Posted on Oct 16, 2020
George C. Marshall: A Study in Character - George C. Marshall
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On October 16, 1959, George Marshall died at the age of 78. I think every young officer should read this. From the article:
"George C. Marshall: A Study in Character
By: Colonel Charles F. Brower, US Military Academy
General George Catlett Marshall is widely accepted as this nation’s most esteemed 20th century military figure and as a paragon of professionalism and officership. Marshall, the soldier, and his military career serve as a comforting reference point for thoughtful officers to guide upon when they feel they are in danger of losing their ethical and professional bearings.
His was a career that paralleled America’s rise to and acceptance of global responsibilities. Marshall was a creator not only of America’s awesome military power as Army chief of staff in World War II but also of its major foreign and global strategies as a postwar Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. Statesman as well as soldier, his character and accomplishments are so exceptional that he is regularly placed in the company of George Washington when parallels are sought.1
Marshall’s character casts a giant historical shadow. His leadership qualities, sense of duty and honor, selflessness, and abiding commitment to the Constitution and the American civil-military tradition were so extraordinary that virtually every individual with whom he worked, from president on down, felt duty bound to recount and comment upon those traits in hushed tones of veneration. In today’s context it is almost impossible for us to imagine that such a man ever existed.
My task is to bring this historical monument to life, and to relate various aspects of Marshall’s remarkable life to the themes of this conference. I’ll first sketch a portrait of Marshall’s character and moral habits developed during the interwar years. His experiences during these years, we now know, prepared him for the enormous responsibilities he would assume as the organizer of Allied victory in the Second World War.
Focusing on the prewar period may be thought to be a little unusual; I believe, however, that the prewar years served as a crucible that forged Marshall’s character and strengthened his special relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Congress, and the citizens of America.
Next, I’ll link our understanding of the kind of officer Marshall had become by the time he was appointed the Army chief of staff in 1939 to the theme of readiness by analyzing his role during the difficult months between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and American entry into the war in December 1941. Those twenty-seven months were also the first twenty-seven months of Marshall’s tenure as chief of staff and coincided with stunning Axis military victories and the subsequent need to prepare the United States for war. Marshall later called these years the most difficult of all during the war.2 The challenges of preparing for a global coalition war and of mobilizing and integrating every aspect of the nation’s resources into that effort were unprecedented in the American experience. Marshall also found the task made more difficult by the fact that he had to accomplish it while Americans were sharply divided over the nature of the nation’s role in that war. And finally, Marshall’s task was complicated in the period 1939-1941 by the formidable presence of his enigmatic Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Marshall’s most pressing role during this period was to win presidential and congressional approval for a crash effort to bolster American preparedness through the building of a balanced military capability. As Marshall saw it, rearming America was an absolute priority. Yet in the days following the fall of France and with the rearmament process barely under way, Roosevelt concluded that the nation must simultaneously aid Britain in its lonely struggle against Germany. Fears that the modest gains in American readiness thus far realized would be dissipated by FDR’s eagerness to sustain Britain brought Marshall into conflict with the president–and into the harsh glare of partisan politics–when congressional opponents of Roosevelt’s policies sought to draw Marshall into the foreign policy debate.
Marshall’s actions during those twenty-seven months provide useful insights into the relationship between ethics and readiness. Moreover, as a demonstration of how Marshall was able to stand steadfastly for his beliefs while at the same time maintaining his loyalty to his civilian Commander-in-Chief, his actions during that period are also an emulatory perspective on American civil-military relations.
The Shaping of Marshall’s Character
Immediately after World War I, making good on his promise to share insights on his successes in World War I with cadets at his alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute, Marshall provided VMI’s superintendent his observations on what successful leadership in combat in the American Army in France.
Optimism, stamina, love of one’s soldiers, determination and loyalty were qualities for Marshall that distinguished successful officers from the common pack. They were the solid qualities on which a commander could depended, qualities that would make a large organization function effectively, qualities that would be the bedrock of readiness. “When conditions are difficult, the command is depressed and everyone seems critical and pessimistic, you must be especially cheerful and optimistic,” he wrote. Especially then, leaders need to lay aside “any thought of personal fatigue and display marked energy in looking after the comfort of [their] organization, inspecting the lines, and preparing for tomorrow.” This ability to reach deep within one’s personal reserves of stamina and perseverance to lift up and inspire exhausted and dispirited soldiers during such low points was an important Marshall hallmark of leadership. Indeed, more alarming and disastrous the situation, “the more determined must be your attitude.” Finally, Marshall valued loyalty enormously as a leadership virtue. The most successful officers, in his view, made “a point of extreme loyalty, in thought and deed, both to their superiors personally and to one’s efforts to execute their superior’s plans or policies. There could be no role for individual ego in a soldier’s respect for superior authority, he counseled. Indeed, “The less you agree with the policies of your superiors, the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.”3
From his vantage point in the War Department’s Operations Division in 1941, then-Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower saw Marshall every day and noted the types of personalities that did not win favor with his boss. Eisenhower believed Marshall viewed with particular distaste “self-seeking officers” who sought to bring pressure to bear on their own behalf. (In the competition in 1939 as FDR was seeking a new Army chief of staff Marshall had been true to this trait. “My strength with the army,” he told friends seeking to promote his candidacy, “has rested on the well known fact that I attended strictly to business, and enlisted no influence of any sort at any time. That, in army circles, has been my greatest strength in this matter of future appointments, especially.”)4 Another category that vexed him, he told Ike, was officers who could do detailed work but would not take the responsibility for making decisions. Similarly, he objected to men who immersed themselves in minor details and so lost sight of general issues. The group in disfavor also included those who loved the limelight and those who had trouble getting along with others. Nor could he stand pessimists. He would never give command to an officer who was less than enthusiastic about the post or operation in question.5
Of all these qualities of leadership the one most prized by Marshall and perhaps most reflective of his character was that of candor. Frankness of expression and the inability to quibble were in his mind directly related to trust and sincerity, elements that reached to the very core of one’s integrity. Simply put, Marshall gave–and expected to get–the unvarnished facts of a case and he developed early in his career a reputation for straightforwardness and integrity that in his later career gave him enormous credibility with Roosevelt, the Congress and the American people. Three brief anecdotes from Marshall’s early career illustrate how this reputation for candor developed and suggest how his resulting credibility became a priceless asset for Marshall in the execution of his wartime duties.
The first occurred in France in 1917 where then-Major Marshall was serving as a staff officer in the American 1st Infantry Division. During an inspection, General Pershing became unhappy with the level of training in the division and criticized the division commander in front of his subordinates. Loyal to his commander and convinced the humiliation was unjustified Marshall rose to his defense. When Pershing tried to ignore his protests and depart, Marshall exploded, placing his hand on Pershing’s arm to prevent him from leaving and, according to Marshall’s own recollections, practically forcing the general to listen. An extraordinary lecture followed, which identified Pershing’s Headquarters as the source of the problems. Pershing’s offer to look into the situation did not satisfy the now thoroughly-aroused Marshall, who figured he was already in it up to his neck and “might as well not try to float but to splash a bit.” There was no need to look into it, he told Pershing, “it’s a fact.”6
Marshall’s fellow officers were horrified with the scene, but Pershing took the major’s tirade calmly, reminding Marshall that he needed to appreciate the troubles GHQ had. Marshall shot back: “We have them every day and many a day and we have to solve every one of them by night.”7
That ended the conversation and Pershing’s visit. Convinced Marshall would be immediately relieved, his fellow officers all bade him farewell. But they had severely misjudged Pershing. Marshall had in fact won his respect by his candid outburst; rather than relieving Marshall, the AEF commander frequently consulted him thereafter on First Division problems. By the summer of 1918 Marshall had been promoted to colonel and assigned to Pershing’s own staff and within two years had become the general’s personal aide. A long and vitally important relationship had been forged.
For Marshall, the experience served as a highly instructive lesson in leadership. Pershing’s reaction to candid counsel was unusual; Marshall had never before seen a man who would listen so intently to severe criticisms. “Pershing never held it against you personally,” he marvelled. “He might not agree with you in any degree, but he listened to very, very frank criticisms in regard to his actions.”8
Another later episode again illustrates Marshall’s commitment to providing frank and independent advice to his superiors. As the Army’s deputy chief of staff in 1938 Marshall harbored ideas about the need to rearm the nation that clashed with isolationist fears that the United States would be drawn into the impending European war. In the aftermath of the Munich appeasement Roosevelt saw as clearly as anyone that there would soon be a war but adopted the attitude that Britain and France should be encouraged to defeat the Germans by themselves when war came, with the great American arsenal providing them the resources necessary to accomplish that task. But such a strategy, if made public, would expose the President to the wrath of the isolationists who would surely charge him with unneutral behavior and putting the nation’s security at risk.
On November 14, 1938 FDR convened a conference at the White House at which he proposed to build 10,000 war planes, the ostensible aim being the bolstering the strength of the Army Air Corps. Marshall and his chief thought they were in attendance to discuss that program. FDR’s real purpose was to supply the planes to the European democracies in the hope that such assistance might forestall the impending war, and thereby American involvement.
Attending his first conference with the president, Marshall was shocked by FDR’s plan and astonished that no one else had questioned the president’s proposal. After his presentation, FDR indicated that he thought that he had made a good case for his program. The discussion then ran around the room, finding much soothing support for the proposal, until FDR turned to Marshall sitting quietly off to the side. “Don’t you think so, George?” he asked.9
Marshall later admitted a flash of irritation over “such a misrepresentation of our intimacy.” He was never a first-name man. “I don’t think the President ever did that again,” he said later. At the time his response was more direct: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with you at all.”10 Accounts by participants recount that a startled look came over FDR’s face and the conference abruptly ended. Afterward, Marshall’s associates, who had been eyeing him in silence, once again came by to shake his hand and to offer condolences. “Well, it’s been nice knowing you,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. As with the rest, Morgenthau made it obvious that he believed that Marshall’s bluntness had just ended his army career.11
In fact, it had not. FDR never again referred to the incident nor did he display any resentment toward Marshall. “Maybe he thought that I would tell him the truth so far as I was personally concerned,” Marshall speculated later, “which I certainly tried to do in all our conversations.”12 As with the earlier Pershing incident, Marshall’s bluntness impressed rather than alienated his superior. FDR apparently valued an officer who would tell the truth rather than what he thought the president wanted to hear.13
Marshall’s relationship with Roosevelt rested on the belief that frankness and candor were essential elements of his advisory position. He would best fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to him by the nation by establishing and demonstrating that he was a professional soldier and a man of integrity. “I never haggled with the president,” he recalled later. “I swallowed the little things so that I could go to bat on the big ones. I never handled a matter apologetically, and I was never contentious.”14
The record soon showed that predictions of an early end to Marshall’s career were widely premature. In the spring of 1939 Roosevelt began the search for a replacement for Army chief of staff General Malin Craig who was due to retire on 1 September. In April FDR decided for Marshall. Without informing anyone else, Roosevelt summoned Marshall to the White House to give him the news. “General Marshall,” he said, “I have it in mind to choose you as the next Chief of Staff of the United States Army. What do you think of that?”
“Nothing, Mr. President,” Marshall replied, “except to remind you that I have the habit of saying exactly what I think. And that, as you know,” he added, “can often be unpleasing. Is that all right?”
Marshall recalls that Roosevelt grinned and said, “Yes.” Marshall remained persistent. “Mr. President, you said yes pleasantly. But I have to remind you again that it may be unpleasant.” The President continued to grin. “I know,” he said. But he did not add “George.”15
At the outset of their relationship as commander-in-chief and chief of staff, the two men had staked out an area of understanding marked by candor. Marshall had not connived for the position (though he had coveted it) and he had neither covered up any of his views nor professed opinions that were not genuine. And to his credit, FDR had not invited any such behavior. The job of chief of staff came to Marshall without strings, with his integrity intact, and he was therefore positioned to provide his commander-in-chief candid advice insulated and independent from the wizardry of FDR’s beguiling personality.
The Ethical Dimensions of Aid to Britain, 1940-41
Just how much ethical independence existed in the FDR-Marshall relationship was tested in the period after the fall of France in the summer of 1940 by the tension between Marshall’s deep commitment to improving the army’s readiness and Roosevelt’s commitment to providing Britain the resources necessary to ensure its survival.
From the beginning of the war Marshall had sought to convince the president, Congress and the public that the United States was in a bad way in terms of its military capabilities. The army in November 1939 contained fewer than 175,000 men in nine understrength divisions and ranked only nineteenth in the world, trailing, among others, Spain, Portugal, and Bulgaria.
Roosevelt was not opposed to preparedness, however his concept centered on airplanes rather than a balanced force. For his part Marshall proposed a $675 million dollar crash program that called for the creation of a balanced force of 1.25 million men by 1941, the bare minimum needed in his mind for a nation still at peace but prepared for war.
When Marshall and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau went to the White House to ask FDR for the necessary authorization, the president breezily dismissed the program. Morgenthau then asked the President if he would hear Marshall. “I know exactly what he would say,” Roosevelt replied. “There is no necessity for me to hear him at all.”
According to Morgenthau’s diary, Marshall, his face red and his temper barely under control, then asked the president for three minutes to speak. Marshall then passionately presented a warning about the threat faced by the dire straits of its armed forces. “Did the president not understand the danger? Did he not understand that his inaction was putting the nation at risk? If you don’t do something,” he concluded, “I don’t know what is going to happen to this country.” Two days later Roosevelt sent the program to Congress and the Congress soon after appropriated $900 million dollars for it.16
The presidential and congressional shift on defense expenditures were clearly also influenced by the disastrous defeat of the French in the summer of 1940 and the isolation of Great Britain as it stoically endured the Battle of Britain through the summer and fall. Opinions were nonetheless divided on how best to deal with this threatening development. Should the United States provide substantial military assistance to Great Britain to ensure its survival? Must the United States become a belligerent itself or should it decree that a German victory resulted in no clear and present danger to American vital interests and that it should maintain its historic isolationist policy toward European war?17
Marshall found himself at the center of the debate. Instinctively supportive of FDR’s interventionist perspective, Marshall nonetheless wrestled with the troubling question of whether aid to Britain should take precedence over the readiness of American forces.
This question was brought into sharp focus when FDR pressed Marshall in the days after Dunkirk to use American military equipment and ammunition to replenish the lost British stocks. Torn between sympathy for Britain and the necessity of meeting his own defense obligations, Marshall struggled with a matter of conscience that would not be completely settled until the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. The Neutrality Acts forbade the sale or transfer of munitions and implements of war to belligerent powers. Moreover Marshall believed only a few items—mostly obsolete weapons and ammunition from World War I–could be spared; otherwise he saw little help for the British. “The shortage is terrible,” he explained to FDR, “and we have no ammunition for antiaircraft guns and will not for six months. So if we give them the guns they could not do anything with them. Antitank guns, the situation is similar…50 caliber, our situation is the same.”18
After some legal gymnastics the Roosevelt administration used a loophole in the neutrality legislation to transfer these reserve stocks to Britain, where they were quickly consumed by the British war machine. Believing further diminution of resources unwise, Marshall appealed to FDR to consider more carefully the effect of such transfers on the readiness of American armed forces. FDR proved more prescient than his military advisor in this case. He was convinced the survival of Great Britain was vital to American national security and thus just the place to be investing scarce American military resources.19
Marshall believed FDR was ignoring the main point of his argument: the question as to whether Britain could survive at all. Ironically, Marshall’s thinking seems to have mirrored that of Winston Churchill when he had withheld Royal Air Force squadrons during the Battle for France to preserve them for the Battle for Britain. Marshall feared that so committing America’s meager munitions reserves ran the risk of falling into the trap of providing resources inadequate to the task of saving Britain, while at the same time increasing American vulnerability.20
As if anticipating this dilemma, Congress in June forbade the sale of additional surplus materiel unless the chief of naval operations and chief of staff certified that it was not “essential” for American defense. Given his fears, Marshall faced an ethical dilemma. It was possible–but not provable–that the nation could improve its defensive position by sending additional aid to Britain. If Britain fell, however, it would be very difficult to justify the diversion. One of Marshall’s staff put it more bluntly: “If we were required to mobilize after having released guns necessary for mobilization and were found to be short, everyone who was a party to the decision might expect to be hanging from a lamp post.”21
As Britain weathered the German blitz during the summer and fall of 1940, FDR increasingly demanded that the Army allocate a larger share of American war plane production to Britain. In fact, he expected that every other B-17 be turned over to the British as it came off the assembly line. Expert by now at finding legal loopholes, Roosevelt blandly suggested that the Army send bombers to Britain for “combat testing.” Trapped between the congressional requirement for certification and his commander-in-chief’s policy, Marshall was not the kind to ignore the spirit in favor of the letter of the law, and his conscience was troubled. He spent many hours riding his horse along the bridle paths at Fort Myer pondering the issue. Finally, after wrestling with his doubts, he told FDR that he would recommend the transfer, and immediately felt better about it.
“We turned over fifteen Flying Fortresses to the British for experimental purposes,” he recalled later. “I was a little bit ashamed of this because I felt that I was straining at the subject to get around the resolution of Congress.” He added, “Actually when we got into it and did it, it soon became apparent that the important thing was exactly that–to let them have planes for experimental purposes. And we should have done it earlier because we found difficulties with the planes that the Air Corps had not perceived at all.”22
Such recollections might easily be characterized as juicy rationalizations, perhaps, and I am willing to concede the point. What is striking here is that this occasion is considered by Marshall to be the only “duplicity” of his career. And Marshall could have taken comfort in the fact that the Congress soon followed suit, taking its sympathies as well as its doubts into the Roosevelt camp in March by passing the Lend-Lease Act, and thus ensuring Great Britain full access to America’s arsenal of democracy.
During this time period Marshall’s influence with the Congress grew enormously. In congressional hearings he projected an image of cool professionalism, thorough mastery of the facts, truthfulness, and nonpartisanship. Marshall’s candor–his refusal to avoid ugly facts–only added to image. “He would tell the truth even if it hurt his cause,” Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn remembered. “Of all the men who ever testified before any committee on which I served,” Rayburn said, “there is no one of them who has the influence with a committee of the House that General Marshall has.” The reason was simple, he continued, “It is because when he takes the witness stand, we forget whether we are Republicans or Democrats. We remember that we are in the presence of a man who is telling the truth, as he sees it, about the problems he is discussing.”23
Speaker Rayburn’s commentary reminds us once again of the priceless value of one’s integrity.
Marshall and the Ethics of Civilian Control
Partly obscured by differences separating Roosevelt and Marshall over readiness and aid to Britain is the manner in which the commander-in-chief and his senior army advisor resolved their problems. Marshall clearly was not alone in seeing aid to Britain as a dubious proposition. Many sources of influential support for his position existed outside the administration, yet he chose not to exploit the opportunities offered by such allies. Instead, he directed his objections forthrightly to the president and he loyally accepted FDR’s decision when it was reached. Once the decision was made, Marshall did his utmost to make the president’s policy a success. As he remarked later, “I had early made up my mind that I, so far as possible, was going to operate as a member of the team, political and otherwise military; that while it would be difficult at times and [there] would be strong pressures for me to appeal to the public, I thought it was far more important in the long run that I try to do my convincing within the team, rather than to take action publicly contrary to the desires of the President.”24 Neither by footdragging nor by coy maneuvering would Marshall presume to challenge the legitimacy of the president’s authority.
Roosevelt deeply appreciated Marshall’s abiding loyalty to the principle of civilian control. Responding one day to Speaker Rayburn’s praise of Marshall’s integrity and effectiveness with the Congress, FDR insisted that no one admired Marshall more than he did: “I’m not always able to approve his recommendations and history may prove me wrong. But when I disapprove them, I don’t have to look over my shoulder to see…whether he’s going to the Capitol, to lobby against me, or whether he’s going back to the War Department. I know he’s going back to the War Department, to give me the most loyal support as chief of staff that any President could wish.”25
The passing years have brought increasing emphasis on Marshall’s role as a soldier-statesman who believed that civilian authority should control the military and that armed forces should exist to aid in carrying out the foreign policy outlined by the president and Congress. He was comfortable about the American constitutional system as he found it. He believed that military men had a duty to explain the needs of their services and the requirements of their forces to carry out assignments directed by the commander-in-chief. A responsible officer had the right to question a policy he considered wrong or mistaken and to discuss thoroughly a proposal. But there was no right to challenge publicly the wishes of the commander-in-chief. Refusal to accept that rule on the part of an officer meant the destruction of his own power to command. To Marshall, such resistance of the armed forces to the president weakened the fabric of a democratic society.
Marshall’s restrained and professional behavior during the politically-explosive tangles with FDR over the tension between readiness and aid to Britain provides a polar star for members of America’s armed forces to guide upon as they consider their civil-military responsibilities. He did not attempt to advance his cause through leaks to favored journalists. He did not attempt end runs of FDR to the president’s congressional critics. And he did not publish in the New York Times orWashington Post op-ed pieces articulating alternative solutions to the administration’s policies.26 Instead he privately provided his commander-in-chief independent and candid advice, not partisan advocacy of alternative policies, and he loyally supported and actively assisted their execution once the president had decided.
Marshall’s thoughts on civilian control and military subordination to civil authority remain to me the most articulate I have read on the topic. “[The American Armed Forces] have a great asset,” Marshall observed, “and that is that our people, our countrymen, do not distrust us and do not fear us. They don’t harbor any ideas that we intend to alter the government of our country or the nature of this government in any way. This is a sacred trust….We are completely devoted, we are a member of a priesthood really, the sole purpose of which is to defend the republic. We concentrate our time and attention on that subject. That doesn’t mean that we don’t understand other things, but it simply means that we devote our time and attention exclusively to this. I don’t want to do anything…to damage the high regard in which professional soldiers in the Army are held by our people….”27
Conclusion
I have tried in an impressionistic way to illustrate how the record of Marshall’s interwar career provides such useful insights to those in the profession of arms. General Marshall appreciated the priceless nature of his own integrity and credibility and seemed to understand that his behavior was interpreted by others as a larger reflection of the integrity of the armed forces in general. Indeed, his every action seemed governed by these considerations.
In his poem, “George C. Marshall (1880-1959),” Thomas Hawkins Johnson, an Army officer himself, captured nicely the central role that integrity played in Marshall’s life:
In the photograph there are two rows of men,
Twelve or thirteen in all. Their drab uniforms
Look stiff in the midday glare: boots, riding
Breeches, thick wool blouses over khaki
Shirts strapped in with polished Sam Browne belts.
Hatless, they seem to squint at the cameraman,
Though it may be only the poor focus—still,
One recognizes all of them slowly—Bradley,
Patton, Bedell Smith, even the young balding
Eisenhower smiling at some lost remark.
In the rear row, on the end, stands Major Marshall,
Sober, impassive, his gaze impenetrable.
Perhaps such a photograph exists, taken,
Say, 1931 at the Infantry School,
Fort Benning; or perhaps it’s only pasted
In the nation’s worn album of apocrypha.
Because many events have intersected we
Allow that inference: cause: a small, dull army,
A few ambitious men trapped in
A generation of waiting, and one careful
Demon of integrity. The picture snapped,
They stroll toward toward the officer’s club for lunch,
Their conversation stunted in the heat.
Marshall, walking behind, keeps staring back.28
“One careful demon of integrity:” the ethical legacy that George Catlett Marshall left for the American profession of arms.
NOTES
1. Forrest C. Pogue, “George C. Marshall on Civil-Military Relationships in the United States,” in The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, ed. Richard H. Kohn (New York, 1991), 193. 2. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1942 (NY, 1966), xiv. 3. Thomas Parrish,Roosevelt and Marshall: Partners in Politics and war (New York, 1989), 37-38. 4. Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 303-304. 5. Leonard Mosley, Marshall: Hero for Our Times(New York, 1982), 127. 6. Marshall interview, 5 April 1957, George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue, ed. Larry I. Bland (Lexington, Virginia, 1991), 197-198. (Hereafter Marshall interview and date, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, with appropriate page number.) 7. Ibid. 8. Marshall interview, 6 March 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 111. 9. Mosley, 121. 10. Marshall interview, 6 March 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 109. 11. Mosley, 122. 12. Marshall interview, March 6, 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 109. 13. Mark A. Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century(Boston, 1989), 65. 14. Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 23. 15. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War (New York, 1987), 109. 16. The preceding paragraphs pertaining to this incident rest on Pogue, “George C. Marshall on Civil-Military Relationships in the United States,” 206. 17. David G. Haglund, “George C. Marshall and the Question of Military Aid to England, May-June 1940,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980): 745-760. 18. This and the following discussion rest upon Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 50-53. 19. A. J. Bacevich, “”Civilian Control: A useful Fiction?” Joint Forces Quarterly (Autumn/Winter 1994-95): 78. 20. Haglund, 745-760. 21. Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 53. 22. Marshall interview, 15 January 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 288. 23. Parrish, 137. 24. Marshall interview, 22 January 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 297. 25. Parrish, 137. 26. Bacevich, 78. 27. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945 (New York, 1973), 458-459.
28. Thomas H. Johnson, “George C. Marshall (1880-1959),” no date, unpublished poem, in author’s possession."
"George C. Marshall: A Study in Character
By: Colonel Charles F. Brower, US Military Academy
General George Catlett Marshall is widely accepted as this nation’s most esteemed 20th century military figure and as a paragon of professionalism and officership. Marshall, the soldier, and his military career serve as a comforting reference point for thoughtful officers to guide upon when they feel they are in danger of losing their ethical and professional bearings.
His was a career that paralleled America’s rise to and acceptance of global responsibilities. Marshall was a creator not only of America’s awesome military power as Army chief of staff in World War II but also of its major foreign and global strategies as a postwar Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. Statesman as well as soldier, his character and accomplishments are so exceptional that he is regularly placed in the company of George Washington when parallels are sought.1
Marshall’s character casts a giant historical shadow. His leadership qualities, sense of duty and honor, selflessness, and abiding commitment to the Constitution and the American civil-military tradition were so extraordinary that virtually every individual with whom he worked, from president on down, felt duty bound to recount and comment upon those traits in hushed tones of veneration. In today’s context it is almost impossible for us to imagine that such a man ever existed.
My task is to bring this historical monument to life, and to relate various aspects of Marshall’s remarkable life to the themes of this conference. I’ll first sketch a portrait of Marshall’s character and moral habits developed during the interwar years. His experiences during these years, we now know, prepared him for the enormous responsibilities he would assume as the organizer of Allied victory in the Second World War.
Focusing on the prewar period may be thought to be a little unusual; I believe, however, that the prewar years served as a crucible that forged Marshall’s character and strengthened his special relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Congress, and the citizens of America.
Next, I’ll link our understanding of the kind of officer Marshall had become by the time he was appointed the Army chief of staff in 1939 to the theme of readiness by analyzing his role during the difficult months between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and American entry into the war in December 1941. Those twenty-seven months were also the first twenty-seven months of Marshall’s tenure as chief of staff and coincided with stunning Axis military victories and the subsequent need to prepare the United States for war. Marshall later called these years the most difficult of all during the war.2 The challenges of preparing for a global coalition war and of mobilizing and integrating every aspect of the nation’s resources into that effort were unprecedented in the American experience. Marshall also found the task made more difficult by the fact that he had to accomplish it while Americans were sharply divided over the nature of the nation’s role in that war. And finally, Marshall’s task was complicated in the period 1939-1941 by the formidable presence of his enigmatic Commander-in-Chief, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Marshall’s most pressing role during this period was to win presidential and congressional approval for a crash effort to bolster American preparedness through the building of a balanced military capability. As Marshall saw it, rearming America was an absolute priority. Yet in the days following the fall of France and with the rearmament process barely under way, Roosevelt concluded that the nation must simultaneously aid Britain in its lonely struggle against Germany. Fears that the modest gains in American readiness thus far realized would be dissipated by FDR’s eagerness to sustain Britain brought Marshall into conflict with the president–and into the harsh glare of partisan politics–when congressional opponents of Roosevelt’s policies sought to draw Marshall into the foreign policy debate.
Marshall’s actions during those twenty-seven months provide useful insights into the relationship between ethics and readiness. Moreover, as a demonstration of how Marshall was able to stand steadfastly for his beliefs while at the same time maintaining his loyalty to his civilian Commander-in-Chief, his actions during that period are also an emulatory perspective on American civil-military relations.
The Shaping of Marshall’s Character
Immediately after World War I, making good on his promise to share insights on his successes in World War I with cadets at his alma mater, the Virginia Military Institute, Marshall provided VMI’s superintendent his observations on what successful leadership in combat in the American Army in France.
Optimism, stamina, love of one’s soldiers, determination and loyalty were qualities for Marshall that distinguished successful officers from the common pack. They were the solid qualities on which a commander could depended, qualities that would make a large organization function effectively, qualities that would be the bedrock of readiness. “When conditions are difficult, the command is depressed and everyone seems critical and pessimistic, you must be especially cheerful and optimistic,” he wrote. Especially then, leaders need to lay aside “any thought of personal fatigue and display marked energy in looking after the comfort of [their] organization, inspecting the lines, and preparing for tomorrow.” This ability to reach deep within one’s personal reserves of stamina and perseverance to lift up and inspire exhausted and dispirited soldiers during such low points was an important Marshall hallmark of leadership. Indeed, more alarming and disastrous the situation, “the more determined must be your attitude.” Finally, Marshall valued loyalty enormously as a leadership virtue. The most successful officers, in his view, made “a point of extreme loyalty, in thought and deed, both to their superiors personally and to one’s efforts to execute their superior’s plans or policies. There could be no role for individual ego in a soldier’s respect for superior authority, he counseled. Indeed, “The less you agree with the policies of your superiors, the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.”3
From his vantage point in the War Department’s Operations Division in 1941, then-Brigadier General Dwight D. Eisenhower saw Marshall every day and noted the types of personalities that did not win favor with his boss. Eisenhower believed Marshall viewed with particular distaste “self-seeking officers” who sought to bring pressure to bear on their own behalf. (In the competition in 1939 as FDR was seeking a new Army chief of staff Marshall had been true to this trait. “My strength with the army,” he told friends seeking to promote his candidacy, “has rested on the well known fact that I attended strictly to business, and enlisted no influence of any sort at any time. That, in army circles, has been my greatest strength in this matter of future appointments, especially.”)4 Another category that vexed him, he told Ike, was officers who could do detailed work but would not take the responsibility for making decisions. Similarly, he objected to men who immersed themselves in minor details and so lost sight of general issues. The group in disfavor also included those who loved the limelight and those who had trouble getting along with others. Nor could he stand pessimists. He would never give command to an officer who was less than enthusiastic about the post or operation in question.5
Of all these qualities of leadership the one most prized by Marshall and perhaps most reflective of his character was that of candor. Frankness of expression and the inability to quibble were in his mind directly related to trust and sincerity, elements that reached to the very core of one’s integrity. Simply put, Marshall gave–and expected to get–the unvarnished facts of a case and he developed early in his career a reputation for straightforwardness and integrity that in his later career gave him enormous credibility with Roosevelt, the Congress and the American people. Three brief anecdotes from Marshall’s early career illustrate how this reputation for candor developed and suggest how his resulting credibility became a priceless asset for Marshall in the execution of his wartime duties.
The first occurred in France in 1917 where then-Major Marshall was serving as a staff officer in the American 1st Infantry Division. During an inspection, General Pershing became unhappy with the level of training in the division and criticized the division commander in front of his subordinates. Loyal to his commander and convinced the humiliation was unjustified Marshall rose to his defense. When Pershing tried to ignore his protests and depart, Marshall exploded, placing his hand on Pershing’s arm to prevent him from leaving and, according to Marshall’s own recollections, practically forcing the general to listen. An extraordinary lecture followed, which identified Pershing’s Headquarters as the source of the problems. Pershing’s offer to look into the situation did not satisfy the now thoroughly-aroused Marshall, who figured he was already in it up to his neck and “might as well not try to float but to splash a bit.” There was no need to look into it, he told Pershing, “it’s a fact.”6
Marshall’s fellow officers were horrified with the scene, but Pershing took the major’s tirade calmly, reminding Marshall that he needed to appreciate the troubles GHQ had. Marshall shot back: “We have them every day and many a day and we have to solve every one of them by night.”7
That ended the conversation and Pershing’s visit. Convinced Marshall would be immediately relieved, his fellow officers all bade him farewell. But they had severely misjudged Pershing. Marshall had in fact won his respect by his candid outburst; rather than relieving Marshall, the AEF commander frequently consulted him thereafter on First Division problems. By the summer of 1918 Marshall had been promoted to colonel and assigned to Pershing’s own staff and within two years had become the general’s personal aide. A long and vitally important relationship had been forged.
For Marshall, the experience served as a highly instructive lesson in leadership. Pershing’s reaction to candid counsel was unusual; Marshall had never before seen a man who would listen so intently to severe criticisms. “Pershing never held it against you personally,” he marvelled. “He might not agree with you in any degree, but he listened to very, very frank criticisms in regard to his actions.”8
Another later episode again illustrates Marshall’s commitment to providing frank and independent advice to his superiors. As the Army’s deputy chief of staff in 1938 Marshall harbored ideas about the need to rearm the nation that clashed with isolationist fears that the United States would be drawn into the impending European war. In the aftermath of the Munich appeasement Roosevelt saw as clearly as anyone that there would soon be a war but adopted the attitude that Britain and France should be encouraged to defeat the Germans by themselves when war came, with the great American arsenal providing them the resources necessary to accomplish that task. But such a strategy, if made public, would expose the President to the wrath of the isolationists who would surely charge him with unneutral behavior and putting the nation’s security at risk.
On November 14, 1938 FDR convened a conference at the White House at which he proposed to build 10,000 war planes, the ostensible aim being the bolstering the strength of the Army Air Corps. Marshall and his chief thought they were in attendance to discuss that program. FDR’s real purpose was to supply the planes to the European democracies in the hope that such assistance might forestall the impending war, and thereby American involvement.
Attending his first conference with the president, Marshall was shocked by FDR’s plan and astonished that no one else had questioned the president’s proposal. After his presentation, FDR indicated that he thought that he had made a good case for his program. The discussion then ran around the room, finding much soothing support for the proposal, until FDR turned to Marshall sitting quietly off to the side. “Don’t you think so, George?” he asked.9
Marshall later admitted a flash of irritation over “such a misrepresentation of our intimacy.” He was never a first-name man. “I don’t think the President ever did that again,” he said later. At the time his response was more direct: “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with you at all.”10 Accounts by participants recount that a startled look came over FDR’s face and the conference abruptly ended. Afterward, Marshall’s associates, who had been eyeing him in silence, once again came by to shake his hand and to offer condolences. “Well, it’s been nice knowing you,” said Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau. As with the rest, Morgenthau made it obvious that he believed that Marshall’s bluntness had just ended his army career.11
In fact, it had not. FDR never again referred to the incident nor did he display any resentment toward Marshall. “Maybe he thought that I would tell him the truth so far as I was personally concerned,” Marshall speculated later, “which I certainly tried to do in all our conversations.”12 As with the earlier Pershing incident, Marshall’s bluntness impressed rather than alienated his superior. FDR apparently valued an officer who would tell the truth rather than what he thought the president wanted to hear.13
Marshall’s relationship with Roosevelt rested on the belief that frankness and candor were essential elements of his advisory position. He would best fulfill the responsibilities entrusted to him by the nation by establishing and demonstrating that he was a professional soldier and a man of integrity. “I never haggled with the president,” he recalled later. “I swallowed the little things so that I could go to bat on the big ones. I never handled a matter apologetically, and I was never contentious.”14
The record soon showed that predictions of an early end to Marshall’s career were widely premature. In the spring of 1939 Roosevelt began the search for a replacement for Army chief of staff General Malin Craig who was due to retire on 1 September. In April FDR decided for Marshall. Without informing anyone else, Roosevelt summoned Marshall to the White House to give him the news. “General Marshall,” he said, “I have it in mind to choose you as the next Chief of Staff of the United States Army. What do you think of that?”
“Nothing, Mr. President,” Marshall replied, “except to remind you that I have the habit of saying exactly what I think. And that, as you know,” he added, “can often be unpleasing. Is that all right?”
Marshall recalls that Roosevelt grinned and said, “Yes.” Marshall remained persistent. “Mr. President, you said yes pleasantly. But I have to remind you again that it may be unpleasant.” The President continued to grin. “I know,” he said. But he did not add “George.”15
At the outset of their relationship as commander-in-chief and chief of staff, the two men had staked out an area of understanding marked by candor. Marshall had not connived for the position (though he had coveted it) and he had neither covered up any of his views nor professed opinions that were not genuine. And to his credit, FDR had not invited any such behavior. The job of chief of staff came to Marshall without strings, with his integrity intact, and he was therefore positioned to provide his commander-in-chief candid advice insulated and independent from the wizardry of FDR’s beguiling personality.
The Ethical Dimensions of Aid to Britain, 1940-41
Just how much ethical independence existed in the FDR-Marshall relationship was tested in the period after the fall of France in the summer of 1940 by the tension between Marshall’s deep commitment to improving the army’s readiness and Roosevelt’s commitment to providing Britain the resources necessary to ensure its survival.
From the beginning of the war Marshall had sought to convince the president, Congress and the public that the United States was in a bad way in terms of its military capabilities. The army in November 1939 contained fewer than 175,000 men in nine understrength divisions and ranked only nineteenth in the world, trailing, among others, Spain, Portugal, and Bulgaria.
Roosevelt was not opposed to preparedness, however his concept centered on airplanes rather than a balanced force. For his part Marshall proposed a $675 million dollar crash program that called for the creation of a balanced force of 1.25 million men by 1941, the bare minimum needed in his mind for a nation still at peace but prepared for war.
When Marshall and Treasury Secretary Morgenthau went to the White House to ask FDR for the necessary authorization, the president breezily dismissed the program. Morgenthau then asked the President if he would hear Marshall. “I know exactly what he would say,” Roosevelt replied. “There is no necessity for me to hear him at all.”
According to Morgenthau’s diary, Marshall, his face red and his temper barely under control, then asked the president for three minutes to speak. Marshall then passionately presented a warning about the threat faced by the dire straits of its armed forces. “Did the president not understand the danger? Did he not understand that his inaction was putting the nation at risk? If you don’t do something,” he concluded, “I don’t know what is going to happen to this country.” Two days later Roosevelt sent the program to Congress and the Congress soon after appropriated $900 million dollars for it.16
The presidential and congressional shift on defense expenditures were clearly also influenced by the disastrous defeat of the French in the summer of 1940 and the isolation of Great Britain as it stoically endured the Battle of Britain through the summer and fall. Opinions were nonetheless divided on how best to deal with this threatening development. Should the United States provide substantial military assistance to Great Britain to ensure its survival? Must the United States become a belligerent itself or should it decree that a German victory resulted in no clear and present danger to American vital interests and that it should maintain its historic isolationist policy toward European war?17
Marshall found himself at the center of the debate. Instinctively supportive of FDR’s interventionist perspective, Marshall nonetheless wrestled with the troubling question of whether aid to Britain should take precedence over the readiness of American forces.
This question was brought into sharp focus when FDR pressed Marshall in the days after Dunkirk to use American military equipment and ammunition to replenish the lost British stocks. Torn between sympathy for Britain and the necessity of meeting his own defense obligations, Marshall struggled with a matter of conscience that would not be completely settled until the passage of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941. The Neutrality Acts forbade the sale or transfer of munitions and implements of war to belligerent powers. Moreover Marshall believed only a few items—mostly obsolete weapons and ammunition from World War I–could be spared; otherwise he saw little help for the British. “The shortage is terrible,” he explained to FDR, “and we have no ammunition for antiaircraft guns and will not for six months. So if we give them the guns they could not do anything with them. Antitank guns, the situation is similar…50 caliber, our situation is the same.”18
After some legal gymnastics the Roosevelt administration used a loophole in the neutrality legislation to transfer these reserve stocks to Britain, where they were quickly consumed by the British war machine. Believing further diminution of resources unwise, Marshall appealed to FDR to consider more carefully the effect of such transfers on the readiness of American armed forces. FDR proved more prescient than his military advisor in this case. He was convinced the survival of Great Britain was vital to American national security and thus just the place to be investing scarce American military resources.19
Marshall believed FDR was ignoring the main point of his argument: the question as to whether Britain could survive at all. Ironically, Marshall’s thinking seems to have mirrored that of Winston Churchill when he had withheld Royal Air Force squadrons during the Battle for France to preserve them for the Battle for Britain. Marshall feared that so committing America’s meager munitions reserves ran the risk of falling into the trap of providing resources inadequate to the task of saving Britain, while at the same time increasing American vulnerability.20
As if anticipating this dilemma, Congress in June forbade the sale of additional surplus materiel unless the chief of naval operations and chief of staff certified that it was not “essential” for American defense. Given his fears, Marshall faced an ethical dilemma. It was possible–but not provable–that the nation could improve its defensive position by sending additional aid to Britain. If Britain fell, however, it would be very difficult to justify the diversion. One of Marshall’s staff put it more bluntly: “If we were required to mobilize after having released guns necessary for mobilization and were found to be short, everyone who was a party to the decision might expect to be hanging from a lamp post.”21
As Britain weathered the German blitz during the summer and fall of 1940, FDR increasingly demanded that the Army allocate a larger share of American war plane production to Britain. In fact, he expected that every other B-17 be turned over to the British as it came off the assembly line. Expert by now at finding legal loopholes, Roosevelt blandly suggested that the Army send bombers to Britain for “combat testing.” Trapped between the congressional requirement for certification and his commander-in-chief’s policy, Marshall was not the kind to ignore the spirit in favor of the letter of the law, and his conscience was troubled. He spent many hours riding his horse along the bridle paths at Fort Myer pondering the issue. Finally, after wrestling with his doubts, he told FDR that he would recommend the transfer, and immediately felt better about it.
“We turned over fifteen Flying Fortresses to the British for experimental purposes,” he recalled later. “I was a little bit ashamed of this because I felt that I was straining at the subject to get around the resolution of Congress.” He added, “Actually when we got into it and did it, it soon became apparent that the important thing was exactly that–to let them have planes for experimental purposes. And we should have done it earlier because we found difficulties with the planes that the Air Corps had not perceived at all.”22
Such recollections might easily be characterized as juicy rationalizations, perhaps, and I am willing to concede the point. What is striking here is that this occasion is considered by Marshall to be the only “duplicity” of his career. And Marshall could have taken comfort in the fact that the Congress soon followed suit, taking its sympathies as well as its doubts into the Roosevelt camp in March by passing the Lend-Lease Act, and thus ensuring Great Britain full access to America’s arsenal of democracy.
During this time period Marshall’s influence with the Congress grew enormously. In congressional hearings he projected an image of cool professionalism, thorough mastery of the facts, truthfulness, and nonpartisanship. Marshall’s candor–his refusal to avoid ugly facts–only added to image. “He would tell the truth even if it hurt his cause,” Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn remembered. “Of all the men who ever testified before any committee on which I served,” Rayburn said, “there is no one of them who has the influence with a committee of the House that General Marshall has.” The reason was simple, he continued, “It is because when he takes the witness stand, we forget whether we are Republicans or Democrats. We remember that we are in the presence of a man who is telling the truth, as he sees it, about the problems he is discussing.”23
Speaker Rayburn’s commentary reminds us once again of the priceless value of one’s integrity.
Marshall and the Ethics of Civilian Control
Partly obscured by differences separating Roosevelt and Marshall over readiness and aid to Britain is the manner in which the commander-in-chief and his senior army advisor resolved their problems. Marshall clearly was not alone in seeing aid to Britain as a dubious proposition. Many sources of influential support for his position existed outside the administration, yet he chose not to exploit the opportunities offered by such allies. Instead, he directed his objections forthrightly to the president and he loyally accepted FDR’s decision when it was reached. Once the decision was made, Marshall did his utmost to make the president’s policy a success. As he remarked later, “I had early made up my mind that I, so far as possible, was going to operate as a member of the team, political and otherwise military; that while it would be difficult at times and [there] would be strong pressures for me to appeal to the public, I thought it was far more important in the long run that I try to do my convincing within the team, rather than to take action publicly contrary to the desires of the President.”24 Neither by footdragging nor by coy maneuvering would Marshall presume to challenge the legitimacy of the president’s authority.
Roosevelt deeply appreciated Marshall’s abiding loyalty to the principle of civilian control. Responding one day to Speaker Rayburn’s praise of Marshall’s integrity and effectiveness with the Congress, FDR insisted that no one admired Marshall more than he did: “I’m not always able to approve his recommendations and history may prove me wrong. But when I disapprove them, I don’t have to look over my shoulder to see…whether he’s going to the Capitol, to lobby against me, or whether he’s going back to the War Department. I know he’s going back to the War Department, to give me the most loyal support as chief of staff that any President could wish.”25
The passing years have brought increasing emphasis on Marshall’s role as a soldier-statesman who believed that civilian authority should control the military and that armed forces should exist to aid in carrying out the foreign policy outlined by the president and Congress. He was comfortable about the American constitutional system as he found it. He believed that military men had a duty to explain the needs of their services and the requirements of their forces to carry out assignments directed by the commander-in-chief. A responsible officer had the right to question a policy he considered wrong or mistaken and to discuss thoroughly a proposal. But there was no right to challenge publicly the wishes of the commander-in-chief. Refusal to accept that rule on the part of an officer meant the destruction of his own power to command. To Marshall, such resistance of the armed forces to the president weakened the fabric of a democratic society.
Marshall’s restrained and professional behavior during the politically-explosive tangles with FDR over the tension between readiness and aid to Britain provides a polar star for members of America’s armed forces to guide upon as they consider their civil-military responsibilities. He did not attempt to advance his cause through leaks to favored journalists. He did not attempt end runs of FDR to the president’s congressional critics. And he did not publish in the New York Times orWashington Post op-ed pieces articulating alternative solutions to the administration’s policies.26 Instead he privately provided his commander-in-chief independent and candid advice, not partisan advocacy of alternative policies, and he loyally supported and actively assisted their execution once the president had decided.
Marshall’s thoughts on civilian control and military subordination to civil authority remain to me the most articulate I have read on the topic. “[The American Armed Forces] have a great asset,” Marshall observed, “and that is that our people, our countrymen, do not distrust us and do not fear us. They don’t harbor any ideas that we intend to alter the government of our country or the nature of this government in any way. This is a sacred trust….We are completely devoted, we are a member of a priesthood really, the sole purpose of which is to defend the republic. We concentrate our time and attention on that subject. That doesn’t mean that we don’t understand other things, but it simply means that we devote our time and attention exclusively to this. I don’t want to do anything…to damage the high regard in which professional soldiers in the Army are held by our people….”27
Conclusion
I have tried in an impressionistic way to illustrate how the record of Marshall’s interwar career provides such useful insights to those in the profession of arms. General Marshall appreciated the priceless nature of his own integrity and credibility and seemed to understand that his behavior was interpreted by others as a larger reflection of the integrity of the armed forces in general. Indeed, his every action seemed governed by these considerations.
In his poem, “George C. Marshall (1880-1959),” Thomas Hawkins Johnson, an Army officer himself, captured nicely the central role that integrity played in Marshall’s life:
In the photograph there are two rows of men,
Twelve or thirteen in all. Their drab uniforms
Look stiff in the midday glare: boots, riding
Breeches, thick wool blouses over khaki
Shirts strapped in with polished Sam Browne belts.
Hatless, they seem to squint at the cameraman,
Though it may be only the poor focus—still,
One recognizes all of them slowly—Bradley,
Patton, Bedell Smith, even the young balding
Eisenhower smiling at some lost remark.
In the rear row, on the end, stands Major Marshall,
Sober, impassive, his gaze impenetrable.
Perhaps such a photograph exists, taken,
Say, 1931 at the Infantry School,
Fort Benning; or perhaps it’s only pasted
In the nation’s worn album of apocrypha.
Because many events have intersected we
Allow that inference: cause: a small, dull army,
A few ambitious men trapped in
A generation of waiting, and one careful
Demon of integrity. The picture snapped,
They stroll toward toward the officer’s club for lunch,
Their conversation stunted in the heat.
Marshall, walking behind, keeps staring back.28
“One careful demon of integrity:” the ethical legacy that George Catlett Marshall left for the American profession of arms.
NOTES
1. Forrest C. Pogue, “George C. Marshall on Civil-Military Relationships in the United States,” in The United States Military Under the Constitution of the United States, 1789-1989, ed. Richard H. Kohn (New York, 1991), 193. 2. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1942 (NY, 1966), xiv. 3. Thomas Parrish,Roosevelt and Marshall: Partners in Politics and war (New York, 1989), 37-38. 4. Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 303-304. 5. Leonard Mosley, Marshall: Hero for Our Times(New York, 1982), 127. 6. Marshall interview, 5 April 1957, George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences for Forrest C. Pogue, ed. Larry I. Bland (Lexington, Virginia, 1991), 197-198. (Hereafter Marshall interview and date, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, with appropriate page number.) 7. Ibid. 8. Marshall interview, 6 March 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 111. 9. Mosley, 121. 10. Marshall interview, 6 March 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 109. 11. Mosley, 122. 12. Marshall interview, March 6, 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 109. 13. Mark A. Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century(Boston, 1989), 65. 14. Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 23. 15. Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants & Their War (New York, 1987), 109. 16. The preceding paragraphs pertaining to this incident rest on Pogue, “George C. Marshall on Civil-Military Relationships in the United States,” 206. 17. David G. Haglund, “George C. Marshall and the Question of Military Aid to England, May-June 1940,” Journal of Contemporary History 15 (1980): 745-760. 18. This and the following discussion rest upon Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 50-53. 19. A. J. Bacevich, “”Civilian Control: A useful Fiction?” Joint Forces Quarterly (Autumn/Winter 1994-95): 78. 20. Haglund, 745-760. 21. Pogue, Ordeal and Hope, 53. 22. Marshall interview, 15 January 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 288. 23. Parrish, 137. 24. Marshall interview, 22 January 1957, Bland, Interviews and Reminiscences, 297. 25. Parrish, 137. 26. Bacevich, 78. 27. Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945 (New York, 1973), 458-459.
28. Thomas H. Johnson, “George C. Marshall (1880-1959),” no date, unpublished poem, in author’s possession."
George C. Marshall: A Study in Character - George C. Marshall
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George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century
Marshall was the architect of both the Allied World War II victory and key U.S. Cold War policies, most notably the European Recovery Program, known as “the ...
Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on October 16, 1959 General George Catlett Marshall Jr. died at the age of 78
Rest in peace George Catlett Marshall Jr.
As a USMA cadet [1976-1980] I was instructed on George C. Marshall' background role in WWI, his planning skills, the between-the-war years, Chief of Staff War Department [Army] during WWII, the Marshall Plan and his other achievements as Secretary of State.
George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century
Marshall was the architect of both the Allied World War II victory and key U.S. Cold War policies, most notably the European Recovery Program, known as “the Marshall Plan,” for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He is generally considered our greatest soldier-statesman since George Washington. By assessing his extraordinary accomplishments, character, and leadership abilities, this lecture by Mark A. Stoler attempts to explain why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TL6dUwMn04
Images:
1. General George C Marshall - U.S. Army Chief of Staff
2. George and Katherine Marshall in front of Dodona Manor, 1949
3. The Marshalls on the lawn of Dodona with Mrs. Marshall’s daughter, Molly Winn, and Molly’s children, 1944
4. The Marshall House in Leesburg, Virginia was Marshall‘s private residence from 1941 until his death in 1959
Biographies
1. georgecmarshall.org/marshall
2. background on the George C. Marshall International Center from georgecmarshall.org
1. Background from {[https://www.georgecmarshall.org/marshall]}
Biography of George C. Marshall from The George C. Marshall International Center
Who Was General George C. Marshall?
General George C. Marshall is considered by many to be one of the greatest modern-day American heroes. He is recognized as the organizer of the Allied Victory in World War Two and the architect of the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) that changed the face of the world and earned Marshall the Nobel Peace Prize. From the beginning of his 44-year public career as a graduate of Virginia Military Institute in 1901 to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, Marshall’s decorations, awards, and honorary degrees total more than 60, and include military, civilian, and substantial foreign recognition.
Amid his extraordinary accomplishments, Marshall was most appreciated and beloved for who he was. He did not seek fame and earned an uncontested reputation for being an honest, humble, and resolute leader. His personal contributions to the efforts and development of the United States and other countries during some of the most significant events in modern history are remarkable, not just for the magnitude of what he accomplished, but because of the incorruptible, selfless integrity with which he served.
George C. Marshall, His Early Career
George C. Marshall was born December 31, 1880, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, into the family of a prominent local businessman whose company manufactured coke ovens and who participated in real estate ventures. His comfortable childhood was filled with episodes of fun and mischief, shaped by the love and discipline of his parents.
In his early education he was a lackluster student, but later when he overheard his older brother Stuart beg his mother not to let George go to the Virginia Military Institute because he thought it would disgrace the family name, George was inspired to outshine his brother.
His career at VMI was marked by an uncommon determination to excel, and in his senior year he was selected as First Captain of the Cadet Corps, the most honored position in that institution.
1902 – 1929, The Beginning of a Military Career
George C. Marshall obtained his commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1902 as the result of an interview with no less than President McKinley. This interview led to his being authorized to take the required examination, his success at which made possible a commendation by his senator on Marshall’s behalf to the Secretary of War. Immediately after receiving his commission he married Elizabeth “Lily” Carter Coles, his college sweetheart from Lexington, Virginia. His first assignment was with the 30th Infantry in the Philippines, part of the U.S. occupation to quell an insurrection by natives. This assignment in leading troops in combat was the beginning of a long career of learning the many duties and functions of an Army officer, vital to an officer destined to achieve the highest rank in the service. His duties prior to the World War I included service in mapping remote parts of Texas, a stint as student, and later as instructor, at Fort Leavenworth’s officer Staff School. As the top student in his class, his subsequent assignment as a Leavenworth instructor was a distinct honor indicative of his evident potential. This was the first of many key teaching assignments that marked his military career. His assignment with the Massachusetts Militia, forerunner of the National Guard, and duty with the 4th Infantry at three different military bases, gave him insight into the range and structure of the U.S. Army in peacetime. His duty as aide-de-camp for General Hunter Liggett in the Philippines and later to General James Bell in the U.S. afforded him invaluable experience in effective staff work that would eventually propel him to a position that proved to be his forte in World War I and later years.
His assignment as Assistant Chief of Operations for the show-horse 1st Division in France in 1917 gave him the opportunity to distinguish himself amongst the senior Army leadership as one of the most promising staff officers in the command. Ironically this opportunity arose as the result of a characteristically Marshall reaction to what he perceived as an injustice. His challenge of the formidable Commanding General John J. Pershing in front of the 1st Division staff for his unfair criticism of the division and its commander (Maj. Gen. William Sibert) was unprecedented conduct for a middle-grade officer. His crisp and meticulous critique of the failings of Pershing’s General Staff that had undermined the division’s performance stunned General Pershing and the assembled staff.
Pershing said nothing. He departed abruptly, thereby persuading Marshall’s peers that his career was over. But Marshall’s determination to speak “truth to power” proved an incalculable asset to his superiors and belied the pervasive belief that unvarnished candor to superiors was career suicide. Marshall’s honesty and intellectual rigor soon earned him appointment to the Operations Staff of the General Headquarters. In this capacity he drafted the operations order moving 400,000 American troops from the St Mihiel salient to the Meuse-Argonne offensive to join some 200,000 Americans already engaged in a complex 72-hour movement. Marshall’s order was viewed as a masterstroke of brilliant staff work and marked him as a likely future Chief of Staff of the Army though he was then only a Lieutenant Colonel.
After the Armistice, Marshall remained in France as Chief of Staff of the 8th Army until he was selected to be General Pershing’s Aide-de-Camp. As such, he accompanied Pershing on a victory tour of the Allies’ capitals which gave him the opportunity to meet several of the individuals who became prominent leaders in World War II. His service as Pershing’s ADC while the latter served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army provided Marshall insight into the Army’s dealing with a presidential administration, the federal bureaucracy and, most importantly, with the Congress. In 1924 when General Pershing stepped down as Chief of Staff, Marshall sought appointment as a line officer and was named Deputy Commander of the elite 15th Infantry in Tientsin, China.This was one more assignment during which he could expand the scope of his acquaintance with promising officers and evaluate those who did measure up, a sort of virtual “Black Book.”
This methodical process of observation became a part of the critical personnel decisions that Marshall would have to make when he rose to command the U.S. Army as it mobilized for World War II. It was at the end of this tour in 1927 that his beloved but frail first wife Lily Coles died. Marshall had initially been assigned as an instructor at the prestigious Army War College. After his wife’s death, he was given the choice of three posts, and he opted to be Assistant Commandant at the Fort Benning Infantry School, another excellent vantage point to expand and refine his “Black Book.”
It was in this assignment that George Marshall made one of his most enduring contributions to the Army by promoting the reformed infantry doctrine and training to replace infantry attacks in mass formations with assault by small units by fire and maneuver. He revamped training methods to keep operations and orders simple, to provide officers flexibility in responding to changing situations, and to concentrate on field exercises in lieu of lectures. This change in tactics and training saved thousands of American infantrymen’s lives in World War II, which was a war of movement, as opposed to one of static defense that he had observed from the front in World War I. During Marshall’s five years at Fort Benning, according to Marshall’s biographer, Forrest Pogue, 150 future World War II generals passed through in training, and some 50 more future generals served on the Infantry School’s staff.
Early Career, 1930 – 1939
While at Fort Benning, George C. Marshall courted and married in October 1930 Katherine Boyce Tupper Brown, a charming Baltimore widow with three young children. His subsequent assignments with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Georgia and South Carolina in 1932-33 gave Marshall a window into the character and ability of young American men who would serve in his citizen army in the coming war. Following his service with the CCC, he returned to a recurring role in his life, that of teacher serving as the Senior Instructor with the Illinois National Guard. His focus in his tour from 1933 to 1936 was to apply his infantry training concepts to the poorly motivated and trained National Guard units in recognition that the citizen-soldier would carry the burden in any future war. He concentrated his efforts on enhancing the professionalism of the Guard soldiers, and especially of the officers. He also developed Guard command staff structures for the Guard while making unit training more realistic and more efficient. He also pressed the Army for the assignment of higher caliber officers to all the state National Guard commands. Marshall’s promotion to brigadier general in October 1936 was, as he recognized, and for which he had gently campaigned, an essential step toward realizing his interest in becoming Chief of Staff of the Army.
His promotion earned him command of the 5th Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division and the position of post commander of Vancouver Barracks, situated just north of Portland, Oregon. This proved to be a very satisfying assignment for him both professionally and personally. In addition to obtaining a long-sought and significant troop command, traditionally viewed as an indispensable way station to the pinnacle of the U.S. Army, Marshall was also responsible for 35 CCC camps in Oregon and southern Washington. As post commander, Marshall made a concerted effort to cultivate relations with the city of Portland and to enhance the image of the U.S. Army in the region. With the CCC he initiated a series of measures to improve the morale of the participants and to make the experience beneficial in their later life. He started a newspaper for the CCC region that provided a vehicle to promote CCC successes, and he initiated a variety of programs that developed their skills and improved their health. Marshall’s inspections of the CCC camps gave him and his wife Katherine the chance to enjoy the beauty of the American Northwest and made the assignment what he called “the most instructive service I ever had, and the most interesting.”
In July 1938 George Marshall arrived at his new assignment as Head of the War Plans Division at Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C. While Marshall was widely regarded as a brilliant staff officer, he regretted giving up his troop command and the satisfaction of working with the CCC in the magnificent setting of the Northwest. War clouds were gathering in Europe as Hitler’s aggressive actions slowly began to persuade European democracies that they could be constrained only by the use of force. Concurrently, Japan pursued its conquests in China and threatened other Western interests in the Pacific. Distasteful as it was for Americans, war planning became essential, and Marshall was clearly the officer to lead these efforts. Within three months, he was elevated to the Deputy Chief of Staff position. In this capacity he attended a White House conference in November 1938 that proved a fateful encounter that shaped not only his career, but also the course of American history in the 20th Century.
At that council of his senior advisers, President Roosevelt proposed to built 10,000 aircraft for European democracies to forestall U.S. involvement in the impending war. Marshall was stunned by the proposal which made no provision for training of flight crews and other logistical challenges. More importantly, this initiative would be at the expense of America’s need for more troops, tanks and all the other material required to prepare for war. When Roosevelt went around the room asking the attendees for their reaction, Marshall was further astounded that all of his military colleagues assented to the proposal with which he knew they really did not agree.
When the President came to Marshall, he asked, “Don’t you think so, George?” Marshall, who was attending his first conference with Roosevelt, was vexed at the President’s “misrepresentation of our intimacy” by the use of his first name. Nonetheless, he firmly replied, “I’m sorry Mr. President, I don’t agree with you at all.” This apparently startled the President and the meeting adjourned abruptly thereafter. As with his confrontation with Pershing in 1917, Marshall’s fellow participants assumed his compulsion to express his opinion bluntly, yet honestly, spelled the end of his career in Washington. To his credit, Roosevelt recognized Marshall’s character and came to value his unfailing honesty. In April 1939, Marshall was summoned to the White House, and Roosevelt selected him to become Chief of Staff of the Army, thereby vaulting him over several dozen more senior officers. Marshall was honored, but he made clear in his response to the President, that, “I have the habit of saying exactly what I think,” to which he added, “and that can be unpleasing. Is that all right?” Roosevelt’s acceptance with a grin only inspired Marshall to remind the President again that his candor may be “unpleasant.” Roosevelt maintained his grin and said with resignation, “I know.” This exchange cemented the terms of probably the most important operational relationship in American military history.
Winston Churchill called him “the noblest Roman”; President Harry Truman said he was “the greatest military man America ever produced”; and U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson considered Marshall the finest soldier he had ever known.
In 1939 General George C. Marshall became U.S. Army Chief of Staff–the highest rank in the Army. The day of his promotion, however, would prove prophetic: Hitler invaded Poland, and Marshall’s work was cut out for him.
While Americans watched the advance of Hitler across Europe with horror, Marshall began to prepare for what he believed was inevitable armed conflict. By the time the United States went to war in 1941, Marshall’s leadership, foresight, and integrity had led to the expansion of the Army from 172,000 men to more than a million. By early 1945, the Army had grown to more than eight million – an achievement that required brilliant planning, persuasion, and execution skills.
Throughout World War II, Marshall was at the heart of solving many problems – strategy, supply, budgeting, leadership, and battle priority. Most important was Marshall’s role in the outcome of the war: the Allied Victory.
By March 1942, Marshall was firming up the concept to consolidate the Allied armies and use that amazing force to defeat the Germans. His plan was to build a huge U.S. army, ship it to England, cross the Channel, and invade France. Ultimately, the execution of the plan was stalled many times over, much to the concern of Marshall, and required 90 separate meetings before being launched in 1944. But what Marshall predicted then we know today: Normandy proved that the power of a coordinated, worldwide Allied strategy was the way to win the war.
As U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall was indispensable. He negotiated wartime strategy alongside President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, and he was responsible for the smooth operation of the Alliance and the execution of the Normandy Invasion. His counsel and leadership also played a key role in the defeat of Japan in 1945.
In 1945, General George C. Marshall was released from duty as Army Chief of Staff and began his career as a statesman. Serving as a Special Presidential Envoy in China, where he experienced the intractable nature of Chinese politics. His mission was to negotiate a settlement between China’s two warring forces and keep the opportunistic Soviets from taking over–an assignment that was both frustrating and impossible. The extreme elements of the Communists and Nationalists were in charge and prevented a settlement, and Marshall eventually ended his efforts to unify China. The China mission was one of the few disappointments of Marshall’s career.
Marshall was sworn in as Secretary of State in 1947, and he found himself again focused on Europe, where conditions were deplorable. After World War II, Europe had experienced a bitter winter, and food was scarce in both victorious and defeated nations. People were dying in the streets from starvation, there was virtually no industry, crime rates were rising dramatically, and the threat of Soviet expansion was ever-increasing.
After a foreign ministers conference, Marshall was convinced that the Soviet Union was using the plight of the European countries, particularly Germany, to its advantage and that immediate action was needed. Marshall began an extensive, oft-criticized campaign to revive Europe. What ultimately become known as the Marshall Plan was, according to historian Randall B. Woods, the single most successful foreign aid program in modern history, and ensured stability and democracy in Europe.
During his years as a statesman, Marshall also served as President of the American Red Cross from 1949 to 1950, and Secretary of Defense from 1950 to 1951 during the Korean Conflict. In 1953, he headed the United States delegation to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and later that year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian efforts and contributions to world peace and understanding.
The Marshall Plan
As Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall had an enlightened and visionary attitude toward dealing with Europe after World War II. The world wanted to punish and punish harshly–particularly Germany. Yet Marshall believed that to support and stabilize Europe, a conciliatory approach to reconstruction, including that of Germany, was absolutely necessary.
At the time devastated European countries were being tempted by communism because it represented hope from post-war economic, political, and social despair. To ensure freedom, Marshall and others began imagining a program that would restore the economic health of Europe–a program that would rely on countries acting cooperatively with the aid and assistance of the United States.
What is now known as the Marshall Plan was broad-based, and dealt with critical issues such as trade agreements, loan repayments, and financial aid. It was not unanimously embraced. Many Americans, including some members of Congress, favored isolationism. The Soviets did not want to reveal their needs to other countries or accept East-West trade, which would ruin their plan to control the commerce of the Eastern Bloc. France, which had been invaded three times in a century, did not want a strong Germany. Again and again, however, Marshall communicated that a strong Germany was a strong Europe. By December 1947, Congress approved a $600 million measure to provide temporary aid to Western Europe. A few days later President Truman sent the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) to Congress for its approval.
By the time the plan had been administered in 1951, more than $13 billion had been distributed to the 16 participating countries. (That’s about $140 billion in 2015 dollars.) Europe’s Gross National Product rose 33 percent, industrial production increased 40 percent, and by 1953, trade between European countries increased almost 40 percent.
The Marshall Plan laid the groundwork for the modern European Union, and it is considered by many to be the most successful foreign aid program of the 20th century.
2. Here is background on the George C. Marshall International Center.{[https://www.georgecmarshall.org/]}
"The Marshall House, formerly known as Dodona Manor, is an early 19th century house situated on the eastern boundary of the Old Historic District of Leesburg, Virginia, the county seat of Loudoun County. While the earliest owners added to the original structure, with the exception of interior cosmetic design elements and the addition of the Stone Court patio by the Marshalls, the foot print of the house today is the same as it was in the mid 1800s.
As a career military officer, Marshall lived on many military posts. Dodona was the first home he ever owned. Upon returning to Dodona in 1942 from wartime meetings in Europe, Marshall said, "This is Home...a real home after forty-one years of wandering." At Dodona Manor, the Marshalls sought refuge from the stressful and relentless demands of public life. Dodona was where the family gathered, where Marshall, an avid gardener, tended to his legendary vegetable garden, and where Katherine nurtured her lovely rose garden. It was their private oasis.
When development threatened the destruction of the Marshall homesite in the 1980s, dedicated local citizens raised funds to purchase the property. With contributions from individuals, businesses, public and private organizations, and generous support from former Marshall Plan countries, an authentic restoration of the residence and grounds was completed to reflect the time the Marshalls lived there.
Today Dodona Manor is a house museum and a National Park Service designated National Historic Landmark. It is the home of the George C. Marshall International Center whose mission is to preserve Marshall's legacy and foster international cooperation and cultural exchange. The George C. Marshall Center regularly welcomes foreign dignitaries and is a frequent site for international receptions. It offers cultural events, exhibits, and educational programs that attract American and international educators. The Center also acts as the administrator for the Loudoun County/Main-Taunus-Kreis Student Partnership Exchange Program.
The ongoing work of the Marshall Center is supported by public and private funds from home and abroad. International contributors include those from Germany and other nations that benefitted from Marshall Plan assistance.
The George Marshall Society seeks to cultivate a wide variety of connections to The Marshall House. This historic setting serves as an eloquent and impressive reminder of George C. Marshall's dedicated service not only to his country but to the international community as well. For the Washington and Frankfurt/Rhein-Main communities, The Marshall House also symbolizes the close ties between Germans and Americans that were created as a result of the Marshall Plan.
Contact und more information:
George C. Marshall International Center
217 Edwards Ferry Road
Leesburg, VA 20176
Tel: (001) 703 - 777 1880
Fax: (001) 703 - 777 2889
Mail: [login to see]
For more info georgecmarshall.org"
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Maj Kim Patterson PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. MSgt Robert "Rock" Aldi
Rest in peace George Catlett Marshall Jr.
As a USMA cadet [1976-1980] I was instructed on George C. Marshall' background role in WWI, his planning skills, the between-the-war years, Chief of Staff War Department [Army] during WWII, the Marshall Plan and his other achievements as Secretary of State.
George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century
Marshall was the architect of both the Allied World War II victory and key U.S. Cold War policies, most notably the European Recovery Program, known as “the Marshall Plan,” for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He is generally considered our greatest soldier-statesman since George Washington. By assessing his extraordinary accomplishments, character, and leadership abilities, this lecture by Mark A. Stoler attempts to explain why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TL6dUwMn04
Images:
1. General George C Marshall - U.S. Army Chief of Staff
2. George and Katherine Marshall in front of Dodona Manor, 1949
3. The Marshalls on the lawn of Dodona with Mrs. Marshall’s daughter, Molly Winn, and Molly’s children, 1944
4. The Marshall House in Leesburg, Virginia was Marshall‘s private residence from 1941 until his death in 1959
Biographies
1. georgecmarshall.org/marshall
2. background on the George C. Marshall International Center from georgecmarshall.org
1. Background from {[https://www.georgecmarshall.org/marshall]}
Biography of George C. Marshall from The George C. Marshall International Center
Who Was General George C. Marshall?
General George C. Marshall is considered by many to be one of the greatest modern-day American heroes. He is recognized as the organizer of the Allied Victory in World War Two and the architect of the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) that changed the face of the world and earned Marshall the Nobel Peace Prize. From the beginning of his 44-year public career as a graduate of Virginia Military Institute in 1901 to the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, Marshall’s decorations, awards, and honorary degrees total more than 60, and include military, civilian, and substantial foreign recognition.
Amid his extraordinary accomplishments, Marshall was most appreciated and beloved for who he was. He did not seek fame and earned an uncontested reputation for being an honest, humble, and resolute leader. His personal contributions to the efforts and development of the United States and other countries during some of the most significant events in modern history are remarkable, not just for the magnitude of what he accomplished, but because of the incorruptible, selfless integrity with which he served.
George C. Marshall, His Early Career
George C. Marshall was born December 31, 1880, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, into the family of a prominent local businessman whose company manufactured coke ovens and who participated in real estate ventures. His comfortable childhood was filled with episodes of fun and mischief, shaped by the love and discipline of his parents.
In his early education he was a lackluster student, but later when he overheard his older brother Stuart beg his mother not to let George go to the Virginia Military Institute because he thought it would disgrace the family name, George was inspired to outshine his brother.
His career at VMI was marked by an uncommon determination to excel, and in his senior year he was selected as First Captain of the Cadet Corps, the most honored position in that institution.
1902 – 1929, The Beginning of a Military Career
George C. Marshall obtained his commission as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1902 as the result of an interview with no less than President McKinley. This interview led to his being authorized to take the required examination, his success at which made possible a commendation by his senator on Marshall’s behalf to the Secretary of War. Immediately after receiving his commission he married Elizabeth “Lily” Carter Coles, his college sweetheart from Lexington, Virginia. His first assignment was with the 30th Infantry in the Philippines, part of the U.S. occupation to quell an insurrection by natives. This assignment in leading troops in combat was the beginning of a long career of learning the many duties and functions of an Army officer, vital to an officer destined to achieve the highest rank in the service. His duties prior to the World War I included service in mapping remote parts of Texas, a stint as student, and later as instructor, at Fort Leavenworth’s officer Staff School. As the top student in his class, his subsequent assignment as a Leavenworth instructor was a distinct honor indicative of his evident potential. This was the first of many key teaching assignments that marked his military career. His assignment with the Massachusetts Militia, forerunner of the National Guard, and duty with the 4th Infantry at three different military bases, gave him insight into the range and structure of the U.S. Army in peacetime. His duty as aide-de-camp for General Hunter Liggett in the Philippines and later to General James Bell in the U.S. afforded him invaluable experience in effective staff work that would eventually propel him to a position that proved to be his forte in World War I and later years.
His assignment as Assistant Chief of Operations for the show-horse 1st Division in France in 1917 gave him the opportunity to distinguish himself amongst the senior Army leadership as one of the most promising staff officers in the command. Ironically this opportunity arose as the result of a characteristically Marshall reaction to what he perceived as an injustice. His challenge of the formidable Commanding General John J. Pershing in front of the 1st Division staff for his unfair criticism of the division and its commander (Maj. Gen. William Sibert) was unprecedented conduct for a middle-grade officer. His crisp and meticulous critique of the failings of Pershing’s General Staff that had undermined the division’s performance stunned General Pershing and the assembled staff.
Pershing said nothing. He departed abruptly, thereby persuading Marshall’s peers that his career was over. But Marshall’s determination to speak “truth to power” proved an incalculable asset to his superiors and belied the pervasive belief that unvarnished candor to superiors was career suicide. Marshall’s honesty and intellectual rigor soon earned him appointment to the Operations Staff of the General Headquarters. In this capacity he drafted the operations order moving 400,000 American troops from the St Mihiel salient to the Meuse-Argonne offensive to join some 200,000 Americans already engaged in a complex 72-hour movement. Marshall’s order was viewed as a masterstroke of brilliant staff work and marked him as a likely future Chief of Staff of the Army though he was then only a Lieutenant Colonel.
After the Armistice, Marshall remained in France as Chief of Staff of the 8th Army until he was selected to be General Pershing’s Aide-de-Camp. As such, he accompanied Pershing on a victory tour of the Allies’ capitals which gave him the opportunity to meet several of the individuals who became prominent leaders in World War II. His service as Pershing’s ADC while the latter served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army provided Marshall insight into the Army’s dealing with a presidential administration, the federal bureaucracy and, most importantly, with the Congress. In 1924 when General Pershing stepped down as Chief of Staff, Marshall sought appointment as a line officer and was named Deputy Commander of the elite 15th Infantry in Tientsin, China.This was one more assignment during which he could expand the scope of his acquaintance with promising officers and evaluate those who did measure up, a sort of virtual “Black Book.”
This methodical process of observation became a part of the critical personnel decisions that Marshall would have to make when he rose to command the U.S. Army as it mobilized for World War II. It was at the end of this tour in 1927 that his beloved but frail first wife Lily Coles died. Marshall had initially been assigned as an instructor at the prestigious Army War College. After his wife’s death, he was given the choice of three posts, and he opted to be Assistant Commandant at the Fort Benning Infantry School, another excellent vantage point to expand and refine his “Black Book.”
It was in this assignment that George Marshall made one of his most enduring contributions to the Army by promoting the reformed infantry doctrine and training to replace infantry attacks in mass formations with assault by small units by fire and maneuver. He revamped training methods to keep operations and orders simple, to provide officers flexibility in responding to changing situations, and to concentrate on field exercises in lieu of lectures. This change in tactics and training saved thousands of American infantrymen’s lives in World War II, which was a war of movement, as opposed to one of static defense that he had observed from the front in World War I. During Marshall’s five years at Fort Benning, according to Marshall’s biographer, Forrest Pogue, 150 future World War II generals passed through in training, and some 50 more future generals served on the Infantry School’s staff.
Early Career, 1930 – 1939
While at Fort Benning, George C. Marshall courted and married in October 1930 Katherine Boyce Tupper Brown, a charming Baltimore widow with three young children. His subsequent assignments with the Civilian Conservation Corps in Georgia and South Carolina in 1932-33 gave Marshall a window into the character and ability of young American men who would serve in his citizen army in the coming war. Following his service with the CCC, he returned to a recurring role in his life, that of teacher serving as the Senior Instructor with the Illinois National Guard. His focus in his tour from 1933 to 1936 was to apply his infantry training concepts to the poorly motivated and trained National Guard units in recognition that the citizen-soldier would carry the burden in any future war. He concentrated his efforts on enhancing the professionalism of the Guard soldiers, and especially of the officers. He also developed Guard command staff structures for the Guard while making unit training more realistic and more efficient. He also pressed the Army for the assignment of higher caliber officers to all the state National Guard commands. Marshall’s promotion to brigadier general in October 1936 was, as he recognized, and for which he had gently campaigned, an essential step toward realizing his interest in becoming Chief of Staff of the Army.
His promotion earned him command of the 5th Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division and the position of post commander of Vancouver Barracks, situated just north of Portland, Oregon. This proved to be a very satisfying assignment for him both professionally and personally. In addition to obtaining a long-sought and significant troop command, traditionally viewed as an indispensable way station to the pinnacle of the U.S. Army, Marshall was also responsible for 35 CCC camps in Oregon and southern Washington. As post commander, Marshall made a concerted effort to cultivate relations with the city of Portland and to enhance the image of the U.S. Army in the region. With the CCC he initiated a series of measures to improve the morale of the participants and to make the experience beneficial in their later life. He started a newspaper for the CCC region that provided a vehicle to promote CCC successes, and he initiated a variety of programs that developed their skills and improved their health. Marshall’s inspections of the CCC camps gave him and his wife Katherine the chance to enjoy the beauty of the American Northwest and made the assignment what he called “the most instructive service I ever had, and the most interesting.”
In July 1938 George Marshall arrived at his new assignment as Head of the War Plans Division at Army Headquarters in Washington, D.C. While Marshall was widely regarded as a brilliant staff officer, he regretted giving up his troop command and the satisfaction of working with the CCC in the magnificent setting of the Northwest. War clouds were gathering in Europe as Hitler’s aggressive actions slowly began to persuade European democracies that they could be constrained only by the use of force. Concurrently, Japan pursued its conquests in China and threatened other Western interests in the Pacific. Distasteful as it was for Americans, war planning became essential, and Marshall was clearly the officer to lead these efforts. Within three months, he was elevated to the Deputy Chief of Staff position. In this capacity he attended a White House conference in November 1938 that proved a fateful encounter that shaped not only his career, but also the course of American history in the 20th Century.
At that council of his senior advisers, President Roosevelt proposed to built 10,000 aircraft for European democracies to forestall U.S. involvement in the impending war. Marshall was stunned by the proposal which made no provision for training of flight crews and other logistical challenges. More importantly, this initiative would be at the expense of America’s need for more troops, tanks and all the other material required to prepare for war. When Roosevelt went around the room asking the attendees for their reaction, Marshall was further astounded that all of his military colleagues assented to the proposal with which he knew they really did not agree.
When the President came to Marshall, he asked, “Don’t you think so, George?” Marshall, who was attending his first conference with Roosevelt, was vexed at the President’s “misrepresentation of our intimacy” by the use of his first name. Nonetheless, he firmly replied, “I’m sorry Mr. President, I don’t agree with you at all.” This apparently startled the President and the meeting adjourned abruptly thereafter. As with his confrontation with Pershing in 1917, Marshall’s fellow participants assumed his compulsion to express his opinion bluntly, yet honestly, spelled the end of his career in Washington. To his credit, Roosevelt recognized Marshall’s character and came to value his unfailing honesty. In April 1939, Marshall was summoned to the White House, and Roosevelt selected him to become Chief of Staff of the Army, thereby vaulting him over several dozen more senior officers. Marshall was honored, but he made clear in his response to the President, that, “I have the habit of saying exactly what I think,” to which he added, “and that can be unpleasing. Is that all right?” Roosevelt’s acceptance with a grin only inspired Marshall to remind the President again that his candor may be “unpleasant.” Roosevelt maintained his grin and said with resignation, “I know.” This exchange cemented the terms of probably the most important operational relationship in American military history.
Winston Churchill called him “the noblest Roman”; President Harry Truman said he was “the greatest military man America ever produced”; and U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson considered Marshall the finest soldier he had ever known.
In 1939 General George C. Marshall became U.S. Army Chief of Staff–the highest rank in the Army. The day of his promotion, however, would prove prophetic: Hitler invaded Poland, and Marshall’s work was cut out for him.
While Americans watched the advance of Hitler across Europe with horror, Marshall began to prepare for what he believed was inevitable armed conflict. By the time the United States went to war in 1941, Marshall’s leadership, foresight, and integrity had led to the expansion of the Army from 172,000 men to more than a million. By early 1945, the Army had grown to more than eight million – an achievement that required brilliant planning, persuasion, and execution skills.
Throughout World War II, Marshall was at the heart of solving many problems – strategy, supply, budgeting, leadership, and battle priority. Most important was Marshall’s role in the outcome of the war: the Allied Victory.
By March 1942, Marshall was firming up the concept to consolidate the Allied armies and use that amazing force to defeat the Germans. His plan was to build a huge U.S. army, ship it to England, cross the Channel, and invade France. Ultimately, the execution of the plan was stalled many times over, much to the concern of Marshall, and required 90 separate meetings before being launched in 1944. But what Marshall predicted then we know today: Normandy proved that the power of a coordinated, worldwide Allied strategy was the way to win the war.
As U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall was indispensable. He negotiated wartime strategy alongside President Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, and he was responsible for the smooth operation of the Alliance and the execution of the Normandy Invasion. His counsel and leadership also played a key role in the defeat of Japan in 1945.
In 1945, General George C. Marshall was released from duty as Army Chief of Staff and began his career as a statesman. Serving as a Special Presidential Envoy in China, where he experienced the intractable nature of Chinese politics. His mission was to negotiate a settlement between China’s two warring forces and keep the opportunistic Soviets from taking over–an assignment that was both frustrating and impossible. The extreme elements of the Communists and Nationalists were in charge and prevented a settlement, and Marshall eventually ended his efforts to unify China. The China mission was one of the few disappointments of Marshall’s career.
Marshall was sworn in as Secretary of State in 1947, and he found himself again focused on Europe, where conditions were deplorable. After World War II, Europe had experienced a bitter winter, and food was scarce in both victorious and defeated nations. People were dying in the streets from starvation, there was virtually no industry, crime rates were rising dramatically, and the threat of Soviet expansion was ever-increasing.
After a foreign ministers conference, Marshall was convinced that the Soviet Union was using the plight of the European countries, particularly Germany, to its advantage and that immediate action was needed. Marshall began an extensive, oft-criticized campaign to revive Europe. What ultimately become known as the Marshall Plan was, according to historian Randall B. Woods, the single most successful foreign aid program in modern history, and ensured stability and democracy in Europe.
During his years as a statesman, Marshall also served as President of the American Red Cross from 1949 to 1950, and Secretary of Defense from 1950 to 1951 during the Korean Conflict. In 1953, he headed the United States delegation to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and later that year was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian efforts and contributions to world peace and understanding.
The Marshall Plan
As Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall had an enlightened and visionary attitude toward dealing with Europe after World War II. The world wanted to punish and punish harshly–particularly Germany. Yet Marshall believed that to support and stabilize Europe, a conciliatory approach to reconstruction, including that of Germany, was absolutely necessary.
At the time devastated European countries were being tempted by communism because it represented hope from post-war economic, political, and social despair. To ensure freedom, Marshall and others began imagining a program that would restore the economic health of Europe–a program that would rely on countries acting cooperatively with the aid and assistance of the United States.
What is now known as the Marshall Plan was broad-based, and dealt with critical issues such as trade agreements, loan repayments, and financial aid. It was not unanimously embraced. Many Americans, including some members of Congress, favored isolationism. The Soviets did not want to reveal their needs to other countries or accept East-West trade, which would ruin their plan to control the commerce of the Eastern Bloc. France, which had been invaded three times in a century, did not want a strong Germany. Again and again, however, Marshall communicated that a strong Germany was a strong Europe. By December 1947, Congress approved a $600 million measure to provide temporary aid to Western Europe. A few days later President Truman sent the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) to Congress for its approval.
By the time the plan had been administered in 1951, more than $13 billion had been distributed to the 16 participating countries. (That’s about $140 billion in 2015 dollars.) Europe’s Gross National Product rose 33 percent, industrial production increased 40 percent, and by 1953, trade between European countries increased almost 40 percent.
The Marshall Plan laid the groundwork for the modern European Union, and it is considered by many to be the most successful foreign aid program of the 20th century.
2. Here is background on the George C. Marshall International Center.{[https://www.georgecmarshall.org/]}
"The Marshall House, formerly known as Dodona Manor, is an early 19th century house situated on the eastern boundary of the Old Historic District of Leesburg, Virginia, the county seat of Loudoun County. While the earliest owners added to the original structure, with the exception of interior cosmetic design elements and the addition of the Stone Court patio by the Marshalls, the foot print of the house today is the same as it was in the mid 1800s.
As a career military officer, Marshall lived on many military posts. Dodona was the first home he ever owned. Upon returning to Dodona in 1942 from wartime meetings in Europe, Marshall said, "This is Home...a real home after forty-one years of wandering." At Dodona Manor, the Marshalls sought refuge from the stressful and relentless demands of public life. Dodona was where the family gathered, where Marshall, an avid gardener, tended to his legendary vegetable garden, and where Katherine nurtured her lovely rose garden. It was their private oasis.
When development threatened the destruction of the Marshall homesite in the 1980s, dedicated local citizens raised funds to purchase the property. With contributions from individuals, businesses, public and private organizations, and generous support from former Marshall Plan countries, an authentic restoration of the residence and grounds was completed to reflect the time the Marshalls lived there.
Today Dodona Manor is a house museum and a National Park Service designated National Historic Landmark. It is the home of the George C. Marshall International Center whose mission is to preserve Marshall's legacy and foster international cooperation and cultural exchange. The George C. Marshall Center regularly welcomes foreign dignitaries and is a frequent site for international receptions. It offers cultural events, exhibits, and educational programs that attract American and international educators. The Center also acts as the administrator for the Loudoun County/Main-Taunus-Kreis Student Partnership Exchange Program.
The ongoing work of the Marshall Center is supported by public and private funds from home and abroad. International contributors include those from Germany and other nations that benefitted from Marshall Plan assistance.
The George Marshall Society seeks to cultivate a wide variety of connections to The Marshall House. This historic setting serves as an eloquent and impressive reminder of George C. Marshall's dedicated service not only to his country but to the international community as well. For the Washington and Frankfurt/Rhein-Main communities, The Marshall House also symbolizes the close ties between Germans and Americans that were created as a result of the Marshall Plan.
Contact und more information:
George C. Marshall International Center
217 Edwards Ferry Road
Leesburg, VA 20176
Tel: (001) 703 - 777 1880
Fax: (001) 703 - 777 2889
Mail: [login to see]
For more info georgecmarshall.org"
FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs SMSgt Lawrence McCarter SPC Michael Duricko, Ph.D GySgt Thomas Vick MSG Felipe De Leon Brown SGT Denny Espinosa SSG Stephen Rogerson SPC Matthew Lamb LTC (Join to see) LTC Greg Henning Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D. Maj Kim Patterson PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO2 (Join to see) SSG Franklin Briant SPC Woody Bullard TSgt David L. MSgt Robert "Rock" Aldi
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MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D.
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304th Tank Bde. FT-17 light tank with doughboy on top in the Meuse-Argonne, mid-Oct. 1918. The 1st Lt. Tank Bde. was redesignated at the beginning of the Meuse-Argonne offensive to bring it in line with the tank unit numbering system created by the Tank Corps in the U.S.
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MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D.
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301st Tank Bn. assists troops assaulting the Hindenburg Line, Oct. 1918:
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MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D.
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301st Tank Bn. Mk. IV 'hermaphrodite' heavy tank: The term hermaphrodite was given to Mk. IV and V heavy tanks employing a combination of 37mm cannon and Hotchkiss machine guns in their sponsons.
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MAJ Dale E. Wilson, Ph.D.
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FT-17 light tanks help U.S. Infantry advance in the Argonne Forest, Oct. 1918:
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SGT (Join to see) solid read and share for the MOH recipient.
SPC Margaret Higgins COL Mikel J. Burroughs CPL Dave Hoover Lt Col Charlie Brown Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SCPO Morris Ramsey PVT Mark Zehner Sgt (Join to see) SSG Michael Noll SSG Robert Mark Odom CPL Douglas Chrysler PO1 Tony Holland SGT Steve McFarland SPC Mark Huddleston CW5 Jack Cardwell PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO1 Lyndon Thomas PO3 Phyllis Maynard Maj Kim Patterson
SPC Margaret Higgins COL Mikel J. Burroughs CPL Dave Hoover Lt Col Charlie Brown Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen SCPO Morris Ramsey PVT Mark Zehner Sgt (Join to see) SSG Michael Noll SSG Robert Mark Odom CPL Douglas Chrysler PO1 Tony Holland SGT Steve McFarland SPC Mark Huddleston CW5 Jack Cardwell PO1 William "Chip" Nagel PO1 Lyndon Thomas PO3 Phyllis Maynard Maj Kim Patterson
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