlord.”20
It is not clear whether the Americans had planned to make Stalin the broker of the Western Allies’ remaining strategic moves in Europe. But in his remarks that followed, Stalin in effect vetoed further extensive operations in Italy, making the invasion of France the unavoidable course to take. The Soviet leader opened his comments with a promise to join the Americans in the Far East against Japan, after Germany’s surrender. He then turned to his chief concern, the war against Hitler. He amiably agreed that the operations in Italy were “of great value to further the war against the Axis” insofar as they opened the Mediterranean to free navigation. But “now they [were] of no further great importance as regards the defeat of Germany.” Rather, the “most suitable sector for a blow at Germany would be from some place in France.” Stalin endorsed Anvil, an invasion of southern France, first proposed by the Allied planners at the Quadrant Conference and now, at Tehran, reiterated by Marshall as a valuable adjunct of Overlord. Ideally, Stalin stated, the Anglo-American assault on the Continent should be a pincer movement in France from both the Channel in the north and the Mediterranean in the south. Stalin had little patience with the tortuous Italian campaign. He waved off Clark’s cherished goal, declaring that Rome could be “captured at a later date.”21
The next morning, when the military staffs of the UN partners met for the first time, the previous day’s amiability was notably absent. In a mid-November secret memo preceding the conference, Gen. Sir John Kennedy, Brooke’s Assistant CIGS, had already laid out the British agenda. The “strategy to be advanced in the coming conference,” he wrote, must “continue the offensive in Italy,” induce Turkey to join the Allies against the Axis, mount various actions to bolster Tito’s anti-Axis guerrilla partisans in the Balkans, and “accept a postponement of Overlord.”22 Churchill’s obliging remarks at the plenary session had only disguised the British Mediterranean addiction, and at the morning session Brooke ardently defended continuing the Italian offensive until the second front in France was actually launched. CIGS also took issue with Soviet support for an invasion of the South of France to either precede or follow the cross-Channel operation. There would not be sufficient forces left over from Italy, he claimed, to allow two invasions of France.
Mistrustful of the Allied commitment to invade France, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, Stalin’s military mouthpiece, now asked the American chief of staff to explain his country’s position on land operations in Europe. Marshall responded with a minilecture on American logistical plans to supply the projected invasion. It was the American resolve to bring as many troops into action as possible, he said. Fifty divisions and mountains of supplies and equipment were available in the United States for the campaign; the problem was the shipping and landing craft to get them to the scene of battle. The reason for “favoring Overlord from the start,” he noted, was that it was “the shortest oversea transport route.” After the initial landings in France reinforcements could “be sent directly from the United States to the French ports.” Not until his concluding remarks did Marshall finally get around to answering Voroshilov’s question, and even at this point his response was off center. “If we confine ourselves to reduced operations in the Mediterranean for the next three months,” he declared, it would “entail the least interference with OVERLORD.” As for the issue of invading southern France, he disagreed with General Brooke. That operation was very important for the success of the cross-Channel operation.23
Voroshilov chose to interpret Marshall’s remarks as a firm American agreement that Overlord was, as he said, “of the first importance.” But seeking further reassurance, he asked Brooke directly whether he too considered the cross-Channel invasion a certainty. CIGS responded with the usual British temporizing. Britain “considered the operation as an essential part of this war.” On the other hand, “his majesty’s advisors had always stipulated that it must be mounted at a time when it would have the best chances of success.” The German “fortifications in Northern France” were “of a very serious character,” and German communications in the area where the battles would be fought were “excellent.” But then he backpedaled. Conditions, he assured the Soviet marshal, would finally be propitious in 1944.
Reassured or not, Voroshilov hastened to put the full weight of the Soviet leaders behind Overlord. Marshal Stalin and the Soviet general staff attached “great importance to OVERLORD,” he pronounced, and “felt that the other operations in the Mediterranean” could “be regarded only as auxiliary.” The Soviet marshal went on to predict that Overlord would “be successful” and “would go down in history as one of our greatest victories.” “As a military man,” he personally thought that Overlord was “the most important operation and that all the other auxiliary operations such as Rome . . . and what not, must be planned to assist OVERLORD and certainly not to hinder it.” Brooke was quick to reassure Voroshilov that he “recognized that the Mediterranean operations are definitely of a secondary nature.” Yet he refused to surrender unconditionally. Further military action in Italy and elsewhere, he insisted, could help Overlord and have a positive impact on the eastern front.24
That afternoon the Big Three leaders held their second plenary session, and after a review of the morning’s military discussion took up once more the issue of Overlord. It was during this meeting that, in an almost offhand way, Marshall’s future role in the war was decided. However improbably, it was Joseph Stalin who finally forced FDR to choose between Marshall and Eisenhower as supreme commander of the cross-Channel invasion of France.
Stalin had never met Eisenhower and had just been introduced to Marshall for the first time. But he apparently favored the American chief of staff from the outset. The Soviet leader, Marshall later noted, was “agreeable in regard to me and made sort of semi-affectionate gestures.”25 In any event, at Tehran, Uncle Joe had no patience with the Anglo-American failure to chose a commander for Overlord, and during this second plenary meeting pointedly asked who had been designated to lead the operation. When told that it “was not yet decided,” he responded bluntly: “Then nothing will come out of these operations.”26 Still uncertain of his decision but recognizing that further delay was not expedient, Roosevelt promised that when he and Churchill returned to Cairo to complete their interrupted conference the issue would finally be settled.
By now, over Marshall’s strong dissent, FDR had abandoned his view that the supreme commander, whoever he might be, should lead all Allied forces in Europe. Rather, he now agreed, his powers should be limited, as the British preferred, to the operations in France, both Overlord and Anvil, with a separate unified command for the Mediterranean. Reducing the scope of the supreme commander worsened the case for Marshall by strengthening the argument that to take him from his critical Pentagon office to command Overlord would be an actual demotion. The president had more compelling reasons as well to keep Marshall close by. It was perhaps at this point that FDR—observing Marshall in action against Brooke and Churchill at Tehran—that FDR concluded that he could not forgo his presence close to the White House and Capitol Hill. But in any case, after questioning many observers, the playwright and speechwriter Robert Sherwood, a good friend of Harry Hopkins and a man who knew FDR well, concluded that “no one will ever know just what finally went on in Roosevelt’s complex mind to determine the decision.”27
Back in Cairo, before dinner on December 4, the president sent Hopkins personally to sound Marshall out in his quarters on the matter of the supreme commander of Overlord. Like his boss, Hopkins was reluctant to take a point-blank approach and instead left Marshall to make his own case. The president “was in some concern of mind” about the appointment, he told the chief of staff. The statement hung in the air, awaiting a response. But Marshall’s pride forbade a self-seeking answer. He kicked the ball back. He would “go along wholeheartedly with whatever decision the president made”; Roosevelt “need have no fears regarding [his] personal reaction.”28 That was all that the emissary could extract from the candidate. Informed of the exchange when Hopkins returned, FDR now had no choice, however uncomfortable it made him: He must personally confront the general. The following day he summoned Marshall to his villa. Which post did Marshall prefer, he asked, army chief of staff or supreme commander in France? Marshall refused to answer. “I just repeated again in as convincing language as I could that I wanted him to feel free to act in whatever way he felt was to the best interest of the country and to his satisfaction and not in any way to consider my feelings. I would cheerfully go whatever way he wanted me to go.”29 Without any means of escape Roosevelt now made his choice; the chief of staff, he said, would remain at the Pentagon.
Marshall had chosen his own fate. The decision to command Overlord had been his to make; Roosevelt would have gone along if he had made his preference clear and emphatic. But to have done so, as Marshall’s biographer Mark Stoler writes, would have violated “his sense of honor and duty” and also have blemished his self-crafted persona.30 George Marshall could not do it.
Once Marshall was out of the running, the only real choice as Overlord commander was his protégé. On December 6 Roosevelt, still in Cairo, sent a brief message to Stalin: “The immediate appointment of General Eisenhower to command of Overlord has been decided upon.” Marshall sent Eisenhower a longhand copy of FDR’s telegram with his own endorsement: “Dear Eisenhower, I thought you might like to have this as a momento [sic].”31 In a Christmas Eve radio broadcast the president publicly announced the appointment of Eisenhower as supreme commander, Allied Expeditionary Force. His headquarters would be known as SHAEF.
And so Marshall once more had failed to win a combat command. He would never lead men in battle; he would remain a desk officer, a military manager, and a top administrator to the end of his army career.
Was he deeply disappointed? He never said. His aide, Col. Frank McCarthy, a man who knew him well, claimed, just following the decision, that he showed no outward sign of a setback. Yet on many occasions in his career he had lamented being passed over for troop command and relegated to staff jobs. Commanding troops was a pervasive goal in the professional army. It was why vigorous, adventurous, intelligent young men were drawn to military life in the first place. It was also normally the road to quick advancement. And then there were fame and glory. FDR understood that the supreme command assignment of Overlord would be a kind of military apotheosis. As he would tell Eisenhower while in North Africa, they both knew who had served as Lincoln’s chief of staff in the last years of the Civil War, but virtually no one else did, while “every schoolboy” knew the names Grant, Lee, Sherman, and Jackson. He hated “to think,” the president mused, “that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was.”32
Marshall arrived back in Washington from his round-the-world, post-Sextant trip on December 22, tired from his visits to MacArthur and the Pacific troops and the long hours on cramped, noisy planes. After a day in his Pentagon office he and Katherine went off to Dodona Manor to unwind and relax. During their years in Washington they would often seek refuge at the Leesburg house, and on religious holidays they attended services at the town’s small Episcopal church. But this year, as in others, they closed it soon after Christmas.
To escape the harsh Washington winter the Marshalls stole a week off in early January to visit Miami Beach. The oceanside Florida city had been taken over by the military as a training camp, with most civilians ousted from the beachfront hotels and replaced by air corps cadets and instructors. Nevertheless, it was, Katherine later wrote, “a delightful week.” She and George swam in the warm Atlantic water each day before lunch, took a nap, and then went for another swim, or, alternatively, the general would go deep-sea fishing.33
Marshall returned to his office on the sixteenth to resume the business of fighting the war. A later description depicts his routine labors at the new Pentagon Building. The chief of staff sat behind a large antique desk bequeathed to the government by Philip Sheridan, the dashing Civil War cavalry officer who had served in the 1880s as commanding general of the army. On Marshall’s office wall was a painting of the critical Meuse-Argonne battle of the First World War, which he had helped plan. In the corner of the room was a grandfather clock; next to it an American flag and his four-star general’s banner.34 To preserve his health and energy Marshall maintained limited hours. He arrived early but also left early, believing that no effective work was ever done much past three o’clock.
Marshall had returned to Washington to find the country suffering from a combination of war weariness and overconfidence. With the Japanese Pacific offensive effectively checked and the Wehrmacht in retreat, many Americans now felt that UN victory was assured and they could relax their vigilance and resolve. One disturbing symptom of the new mood was widespread labor troubles.
As part of the post–Pearl Harbor mobilization effort, the government had extracted a pledge from organized labor to eschew strikes that interfered with vital war production. The inevitable management-labor disputes would be settled by arbitration through the National War Labor Board (NWLB). By and large the unions had kept their pledge. But not the United Mine Workers, led by FDR’s opponent John L. Lewis, which had defied the government and mounted a damaging work stoppage in mid-1943 that had outraged the president. Now, as 1944 approached, infected with the new complacency virus, the railroad brotherhoods threatened to shut down train service throughout the nation, an action that promised to strangle the war effort. Two days after Christmas, Roosevelt ordered the War Department to take control of the railroads. Now, if the railroad brotherhoods struck, the union leaders could be prosecuted for obstructing the war effort. Three of the brotherhood unions agreed to call off the strike, but two remained poised to walk out. Meanwhile, the steelworkers, too, were growing restless at what they considered unfair treatment at the hands of the NWLB and the steel company executives. To many media pundits the once-united country seemed on the verge of turmoil. In Germany the Goebbels propaganda machine, it was reported, was gloating at the anticipated disarray of the American war effort.
Marshall had avoided taking sides in labor disputes, but the actions and threats of the unions now enraged him. He was “sleepless with worry,” he informed Jimmy Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization (OWM).35 Equally dismayed, Byrnes arranged for Marshall to meet with a small group of influential print and radio journalists for an off-the-record session to drive home the dangers of labor unrest to the national interest. At the meeting Marshall uncharacteristically vented his anger at the unions. He “banged his white-knuckled fist on the desk” and called the imminent rail strike “the damnedest crime ever committed in America,” an act that could cost America hundreds of thousands of lives.36
Despite the reporters’ pledge, details of the meeting and Marshall’s performance leaked out and brought a storm of criticism down on his head. William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor, called Marshall’s attack “irrational, uninformed, and inflammatory.”37 The leftist journalist I. F. Stone scolded Marshall for his “exaggerated” attack and suggested it was intended “to stir popular support for further anti-labor legislation.”38 The mainstream press generally applauded him, as did the Communist Daily Worker, always solicitous of Soviet needs, but the adverse publicity chastened Marshall and clearly reinforced his resolve to avoid future political and ideological controversies.
During these months of marking time for the cross-Channel main event, Marshall rescued his friend Sir John Dill from professional decapitation. Dill and Churchill, his boss, had never gotten along; that was why the field marshal had been removed in late 1941 as CIGS and replaced by Brooke. But, exiled to Washington as head of the British Joint Staff Mission, he had become a close friend of Marshall’s and an invaluable liaison between Britain and America. Churchill now believed he was too close to the Americans and had grown uncomfortable with his role in the British military delegation in Washington. To save Dill from recall Marshall arranged for Yale University to award him the Charles P. Howard Prize for contributing to improved international relations. A colorful academic procession accompanied the ceremony, photographs of which were duly sent off to London. Churchill was impressed; Dill stayed on in Washington.
As he waited for D-Day, Marshall occupied himself speaking to war bond rallies, addressing the American Legion, deciding the fate of the failed general John Lucas, seeking convalescent accommodations for the ailing Harry Hopkins at White Sulphur Springs following a hospital stay, and proposing to Eisenhower a major airborne operation to accompany the cross-Channel landings. In late February he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to oppose a Senate resolution endorsing U.S. support of a “Jewish Commonwealth” in Palestine in light of the “ruthless persecution of the Jewish people in Europe.”39 Though a low level of anti-Semitism was, at the time, pervasive in Protestant America, there is no reason to believe that Marshall disliked Jews. Bernard Baruch was a close friend, and the chief of staff often sought refuge from the cares of his job at Baruch’s show plantation in South Carolina. Marshall’s objections to the resolution, like those of his War Department colleagues, were that it would upset the Arabs in North Africa and the Middle East, where American troops were stationed and require military reinforcements to retain order. Better to postpone such a motion until the war was over, he told the senators.
During these waiting months a private incident affords a rare glimpse into both Marshall’s marriage and personality. Once back from their Florida break, Katherine had resumed her public routine as wife of the wartime chief of staff. In March she came to New York to do her part for the Fourth War Bond Drive. There, on a freezing, windy day in Lower Manhattan, she gave her standard twenty-minute speech and, at the end, was lassoed by the event’s promoters into a public display of eating doughnuts from the Doughnut Wagon, whose owner had promised to provide a free doughnut to every bond buyer at the rally. Lashed for an hour by freezing wind, she returned to Washington with a ferocious sinus infection.
What followed at Quarters No. 1 when she reached home reveals an important thread in the Marshalls’ marital relations. The general apparently did not exempt his wife from the unbending persona he had cultivated over the years. When George returned from the Pentagon that evening he scolded his wife as if she were a child and he her father. “After taking you to Florida for a week to get the sun, you undo all the good accomplished in one hour—standing on 14th Street in New York for one hour, eating doughnuts! What, in Heavens name, have doughnuts got to do with the War Bond Drive? If you can’t say ‘No’ you ought not to be allowed out alone!”40 Katherine writes that she laughed at her husband’s tirade, but surely she felt undervalued in some way.
If not completely in Katherine’s favor for a time following this incident, Marshall was clearly popular with the American media. On January 3 Time magazine placed his picture on its cover as “Man of the Year.” The text that followed was blatantly hyperbolic. “Never in U.S. history has a military man enjoyed such respect on Capitol Hill,” it announced. The chief of staff had transformed a “worse-than-disarmed U.S. into the world’s most effective military power.” A list of Marshall’s specific accomplishments followed: He had “laid out a program of training and a schedule of equipment that are unmatched anywhere”; he had avoided “hastily planned or ill-advised military operations”; he had insisted on unity of Allied command; he had “refused to be panicked by nervous demands of theater commanders in sending out green and half-equipped troops”; he had early recognized the significance of airpower and promoted the air program; he had been open to the possibilities of new military equipment and weapons. All told, he was the closest thing to the “indispensable man.”41 Many of these achievements were either mythical or half-truths.
However flattering Time’s accolade, during this period of military stasis and public distraction Marshall was forced to confront once again a serious military manpower shortage. The shortfall most affected the infantry. The three young historians who, at the war’s end, wrote the Organization of Ground Combat Troops volume for the army’s Official History series concluded, with some judicious restraint, that “the ground forces of World II proved to be none too large.” In 1918, they observed, American troops were “needed only in France,” but in “1942–45 they were needed on opposite sides of the globe.”42
The shortage, though first noticed in 1942, had become acute as forces were being assembled in Britain for the cross-Channel operation. As General McNair, the head of G-3, wrote to Marshall in early January 1944: “At no stage in our operations, including the present, has the supply of replacements been adequate.” In his opinion “the most serious aspect of the replacement situation” was “not the replacement agencies [that is, the Repple-Depple arrangement], but . . . lack of manpower. . . . Units of the Army Ground Forces today,” he explained, had “a net shortage of 56,000 men.”43 Marshall acknowledged the shortfall. Later that month he sent an urgent message to theater commanders asking them to economize on the use of manpower by abandoning rear bases no longer essential, by employing civilians in rear areas to replace service troops, and by other means. “Worldwide requirements for forthcoming operations are creating service and combat troop demands which are becoming increasingly difficult to meet,” he wrote. “It is necessary,” he continued, “to make drastic revisions in the troop bases of all theaters.”44
Despite these efforts to conserve, by mid-1944 the manpower dearth was being felt with increased force on the fighting fronts and promised to seriously weaken operations in the battles still to come.
The infantry deficit in the last year of the war had several causes. First, casualties in Italy and the Pacific had run high, higher than expected. Then, after D-Day, the grinding battles in Normandy and in the Hürtgen Forest (on the Belgian-German border) and the Ardennes (which took in parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Germany) would make losses far worse. But Marshall and Stimson also believed that part of the blame rested with the Selective Service System. Run by civilians and sensitive to the needs of industry and agriculture and the pressures of influential politicians and anxious parents, local draft boards handed out wholesale deferments for “essential skills” and 4-F (“unfit for service”) classifications. At one point in late 1944 the secretary and the chief of staff would seriously consider forcing the Selective Service head, Gen. Louis Hershey, to resign, and replacing him with a more compliant man.
In these months Marshall also worried about the fighting quality of the American infantry. But he refused to change one of its causes—the flawed replacement system so misused in the North African and Mediterranean campaigns. Writing to Ike in mid-May he acknowledged the mediocre “effectiveness of the infantry in combat” and admitted that “many suggestions” for change had “been considered.” These included “special replacement companies in regiments; special replacement battalions in divisions; overstrength to be used for mandatory furloughs and separate regiments for relief purposes.” But all of these, he insisted, were “unsatisfactory for one reason or another.” His rejection of reform, when parsed, relies on arbitrary precedent. “The magnitude of our world-wide tasks and the limitations of manpower,” he claimed, “require the specific assignment of every man we are authorized and all are so assigned on the Troop Basis.”45
Yet Marshall was not totally unyielding. Recognizing some of the replacement policy’s failings, he suggested shortly before D-Day that Eisenhower place a single officer in charge of the system in northern Europe. This commander would see to it that replacement candidates did not stagnate in depots but would be quickly reassigned to new posts. However, he still insisted that it was more important to keep the existing divisions up to strength than to add to their number. What the fighting army needed, he wrote, was not more divisions, but a robust supply of vigorous, well-trained replacements. Ike responded that “the procedures we adopt should be perfected before the attack so that we can depend upon the greatest economy and efficiency in the use of manpower.” Nonetheless it would be difficult to find the right man for the job, for “he must be tough but understanding and broadly experienced but still full of energy.”46
Though he and Marshall agreed that the Selective Service System under Hershey was deficient, Stimson did not concur with his chief of staff about the overall size of the Army Ground Forces. In the weeks before D-Day, worried that too few troops were available for the imminent cross-Channel invasion, he strongly recommended that additional divisions be created. Marshall resisted. The chief of staff, Stimson noted in his diary, “takes quite a different view.” He was “more optimistic” in a way that Stimson believed “rather dangerous.” Stimson was apparently tempted to bring the matter to FDR to adjudicate but did not want to provoke an open struggle with Marshall when “he was in fundamental agreement [with him] on so many issues.”47
To be fair, Marshall had sought periodically to alleviate the dearth of fighting men by tapping new sources. He sought to shift to combat units many soldiers in training for noncombat roles. One of his targets was the Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP), created by Stimson in late 1942 to educate especially qualified draftees to meet the army’s needs for doctors, dentists, translators, engineers, and psychologists, and incidentally to keep in operation colleges and universities, their enrollments severely depleted by the draft. Assigned to colleges and universities for programs paid for by the U.S. Treasury, these academically talented young men, numbering as many as 140,000 in 1944, received army wages and attended classes in uniform but were unavailable for combat service. Marshall never liked ASTP. Smart, educated men, he believed, should lead infantry units, not be shunted off to the sidelines. By 1944, as serious military manpower shortages mounted, such men, he concluded, could not be spared as riflemen and infantry squad leaders. In February Marshall told Stimson that unless the War Department ended the program he would be forced to disband ten combat divisions. The secretary reluctantly complied, cutting ASTP in half and shifting its members to regular training divisions for basic combat training. Many of these men deeply resented what they considered the army’s breach of faith.
Early in the war Marshall had also concluded that one large unutilized personnel pool was the nation’s women. The chief of staff was scarcely a modern feminist; in fact within his marriage he was a patriarch of the old school. But when a group of activists proposed creation in May 1942 of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACs, later shortened to WACs) to replace male soldiers in noncombat positions with uniformed women, he—unlike many of his military colleagues—had enthusiastically embraced it and helped guide the authorizing measure through Congress. The chief of staff personally selected the efficient Oveta Culp Hobby, a socially prominent Texan, as the corps’ first head. By the end of the war 150,000 women had served as WACs, relieving as many as seven divisions of men for combat duties.
As the war wound down, Marshall and his boss also worried about the nation’s future wartime manpower needs and actively supported the National Service Bill introduced early in 1945 by Representative James Wadsworth of New York, mandating that all men eighteen to sixty-five and all women eighteen to fifty in times of national crisis perform services for their country either in uniform or as civilian war-connected workers, the assignments to be determined by a director of national service. Though supported by Secretaries Stimson and Knox and by both Marshall and King, it was strongly opposed by organized labor and by some segments of industry management and, to Marshall’s regret, never reached a final vote in Congress. In the years ahead, painfully aware of Americans’ initial unpreparedness in two wars, Marshall would continue to fight for some version of universal service for the country’s young men.
Meanwhile, in London, during the relatively quiet months preceding D-Day, final planning for an invasion of northern France was being completed under Cossac, the cross-Channel planning staff headed by British lieutenant general Frederick Morgan. As early as August 1943 Morgan and his staff had prepared an invasion plan that became the basis for discussion between the Allies. His original proposal had provided for three Allied divisions for the initial landings on the French coast. With Overlord finally in place, Montgomery, chosen to lead the initial land combat operations, objected. This was too weak a force to overcome German resistance on the beaches. This time Monty was palpably right, and the proposed Anglo-American landing force was increased to five divisions.
Marshall’s role in the stupendous cross-Channel operation would be limited and largely confined to the planning phase. Repelling British attacks on Anvil was one contribution to Overlord. Churchill believed that an invasion of southern France would weaken, rather than strengthen, the cross-Channel assault. Writing to Ike in mid-April before the operation, the prime minister announced that his support for Overlord had now “hardened very much.” But for that very reason he opposed the Anvil operation. “I do not believe an advance up the Rhone Valley . . . will [favorably] influence our main operations this summer.” The Germans, he noted, would fight a minor holding operation in southern France and save their strength to repel the Normandy invaders.48 For a time even Eisenhower thought that, for the sake of Overlord, the Anvil operation should be contracted. Marshall fought to retain Anvil. The Allies, he said, had promised Stalin at Tehran to conduct such an operation; it was also, he insisted, a profitable way to utilize the growing number of Free French divisions coming online. In early February he scolded Ike for his doubts, but concluded characteristically that he must nonetheless be the ultimate judge. “OVERLORD, of course is paramount,” he wrote to the supreme commander, “and it must be launched on a reasonable secure basis of which you are the best judge.”49 In the end, renamed Dragoon, the invasion of the French Mediterranean coast was postponed until mid-August, two months after Overlord, and proved a success primarily by providing the intact port facilities of Marseille to supply the Allied armies by now fighting hard in northern France.
During this early stage of Overlord planning Marshall sought to help Eisenhower find the best battle commanders for the operation. Writing to him in late March, he noted his “special effort,” with McNair’s advice, to give him “a few more men” who had demonstrated in the United States “that they are in an aggressive mood and have developed well in the [officer] training program.” He had told McNair that he wasn’t “so much interested in . . . their tactical skill” as he “was in having sturdy, aggressive fighters who would stand up during moments of adversity. . . . The point I wish to make,” he concluded, “is my desire to provide for you all the skill that we can muster for the first four weeks of your battle and you will not be involved in quibbles with G-1 for personnel.”50 But Marshall’s role in selecting combat leaders for Overlord was largely advisory. “Commanders in the American Army,” Ike would write, “were all of my own choosing. Ever since the beginning of the African campaign there had existed between General Marshall and me a fixed understanding on the point.”51
But there were several notable exceptions to the self-denying policy: top combat commanders Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, and George Patton.
Marshall had met Bradley at Fort Benning in 1929, where, as an instructor at the Infantry School, the homely young Missourian became one of “Marshall’s men.”52 Though not known for his élan, and probably undeserving of his popular reputation as the “GI’s general,” Bradley was a sound, steady leader, and when Marshall suggested him to command the American combat forces in Normandy under Montgomery, Ike accepted the recommendation with pleasure. He also accepted without demur Mark Clark, another Marshall favorite.
Patton was a more problematic Marshall choice than either of the others. The swashbuckling, profane, ill-tempered general had disgraced himself during the Sicilian campaign by slapping, for supposed malingering, two battle-stressed American soldiers he encountered at army field hospitals. On one of these occasions he unguardedly shouted: “There is no such thing as shell shock. It’s an invention of the Jews.”53 Ike made him apologize to the victims of these outbursts but did not send him home. Marshall, as we saw, already recognized Patton’s propensity for outrageous behavior and expression, but apparently not until the Washington columnist Drew Pearson published the story in November 1943 did he learn of the slapping incidents. Then, in late April, while in England awaiting assignment for service in France, Patton blundered again. Speaking to a small luncheon meeting on the occasion of an American “Welcome Club” opening for troops, he remarked that since it was the “evident destiny of the British and Americans, and, of course, the Russians, to rule the world, the better they knew each other the better job [they would] do.”54 No doubt many Americans would have agreed with the general, but to the British and American governments, struggling to present the UN as an altruistic champion of liberation from tyranny, it was infuriating. This time Marshall learned about the indiscretion before Ike and warned him that Patton had endangered the whole army promotion list then before Congress for approval. In an exchange of cables with the supreme commander he acknowledged that Patton was a scrapper who had “actual experience in fighting Rommel and in extensive landing operations followed by a rapid campaign of exploitation.” But if Ike believed that another general would do for the job lined up for Patton in France, he should feel free to replace him. Eisenhower was personally disgusted with Patton’s behavior. “I am exceedingly weary,” he wrote to his chief, “of his habit of getting everybody in hot water through the immature character of his public actions and statements.”55 He apparently interpreted Marshall’s message as a recommendation to fire Patton. But for some tense days he dithered, uncertain whether keeping him would offend his boss. In the end Marshall firmly reassured Eisenhower that the decision was his to make, and after an appropriate dressing-down, Ike wrote to Patton that his faith in him “as a battle leader” had overcome his chagrin at his personal indiscretion. He would be allowed to retain his command.56
If Marshall occasionally forayed into the choice of top commanders, at one point in this preparatory stage he also intruded into a major tactical issue: the use of airpower in the cross-Channel campaign. Marshall’s proposals for the use of the army’s air arm warrants a mixed review. Though scarcely a fanatic, he was a firm believer in airpower and could not resist urging the augmented use of the Allied air arm in the approaching Continental operations. When, in the run-up to the Normandy landings, fearing high French civilian casualties, Churchill had objected to the saturation bombing of French railroads and train marshaling yards to keep the Germans from reinforcing the invasion beachheads, Marshall insisted that Ike and the air commanders be allowed a free hand in deciding vital strategy. That decision proved astute. By D-Day the French railroads serving the Channel ports had been made virtually unusable. German reinforcements for the beachhead defenders were crucially delayed; the Allied invasion forces were not thrown into the sea.
But Marshall’s air campaign proposals for France were not always wise. In early February he suggested that Ike seriously consider a massive airborne operation, deploying parachutists and glider troops, to accompany the cross-Channel seaborne landings. In fact on D-Day two American airborne divisions would descend on the Cotentin Peninsula, where they managed to confuse the German defenders and probably contributed to the successful landings farther east in Normandy. But Marshall’s February plan, seconded by Hap Arnold, went beyond these operations. As an opening move of the cross-Channel attack, he proposed that several airborne contingents be dropped near Évreux, close to Paris, where they would attack the German forces from the rear as they raced to repel the Allied beachhead landings in Normandy. Besides aiding the landings, such a “true vertical envelopment,” he told Ike, “should be a complete surprise” to the enemy as well as a “rallying point for considerable elements of the French underground.” The operations would open “another front in France” and “tremendously increase” the speed of the Allied buildup. Fearing that such a novel move would be rejected by Ike’s conservative planners, he urged the supreme commander to consider the plan carefully before his staff “tears it to ribbons.”57
Ike’s response was a judicious no. He “agreed thoroughly with the conception,” but disagreed “with the timing,” he wrote to his chief. “Mass in vertical envelopments is sound,” but since the airborne force is initially “immobile on the ground,” the time for such an envelopment “is after the beach-head has been gained and a striking force built up!” It would be difficult early in the Normandy campaign to defend these lightly armed airborne troops against heavy German attack. He, too, “instinctively” disliked upholding “the conservative as opposed to the bold,” he assured Marshall, but perhaps large-scale airborne operations would be more useful later in the campaign.58 And Ike was right. As Gen. James Gavin, the astute leader of the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, would later note: “Washington never seemed to understand how vulnerable airborne was to tanks unless we were reinforced immediately.”59 Those limited airborne landings that actually accompanied D-Day would prove costly in lives and were ultimately as futile as those employed by the Market Garden operation in occupied Holland conducted by Monty later in the year.
On June 6, 1944, at 1:30 a.m., thousands of American, British, Canadian, and Polish troops stormed ashore on the beaches of Normandy in northern France. D-Day, for which Marshall had labored for two and a half years, had finally arrived.
Back in Washington, Marshall had remained cool, seemingly almost indifferent, during the tense final countdown to the landings. The night before, he was at the Soviet Embassy to receive a decoration, the Order of Suvorov. He escaped to Quarters No. 1 soon after the ceremony and simply went to bed. As he later explained his composure, “Well, there was nothing I could do about it anymore. It was much better to get a good night’s sleep and be ready for whatever the morning might bring.”60
For the rest of the eleven-month campaign to destroy the German Reich, Marshall remained on the sidelines while the European Theater of Operations (ETO) generals engaged the Wehrmacht in mortal combat. At times he lost touch with the details of Ike’s battle plans. At one point, after the initial landings had been stabilized but the breakout from the beaches not yet achieved, he seemed mystified by Eisenhower’s intentions. At the end of July he complained to the supreme commander, “We had not received recently any information on your thoughts concerning the situation and your probable course of action.” For instance, he went on, “we received no information of Bradley’s present offensive except an unexplained reference in a radio [communication] from Mr. Stimson referring to COBRA, whatever that was.”61
Though he left active command of the campaign to Ike, Marshall could not resist visiting the Allied landings soon after the Normandy beaches were secured. On June 8, after a brief stop in Britain, he was ferried to Omaha Beach, where the American troops had gained a toehold by the narrowest of margins. Afterward the chief of staff reported optimistically—too optimistically—to FDR and Stimson: “Conditions on the beachhead are generally favorable with but minor difficulties or delays.” He was especially pleased by the fighting spirit of the American troops. Morale was “high,” he noted, and “our new divisions as well as those which have been battle tested” were “doing splendidly.” As for the commanders, “Eisenhower and his staff are cool and confident, carrying out an affair of incredible magnitude and complication with superlative efficiency.”62 On the way home Marshall stopped over in Italy and took the occasion to visit the military cemetery at Anzio where Allen was buried. Back home he wrote to Madge Brown, Allen’s widow, to describe the grave site and to tell her that all her husband’s fellow soldiers spoke of him in “very high terms.”63
Marshall made one more trip to the front in France before the final defeat of Germany.* In early October, accompanied by Byrnes of the OWM, he flew to Paris, freed from German occupation in August, to see again for himself how the war was progressing.
Much had changed, of course, since those anxious days of early June when the success of the Normandy landings was still at risk. For weeks after the Allies consolidated their hold on the beaches they had struggled to breach the successive walls of impenetrable hedgerows that imprisoned them in the shallow Norman landing enclave. Then, in late July, Bradley launched Cobra, the operation that Marshall had complained that he knew nothing about. At Saint-Lô his First Army, preceded by Sherman “Rhino” tanks armed with steel plows in front, punched through the hedgerows, broke out into smooth, tank-friendly country, and raced toward the German border. Meanwhile, led by Patton, now arrived in France as commander of the newly activated Third Army, American troops overran Brittany, captured the port of Brest, and then joined the First Army in its dash toward the Rhine. The breakout at Saint-Lô offered the chance for Bradley and Patton to encircle much of the German army on the western front and perhaps end the war in a matter of weeks. But neither Eisenhower nor Bradley was willing to accept the risks to the American flanks and refused to authorize the wide sweep needed to close the trap. The bulk of the German army escaped, though badly mauled and in headlong retreat. The Allies now began a fast sprint across France, led by Patton’s troops. In mid-August, as part of Anvil-Dragoon, American and Free French forces landed along France’s Mediterranean coast to weak opposition. Vital supplies and munitions were soon pouring through Marseille to the Allied armies to the north. A month later the Dragoon invaders from the south had linked up with Patton. On August 25, reinforced by Free French troops, a largely undamaged Paris fell to the Allies. By early September, with the Americans and British hot on the heels of the Wehrmacht’s retreating Army Group B, the war in the West seemed almost won. As Churchill would note in mid-September, since Sextant “everything we had touched had turned to gold.”64
The surge of confidence was misplaced and damaging. At this point “an unhealthy aura of overoptimism and self-deception swept through the ranks of the Allied high command,” Carlo D’Este has written.65 Though distant from the scene of battle, even Marshall was infected by the “victory disease” and believed the war would be over by early November.66
Though the summer of 1944 brought Marshall professional satisfactions, it was also an anxious time for him personally as his role in the Pearl Harbor disaster came under renewed scrutiny. Americans understandably sought answers to the debacle of December 7, 1941. Shortly after the catastrophe, FDR had appointed Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts to investigate the attack. The second of nine official investigations, the Roberts Commission inquiry condemned General Short and Admiral Kimmel for dereliction of duty, and they had been removed from their commands. But the results had not satisfied skeptics, especially FDR’s political enemies. Seven Pearl Harbor investigations would follow the Roberts proceedings, including the one conducted by the Army Pearl Harbor Board in June 1944 and another—the most exhaustive—in 1945 after the war ended, by a Joint Congressional Investigating Committee whose sessions would last for weeks.
In the case of the army board inquiry, all three of the members, it was said, were officers who had reason to resent the chief of staff for decisions he had made that adversely affected them and their careers. Marshall naturally brooded about the inquiry’s personal impact, but he and Stimson also worried that it might reveal the existence of the still-secret Magic code decipherments and squander a vital American intelligence asset. They particularly feared that, in the course of the 1944 presidential campaign, the Republican candidate, Thomas Dewey, would reveal that the commanders at Pearl Harbor had access to the secret Japanese codes.* The hearings, lasting through the early fall, accordingly, were held in secret and no mention was made of Magic in the official record.
Marshall’s one-day interrogation took place in his own Pentagon office on August 7. His testimony was somewhat offhand. He admitted to lapses of memory and to mistakes in judgment but blamed the disaster ultimately on General Short. The army commander in Hawaii, he noted, had been given orders “to put his command on alert against a possible hostile attack by the Japanese,” and “the command was not so alerted.”67
Marshall was shaken by the final army board report submitted in November 1944, soon after FDR’s reelection to a fourth term. The board ascribed the “Pearl Harbor disaster . . . primarily to two causes.” First, as Marshall had attested, was General Short’s failure “adequately to alert his command for war.” But second was the War Department’s failure to keep Short “adequately informed as to the developments of the US-Japanese negotiations,” information that “might have caused him to change from the inadequate alert to the adequate one.”68 Marshall himself came out bruised. He was not branded a conspirator or a traitor, as extremists then and later believed was warranted. But according to the board, the chief of staff had been remiss in a number of significant ways. He had failed to keep General Short fully informed in the weeks before December 7 of how severely strained relations were with the Japanese; he had failed to send additional instructions to Short when it became clear that the general had misinterpreted his warning of November 27 to mean that he should guard primarily against sabotage in Oahu, not against a general attack; he had failed on the evening of December 6 and the early morning of December 7 to warn Short of an imminent break with Japan; and, finally, he had failed to investigate fully the state of readiness in the Hawaiian army command between November 27 and December 7.
In other words, the assessment of Marshall’s actions was harsh. It challenged the image that he had planted in the minds of the nation’s leaders and the public at large. When Roosevelt, a strong Marshall partisan, read it he remarked, “Why, this is wicked! This is wicked!”69 Though the board’s conclusions remained secret, when he learned of them from Stimson on November 11, Marshall seriously considered resigning. Discussing the findings with his boss, he lamented that “his usefulness to the Army [might well have] been destroyed.” Stimson sought to reassure him. “I told him that was nonsense,” the secretary wrote in his journal. Dismayed by the report himself, Stimson ordered an additional study of the Pearl Harbor circumstances along with a review of the conclusions by the judge advocate general. Based on these efforts, in a private written statement, the secretary absolved Marshall of all responsibility for Short’s failures on December 7. None of these, he wrote, could be “attributed to the Chief of Staff.” On the contrary, he wrote, “throughout this matter, I believe, he acted with his usual great skill, energy, and efficiency.”70 The secretary of war’s support revived Marshall’s spirits; there would be no more talk of resignation.
Stimson favored release of the army board report along with a word-for-word refutation of its conclusions, but the president ordered the document sealed until after the war. In fact enough of the overall conclusions seeped into public consciousness to confirm the suspicions of the isolationists and other administration enemies. In the words of Marshall’s biographer Ed Cray, the report would be “a political time bomb ticking away under Marshall’s reputation through the rest of the war.”71
It was in mid-September, during the brief fall euphoria, that the Anglo-American Allies met for their last bilateral summit conference, code-named Octagon. Once more the site was Quebec, the picturesque Francophone town on the St. Lawrence River.
Marshall himself saw little reason for another Anglo-American meeting, but Churchill was uneasy at the nine-month delay since the last summit and considered several important issues between the Allies still unresolved. Foremost, he feared the Americans intended to transfer Mark Clark’s Fifth Army from Italy to France. He had a better plan for these troops: Once they had defeated Kesselring, send the Allied forces in Italy northeastward through the so-called Ljubljana Gap in Croatia and then push on to Vienna, where they could meet the Russians moving west from Ukraine. The American planners had no intention of joining in any Churchillian Balkan adventure, and at Quebec Marshall made their objections clear. But the chief of staff also promised not to withdraw American units from Italy until the Germans there surrendered. At Octagon, Churchill also sought to assure a British role in the Pacific after Germany’s defeat. Such a role, he felt, could redeem the humiliating post–Pearl Harbor British debacles in Burma, Malaya, and Singapore, and help Britain recover the occupied portions of its Far Eastern empire. He did not offer British ground forces to the Far East—there were none to spare; but the Royal Navy, still a force to be reckoned with, surely could expect to join the final push against Japan. Neither Marshall nor FDR had any desire to help their ally regain past imperial glories. Nor did they feel they needed substantial British help to finish off the Pacific enemy. King especially did not wish to share credit for Japan’s final defeat with the Royal Navy, and glared at the president at a session when he verbally accepted Churchill’s offer. In the end Marshall proved more willing to accommodate the British than did the Anglophobic chief of naval operations. At one point he and the hard-nosed King “nearly had words.”72
More significant than the arguments at Octagon over Allied military operations were the discussions of postwar German issues. At Quebec the Allies amended a provisional agreement among the Big Three on separate occupation zones in Germany after victory to shift the U.S. zone to the southwestern portion of the country, leaving the northwest to Britain. Churchill and FDR also signed on to the draconian Morgenthau Plan, which promised to strip postwar Germany of its industrial base and make it into a pastoral, deindustrialized, almost medieval economy. Both Marshall and Stimson had vivid memories of the faulty peacemaking arrangements following the First World War, and both opposed a draconian peace. In discussions prior to Quebec, they had agreed that the Morgenthau scheme was likely to foster resentments akin to those after Versailles and encourage similar toxic political responses. Marshall did not speak up against the plan at Octagon, but the discussions with Stimson undoubtedly helped influence his later policies as secretary of state.
In some respects Octagon also marked the early rumblings of the Cold War. By the fall of 1944 Soviet armies had pushed past the prewar boundaries of the USSR and were about to cross into Poland and the Baltic states, with the Balkans not far beyond. It was Churchill’s fear that the Russians, and Communism, would occupy and completely dominate postwar Eastern Europe that fueled his interest in an Allied thrust toward Vienna. But Americans, including Marshall, were not yet as alert to Soviet ambitions as the prime minister and refused to go along.
Taken together the results of the Octagon meetings were minor. The grand military strategies of the Allies were already in place and seemingly proceeding satisfactorily. Though postwar problems were cropping up, they had not yet become urgent. The American military staffs at Quebec were by now practiced in the ways of their “cousins,” and could parry them effectively. At previous Allied conferences Marshall had been a stubborn and often aggressive partisan. At Quebec in the late summer of 1944 he could relax, confident that he had contributed abundantly to the blueprint for victory.
But the optimistic mood of late summer 1944 did not last. During the fall and winter the Allied advance in France, rather than a milk run to Berlin, became a frustrating and costly slog; the war in northern Europe degraded into a virtual stalemate. Hitler had no intention of allowing the hated enemy, led by the Jews, to destroy his “thousand-year Reich.” New secret weapons—buzz bombs, V-2 rockets, jet-propelled pursuit planes—would come to Germany’s rescue and destroy the enemy’s air fleets and undermine the morale of the British people. With 3.4 million troops still left in its ranks, the German army, stiffened by Hitler’s fanatical resolve, was a long way from surrender. Behind the barrier of the Maginot-like Siegfried Line it would halt the Allied offensive in its tracks, the Führer believed. The Western Allies, by now alienated from the Bolshevik Asiatic Russian hordes, he predicted, would accept a negotiated peace; Germany, and its conquests, would be saved.
Hitler’s generals, though skeptical of the dictator’s inflated hopes, were encouraged by Anglo-American logistical problems to continue the fight. In the sweep across France, as their supply lines stretched out, the Allied armies, denied undamaged Channel ports, were being compelled to leave much of their gasoline, fresh equipment, and ammunition behind them. Anvil-Dragoon helped alleviate the supply problem but not enough. On September 4 the British had captured the Belgian port of Antwerp, one of the largest in Europe, but, despite Ike’s persistent pressure, had failed to clear enemy forces from the Scheldt Estuary connecting it to the sea. By late summer the tanks and trucks of Patton, Montgomery, and Bradley were running out of fuel and could not go farther.
The military stasis fomented stresses within the Allied coalition, with Montgomery, commanding the Twenty-First British Army Group to the north, serving as the lord of discord. The prickly British general was dissatisfied with his role in the European theater. After the cross-Channel landings the British-Canadian units under his immediate command had failed to show much enterprise in capturing the important Norman port town of Caen. Then, after the breakout from the beachheads by Bradley and Patton, the Americans had garnered all the headlines. To regain the spotlight Monty had sought to turn his temporary Overlord field command into a permanent arrangement but was frustrated when, acting on Marshall’s advice, on September 1 Ike decided to take direct charge of the battlefront himself. Many of Montgomery’s discontents echoed his nation’s: Britain was now the junior partner, unable to match the American military cornucopia—human and matériel. It had also failed to acquit itself in combat. With the exception of El Alamein, time and again British troops and generals had lost battles even on occasions when the odds were clearly in their favor. But Montgomery’s divisiveness also derived from personal qualities. He was monumentally egocentric and overconfident. He scorned the supreme commander’s military abilities. Ike’s “ignorance as to how to run a war,” he wrote to Brooke in August, “is absolute and complete.” Eisenhower was essentially an amiable figurehead, though “such a decent chap” that it was “difficult,” he admitted, “to be angry with him for long.”73 But he should devote his energies to where his talents lay—inter-Allied relations, military government, and the like—leaving to others, namely himself, the actual land battles.
Eisenhower was aware of his subordinate’s disdain. But, in the spirit of Allied amity, he refused to reciprocate, at least publicly. In late July, after a series of American press articles criticizing Montgomery was called to his attention, he wrote to General Surles, the army’s chief public relations officer, expressing his concern and proposing a way to squelch the controversy. “My only concern . . . is that criticism directed against any one of my principal subordinates . . . is certain to disturb the spirit of teamwork that I have so laboriously worked for during the past two years.”74 Would Surles, in replying to the press, emphasize that any attack on one of his subordinates was an attack on him? Marshall could not have been more pleased with the response; it was exactly the one he would have made.
Ike may have ducked a rivalrous public confrontation with Montgomery, but he could not avoid a battle with him within the highest command levels over how to clinch the campaign against Hitler’s Germany. During the summer, with the Wehrmacht in general retreat and Allied forces able to “advance almost at will,” Eisenhower had concluded that once the Rhine’s west bank had been cleared of enemy troops the Allies would push rapidly into Germany, marching abreast, as it were. “We must immediately exploit our success,” he cabled Montgomery on September 5, “by promptly breaching the Siegfried Line, crossing the Rhine on a wide front and seizing the Saar and Ruhr.” He denied that he was indifferent to the “northern route of advance,” but that should wait until the ports of Le Havre and Antwerp were fully open to use.75
Monty begged to differ. The broad-front approach was a colossal mistake. Instead, a “powerful and full blooded thrust toward Berlin,” from his position to the north, on the Allies’ left flank, was preferable.76 A narrow, concentrated drive through the Ruhr Valley, he was sure, would slice like a knife through the German defenses, allow the Allied armies to take Berlin in advance of the Russians, and quickly end the war. Equally frustrated with the broad-front strategy was Patton. He, too, favored a focused push, predominantly by armored forces, though to Monty’s south, by his own Third Army.
Ike’s veto of Monty’s strategic plan as a “mere pencil-like thrust,” vulnerable to flank attack and too wasteful of resources, set off an explosion when, at a meeting in liberated Brussels on September 10, the British commander, newly elevated to field marshal by Churchill, fired back rudely at the supreme commander.77 Monty called the broad-front strategy “balls, sheer balls, rubbish!”; it simply would not work.78 He apologized for his outburst when Eisenhower reminded him that he was Monty’s boss, but clearly the ill will between the two continued. In fact, however, both strategies were flawed, Monty’s for the reasons that Ike suggested; his own for failing to take into account manpower limitations. The ninety-division army that Marshall had mandated simply could not supply the number of combat troops for a front of six hundred miles, strung out from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. In late December, Ike and his lieutenants would learn how shaky their own troop dispositions were in the face of strong German attack.
Though still wary of meddling in combat operations, Marshall could not entirely avoid being drawn into the dispute over the endgame European strategy. The chief of staff was no admirer of Montgomery. He had been unimpressed when he first met him in Algiers in May 1943. Now, when he dropped in on Monty at his Eindhoven headquarters in the Netherlands during his October 1944 European visit, he was deluged by the British commander with complaints about Ike. According to the new field marshal the supreme commander lacked “grip and operational direction.” Operations in eastern France and the Low Countries had “become ragged and disjointed,” and the Allies had now gotten themselves “into a real mess.” The attack angered Marshall, who “came pretty near,” he later reported, “to blowing off out of turn.” Monty, he was convinced, was driven by “overwhelming egotism,” but in any case, he concluded, it “was Eisenhower’s business not mine” and he “had better not meddle.”79 As for the question of broad front versus narrow thrust, though there is no evidence that Marshall was Ike’s inspiration, the chief of staff sided with the supreme commander. As he declared in his postwar interviews, he was skeptical of “very dashing action” of the sort recommended by Patton and now by Monty. It had worked in Patton’s favor after the Normandy breakout, but “that is not always the case.”80
Despite the mutual animus, as a sort of consolation prize, and perhaps to indulge Marshall’s misplaced taste for airborne operations, the conciliatory Eisenhower in mid-September authorized Monty to launch Operation Market Garden, a modified version of the field marshal’s narrow-front strategy. This would be a multinational push, by both ground and airborne troops, to capture the Dutch bridges over the Rhine and its tributaries, turn the enemy’s right flank, and, it was hoped, finally envelop the Ruhr region, Germany’s industrial heartland.
The operation was a disaster. Monty’s staffers were warned by the Dutch underground of two German panzer divisions present at Arnhem, at one of the bridges. As revealed by their Ultra code intercepts,* the British had learned of the presence of hidden German forces in the area. Monty’s staff ignored both. The airdrops were ineffective; most were too far from the bridge objectives. The lightly armed parachute and glider troops—British, American, and Polish—sent to seize the river bridges and canal crossings met with ferocious resistance, with many either killed or captured. Meanwhile, British infantry under the overrated general Sir Brian Horrocks, coming from the south to consolidate the presumably captured water crossings and then strike westward into the Ruhr Valley, were subjected to a withering gauntlet of German fire. Fighting their way along a congested two-lane highway, they failed to show much dash and resolve and allowed the Allied airborne troops to be slaughtered by the enemy. Market Garden, when it finally shut down on September 29, had been a costly and embarrassing failure. Even Montgomery, a man not given to self-criticism, admitted he had made some mistakes. On the other hand, he claimed, the operation had been “90% successful,” and would, he asserted, have succeeded totally if it had been better backed—presumably by Eisenhower.81
After Market Garden the dispute over how to regain the momentum of the summer resumed. Increasing German resistance halted the Allied broad-front advance before it could breach the fortified Siegfried Line and the Rhine barrier to Germany. The fighting along the Reich’s western borders proved savage and bloody. The confrontation between Courtney Hodges’s First Army and the Wehrmacht in the frigid Hürtgen Forest in November typified the futility of the autumn Allied campaign. The grinding battle sent 24,000 Americans to hospitals or their graves for virtually no gain. Nor was Patton’s September drive to take the fortress city of Metz in Lorraine much more successful. Metz did not fall until late November after the Third Army had suffered 45,000 casualties. And at that, the soldiers’ lives were wasted. The campaign liberated some five thousand square miles of French territory, but it delayed the American advance for three months and allowed the enemy to retreat intact to stronger positions farther east.
The fighting on Germany’s western borders revealed once more the failings of American troop training and manpower replacement policies. The performance of American infantry in eastern France often disappointed their leaders. Lt. Colonel William Simpson of the Second Division’s Tenth Infantry acknowledged in a September report that the soldiers he observed had been afflicted with excessive caution. “We lost time because of lack of boldness and aggressiveness on the part of our scouts.”82 The troops, he added, were too ready to withdraw if they encountered resistance. The enemy, too, remarked on the weaknesses of American troops under fire. The Americans, observed Capt. Walter Schaefer-Kehnert, with the German Ninth Panzer Division, “operated by the book. If you responded by doing something not in the book, they panicked. It usually took them three days after an attack to prepare for the next one. . . . It took a ridiculously long time to get into Germany.”83
Some of the critics once again pointed directly at the training process as the cause of the deficiencies. The writer and cultural critic Paul Fussell, then a twenty-year-old rifle platoon lieutenant deployed along the western German border, disparaged the infantry training he had received at Fort Benning, where Marshall’s “fire-and-movement” doctrine had been promoted. The tactic had been drilled into his fellow rookie junior officers for six months, and “we all did grasp the idea,” Fussell later wrote. “But it had one signal defect, namely the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy’s flank is. If you get up and go looking for it, you’ll be killed.”84 Nor were the training deficiencies limited to the foot soldiers. The historian Stephen Ambrose quotes a nettled tank commander at the Battle of the Bulge in December: “I spent long hours in the [tank] turret when I was literally showing men how to feed bullets to the gun. Could they shoot straight? They couldn’t even hold the gun right!”85 Another tanker wrote of the new three-man crew for his light tank that they were all eighteen years of age and that only one had ever even driven a car.
And the flawed troop replacement policy once more, on the German border as in the Mediterranean, contributed appreciably to the deplorable results. One American replacement soldier assigned to the campaign confessed that he had never fired directly at the enemy. In his new battalion “nobody had time to teach you anything, you just had to pick it up for yourself.” Pvt. Red Thompson, a scorned replacement, learned to take care of himself, but, he noted, “I knew I was just cannon fodder.”86 Officers confirmed the problem. A company commander serving with Patton complained to his superiors that it was foolish to carry out operations like those at Metz with depleted units filled with raw replacements. “I knew . . . [such units] were not trained [or] hardened.” “All the leaders,” he wrote, “were lost exposing themselves at the wrong time. . . . The new men seemed to lose all sense of reasoning. They left their rifles, their flamethrowers, satchel charges and what not laying [sic] right there where it was. I was disgusted.”87
The deficiencies of training and replacement in the eleven months between D-Day and the Third Reich’s surrender in May 1945 were understood by both the Pentagon and by the leaders at SHAEF. So why were they not corrected? As noted above, Marshall, McNair, and others poked at the existing system but neither hard nor effectively enough. In fact Marshall was one of the more ardent defenders of keeping inviolate the existing divisions, a position that nurtured the crippled replacement system. As for Eisenhower and his lieutenants, Ambrose claims that they were obsessed with “an ever greater flow of replacements” for the final battles and did “precious little to insist on improving the training.”88
Adding to his disappointment with the slowdown and the costly battle of attrition that followed along Germany’s western borders, the last months of 1944 were not a happy time for Marshall generally. At the beginning of November his friend, Field Marshal Dill, the man whose role as honest broker between the English-speaking Allies had so often smoothed the way to needed compromise, died of pernicious anemia. It was both a personal and a professional loss that deeply affected Marshall. Overcoming precedent and some jingoist American Legion officials, he was able to arrange for Dill, a foreign soldier, to be buried with honors at Arlington National Cemetery.
Marshall’s sorrow may have been eased by his appointment soon after as a five-star general, but it probably was not. Disturbed that the top American officers were outranked by the field marshals of the British and other foreign armies, FDR had decided that the United States should create a new, higher rank than four-star general. Marshall disagreed. He had never felt inferior to Brooke or Montgomery because he was just a “general,” he noted. And besides, he believed, a five-star rank, if created, should be reserved as the ultimate honor for a commander after final victory in war, as in the cases of Grant, Sherman, and Pershing. He also deplored conferring the honor on any man while Pershing was alive, and, though now confined permanently to his bed at Walter Reed Hospital, the World War I leader was still breathing. To create such a rank, Marshall felt, would subtract from the honor accorded his revered mentor after 1918. Despite Marshall’s objections Roosevelt pushed a bill through Congress, and on December 15, along with MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Arnold, Marshall became a “General of the Army.”
Hoping to save the Third Reich from final destruction, in mid-December the Germans launched a major offensive through Belgium’s thick Ardennes forest. The last spasm of German offensive power, the attack was a desperate move that Hitler believed might recapture now-functioning Antwerp, split the Allied armies, weaken the Anglo-American coalition, and force Britain and America to accept the negotiated peace he craved. Despite mounting intelligence of a German buildup and the precedent of the German breakthrough in 1940 in the same place, the attack through the tangled Ardennes came as a complete surprise to Ike and his lieutenants. Launched in snowbound, bitterly cold, overcast weather that kept Allied planes grounded, for the first few days the offensive made remarkable early progress against thinly spread American forces, and severely jolted the unsuspecting supreme commander.
Back in Washington, Marshall and Stimson initially dismissed the German Ardennes assault, soon labeled the “Battle of the Bulge” by the media, as a feeble last gasp. Their confidence quickly turned to alarm, but the chief of staff could only urge Ike to do his best. He had given orders, he wrote to Ike on December 24, that the supreme commander be spared all the usual distractions to pursue the single goal of stopping the enemy drive. “I kept down the messages to Eisenhower,” he later noted. “I made them recall one they sent during the Bulge; I said ‘Don’t bother him.’”89 When the tide of battle finally turned decisively in the Allies’ favor, he cabled Ike: “You are doing a fine job and go on and give them hell.”90
But in fact the top American commanders at European theater SHAEF headquarters in Versailles had not done such a “fine job.” Ike and Bradley had disregarded the accumulating information from Ultra and other intelligence sources of the German buildup in Belgium. More telling, perhaps, Ike’s broad-front strategy, combined with Marshall’s ninety-division manpower limit and the heavy casualties in the late fall campaigns at Hürtgen and Metz, had mandated the sparse distribution of forces in the Ardennes.
Alerted to the manpower problems in the Ardennes and fearful of future difficulties down the road, Stimson sought to revise American military recruitment policy. As news of the German successes flooded into Washington, the secretary grew anxious. Selective Service, he demanded, must accelerate the draft call-up so that the army could create ten additional divisions in time for the fighting ahead in both Europe and the Pacific. The chief of staff objected, claiming that an acute shortage of experienced junior officers prevented such expansion. In a session with the secretary that Stimson described in his diary as “very stormy,”91 Marshall said that he would resign rather than yield and “asked him [Stimson] to tell the President this.”92 Stimson conceded but Marshall did, too—in a minor way. Realizing that perhaps he had gone too far, he wrote to Eisenhower soon after that the “Army ceiling” would be increased by taking into account the number of soldiers in hospitals and “some other ineffectiveness.” But, he warned, “this action would not help the flow of replacements for nearly six months.”93 It was a standoff: The American combat army would remain lean and stressed until the final Axis defeat.
By late January, finally, with cloudless skies for Allied aircraft and the arrival of U.S. airborne reinforcements, the Wehrmacht was checked, its gains erased, and the Allied front line in the Ardennes painfully restored and readied for advances into Germany. The enemy had suffered one hundred thousand casualties, but even more than their manpower losses, the Germans had used up their last reserves of tanks and other heavy equipment. From now on only Hitler’s fanaticism, and savage repressive measures to put down civilian dissent and defeatism at home, kept Germany in the excruciating and futile war.
The Ardennes offensive would widen the gap between the British and American Allies. Churchill and British opinion makers seized on the Bulge setback to argue again for a greater British role in the final drive into Germany. During these last months of the European war, though usually careful to accommodate British complaints for the sake of coalition unity, Marshall supported Ike’s refusal to cave in to British pressures to share troop command with Monty during and after the Bulge. Writing to Ike just before the New Year, the chief of staff called his attention to British press demands that he hand over battlefield authority to a British deputy commander, certain to be Montgomery. Marshall apologized for bothering Eisenhower while he was in the midst of containing the Ardennes offensive, but he felt he had to comment. “Under no circumstances make any concessions of any kind whatsoever,” he wrote. Ike not only had his “complete confidence,” but there “would be a terrific resentment in this country following such action.”94
British pressure to favor Montgomery continued into the last months of the European war in the form of demands that the main Allied advance into Germany be in the north, where the bulk of the British forces were concentrated. It was a version of Monty’s narrow-thrust strategy and received no better reception from either Marshall or Eisenhower.
The issue of national priority in the final battles in the West carried over to Argonaut, the last wartime conference of the Big Three. The main event was a set of tripartite Allied-Soviet meetings held at Yalta in the Soviet Crimea, but these were preceded by four days of British-American military staff meetings at Malta, the British island redoubt in the Mediterranean just south of Sicily, now finally safe from devastating air attack and invasion.
Marshall played an active role in these preliminary staff deliberations. On January 28, on the way to Malta, he met with Eisenhower at the Château Valmont outside Marseille. Arriving feeling somewhat skeptical of his protégé after the near-disaster in the Ardennes, he would leave reassured. The two men considered Ike’s plan for final defeat of the Germans. The general reiterated his broad-front intentions. The final assault would be “a series of concentrated and powerful attacks along the Rhine” and then, after clearing the river’s west bank of the enemy, “hurl[ing] some seventy-five reinforced divisions against the Germans in great converging attacks” that would carry the Allied armies to final victory.95 Brooke had already complained that Ike was about to commit that classic military blunder—dispersing his forces. Backing Montgomery without reservation, he had again proposed instead one vigorous thrust on the Allied northern flank across the Rhine. Now, at their Château Valmont meeting, Marshall emphatically rejected the British scheme and endorsed Ike’s plan. To reinforce it he suggested that the supreme commander send his trusted chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith, to Malta to defend his strategy. As for the British push to take over command of all Allied combat operations, he promised at Malta to beat back the continuing demands of Monty and Churchill.
The following day Marshall left for the scheduled Anglo-American staff discussions. As expected, these focused on Ike’s proposed endgame strategy and on the supreme commander’s role for the remainder of the European war. On Tuesday the thirtieth, at the Combined Chiefs’ session, Bedell Smith and Gen. Harold Bull, his assistant, defended a modified version of Ike’s final-offensive plan. Once across the Rhine, Smith explained, the Allies would launch two thrusts into Germany, one to the north, but another from the south. He was careful to highlight the role that Monty would play in the three-phase operation. But Brooke nevertheless objected. The British Chiefs of Staff, he said, “felt that there was not sufficient strength available for two major operations,” and “of the two, the northern appeared the most promising.”96 The Combined Chiefs’ discussion the following day concerned routine matters and was followed in the evening by a festive, good-humored dinner for the CCS hosted by British admiral Andrew Cunningham at Malta’s Admiralty House.
But the surface amiability of Tuesday and Wednesday did not foretell the atmosphere of Thursday. There is virtually nothing in the official records to disclose the passionate disagreements between the Allies on the third day of the meetings. But passionate—and angry—they were, British feelings fueled by their loss of leadership, American by the constant British carping against Ike and pressure to expand Monty’s role in the final victory push.
At the Combined Chiefs’ afternoon meeting on February 1, Marshall criticized Montgomery and Churchill for seeking to cripple the supreme commander and apparently disparaged Montgomery’s generalship. He clashed once again with Brooke over the plan to invade Germany. The British did not object so much to the American proposal as stated by Smith and Bull, but were upset, they said, by an amended outline by Eisenhower that seemed to retreat from the northern aspect and to muddle the whole issue. When Marshall asked Brooke to approve Ike’s broad-front strategy, he refused. This is the sanitized bare-bones written record of events. But the reality was more vivid. The meeting on the first, Harry Hopkins would write, produced one of “the most violent disagreements and disputes of the war.” The “arguments reached such a point” that Marshall, “ordinarily one of the most restrained and soft spoken of men,” announced that if the British plan were adopted “he would recommend to Eisenhower that he had no choice but to be relieved of command.”97 According to Brooke, Marshall also expressed his “full dislike and antipathy” for Montgomery.98
That evening, hoping to calm the waters, Smith came to Brooke’s quarters for further discussion of the invasion plan for Germany. He failed. Instead, the meeting became acrimonious. Brooke demanded that Ike be directed to supply more troops to Monty’s sector of the advance. At this the American blew up: “Goddamn it! Let’s have it out here and now,” he shouted. If Ike were to accept these terms it would amount to a vote of no confidence, and he might well ask that the Combined Chiefs relieve him of command. Brooke responded that Ike was a fine chairman of the board and denied that he had any intention of having him dismissed.99 According to Brooke’s diary, despite the acerbity, “the talk did both of us good.”100 But apparently it did not, and on the following day, at the Combined Chiefs’ meeting, the battle resumed. This time Marshall evicted the staff members from the room, leaving only the chiefs themselves. He now sought to browbeat Brooke into accepting Ike’s amended plan. All Brooke would agree to was to “take note of” Ike’s conclusions, and there the issue remained until FDR himself arrived at Malta’s Valletta harbor aboard the USS Quincy on February 2, the next day.
Roosevelt’s physical appearance shocked both King and Marshall when they saw him. The president looked frail and worn. He had lost weight, had dark circles under his eyes, and his emblematic dark navy cape hung loosely on his frame. Churchill would observe that he no longer seemed interested in military strategy, but in fact, at a two-hour session aboard the navy cruiser that same day, FDR had enough energy to settle the Anglo-American military differences in favor of the supreme commander. As a pacifying gesture FDR accepted the British request that Field Marshal Alexander, one of their own—and more compliant than Ike—be appointed his deputy in the European theater. In the end, as personified by the president, American numbers and sheer military preponderance had prevailed over British pride. And apparently the British soon came around to accepting the American strategy. According to Eisenhower, some weeks later, as he and Brooke stood on the banks of the now-unobstructed Rhine, CIGS turned to him and said: “Thank God, Ike, you stuck by your plan. You were completely right and I’m sorry if my fear of dispersed effort added to your burdens.”101 In fact Brooke repudiated the quotation. As he later wrote: “I am still convinced that he was completely wrong.”102
The Malta meetings were quickly followed by the epoch-making political discussions of February 4–11 among the Big Three at Yalta. In the Cold War years of the fifties Marshall would be accused of collaborating in a betrayal of America’s vital interests at Yalta. But in fact the meetings only marginally engaged him. At the opening session he contributed a concise review of the state of ground force battle on the Anglo-American western front. He also described the battering of Germany by the Allied air forces. In a year it had cut enemy oil production by 80 percent. One of his few serious concerns was the Russian role against Japan. At Tehran, Stalin had said that the Soviet Union would join Britain and the United States in the Pacific war after Germany’s defeat. But Marshall had remained unconvinced. At Yalta he got a reassuring pledge from Gen. Alexey Antonov, the Soviet chief of staff. But that, too, was not enough. To be convincing, he believed, the decision must be confirmed by evidence of specific mutual advantages. And they were. At an afternoon meeting on February 8 Stalin and FDR put together a plan for Soviet participation in the Far Eastern war that included transfer of marginal Japanese territory to the Russians and a number of minor territorial concessions the Soviets demanded. In return the Soviet leader promised to argue for intervention against Japan before the Supreme Soviet, the rubber-stamp Soviet parliament.
Marshall had gotten what he had come to Yalta for and played no part in the decisions regarding Europe’s postwar fate that right-wing enemies of FDR and Harry Truman, his Democratic successor, would later excoriate. He returned to Washington by way of Italy, where he hoped his presence would help counteract Congresswoman Luce’s skeptical view of troop morale. Mark Clark, ignoring Marshall’s orders, arranged a resplendent honors ceremony that included reviewing troops from all the UN units fighting Marshal Kesselring.
He arrived back at the Pentagon on February 16 and flew down to Liscombe Lodge in Pinehurst, North Carolina, near Fort Bragg, the cottage that Katherine had just bought. Visits to the lodge in winter would soon become part of Marshall’s annual schedule. During the week George would remain in the capital, close to his office, while Katherine, her grown children, and assorted grandchildren escaped from the damp, flu-inducing weather of Washington to the dry North Carolina sandhills. Marshall would fly to Pinehurst on weekends “when possible.” According to Katherine, George adjusted comfortably to this regimen. Together, Dodona Manor and the house at Pinehurst, she wrote, “were a God-send to an over-burdened and tired man.”103 Marshall actually seemed to like the commuting, considering himself “fortunate” to “[be] able spend my weekends” at the North Carolina resort.104
Meanwhile, though the German Ardennes offensive had been turned back and the Allied advance resumed, the relentless fighting in Europe dragged on. In March the Allied armies finally crossed the Rhine at several points and raced toward the heart of Germany. The relative ease of the crossings, Ike believed, had been made possible by his disputed strategy of first defeating the Wehrmacht forces along the river’s west bank. Yet lashed on by their fanatical Führer, the Wehrmacht, with increasing futility and growing despair, continued to resist. As the Allied armies advanced into the Vaterland itself, they continued to face ferocious resistance, though from depleted forces often consisting of tired old men and fanatical young boys in ill-fitting uniforms. They also uncovered the horrors of the death camps that revealed the true evil of the Nazi regime. In these last days Hitler would grasp at straws. When Roosevelt, visibly haggard and sickly at Yalta, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Georgia on April 12, the dictator’s hopes revived; the American president’s demise, he announced, would undermine the enemy’s alliance and save Germany. But of course it did not.
On April 25 Soviet and American troops coming from opposite directions met at Torgau on the Elbe River. The Allied armies would go no farther east. The question of pushing on all the way to Berlin before the Russians arrived had already been decided. Patton, whose bellicose right-wing political instincts were by now fully awakened to the postwar Soviet threat, strongly advised driving through to Berlin. More tellingly, Churchill had warned Ike in late March that if the Anglo-Americans failed to “cross the Elbe and advance as far eastward as possible,” the Russian army would take Vienna and “overrun Austria.” Abandoning Berlin to their tender mercies “may strengthen their conviction, already apparent, that they have done everything.”105 Eisenhower was not naive about Soviet intentions, but considered Berlin “nothing more than a geographical location”106 and thought there was no good military reason to snatch the trophy from the Russians. Capturing Berlin would unnecessarily offend the Soviets, and for no good tactical reason. Besides, it would force the Americans to take on the heavy logistical burden of caring for additional thousands of hungry, homeless German civilians. He would only reconsider, he said, if the Combined Chiefs of Staff ordered him to do so. There is no record of Marshall’s view of the specific Berlin issue. He was indeed aware of the points of conflict with the Russians but hoped that after the war these frictions would not endanger a lasting peace. He also feared jeopardizing the Russian pledge to join the war in the Pacific. It must therefore be assumed that he was not likely to endorse snatching the city from under the Russians’ noses. Moreover he was reluctant to incur further American casualties. As he wrote to Ike on April 28 regarding suggestions that advancing Allied forces push into Czechoslovakia, he was “loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.” Czechoslovakia would undoubtedly “have to be cleared of German troops,” but by the Russians, not the Americans, though “we may have to cooperate with the Russians in so doing.”107 Events would vindicate Ike’s and Marshall’s conclusions about the cost of taking Berlin: In the battles to capture the German capital the Red Army would suffer more than 350,000 casualties, including 78,000 deaths.
On April 30, at his underground Führerbunker in Berlin, Hitler and his new bride, Eva Braun, committed suicide. On May 7, at SHAEF headquarters in Reims, the German chief of staff, Alfred Jodl, signed unconditional surrender terms with the Western Allies, a ceremony repeated the next day in Berlin between Gen. Wilhelm Keitel and the Russians. The unholy war in Europe was over!
Marshall was jubilant. Though this private man never made public his joy at victory, it reverberates in his congratulatory radiogram to Eisenhower on the day of Germany’s surrender. “You have completed your mission with the greatest victory in the history of warfare,” he declared. “You have made history, great history, for the good of all mankind and you have stood for all we hope and admire in an officer of the United States Army.”108
Whatever his personal response to victory, Marshall could bask in the accolades that now rained down on him. Ike responded to his chief’s praise with his own tribute. Marshall had an “unparalleled place in the respect and affections of all military and political leaders with whom I have been associated, as well as with the mass of American fighting men,” he wrote. “Our army and our people have never been so deeply indebted to any other soldier.”109 On May 8—the official American “VE-Day”—Secretary Stimson called Marshall to his office, where he had gathered the leading members of the Army General Staff. Positioning Marshall in the middle of the group, he acknowledged his own and the country’s “great debt” to the general. He had personally “never seen a task of such magnitude performed by man” as Marshall had accomplished, he said. Looking directly at his friend and cherished wartime accomplice, he declared: “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime, and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known.”110 Churchill, who had already called Marshall “the true ‘organizer of victory,’” also lavished praise on the American chief of staff. Ignoring their many disagreements in the flush of victory, the PM composed an encomium carefully matched to Marshall’s role in the war. “It has not fallen to your lot to command great armies,” but “to create them, organize them, and inspire them,” he wrote. Under Marshall’s “guiding hand the mighty and valiant formations which have swept across France and Germany were brought into being and perfected in an amazing time.” The prime minister concluded with a glowing personal tribute: “There has grown in my breast through all these years of mental exertion a respect and admiration for your character and massive strength which has been a real comfort to your fellow-toilers, of whom I hope it will always be recorded that I was one.”111
Marshall undoubtedly enjoyed these tributes—and the many others bestowed by friends and colleagues—but he was painfully aware that the job was only half done. Back in September, with German defeat looming, he anticipated the reluctance of American fighting men, especially weary veterans of Europe and North Africa, to accept the additional sacrifices and risks needed to defeat Japan. As before, he turned to Hollywood’s Frank Capra for help. Capra produced a short documentary film, Two Down and One to Go, that explained to the troops why the Pacific enemy must now be vanquished. Sent under seal to hundreds of military posts, it was not to be played until the end of fighting in Europe.
The finally unveiled thirty-minute film shows Marshall at his desk, in full uniform, with Pershing’s portrait on the wall behind him. In a calm and even voice, between clips of heroic Allied wartime military and naval actions, the chief of staff reads his text. Europe had been first, he declares, because the Pacific enemy had not been accessible and, after Pearl Harbor, the United States had initially lacked the naval resources to challenge it. But the war, east and west, was one war, and now that Germany was defeated, “we will not have won this war until Japan has been totally crushed.”112 On VE-Day Marshall delivered the same message to the wider American public by radio: “Let us celebrate the victory and say our prayers of thanksgiving and then turn with all the power and stern resolution of America to destroy forever and in the shortest possible time every vestige of military power in the Japanese nation.”113
In the short Capra film Marshall appears animated and robust. But like many other Allied war leaders he was now tired. His wartime labors had exacted an appreciable personal toll. As he would write to Secretary Stimson several years later: “In all my Washington posts since 1938 I never seem to have [had] a day of restful existence.” He expressed a similar view to Ike: “This is not an easy world to live in for people like you and myself.”114 Besides his fatigue, over the years his health had suffered. Though six feet tall, lean, and still vigorous-looking, Marshall had endured several chronic illnesses, including a heart murmur and an inflamed kidney. He had spent time at Walter Reed Hospital. He was now sixty-five and looking forward to retirement. But the Pacific conflict now awaited him. Personal ease, like final world peace, would have to be postponed.