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Great Contemporaries: George Marshall and America at War (2)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | January 5, 2024
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries
Continued from Part 1….. President Roosevelt and George Marshall closely followed Britain’s seesaw battles in North Africa. By mid-1941, the outcome was anything but certain.
Britain and the Middle East
The British had longstanding strategic, imperial and economic interests in the Middle East and a modest military presence in Egypt. To Mussolini, Egypt looked like a soft target. He ordered his large, Libyan-based army to march on Cairo, but it quickly bogged down a few miles into Egypt. Italy’s armed forces were unprepared for a major war against a first-class power—as some of Mussolini’s generals tried in vain to tell him.
Operating on a shoestring, an improvised British offensive, Operation Compass, wiped out the entire Italian Tenth Army. Between December 1940 and February 1941, it overran eastern Libya (Cyrenaica), suffering less than a thousand fatalities. Hitler, alarmed for his Italian ally, sent a small German “blocking force” to Libya, commanded by the then-unknown Erwin Rommel. At this point the avalanche intensified.
Earlier, Mussolini had sent his inadequately trained, poorly equipped, badly led legions into Greece. The Greek Army stopped them cold. But Hitler could not afford a British presence within striking distance of Romanian oil fields on the eve of his attack on Russia. In April 1941 the Wehrmacht overran Greece and Yugoslavia, followed by a successful airborne invasion of Crete.
With British forces diverted to Greece, Rommel counterattacked in North Africa, raking Cyrenaica and sweeping the British back into Egypt. Encouraged by British setbacks and German and Italian agents, pro-Axis Iraqi army officers toppled the Iraqi government. This threatened British oil supplies and communications with India.
A brief improvised campaign restored the pro-British Iraqi government. Ineffectual Luftwaffe sorties supporting the Iraqi rebels occurred in Vichy-controlled Syria. They convinced British Middle Eastern Headquarters in Cairo to occupy Syria in July.
Mideast quandaries
By mid-1941 the Middle East had become the focus of a massive Imperial war effort. British, Australian, New Zealand, South African and Indian divisions (plus a small Polish contingent) were deployed from the Egyptian desert to India. A huge base area had been created in Egypt (still technically neutral).
Britain’s presence in the Middle East was the product of a complex history born of concern for Imperial communications and later oil. But its transition to a major theater of operations was the product of the war’s development. As Lord Kitchener had said to Winston Churchill early in the previous war: we make war not as we would like but as we can. Dialing back the war effort there was impossible.
Yet that is what Roosevelt suggested to Churchill in May 1941. Accepting that Britain’s Middle East position might well collapse. he assured the embattled Prime Minister: “Naval control of the Indian Ocean and Atlantic Ocean will in time win the war.”
It was the wrong moment to offer such Olympian reassurance. Churchill fired back: “We must not be too sure” that the loss of the Middle East would not be very “grave.” (His draft had used the words “mortal” and “overwhelming” before settling on “grave”).3
FDR, as was his wont, backed away from further direct confrontation with the Prime Minister, but it was the opening shot in what was to be a three-year Anglo-American argument over Britain’s Mediterranean focus, at which the Americans looked critically. Deeming it “imperial,” they regarded an Atlantic and Northwest Europe orientation as strategically correct. The principal American protagonist in that long debate was George Marshall.
George Marshall and alliance politics
In August 1941 Marshall met Churchill and the British Chiefs of Staff for the first time at the Atlantic Charter meeting. American skepticism about the British position in the Middle East was again voiced. Marshall and his colleagues also questioned British strategy after the collapse of France: Naval blockade and bombing had at that point provided no appreciable results. Subversion, a newer idea, was still getting on its feet.
Britain expected its Special Operations Executive to produce “secret armies.” Landing British forces in Europe, they said, would “detonate” uprisings among subject peoples. Well might the Americans look upon this with skepticism. After June 1940, however, it was all the British could offer.
The British in turn were surprised at Marshall’s “hemispheric” orientation, with military intervention to forestall German intrigues in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. These were expansive plans, the British thought. Particularly when the Selective Training and Service Act was extended by only a single vote in the House of Representatives.
Apart from trading strategic fantasies, the most significant thing about the Atlantic meeting was that Marshall met General Sir John Dill. His link with Churchill’s Chief of Imperial General Staff became crucial to the Anglo-American military alliance. Their almost instant rapport began to take concrete form at their next meeting.
“Arcadia” and the Combined Chiefs
After Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, Roosevelt hoped to postpone a summit meeting with the British. But Churchill insisted, so the lengthy “Arcadia” meeting occurred in Washington over the holidays in 1941-42. Here George Marshall won two major victories, ensuring that the war would be managed largely on American lines.
The Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) as created at Arcadia. It soon became the main Allied decision maker on strategic issues. It sat in Washington and with General Dill the British representative. Churchill had long been disenchanted with Dill, who he felt was too indecisive. But his replacement, Alan Brooke (who had no difficulty being assertive and decisive), was new to the CIGS position. Churchill therefore took Dill with him to Arcadia.
The warmth between Marshall and Dill deepened until Dill’s death in November 1944. Marshall would describe their friendship as “unique in my lifetime.” He arranged a waiver of regulations to allow Dill’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Later he spearheaded the commissioning and erection of an equestrian statue over Dill’s grave. Their friendship lubricated the often-fractious Anglo-American military alliance.
Marshall’s second success at Arcadia was the creation of command machinery for future theaters of operation. The British model, as in their Middle East Command, was a troika of equal service heads. The American model was a supreme commander with a subordinate trio of service commanders. At Arcadia, the Americans won the argument. The first of these new command structures was awkwardly titled American-British-Dutch-Australian Command (ABDA). Its purpose was to contain the Japanese offensive surge in South East Asia.
Leadership decisions
To command ABDA, Marshall suggested General Sir Archibald Wavell, once British commander in the Middle East (until he failed against Rommel). Thus, it was a British officer who presided over ABDA’s inevitable failure. (Lacking everything it needed, it lasted barely a month and accomplished nothing.)
Was Marshall being Machiavellian, choosing a British general for what he must have known was a doomed endeavor? Possibly, but the only other candidate with appropriate seniority was Douglas MacArthur, then directing, unsuccessfully, the defense of the Philippines. MacArthur however was not a favorite of either Marshall or FDR. It was likely American politics that handed Wavell the poisoned chalice that was ABDA.
Arcadia put down markers for how the Anglo-American war effort would be managed. Final decisions would be made in Washington, where Marshall’s friend Dill represented the British Chiefs. Theater commands would be constructed on American lines. The full implications of Arcadia were not immediately apparent, since the Japanese swept all before them. In North Africa, Rommel staged another of his successful offensives in the desert. George Marshall thus lost the first major Anglo-American strategic argument of the war. But as the U.S. war effort swelled, it would ultimately give the Americans a decisive grip on alliance strategy. But all that lay in the future.
Where to strike?
The immediate aftermath of Arcadia was grim. During the conference the “Crusader” offensive produced the first British victory of the war. Churchill had long eyed French North Africa as a suitable follow-on objective. Now he proposed “Gymnast,” later “Torch,” a combined Anglo-American assault.
George Marshall and his staff were opposed. They remained wedded to a military buildup in Britain for cross channel attack, driving on the Ruhr and, ultimately, Berlin. The British military historian J.F.C. Fuller later, rather waspishly, characterized this as stemming from the American “mass production” mentality. Build your machine big enough and you can drive it anywhere. In fact, Marshall’s thinking reflected the “strategy of U.S. Grant”—go for the heart of the enemy’s fighting power. Marshall’s Army carried more weight than the U.S. Navy on European strategy. Anything save the earliest possible cross channel attack was simply a diversion of resources—from winning the war as quickly as possible.
In the abstract, there was much to be said for Marshall’s approach. In practice it was simply not realistic in 1942, as Churchill and Brooke clearly saw. The American buildup in Britain was slowed by shipping shortages. Germany’s U-boats would not be decisively beaten for another year. Marshall and his staff underestimated how formidable the Wehrmacht was, and how much their new, raw units had to learn.
Visiting an American training site in 1942, Churchill’s personal chief of staff, Hastings “Pug” Ismay, quietly told the Prime Minster it would be suicidal to pit the American troops in their current state against the German Army. Churchill’s reply was that the raw material was excellent, and they would learn rapidly. Both were correct.
Roosevelt opts for North Africa
Marshall’s argument that even if a 1942 invasion was not possible, a “sacrifice” landing might be necessary to take pressure off the Russians. This made no impact on the British. The Germans, they said, could handle any 1942 Allied onslaught without drawing on their forces in Russia. And, indeed, the “sacrifice” would mostly be of British and Canadian soldiers.
The argument ended when Roosevelt overruled his Joint Chiefs of Staff (something he rarely did). “Torch,” he decided, would put American troops in action in 1942—a decision driven by the politics of war. Marshall lost an argument, in long retrospect almost certainly fortunately. However, his prediction that Torch would draw heavy resources proved accurate. His view was reinforced by the next major allied conference at Casablanca, which deepened the commitment to the Mediterranean. The British saw this as a way to knock Italy, the weaker Axis partner, out of the war.
For the balance of 1943, American armies grew and gained experience in the Mediterranean theater. American industrial power leapt ahead, while the British reached and passed the peak of their mobilization. Marshall was therefore gradually able to wrest control of allied strategy from Churchill and Brooke, setting in motion the “strategy of U.S. Grant.”
Churchill’s Mediterranean strategy
At Casablanca, the Americans had felt “out-argued” by the well-organized British (with years of war behind them). By May 1943, at the “Trident” conference in Washington, Marshall could better defend his point of view. The cross-channel attack was firmly set for May 1944.
Marshall’s prediction that the Mediterranean theater would draw in resources and delay the cross-channel attack was borne out. Hitler poured reinforcements into Tunisia, delaying the Allied victory there until May 1943. Still, the bag of Axis prisoners was greater than the number taken by the Russians at Stalingrad). By that time, further Mediterranean operations were inevitable.
Sicily was invaded in July and Mussolini’s tottering regime collapsed the same month. His successors promptly surrendered. The British saw great possibilities opening in Italy and the Balkans, where the occupiers of an economically vital area were demoralized Italians.
The Italian campaign, begun in September, at first seemed a walkover. (The Germans were expected to retire to the Alps.) Operations continued, especially in the eastern Mediterranean and Southeast Europe, where the Americans evidenced an irrational fear of involvement—something, legend apart, Churchill never proposed.
Led by George Marshall, the Americans became increasingly implacable. The crucial moment came in September. Marshall, using the American-dominated Combined Chiefs and theater command, shut down Churchill’s desire to exploit Italy’s collapse by seizing the Italian-occupied islands in the Aegean and persuade Turkey to enter the war. This would have had undeniable value, but the Turks had no intention of getting involved.
This episode hardly figures in American accounts. But even a cursory reading of Churchill’s memoirs leaves no doubt about how intensely he felt about it. He clearly saw this as the moment the Americans, personified by Marshall, took control of allied strategy.
To cross the Channel
Two further events prioritized the cross-Channel invasion. At the September 1943 Quebec conference, the British agreed to remove seven veteran divisions from the Mediterranean, slowing the advance in Italy. The object was to add combat experience to the untested Allied formations assembling for the assault on Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Simultaneously, the Germans consolidated their defense line south of Rome, a move that would balk the Allies until spring.
Then at Teheran in November, Roosevelt signaled to Stalin that the U.S. would no longer necessarily align with Britain on major strategic decisions. Stalin had finally secured a firm commitment for his “Second Front.” Of course, there had always been a Second Front: Britain’s war effort had kept the Wehrmacht pinned down in Western Europe and the Mediterranean. But both the Americans and the Russians defined the term as applying only to a landing in France.
Stalin argued that the commitment would only be real if a commander was named. This was another not-quite-accurate statement accepted by Roosevelt and, perforce, Churchill, who had long promised that post to Brooke. But by now an American commander seemed inevitable, and the assumption was it would be Marshall.
At Quebec, Churchill abruptly informed Brooke, who seems never to have forgiven him—not so much for the decision as for the tactless way it was conveyed. But Marshall too was out of the running when the President decided he “could not sleep” if George Marshall wasn’t in Washington. FDR may well have meant that literally.
The choice fell to Dwight Eisenhower, whose allied command experience was during a not-always-smooth year in North Africa. The decision would take Ike to the White House—and a place larger than Marshall’s in American historical memory.
Red herrings and distractions
At Teheran, Stalin threw another apple of discord into Anglo-American planning. The planners for what became Operation Overlord had envisioned a companion landing in the South of France. Its purpose was to distract the Germans, divide their forces and secure the great port of Marseilles. It would also allow deployment of the new French army, armed and equipped in North Africa by the Americans (and made up largely of French colonial subjects from North and West Africa plus ethnic Frenchmen from the settler communities there).
Stalin embraced the idea because he doubtless wanted the largest possible allied commitment to France. The operation (“Anvil,” later “Dragoon”) was henceforth regarded by the Americans as a firm promise to the Russians. This further deemphasized the Italian campaign—just at the moment when it became a crucial issue for the Prime Minster.
The Mediterranean was important to the British because they saw no realistic prospect of successfully crossing the Channel in 1942-43. Breaking Italy and reopening the Mediterranean offered real strategic advantages. By 1943-44, however, the calculus had shifted. By that point the Germans were on the defensive everywhere and under heavy (still controversial) air bombardment. The U-boats had been tamed and the American buildup in Britain was accelerating. British and American units alike had acquired valuable combat and amphibious warfare experience. Marshall and his planners did not wish to abandon the Italian campaign—just to treat it as a secondary matter. But that was not how Winston Churchill saw matters.
Churchill’s Mediterranean lament
By early 1944 the Mediterranean theater was commanded by General Sir Harold Alexander with majority British forces. It was Churchill’s main asset in his increasingly difficult—and ultimately doomed—struggle to maintain British parity in the alliance. This was complicated by the inevitable shrinkage of the British Army as Britain’s manpower pool ran dry.
Churchill, still wanting a British victory in Italy, stubbornly resisted the south of France invasion. “Dragoon” was postponed to August because of lack of landing craft, but the Americans remained committed to it. In exasperation, Churchill wrote his Chiefs of Staff: “The Arnold, King, Marshall combination is one of the stupidest strategic teams ever seen. They are good fellows and there is no need to tell them this.”4
George Marshall always maintained that shifting Allied strategy to North Africa in 1942 had been a mistake. He fought hard over the next two years to move it back to what he saw as its correct axis. Churchill’s failure to stop “Dragoon” marked the victory of the “strategy of U.S. Grant.” American dominance in the alliance now became unmistakable.
Marshall and the war in the Pacific
Once “Overlord” succeeded and allied armies surged toward the Reich, Marshall’s role began to evolve. The big strategic arguments were over. The war, at least in Europe, was being conducted on American lines. (And, whatever Montgomery thought of Eisenhower, that would not change.) It was now just a matter of time. But what of the other war, of which so little has so far been said?
Marshall had relatively little impact on the Pacific. The decisive drive across the Central Pacific was a Navy-Marine Corps show with little army participation. Largely for political reasons, Douglas MacArthur was left to run his own satrapy in the South-West Pacific, although the U.S. Army contribution was much larger by 1944-45.
There was, however, one theater of the war against Japan where Marshall’s role was important. His knowledge of the pre-1939 officer corps—much of it derived from his time at Fort Benning—drove his selections for high command. In Europe, where Anglo-American cooperation was crucial, he chose Eisenhower, who became one the greatest coalition commanders in history. The American war effort in southeast Asia was based in British-governed India. To run it, Marshall chose the rabid Anglophobe Joseph W. Stilwell. The reason, as Churchill divined at the Arcadia conference, could be summed up in one word: China.
China, Marshall and Stillwell
Roosevelt was a firm believer in the importance of China to the allied war effort. Chiang Kai-shek was an early recipient of Lend-Lease, which reached China via Britain’s “Burma Road.” The link was severed when the Japanese overran Burma in early 1942. Washington wanted Stillwell to restore that connection. His abrasiveness and loathing of the British suited Marshall’s (and Roosevelt’s) purposes. When at last Marshall recalled Stilwell in the autumn of 1944, it was only because the land link to China had been reestablished. (Ironically, that was mainly due to the victories of General Bill Slim’s outstanding Indian Army.)
Marshall’s assessment of Stilwell’s work was signaled by a promotion to four-star rank and selection to take over a very senior Pentagon post. He would have commanded an army in the invasion of Japan had the Pacific war not been abruptly ended by the atomic bomb. Cooperation with the British was essential in Europe, confrontation in South East Asia. In both cases Marshall’s lodestar was American strategic aims.
War’s end and aftermath
George Marshall had, surprisingly, little voice in the decision to use the atomic bomb. He felt that an invasion of Japan’s home islands would be necessary, while recognizing the attendant high casualties. But the decision was the President’s. Marshall could only have been relieved when the invasion of Japan became unnecessary.
Marshall became a five-star general when the rank was created in 1944, giving the U.S. Army an equivalent to British field marshals. After six of the most exhausting years imaginable, George Marshall stepped down as Army Chief of Staff in November 1945. He did not retire. Five-star generals, like field marshals, remained on the active list for life.
Marshall’s postwar career, as Truman’s envoy to China, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, was varied and busy. His name was embedded in history when as Secretary of State, he put all his prestige behind the Marshall Plan. That far-sighted act of policy stabilized Western Europe in the fraught early Cold War years. But that would take this essay beyond the story of the immensely able solider, whose role during the Second World War was crucial. It must therefore fall to other hands.
Despite sharp wartime differences, the British never forgot George Marshall. At the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, when he entered Westminster Abbey representing the United States, the vast congregation stood as a mark of respect. When he was hospitalized and dying in 1959, Churchill (by then “Sir Winston”), on a visit to Washington, accompanied President Eisenhower to see him. The Prime Minister left Walter Reed Medical Center with tears in his eyes.
The General’s onetime subordinate, Eisenhower, went further and is more widely remembered. But few contributed more to winning the war than George Marshall.
Endnotes
3 Warren F. Kimball, ed., Churchill & Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, 3 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1984), I: 181-82.
4 Reference was to U.S. Air Force General H.H. Arnold, and Navy Admiral Ernest J. King. Churchill printed this minute, minus the two quoted sentences, in the appendix to Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953, 161). The British official history, The Mediterranean and Middle East, vol. 2, by Moony et. al. (London: HMSO, 1984, 335) brought the missing sentences to light thirty-one years later. They reflected of course Churchill’s utter exasperation at that moment, not his considered view.
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
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Dr. Callahan, I enjoyed reading these two articles on General Marshall and his impact on the two World Wars, very clear and interesting. While Marshall was engaged in so many activities during his lifetime, these two engagements were the key to his greatness as an American military figure. Thank you for your work.