The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  He finally had the president’s attention. “We are in a situation now where it’s desperate,” Marshall continued. “I am using the word very accurately, where it’s desperate. We have literally nothing, nothing, and unless something is done immediately, and even then it takes a long, long time to get any return on it, we are caught in a dreadful position of unpreparedness. And with everything being threatened the way it has been, I feel that I must tell you just as frankly and vehemently as I can what our necessities are.”

  Morgenthau wrote in his diary that Marshall “stood right up to the president.” It worked. The next day the president asked Marshall to draw up as soon as possible a list of what the military needed. Marshall would later recall this meeting as a turning point in FDR’s military policy.

  Marshall’s attitude toward his dealings with Roosevelt provided a model of civil-military discourse. It was, most of all, frank—at least on Marshall’s side. Yet it was not close. As chief of staff, Marshall would insist on remaining socially and emotionally distant from the president, seeing it as necessary to maintaining a professional relationship. Nowadays, most senior officers would leap at the chance to spend time with the commander in chief during his more relaxed moments. For example, before the Iraq war, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of the U.S. Central Command, overseeing the Middle East, visited President George W. Bush at the latter’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, as Marine Gen. Peter Pace would do later as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Marshall was wary of such intimacies. “I found informal conversation with the president would get you into trouble,” he later explained. “He would talk over something informally at the dinner table and you had trouble disagreeing without creating embarrassment. So I never went.” He refused even to laugh at the president’s jokes. The first time he ever visited Roosevelt’s home at Hyde Park, New York, was for the president’s funeral. But he and the president were perhaps the best wartime civil-military team the nation has ever had.

  Marshall prepares for war

  Even before he became chief of the Army, Marshall was thinking about how to oust the nonperformers in the Army’s senior ranks. In the spring of 1939, war was on the horizon. Marshall had been told he would be the next Army chief, but he had not yet taken that office. He embarked on a sensitive mission to South America to secure agreements to freely move American forces by air and sea across the South Atlantic. The trip was spurred by American worry about growing pro-German sentiment within the Brazilian military, most notably evidenced by a German invitation to the chief of the Brazilian army, Gen. Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro, to lead Nazi troops on a parade in Berlin. Accompanying Marshall was Col. Matthew Ridgway, a rising young officer.

  It is difficult to imagine nowadays, but for ten days during the voyage to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Nashville, Ridgway and Marshall sat on the forward deck of the light cruiser and simply talked. More or less cut off from the world, they discussed the future of the Army, about which Marshall held two great concerns. The first was the need to get more money out of Congress to expand, equip, and train the military. The second was how to find and promote good officers to lead that growing force. “He knew from his own experience in WWI and from his extensive reading of our military history of the political and other pressures which had resulted in the appointment to high command in past wars of so many mediocre and even incompetent officers,” Ridgway recalled.

  The South American mission was a success, with landing and port rights secured, even though Gen. Góis Monteiro went on to accept the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle the following year. For a spell during World War II, the American air base that was established at Natal, in northeastern Brazil, would become one of the busiest airports in the world, used as a ferrying point into Africa, whose coast was about eighteen hundred miles to the east, and also for antisubmarine patrols over the mid-Atlantic.

  Marshall returned to Washington with a battle plan for rapid change in the ranks of the Army’s senior officers. “The present general officers of the line are for the most part too old to command troops in battle under the terrific pressure of modern war,” Marshall said in October 1939, a month after being sworn in as chief of the Army, in an off-the-record comment to a journalist. “Most of them have their minds set in outmoded patterns, and can’t change to meet the new conditions they may face if we become involved in the war that’s started in Europe.” At Marshall’s behest, in the summer and fall of 1941, 31 colonels, 117 lieutenant colonels, 31 majors, and 16 captains were forced into retirement or discharged from the active-duty force. In addition, some 269 National Guard and Army Reserve officers were let go. All told, Marshall estimated that, as chief of staff, he forced out at least 600 officers before the United States entered World War II. “I was accused right away by the service papers of getting rid of all the brains of the army,” he said. “I couldn’t reply that I was eliminating considerable arteriosclerosis.”

  Marshall removed officers in part to convey a sense of urgency. When the commandant at Leavenworth, Brig. Gen. Charles Bundel, told him that updating the complete set of Army training manuals would take eighteen months, Marshall offered him three months to do the job. No, it can’t be done, Bundel responded. Marshall then offered four months. Bundel again said it was impossible. Marshall asked him to reconsider that statement. “You be very careful about that,” Marshall warned.

  “No, it can’t be done,” Bundel insisted.

  “I’m sorry, then you are relieved,” Marshall informed him, in an exchange that evoked Stonewall Jackson’s relief of a colonel in the Shenandoah Valley campaign, an episode Marshall almost certainly knew about. (While on the march in the Shenandoah, Jackson had ordered a colonel to pull together his brigade, which had divided into two or three parts. “It’s impossible, General; I can’t do it,” the officer said. Jackson responded, “Turn your command over to the next officer. If he can’t do it, I’ll find someone who can.”) Marshall replaced Bundel with Brig. Gen. Lesley McNair, who went on to play a major role during the war, overseeing all Army training until he was killed by an Army Air Force fragmentation bomb that fell six miles short in Saint-Lô, France, in July 1944.

  Marshall rarely let slip his fierce temper, but he did so when politicians questioned his efforts to get new men into the leadership of National Guard divisions. At one meeting at which his judgment about moving a general was questioned, he gave members of Congress an ultimatum: “I am not going to leave him in command of that division. So I will put it to you this way: If he stays, I go, and if I stay, he goes.” When Justice Felix Frankfurter passed along a criticism he had heard from a friend in the Army Reserve about the relief of Guard officers, Marshall tartly replied that “most of our senior officers on such duty are deadwood and should be eliminated from the service as rapidly as possible.”

  The United States had not yet entered World War II, but Marshall had determined that most of the top generals in the Army were too aged for combat, and that just below them were many officers who were also far past their prime. Eisenhower stated in his memoirs that one of the beneficial side effects of the big Louisiana Maneuvers, staged in August and September 1941 with several hundred thousand troops in two opposing forces, was their demonstration that “some officers . . . had of necessity to be relieved from command.” Only eleven of the forty-two generals who commanded a division, a corps, or an army in those maneuvers would go on to command in combat. Just one of the prewar Army’s senior generals, Walter Krueger, would be given top command in World War II. Decades later, Eisenhower said that those removals had been key steps to victory in World War II. In his old age, he listed the names of a series of officers who, because they were discarded, are now forgotten by history: “a whole group of people . . . There was Marley, Charley Thompson—what’s his name—McKieffer, Daily, Benedict . . . By God, he [Marshall] just took them and threw them out of the room. . . . He got them out of the way, and I think as a whole he was r
ight.” The corollary to swift relief is, of course, rapid advancement of others, usually younger officers. “I was the youngest of the people that he pushed up into very high places,” Eisenhower continued.

  Today’s officers sometimes fret about “personnel turbulence,” but their lives look unruffled compared with the first two years of Marshall’s leadership. He took over an Army of just 197,000 people, a number that included the infant Air Force. Under Marshall, the Army grew in just two years to 1.4 million in the summer of 1941, and two years after that it had reached nearly 7 million, finally peaking in 1945 at 8.3 million. The newcomers were overseen by a new generation of commanders who were being pushed hard. Once those new leaders were in place, Marshall told military journalist George Fielding Eliot, he would put them through their paces to gauge who among them was really capable. He elaborated:

  I’m going to put these men to the severest tests which I can devise in time of peace. I’m going to start shifting them into jobs of greater responsibility than those they hold now. . . . Then I’m going to change them, suddenly, without warning, to jobs even more burdensome and difficult. . . . Those who stand up under the punishment will be pushed ahead. Those who fail are out at the first sign of faltering.

  Those who passed the tests moved quickly. At one point Marshall, irked by the erratic quality of staff work in the Army Air Force and wanting to reward talent and maturity when he saw it, promoted a major directly to brigadier general, skipping altogether the ranks of lieutenant colonel and colonel.

  The nature of the force was changing rapidly. The U.S. Army not only leaped into the front ranks of the world’s armed forces but in just a few years would be transformed into the premier mechanized military on the planet. The unprecedented mobility that the Americans developed carried deep implications for personnel policies. Most notably, the speed at which the Army could move would make mental flexibility in leadership even more valuable. As manpower ran short, this suppleness enabled the American military to get by with far fewer divisions than had been planned. As military historian Russell Weigley explained, “If there was a justification for the risk of raising only 89 divisions, much of the justification must be that divisions could be shifted wherever they were needed with a promptness that no other army could match. In combat, too, they could move with unparalleled rapidity.”

  Marshall’s inclination to remove unsuccessful officers intensified once the United States had entered the war. At one point he ordered a general to France immediately but was informed that the man had declined to leave so quickly, because his wife was away and his household furniture was not packed. Astounded, Marshall called the general, whom he had known as a good friend for years. “Was that a fact?” Marshall recalled asking.

  “Yes, I can’t leave here now,” the general responded.

  “Well, my God, man, we are at war and you are a general,” said a puzzled Marshall.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” the officer said.

  “I’m sorry too,” Marshall concluded, “but you will be retired tomorrow.”

  This take-no-prisoners attitude was instilled in subordinates. To understand just how wide and broad the cuts were, consider the swift decline of the career of Maj. Gen. James Chaney, Eisenhower’s forgotten predecessor in Britain. A veteran pilot, Chaney had been sent to England as an observer of the Battle of Britain. When the United States entered the war, he was named the commander of American forces in the British Isles.

  Eisenhower, visiting England, found Chaney “completely at a loss” in understanding the state of the war. Chaney and his staff were working peacetime hours, and British officials did not seem to know what the American general was supposed to be doing in their country. Eisenhower reported back to Marshall, who soon informed Chaney that he was being replaced. “I deem it of urgent importance,” Marshall told him, “that the commanding general in England be an officer who is completely familiar with all our military plans and affairs and who has taken a leading part in the military developments since December 7.” Hence, Marshall informed Chaney, “I am assigning Eisenhower to the post.” Marshall’s cold-bloodedness was evident when Chaney returned to the United States and Marshall declined to meet with him. In May 1943, less than a year after his removal from London, Chaney was stuck overseeing a boot camp outside Wichita Falls, Texas. Chaney’s aide in England, Charles Bolte, received a similarly brisk dismissal. One day, Ike said, “Well, you better go along, too.”

  Though Marshall and his commanders were quick to punish incompetence, they believed in second chances. The system of relief during Word War II could be forgiving. Bolte, for example, recovered from his earlier setback. During the war, he commanded a division in Italy and eventually rose to four-star rank. Indeed, at least five Army generals of World War II—Orlando Ward, Terry Allen, Leroy Watson, Albert Brown, and, in the South Pacific, Frederick Irving—were removed from combat command and later given another division to lead in combat.

  • • •

  Teamwork was a core value for Marshall. Simply failing to show a spirit of cooperation was, for him, reason enough to remove a senior officer. Early in the war, he seriously considered relieving Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. as the Army commander in Alaska for failing to get along with his Navy counterpart. Buckner was the son of the Confederate general of the same name, who was most noted for surrendering Fort Donelson to Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862. He was sent to Alaska in 1940 as an aging colonel. When a new Navy admiral, Robert “Fuzzy” Theobald, showed up a few years later, the two soon clashed. In August 1942, Buckner unaccountably chose to read aloud to his hot-tempered counterpart a poem mocking the Navy’s fears of operating in the wild Bering Sea. The performance provoked a wave of naval indignation that soon reached Marshall. (Marshall was long familiar with Buckner’s tendency to shoot off his mouth, having cautioned retired Marine Maj. Gen. John Lejeune a decade earlier against hiring Buckner as commandant of the Virginia Military Institute for “fear . . . that his habit of talking a great deal might involve him in difficulties.”) Perhaps because he had expected such behavior, Marshall ultimately decided against relieving Buckner from the Alaska post. However, the Navy sacked Theobald early in 1943, relegating him to running a Boston shipyard.

  In 1944, ironically, Buckner would go on to lead a board that looked into the most controversial combat relief of the war: the firing on Saipan of Maj. Gen. Ralph Smith, commander of the Army’s sluggish 27th Division, by Marine Lt. Gen. Holland M. “Howlin’ Mad” Smith. (“The interesting question,” observed retired Army Lt. Col. Wade Markel, “is not why Holland Smith relieved Ralph Smith, but why it took him so long.”) Marshall later dispatched Buckner to Okinawa, where at the front line in June 1945 he waved off a Marine officer’s warning to remove his helmet because its three shiny stars were likely to provoke Japanese artillerymen. Minutes later, as Buckner stood arms akimbo, a Japanese shell exploded next to him, making him the highest-ranking American officer to be killed by enemy fire during World War II.

  Perhaps the most significant point about Marshall’s approach to generalship in World War II was that it tended to create an incentive system that encouraged prudent risk taking. “A flexible system of personnel management that rapidly identified proven leaders and placed them in appropriate positions of responsibility helped accelerate the process of change during World War II,” concluded Markel, a specialist in personnel policy. “The temporary promotion system and its accompanying culture . . . offered unlimited advancement to those who could produce success, and summary dismissal to those who couldn’t. Confronted with these stark options . . . the capable found a way to succeed and were accordingly rewarded; the incapable were, of course, replaced by the capable.”

  In other words, while sometimes mistaken and occasionally brutal to individual officers, the Marshall system generally achieved its goal of producing military effectiveness. To understand how, the best place to begin is w
ith Dwight D. Eisenhower, who just a year before the start of World War II was still a lieutenant colonel, not even in command of a regiment, let alone the armies of millions he would oversee a few years later.

  CHAPTER 2

  Dwight Eisenhower

  How the Marshall system worked

  On December 12, 1941, five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dwight D. Eisenhower sat in his office at Fort Sam Houston, the Army base on the scrubby outskirts of San Antonio. He had been promoted to brigadier general ten weeks earlier. His telephone rang. “Is that you, Ike?” he heard someone say over the line. Eisenhower recognized Col. Bedell Smith’s voice.

  “Yes,” Eisenhower replied. Smith worked in the War Department, in Washington, D.C. He had a message for the young brigadier general: George Marshall wanted Eisenhower to come to the capital immediately.

  Whether facing a single battle, an extended campaign, or an entire war, generals often do their most significant work before the major fighting begins. That was the case with Marshall, who made his most important personnel decision of World War II on that Friday, December 12, 1941. Marshall’s genius in selecting Dwight Eisenhower was to recognize the potential match between Ike’s qualities and the unique challenges of being the supreme commander of a multinational force in a globe-spanning war.

  Marshall had witnessed friction and strife between the United States and its British and French allies in World War I, and he had thought for decades about how to avoid a repetition. He knew he needed someone who could lead a team and enforce its rules. He also calculated that, because the United States was secure on its own continent, when it went to war it would do so overseas, and that necessarily would mean working closely with the militaries and governments of other nations whose aims and interests would not necessarily jibe with those of the United States. Whoever led American forces would need to be able to function well within a coalition framework, and probably also lead it. Out of hundreds of possible candidates, he eventually picked Eisenhower as the man for the job.