The Yanks Are Coming! (26 page)

Marshall and his team were agreed that the United States could not disengage from the war-shattered world; the United States would have to lead it, help rebuild it, and aid it; and to ensure American security, the United States needed military strength with a global reach; it was no longer insulated by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. George Kennan, who had developed the idea of “containment,” of forcibly blocking an expansionist Soviet Union, had an ally in Marshall. During the Second World War, Marshall had kept his views as strictly military as possible, regarding the Soviet Union as an enormous military force arrayed against Nazi Germany and potentially against Japan. As secretary of state, he took Kennan's view, that the Soviets were internationally aggressive and responded only to tough talk and the threat of actual force. When the British government conceded that it could no longer afford to continue fighting Communists in postwar Greece or support Turkey against the Soviet Union, the Truman administration, Marshall included, believed the United States had to fill the gap.

In 1947 Marshall announced the principles for a European Recovery Program, which became known as the Marshall Plan, for the rebuilding of Western Europe. Marshall was also involved in the direction of the Berlin airlift (after the Soviets blockaded West Berlin in 1948), he encouraged the formation of a West German government, and he oversaw the creation of NATO (founded in 1949). Throughout the early Cold War period, Marshall had to play power
politics against a massively militarized Soviet Union. America's own armed forces had been rapidly demobilized after the Second World War. Urged by foreign policy hawks “to give the Russians hell” in negotiations, Marshall lamented, “My facilities for giving them hell. . . . was 1⅓ divisions over the entire United States. This is quite a proposition when you deal with somebody with over 260 and you have 1⅓.”
²³

Nevertheless, by 1948 Marshall was pleased to see Western Europe recovering and Soviet influence retreating; there the United States was winning the peace. The same could not be said of China. Marshall took what he considered the realist position: Chiang's Kuomintang was so corrupt and its hold on power so tenuous that it would require an unsustainable drain on American resources to support it. If China fell to the Communists, it would not, Marshall thought, pose a grave foreign policy risk to the United States; it was not Europe. China—however large it was and however large it loomed in the American imagination as a great field for missionaries and spreading democracy—was at best a regional power, and a chaotic and impoverished one. Even as a Communist state, it could be a rival rather than a satellite of the Soviet Union. Moreover, like the Soviet Union, it could be contained. George Kennan and Marshall believed that the answer to a chaotic or Communist China was not to intervene there but to build up Japan and the Philippines, just as the United States was rebuilding Western Europe. Containment did not mean rushing to fight the Communists everywhere but rather reinforcing potential Western strong points to inhibit Communist expansion. It also meant not creating opportunities for Soviet gains, which Marshall thought would be the result of the partition of Palestine into Zionist and Arab states—a partition that might inflame the Arab world and make it susceptible to
Soviet influence. President Truman recognized the new state of Israel anyway.

Marshall resigned after Truman's 1948 reelection, but in 1949 the president appointed him to lead the American Red Cross, a position that was meant to ease Marshall into retirement. The eruption of the Korean War in 1950, however, meant a return to the colors, not this time as a general, but as secretary of defense. Marshall wanted his term to last only six months—an emergency interim appointment to help with rapid mobilization—but was persuaded to extend it to a year. He took over as secretary of defense in September, a week after MacArthur landed his blow at Inchon. In the months that followed, as American fortunes in the war waxed and waned, and MacArthur and Truman butted heads over strategy, Marshall cautiously took the side of the commander in chief. Marshall knew MacArthur's merits, and he believed in giving autonomy to the officer in the field, but he also believed in a strict demarcation of military authority. MacArthur could argue for his strategy, but in the end he had to be subordinate to the authority of the president of the United States—and that, it appeared, MacArthur was unwilling to accept. MacArthur returned to the United States and a hero's welcome. Marshall, on the other hand, though he retained his dignity and stature, came under attack from Senator Joe McCarthy and his supporters, who portrayed him as a Communist-appeaser. In 1948, Marshall had written to a friend, “God bless democracy! I approve of it highly but suffer from it extremely. This incidentally is not for quotation.”
²⁴
Not for quotation, perhaps, but it illuminated how stoically he accepted the storms and tempests of public controversy.

After his resignation in September 1951, Marshall retired, save for fundraising work for VMI (which named one of the five arches in its barracks after him),
²⁵
acting as chairman for the American
Battle Monuments Commission, and representing the United States at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In 1953 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In his acceptance speech he noted, “There has been considerable comment over the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1953 to a soldier. I am afraid this does not seem as remarkable to me as it quite evidently appears to others. . . . The cost of war in human lives is constantly spread before me, written neatly in many ledgers whose columns are gravestones. I am deeply moved to find some means or method of avoiding another calamity of war.” That means or method, he added, included the West having a “very strong military posture.”
²⁶

Marshall was pleased to spend his retirement quietly—gardening, hunting (at least before bad health got in the way), and reading for pleasure (Westerns were favorites). He died in 1959 after a series of strokes. He had been something of an American Cincinnatus, pressed into long service but happy in private life and disdaining political ambition. American admirers compared him to George Washington for his dignity and strength of character. Winston Churchill took a longer view, or a more poetic one, saying of Marshall, “That is the noblest Roman of them all.”
²⁷

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

EDDIE RICKENBACKER (1890–1973)

E
ddie Rickenbacker, one of the great American heroes of the First World War, was a well-known figure up to his death. Since then he has been largely forgotten, which is too bad, because his was a great American story. He was the son of German-speaking Swiss immigrants who, however precarious their economic circumstances, were hugely patriotic about their new country. Nineteenth-century America had no welfare state but did have a highly effective culture for stamping Americanism onto newly arrived European immigrants. As one example: Rickenbacker's father, though over forty and a family man, sought to prove his zealous American patriotism
by enlisting for the Spanish-American War. To his disappointment and his wife's relief, he was turned away.

Eddie Rickenbacker grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the third of eight children. His parents had the Germanic virtues—they were strict, strong, confident, and industrious—and Eddie put a turn-of-the-century American spin on them: he was a tough, enterprising, daredevil, fun-loving, rambunctious boy. He was ready with his fists, keen for a smoke, leader of a boyhood gang (more
Our Gang
than Crips and Bloods), and held a variety of odd jobs, including selling newspapers from the age of five. He once tried to “fly” a bike-plane (a bike with an umbrella attached) off the roof of a barn and managed to survive that and many other dangerous boyhood accidents, including, variously, crashing into a horse-drawn street car, falling headfirst into a ditch and knocking himself unconscious, and more than once barely escaping being run over by a train. He dodged death so often that he realized one day he wouldn't: “I could see time stretching on endlessly. As it continued, more and more wondrous marvels would be developed and become realities. But at some point along this interminable path, my life would stop, and time would flow on without me. In my despair, I would go off alone to the barn and sob for hours at a time.”
¹
His father dispelled Eddie's precocious sense of despair in the most practical way—he beat it out of him with a switch.

Resolved to make the best of things, he learned from his father the value of determined, orderly work and from his mother the healing power of prayer. Like his father, Eddie was handy with tools and liked to tinker and build, including a “push-mobile,” a boy-sized horseless carriage he built for racing. When he was fifteen, his life took a more serious turn when his father was killed in a fight at a work site.

BUILDING CARS AND RACING THEM

Rickenbacker convinced his mother to let him drop out of school and take a full-time job; he didn't tell her when he lied about his age and education to employers. After a succession of jobs that ranged from working at a glass factory to polishing and carving grave stones (including his father's) to cleaning railcars to assisting at a bicycle and auto shop, he talked his way into a job at the Frayer-Miller automobile manufacturing plant. While there, he took a correspondence course in engineering, which led to his serving as backseat mechanic for Frayer's race cars. When Lee Frayer took a job designing cars for the Columbia Buggy Company, he brought the seventeen-year-old Rickenbacker with him. The dynamic, cheerful, can-do teenager swiftly moved up from managing a department of fifteen to regional manager of the company and a successful race car driver. By nineteen, he had grown to the size of a football player—six foot two and more than two hundred pounds.

Rickenbacker had made a habit of resigning from one job confident he could get the next one he wanted; this time he had his eye on the Mason Automobile Company, where he hoped to become a full-time racer. Instead, at least initially, they made him a mechanic and race car builder. Not for the first time, Rickenbacker accepted less money because he thought the prospects were better; though as it turned out, he found himself not only racing for the company, as he wanted, but also investing in it to keep it going. Racing cars became his profession—driving for the Maxwell Automobile Company and then for the Prest-O-Lite Company—and it made him a celebrity. It was reported that a silent film actress even sent him a telegram offering to marry him if he gave up racing. He politely declined her offer, remarking with Kiplingesque aplomb, “A woman is only a woman, but my soul mate is a racing car.”
²

In late 1916 Rickenbacker traveled to England to work for the Sunbeam Motor Works getting their racing cars ready for the 1917 racing season in the United States. Germany's declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917, and warning to Americans in England to leave before the torpedoes were set loose, meant Rickenbacker had to return home. His stay in England had not been entirely pleasant. He had been shadowed by British detectives who suspected, because of his name, that he was a German spy, and he was put off by what struck him as British snobbery. Nevertheless, he returned convinced the United States should enter the war on the Allied side, gave public testimonials to that end, and organized a group of race car drivers to form a flying corps, the Aero Reserves of America. Rickenbacker knew something about aircraft engines, had flown and learned that his fear of heights disappeared when he was in the air, and was eager to put his auto racing skills to use in a plane. But Brigadier General George D. Squier of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which ran the Aviation Section, dismissed the idea of race car drivers as pilots, telling Rickenbacker it would be unwise “for a pilot to have any knowledge of engines and mechanics. Airplane engines are always breaking down, and a man who knew a great deal about engines would know if his engine wasn't functioning correctly and be hesitant about going into combat.”
³
What they needed were daredevils without brains.

FLYING ACE

Instead, after the United States declared war, Rickenbacker was tapped by a friend, Major Burgess Lewis, to join the American Expeditionary Force as a driver, receiving an immediate rank of sergeant. He embarked for France, where he was assigned to Colonel Billy
Mitchell. He soon talked his way into pilot training, earned his wings, was promoted to lieutenant, and became an engineering officer responsible for training new pilots under the command of Major Carl “Tooey” Spaatz. Spaatz wanted to retain him, but Rickenbacker was determined to attend Aerial Gunnery School and become a combat pilot. He got his wish. After training at the Gunnery School, he was assigned to the 94th Aero Pursuit Squadron, which became known as the “Hat-in-the-Ring” Squadron from the insignia they designed for their unit. He would be going into combat.

Rickenbacker's first kill was on 29 April 1918, after a series of flights where he had flown through anti-aircraft fire, been shot at by enemy planes, and mistaken two of his colleagues for enemy pilots, though he never fired his guns at them. On 8 May 1918, he became a flight commander after Captain Norman James Hall was shot down and made a prisoner by the Germans. On 28 May, Rickenbacker shot down his fifth plane, which made him an “ace,” and two days later he rescued an American pilot and shot down two more German planes.

The American planes were castoffs from the French—Nieuports at first, which were eventually replaced by much more effective Spads—but the American pilots flew with the same sort of spirit that animated the doughboys on the ground. “It was this style of Indian warfare,” Rickenbacker wrote of Quentin Roosevelt's dogfight tactics, which were similar to his own, “that had moved the German Intelligence Office to state that their training was indeed hopeless against American recklessness. German formation flying was admirable until an American joined it and moved in concert with it for fifteen minutes before shooting it up! One can imagine the disgust of the methodical Boches as they digested this latest trick of the Yank!”
⁴