George C. Marshall: Ordeal and Hope, 1939-1942, by Forest C. Pogue. Viking, $8.95
It was grimly significant that General George C. Marshall took the oath of office as Chief of Staff on September 1, 1939—the day Adolf Hitler hurled his armor and aircraft across the frontiers of Poland and initiated World War II. With war begun in Europe and with Japan engaged in completing the conquest of China, the nation faced stern reality. The gigantic task of rebuilding the land and air forces of the United States and organizing the national resources to support them fell upon an officer almost unknown to the country at large (Marshall had only been promoted from colonel to brigadier general in 1936). In this second volume of Mr. Pogue’s definitive biography, covering the period from the Fall of 1939 to the end of 1942, he makes clear the qualities of greatness which enabled Marshall to understand and to discharge these heavy duties, as well as his shortcomings both of vision and of temperament. It is the special virtue of the book that the reader comes to know its subject by the unfolding story of how he met and surmounted obstacles and how he dealt with his civilian superiors (including Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill) as well as his military colleagues and subordinates. Mr. Pogue devotes a minimum of verbiage to explaining Marshall; he lets the man and his actions speak for themselves. This reviewer’s memory of his own first encounter with Marshall dovetails so precisely with Pogue’s presentation of the soldier and the man that it may be worth recounting here. It occurred in August 1939, while Marshall was still only Acting Chief of Staff during General Craig’s terminal leave and while the mood of the country was occupied with two hopes —that there would be no European war after all, and that the United States could stay out of it if there were. Marshall, without committing himself, made it clear to his visitor that he shared neither hope. Then suddenly he began speaking of the task of building a new Army if one should be needed. Characteristically, he was thinking of the young soldiers who must fill the ranks—and of the kind of leadership he meant them to have. Most of the generals then on the active list were too old for field command, he said. “So,” he went on, “for a new Army we must have a new set of generals. I’m making up a list of colonels and lieutenant colonels, and a few majors, who may qualify if the need arises. I don’t intend to repeat the experience of the Civil War when generals had to be tested on the battlefield at the price of blood. I’m putting the men on this list through every peacetime test I can devise. I’m piling burdens on them, shifting them without notice from one post to another, giving them every opportunity to complain that I’m treating them unfairly. Those that come through this ordeal will wear stars. Those that don’t will never wear ’em.” From his desk drawer he took a little black notebook—later to become an Army legend: he glanced at it, scribbled briefly on a memo pad, pushed the pad across the desk to me. “A few samples,” he remarked. “Off the record for now.” The names on the pad were even less known then than his own—at that time— Eisenhower, Bradley, Clark, Patton, Eichelberger, Hodges, and one or two others who remained unknown to fame because they failed to meet Marshall’s standards. These were ruthless standards as Mr. Pogue emphasizes. They were also, under the circumstances, essential., The summer of 1940 began the true testing time for George C. Marshall. “If one period can be singled out,” notes Mr. Pogue, “as the most significant growing period in a man’s life, it was for Marshall the chaotic eighteen months that spanned France’s downfall and Pearl Harbor. … The fall of France suddenly demanded that he plan and act on a global level: [that he make] the great transition from the role of an able soldier intent on making an efficient force of United States troops and fliers to that of a planner and leader charged with considering the problems of armies and _ strategies other than his own.” Marshall was able to “expand his mental horizons to embrace the globe,” and to shoulder responsibilities such as no American soldier had previously had to face. “Last year we had a little time but no money; now we have money but no time,” he remarked. He fought for still higher appropriations, and got them while warning that eighteen months to two years must go by before the new money showed results in new hardware. Asked by one congressman whether he was not seeking more money than was justified by the current situation, he snapped: “My relief of mind would be tremendous if we just had too much of something besides patriotism and spirit.” Cost-effectiveness was not, it appears, one of Marshall’s obsessions. He wanted timely results, and he was well aware—as he remarked to this reviewer during the Korean War —that the country which winds up a war with surplus stocks of munitions is likely to be the country which is celebrating a victory. There were some who still questioned whether spending money to increase the size of the ground forces was wise. On September 20, 1941, a considerable stir—with ripples reaching the White House—occurred when Walter Lippmann’s column asserted: “AIIl popular doubts, all political confusion, ali ambiguity would be removed by a clear decision to shrink the Army and concentrate our major effort upon the Navy, the Air Force and lend-lease. . . . The effort to raise such a large Army so quickly is not merely unnecessary but undesirable.” In today’s context, one may note, it is interesting to observe that columnists —including Walter Lippmann—display no less assurance in asserting that the United States should reduce its military efforts in Vietnam as the “sovereign remedy for popular doubts, political confusion and ambiguity. Mr. Pogue’s obvious admiration for his subject does not lead him into unjustified use of the whitewash brush when he believes Marshall to have been wrong. Dealing with the endless and still-continuing “why did ‘it happen” debate on the Pearl Harbor disaster, Pogue points out sharply that Marshall should have taken immediate corrective action when Lieut. General Walter C. Short, commanding the Hawaiian Department, reacted to Washington’s warning of November 27 (“hostile action possible at any moment”) by reporting his command “alerted to prevent sabotage’—a wholly insufficient procedure. Marshall’s oversight was the more remarkable, because the other three Pacific commanders who received the same warning—in the Philippines, Panama and San Francisco—reported having gone on full alert and gave specific details of measures taken. Pogue also suggests that Marshall had become so convineced that any Japanese attack on U.S. positions would hit the Philippines first that he had allowed the possibility of an attack on Pearl Harbor, much talked of earlier in the year, to slip out of his range of immediate concern. This amounts to letting an unverified assumption as to the enemy’s intentions prevent constant vigilance based on enemy capabilities—a cardinal error for a commander. One of the author’s most interesting conclusions, which he supports with much corroborative detail, relates to the growth in Marshall’s mind of mistrust for military operations connected with political objectives rather than military objectives. Fully accepting the “Europe-first”’ strategy, approved by President Roosevelt on his reeommendation, he wanted no Mediterranean or Middle Eastern sideshows to divert resources from the main European objective, the ultimate cross-Channel attack to engage and defeat Nazi Germany. “Never absent from his mind was the fact that peripheral operations in the European theater drew shipping and supplies from the Pacific without significantly hastening the winning of the war.” As an American commander, he could not justify depriving American forces in the Pacific of vitally needed requirements for any less purpose than victory over Germany. Marshall’s differences with Churchill arose from “the way they each looked at the map.” Churchill saw the lifeline of the British Empire reaching out through the Mediterranean (or around Africa for a time) to the Middle East and India. Marshall saw the global position of the United States on its island continent, facing a two-front war in Europe and the Pacific and forced to make prescient division of its resources between these two theaters until one should be disposed of and full attention could be turned to the other. Marshall admired Churchill’s “sense of history, his splendid contempt for the enemy, his capacity for boldness. He was appalled by swift changes of plans, a flexibility that brought chaos in planning, a daring that brushed aside careful details. Most of all he dreaded the Churchillian influence on Roosevelt, who also delighted in the dramatie and the unexpected,” a fact of which the Prime Minister took full advantage on more than one occasion. It was upon these considerations that Marshall strongly opposed Roosevelt’s determination to launch the TORCH_ operation against North Africa in the fall of 1942. Roosevelt was motivated by political instinct, which told him that from the point of view of domestic politics, American troops had to be fighting Germans somewhere before the end of 1942, while Allied politics required that something be done in that year to help take the weight of German power off the Russians. Marshall later (talking with Pogue in 1956) agreed with at least the first of these premises. “We failed to see,” he observed, “that the leader in a democracy (at war) has to keep the people entertained. That may sound like the wrong word, but it conveys the thought. The people demand action. We couldn’t wait to be completely ready.” Again a thought which seems to have some pertinence to the problems of 1967.
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