maintained a “little black book”: Paul Barron, archivist, George C. Marshall Library, e-mail message to author, December 12, 2011. There was a moment in 2012 when it was thought that the famous notebook was among a newly found batch of Marshall papers. Marshall’s 1929 appointment diary contained notations of “1,” “2,” and “3” after the names of officers, suggesting some kind of system for ranking them. Further investigation revealed that these actually were notes for dinner parties, with the figures in parentheses representing the number of guests each officer was expected to bring. Additional e-mail messages to author from Barron, May 7, 2012, and from his colleague Jeffrey Kozak, May 8, 2012.
he listed the qualities of the successful leader: George Marshall to Brig. Gen. John Mallory, November 5, 1920, Letter 1-176, in Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, eds., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 1, “The Soldierly Spirit,” December 1880–June 1939 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 202–3. See also Marshall letter of March 15, 1944, in Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, eds., The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 4, “Aggressive and Determined Leadership,” June 1, 1933–December 31, 1944 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 345–46.
a “policy of unpreparedness”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 420.
“optimistic and resourceful type”: Marshall, Memoirs, 172.
units led by these “calamity howlers”: Marshall, Memoirs, 175.
“You may not be in proper uniform”: Pogue, Marshall, vol. 1, 279.
“You can sometimes win a great victory”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 387.
whom Marshall had studied “religiously”: Forrest Pogue, George C. Marshall, vol. 3, Organizer of Victory, 1943–1945 (Viking, 1973), 257. Hereafter: Pogue, Marshall, vol. 3.
“We cannot understand the difference”: Peter Schifferle, America’s School for War: Fort Leavenworth, Officer Education, and Victory in World War II (University Press of Kansas, 2010), 195. I also have relied on Schifferle’s discussion of the competence of senior American officers in World War II, on page 185.
the Army Air Corps possessed: Forrest Pogue, George C. Marshall, vol. 2, Ordeal and Hope, 1939–1942 (Viking Press, 1966), 50. Hereafter: Pogue, Marshall, vol. 2.
“the president gave me”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 109.
he pledged in a “fireside chat”: David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (Oxford, 1999), 396, 427.
he promised not to send American boys: Steven Gillon, Pearl Harbor: FDR Leads the Nation into War (Basic, 2011), 13.
French troops were running from the battlefield: William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (Simon & Schuster, 1969), 641ff.
“was not desirous of seeing us”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 329.
Marshall’s two civilian overseers: John Nelsen, “General George C. Marshall: Strategic Leadership and the Challenges of Reconstituting the Army, 1939–41,” Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1993, 31.
“Of course, General Marshall”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 516.
“If you don’t do something”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 306.
“We are in a situation now”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 517.
“stood right up to the president”: John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency, 1938–1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 141.
“I found informal conversation with the president”: Pogue, Marshall, vol. 1, 324.
they discussed the future of the Army: “Conversations Between General Matthew B. Ridgway, USA, Ret., and Colonel John Blair, USA, AWC 1971–72,” box 89, Matthew Ridgway Papers, USAMHI, 13, 43.
“He knew from his own experience”: Matthew Ridgway, “My Recollections of General of the Army George C. Marshall,” October 3, 1980, in “Reminiscences about George C. Marshall,” box 1, folder 24, Marshall Library, 6.
“The present general officers”: Eric Larrabee, Commander in Chief: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, His Lieutenants, and Their War (Harper & Row, 1987), 101.
At Marshall’s behest: Mark Skinner Watson, Chief of Staff: Prewar Plans and Preparations (U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1950), 242–45.
“I was accused right away”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 534.
“I’m sorry, then you are relieved”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 306.
While on the march in the Shenandoah: Henry Kyd Douglas, I Rode With Stonewall (Fawcett, 1961), 78.
“I am not going to leave him in command”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 456.
“most of our senior officers”: Watson, Chief of Staff, 247.
“some officers . . . had of necessity”: Dwight Eisenhower, Crusade in Europe (Da Capo, 1977), 13.
Only eleven of the forty-two generals: Morelock, Generals of the Ardennes, 90.
“a whole group of people”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, interview by Forrest Pogue, OH-10, Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, KS, 21–22.
“I was the youngest of the people”: Eisenhower, interview by Pogue, Eisenhower Library, 22.
He took over an Army of just: The War Reports of General of the Army George C. Marshall, General of the Army H. H. Arnold, Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Lippincott, 1947), 16, 28, 65. Also, Weigley, History of the United States Army, 599.
“I’m going to put these men”: Larrabee, Commander in Chief, 101–2. My italics.
At one point Marshall, irked by the erratic quality: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 437–39.
The unprecedented mobility that the Americans: See Weigley, History of the United States Army, 477.
“If there was a justification”: Weigley, History of the United States Army, 479.
“Was that a fact?” Marshall recalled asking: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 534. The reluctant officer apparently was Maj. Gen. Robert H. Lewis: See “Marshall to Eisenhower,” October 31, 1944, The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 4, 646, footnote 1.
found Chaney “completely at a loss”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 50.
Chaney and his staff were working: D. K. R. Crosswell, Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010), 260.
“I deem it of urgent importance”: Alfred Chandler, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 1, The War Years (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 338.
Marshall declined to meet with him: General Charles Bolte, interviews by Maclyn Burg, 1973–1975, Eisenhower Library, 62–63, 104.
“Well, you better go along, too”: Bolte, interviews by Burg, Eisenhower Library, 134.
In August 1942, Buckner unaccountably chose: Pogue, Marshall, vol. 3, 152.
“fear . . . that his habit of talking”: George C. Marshall to John Lejeune, November 24, 1931, Marshall-Winn Papers, box 3, folder 32, Marshall Library.
the Navy sacked Theobald: Thomas Buell, Master of Sea Power: A Biography of Fleet Admiral Ernest J. King (Little, Brown, 1980), 320. See also Richard Frank, “Picking Winners?,” Navy History, June 2011, accessed online.
“The interesting question”: Wade Markel, “The Organization Man at War: Promotion Policies and Military Leadership, 1929–1992,” unpublished paper, 2003, 125, xi.
at the front line in June 1945: Nicholas Evan Sarantakes, Seven Stars: The Okinawa Battle Diaries of Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. and Joseph Stilwell (Texas A&M, 2004), 83.
“A flexible system of personnel management” . . . “replaced by the capable”: First part of quote from Wade Markel, “Winning Our Own Hearts and Minds: Promotion in Wartime,” Military Review, November–December 2004, 25. Second part is from Markel, “Organization Man at War,” xi.
2. DWIGHT EISENHOWER: HOW THE MARSHALL SYSTEM WORKED
“The chief says for you to hop a plane”: Eisenhower, interview by Pogue, June
28, 1962, OH-10, Eisenhower Library, xi.
“Had Drum or another officer”: Crosswell, Beetle, 206.
“I suppose it’s too much to hope”: Blumenson, The Patton Papers, 1940–1945, 14.
went out of his way to note: Dwight Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (Doubleday, 1967), 186.
a friend asked him why: Larrabee, Commander in Chief, 415.
after an article by him appeared: Robert Berlin, “Dwight David Eisenhower and the Duties of Generalship,” Military Review, October 1990, 16.
“Particularly, I was not to publish anything”: Eisenhower, At Ease, 173.
“There’s nothing so profound”: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 527.
“was nervous as a girl”: “Interview with Frank McCarthy,” January 7, 1981, Ed Cray Collection, box 1, Marshall Library, 27.
“This message was a hard blow”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 14.
He had missed the last passenger train: This account is largely based on Eisenhower, Crusade, 14. Information about Richardson’s role that weekend is from Mrs. Mamie Doud Eisenhower, interviews by Maclyn Burg and John Wichman, 1972, Eisenhower Library, 86, and also from Bryan Burrough, The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes (Penguin, 2009), 144–45, 217. A slightly different account of Eisenhower’s rail journey is given on page 146 of Geoffrey Perret, Eisenhower (Random House, 1999). Eisenhower confirmed Kittrell’s role in a letter to Kittrell, in Eisenhower papers, Document 1191, December 7, 1954, “To William H. Kittrell,” Series: EM, WHCF, President’s Personal File 1301, The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 15, The Presidency: The Middle Way, Part VI, Eisenhower Library, online.
He didn’t know the Army chief well: Eisenhower, Crusade, 16.
Marshall clearly had heard good reports: Eisenhower, interview by Pogue, OH-10, Eisenhower Library, 2.
“I walked into his office”: Eisenhower, interview by Pogue, Eisenhower Library, 20.
“I loved to do that kind of work”: Eisenhower, At Ease, 201.
“The question before me”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 19.
“I agree with you”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 22.
In the early 1920s, the Navy’s War Plan Orange: Brian Linn, “The American Way of War Revisited,” Journal of Military History, April 2002, 528. However, there may be an additional reason for Marshall’s inquiry to Eisenhower: According to Henry Stimson, secretary of war at the time, in mid-1941, spurred by what Stimson called “the contagious optimism” of Douglas MacArthur, there was a spate of talk among military planners that the Philippine Islands might indeed be defensible; see Stimson and Bundy, On Active Service in Peace & War, 388.
“we cannot, even as conditions are today”: Henry Gole, The Road to Rainbow: Army Planning for the Global War, 1934–1940 (Naval Institute Press, 2003), 97.
The Navy’s “Rainbow 5” global war plan: Chief of Naval Operations, “Promulgation of Navy Basic War Plan–Rainbow No. 5 (WPL-46),” printed as Exhibit No. 4, Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 965.
MacArthur had put aside Ike: Paul Rogers, The Good Years: MacArthur and Sutherland (Praeger, 1990), 39–40. See also Matthew Holland, Eisenhower Between the Wars: The Making of a General and Statesman (Praeger, 2001), 196, and Carlo D’Este, Eisenhower: A Soldier’s Life (Henry Holt, 2002), 248–49.
“Eisenhower,” Marshall said, “the department”: Dwight Eisenhower, “George Catlett Marshall,” The Atlantic, August 1964, accessed online.
“the security of England”: Chandler, Papers of Eisenhower, vol. 1, The War Years, 205. See also Eisenhower memorandum to Marshall titled “Strategic Conceptions and their application to Southwest Pacific,” February 28, 1942, record group 165, box 43, book 4, National Archives, 1–2.
In his memoirs, he recalled making the decision: Eisenhower, Crusade, 30.
he could envision “launching a decisive blow”: Joseph Hobbs, Dear General: Eisenhower’s Wartime Letters to Marshall (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 54.
“Some men reach the top” . . . “He is, in fact, a great democrat”: Maj. Gen. Sir Francis de Guingand, Generals at War (Hodder and Stoughton, 1964), 192–93.
“Here was somebody” . . . “most natable”: Maj. Gen. Sir Kenneth Strong, Intelligence at the Top: The Recollections of an Intelligence Officer (Cassell, 1968), 79, 113.
minor aristocrats and country gentlemen: In 1912, 9 percent of new British officers “came from titled families and 32 percent from country landowning families,” observed John Lewis-Stempel in Six Weeks: The Short and Gallant Life of the British Officer in the First World War (Orion, 2010), 59–60. Almost all the rest, he added, were from the upper middle class. But by 1918, so many British officers had been killed that about 40 percent of officers came from “working and lower middle class backgrounds” and so were given the status of “Temporary Gentlemen.”
One officer who shot to prominence: Clarence Huebner, “Leadership in World War II,” Coast Artillery Journal, November–December 1946, 42.
“At any moment, it is possible”: David Eisenhower, Eisenhower at War, 1943–1945 (Random House, 1986), 63.
“He was not one of those in whom”: Hobbs, Dear General, 51.
“Patton I think comes closest to meeting”: Alfred Chandler Jr., The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. 2, The War Years (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 824–25.
On February 4, 1943, Eisenhower even recommended: Hobbs, Dear General, 66.
“Generals are expendable”: Chandler, Papers of Eisenhower, vol. 2, The War Years; quoted in Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn (Henry Holt, 2002), 317.
Two hundred Army engineers: The number two hundred is from Gerald Astor, Terrible Terry Allen (Presidio, 2003), 148.
“It was the only time”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 141.
Ike was shaken by the lackadaisical attitude: Eisenhower, At Ease, 262.
the worst defeat of American ground forces: For this judgment, see Peter Mansoor, The GI Offensive in Europe: The Triumph of American Infantry Divisions, 1941–1945 (University Press of Kansas, 1999), 89.
In about a week, Allied losses: Antulio Echevarria, “American Operational Art, 1917–2008,” in John Andreas Olsen and Martin Van Creveld, eds., The Evolution of Operational Art: From Napoleon to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2011), 147.
“The proud and cocky Americans today”: Harry Butcher, My Three Years with Eisenhower: The Personal Diary of Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, Naval Aide to General Eisenhower, 1942 to 1945 (Simon & Schuster, 1946), 268.
One of the few bright spots at Kasserine: Roger Spiller, ed., American Military Leaders (Praeger, 1989), 345.
“Our people from the very highest”: Pogue, Marshall, vol. 3, 185.
“bedraggled . . . tired . . . down”: Eisenhower, “Speech in New York, NY, December 3, 1946,” in Rudolph Treuenfels, ed., Eisenhower Speaks (Farrar, Straus, 1948), 168.
“the black reminders”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 96.
he wrote to his old friend Leonard “Gee” Gerow: D’Este, Eisenhower, 393.
Ike’s intelligence officer had to be British: Hobbs, Dear General, 102–3.
the American forces were “complete amateurs”: Nigel Hamilton, Master of the Battlefield: Monty’s War Years, 1942–1944 (McGraw-Hill, 1983), 206.
“Believe me, the British have nothing to learn”: Kenneth Macksey, The Tank Pioneers (Jane’s, 1981), 187; quoted in Douglas Delaney, “A Quiet Man of Influence: General Sir John Crocker,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, Autumn 2007, 196.
“The s.o.b. publicly called our troops cowards”: Blumenson, Patton Papers, 222. In a sign of how pervasive cross-ally unhappiness could be in World War II, just over a year later, Canadian Gen. Harry Crerar tried in turn to fire Crocker. See John English, Patton�
�s Peers: The Forgotten Allied Field Commanders of the Western Front, 1944–45 (Stackpole, 2009), xxviii.
“peculiar apathy”: Hobbs, Dear General, 67, 105.
He already had received internal reports: Crosswell, Beetle, 390.
“My own real worry”: Hobbs, Dear General, 105.
“to be cold-blooded about removal”: Butcher, Three Years, 273.
“if I thought anyone was not making the grade”: Strong, Intelligence at the Top, 83.
“Patton would parade around”: “General William C. Westmoreland, USA Retired,” interview by Col. Duane Cameron and Lt. Col. Raymond Funderburk, 1978, William Westmoreland Papers, box 69, USAMHI, 94.
“a Wild West cowboy”: James Polk, “Patton: ‘You Might As Well Die a Hero,’” Army Magazine, December 1975, 42.
“I think Fredendall is either a little nuts”: Blumenson, Patton Papers, 181.
“Ward lacks force”: Blumenson, Patton Papers, 199.
“the impression of a degree of pessimism”: Russell A. Gugeler, Major General Orlando Ward: Life of a Leader (Red Anvil Press, 2007), 205.
“In my opinion General Ward”: Gugeler, Ward, 201.
“the troops had to be picked up quickly”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 150.
Ward was permitted to see Marshall: Bland, Marshall Interviews, 617.
Ward was forgiven his indiscretion: Maj. Gen. Orlando Ward, interview by Forrest Pogue, Denver, Colorado, May 5, 1957, 183N, Copy 2, Forrest C. Pogue Oral History Collection, George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, VA. Hereafter: Pogue Oral History Collection, Marshall Library.
Ernest Harmon was instructed by Patton: Ernest Harmon, Combat Commander: Autobiography of a Soldier (Prentice-Hall, 1970), 123.
“Among all the figures of antiquity”: Eisenhower, At Ease, 40.
“Immediate and continuous loyalty”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 158.
“men who have measured up”: The War Reports, 125.
“if results obtained by the field commander”: Eisenhower, Crusade, 369.
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