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‘George Marshall,’ by Debi and Irwin Unger with Stanley Hirshson

By Mark Atwood Lawrence

• Nov. 26, 2014

Where have all the great generals gone? The United States has been at war since 2001 — its longest period of uninterrupted conflict — and for considerable stretches of the last half-century. Yet during all those years the nation has produced no military commanders of undeniable greatness.

For models of generalship, historians and biographers reach further back, returning again and again to the likes of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. (Black Jack) Pershing and Dwight Eisenhower, most of whom have been the subjects of admiring and popular volumes in recent years.

But no American military leader has been so revered as George Catlett Marshall, the Army chief of staff during World War II and then secretary of state and secretary of defense. Contemporaries heaped praise on Marshall for organizing the enormous expansion of United States forces necessary to challenge the Axis powers, managing relations with America’s cantankerous allies and playing a key role in devising the military strategies that ultimately won the war. Truman called Marshall “the greatest military man that this country ever produced — or any other country for that matter.” Time magazine, which twice named Marshall its man of the year, called him simply “the indispensable man” in 1944. Later commentators have mostly echoed these judgments, holding up Marshall as a model of all that’s lacking in American commanders ever since.

Debi and Irwin Unger take exception to this heroic depiction in their elegant and iconoclastic biography, which pokes innumerable holes in Marshall’s reputation for leadership and raises intriguing questions about how such reputations get made. Marshall emerges not as the incarnation of greatness but as an ordinary, indecisive, “less than awe-inspiring” man who achieved an unexceptional mix of success and failure.

Why the discrepancy between the reputation and what “George Marshall: A Biography” claims is the reality? The answer, the Ungers assert, lies in “Americans’ yearning for a Platonic ideal of a triumphant military leader above politics, deceit and selfish ambition.” In fact, they add, a man of “unremarkable powers” was protected from the criticism he deserved by his “sterling character” and an aloof, stern bearing that kept potential critics from looking too closely. “Only a very few keen observers saw beyond the conventional wisdom,” the book concludes.

Such refreshing contrarianism comes as little surprise given the book’s team of accomplished authors. The Ungers’ co-­author, the Queens College historian Stanley Hirshson, who began researching the book before his death in 2003, is best known for a remarkably favorable biography of the oft-maligned Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman and a mostly critical study of the much-celebrated World War II general George S. Patton. Irwin Unger, a Pulitzer Prize-­winning historian, and his wife, Debi, whose collaborations include several studies of reform and dissent movements of the 1960s, carried on Hirshson’s research and wrote the book.

To be sure, the Ungers credit Marshall with momentous accomplishments. He deserves praise, they note, for ceaselessly pushing against the nation’s pervasive isolationist mood in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack and demanding steps to prepare the nation for war.

They also laud Marshall’s determination, in the face of opposition from much of the American public, to prioritize the war in Europe over the fight against Japan and, over British objections, to make a major attack across the English Channel the focal point of Allied strategy rather than operations in the Mediterranean. Both choices were, the Ungers assert, pivotal to the ultimate Allied victory. Most of all, the book extols Marshall’s wisdom in insisting on unified Anglo-American commands and deftly managing relations between the two prideful militaries.

In other ways, though, Marshall comes across as nothing special. In the Ungers’ telling, Marshall’s ascent through the ranks — a slow and frustrating experience that led him to question his commitment to the Army — owed as much to good timing as to any particular genius. The expansion of the military during World War I pulled him from obscurity, and the rise of fascism in the 1930s meant that his years as chief of staff would be endowed with epochal importance.

More strikingly, the book questions Marshall on matters that have usually counted in his favor. Like his champions, the Ungers note that he presided over the stunning growth of the Army from 275,000 to more than eight million men. But they insist that the latter number was still dangerously low considering the challenges the Army faced in waging a two-front war. More damning still, they argue, Marshall failed to assure adequate training for American servicemen to fight effectively against highly skilled enemies. The consequences were unnecessary American casualties and numerous battlefield setbacks before sheer industrial prowess could compensate for the deficiencies of American troops.

Nor do the Ungers affirm Marshall’s reputation as a good judge of subordinates. In fact, they reserve some of their strongest criticism for the men Marshall chose as his field commanders, including Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, Joseph Stilwell in China and Mark Clark in Europe. Marshall’s protégés, the book suggests, “probably varied as much in leadership quality as any random selection among the list of available officers at the time of their assignments.”

The Ungers focus less attention on Marshall’s postwar career, including his stints in Harry Truman’s cabinet during the crisis-filled years from 1947 to 1951. But here, too, their appraisal is mixed at best, even in connection with the achievement most closely associated with Marshall’s years as secretary of state, the $17 billion economic aid program to rebuild war-­devastated Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was, in fact, the work of numerous officials, according to the Ungers, and Marshall’s main contribution was simply to lend his name to the effort. Recognizing that Marshall’s stature would help win congressional approval of the program, the Truman administration was happy to let him take credit.

Mostly, the Ungers’ vision of Marshall is persuasive. Praise for the general has soared so high over the years that the reality is bound to lie closer to the ground. The book also offers a useful reminder that glorification of the World War II era may tell us more about the disappointments of our own times than about an increasingly remote past when — no ­surprise — American leaders stumbled and were sometimes saved from their errors by the scale of the American war machine and the endurance of their ­allies.

Still, it seems reasonable to believe that the challenges of raising an army and fighting monumental conflicts on two fronts were so great that Marshall, whatever his flaws, deserves the praise he has received. Could someone else have done better given the constraints that would have confronted any Army chief of staff — not just isolationist sentiment and poor military preparedness but also wobbly civilian leadership, fierce interservice rivalries and a superabundance of headstrong subordinate officers?

To reckon seriously with this question would require a much broader examination of the United States at war than the Ungers provide. And it is, of course, ultimately unanswerable. But greater attention to the wider context of Marshall’s leadership might show that mediocrity pervaded the American war effort across the board, not just the performance of one man.

GEORGE MARSHALL

A biography.

By Debi and Irwin Unger with Stanley Hirshson

Illustrated. 552 pp. Harper. $35.

Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is “The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.”

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George C. Marshall

By: History.com Editors

Published: October 29, 2009

George C. Marshall (1880-1959) was one of the most decorated military leaders in American history. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, he was a World War I staff officer and later became assistant commandant at the U.S. Infantry School. Named chief of staff when World War II began in 1939, Marshall was responsible for exponentially increasing the size of the U.S. Army, and he helped devise Operation Overlord in 1944. After the war, he came out of retirement to serve as President Harry Truman’s secretary of state. His economic recovery program for Europe became known as the Marshall Plan, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

George Marshall remains, after George Washington , the most respected soldier in American history. Yet he never had command of troops in battle, the customary path to greatness for a military leader. He excelled at many other tasks that a modern officer is asked to perform and then served capably in the civilian roles of diplomat and policy maker as well.

Marshall’s rise to the top in the U.S. Army followed paths opened by reforms of the early twentieth century that emphasized professional military education, a new staff system to prepare for war, and closer coordination of the citizen soldiers of the National Guard with the regular army. As a staff officer in World War I , Marshall was centrally involved in the planning of offensives by the American Expeditionary Force in France. Later, as assistant commandant of the Infantry School, he left a strong imprint on the tactics that the U.S. Army was to use in World War II . Extensive work with National Guard units gave him exposure to the civilian world and experience in dealing with politicians that were unusual for officers of his time.

Though Marshall had never commanded a division, he became chief of staff on the day that World War II began in Europe. The U.S. Army in September 1939 had scarcely any modern weaponry and was roughly the size of the Dutch army that survived less than a week against the German blitzkrieg in 1940. By the time the U.S. Army began fighting the Wehrmacht in 1942, its effective combat strength had increased more than tenfold. Marshall was the architect of this remarkable buildup.

Marshall keenly appreciated that success in a multitheater coalition war required harmonious civil-military, interservice, and interallied relationships. He won the confidence of President Franklin Roosevelt, worked effectively with his naval counterpart, Admiral Ernest King, and ensured coordination of American and British military leadership through the Combined Chiefs of Staff and unity of command in combat theaters.

Marshall proved less sure-footed in his approach to the most important strategic choice facing the United States in World War II: when and where to employ American forces on a large scale. Marshall’s support of a Germany-first strategic priority was on the mark, but his advocacy of an Anglo-American invasion of France in 1943 put him on shaky ground. Until American forces had gained more experience against the Wehrmacht, until command of the Atlantic was achieved in mid-1943, and until command of the air was secured in early 1944, an amphibious assault across the English Channel would have carried great military risk. And given that the British would have supplied the bulk of the troops for a 1943 invasion, military failure would have involved the political risk of undercutting Britain’s commitment to the war effort. Franklin Roosevelt, although overruling the chief of staff on this crucial strategic issue, came to regard him as so indispensable in Washington that, when the cross-Channel assault was finally mounted in 1944, he could not let Marshall assume command of the invasion force. The general was sorely disappointed but characteristically never uttered a word of complaint.

Marshall was set to retire after the war when President Harry Truman sent him to China in late 1945 to avert a civil war between the Kuomintang government and the Communist Party. Even Marshall’s force of character could not bring about a durable compromise between those antagonists, however. His experience in China did prove beneficial when he became Truman’s secretary of state in 1947. For he could make a strong case that American military intervention in the Chinese Civil War would be a costly venture with only a dim prospect of success.

In the Cold War , as in World War II, Marshall saw Europe as the top American strategic priority. The famous plan of foreign aid that bears his name helped protect friendly European countries from Communist subversion. Before he left the State Department in 1949, he also helped erect two other pillars of containment in Europe to stand alongside the Marshall Plan – a West German state and a Western military alliance: NATO.

After the outbreak of the Korean War , Truman brought Marshall out of retirement once again, this time to serve as secretary of defense. The president hoped that Marshall would keep General Douglas MacArthur under control. But Marshall was not well suited for that role: although in principle he deeply believed in civilian control of the military, in practice he had also long believed that theater commanders should have considerable scope to act on their own judgment.

After Truman fired MacArthur, Senator Joseph McCarthy viciously impugned Marshall as a dupe of the Communists. But for almost all of Marshall’s contemporaries, it was precisely his character and his patriotism that made him so worthy of respect.

BRADFORD A. LEE

Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman (1991); Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall , 4 vols. (1963-1986); Mark A. Stoler, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century (1989).

The Reader’s Companion to Military History. Edited by Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

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Photo Credit: Lieutenant General Omar Bradley greets Marshall in Normandy in June 1944.

George C. Marshall: The Indispensable Man

Forget Eisenhower, forget Patton. The man most responsible for the Allies’ victory was a quiet, desk-bound warrior.

This article appears in: Winter 2011

By Eric Hammel

George Catlett Marshall was the greatest American military man of his age. If the United States Army had kicked off the 20th century with the specific intent of constructing a chief of staff to lead it to victory in World War II, it could not have done a better job than what chance provided in the triumphs and travails over the 40 years that molded George Marshall.

Marshall in the Great War

Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on December 31, 1880, Marshall entered the Virginia Military Institute with the class of 1901, with which he graduated as first captain. His first posting as an infantry lieutenant was to a unit in the Philippines a year after the insurrection there had been put down. Following a two-year tour in Oklahoma, Marshall was selected (at the urging of his mentor, Brig. Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing) to study at one of the early service schools, the School of the Line, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He excelled academically, passed an exam for promotion to first lieutenant, and was assigned first as a student to the Army Staff College, then as an instructor for two more years.

In the remaining years before the Great War, Marshall undertook routine assignments. He took extended leave twice, first to watch the British Army train in the United Kingdom and later to tour Russo-Japanese War battlefields in Asia and discuss tactics with Japanese officers. He came away from these interactions with a list of things he wanted to see fixed in the U.S. Army, among them a paucity in night battle doctrine, a technique he drove home throughout his career. Well regarded by his peers and his superiors as a comer, but without any first-hand experience in war, Marshall was finally promoted to captain in mid-1916.

With a temporary promotion to lieutenant colonel, Marshall arrived aboard the first American troop transport to reach France as an assistant operations officer with the 1st Infantry Division. The arrival was more symbolic than anything, for it became Marshall’s job to train the division to take part in actual war. This he did with great success. Alas, Marshall was considered too valuable to command troops in battle; he ended the war as an unblooded temporary colonel serving as operations officer of the U.S. First Army.

A Friendship with Stilwell

Marshall’s brilliant work in France brought him an assignment to his old mentor, General of the Armies John Pershing, whom he served as aide-de-camp for five years right after the war. This was as career-boosting a friendship as could befall any Regular Army officer.

From an office in Washington, Lt. Col. Marshall was transferred to an office in China, where he served as executive officer of an infantry regiment based in Tientsin. It was here that he rekindled a friendship with Major Joseph Stilwell, who had served with Marshall in France on the 1st Infantry Division staff. Marshall’s relationship with the fiery but intellectual Stilwell is emblematic of the relationships, forged over a long career, that served the World War II Army so well when Marshall was able to reach back, so to speak, to elevate officers who had made an especially good impression on him, whose work ethic and thought processes he particularly admired.

Teaching 200 Future Generals

In 1927, Marshall was an instructor at the Army War College at Washington Barracks (now known as Fort Lesley J. McNair) in Washington, D.C.—a heady assignment he might have relished had it not coincided with the death of his beloved wife, Katherine. Seen by friends and interested superiors as a man who might need to bury his grief in hard work, Lt. Col. Marshall was reassigned as assistant commandant of The Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, which placed him in charge of the instructional staff and the curriculum. Marshall’s posting to Benning was the assignment from which the United States Army derived its victory in World War II.

A listing of students and instructors at The Infantry School during Marshall’s five-year tour as assistant commandant and then commandant is tantamount to a list of the best army, corps, and division commanders the U.S. Army—which is to say George Catlett Marshall—put into play during World War II. The comprehensive changes, the instructional innovation, and the sheer amount of training to think on their feet engineered by Marshall during his Benning tour set these younger officers up for the battlefield victories they would one day win.

Approximately 200 future generals transited Benning as students or instructors during Marshall’s tenure, and he had a direct hand in elevating nearly every single one of them to flag. Among the most prominent were Lt. Col. Joseph Stilwell, Major Omar Bradley, Major Gilbert Cook, and Captain J. Lawton Collins. Also, Lt. Col. Courtney Hodges served on the Infantry Board with Marshall. A few of the more celebrated future generals who passed through the school as students during Marshall’s tenure included Terry Allen, Clarence Huebner, James Van Fleet, Walter Bedell Smith, Matthew Ridgway (who had served with Marshall in China), Manton Eddy, and Norman Cota.

The Renaissance of the Infantry School

The Infantry School itself, which was dedicated to training mid-career officers who were ticketed to move up, underwent a renaissance under Marshall, who encouraged—in fact, demanded––original thinking and inspired experimentation. At Marshall’s urging, basic infantry tactics, all the way to squad level, were stripped down, studied, rejiggered, and finally updated for the modern battlefield and its modern weapons. At The Infantry School, Marshall quite literally changed the way American infantrymen at all levels conducted war and, in so doing, he personally gave rise to the intellectual renaissance that swept the U.S. Army ground establishment in the lean 1930s.

Marshall built upon the work of his immediate predecessor, Colonel Frank Cocheau, who put into play a new teaching principle when he arrived at Benning in mid-1925: demonstration-explanation-performance. All of the students had to go through each lesson. First the instructor demonstrated to the students what they had to learn, usually by employing crack infantry units assigned to The Infantry School for that purpose. Next, the students were expected to explain the lesson to the instructor. Finally, the students had to prove to the school staff that they had learned the lesson.

This evolution revolutionized military training in the United States and it was significantly bolstered when Cocheau dispatched an instructor for a year at the University of Minnesota to study educational psychology. When this officer returned to Benning, Marshall asked him to run a seminar for the school staff to enhance the overall approach to the mission of educating intelligent men years away from college and at the edge of a phase of life in which many adults literally close their minds.

When he arrived at Benning, Marshall’s mission was not so much to remake The Infantry School, per se, as to remake The Infantry School in such a way as to eventually transform the entire Army by changing the way its officers thought about war. It was Marshall’s observation from numerous field exercises and the experience of developing operational plans for an infantry division and ultimately a field army in France that planning a battle is an effort in controlling chaos: it couldn’t be done. Marshall’s key insight and innovation, which alone would have earned him a secure spot in military history, was that battlefield commanders could be systematically reconditioned to accept the chaos as inevitable and to factor it into both advance planning and the actual way they would undertake their quest to dominate any battlefield of any size.

Training Officers to Expect the Unexpected

In addition to training officers to be flexible thinkers, Marshall’s new syllabus proved to be an excellent tool for weeding out officers who could not be weaned from an unbridgeable tendency to freeze up when their plans inevitably went awry.

Marshall backed his theory with ample training examples: a last-minute change in objectives just as a fully briefed infantry force was about to set out; the appearance out of the blue of a flanking movement by enemy tanks that had never been briefed into the exercise; or orders for moves that did not match up to any maps any of the students had in hand. Marshall and his instructors were positively diabolical in the ways they screwed up the best-laid plans of their students, all with the intention of forcing them to rely on and hone their native ability to think on their feet under intense pressure.

Marshall also demonstrated in a hundred different ways how even the smartest students had not sufficiently honed their powers of observation. And he forced his students to think, and observe, and act as much in the dark of night as in the light of day, for the night attack, which was underappreciated and therefore underutilized by the U.S. Army, was a chaos-inducing tool embraced by many potential adversaries. Indeed, the night attack had become Marshall’s favorite tool after he heard it extolled by Japanese officers during his tour of Russo-Japanese War battlefields before the Great War.

Another ironclad aid Marshall taught was economy of thought. He constantly harped on the instructors to tighten up their written and verbal lessons, and for the students to explain things in the fewest possible words, oral and written. He wanted the essence, the heart of the matter, to be delivered clearly in the least possible time. As with all of Marshall’s practical lessons, this revolution in brevity eventually permeated the Army, for instructors and students alike were released back into the Army’s many nooks and crannies when their time at Benning ended, all unabashedly enthusiastic to train their fellow soldiers.

Creating the Optimal Infantry Battalion

Marshall’s influence reached well beyond the classroom during his tour at Benning, for the Infantry School was as much a laboratory as it was an educational institution. By employing the demonstration infantry regiment resident at Benning, Marshall and the various geniuses he commanded played with the size and internal organization of the infantry battalion to find an optimal size and organization.

The battalion was the smallest organization in the Army that could conduct independent, self-contained operations. Mirroring the Army general staff set-up, the infantry battalion had a complete staff with slots for personnel and administration (S-1); intelligence and scouting (S-2); training, planning, and operations (S-3); and logistics and supply (S-4). The battalion comprised three infantry companies and a weapons company armed with mortars and machine guns. The questions Marshall posed were: How big could a battalion be if it was to be easily controlled in battle by its commander? And, what was the smallest it could be to accomplish its missions while freeing up troops and officers to man a larger number of battalions? Where was the balance?

Working with battalions ranging in size from 300 to 3,000 men, Marshall’s team arrived at 850 as being the optimal requirement for an infantry battalion of the day. This was so accurate an analysis that many of the world’s armies field infantry battalions roughly 850-strong to the present day.

Lobbying For More Firepower With Fewer Men

As soon as The Infantry School had designed the ideal infantry battalion, Marshall went to work to design the ideal infantry regiment and division—indeed, the ideal infantry squad, infantry platoon, and infantry company. He and his men made a lasting mark on all these levels except at the divisional level.

In a report Marshall had probably written over the signature of General Pershing, the chief of staff had attempted to make a case for a smaller infantry division than the four-regiment behemoth the Army fielded in France. Riding on his other successes at The Infantry School, Marshall attempted to get the generals to sign off on a plan to triangularize the entire infantry, from platoon to division.

The seniors agreed to do so from platoon to regiment (three squads per platoon, three rifle platoons and a weapons platoon per company, three infantry companies and a weapons company per battalion, three infantry battalions and a heavy weapons company per regiment). But the attempt to change the shape of the infantry division (from four infantry regiments and an artillery regiment) was quashed. The division was, after all, the purview of generals.

Marshall and his acolytes proposed providing so much fire power to the smaller triangular division that it could throw twice its old weight in steel but tie up only half as many men. The generals quashed this recommendation as well, but Marshall and his subordinates filed it all away, certain that at least one of them would one day cast the deciding vote.

The Holding Attack

Once the infantry organization was triangularized from platoon to regiment, The Infantry School focused on the optimum tactic for it: the holding attack. Even at squad level, a fire element that included at least one automatic weapon could establish a base of fire and engage the enemy on his front—hold the enemy in place—while the rest of the unit attempted to skirt the beaten zone to deliver a flank or rear assault. One element holding the enemy under fire and a maneuver element delivering an attack from outside the ring of fire equals a holding attack. It takes fewer troops to hold than to attack.

Thus, one squad and perhaps an attached machine gun could establish and hold the base of fire while the other two squads in a platoon maneuvered to mount a flank attack. With the aid of light mortars and one or two machine guns, one platoon could hold and two platoons could attack. Even better, to hedge against inevitable chaos, one element could hold, one element could attack, and one element could be held in reserve to perhaps bolster the attack, reinforce a base of fire, exploit a breakthrough, or counter an enemy counterattack. Companies, battalions, regiments, divisions, corps, field armies, and even army groups could exploit the utter simplicity of the holding attack. And, of course, the holding attack Marshall favored was ideally served by a triangular organization.

Fire-And-Move

In 1930, Captain J. Lawton Collins, a particular favorite of Marshall’s, came up with a simplified scheme for close-order drill that finally took into account the fire-and-move small-unit tactics of every American battlefield since Gettysburg, or even First Bull Run.

The objective of drill prior to the Great War’s trench warfare was to move an infantry unit across a battlefield in a solid, protective block that could put out massive coordinated volleys of fire as well as reload behind a protective screen of bullets or bayonets. Repeating rifles and machine guns, when they appeared, shredded the old battle formations and led to fire-and-move tactics, which allowed individuals and small groups of infantrymen to make use of cover and terrain as they advanced on the enemy in small rushes, putting out suppressive fire as they went or with suppressive support from a stationary base of fire.

The first real use of fire-and-move tactics was posited by Confederate General James Longstreet of the Army of Northern Virginia, around 1863––a response to rapid-fire, breech-loading rifles in the hands of Union common infantry. In any case, 1930 seemed about time to alter the very old close-order drill regulations, and Collins had a very simple drill all worked out. Marshall agreed; he endorsed it and sent it up the chain. It was dead on arrival.

Both the chief of the infantry branch and the chief of staff, General Charles Summerall, rejected it out of hand, claiming its very simplicity would hurt Army morale. This speaks volumes about the usefulness of the drill; it was no longer about battlefield evolutions; it was about the discipline many officers thought could be derived from mind-numbing, time-eating, make-work projects aimed solely at keeping idle hands and feet moving in some regimented way. The Collins drill endorsed by Marshall was aimed at building confidence, enhancing teamwork, and developing unit esprit. Marshall was unwilling to go to the mat with General Summerall, under whom he had served in the 1st Infantry Division in France, but he kept Collins and his modern drill in mind for some future opening.

An Army of Voracious Readers

Under Marshall’s influence, The Infantry School professional library was massively built up, and everyone who passed through the school was expected to read voraciously—to make time to read within an impossibly busy schedule.

Even without the crucible of World War II, Marshall and the hundreds of officers he influenced during his tour at The Infantry School changed the U.S. Army forever. They learned and tested and nurtured truths about making war—and about teaching and learning and running organizations, about working cooperatively, and so on. Their efforts stood their nation in good stead for nearly as long as the youngest of them drew breath. They infected the Army and a nation of wartime soldiers with their virus for getting things done, with their patented American can-do spirit. And in doing so, they changed the world.

If George Catlett Marshall had accomplished in life only what he accomplished at Fort Benning between 1928 and the fall of 1932, he would have been accorded a place of honor in American military history. But there was more to come.

Reforming the National Guard

When the Benning tour ended, Marshall, who had remarried in 1930, was posted to Georgia to command a rag-tag battalion of infantry.The unit was so small and so poorly equipped that it could not realistically train. Morale was extremely low because the poorly paid troops could not buy enough food for their families, a problem Marshall fixed on the sly by selling the needy troops “leftovers” from the battalion kitchens for pennies on the dollar.

During his tour in Georgia—and from May 1933 as commanding officer of an infantry regiment in South Carolina—Marshall had his first experience with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), for which he oversaw the construction and administration of 34 camps staffed in part by Regular Army officers and noncommissioned and Organized Reserve officers. This experience, and a later one in the Pacific Northwest, gave Marshall a refresher course in dealing with the induction and training of masses of people who, to an Army officer, looked an awful lot like raw recruits. This is what he had done for the 1st Infantry Division in 1917 and part of 1918, and it helped prepare him for what he would have to do beginning again in 1940.

In October 1933, after only five months in command of his regiment, the crown jewel of many a career, Colonel Marshall was abruptly reassigned as senior instructor to the staff of the 33rd Infantry Division––the Illinois National Guard command based in Chicago. The move came as a blow to Marshall. Had he done something wrong? Was he being shown the door?

Not at all. The 33rd Division had been called out in 1932 to dampen the effects of forecasted labor unrest in an urban area facing 50 percent unemployment. The Guardsmen had performed less efficiently than expected. It was Marshall’s brief to train the division to a level the Army required in the event the National Guard was called to war.

Yet again, a playwright could not have done a better job than chance did when it came to scripting the details of the career of the man who would be the nation’s number one soldier when, indeed, the entire National Guard was called to the colors. It would be Marshall’s lot to oversee the training and equipping, even the streamlining and a massive change in management for the entire Guard. The insights he gained into Guard methods, Guard shortcomings, and Guard politics while he served in Illinois, not to mention new ways to apply The Infantry School experience, were legion.

Managing a Promotion to Brigadier General

The promotion clock nearly ticked out on Marshall. If he didn’t get a star soon, he would be mandatorily retired as a colonel. And even if he won one star, could he earn two before the unofficial cutoff, at age 61, after which tradition forbade generals from being considered for the post of chief of staff? It is true that by the mid-1930s, Marshall wanted to be chief of staff, and he even felt he had an outside chance to get there.

Several senior officers who knew Marshall well took it upon themselves to extol his merits as a means to getting him a star. Marshall, on the other hand, made only one request of only one man. General Pershing, who had been Marshall’s best man at the second wedding, agreed to lay out Marshall’s career in writing, via efficiency reports dating back to 1915, to the secretary of war. Pershing, however, had a better card to play: he spoke in Marshall’s behalf directly to Franklin Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, in May 1935, took care of the secretary of war in a brief note: “General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (Infantry) be promoted to Brigadier. Can we put him on list of next promotions? He is 54 years old.”

The 1935 promotion list was issued without reference to Marshall. Someone high up was willing to defy the president. But defy Pershing? Even in old age and long retirement, Black Jack would not take it. The old general of the armies went to work behind the scenes. Chief of Staff MacArthur was set to swing into action, but the other player whose wishes had been defied set another mechanism in motion. On October 2, 1935, the president announced that MacArthur was to nominally retire in order to travel to Manila to advise the new defense force of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, which was only a few years away from being granted independence as a sovereign nation. Named in MacArthur’s place as chief of staff was Maj. Gen. Malin Craig, who was elevated to four stars.

Craig and Marshall were friends going back 30 years. The new chief backed Marshall’s advancement, but he could not move the promotions board. Rather, the commanding general of VI Corps, who was based in Chicago, lived across the hall from the Marshalls, and was another of Marshall’s old friends and admirers, arranged for Marshall to pay a visit to Secretary of War George Dern in April 1936. The colonel came away from the meeting with a verbal commitment that Dern would see to the promotion no later than September.

A One-Star General as Second-in-Command

On October 1, 1936, Marshall was promoted to brigadier general and elevated to command the 3rd Division’s 5th Brigade in Washington State. Ironically, all the political pull on the Marshall promotion got him his star only a matter of weeks before seniority alone would have done the job. But chalk up another lesson for the future chief of staff: mere seniority would not play a decisive role in moving good men ahead in an Army he might run.

In the Pacific Northwest, Marshall put in much of his time overseeing the regional CCC program and camps. He was particularly caught up in educating and training the young CCC men for work and life in the real economy. Marshall did his best, also, to nurture professional education for his officers, especially the young ones. The list he maintained of especially promising young men grew and grew.

Near the end of 1937, Marshall had a one-on-one conversation with President Roosevelt when the latter toured the Pacific Northwest. Nothing came of it; it was probably as forgettable to Roosevelt as a brief encounter the two had shared in 1928.

The call came in June 1938. Beginning on July 7, Brig. Gen. Marshall was to prepare himself to run the Army’s War Plans Division, as soon as he could get up to speed in a place where reading material was yards thick. Chief of Staff Craig greeted him thusly: “Thank God, George, you have come to hold my trembling hands.”

The War Plans job lasted only three months. As the true meaning of the Munich crisis and Germany’s dismantling of Czechoslovakia settled upon the world, planning in Washington for a war in Europe broke down when Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson refused to attend a vital meeting called by General Craig on the excuse that a two-week-old vacancy of the deputy chief of staff had to be filled first, because the deputy oversaw the Army’s budget process. On a personal level, Craig was all for filling the vacancy with Marshall, but Marshall was a very junior one-star general. What would that do to protocol and the morale of most of the Army’s generals?

But Assistant Secretary Johnson, who was pretty much running the Department of War in place of a largely absent Secretary of War Harry Woodring, wanted Marshall for the job. To break the stalemate, Johnson issued Craig a direct order. This was the cover Craig needed; the deed was done during the third week of October 1938. Even though he would wear only one star, Marshall became the number two man in an army that appeared to be headed for war. It didn’t hurt one bit that the voracious information-gathering vessel that was George Marshall had just undergone a three-month crash reading course on just about everything the Army needed and wanted to do to win a war almost anywhere in the world.

Arguing For a More Balanced Military

Weeks after he became Craig’s deputy, Marshall finally made a lasting impression on President Roosevelt. At the November 14, 1938, aircraft meeting, as the assembled honorables listened mutely and nodded appreciatively at the president’s ruminations on the singular virtues of air power, only Marshall spoke up, but only after the president asked his opinion: “Don’t you think so, George?” Marshall was not ready to be addressed so familiarly by a man he barely knew, not even this man. “Mr. President,” Marshall responded in a rather chilly tone, “I am sorry, but I don’t agree with that at all.” And then Roosevelt ended the meeting.

It didn’t matter whether George Marshall agreed with the president; the planning Roosevelt set in motion on November 14, 1938, would move forward because Assistant Secretary Johnson and General Craig—not to mention Roosevelt himself—wanted it to. Marshall could content himself with simply overseeing the budget, or he could advance his case with Johnson and Craig while there was hope that the planning and spending would not so favor the Air Corps that the rest of the Army would shrivel up and blow away. Marshall was not against building airplanes but he could not fathom who would fly tens of thousands of them, nor how they might win a war—maybe two wars, simultaneously—without a little help from a ground army, or even a navy.

When Marshall spoke out at the aircraft meeting he instantly but unknowingly cemented his relationship with two men in the room whom he barely knew. One, Assistant Secretary of War Louis Johnson, had had the most to do with Marshall’s appointment as deputy chief of staff, but the two had not done much to exchange views. Equipping and arming the entire Army was not just a job to Johnson, it was a mission. Johnson expected to be elevated to secretary of war when the president finally tired of having Harry Woodring, an uncooperative, moralizing isolationist, around. Thus Johnson’s backing for Marshall’s elevation was probably an omen that he was building up his own following within the War Department.

Fostering a Relationship With Harry Hopkins

The surprise relationship was with Works Progress Administration (WPA) chief Harry Hopkins, a key personal advisor to the president, who, like Marshall, was unafraid to say “no” to the great man. So unafraid and so committed to rearmament was Hopkins that he had taken several blatantly illegal actions to benefit the Army. In the first instance, he had cunningly reallocated $2 million in funds earmarked for the WPA to purchase machine tools Army arsenals needed but could not get from the Congress, to manufacture small arms ammunition. In the second case, Hopkins saw to it that $250 million in Civilian Conservation Corps funding was used to build permanent housing and other facilities for CCC workers on Army posts. If the Army ever got around to expanding—and Hopkins was betting it would—a significant start in needed barracks and other buildings had been made.

Marshall knew Hopkins had engineered these windfalls, but he did not speak directly with the man until the last week of 1938, when Hopkins phoned Marshall to set up a meeting at his Department of Commerce office. At that meeting the two spoke frankly of their shared views with regard to a balanced Army. This was the beginning of a great friendship and strategic partnership. When Hopkins urged Marshall to make his case for a balanced force directly to the president, Marshall said he felt his earlier candor might have made his opinions moot. Marshall then asked Hopkins to speak up, and Hopkins agreed to do so.

At the Oval Office followup to the aircraft meeting, which took place at the close of December 1938, Roosevelt complained that his November 14 request for airplanes had resulted

in the Army’s asking him for a few planes and everything else in the world it felt it needed in the near term. True to his word, Hopkins spoke first in an effort to realign the president’s thinking. Then Assistant Secretary Johnson piled on. General Craig spoke up too, somewhat more diffidently than the civilians. And in the end Marshall quietly and methodically aired his views in some detail.

Speaking out twice in a row transformed Brig. Gen. Marshall into an inside player—not because of his titular power, but for the power of his character. Far from experiencing an ignominious transfer from his post, he virtually cemented himself in many powerful minds as the leading contender to replace Craig whenever Craig retired. As Douglas MacArthur had learned from his 1933 temper tantrum at his first meeting with the new president, Roosevelt favored one character trait above all others, and that was the courage of conviction that obligated a man to speak truth to power. In the harrowing years ahead, it was perhaps through his powerful trait of unflinching candor that Marshall best served his nation, and perhaps humanity as a whole.

Following their candid and friendly get-together in the immediate aftermath of the November 1938 aircraft meeting, Deputy Chief of Staff Marshall and WPA Administrator Hopkins met whenever they could during the first quarter of 1939. In the main, Marshall educated Hopkins on the ways and needs of the Army because Hopkins was the one person in the Roosevelt inner circle who felt the President urgently needed educating. Roosevelt favored the Navy to the extent of virtually ignoring the Army, and that, Hopkins and Marshall agreed, needed to be corrected.

So, as a deep and genuine friendship blossomed between men who were polar opposites in all things except their passion to build a balanced Army (which had become a catchphrase in Army circles), Marshall filled out Hopkins’s feelings with facts and insights, and these typically found their way to the president’s ear, which became increasingly willing to listen.

Marshall’s Rapid Rise to Head of the Army

Overworked and in faltering health, General Craig gave notice to President Roosevelt in March or April 1939 that he intended to go on terminal leave in late June and formally retire from the Army on August 31. Though Craig favored Marshall to replace him, this was entirely the president’s call.

Marshall was junior to 33 other generals, but when age was factored in, only four could serve out a four-year term before the mandatory retirement age of 64. The competition was going to be fierce, but the front-runner from the Army’s perspective was a little too ardent in his request for the taste of his fellow generals, and he quite possibly offended the president.

Marshall was extremely circumspect in spite of attracting many influential supporters, not least being old General Pershing. But the voice that swayed the president to a man he barely knew and had not yet fully sized up was that of Marshall’s new friend, Harry Hopkins. On April 23, 1939, Marshall was called to the White House.

When they met in private, once the offer was made but before it was accepted, Marshall asked the president if he would be allowed to always speak his mind, even if his was an answer or issue Roosevelt didn’t want to hear. The president said “yes,” and then “yes” again when Marshall requested a confirmation. The deal was thus sealed.

George C. Marshall continued to work tirelessly as deputy chief of staff. He was elevated to four-star rank and sworn in as chief of staff on September 1, 1939—the day Germany invaded Poland.

From the very moment Marshall ascended to the head of the United States Army, his was the brain at the center of the orderly, measured growth that created the wartime field armies and all the organizations that supported them until the moment of final victory. His was the voice, second only to the president’s, that reasoned with and brilliantly cajoled a tight-fisted, antiwar Congress toward making available all the resources it took to even begin the mind-boggling undertaking of laying the foundation for the organization that, by 1945, had trained, equipped, transported, and launched millions of Americans toward his own unbreakable goal of total victory.

Marshall had a hand in every aspect of the vital strategic planning that guided his armies across battlefields around the world. He personally approved the retention or elevation of every general officer who served in the wartime army he led, and of course he selected wisely from among the hundreds and hundreds of men he had commanded and taught all across his prewar career.

Marshall’s Postwar Career

Less than three months after World War II ended, a grateful nation allowed Marshall to lay down the heavy pack he had carried with pride and honor since 1901. But Harry Truman, the new president, still needed him, first to mount a mission to China to attempt to end the civil war there. The effort failed, a rare defeat for Marshall.

Next, in January 1947, Marshall agreed to serve as secretary of state. Among his stellar diplomatic victories—accomplished in little more than a year of service—was what came to be called the Marshall Plan, the American contribution to pulling Europe up from the ashes of the victory Marshall had engineered. For good measure, he supported the building of a modern, democratic Japan on the ruins of the feudal nation his armies had defeated.

He retired again in early 1949, but was called to the colors one last time in September 1950, now to serve as interim secretary of defense at a time when the Korean War was going very badly for the forces of the United Nations. (He replaced his old mentor, Louis Johnson, who failed miserably to pull together a viable field army for Korea.) The six-month tour to which he had acceded stretched to a full year. Marshall retired once and for all on September 1, 1951—a few months over 50 years since taking his oath as a new second lieutenant, and 12 years to the day since being sworn in as Army chief of staff.

George Catlett Marshall, the warrior who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953, remained in retirement to the end of his days. He suffered a crippling stroke in early 1959 and passed away, aged 78, in October of that year at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The old general was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery. But the memory of his life and legacy continues to burn brightly like an eternal flame.

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One thought on “ george c. marshall: the indispensable man ”.

“Roosevelt favored one character trait above all others, and that was the courage of conviction that obligated a man to speak truth to power.”

Very powerful words indeed.

I love these profiles. They are very well researched and written. Keep up the good work.

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George C. Marshall

George C. Marshall General of the Army December 31, 1880 – October 16, 1969

George C. Marshall, 1946. U.S. Army.

It has been said that courage can be contagious. Those who served under General George C. Marshall would add that his additional characteristics—that of quiet dignity, effective communication, and the belief in the good of one’s country—were just as effective. Altogether, they were the reason Marshall was the first man promoted to five-star General of the Army during World War II. His legacy, both on and off the battlefield, left a lasting impression on the U.S. Army and the world.

George Catlett Marshall is often described as a “genius of logistics.” A 1901 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, he studied modern warfare at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There he graduated first in his class at the Army Staff College. Taking what he had learned at Fort Leavenworth, Marshall assisted with the 1st Division’s mobilization and training, both in the United States and in France, during World War I.

Marshall served as one of the chief planners of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. He successfully transferred almost 600,000 men to the front without provoking the German army into deploying additional troops. As part of the Allies’ final offensive strategy, the Meuse-Argonne Offensive stretched across the entire Western Front from late September, 1918, through the final day of the war on November 11, 1918. His logistical skills impressed his superiors so much that they noted “he should be made a brigadier general … and every day this is postponed is a loss to the Army and the nation. He is a military genius.”

Following World War I, Marshall became aide-de-camp to Army Chief of Staff General John J. Pershing from 1919 to 1924. The two men had had run-ins throughout the war, and Marshall had made an impression when he vigorously defended his divisional commander against what he considered to be unjust criticisms from Pershing. What might have led to a court-martial instead ended with Pershing admiring the younger man’s honesty, loyalty, and candor. Pershing soon had Marshall transferred to his staff.

Of all the lessons Marshall learned while working under Pershing, the necessity of a trained, mobilized Army was the most important. Both men had been horrified by the lack of training soldiers received during the Great War. They believed it resulted in unnecessarily high casualties in the 19 months the country had been at war. Consequently, throughout the rest of his 45 year Army career, Marshall fiercely advocated for combat readiness, so much so that he made it the focal point of his time as an instructor at the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, from 1927 to 1932.

Marshall’s curriculum emphasized the importance of tactical innovativeness, creativity, and operational flexibility. He and his instructors wanted their officer-students to be able to think through and solve problems on the battlefield quickly, without being tied down with old-fashioned techniques and what was known as “the school solutions.” By the end of his five years at Fort Benning, Marshall and his staff had transformed the Infantry School into an institution that “developed flexible, effective leaders for the modern battlefield.” By doing so, he trained 150 future World War II generals.

Marshall has long been compared to another famous American George— George Washington . They were both Soldiers of maturity and dignity whose military identity merged with America’s purpose. They were father figures; leaders not followers. Perhaps that is why, when Europe was on the precipice of war once again, President Franklin D. Roosevelt instinctively turned to Marshall for guidance.

Marshall was renowned for his frankness and did not hold back when Roosevelt asked for advice. In November 1938, he bluntly told Roosevelt that he did not agree with the president’s idea to build 10,000 warplanes as a way to help Europe while simultaneously deterring Hitler. His response shocked the president. His colleagues believed that he had ruined his career. Once again, however, Marshall’s candor won out and Roosevelt appointed him the Army’s chief-of-staff. He was sworn in on September 1, 1939, the same day Adolf Hitler invaded Poland.

As chief-of-staff, Marshall transformed the Army during World War II. Before the start of the war, America’s Army was composed of approximately 174,000 men and ranked 17th in the world in terms of strength. Marshall and Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the treasury, approached Roosevelt with a $675 million budget (about $13 billion in 2021) that they argued would be enough to create an Army of 1.25 million men by 1941. This, they explained, would be the bare minimum needed for America to remain neutral, but also be prepared for war. After initially dismissing the plan, Roosevelt listened to Marshall’s explanation as to why it was necessary and how, by disregarding the plan, Roosevelt was putting the nation in grave danger. Two days later, Roosevelt sent Marshall’s budget and plan to Congress, where it was approved with a budget of $900 million (about $17 billion in 2021). Marshall’s plan was so effective that by the end of the war the United States Army was made up of 8.25 million Soldiers.

Both Congress and President Roosevelt came to rely heavily on Marshall throughout World War II. Sam Rayburn, the speaker of the house, stated that “of all the men who ever testified before any committee on which I served, there is no one of them who has the influence with a committee of the House that General Marshall has.” Congress and the president appreciated Marshall’s integrity, loyalty, and effectiveness. Their reliance on Marshall played a part in why he was not appointed commander of Operation Overlord, which was the code name given to the invasion of France in 1944. Roosevelt instead gave the command to General Dwight Eisenhower, explaining to Marshall that he “didn’t feel I could sleep at ease with you out of Washington.” Despite not receiving the coveted command of Operation Overlord, Marshall was instrumental in the planning of the invasion of Normandy. In order to be of equal rank to his European counterparts, Congress appointed Marshall a five-star general of the army on December 16, 1944. He was the first of five World War II Army generals to hold this rank.

Marshall retired as the Army’s chief-of-staff in November 1945. He had hoped to retire from public life altogether but, before he could, President Truman asked him to serve as secretary of state. Ever the loyal citizen, Marshall felt as though he could not refuse. He was sworn in on January 21, 1947. As secretary of state, Marshall achieved one of his greatest victories, the implementation of the Marshall Plan. This plan, officially known as the European Recovery Program, aimed to help allied European countries rebuild after World War II and stop the spread of communism from the Soviet Union. After Marshall successfully appealed to Congress, the United States sent $13 billion in economic aid (about $134 billion in 2021). By the time the plan ended in June 1952, every allied state’s economy had grown past its pre-war levels. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for the Marshall Plan in 1953.

Marshall finally retired from public service in 1951 after 49 years of service to his country, including a year as secretary of defense from 1950 to 1951. He enjoyed life as a private citizen but did agree to one notable public service appointment in 1953, when President Eisenhower asked him to head the American delegation at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. As he walked into Westminster Abbey to take his seat before the ceremony, the audience rose to their feet as a sign of respect to the man whom Winston Churchill hailed as the “true organizer of victory.”

General George C. Marshall died at Walter Reed Hospital on October 16, 1959, at the age of 78 after suffering a series of strokes. Since his death, he has been hailed as the “last great American.” A title worthy of a humble, determined, courageous man who guarded the ideals of democracy and transformed America’s Army into one of the strongest the world has ever known.

Caitlin Healy Education Specialist

Baker, Kevin. “America’s Finest General.” Military History Magazine , September 1, 2011, 28-35. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/06/MarshallarticleMiltaryHistory2011.pdf.

Benesh, Peter. “He Marshalled Might for Right.” Investor’s Business Daily. February 9, 2010. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/IBDMarshallarticle.pdf.

Bland, Larry I. “Marshall and the “Plan”.” The George C. Marshall Foundation. Accessed June 20, 2021. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/essays-remarks/marshall-and-the-plan-bland/.

Bland, Larry I. “George C. Marshall and the Education of Army Leaders.” Military Review 68 (October 1988): 27-37. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/Education_of_Army_Leaders.pdf.

Brower, Charles F. “George C. Marshall: A Study in Character.” The George C. Marshall Foundation. Accessed June 20, 2021. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/essays-remarks/george-c-marshall-study-character/.

Ellwood, David W. “The Marshall Plan: A Strategy That Worked.” Foreign Policy Agenda , April 2006, 17-25. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/05/The_Marshall_Plan_A_Strategy_that_Worked_000.pdf.

Hindley, Meredith. “How The Marshall Plan Came About.” Humanities 19, no. 6 (Nov. & Dec. 1998). https://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2014/05/How_the_Marshall_Plan_Came_About_000.pdf.

“Marshall and the Benning Revolution.” The George C. Marshall Foundation. January 23, 2015. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/blog/marshall-benning-revolution/.

Morrow, Lance. “George C. Marshall: The Last Great American?” Smithsonian Magazine , August 1997. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/Last_Great_American.pdf.

Pops, Gerald. “The Ethical Leadership of George C. Marshall.” Public Integrity 8, no. 2 (Spring 2006). https://academic.udayton.edu/RichardGhere/POL 318/Pops.pdf.

Saltman, David. “General of the Army George C. Marshall: The George Washington of the 20th Century.” Officer Review , December 1995, 6-8. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/George_Washington_of_the_20th_Century.pdf.

Additional Reading

Eisenhower, Dwight D. “George Catlett Marshall.” The Atlantic , August 1964. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1964/08/george-catlett-marshall/305438/.

Kingseed, Cole C. “Marshall’s Men.” AUSA’s Army Magazine , December 2009, 51-59. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/Kingseed_1209.pdf.

Liebling, A. J. “Chief of Staff.” New Yorker , October 18, 1940. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1940/10/26/chief-of-staff.

Pogue, Forrest C. “General George C. Marshall – Soldier and Statesmen.” Lecture, The 1958 Willis Jefferson Dance, Jr. Memorial Lecture, The Virginia Military Institute, April 18, 1958. https://www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2014/04/pogue1958lecture.pdf.

“The Benning Revolution.” In A History of Innovation: U.S. Army Adaptation in War and Peace , edited by Jon T. Hoffman, 27-36. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 2009. https://history.army.mil/html/books/innovation/History_of_Innovation.pdf.

Weintraub, Stanley. “15 Stars.” New York Times , August 5, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/books/chapters/0805-1st-wein.html.

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Marshall Bibliography

Selected works about george c. marshall., marshall, george c. memoirs of my services in the world war, 1917–1918 ..

Edited by James L. Collins, Jr. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976. Marshall drafted this manuscript while he was in Washington, D.C., between 1919 and 1924 as aide-de-camp to General of the Armies John J. Pershing. Given the growing bitterness of the “memoirs wars” of the period, however, he decided against publication, and the draft sat unused until the 1970s when Marshall’s step-daughter and her husband decided to publish it.

Marshall, George C. George C. Marshall Interviews and Reminiscences

for Forrest C. Pogue; Edited by Larry I. Bland. 3d ed., Lexington, Va.: George C. Marshall Foundation, 1996. The edited transcripts of Forrest Pogue’s tape-recorded interviews and his notes on unrecorded interviews, this is a key source for understanding Marshall. Pogue contributed a seventeen-page Introduction on the background to the interviews.

Marshall, George C. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall

Edited by Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981– . These include selected and annotated documents, mainly by Marshall. Six of the seven volumes in the series have been published, covering the period 1880 through 1949, and the final volume is expected out in 2015.

Marshall, Katherine Tupper Together: Annals of an Army Wife.

New York: Tupper and Love, 1946. Mrs. Marshall’s autobiography, which covers the years 1930 to 1945, was begun after the General departed for his mission to China in late 1945 and completed after she joined him there. General Marshall edited the manuscript in China, and in some instances reduced her defense of his actions. The book was widely reprinted in the late-1940s, and there are several editions.

Pogue, Forrest C. George C. Marshall

4 vols., New York: Viking, 1963–87. This is the standard against which all work on Marshall is judged. The series includes: Education of a General, 1880–1939; Ordeal and Hope, 1939–1942; Organizer of Victory, 1943–1945; and Statesman, 1945–1959.

Cray, Ed General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman

New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990. Another excellent single-volume biography, it is much longer than Stoler’s and was aimed at a general trade audience.

Faber, Harold Soldier and Statesman: General George C. Marshall

New York: Ariel Books, 1964.

Frye, William Marshall: Citizen Soldier

Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1947.

Moseley, Leonard Marshall: Hero for Our Times

New York: Hearst Books, 1982.

Payne, Robert The Marshall Story: A Biography

New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951.

Roll, David L.

George marshall: defender of the republic.

New York: Dutton Caliber, 2019. Aimed at general audiences, research for the latest single-volume biography was conducted at the Marshall Foundation archives and is available at major bookstores.

Stoler, Mark A. American Century

Boston: Twayne, 1989. This is one of the best of the single-volume biographies. It was intended as a collateral reading in college undergraduate courses, and a paperback edition is still in print.

Lubetkin, Wendy George Marshall

New York: Chelsea House, 1989. A volume in the World Leaders Past and Present series.

Saunders, Alan George C. Marshall: A General for Peace

New York: Facts on File, 1996. A volume in the Makers of America series.

Skutt, Mary Sutton Growing Up, by George: George C. Marshall’s Early Years

Uniontown, Pennsylvania—Lexington, Virginia, 1880–1901. Lexington, Va.: News-Gazette, 1997.

Skutt, Mary Sutton George C. Marshall, Reporting for Duty

Lexington, Va.: Blue Valley Books, 2001. This volume covers Marshall’s career between 1901 (graduation from VMI) and 1945 (retirement as U.S. Army Chief of Staff). A third volume is in preparation covering the years between 1946 and 1959.

Baker, Kevin America’s Finest General

Read Kevin Baker’s article, “America’s Finest General,” published by Military History magazine, September 2011.   Article is reprinted with the permission of Weider History Group.   Copyright © 2011.

Beal, John Robinson Marshall in China Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1970.

Beal, a newspaper reporter, was hired in the spring of 1946 by the Chinese government as advisor on press and public relations. Marshall suggested the role as a method of keeping the Nationalist regime from generating bad publicity in the United States.

Bland, Larry I. George C. Marshall’s Mediation Mission to China, December 1945–January 1947

Lexington, Va.: George C. Marshall Foundation, 1998. A collection of essays by various authors.

Brower, Charles George C. Marshall: Servant of the American Nation

New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2011. Charles F. Brower has compiled key essays from a symposium held at the Virginia Military Institute, the general’s alma mater, on the 50th anniversary of Marshall’s death. This is a significant work because it provides a balanced assessment of the general’s notable achievements, offers multi-faceted insight into his personality, and suggests that his life remains a model for public service.

Ferrell, Robert H. George C. Marshall as Secretary of State, 1947–1949

New York: Cooper Square, 1966. Volume fifteen in the American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy series.

McCarthy, Joseph R. America’s Retreat from Victory: The Story of General George Marshall

New York: Devin-Adair, 1951. A ghost-written right-wing diatribe by the infamous junior senator from Wisconsin in which he asserts that Marshall was a Communist dupe and thus to blame for much of what was wrong in the world.

Parrish, Thomas Roosevelt and Marshall: Partners in Politics and War, The Personal Story

New York: William Morrow & Co., 1989.

George Marshall and the American Century

Produced by Great Projects Film Company for PBS, 1994. 88 minutes. Directed by Kenneth Mandel and Ken Levis. Narrated by E. G. Marshall.

George C. Marshall: Soldier and Statesman

Produced by Lou Reda Productions. for A&E Television Network, 1998. 47 minutes. Directed by Don Horan.

Motion and Still Pictures Online in the Marshall Film Archives A Guide to George C. Marshall Motion Pictures.

2000. Compiled by Sharon Ritenour Stevens. List of Marshall-related motion pictures and newsreels. Photographs are available by clicking on the images.

Marshall Plan Filmography.

2002. Compiled by Linda R. Christenson. Descriptive list of films about the Marshall Plan

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George Marshall: Defender of the Republic Hardcover – July 9, 2019

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• Print length 704 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Dutton Caliber
• Publication date July 9, 2019
• Dimensions 6.4 x 2.17 x 9.52 inches
• ISBN-10 110199097X
• ISBN-13 978-1101990971
• See all details

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Praise for george marshall: defender of the republic, editorial reviews, about the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

Harvest of Death

George Marshall's ascent to power and prominence began on January 27, 1914, "under the shade of a bamboo clump." Nearly five thousand U.S. Army soldiers had just completed an amphibious landing on the island of Luzon in the Philippines and were gathering to attack Manila, some sixty miles to the north. Marshall, then a thirty-three-year-old first lieutenant, was sitting in the mud with his back against one of the trees, surrounded by officers awaiting orders. The wide brim of his felt campaign hat was tipped up, revealing closely cropped sandy hair and deep-set blue eyes. Staring intently at a map, he slowly and confidently dictated orders detailing a choreography of infantry, cavalry, field artillery, signal corps, Filipino scouts, field kitchens, surgical tents, wagons, and hundreds of pack animals. They were to move north day and night on mucky trails through patches of jungle, fields of sugarcane, towering razor grass, and mountain passes. One of the officers who witnessed Marshall's performance that day was Henry "Hap" Arnold, a West Pointer who would rise to become head of the army air force during World War II. Arnold was so impressed that in a letter to his wife he wrote that he had "met a man who was going to be chief of staff of the army some day."

Over the next eight days, Marshall's invasion forces outwitted the enemy defenders and captured successive objectives on the way to Manila. It was just an exercise, a mock invasion and attack, but those who were there spread word throughout the officer ranks that Marshall was a military genius, one of the most promising future wartime leaders in the army.

Instigated by the War Department in Washington, the 1914 maneuvers had been designed to test the army's readiness to defend the Philippine archipelago against a possible invasion by Japan. Following victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and the complete annexation of Korea five years later due to the assassination of a prominent Japanese statesman by a Korean, Japan had become the preeminent power in the Pacific. The Philippines, symbol of U.S. imperialism, stood directly in the path of Japan's increasingly aggressive designs to dominate East Asia. To simulate a Japanese attack, a "White Force" was to land at Batangas Bay, south of Manila, and try to overwhelm the "Brown Force" charged with defending the capital.

Given the importance and high-profile nature of the maneuvers-the largest ever in the Philippines-it was unlikely that a mere first lieutenant like Marshall, no matter how competent, would command the White Force. In fact, General J. Franklin Bell, head of the Philippine Department, had initially selected a hard-drinking colonel to take charge. "A courtly gentleman, a very nice fellow," recalled Marshall, although he couldn't-or preferred not to-remember his name. Referring to the man's propensity for strong drink, Marshall wrote that the colonel would ride beside him in a "spring wagon" with a "zinc-lined suitcase," and every time they stopped he would open the suitcase and "refresh himself against the Philippine heat."

Under the colonel-his name was William Cathcart Buttler-the first stage of the attack, the amphibious landings by the White Force, had to be delayed a week due to a snafu in procuring an adequate number of landing boats. Marshall, an adjutant assigned to the colonel's staff, stepped into the chaos and coolly secured the boats, arranged to have stalls built for the pack animals, and organized the amphibious landings. The umpires for the maneuvers, having lost confidence in Colonel Buttler, proposed that he be removed from command. At some risk to his own career, Marshall presumptuously suggested that to save face the colonel be left in nominal command, but that he, Marshall, be allowed to act as Buttler's alter ego in planning and leading the attack, along with Marshall's close friend, Captain Jens Bugge, the White Force chief of staff. The umpires agreed. The next day Bugge suffered a malarial attack and had to return to Manila. The umpires and General Bell had no choice. Marshall was the only one with knowledge of the White Force plans, forces, and officers. With the War Department in Washington and the garrison in Manila watching, the maneuvers had to go on. First Lieutenant Marshall was in sole command of almost five thousand men.

Except for Marshall's failure to commit enough of his forces to the first day's objective, his performance was regarded by the umpires as outstanding. Under pressure day and night for two weeks, he was imperturbable. With courtesy and self-effacement, he cut through the reluctance of colonels and other senior officers to accept orders from him. The clarity and precision of Marshall's field orders evidenced his grasp of the situations he confronted and his attention to tactical details. The landings of the men, animals, food, and equipment on the beaches at Batangas went smoothly despite the fact that the boats could not stand in closer than three-quarters of a mile and there was no dock. On the way to Manila, Marshall kept his units intact so that attacks on the enemy defenders could be made in strength. He managed three successful mock battles and several skirmishes and cavalry forays, reaching the capital on February 4.

One superior officer wrote in Marshall's efficiency report that he was the best leader of large bodies of troops in the entire American army. Another gushed that "there are not five officers in the Army as well qualified as [Marshall] to command a division in the field." Although the umpires ended the maneuvers without declaring Marshall's White Force a clear winner, the tales that grew out of his performance, and the dazzle that surrounded his name, guaranteed him a reputation in the small officer corps of the Regular Army that few if any of his rank could equal. Beneath the overblown legend, however, certain facts stood out: Marshall's White Force executed a successful amphibious invasion, and then proceeded to outsmart and overwhelm the Brown Force defenders, thus providing the army with vital lessons for the future. Much later, when a confrontation with Japan was far more than a possibility, these lessons were incorporated into the army's war plans.

Whether or not Marshall's performance deserved all of the plaudits it received, there is no doubt that an aura surrounded him, an emanation of controlled power. "His figure," wrote Dean Acheson, "conveyed intensity . . . It spread a sense of authority and calm." Physically, Marshall was lean, erect, square-shouldered, and tall for his era, slightly under six feet. He had a way of carrying himself that conveyed order and self-restraint. His face was pleasing and dignified, though with a long, thin upper lip and receding chin he could hardly be described as handsome. Professionally, Marshall was stern, deliberately reserved, yet he exhibited "nothing of the martinet." In social situations he was typically genial, friendly, and sometimes even warm and charming. Yet his emotions, including his explosive temper, were usually masked, his fears and vulnerabilities well hidden.

Marshall tried but could not conceal his susceptibility to the effects of the enormous stress he was under throughout the war games' days and nights. After the maneuvers were suspended, he was hospitalized in Manila for about two weeks, suffering for the second time from what the doctors of that era called "neurasthenia," a catchall term for a variety of nervous conditions short of insanity such as chronic fatigue, anxiety, depression, and nervous breakdown. Where he fit into this spectrum is unknown. Following these episodes, Marshall realized that he was working himself to death and resolved to take better care of himself. For much of the rest of his life, he made an effort to ride for an hour most mornings before breakfast, play tennis or catnap in the afternoons, and relax after dinner viewing a movie or reading. And if he could find time to hunt or fish, he would escape for a day or two with Hap Arnold or another army pal.

While recuperating, Marshall wrote a rare but revealing letter to his older brother Stuart. Marshall detested braggarts, yet to his brother he boasted at length about how he took on "the entire burden" of commanding the White Force, "chewed the other side up, captured two of their six cavalry squadrons, and smashed up their infantry." In the same letter he wrote that his wife Lily "looks very well," had "gained a number of lbs.," and that they were looking forward to resting for "several weeks or a month" in a "celebrated hotel" near Mt. Fuji in Japan. Had it not been for some emotionally searing comments that Stuart had made years earlier, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about this letter. After all, it is not unusual for a younger brother, no matter how self-effacing, to seek approval from his older sibling, or write about a romantic interlude with his wife. Yet this letter sought more than approval. It summoned a painful past.

Marshall would never forget a conversation between Stuart and their mother that he overheard in 1897, when he was sixteen, living with his family in Uniontown. Marshall had been begging his parents to send him to the Virginia Military Institute. From a room adjoining the kitchen, he heard his brother, who had graduated from VMI in the class of 1894, attempting in vain to persuade his mother that Flicker should not be allowed to attend the Institute because he "would disgrace the family." Stuart was referring to Flicker's feckless attitude toward school, his shyness, and his fear of failure and rejection. As Marshall recalled later, "The urgency to succeed came from hearing that conversation; it had a psychological effect on my career . . . I decided right then that I was going to wipe [Stuart's] face, or wipe his eye."

Nor would Marshall ever forgive Stuart for the "unkind, unfair remarks" he made about Lily Carter Coles, the flirtatious, titian-haired beauty with whom Marshall fell in love as a senior at VMI, the year he headed his class of thirty-three as First Captain, the highest-ranking cadet. In February of 1902, after he had graduated and received his commission in the army, Marshall married Lily in the parlor of the little Gothic cottage at 319 Letcher Avenue near the south Limit Gate of VMI in Lexington, Virginia, where she lived with her widowed mother. The night after their wedding, at the New Willard Hotel in Washington, DC, Marshall learned for the first time that Lily could not risk a pregnancy due to a heart condition (Marshall called it a "mitral regurgitation"). The substance of Stuart's hurtful remarks about Lily, and when he articulated them, is unknown. It is known that Stuart courted Lily when he was at VMI. One historian speculated that Stuart disliked her because she had rejected his marriage proposal. During the late 1920s, Marshall confided to his goddaughter that Stuart "opposed everything I wanted to do, including my marriage to Lily. He attempted to run my life and was unpleasant about it, but when he made unkind, unfair remarks about Lily, I cut him off my list."

Though out of character, Marshall's boastful letter to Stuart in 1914 was his way of "wiping" his success in his brother's face-a not-so-subtle reminder that he had become a credit, not a disgrace, to the family. References to nesting in a celebrated hotel with Lily were yet another means of rubbing it in-telling Stuart that he was wrong, that he and Lily were happily married. This would be one of the last letters that Marshall would write to Stuart. He would be estranged from his brother for the rest of his life.

After Marshall was discharged from the hospital in Manila, he and Lily set off on a four-month journey to Japan, Manchuria, and Korea, courtesy of the army's generous sick leave policy combined with Marshall's accumulation of regular leave. As guests of the Japanese army the couple spent a month in Manchuria, where Marshall toured on horseback the already forgotten battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War, prophetically noting in his thirty-three-page report "the sublime spirit of self-sacrifice for the cause of the Emperor displayed by the Japanese soldier." On the return trip to Japan, Marshall stopped to investigate the terrain on the south side of the Yalu River before he and Lily continued by train to Seoul. Thirty-six years later, when he was secretary of defense, this area would be a flashpoint in the Korean War.

On June 28, 1914, when Marshall and Lily were nearing the end of their trip, an act of terrorism in the turbulent Balkans improbably triggered what came to be called the Great War, later known as the First World War. The terrorist, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb named Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed at point-blank range Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his consort Sophie when their carriage came to a momentary halt opposite a cafŽ in Sarajevo. Princip and his coconspirators hoped that the murder of the future king would foment an uprising leading to the freedom of the South Slav people from Austro-Hungarian rule and the creation of a Greater Serbia. Instead, they were the spark that kindled the first of the twentieth century's two world wars, at the center of which was German power.

If Princip was the spark, the fading empire of Austria-Hungary, called the Dual Monarchy, was the chaff that ignited the fire. Rather than dealing on its own with the tiny kingdom of Serbia, home of the conspirators, it decided to seek the support of Germany. In the judgment of historian John Keegan, it was this decision that "transformed a local into a general European crisis." Once Germany signaled its support for war against Serbia, the fire began to spread. Russia mobilized for war. Germany declared war against Russia, then against France, Russia's ally. The blaze raged out of control. When Germany demanded that its armies be permitted to pass through Belgium to attack France, Great Britain, a guarantor of Belgian neutrality, declared war against Germany.

Within six weeks of the double assassination, Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II, emperor of a powerful new nation less than half a century old, was at war with the three other great powers in Europe-Russia, France, and Great Britain. Except for France, it was a family affair since Czar Nicholas II of Russia and Britain's King George V were cousins of the kaiser. Not to be left out, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia and Britain, and France declared war on the Dual Monarchy. From his window overlooking Horse Guards Parade in London, British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey lamented, "The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

In the fall of 1914, the German army sliced through neutral Belgium and Luxembourg into France, at one point reaching the Marne River, a short distance from Paris. Racing to the front, many in taxis, French soldiers rallied, pushing the Germans more than thirty miles back to the line of the Aisne River. Farther north, in Belgium, twenty-five-year-old Private Adolf Hitler fought as an infantryman with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment on the Menin Road in the First Battle of Ypres, known in Germany as the Massacre of the Innocents because 40,000 German enlistees were killed in the first twenty days-Hitler's regiment alone was reduced from 3,600 to 611 men. On December 2, the future FŸhrer was awarded an Iron Cross, Second Class, for protecting his commander's life when a French shell hit their dugout, killing several German soldiers. It was, he later said, "the happiest day of my life." Weeks later, when Hitler's comrades emerged from their trenches during the spontaneous "Christmas truce" of 1914 to shake hands and sing carols with enemy troops in no-man's-land, he strongly disapproved, believing that nothing should interrupt the slaughter.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dutton Caliber; First Edition (July 9, 2019)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 704 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 110199097X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1101990971
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.34 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.4 x 2.17 x 9.52 inches
• #617 in WWII Biographies
• #2,437 in United States Biographies
• #2,655 in World War II History (Books)

About the author

David l. roll.

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Remembering George Marshall: Jeffersonville’s Basketball Legend

George Marshall, the renowned coach in Jeffersonville boys' basketball history, has passed away after achieving significant success with the team, including five sectional titles, five regional championships, three semistate trophies, three Final Fours, and 274 wins during his 16 years as their coach.

• Guided the team to five sectional titles, five regional championships, and three semistate trophies
• Finished with a .745 winning percentage, going 274-94
• Inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1996
• George Marshall has passed away, leaving a significant legacy in Jeffersonville boys' basketball history
• His impact on the team included leading them to several achievements through his coaching tenure

George Marshall leaves behind a remarkable legacy as a successful and influential figure in Jeffersonville boys' basketball history, with an enduring impact on the team's accomplishments.

The summary of the linked article was generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI

News and Tribune • JOSH COOK [email protected]

HIGH SCHOOL SPORTS: George Marshall passes away

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