The Yanks Are Coming! (25 page)

At Marshall's request, his next assignment sent him to China as executive officer of the 15th Infantry Regiment stationed in Tientsin, a happy imperial posting that he held for three years and that afforded him freedom from a desk, a comfortable lifestyle (much enjoyed by his wife), a ringside view of the unfolding Chinese civil war, associates like future Generals Matthew Ridgway and Vinegar Joe Stilwell, and enough leisure time to learn Chinese. In the summer of 1927 he was back stateside as an instructor at the Army War College in Washington, DC, an assignment that thrilled his wife, though her joy was short-lived. She died in September 1927 after a thyroid operation. The Marshalls had been childless, and with no parental responsibilities to divert him from his mourning, he sublimated it into work. In October, he reported to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, as assistant commandant. As he later noted, the “change to Benning was magical.” It “caught me at my most restless moment, and gave me hundreds of interests, an unlimited field of activity, delightful associates, and all outdoors to play in.”
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And for all the image we have of Marshall as a master organizer, planner,
strategist, and supreme desk commander rather than a battlefield leader, he had not joined the Army to be a bureaucrat. Working for Pershing after the war, when he had time to ride and take exercise, his wife noted that Marshall thrived: “he was hard as nails and black as an Indian. I've never seen him looking better.”
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Marshall liked being an Indian; he liked having “all outdoors to play in.”

The play in this case was teaching tactics to infantrymen, which allowed him time in the field, time in the classroom, and time to stamp his ideas on the officers and men who passed through during his five-year tenure at Fort Benning. Among the Infantry School instructors were Joe Stilwell and future five-star general Omar Bradley.
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Marshall wanted orders kept simple so that they could be quickly understood and enacted. He wanted an Army prepared for mechanized “open” warfare, a faster and more powerful version of the German invasion of France in 1914. He wanted soldiers drilled in the fundamentals of infantry combat: shoot, move, communicate.

While at Benning, Marshall found himself a wife. That had not been his intention, but the handsome widower was introduced to the Kentucky-born, English-trained former actress (and daughter of a Baptist minister) Katherine Boyce Tupper, herself a widow. She had, needless to say, stage presence; and so did he, in his quiet, commanding, military way. They met in 1929 and were married in Washington, DC, in 1931. Marshall became the stepfather to her three teenage children: Molly became a riding companion, and the boys, Clifton and Allen, hunting companions.
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In June 1932, Marshall was sent to command an infantry battalion at Fort Screven on Tybee Island, Georgia, a post that, he wrote General Pershing, “at least keeps me away from office work and high theory.”
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A year later he was given command of a regiment at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina and promoted colonel soon thereafter.
In addition to his normal military duties, he was deeply involved in the Civilian Conservation Corps, a liberal program of which the conservative Marshall approved. He saw it as military training by other means for America's young men.

To his dismay he was made senior instructor of the Illinois National Guard in October 1933. To him it seemed a pointless duty, and a potentially distasteful one, given the labor trouble in Illinois; but Douglas MacArthur, who assigned him there, tried to reassure him about the importance of the position. Marshall had worked successfully with Guard units in the past, and more than most officers in the Army, he had a rapport with citizen-soldiers. Marshall spent three years with the Guard before he achieved the long-sought rank of brigadier general and a new assignment, commanding a brigade in Washington State—a job that again included working with the Civilian Conservation Corps, which he loved.

In 1938, however, he was recalled to Washington, DC, to lead the general staff's War Plans Division and three months later became deputy chief of staff of the Army. At a meeting at the White House in November 1938, Marshall was the only officer present to criticize President Roosevelt's plan for increasing American air power. Marshall thought it unbalanced and unrealistic. Roosevelt ended the meeting, but not his relationship with Marshall, whose honesty he admired and whom he appointed Army chief of staff in 1939, making him a four-star general. Marshall was sworn into office 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.

“TO PRODUCE THE MOST EFFICIENT ARMY IN THE WORLD”

Marshall's goal was to build up America's armed forces for what looked like a repeat—though on a greater and more destructive
scale—of the Great War. He had to do so in spite of a Congress opposed to rearmament and a president cautious about pushing his luck. In the Great War, Marshall noted, the American Expeditionary Force, however quickly it was rushed into existence, had time to train in theater and in low-level combat, and thus, to find its feet. In this war, if the United States should enter it, the Army would have to be trained, armed, and ready at the outset—and large enough to make a difference. In 1939, the Army numbered fewer than 175,000 men; Marshall wanted to add more than a million men over the next two years. Roosevelt preferred air power to infantry and, at a meeting on 13 May 1940, rejected Marshall's proposal. Marshall shot back with a detailed defense, adding, “If you don't do something and do it right away. . . . I don't know what is going to happen to this country. . . .
you have got to do something and you've got to do it today
.”
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Roosevelt complied with most of Marshall's requests.

Marshall was focused on the blitzkrieg success of Nazi Germany in Europe, but also on aggressive, expanding imperial Japan. Every officer who had served in the Philippines knew Japan as a potential American enemy. In 1940 Japan became an open ally of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy with the Tripartite Pact. That same year, Marshall himself gained two important allies when President Roosevelt, a liberal Democrat, appointed conservative Republicans Frank Knox (a former Rough Rider and Army major in the Great War) secretary of the Navy and Henry Stimson (an Army colonel in the Great War and a friend of Marshall's) secretary of war. Knox and Marshall, and even more Stimson and Marshall, generally saw eye to eye even when Marshall and Roosevelt did not. The Army chief of staff and the president were divided by strategic vision, temperament, and even manners. Roosevelt favored assisting the British whenever possible; Marshall thought the priority should be America's
own armed forces, not building up an ally that might fall, as France had done. In allotting resources, Roosevelt, who had been assistant secretary of the Navy under President Wilson, tended to give preference to the Navy; Marshall just as naturally thought the Army, which would have to fight the Wehrmacht, should come first. The president had a freewheeling, informal style of doing business; Marshall insisted on cold logic and professional formality.

Marshall could impress and sway Roosevelt with his logic, argument, and force of character; and he radiated credibility and integrity in his dealings with Congress, which was more easily swayed by the Army chief of staff's recommendations than the president's. With Marshall there was no taint of partisan politics—and there was no doubting his expertise or his honesty. When he said, “I have but one purpose, one mission, and that is to produce the most efficient Army in the world,”
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congressmen knew that it was true.

As part of that drive for efficiency, Marshall ran his own office on a rigid timetable. He was at his desk by 7:30 a.m., usually after a morning horseback ride, and out the door no later than 5:00 p.m. After hours, he avoided social engagements (and when they were unavoidable, left early), preferring to go horseback riding (his primary release from the pressures of the office) or play tennis or simply go home, and aides knew better than to contact him at home unless absolutely necessary. A ruthless use of his time in the office—subordinates learned to be concise—and an insistence on making time for relaxation were, he thought, essential to his own efficiency.

In the Army as a whole, he was a keen judge of officers, determined to promote men of ability, regardless of seniority and, in the case of National Guard officers, regardless of their political clout. He had told a reporter in 1939,

           
The present general officers of the line are for the most part too old to command troops in battle under the terrific pressures of modern war. Many of them have their minds set in outmoded patterns, and can't change to meet the new conditions they may face if we become involved in the war that's started in Europe. I do not propose to send our young citizen-soldiers into action, if they must go into action, under commanders whose minds are no longer adaptable to the making of split-second decisions in the fast-moving war of today, nor whose bodies are no longer capable of standing up under the demands of field service. . . . They'll have their chance to prove what they can do. But I doubt that many will come through satisfactorily. Those that don't will be eliminated.
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In their place would be promoted men Marshall had thoroughly tested and who had proved their mettle, men who were currently colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors, men whose names would soon become familiar to the American public: men like Patton, Eisenhower, Mark Clark, Lucian Truscott, and Omar Bradley.

INDISPENSABLE

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Nazi Germany's declaration of war against the United States, Marshall accepted a Europe-first strategy and was a dogged proponent—against President Roosevelt and also against British prime minister Churchill and his generals—of a cross-Channel invasion of occupied France as soon as possible, as soon, indeed, as 1942. President Roosevelt and the British preferred the safer, if more indirect, option of an Allied invasion
of Vichy-controlled French North Africa. This was an argument Marshall lost—at least until 1944.

In 1945 Churchill, Marshall's erstwhile rival for strategic influence on the president, famously said that Marshall was “the true organizer of victory.”
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Marshall, however, wanted to
lead
victory as a commander. Here again, he was foiled, in part because he refused to request the assignment, telling the president the decision was his as commander in chief. Roosevelt confessed he wanted Marshall “to be the Pershing of the second world war and he cannot be that if we keep him here.”
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Yet the president felt he had to “keep him here”; Marshall was indispensable as Army chief of staff. The president thus chose General Dwight Eisenhower, not Marshall, to be the supreme Allied commander for the cross-Channel invasion of Europe that Marshall had so consistently and strenuously advocated. As Roosevelt told Marshall in recompense, “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.”
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Like his hero Robert E. Lee, Marshall was widely seen as a man of unimpeachable character and sound judgment. He was the indispensable man who ensured that America's armies were properly led and supplied. If he was not a leader in the field, he was nevertheless a leader at the highest level of command, working with the commander in chief, giving force and direction to America's global strategy. Like Lee, Marshall was a man of powerfully suppressed emotion. He consciously assumed a mask of command so that he constantly projected a George C. Marshall who was dispassionate, disinterested, logical, honest, and untiring—a man that congressmen, senators, his fellow officers, the commander in chief, and the public at large could trust. But the mask was not something to hide behind; it was a reflection of Marshall himself. He rejected honors and rewards when he could; he squelched would-be biographers (and never
wrote a memoir); he gave informed, straightforward, detailed answers to questions; he supported his commanders in the field (there was between Marshall and Eisenhower none of the rivalry that had divided Army chief of staff Peyton March and commander of the American Expeditionary Force John Pershing in World War I); and he denied having any political ambitions, which he thought would be fatal to his work, with the quip, “My father was a Democrat, my mother a Republican, and I am an Episcopalian.”
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In 1944 President Roosevelt awarded him a fifth star and made him General of the Army.
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In November 1945, two months after the surrender of Japan, Marshall resigned his position as Army chief of staff.

SHAPING THE POSTWAR WORLD

He was not left unemployed long. Indeed, it was but a single day before President Harry Truman called him with a new assignment. He wanted Marshall to go to China. The country—already divided, with American ally Chiang Kai-shek and his party the Kuomintang (and his affiliated warlords) against the Communists led by Mao Tse-tung—seemed certain to fall into civil war unless a coalition government (led by Chiang) could be negotiated. That was Marshall's job: achieve a democratic, non-Communist China that nevertheless included Communists in the government and reformed the corrupt Kuomintang. Marshall did the best he could in an impossible situation. In January 1947, he was recalled to Washington and named secretary of state.

Once he had led soldiers; now he led diplomats—some of the most famous in American history, including future Secretary of State Dean Acheson and future ambassador to the Soviet Union George Kennan. Acheson recalled, “The moment General Marshall entered
a room everyone in it felt his presence. It was a striking and communicated force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.” To Acheson, Marshall said, “I shall expect of you the most complete frankness, particularly about myself. I have no feelings except those I reserve for Mrs. Marshall.”
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