Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  Brooke’s grief and sense of guilt over Janey’s death were also partly assuaged by his marriage in December 1929 to Benita, Lady Lees, the daughter of one Dorset baronet and widow of another who had died of wounds received in the Dardanelles. We are fortunate that Brooke’s second marriage was blissfully happy, since it was partly to inform and amuse Benita that her husband wrote his daily diary throughout the Second World War. (Benita, by then Brooke’s widow for five years, also died as a result of a car crash, in 1968.) There are any number of reasons why one might wish to keep a daily record of one’s life, which must include narcissism, historical interest, self-justification, financial recompense, to assuage the curiosity of one’s children, to amuse oneself in one’s dotage, and doubtless many other, darker psychological impulses. It would be naive to believe that none of these (or others) actuated Brooke, but he was certainly also writing for Benita. Brooke’s diary acted as a powerful emotional safety-valve too, allowing him to make remarks about colleagues that he might well otherwise have made to their faces, to potentially devastating effect. ‘Whatever doubts or fears Brooke may have had,’ recalled the politician David Margesson about Brooke’s wartime poker-face, ‘he kept them from his colleagues.’ Projecting confidence in victory was a vital attribute of any Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and confiding his fears to his journal allowed Brooke the more easily to hide them from his colleagues, whose morale was sustained by the sight of a consistently sanguine commander.

  Brooke seems to have taken a strangely inconsistent attitude towards security; he would severely admonish anyone giving classified information over non-scrambler telephones, yet he posted his diaries to his wife by Royal Mail.30 Whether the many journals kept by senior British officials would have helped the Third Reich much had it successfully invaded Britain might be doubted, but they undoubtedly help historians. When the American historian Forrest C. Pogue was researching for his official biography of Marshall, no fewer than four British officers allowed him to use material from their diaries, each on the condition that he never revealed the fact that they had kept them.31

  In 1942, a Dr Freeman wrote to Marshall to encourage him to ‘keep a memorandum of momentous daily happenings’, but the general replied that his policy was not to do this. ‘Such a practice tends to cultivate a state of mind unduly concerned with possible investigations,’ he replied, ‘rather than a complete concentration on the business of victory.’ He also suspected that diaries might lead ‘subconsciously to self-deception or hesitations in reaching decisions’, and he reacted ‘explosively’ when he discovered his subordinates were keeping them.32

  Having succeeded his friend Archibald Wavell as commander-in-chief of Southern Command in August 1939, the outbreak of war the following month saw Brooke appointed to command II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) that was being sent to France under his fellow Irishman Lord Gort in anticipation of a German attack in the west. Brooke chose Bernard Montgomery and Harold Alexander as his divisional commanders, both Ulstermen like him.

  At that stage Brooke had not yet met or spoken to Winston Churchill, although he had followed his political career with interest. Two of his elder brothers, Ronald and Victor, had served with Churchill, but such was the multiplicity of Fighting Brookes in the British Army that that was almost a statistical likelihood. Ronald had fought in the River War and on the North-west Frontier in the late 1890s, and was wounded in the Boer War with the 7th Hussars, before commanding the 11th Hussars in the Great War. At the battle of Spion Kop in January 1900, he accompanied Churchill on a dangerous observation mission. ‘We crawled forward a short way on to the plateau,’ Churchill recalled in My Early Life, ‘but the fire was much too hot for mere sight-seeing.’33 The next month three shrapnel shells burst directly above them, killing or wounding nineteen men but leaving them unscathed. Alan’s other brother Victor was also wounded in the Boer War, serving with the 9th Lancers, and was killed in action only fifteen days after the Great War broke out. Eighteen years later Alan’s second son, who was to become the third Lord Alanbrooke, was christened Victor after his grandfather and uncle.

  Having left Pershing’s staff in the summer of 1924, George Marshall served for the next three years with the US Infantry at Tientsin in China. On his return in May 1927, his wife Lily, who was afflicted with health so bad that the couple could not have children, was diagnosed with a goitrous thyroid that was found to be strangling her windpipe. After a thyroidectomy in late August she seemed to recover, but then on 15 September she died suddenly of a heart attack while composing a letter to her mother, the last word of which was ‘George’. She was only fifty-three.

  Writing to his mentor General Pershing–who had himself lost his wife and three daughters in an hotel fire in San Francisco in 1915–Marshall admitted that his twenty-six years of intimate companionship with Lily, ‘ever since I was a mere boy, leave me lost in my best efforts to adjust myself to future prospects in life. If I had been given to club life or other intimacies with men outside of athletic diversions, or if there was a campaign on or other pressing duty demanding a concentrated effort, then I think I could do better. However, I will find a way.’34

  It was Marshall’s Army superiors who found the way to concentrate his formidable capacities, by appointing him assistant commandant and head of the infantry school at Fort Benning in Georgia for five years between 1927 and 1932. It was there that Marshall showed his capacities as a reformer. His experience of the later stages of the Great War had convinced him that, in any future conflict, officers would not be able to wait for perfect orders written out over four pages of single-spaced foolscap sheets, such as the ones GHQ had provided then, especially with the unreliable intelligence reports that might be expected from a fast-moving battlefield. He therefore took his officers for long morning rides over many miles, and then at lunchtime required them to draw maps of where they’d been. Since no fewer than two hundred of the twelve hundred generals who served in the US Army during the Second World War attended Fort Benning, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marshall was able to assess the abilities of many of America’s future military leaders for himself. It was reputed that he kept a black book listing the best and worst, which he later drew upon extensively as US Army chief of staff.

  On 15 October 1930, three years after Lily’s death, Marshall married Katherine Tupper Brown, of Baltimore, with Pershing standing best man. The daughter of a Baptist minister, she graduated from Hollins College in Virginia and moved to New York in order to become an actress. Working for Sir Frank Benson’s English Shakespearean Company, she dropped her Southern accent to take roles as important as Ophelia, Portia, Juliet and Viola. In 1911 she had married a Baltimore lawyer, Clifton Stevenson Brown, who died in 1928 (shot by a client, so it was rumoured). Just as Brooke had lost his wife tragically and subsequently remarried in his forties, having flung himself into his military career during the period of maximum grief, and found profound happiness with his second wife, so too did Marshall.

  During the Great Depression, Marshall embraced Roosevelt’s New Deal, of which many of his brother officers heartily disapproved and considered near-revolutionary. He devoted himself to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, training tens of thousands of young men to plant trees, cut firebreaks, clean beaches and rivers, build reservoirs and generally improve America’s infrastructure.35 In the course of this work, which helped him to understand the mentality of American youth and gave him useful insights into how to motivate them–which was to become invaluable when he needed to train eight million of them a decade later–he was finally raised to a substantive colonelcy. Marshall did not win his general’s star until 1 October 1936, however, when he assumed command of the 5th Infantry Brigade at Vancouver Barracks, Washington.

  Marshall was still only a one-star general in 1938. His career had seemed to plateau, and he readied himself for the disappointment of seeing younger men outstrip him in promotion. Yet owing to an extraordinary confluence of domestic
and international circumstances, his own strength of character, Pershing’s support and the President’s acute judgement of personality, within three years he had become a four-star general and Army chief of staff. He was also helped by the fact that Douglas MacArthur, one of the most prominent and decorated soldiers in America, was widely thought too vain, ambitious and difficult a person to return to the post of Army chief of staff which he had held from 1930 to 1935, and was probably too politically conservative to get on successfully with the President.

  In July 1938, having successfully commanded the ‘Red’ Forces in the Fourth Army manoeuvres at American Lake, Washington State, Marshall was ordered to Washington DC to become assistant chief of staff in the War Plans Division of the War Department. This was a key position, overseeing all the future offensive operations of the United States. Three months later, and a fortnight after the Munich Agreement, he was appointed deputy chief of staff. It was in this post that he attended a conference at the White House on 14 November 1938 to discuss the President’s plans to build fifteen thousand warplanes. Others attending included some of the most senior officials in Washington, such as the President’s friend and close confidant Harry Hopkins, the Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the Assistant Secretary for War Louis Johnson, the head of the USAAF General Henry H. ‘Hap’ Arnold, and Marshall’s own boss, the Army Chief of Staff General Malin Craig.

  If Marshall was going to make a good impression on the President, here was his perfect opportunity. Marshall had met Roosevelt for the first time in 1928 at Fort Benning, which was close to the polio convalescent clinic of Warm Springs, Georgia, and five years later Marshall had been present at his first inauguration. They had spoken briefly in 1937 on the President’s visit to Oregon, but otherwise they were strangers.

  According to Arnold’s notes of the White House meeting, the President did most of the talking, emphasizing that ideally he would have liked to build twenty thousand warplanes and create an annual capacity for twenty-four thousand, but acknowledging that this would be cut in half by Congress. He also argued that a large air force would be a greater deterrent to would-be enemy powers than a large army. Marshall was unhappy with this reasoning and the way that Roosevelt was concentrating on having more aircraft instead of more soldiers, ammunition and military equipment, especially since the planes seemed mostly destined to be sent overseas. Against Germany’s ninety field divisions, Japan’s fifty and Italy’s forty-five at the time, the USA had a total of only nine, of which not a single one was at full operational strength.36

  As Marshall recalled of the meeting years later, most of the aides and advisers present ‘entirely agreed’ with the President, ‘had very little to say and were very soothing’. Yet when Roosevelt finally came round to Marshall, saying of his own opening remarks, ‘Don’t you think so, George?’, he replied: ‘I am sorry, Mr President, but I don’t agree with you at all.’ The President gave Marshall ‘a startled look’ as he outlined his objections. As they left the meeting, the other officials chaffed the Deputy Chief of Staff, saying that they thought his tour in Washington was as good as over.37 They were probably only half joking. In fact Marshall’s calculated risk was perfectly justified. He disagreed with the President’s view that a large ground army was not vital, but he must have also reasoned that big men–and FDR was undoubtedly such–surrounded by yes-men can sometimes appreciate an honest foil. It was also part of his job to argue for a large army, and that would have been understood too. Few people outside Marshall’s immediate circle ever called him by his Christian name, and he called his associates and subordinates by their ranks or surnames, in the formal Army manner. He disliked being called ‘George’, even by the President, later recalling: ‘I don’t think he ever did it again…I wasn’t very enthusiastic over such a misrepresentation of our intimacy.’38

  Marshall well understood Roosevelt’s way of suborning people in this way, and refused to be drawn into it. As chief of staff he did not visit Roosevelt’s country estate at Hyde Park, saying that he ‘found informal conversation with the President would get you into trouble. He would talk over something informally at the dinner table and you had trouble disagreeing without personal embarrassment. So I never went.’ Surprisingly, there are also no known photos of FDR and Marshall on their own together. General Thomas Handy described how his boss ‘very definitely’ and deliberately observed a formality with Roosevelt ‘so that he wouldn’t be manipulated as “one of the boys”’.39 He did not want to be drawn into the vortex of Roosevelt’s charm, and didn’t feel it incumbent on him to laugh at the President’s jokes in the way that the press corps and some Cabinet ministers did, yet neither was he stand-offish. (It was also suspected in the Churchill family that Marshall disapproved on moral grounds of the President’s affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd.)

  Whatever Marshall might have privately thought about Roosevelt at this time, he was chosen by the President to follow Craig as Army chief of staff–the professional head of the nation’s military establishment and commander of its field forces. Although Marshall stood no higher than thirty-fourth in Army seniority at the time, with no fewer than twenty-one major-generals and eleven brigadier-generals outranking him, there was an unwritten rule that a chief should be able to serve a four-year term before the age of sixty-four, which made him the fifth-ranking soldier eligible for promotion for the top post. Of those five, Marshall was the President’s personal choice. He put his selection down to Roosevelt knowing he ‘would tell him what was what, straight from the shoulder, and he knew I was not mixed up with any political clique or other group’.40

  Marshall also attributed the President’s decision to the advocacy of Harry Hopkins, with whom he had worked closely over the issue of aircraft procurement since Christmas Eve 1938–when Hopkins became commerce secretary. Because he was not seen as a front-runner he had few enemies, but he did have some very powerful supporters: besides Hopkins, they included Malin Craig, Louis Johnson and especially General Pershing, recognized as the greatest living American soldier. Handsome, just shy of 6 foot tall, grey-haired with fine blue eyes, Marshall certainly looked the part.

  When Marshall became chief of staff, the forces under his command stood at only two hundred thousand strong; America’s was the seventeenth largest army in the world. When Otto von Bismarck was asked what he would do if the British Army ever landed an expeditionary force on the north German coast, he joked that he would send the police to arrest it. Hitler would have been justified in making such a quip about the US Army of 1939. Within six years, however, Marshall had turned it into a fighting force of more than eight million.

  In one of those coincidences of which history is replete, Marshall became Army chief on the very same morning that Adolf Hitler unleashed the Second World War. At 3 o’clock on the morning of his swearing-in, 1 September 1939, Marshall was telephoned with the news that German dive-bombers were attacking Poland. ‘Well, it’s come,’ he told Katherine, and put on his uniform. After the swearing-in ceremony, Marshall went to the White House to brief the President. Except for Hap Arnold, Marshall was the only member of the American and British higher directorate of the war to serve in the same post from Hitler’s invasion of Poland all the way through to the surrender of Japan.

  Marshall soon established a reputation as a straight-talking Army chief. Despite being, in the words of one of Roosevelt’s biographers, ‘a courtly and reserved Pennsylvanian’, he could be exceedingly blunt when necessary.41 To a politician who rang up asking for a certain officer to be promoted, he replied: ‘Mr Senator, the best service that you can do for your friend is to avoid any mention of his name to me.’ Yet when the wife of Teddy Roosevelt Jr asked Marshall to put her husband back into a combat unit after he was hospitalized, but apologized for using her position to get what they wanted, Marshall replied that it was ‘always alright to pull strings and favors if what you wanted was a more dangerous job than the one you had’. (Teddy Jr was in the first wave to alight on Utah Beach in J
une 1944 and the only general to see action that day; he died of a heart attack a month later.)

  General John Edwin ‘Ed’ Hull, of the Operations Division of the War Department, recalled how Marshall worked. When his staff came to him with a problem, they would also have to bring him the various alternative solutions, and their own recommendation. ‘He never nodded his head one way or shook it to indicate he agreed with what they were saying until they had finished. Then he’d say yes or no and that was it.’42 It must have been a nerve-wracking way to work. Hull added, ‘When you went into his office he expected you to walk in, sit down in the chair directly across from his desk and sit there while he finished reading whatever he had in his hand…and he didn’t want you to open your trap about anything until he was finished.’ When he looked up he expected his interlocutor to start speaking and he would give a definite decision before the visitor left the office. ‘There were never two ways of interpreting his instructions, there was only one.’ Hull believed Marshall had an almost photographic memory, and his mind worked fast; he dictated at 150 words a minute. He also had a volcanic temper.43 Nevertheless, he was constitutionally unpompous: even as a four-star general he drove himself into the Pentagon, stopping to give workers lifts, and when he mislaid his spectacles–which he did often–he bought batches of replacements at dime stores.

  In 1940 Marshall bought Dodona Manor, a modest four-bedroom house set in 4 acres on the outskirts of Leesburg, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and 35 miles from Washington DC. Built in 1786 by a nephew of George Washington, it was a charming, though almost Spartan dwelling, seating a maximum of eight around the dining-room table. Marshall slept in a single bed, with his boots and bright mauve dressing gown–his sole Churchillian affectation–in one small closet, and sharing a tiny bathroom with his wife. Pictures of his heroes Robert E. Lee and George Washington adorned the walls of the house, as they do today. In his retirement Marshall added photographs of Pershing, Dill, Bradley, Mountbatten, Churchill and Roosevelt, but the only one featuring Brooke was a group shot taken at the Quebec Conference.