American Warlords

by Jonathan W. Jordan

  “Mr. President,” pressed Morgenthau, playing his last card, “will you hear General Marshall?”

  “I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me to hear him at all.”

  Disregarding the less-than-subtle hint, Marshall walked straight to Roosevelt’s desk. Practically standing over the president, he asked, “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?”

  “Of course, General Marshall.”

  In well over three minutes, Marshall let loose a machine-gun burst of facts, statistics, figures and logic. He described shortages that would dismember operations, logistical gaps that would sire defeats, and lack of funding that would undermine their shared duty to provide for the common defense.

  He ended his fusillade, saying, “I don’t quite know how to express myself about this to the President of the United States, but I will say this—that you have got to do something and you’ve got to do it today.”

  Set on his heels, Roosevelt said nothing. As he looked at the general bearing down on him with his blue eyes, Roosevelt finally grasped the enormity of the problem Marshall had been describing to Harry Hopkins, Henry Morgenthau, Congress, and anyone else who would listen.

  He told Marshall to come back the next day with a list of what he needed. Before long, the sinews of war were thickening around Marshall’s skeletal force.5

  •

  George Marshall’s life settled into a rhythm pendulating between Quarters One, his redbrick residence at Fort Myer, and the old Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue. He awoke early and took a half-hour ride on Rosita, Prepared, or one of his other horses, sometimes alone, sometimes with Katherine or old friends like Colonel George Patton. Over breakfast, he would skim up to nine newspapers, and by 7:15 he would be sitting in the back of his government-issued Plymouth for the seven-minute drive to his office.6

  Marshall started his workday behind his large mahogany desk, reviewing messages that had come in overnight from sources around the world. Eventually he established a morning briefing system that gave him the world’s big picture. Using a series of maps and charts, Marshall’s “G-2” (Intelligence) and “G-3” (Operations) staffs presented a panoramic view of the world at war, region by region. Marshall would often make decisions during the briefing, usually on his own authority, sometimes after consulting with the secretary, sometimes with a call to the White House. The briefings underscored the interconnected nature of the war’s moving fronts, ensuring he would not become bogged down in local crises at the expense of global strategy.7

  Napoleon once quipped, “An army crawls on its belly,” but the U.S. Army crawled on paperwork. Mountains of it. It would have taken dozens of George Marshalls to respond to the requests pouring in from thousands of directions. When he assumed his post, sixty-one staff officers reported to the chief of staff, as well as thirty important and 350 unimportant unit commanders. After Marshall rewrote this unwieldy system, only five officers had unbridled access to the chief.8

  Most of Marshall’s daily contact was limited to his general staff secretary, three regular secretaries, and an aide. To preserve his energy for the most important matters, Marshall appointed a secretariat to act as his paper gatekeeper. Headed by Colonel Orlando Ward, Lieutenant Colonel Omar Bradley, and Major Walter Bedell “Beetle” Smith, the secretariat arrived a few hours ahead of the chief each day to sift through a mountain of fresh paperwork. These men worked through most of the Army’s routine issues, and Marshall expected those issues to be handled without his day-to-day supervision. “Don’t fight the problem; solve it,” he told them.9

  To those who worked for him, Marshall was all business. He seemed born without a sense of humor; if he had one, aides figured, he always left it in his car. Except for his chronic problem remembering names correctly, he was proper, direct, and unequivocal—efficient as a drill press, with the same human warmth. As his civilian secretary Mona Nason charitably put it, “He was a perfectionist himself, and he did the others the honor of expecting them to be perfect too.”*

  “Perfectionism” was one word for it. Descriptions among his staff usually ran something like, “He scared the hell out of the men.” When Miss Nason offered to transfer with him in case he was moved out of Washington, Marshall, touched by her loyalty, remarked that no other staffer had offered to move with him.

  “It’s difficult for people to offer because you’re so reserved, sir,” she replied.

  Marshall flatly replied, “I have to be, or they’d walk all over me.”10

  One of Marshall’s most important lieutenants was a fellow Pennsylvanian named Major General Henry H. Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps and Marshall’s assistant chief of staff for air matters. A bona fide aviation pioneer, Arnold had been trained by the Wright brothers, and he had set three early altitude records. An avid—almost rabid—proponent of airpower, Arnold pushed for the development of a long-range strategic bomber and an expansion of the Air Corps into an autonomous branch of service. His zeal earned him the enmity of many Army staff officers, most line officers, all of the Navy, and even a few journalists like the AP’s Steve Early, whose influence with Roosevelt as presidential press secretary nearly sank Arnold’s career.*11

  Known to friends as “Hap” for his boyish smile and genial personality, Arnold was also one of Marshall’s few friends who could get away with office levity. He once sent a comic actor into Marshall’s office posing as a pushy Polish émigré seeking a U.S. Army officer’s commission. Annoying Marshall by casually referring to him as “colonel” and “captain” in broken English, the man eventually offered Marshall a fine Polish bride in exchange for a commission. As an enraged Marshall was throwing the man out of his office, Arnold burst through the door, howling with laughter.12

  Although Marshall’s formal job was to manage the Army, he kept a close eye on Washington’s power brokers. He memorized the names of the key congressional committee chairmen, journalists, informal advisers, and White House staffers, and he assigned liaison officers to keep those players informed and pacified. Important ones he occasionally hosted for dinner at Quarters One, or took to lunch at Washington’s Alibi Club. For Marshall, social engagements were all business; after one dinner party, he calculated that requests made to him that single evening required him to follow up with thirty-two letters and several radiograms.13

  By 1940, General Marshall was becoming a power in his own right. Reflecting later, he believed his influence grew because “in the first place, they were certain I had no ulterior motives. In the next place, they had begun to trust my judgment. But most important of all, if Republicans could assure their constituency that they were doing it on my suggestion and not on Mr. Roosevelt’s suggestion, they could go ahead and back the thing. [The president] had such enemies that otherwise the members of Congress didn’t dare seem to line up with him. And that was true of certain Democrats who were getting pretty bitter.”14

  Washington power brokers, of course, included the press. The men and women armed with notepads and telephone lists might help or hurt the Army, but because they had space to fill for their readers, they were incapable of doing nothing. Marshall gave these journalists his time and regularly brought them into his office for briefings, both on and off the record.

  At these briefings, Marshall won over the Fourth Estate, not so much for what he said, but for the way he said it. At a later press conference that became part of the Marshall legend, he briefed some thirty veteran correspondents on the complexities of the war’s larger picture. Rather than take questions one at a time, he asked the reporters to give him all their questions before he spoke. Some asked detailed, technical questions, while others wanted to know about broad, geostrategic issues.

  After everyone had asked their questions, Marshall leaned back in his chair and began speaking. He spoke for forty minutes, without notes, on the war’s various facets, going around the world in an integrated presentation that address
ed every question from every reporter. As he worked into his narrative the answers to each question, he looked directly at the reporter who posed it. It was, said one journalist, “the most brilliant interview I have ever attended in my life.”15

  Marshall’s twin obsessions were organization and personnel. He built a cadre of hardworking staffers who possessed the intelligence and self-confidence to make decisions without passing everything up to him. He spent hours weeding out the verbose, the inarticulate, and the indecisive. Taking a special dislike to self-promoters—who are as abundant in the Army as anyplace else—he looked for men who put the country’s interest above their own.

  One of his wartime planners, Brigadier General Dwight Eisenhower, vividly remembered the chief’s views on promotions, a subject dear to every career officer’s heart. “I want you to know that in this war the commanders are going to be promoted and not the staff officers,” Marshall told the overworked staff officer. “You are a good case. General Joyce wanted you for a division commander . . . You’re not going to get any promotion, you’re going to stay here on this job and you will probably never move.”

  Eisenhower, his bald forehead turning crimson, sputtered, “General, I don’t give a good God damn about your promotion. I was brought in here to do my duty, I am going to do that duty to the best of my ability and I don’t care.”

  As Eisenhower got up and marched to Marshall’s door, he looked back sheepishly at his boss. “By God there was a little quick of a smile,” he recalled. He later reflected, “[Marshall’s] obsession about disliking people that were self-seeking in the matter of promotion or anything else, it was really terrific.”*16

  The men who survived Marshall’s weeding-out process left their marks on the service a thousand different ways. When, for example, “Beetle” Smith learned of a small two-seater being peddled by the Bantam Car Company, he looked into it and made a three-minute pitch to Marshall. Marshall told Beetle to get fifteen samples and have them tested. The contraption, nicknamed the “jeep,” was quickly snapped up by every branch of the Army as fast as Bantam, Willys, and Ford could roll them out.17

  • • •

  In the office, Marshall worked with an intensity that awed his associates. But the Army’s business was a marathon, not a sprint. He was known for saying no one ever had an original idea after three o’clock, and to keep up his canter, he regularly went home for lunch, took an hour’s nap, and left the office each day around four or five in the afternoon. Westerns, detective stories, and The Saturday Evening Post formed the core of his pleasure reading, and he enjoyed lighthearted plays and comedic musicals. His aides, including Lieutenant Colonel Frank McCarthy and his bodyguard, Sergeant James Powder, kept track of everything from notes of things he promised to do for congressmen to his travel kit, which they stocked with pocket novels, chocolate bars, and dime-store reading glasses the chief was forever misplacing.18

  The few who knew Marshall outside the office saw a warmth and sense of humor that he withheld from his official family. Though childless, he had a soft spot in his heart for children, especially Katherine’s teenage son, Allen Brown. His passion was gardening, he enjoyed Gilbert and Sullivan, he was a fine fishing and duck-hunting companion, and he chuckled at funny stories, even if he was inept at repeating them. He would insist that his staffers get away for occasional vacations, telling them, “I don’t want tired men making decisions that affect human lives.” When he came home from overseas trips, he was meticulous about writing wives of officers he knew to let them know how their husbands were doing.19

  • • •

  In the words of one journalist, George Marshall was “the most self-confident man who ever wore pants.” But the self-confident general often fretted over wild schemes his commander-in-chief might dream up when left to his own devices. He later admitted, “I frankly was fearful of Mr. Roosevelt’s introducing political methods of which he was a genius into a military thing. . . . You can’t treat military factors in the way you do political factors.”20

  In 1939, FDR moved the Joint Army-Navy Board into the Executive Office of the President. This bureaucratic shell game, largely unnoticed by Congress or the public, bypassed the secretaries of war and navy and gave Roosevelt a direct line to the nation’s military planners. FDR thus became the loom through which all strategic threads ran. New York Times military correspondent Hanson Baldwin, one of the few pressmen who noticed the shift, remarked, “The President is paying even closer attention than formerly to national defense problems and is assuming even more completely his prerogatives as commander-in-chief.”21

  Cutting out the secretary of war made Marshall uncomfortable. In Marshall’s mind, even a machine as cumbersome as an army could function like a Swiss watch as long as duties were logically allocated, men were dedicated, and the organization was properly structured. It bothered him that the president was back-channeling information from the Army.

  But strict organization was tiresome, even anathema to Roosevelt. As a victim of infantile paralysis at age thirty-nine, he realized life had a certain randomness, and he had learned to become comfortable with inconsistency, even enjoy it. He treated lines of responsibility with benign neglect, to be used when convenient and disregarded when they got in the way. He would dole out overlapping projects to sworn enemies, bypass chains of command, and refuse to bind himself to any precedent that might not suit him in the future. A master of the art of ignoring problems until they solved themselves, FDR encouraged dissent and talked out of both sides of his mouth. Lines would remain fuzzy, opportunities would be seized as they stumbled across his desk, and a film of unpredictability would shadow the American high command.22

  Roosevelt’s informality especially troubled Marshall. He winced at the president’s “cigarette-holder gestures”—a wave of the hand and blithe assurance that things would work out all right. Worst of all, one never knew when the president was making small talk and when he was mining facts for a critical decision. “Informal conversation with the president could get you into trouble,” Marshall remembered. “He would talk over something informally at the dinner table and you had trouble disagreeing without embarrassment. So I never went.”23

  Marshall also avoided visits to Springwood, Roosevelt’s Hyde Park mansion. He kept his distance from FDR’s inner circle, discouraged Roosevelt from calling him by his first name, and even tried to avoid laughing at the president’s jokes. When Harry Hopkins suggested that Roosevelt would welcome Marshall occasionally dropping by for a martini in the presidential study, Marshall replied, “I’m at the president’s disposal and he knows it, twenty-four hours of the day. But if I attempted to step out of character, then it would be artificial, and I just don’t think that I can or should do it.”24

  Marshall knew that when someone approached the president with an unpleasant or difficult subject, Roosevelt could parry and feint like a French swordsman. “It was frequently said in those days by politicians who had seen Mr. Roosevelt that they never got a chance to state their case,” he reminisced. “He was quite charming and quite voluble and the interview was over before they had a chance to say anything.” The best Marshall could do was avoid prolonging FDR’s homespun homilies by remaining silent until the president drew a breath, then jump into the problem.25

  When Roosevelt did ask Marshall for his opinions, he gave them straight and to the point. He counseled subordinates to put written recommendations to the president in plain English, without flourish, preferably condensed to one page. “He is quickly bored by papers, lengthy discussions, and by anything short of a few pungent sentences of description,” Marshall told them. “You have to intrigue his interest.”26

  Another problem that defied solution was FDR’s penchant for talking to key decision-makers without having anyone spread the word about what he was saying. Marshall once complained to Hopkins, “The President at times sees Admiral Leahy, Admiral King, Arnold, or me and then the problem is, w
ho summarizes what has occurred and provides a check to see that the necessary instructions are sent around.” He warned Hopkins, “We may get into very serious difficulties in not knowing the nature of the President’s revisions of the drafts of messages we submit to him. All of these things may easily lead to tragic consequences.”27

  THREE

  “THE HAND THAT HELD THE DAGGER”

  AS ROMMEL AND GUDERIAN ADMINISTERED THE FRENCH ARMY ITS LAST rites, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Roosevelt a “Most Secret” message vowing to carry on the struggle even if France fell. But to continue that struggle, he needed weapons to defend his island nation while his battered army, being driven off the Continent, licked its wounds. He needed forty or fifty destroyers, he said. He also needed torpedo boats. Several hundred fighter planes. Antiaircraft guns. Ammunition. Artillery sights. Raw steel.1

  The request was hardly unexpected, but it arrived at a moment when the Army’s pantry, if not bare, was thinly stocked. Marshall warned Henry Morgenthau, whom FDR had placed in charge of weapons sales, “The shortage is terrible, and we have no ammunition for antiaircraft and will not for six months. So if we give them the guns they could not do anything with them. . . . Antitank guns, the situation is similar, a shortage . . . 50-caliber, our situation is the same.” The Army Air Corps was training pilots in mocked-up wooden boxes, and General Arnold pointed out that the delivery of even one hundred planes to Britain—about a three-day supply of RAF battle losses—would set the Air Corps training program back six months.2

  Europe’s democracies looked done for, and it was Marshall’s job to build America’s arsenal, not give weapons to allies on the brink of surrender.

  • • •

  Roosevelt mulled over Churchill’s plea, fully aware that a wrong guess about British aid would cost the country dearly. He firmly believed the best way to fight Hitler was with American machines and British blood. But shipping off weapons that might be needed to defend the Western Hemisphere, should London fall, was one of the biggest gambles he had faced since the Hundred Days of 1933.