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T h e New Chief

N mid-April, 1945, the Commander of Allied troops in Europe paused in his preparations for the final drive to the heart of

Germany to write a warm and gracious letter to his chief in Wash- ington, General of the Army George C . Marshall. Come over for a visit, urged General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and “see in visible form the fruits of much of your work over the past five years.” Even in a short visit, he added, “I am sure you would see things that would be of great satisfaction from now on.”l The Chief of Staff made no response; the war ended in Europe without his observing at its peak the great Army he had created and trained. Later, he brought the triumphant commanders home for tumultu- ous receptions, sending each man to a different city where he would be certain of fresh acclaim. The only public cheers the organizer of victory received were those of 1919 when, as General Pershing’s aide, he rode through the cheering throngs of Paris, London, New York, and Washington.

Marshall missed the plaudits he would have gained as leader of the Allied forces in a successful invasion of Europe. But he had won a greater triumph. Starting in 1939 with an Army and Army Air Corps of fewer than 200,000 men, he had directed their growth until in the spring of 1945 they numbered nearly eight and one- third million, ranged round the globe, tested in the operations he helped to plan, victorious on every front. In the brilliant perform- ances of the troops he had inducted, trained, and equipped lay all the “satisfaction” that he craved. Three months after the Japanese surrender concluded the Second World War, President Harry S. Truman bestowed on the retiring General the nation’s accolade:

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2 Ordeal and Hope “In a war unparalleled in magnitude and horror, millions of Amer- icans gave their country outstanding service. General of the Army George C. Marshall gave it victory.”2

General Marshall began his duties as Chief of Staff in a period of international turmoil. “My day of induction was momentous,” he wrote a friend, “with the starting of what appears to be a world war.”3 And so it proved to be. Hitler attacked Poland on Septem- ber 1, a few hours before the General took his oath of office. Two days later Great Britain and France entered the war against Ger- many. Within a week .the countries of the British Commonwealth joined the mother country. In mid-September, as Germany rocked Poland with furious ground and air assaults, the Russians poured in from the east to complete that hapless country’s ruin.‘In early November the brutal successors of Russian tsars and Prussian kings again partitioned Poland, turning back a page of European history by nearly a century and a half. This quick victory, revealing both the power of Germany and the weakness of the western democra- cies, swept away the last of the comfortable fictions by which the United States justified its neglect of defense preparations in a period when Germany, Italy, and Japan were demanding that the world order be changed to their liking.

For twenty years the’united States had managed to stay at peace while achieving the contradictory ends of rejecting the system of collective security offered by the League of Nations and of failing to make adequate provisions for a self-maintained system of na- tional defense. In 1920, after refusing League of Nations member- ship, Congress passed a national defense act authorizing a peace- time Regular Army with a strength of 280,ooo and an effective reserve program. In the economy drives of the prosperous 1920s and the stress on welfare programs during the lean years that fol- lowed, Congress declined to appropriate sufficient funds to put even these modest plans into full effect. The regular forces aver- aged from igo,ooo to igo,ooo between 1922 and 1939. Not until after the fall of France was the figure set by the original act attained. By the Five-Power Naval ‘Treaty of 1922 the United States gave up an extensive construction program designed to produce a two- ocean navy, in order to escape a possible naval race with Great Brit- ain and Japan and freeze the status quo in the Pacific. In a period of vaunted self-reliance, Americans were able to sleep quietly only

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e New Chief 3 because of their trust in the strength and resolution of ‘Great Britain and France, the ability and willingness of the League of Nations to prevent aggression in Europe and Asia, and Germany’s peaceable acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles.

In the first decade and a half after World War I the United States was’ interested less in what might be needed for its future protection than in whether it had been duped by the Allies or by “merchants of death” in the conflict that had passed. The writings of revisionist historians, revelations by congressional inquiries, and refusals of former allies to pay their war debts helped persuade the general public that the nation’s great mistake of 1917 was sending troops to France.

When the Ethiopian conflict and the,Spanish Civil War threat- ened to involve the United States again in the affairs of Europe, Congress hastily adopted a series of laws designed to keep the coun- try out of the first World War. Isolationist proposals reached their peak in 1938 when the House of Representatives approved by 209 eo 188 the proposed constitutional amendment offered by Repre- sentative Louis Ludlow of Indiana to require a national referen- dum before the United States could go to war. Although the niea- sure failed to get the necessary two-thirds vote, it obviously had the support of a large segment of the population.

Fortunately for the Army and Navy, the same month that saw the vote on the Ludlow amendment also heard vigorous presiden- tial warnings that the United States was living in a rapidly chang- ing world. Alarmed by the Japanese abrogation of the Five-Power Naval Treaty, renewed Japanese expansion in Manchuria, and anti-American incidents such as the Japanese attack on the U.S.S. Panay in Chinese waters, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938 pushed through Congress a bill allowing a 20 per cent increase in the Navy. Early in 1939 he called for one and one-third billion dol- lars for the armed services, a considerable increase over appropria- tions for the preceding year. Less than a week later he asked for an additional half-billion dollars, specifying that three-fifths would go for the procurement of military aircraft. It was clear that he in- tended part of the expanded airplane production to aid Great Brit- ain and France.

By the summer of 1939 the President became alarmed lest, i f war came, the Neutrality Act of 1937 prevent the United States

4 from making munitions and planes available to Great Britain and France. To his dismay Congress refused to consider a series of qual- ifying amendments before the outbreak of war. He had no choice when the fighting began but to proclaim American neutrality. Three days later he announced a state of limited emergency and with it a ban on the export of war materials to belligerents. Before the month’s end he called in congressional leaders and repeated his earlier plea for the lifting of the embargo on arms shipments.

Germany’s swift defeat of Polish forces as Britain and France looked on helplessly shocked the West. Suddenly it seemed that instead of being able to depend on the democracies to hold the line at the Rhine, the United States might have to defend London and Paris against assault. No longer was it possible to dismiss as mere evidences of war weariness or internal discord the recent diplomatic defeats of Great Britain and France. Obviously the countries on which America counted for protection, while letting its own defenses deteriorate, had also failed to keep pace in the rearmament race with Adolf Hitler.

Thus, like France and Britain, the United States in 1939 suf- fered from the twin ills of complacency and unpreparedness. Fortu- nately its fighting forces, weak as they proved to be, and the breadth of the oceans gave General Marshall and Admiral Harold R. Stark, the Chief of Naval Operations, a little time in which they could shore up America’s defenses. Certain cherished national fallacies hampered their efforts. Since Bunker Hill, congressmen as well as schoolchildren had accepted the concept that the patriot, armed with little more than the righteousness of his cause, could quickly take his place behind the country’s breastworks or even man a for- eign trench. Forgetting the bitter experiences of the Civil War and World War I, many American leaders opposed military training and relied on the simple cry of danger to fill the ranks of the Regu- lar Army and the National Guard. Perhaps most disturbing was the most recently born myth that America’s tremendous industrial complex and special “know-how” in the fields of production and supply made unnecessary costly programs of developing and stock- piling military weapons and equipment.

The hallowed fallacies fitted comfortably into the framework of political demands for economy and general national distrust of military preparedness. For ten years Marshall’s predecessors had

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The New Chief 5 I requested critical items desperately needed by the Army and Air

Corps but had ended by cutting their lists to a point acceptable to the President and Congress. Convinced that one day the Army would be asked why it had left the country unprepared for war, War Department planners in the late 1930s began to assemble evidence that they had at least warned of the country’s military weakness.

Despite the clear evidence that the United States could no longer expect its friends in Western Europe to contain German aggression or rely on Russia to serve as a counterweight to Nazi designs, the nation still delayed taking the strong measures needed for hemi- spheric defense. Congress went so far as to show its sympathy for the Western Powers in November 1939 by permitting the ship- ment of arms on a “cash-and-carry” basis, but it adopted no long- range plans to build up the armed forces. American thinking was still obsessed by the fear that large defense appropriations would lead to intervention; well-known figures warned against this even- tuality. Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, eminent airman and na- tional hero, spoke in mid-September for many of his fellow coun- trymen in warning that participation in the war would mean the loss of the nation’s democracy.

General Marshall had watched with deep concern as the country seemed to follow its familiar pattern of neglecting defenses until crisis forced it to start arming overnight. And the outbreak of war in Europe did little to reverse this trend. Looking back at these troubled days seventeen years later, he spoke of his “tragic feeling” that the United States could have “shortened the war by at least a year” and saved “billions of dollars and IOO,OOO casualties” by initiating a speedy rearmament program in the fall of 1939 .~ He attributed part of the blame to the President’s failure to press Congress for larger defense appropriations and to his delays in appointing a board with broad powers to manage war production. But, recalled Marshall, Roosevelt was aware “that the Middle West was so solidly against him that if he moved into a large military effort he would encounter such opposition he wouldn’t be able to manage [it].” Under these circumstances his @icy of acting “carefully and in a very restrained manner’’ proved to be politically

In stressing the role of the Middle West in the isolationist move-

ment of B 939-4 n , General Marshall o ~ e r l ~ o k e d he strong oppsi- tion to Roosevelt’s reanhament policies in other parts Of the coun- try. Teamed against the President in the p i ~ d before the Pearl Harbor attack was an uneasy alliance of c~n~ervatives, liberals, and radicals brought together in temporary collaboration. At the hard core of the movement were isolationists of the qn4-17 variety, who clung fondly to George Washington’s admonitions to stay clear of en tangling alliances, and the disillusioned internationalists, who believed that their idealistic crusade of 1917-18 Rad been grossly betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles. Joining them briefly, until Germany attacked the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941, were those Communists or fellow travelers who on the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August n939 had flopped overnight from a militant anti-German stand to support of h e s i c a n neutrality. Out of place in this company was a newer group consisting of businessmen apparently frightened by all of Roosevelt’s policies. Loathing his domestic program and determined to block any devel- opment that would increase his control over taxes, production, prices, and labor, they furnished much of the cash and effective leadership for a bitter last-ditch fight against any weakening of neutrality legislation

Marshall’s program for strengthening the Army was caught in the cross fire. Accustomed to the opposition ~f traditional isola- tionists, he was astonished to find some old acquaintances from conservative business circles fighting his proposals and, in time, accusing him of being a Roosevelt tool. The appropriations he believed essential to raise the A m y to a passable state of efficiency he heard described as the first moves by the President to involve the United States in conflict abroad. Increased airplane produc- tion, preparation of special forces to protect the sphere, and the early proposals for selective servic searched for evidence that they were steps towar knew America’s weaknesses too well ’ to favor warlike measures against Germany, but he was convinced that more men, training, and equipment were needed to defend the Western Hemisphere against possible aggression.

The task confronting the Chief of Staff in the fall of ICJB MEIS

staggering. Seventeenth in rank among the world’s a m e d forces, the United §tam Army retained from W d d War 1 d y the Itaster

increase in aid to the Western Allies.

e New c 7 of its fighting reputation. Weapons effective in the Meuse-Argonne were obsolescent; many officers lacked proper training or had stag- nated; the allotment for training in the late thirties, amounting to approximately two per cent of the Army’s appropriations, was insufficient to keep the Regulars in shape or give the National Guard a real concept of field duties; and the lack of equipment and personnel for existing units held them below authorized peace- time strength. Worse still, Congress in its legislation reflected the national conviction that enforcement of the neutrality laws was sufficient to prevent war from touching the Western Hemisphere.

In meeting the tremendous challenges of his new job, Marshall himself moved unobtrusively and deliberately toward his goals. He was not of the breed of officer who announced his arrival on a new post by moving the flagpole, changing the flower beds, or enlarg- ing the space allotted for his office. While Acting Chief of Staff during the summer, he had been able to fit smoothly into his new responsibilities. He and Mrs. Marshall had slipped quietly into the Chief of Staffs quarters at Fort Myer in late August, and the War Department had completed its transfer from the old State, War, and Navy Building next to the White House to part of the Muni- tions Building on Constitution Avenue shortly before he took up his new duties. He was pleased with the new offices, finding that “doing business in this building has increased the efficiency of operations very materially, for now it is a simple thing to bring in the people you want and talk things over.” “I have the Assistant Chiefs of Staff in here frequently,” he added, “and it only costs them a minute or two to get here, and we settle things in a hurry and then they are back at work.” It was helpful, too, to be little more than two miles across Memorial Bridge from his quarters, so that he could go home at noon. His secretary telephoned from his office when he started, “and I walk right to the lunch table-on the glassed-in porch-from the car, and then I have a half hour or more to relax in a more restful atmosphere than here at the office or at the Army and Navy

He especially liked the way that his staff had smoothly made the transition from one chief to another. In July he had brought in as his successor in the Office of Deputy Chief of Staff, Brigadier General Lorenzo D. Gasser, a tremendously effective administrator, linked with Marshalf back in igyj before either had received a

e general’s star as one who was eminently fitted for two-star rank. The Chief of Staff reported to his predecessor in September his immense gratification “with the efficient, quiet manner in which the Staff has gone about business. We were well prepared to extend ourselves immediately, so there is no necessity for our rushing here and there and deciding things on the spur of the moment. . . . Gasser has beensplendid; I could not have done a wiser thing than bring him in. He has relieved me of a tremendous load, and as a matter of fact H have walked out of about 75 per cent of the normal business and left it completely to him, without even know- ing what was going on in that connection.”7

He also relied heavily on his Secretary General Staff, Lieutenant Colonel Orlando Ward, a quiet, studious type, who resembled a teacher more than a future armored division commander. Ward and his assistant, Stanley R. Mickelson, were the first of a remark- able group of officers who served Marshall in the exacting job of handling correspondence, collecting statistical information, and keeping up with the entire flow of business between the Chief of Staff and his various assistants. In the course of the war this staff was to include a number of top officers, destined to become high- ranking generals, such as Omar N. Bradley, Maxwell D. Taylor, J. Lawton Collins, and Walter Bedell Smith. As the war progressed he brought in younger reserve officers in order that the older men could have a chance at high command. Among them were two sons of the Virginia Military Institute, Frank McCarthy and Mer- rill Pasco, who remained with him during most of the war.

In taking over, the General saw that some changes would need to be made in the administrative organization in order to handle the growing responsibilities of the Army. He was disturbed by a number of practices,“‘age old in custom but inappropriate to the war office of a great power,” that he saw about him. While still Acting Chief of Staff hc had told Gasser, “Gradually and without any publicity and undue stirring up of people, I wish to eliminate such features of the War Department as are a continuation of the old days when the Army was a very small affair.”8 But he moved slowly. For the moment he retained the General and Special Staff sections and the various chiefs of arms and administrative services as they had existed between the two wars; a thorough reorganiza- tion would await the shock of Pearl Harbor.

The New Chief . 9 The number of activities calling for the Chief of Staff’s personal

attention was astounding. In addition to taking part in the un- scheduled meetings with the President, members of the Cabinet, the Secretary and Assistant Secretaries of War, the unofficial ad- visers, such as Harry Hopkins and Bernard Baruch, members of boards and committees that dealt with production, allotments, and economic policy, and officers of his own staff, he sat in regular con- ferences that helped determine military policy. He was a member of the President’s War Council, which included the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, and the Chief of Naval Operations: a mem- ber together with the Undersecretary of State and the Chief of Naval Operations of the Standing Liaison Committee, which dealt mainly with military and political planning for the Western Hemi- sphere; and a member of the Joint Army-Navy Board, which coor- dinated policy for all matters requiring joint action of the services.

Inside the War Department, Marshall regularly attended the Secretary of War’s conference, made up of the top civilian and military heads of the department, and his own conference with the deputy chiefs of staff and the assistant chiefs of staff for per- sonnel, intelligence, operations, and supply and the head of the War Plans Division. The list of officers with whom he had to deal ran on through chiefs of arms (Infantry, Cavalry, Field Artillery, Coast Artillery), chiefs of services and administrative bureaus, corps area commanders, and commanders of overseas establish- ments. With the expansion of the air and ground forces, the num- ber of problems requiring Marshall’s attention grew alarmingly. By 1941 some sixty officials of the War Department and Army theoretically had access to the Chief of Staff. In the quiet days that Marshall had known as Pershing’s aide, when the Chief of Staff could stay abroad from two to six months out of the year without disturbing the even flow of the War Department’s work, there had been time for him to give personal attention to minor proposals. But in the months after war began in Europe new responsibilities threatened to overwhelm the Chief of Staff before he could insti- tute drastic reforms. In his first twomyears as head of the Army, Marshall had to struggle to keep his head above water.

In the midst of all these duties and administrative pressures Marshall managed to make his presence felt. A superb staff officer, he worked best with groups of advisers. He exerted his influence in

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casual discussions with division heads in initiating new studies or by criticizing their proposals. Seldom expressing a specific opinion in conference with his subordinates, he would shape the discussion by the nature of his questions. Papers brought to his desk started a chain reaction in which he penned comments and pointed queries and made copious revisions. Many of them were sent back with specific directions for further study. T h e process might go on through several changes until at last he made the proposal or paper his own by barking, “Do it,” to a stzff member or writing the key words, “Send this out.”

Marshall began his work as Acting Chief of Staff in the summer of 1939 by pushing projects already recommended by General Malin Craig, the outgoing Chief of Staff. The first major venture on his own was a modest request for an increase in Army strength after the outbreak of the war in Europe. In mid-September he summarized his proposal for his predecessor: “We are headed to full peace strength of 280,000, and a total increase of 126,000 for the National Guard, with about double the number of pay drills and two rations a month-one for weekend shooting and one for weekend field training.” “Unfortunately,” he went on, “there is little that can be done regarding munitions which we lack which can be remedied quickly.” 9

In approaching Congress the Chief of Staff and his associates measured their demands, as General Marshall put it, on the basis of “what we might be permitted to do rather than . . . what should be done on the basis of national defense.”10 Having pre- sented his budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1940, shortly before Germany invaded Poland, he now had to go back and ask for an increased appropriation. Marshall was placed in the un- happy position of a college freshman who, after telling his stern father that he could get by on a slightly larger allowance next term, has to return a week later to the irate parent to ask for a much greater increase as well as for funds to pay an oversized bar bill that had unexpectedly come due.

Marshall was questioned sharply on his request when he ap- peared in November before the House Subcommittee on Ap- propriations. Representative George W. Johnson, West Virginia Democrat, spoke for many of his colleagues in asking why it was necessary to increase the Army during a period when the Euro-

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The New Chief 11

pean countries were too busy fighting one another to be concerned with the United States. Marshall flared up when the congressman warned that the warring countries might regard the sudden de- fense build-up as an unfriendly act. The Army was not building up, Marshall said sharply, but trying to catch up to the level that had been authorized as long ago as 1920. He assured the subcom- mittee that the War Department had “an earnest desire, a des- perate desire, to keep out of trouble, and no one is more sin- cere in that desire than the Chief of Staff.” l1

The years 1940-41, Marshall said later, were his most difficult of the war. At the beginning of 1940 he wrote a friend of the “terrific strain” he and his colleagues felt as they worked practically on “a wartime basis with all the difficulty and irritating limitations of peacetime procedure.” l2 He was well prepared physically and mentally for the ordeal ahead. The two warnings of the danger of overwork he had received before World War I had convinced him that he must conserve his strength. From sad experience, he counseled a hard-working officer in 1937 to make “a studied busi- ness of relaxing and getting to the office late, taking trips, and making everybody else work like hell.”13 He drove his staff hard. “Once in the machine here, it is very difficult to spare anybody, because I have to work fast and rather ruthlessly,” he warned a friend in 1g4O.l4 But he came early to work and left his desk cleared before he left at the end of the day. Not by avoiding work but by organizing it and his life and adhering to a fairly strict routine did he keep his health and sanity.

Fellow officers met him as he rode regularly in the morning or afternoon, or both, near Fort Myer, at first with his stepdaughter Molly and later alone, determined to keep down the “desk belly” the doctor had warned him against in the spring of 1939. When he rode in the morning he returned to Quarters I for a shower, ate an ample but simple breakfast, took a quick look at several newspapers (these oEten included the New York Times, Washing- ton Post, and Christian Science Monitor), and arrived at the Muni- tions Building usually by 7: 30, ready to start his morning briefings. Although his dictum that no one had an original thought after three o’clock was widely quoted in Washington, he seldom finished his tasks at that early hour. The afternoon stint in the office was ended by four or five o’clock whenever p0ssib1e.l~ Members of his

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staff were less lucky. They complained that occasionally after his requests for a staff study by the next morning had kept them up most of the night, he looked at their drawn faces and glazed eyes and told them solemnly that they shouldn’t work so hard.

On returning to Fort Myer he often started at once for an after- noon ride, using it to think over his problems or to review de- cisions that faced him. In the summer when he had the chance he would, like many another resident of the sticky Washington area, slip away with his wife to a point near Georgetown, where the twa could rent a canoe and drift slowly down the river. Qften on long evenings they walked in the quiet of nearby Arlington Cemetery. Although no teetotaler-he liked a weak old-fashioned or a bour- bon highball-he made a practice of shunning cocktail parties and holding attendance at formal dinners to a minimum. Customarily he and Mrs. Marshall kept their evenings free; the General found relaxation in casual conversation from which he excluded all men- tion of office matters. He enjoyed watching a movie, particularly westerns, at the Fort Myer post theater, where they usually arrived just after the lights were lowered, or spending the evening with magazines and books. His reading, as always, was extremely varied. Of the many magazines to which they subscribed, he preferred the Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest. The books ranged from a current western-a preference he shared with Eisenhower -to a new biography or a volume of history.

Long before 1939 Marshall had formed the habit of retiring early. Like many successful executives, he had the faculty of going to sleep quickly and soundly, leaving to the light of day the exam- ination of puzzling problems. In an effort to discourage business calls at night he normally declined to answer the telephone after dinner. All evening messages were relayed to a member of his staff, who decided whether the General should be disturbed-a practice that undoubtedly saved his physical and mental stamina for the following day but made his subordinates unduly reluctant to in- fom him of critical matters at night. As the harsh pressure of the war mounted, Marshall gave up

many of the personal contacts he once treasured. He had never made close friendships easily; now he seemed more and more dis- tant. Some officers who met him for the first time during the war concluded that he had no confidants. P t was not tru-ld friends

The New Chief 13 such as Philip B. Peyton, Charles D. Herron, and Frank McCoy could attest to that-but the number of long talks with old friends and the chats with younger officers of his staff dwindled as the strain increased. The reserve, aloofness, and austerity that had long been obvious traits of his personality became more intense. One wise officer, still on a “Dear George” basis in private letters, fol- lowed the course of avoiding all allusions to personal matters when he called in connection with official business. One day, he recalled, he left without remarking that he and his wife were looking for- ward to seeing the Marshalls at their home that evening for dinner.

There were exceptions to the rule. Even in the busiest season he found some time for old friends visiting in Washington unless he suspected that they intended to ask for a special favor. Until the war made it impossible to squeeze in casual visitors who arrived unannounced, the door was open to VMI classmates, associates from Fort Leavenworth days, and especially veterans of the 1st Division in the First World War. An orderly or chauffeur who had .once worked for General Pershing needed only to mention that fact to gain admittance to the office.

To save time the General used a no-nonsense approach with sub- ordinates that sometimes frightened the uninitiated into tongue- tied confusion. An officer, on being ordered to report at the Gen- eral’s office, was expected to enter at the appointed time, walk uninvited to the chair- placed in front of the General’s desk, and without speaking or saluting take his seat. The Chief of Staff, ab- sorbed in a document or letter, would finish his reading and quickly raise his head, looking fixedly at the visitor. On that cue the officer was expected to start tal king. The General, completely attentive, would lean forward to follow the discussion. Unless the speaker bored him or continued to labor a point Marshall remained silent until the officer had finished. Then with swift verbal jabs he probed for further information. Once he had satisfied his curiosity, he abruptly ended the session and turned to the next item of busi- ness?

Unwilling to tolerate windy explanations, he cut in mercilessly on tedious talkers and suffered fools not at all. Capable of great patience in hearing a case, he developed a brusqueness in manner and a sharpness in questioning that sometimes bordered on rude- ness. Never completely rid of a violent temper, he managed usually

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14 to keep it under the tight control he had developed since World War I, even though he found that “forbearance and self-restraint are very wearing on the individual and probably do more harm than violent exercise.” l7 Occasionally, tried beyond his patience, or perhaps to score an effect, he let himself explode. Then, whitefaced and shaking, he burned “the paint off the walls.” But hot anger was a rarity. More often, it took an icy form. Those who crossed him learned that freezing as well as blazing wrath could remove the hide.

His insistence on articulateness in his assistants proved unnerv- ing to the clumsy of speech and the unprepared. More than one officer who had chanced going into the chief’s office without doing his homework paved the way for quick reassignment by pawing the air as he struggled for words and information to answer the General’s questions. His almost brutal emphasis on clear presenta- tions was unduly hard on officers whose powers of expression were unequal to their store of information. Their services were often saved by more coherent colleagues who saw to it that these other- wise capable officers presented their views by memoranda rather than in personal reports. They learned to watch €or signs of the chief’s displeasure and explained why an officer had not done well. For it was well known that if he concluded an officer was below the mark, it was extremely difficult to eradicate that impression from his mind.

His assistants extended this watchfulness to cases where some misinterpreted comment might prejudice the future chances of a promising officer. In one such instance, someone reported to the General that if Colonel Ray W. Barker, then in London, could get back to the United States he would get his star. Assuming that the colonel had instigated the suggestion, the General muttered, “Me won’t get his B. G. and he won’t go back.” An officer who knew the facts of the case risked Marshall’s displeasure by insisting that he hear the full explanation of the remark. “I knew,” he said afterward, “if I didn’t get it straightened out then and correct it in the Chief of Staffs mind, Barker would lose his promotion.” The matter was soon properly adjusted, and Barker went on to get not only his first but a second star. But there had been a close shave?

As Marshall entered the Munitions Building each morning he

ef looked lean and fit. In the civilim clothes that he usually wore in the days before the Pearl Harbor attack-a holdover from his duty with Pershing when congressmen had made “acrid com- ments” about the number of men in uniform they saw around Washingtonlo-he could have passed for a vigorous leader in any profession. The suggestion of frailness evident at the time of the 1937 operation was disappearing as his knobby face filled out slightly, softening the two somber lines that ran from nose to mouth. His eyes, cool and very blue, seemed gentle to those who knew him best but alarmingly cold and hard to those who stirred his displeasure. As he strode from his car to his office with head erect, step quick, he was obviously a man of unconscious and un- questioned authority. Although often deliberate in his movements, sparing in his use of gestures, he conveyed a quality of force and action-and a youthfulness that belied his fifty-nine years and the gray hairs that had replaced the former flicker of red. Visitors noted his fine, expressive hands, his direct gaze, his air of com- mand. His voice, normally quiet and soft, changed quickly to a sharp bark as he corrected a blunder or questioned an ill-advised proposal. With few exceptions those members of his staff who knew him best mingled their affection with a touch of awe.

The aura of authority that he had gradually acquired over the years became pronounced by the end of his first two years as Chief of Staff. Few people could put their finger on it, but every subordi- nate and most of his colleagues were impressed by the air of com- mand he exuded. “He made you want to do your best,” said one assistant. Others have recalled that they never really felt that they had done quite enough since he clearly expected of them their best-exacting it by patient expectancy rather than by loud de- mands or poundings of the desk.

Marshall personally never knew how he developed the art of command. Some of it he had achieved by the time of his second year at the Virginia ilitary Institute. Fellow cadets from that period have recalled his ability to lead and the firm voice that obviously expected to be obeyed. A mastery of his .profession, born of extremely hard work and dedication rather than striking power of intellect, impressed all who worked with him. A knowledge of detail and the ability to bring together from a mass of recom- mendations an effective plan for action made him a splendid staff

a6 Ordean mdl Hope officer. And, especially, there was his formidable self-discipline. Hn a perceptive appraisal, Kenneth Davis spoke of the self-mastery “which gave to him his rare distinction, causing associates to trust him as they did few men.”2o

There was integrity-a disdain for false speaking and dissem- bling and an unwillingness to become a pawn of any man. “The thing that stands- out in everybody’s recollection of General Mar- shall,” Dean Acheson has said, “is the immensity of his integrity, the loftiness and beauty of his character.” 21 ‘The General treasured traditional values and a good name and simple virtues and was not embarrassed by possessing them. When he first came to Wash- ington in 1938 newsmen and politicians and soldiers alike saw in him a highly skilled practitioner of his profession. By the end of 1941 they recognized him as one of the few men who made Wash- ington tick and a leader whose aspirations and inner sureness were desperately required by a country in the midst of war.

For all his strength and authority, his appeals to Congress early in 1940 met little success. The sense of urgency that pervaded the country in the first weeks of fighting in Europe relaxed in the late fall and winter of 1939-40 as Hitler regrouped his forces. Congress- men and commentators talked of a “phony” war whose theme song was nothing more martial than “we’ll hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line.” Members of Marshall’s own War Plans Divi- sion reflected the changed climate of opinion when they concluded in late December that so long as full-scale fighting continued in Europe and Asia the Western Hemisphere was not in danger.22

In Britain and France, where frenzied efforts had been made to prepare against attack from the air, the people recovered their confidence as weeks passed with no threat of immediate action by Hitler. Their chief anger at the end of 1939 was directed, as was America’s, against the Soviet Union for invading Finland and reducing the Baltic states to satellite status. TQ those Americans who had fought to amend the Neutrality Act to permit sales of airplanes and other commodities of war to the western democra- cies, the British and French seemed unduly slow about placing orders.

arshall’s dominant problem was getting a p p r ~ v d ~f his reqpae~t for funds to complete the equipping of 227,000 men in the Regular

and 235,OOO ill the NaeiOI?~d ZSid QO PFfDVide the

The New Chief 17

critical items of equipment for another 500,000 who would be called to service in an emergency. Anticipating a strong fight in Congress on the 850 million-dollar budget, the Chief of Staff used every opportunity offered to explain- the importance of his re- quests. In a speech to the American Historical Association at the end of December, deploring the failure of schools to teach mili- tary history, he grabbed headlines by announcing that the Army was less than 25 per cent ready to fight.23 In mid-February he warned a radio audience that time was running out for America. Modern warfare, he reiterated, could not be improvised, and there was a time lag of one or two years between the initial order and the delivery of the finished product to the

Despite these public warnings he proceeded cautiously with both President and Congress. In explaining his budget he carefully avoided challenging the limits set by the White House, making clear that the Army was asking only for the items absolutely neces- sary to meet existing demands. He advised his staff members in mid-February 1940 to be patient in their approach to Congress, say- ing that their bills might fare better if left to the last possible date since it was probable “that events in Europe will develop in such a way as to affect congressional action.”25 He recognized that he would need help. “The trouble is,” he wrote Douglas S. Freeman, “we have no fat meat that permits of heavy cuts without serious damage, yet the pressure from home is so heavy for economy that the legislators are genuinely embarrassed and they have my sym- pa thy.” 26

On February 23 he begged the members of the House Appro- priations Committee to allow the armed forces to proceed “step by step to prepare ourselves against the possibility of chaotic world conditions” in order to deter any nation or group of nations from menacing the Americas. Fixing his eyes on the congressmen who listened attentively to his words, he warned dramatically, “If Eu- rope blazes in the late spring or summer, we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western

While hearings continued on the appropriations bill he flew to Hawaii on a long-delayed inspection tour, spending nine days as the guest of his onetime classmate at Fort Leavenworth, Major General C. D. Herron, commander of the Hawaiian Department. On his return in mid-March he was told that his bill was in trouble.

18 ordeal and Hope Not only was the House Committee hostile, but there was growing opposition in the Senate. General Hugh Johnson reported that one member of the Upper House had said that they were going to cut the hell out of the Army’s appropriations. In his “thank you” note to Herron, Marshall described the backfire he was trying to build against the Senate action as “really hard work, beqause I have to see so many people, convince them, provide them with arguments, and then see that the whole scheme of defense dovetails together.” 28

He was not fully successful in his efforts. Europe was not yet ablaze and some members saw only the warning lights of the ap- proaching elections. OnsApril 3 the House Committee cut the budget of the armed forces by almost io per cent, striking from Marshall’s list an air base at Anchorage, Alaska, and all but 57 planes from a request for 166. Six days later Germany invaded Denmark and Norway.