God Help George Marshall

COMMAND

(See Cover)

Last week an air of great decision hung over Washington. To some it even seemed that the commanders and civilians who hold the fate of the U.S. in their hands had decided at last "how the U.S. is going to fight the war."

The decision apparently had to do with the intricate, vital, all-inclusive problem of U.S. manpower (TIME, Oct. 5)--a problem which goes to the roots of global strategy, because the number and kind of fighting men the U.S. elects to place on the battle lines will determine that must and can be done by those remaining in the home arsenal.

WPB Chairman Donald Nelson declared that the problem had to be faced, the decision had to be made--and soon. He and the Manpower Commission's chairman, Paul Vories McNutt, had told a House Committee that the U.S. must screw itself up to the mandatory control of all civilian manpower. But they knew that legislation alone would not solve the problem. The first, the basic decision was on the size of the U.S. Army.

Precisely this basic decision seemed to have been made just last week--exactly ten months after Pearl Harbor. At least in its essentials, the decision even appeared to have been made--wrapped up and delivered in its minimum detail (so many weapons for so many men in such & such a time) to Donald Nelson, Paul McNutt and other key civilians who had to have the information before they could effectively get on with their jobs.

WPB certainly had the impression that for the first time--"the very first time"--it knew exactly what the military expected to be done in a given span. For the first time--"the very first time"--WPB considered that it had a specific, intelligible, practicable schedule of requested production, reasonably keyed to the actual production capacity of the U.S. The men in charge of war production were even able to visualize an overall, master plan for 1943--including a marked increase in the dollar-volume of aircraft, a great increase in the number of heavy, long-range bombers like those which were just beginning the U.S. air assault on German Europe (see p. 27).

Global Secret? This apparently belated arrival at vital decisions looked bad for General George Catlett Marshall, the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, and others in the U.S. high command. In fact, such delay seemed to confirm what many responsible men, at the key controls of the U.S. arsenal, had been saying: that the military, up to last week, had simply lacked any real strategy, any real grasp of the global war, any real plan for winning the war.

The Army had an answer. According to military men who should know best, the basic decisions were not so belated; the Army has long had a plan for global war. All that happened last week, according to these sources, was that General Marshall & staff at last let Don Nelson and a few other key civilians in on some of the end facts stemming from the Army's Master Plan. The Army's extreme reticence, up to last week, had simply been in the interests of necessary secrecy (the Army does not have a high regard for the discretion of civilian Washington). According to this explanation:

In all main essentials, including the time of the second front, the Army's plan stands today as it was originally framed in Washington last December when Winston Churchill and some of Britain's top military men visited the U.S. Such details as the size and nature of the forces to be sent to the fronts were settled later, but the choice of the fronts themselves remains unchanged. The loss of Malaya, Singapore and Java, events on the Russian front, the agitation for a second front, later conferences in London, Washington and Moscow, Joseph Stalin's demand for the fulfilment of Allied obligations "fully and on time"--none of these factors has materially altered the plan or the basic elements which originally determined its shape and timing, The attack on the outer Aleutians, the Battle of Midway and other events since last December have caused shifts in detail, not in the overall scope and direction of the plan.

Upon this conception of their global policy, General Marshall and the U.S. Army command were willing to stand last week.

Global Grace. General Marshall likes to be out with the troops, but last week, as he is most of the time, he was in Washington. At 7:30 each morning he stepped from a black Buick sedan and walked into the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue. In his big, plain office on the second floor, next door to the Secretary of War, he began his day by looking through "the log"--a sheaf of radiograms and cables from Britain, Iceland, Newfoundland, Alaska, the Caribbean, Brazil, British Guiana, Ecuador, West Africa, North Africa, Persia, Hawaii, Australia, the Solomons, India, China--from any point (including several places now unmentionable) where U.S. troops and airmen might have had anything to report overnight. His "log" might also include pertinent communications from the British, Russians or Chinese on any of the Allied land and sea fronts. Or from Army troops and cargo ships in the Atlantic, the North Sea, the Barents Sea, the Pacific, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf. Or from waypoints in the Army's spreading, global web of airlines.

Always there were long, blue, green and pink reports from the Combined Chiefs of Staff--the Allies' nearest equivalent of a global command, which General Marshall was principally responsible for organizing last February. Usually these reports were from Britain's Sir John Dill or his subordinates, or from the U.S. Navy's Admiral Ernest Joseph King, if some matter touching the interlocked U.S. and British navies had come up. If there were references to the Russians or the Chinese, who consult only the C.C.S., they usually came through U.S. or British channels.

General Marshall then read his mail, rapidly dictated answers to a few "must" letters. Sometimes this correspondence included a letter to wife, parents or other nearest kin of a U.S. soldier killed in action. So far in World War II, General Marshall has written such a letter to the family of every man who died in army khaki. Soon the dead will be too many, and he will have to forego his act of grace.

Global Round. By 9 a.m. General Marshall was ready for new business. First to see him was usually Major General Thomas T. ("Tom") Handy, a little known but highly important Army figure who heads the General Staff's Operations Division, charged with developing new ideas and improving old ones for the combat armies. Although the chief duty of the reorganized General Staff is to evolve plans to be executed by the Army's functional branches--Air, Ground, Supply--Tom Handy actually directs much of the Army's operations.

A connecting door in the west side of General Marshall's office might suddenly open; the lined but perky face of Secretary Stimson would appear, withdraw. General Marshall would quickly arise, walk into the Secretary's office, then, after a few minutes, return to his own desk (once the property of "Little Phil" Sheridan). Every day there are many such casual meetings between the Secretary and the Chief of Staff.

Next in might be the Chief of the Army Air Forces, Lieut. General Henry H. Arnold, still "Hap," still ruddy. The Air Forces are now "autonomous" within the Army; "Hap" Arnold is, in his own right, a man of increasing stature both in the Army and in Allied councils, but he is still subject to the Chief of Staff.

Another airman was a less frequent visitor: dour, taciturn, officially ruthless Lieut. General Joseph McNarney, Deputy Chief of Staff, whose rise was in some ways symbolic of the Air Forces' new prestige in the Army. McNarney has a job of the first importance which might have gone to a groundsman. As General Marshall's trusted deputy, he alone is empowered to act in the name of the Chief on many matters which otherwise would sponge up General Marshall's crowded hours.

Global Pair. Occasionally the compact list of morning callers includes the spare, incisive man who, beyond all others in the Army except Douglas MacArthur, has caught the public eye: Lieut. General Brehon Burke Somervell, Chief of the Services of Supply. Among the men around the Chief of Staff, General Somervell bears a distinctive brand. Brilliant, dashing, he depends strongly upon picked subordinates of whom he requires the same luminous qualities. Quiet, monotonal George Marshall requires great competence, but he does not demand brilliance; he knows how to use the human tools at hand, considering it part of his duty to extract the utmost from merely adequate men.

After ten months of war some of the Chief's precious morning time has still to be allotted to "must" callers: Senators, Congressmen, a few civilian executives, occasional industrialists who should or must be served. At 12:40, on the lighter days, General Marshall motors to his pleasant, rambling home at Fort Myer (across the Potomac in Virginia) for lunch, then rides back to the Munitions Building at about 2 p.m. One day of the week he lunches with the other members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, then spends the afternoon with Admiral King and other top sea dogs. At these sessions, the Chief of Staff and the COMINCH make an oddly effective pair: General Marshall is among the few in Washington who really know how to get along with briny Admiral King, and one of the miracles of World War II is the cordial state of Army-Navy relations at the top, however sour they may sometimes be on the lower decks.*

Global Head? Once each week he meets with the Army War Council: Stimson, Arnold, McNarney, Assistant Secretaries Robert Abercrombie Lovett (Air) and John J. McCloy (general utility), and able Lieut. General Lesley J. McNair, Chief of the Army's Ground Forces, who has the biggest direct command in the service. At these conferences, General Marshall does not have to consult world maps. He carries his war map in his head.

Frequently -- but less frequently since Admiral William D. Leahy became the President's personal Chief of Staff -- General Marshall visits the White House.

George Marshall's staff swears that the President has up to now never overruled his decisions on "purely military matters." Only on politico-military matters (the Army's move into New Caledonia; the proposal to draft 18-year-olds) must the Chief of Staff be guided by the President.

The General tries to finish his military day at 5 p.m. He rarely succeeds. When he does get away in time, he takes a canter on Prepare, a chestnut gelding. The ride is his only regular exercise, and his aides think that he needs it, fear that winter and the increasing press of war will force him to give it up. At 61, after 41 years in the Army, he wears his years well. He is still erect, his sandy hair is not yet wholly grey. He can put in a long day with troops in the field and be hale in the morning. But his aides think enough of his evening rest (reading, movies, occasional dinners out with Mrs. Marshall) to see that he is disturbed only in extreme emergency. Last summer the General spent his free Saturday nights and Sundays at his country place near Leesburg, Va. An Army messenger, arriving importantly with a vital dispatch, found the Chief of Staff up a tree, pruning the limbs.

Such, in the externals of person and routine, is the No. 1 soldier of the U.S. Such is the man whom Pershing called the finest officer in World War I; whom another Chief of Staff once compared to Stonewall Jackson; of whom a well-informed civilian observer recently said: "If George Marshall is no good, God help the U.S." Last week a responsible official who holds no great brief for "the Army mind," yet is in constant contact with General Marshall and the Army, said of him: "I do not know any other officer who could have done the job he has done quite so well."

Global Army. George Marshall, democrat, would be the first to agree that the U.S. Army is not his army. He would be first to say that the U.S. Army, 1942, belongs to the "more than five million" men and officers now in khaki, to the two or three million more who will certainly be in uniform before World War II is much older; to the "more than 700,000" who are the vanguard of huge A.E.F.s.

It is an army unique in U.S. history. Its booted paratroops, glider squadrons, armored army-within-an-army, are new on the U.S. scene (and newer, perhaps, than they need have been if the Army's pre-1940 command had not been approximately as sleepy as the country was). It is an army created with phenomenal speed from the embryo Regular Army of 174,000 men in mid-1939, 280,000 in mid-1940.

The shock of Dunkirk, the draft of 1940, the muddled rush to house the new army for its first winter, the first flow of the young men from their homes, schools, farms, jobs, into a peace time army whose reason for being was far from plain to many of its recruits--of all these things, and more, the army was born. There were the months when OHIO, chalked on latrine walls, meant "over the hill in October," and many of the young men cursed George Marshall, the President, the Congress which (by a House vote of 203-to-202) extended their draft service in August 1941. There was the time, very late in 1941, when the young men on maneuvers had no ammunition for practice fire, not enough guns to shoot if they had the ammunition. But the vollunteers, the draftees poured into the new camps, the army swelled to 951,000 in early 1941, to 1,600,000 by December, and they did not go over the hill.

Then came Dec. 7.

By last week the U.S. Army, already one of the biggest, began to look like one of the finest organizations of men that has ever made history. To make history its way, it might have to be the best army since wars began.

The American army was, and probably always would be, an intensely human army. Irving Berlin's minstrels sing:

This is the Army, Mr. Jones,

No private rooms or telephones,

You had your breakfast in bed before,

But you won't have it there any more.

Global Task. After ten months of war the new army is largely unproved. Its commanders, George Marshall included, are unproved in the combat of World War II. Yet he is a commander, his is an army with a task unprecedented in military history. No other general has had to wage war on the total, global scale which now confronts General Marshall. His overseas force is spread over six continents, his men will probably have to fight on them all before World War II is won.

George Marshall likes to reduce this huge responsibility to common terms. Says he, well defining his immediate burden: "What the American people are interested in is the best leadership, the best training, the best conditioning and the best discipline; for a combination of these things will give their boys the best chance of coming back alive."

* Below the top deck, Army-Navy relations have never been worse than they were last week, and they were bound to demand the immediate attention of General Marshall. What had touched off the latest upheaval was a series of Satevepost pieces by Admiral Thomas Charles Hart castigating the Army for its Pacific performance (TIME, Oct. 12)

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