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Great Contemporaries: Marshall, “The American Carnot” (1)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | December 15, 2023
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries
Marshall and the American century
George Catlett Marshall1 was born in Pennsylvania on New Year’s Eve 1880 to a comfortable middle-class family with Virginia roots. A military career was always his plan but, with average grades, West Point seemed out of reach. He entered the army in 1901 via an alternate route: Virginia Military Institute (VMI). His military life began at the moment when an enormous change was starting, both for the army and the nation it served.
The Civil War was a living memory in 1901 (especially at VMI), as were the recently concluded “Indian Wars.” But the Spanish-American War had begun the nation’s and its army’s involvement overseas. Marshall’s career would track with that change. The “Indian-fighting army” of the post-Civil War years—small and quite marginal to the nation—would, by the time he retired, have morphed into force of millions, globally deployed. By then the American military had become a central institution in national life. Only two years after his death, President Eisenhower, whose career Marshall had supercharged, would use his Farewell Address to warn about the rise of a “military-industrial complex.”
Early experience
All this was unimaginable when Marshall was commissioned in 1901. His first posting was to the Philippines. The Army was engaged in a grinding, ugly counterinsurgency campaign (not unlike some of its “Indian Wars”) against Filipinos who did not want to trade Spanish rule for American, preferring independence. (Kipling’s “Take Up the White Man’s Burden” was dedicated to America to mark its entry into the imperial club.)
Company grade command in the waning days of that campaign was however Marshall’s last “sharp end” experience. Henceforth he was to make his mark as a staff officer. He was an Honor Graduate from the Infantry-Cavalry School Course (now the Army’s Command and General Staff College) in 1907. The following year he graduated first in his class from the Army Staff College (now the Army War College). It is worth noting that his regular army rank at this point was Lieutenant—he did not reach Captain until mid-1916.
His military education for both staff work and higher command took place much earlier in his career than would be the case today. By the time he pinned on his Captain’s insignia, however, his career was on the verge of rapid, if brief, acceleration as prewar regulars ascended, temporarily, to higher ranks.
The Great War
The United States entered the First World War in April 1917. In the next eighteen months, the army grew from 1914’s force of 98,000 to the four-million-strong behemoth of 1918. It was the foundation for Marshall’s subsequent career, showcasing his skills as a staff officer—and his willingness to correct his superiors.
Marshall planned the divisional-level Battle of Cantigny in May 1918. He had already caught the eye of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) Commander, General John J. Pershing. Inspecting Marshall’s division, Pershing began to berate its staff for failures, only to be interrupted by Marshall (still a substantive captain). He pointed out that Pershing was not taking the division’s logistic and administrative problems into account. That might have wrecked his career there and then, but Pershing was impressed. By late summer 1918, Marshall, now a temporary Colonel, was planning the Meuse-Argonne operation. It was the U.S. Army’s major Great War offensive, but by the time it was launched the German state and its army were collapsing. The war’s abrupt end slammed the brakes on Marshall’s career.
Peacetime advancement
Reverting to his regular army rank of captain in June 1920, Marshall began a slow crawl back-up the promotion ladder. In the shrunken, marginalized peacetime army he would not get back to his 1918 rank of colonel until 1933. American opinion was that participation in the war had been an error, never to be repeated. An expeditionary army would not be needed again. (Much the same view, with even greater intensity, held in Britain, underpinning Appeasement and marginalizing the British army. The navies in both countries fared better.)
During these bleak years for the service, Marshall solidified his credentials as a highly professional and competent staff officer. Pershing, who had boosted Marshall’s career in France, continued to back him. Marshall became an aide-de-camp to Pershing in 1919. When Pershing became the Army’s professional head in 1920, Marshall followed him to Washington. For four years Marshall served both as an important planner and an Army War College instructor. His focus was on incorporating the lessons of the World War into the Army’s thinking—a task not made easier by the national mood of isolationism.
After Pershing’s retirement in 1924, Marshall, now again a lieutenant colonel, had the usual mix of command and staff appointments. He had a major impact at the Army’s Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Stressing realistic training and tactical flexibility, the “Benning Revolution” trained 200 general officers in Marshall’s Second World War Army. They included Omar Bradley, Walter Bedell Smith, Matthew Ridgeway, J. Lawton Collins and Joseph Stilwell. A volume prepared under Marshall’s auspices incorporating Great War lessons, Infantry in Battle, was still being used in the officer education in the 1980s.
Another world war
In September 1938 Marshall, now a brigadier general, returned to Washington to head the Army’s War Plans Division. He would remain in Washington for the rest of his career. His tenure of the WPD was short, as he was moved to Deputy Chief of Staff. After barely a year, Franklin Roosevelt named him, as a major general, the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff.
The date of his new rank, and position as professional head of the Army was 1 September 1939. At dawn that morning, Germany invaded Poland, setting off the greatest war in human history. This war that would make Marshall a central figure, not only in U.S. Army but in American history.
Why did Roosevelt choose Marshall? He was after all only 34th in seniority among serving officers (one of the small subset whose age would permit them to serve a full four-year term before retirement). But bureaucratic concerns never carried much weight with FDR. Personal impressions did, however.
At a meeting concerning the expansion of the Army Air Corps, Marshall told the President that his vision of a large aircraft building program as a deterrent to the European dictators ignored the logistical and training issues involved in air force expansion. Twenty years before, he had corrected Pershing on the same kind of problems. That risky decision had given his career a decided boost. Contradicting the commander-in-chief was an even riskier move, but it helped him to the summit of his profession. (He would later balk, without ill effect, at Roosevelt’s attempt to put their relationship on a first name basis. Pomposity? Or a desire to avoid the President’s powerful magnetic field?)
“The American Carnot”
The army, when Marshall assumed command, was a small, inbred parochial service (memorialized in the novel From Here to Eternity). Its numbers (190,000) put it in the same class as Portugal and Bulgaria. As Marshall had pointed out to FDR, it did not have a single full strength, completely equipped division. That army, along with much else, began to change in the summer of 1940. In response to Germany’s conquest of most of Western Europe, and threat to Britain, “preparedness” began to ramp up.
Roosevelt, running for an unprecedented third term, moved cautiously. He faced not only strong isolationist sentiment, but even some pro-Axis opinion. In mid-1940 there were gestures of support for Britain and much verbal sympathy. In September (after Britain’s immediate survival seemed assured) came the “Destroyers for Bases” deal (of greater symbolic than practical value). More crucially for Marshall and the Army, the Selective Service Act returned conscription to American life, where it would remain for the next three decades.
If the United States became a belligerent, Marshall believed “the draft” was a necessity. This also marked the moment at which Marshall’s extraordinary administrative skills became crucial to both the army and the U.S. war effort. Churchill, after the war, called Marshall the “organizer of victory… the America Carnot.” The phrase was well chosen. Lazare Carnot had turned the French Revolution’s early mobs of enthusiastic volunteers into an organized army. Likewise, Marshall turned large numbers of not-always-enthusiastic conscripts into formidable armies.
Skill and influence
Marshall’s role is usually discussed now in terms of his contributions, increasingly influential in 1943-45, to Anglo-American strategy. His clashes with Churchill and Britain’s formidable Chief of Imperial General Staff, General Sir Alan Brooke, are well known. But the skill with which he built a small, somewhat obsolescent force into a mighty army was staggering. Marshall selected and promoted its leaders, oversaw its organization and training, secured its equipment. This involved managing relations with the President (nowhere near as administratively tidy-minded as Marshall) and members of Congress. It involved working with industry, and with a public anxious about “their boys.”
Not all of it was done flawlessly, of course. Marshall’s original conception was a 265-division army, matching German and Russian numbers. It was scaled down to ninety-five to avoid draining the industrial and agricultural workforce. Nonetheless, that made the U.S. Army by far the largest of the western allies’ armies. (Britain raised only 48 divisions from its much smaller population.) His army was the key factor in giving FDR a decisive voice in the alliance from 1943 on.
Bumps in the road
Historians have parsed the American war effort, noting flaws in the force that Marshall organized. A few were serious. The “individual replacement” plan put men into units where they were strangers, impairing unit cohesion. Trained inadequately for the situations they faced, the replacements became casualties before they could acclimate themselves. The replacement system almost collapsed during the Winter of 1944-45, when casualties were particularly heavy. It was largely the work of General Leslie McNair, a close friend of Marshall since 1917. But, of course, the Chief of Staff bore ultimate responsibility.
Nearly a million African-Americans served in the Second World War army. At first nearly all were restricted to service and support units, predominately commanded by white officers. The Tuskegee Airmen defied the norm and fought with distinction in the Army Air Corps. Eventually, outside pressure forced the embodiment of an African-American combat formulation, the 92nd Infantry Division. It was sent in late 1944 to the Fifth Army in Italy, by then a secondary theatre. During the bitter winter of 1944-45, it was stationed in the snow-covered Apennine Mountains with little chance to distinguish itself. The racism widespread in American society at the time, as well as the Southern roots of many regular officers, clearly drove this. In this respect all that can now be said is that Marshall was a man of his times (and perhaps of VMI).
Warp speed expansion
Nearly 40% of Marshall’s army was in service and support units. The U.S. Army was logistically lavish, not least because it took with it overseas as much as possible of the abundance of American life, especially in terms of rations. This was felt to be essential to morale. It assured draftees’ families that their sons (and a few daughters) were being properly cared for. Naturally it increased the shipping needed to support Army deployment in 1943-44. The concurrent global shipping stringency complicated already tangled business of Anglo-American strategic decision-making.
When all the debits are recorded, however (and those noted above do not constitute an exhaustive list), it remains true that Marshall oversaw a forty-fold expansion of the Army at warp speed. He did so in a country without a strong military tradition. He nurtured and sustained political support, not only from Roosevelt but from Congress. Over 70% of that force was deployed overseas, where it fought with steadily increasing effectiveness. It is an achievement that well merits Churchill’s encomium. But if Marshall was a Carnot, was he also a von Moltke—the chief of staff who shaped the Prussian victories that drove the unification of Germany.
Marshall as strategist: “Germany first”
By spring 1941, the British Chiefs of Staff were certain that American belligerence was indispensable to victory. Anglo-American strategy was shaped then by prolonged (and very secret) staff discussions in Washington. These produced the basic “Germany First” decision (although in practice the U.S. Navy would not always be guided by it).
“Germany First” would always be bedrock for Marshall. He had been a key U.S. Army planner when war in 1919 was still a possibility. His plan for a huge army was the only way to challenge the German Army head on. Moreover, only by using the American army on a large scale could the decision to raise it be justified.
Marshall knew that Roosevelt’s instincts favored the Navy. (FDR had been Assistant Navy Secretary in the Wilson Administration.) The president’s personal chief of staff was Admiral William Leahy, former Chief of Naval Operations. Marshall once called FDR’s attention to the fact that he referred to the Navy as “us” and the Army as “them.”
By keeping the strategic focus on the European theatre, Marshall could ensure that the Army carried its appropriate weight. But focusing on Europe did not decide how and where the Wehrmacht was to be confronted. It was this issue which produced a prolonged Anglo-American tussle from Pearl Harbor to midsummer 1944. It continued later in the memoirs of the participants and the first generation of historical studies. It remains central to the historiography of the Anglo-American war effort.
The “Grant Strategy”
Basically, it came down to an American strategic tradition. The great American military historian, Russell Weigley, described it as “the strategy of U.S. Grant”: going straight for the heart of an enemy’s fighting power. Thus, Grant had assigned the Army of the Potomac its sole objective: Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.2
Marshall and his planners believed that, using Britain as a springboard, a landing in northern France at the earliest possible moment, followed by a drive for the Ruhr—the heart of German war industry—and then on to Berlin would engage the Wehrmacht most effectively and end the war most rapidly. And, of course, it would allow the deployment of the huge army the U.S was raising.
The “Grant Strategy” was reinforced in Marshall’s mind by the June 1941 German assault on Russia. Stalin immediately began to demand a British—and after December 1941 an Anglo-American—attack on Western Europe. The Anglo-Americans understood very clearly how overwhelmingly important it was to keep Russia in the war. The bulk of the German army and air force was tied down on the Eastern Front. There the Red Army, as Churchill was to tell the House of Commons in 1944, “tore the guts” out of the Wehrmacht. Some 80% of German military fatalities during the war took place on the Eastern Front.
Marshall always felt that the best way to take the pressure off the Russians was to land in France as early as possible. The problem was that the British war effort had developed along different lines, and in response to different imperatives. This set the stage for the most long-enduring Anglo-American argument of the war. At the core of that argument were the very different situations (and histories) of the two nations.
The British alternative
Marshall and his plans relied on the huge industrial and demographic reserves of the U.S. This permitted the lavishly equipped and supported army that Marshall actually created. Britain by contrast began the war with no comparable finances, industrial base or population (48 million as opposed to 131 million in America).
Moreover, Britain was haunted by its 885,000 deaths in the Great War. “We want no more Passchendaeles,” a young British staff officer heard a Cabinet minister say. “Passchendaele” (275,000 British casualties) was symbol of the costly, futile strategy of General Sir Douglas Haig in 1916-17. There was nothing like that in the U.S. Army’s limited Great War experience (58,000 combat deaths). And Passchendaele followed the 1916 Somme battle, the costliest in British history (420,000 casualties). Neither battle changed the front lines significantly. “Never again” suffused British thinking when Britain and France faced the second clash with Germany in a generation.
Anglo-French plans called for a long war of attrition. The allies would stand on the defensive in the West while the Royal Navy reinstalled the blockades that, by 1917-18, had Germany and Austria-Hungary on the verge of starvation. The Royal Air Force would meanwhile carry out a “strategic bombing” offensive against German industry. This mode of war was new and completely untested, but enthusiastically advocated by Britain’s air marshals.
Contrary factors
British and French planners hoped this strategy would produce victory without the bloodbaths of 1914-18. But the plan was based on misunderstandings about both German industry and the coercive power of the German regime. There was also excessive optimism about the RAF’s ability.
Part of the design collapsed even before the war began. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 blew a gigantic hole in the British blockade. The Chamberlain government’s decision not to initiate strategic bombing cancelled another aspect. The rest of the Anglo-French strategy collapsed with the defeat of France in May-June 1940.
The British were left to improvise a formula for survival: defend Britain itself, keep open the Atlantic supply lines, cultivate American support. To this was added a war against Italy in the Mediterranean. Pre-war Anglo-French staff discussions had contemplated offensive operations against Italy, the weaker Axis power. Their target was Libya, Mussolini’s most vulnerable African colony. Italy, however, remained neutral until the eve of the French collapse. Then a series of events provided a classic example of how war creates its own momentum, ignoring planners’ wishes.
Continued in Part 2.
Endnotes
1 The most thorough study of Marshall is still Forrest Pogue’s four-volume official biography, George C. Marshall, which appeared 1963-1987 and is still in print.
2 Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War, originally published in 1973 and still in print.
The author
Dr. Callahan is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware and a leading scholar of the Indian Army in the two World Wars. He taught at the University for 38 years and was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, where an annual student prize bears his name. Among his books are Churchill and His Generals (2007) and Churchill: Retreat from Empire (1997).
Churchill’s Generals, by Raymond A. Callahan
“Bernard Montgomery: Right Man at the Right Time,” 2021.
“Claude Auchinleck: Soldier of the Raj,” 2021.