No Bed of Roses

By Mayo Mohs

GEORGE C.MARSHALL: ORGANIZER OF VICTORY by FORREST C. POGUE 683 pages. Viking. $15.

General of the Army George Catlett Marshall was the only American general in history to survive an entire war as Army Chief of Staff. Secretary of War Henry Stimson wanted him to be Supreme Allied Commander for the anticipated invasion of Europe, and Franklin Roosevelt concurred. But eventually it was decided that the country needed its "most accomplished officer" just where he was.

In this fine third volume of Forrest Pogue's four-volume biography, the author carries the general up through V-E day and demonstrates that Marshall was indeed indispensable in Washington. Marshall, in fact, seems to have possessed all those qualities which generals should have and rarely do --breadth of vision with grasp of detail, patience, strategic intelligence and humanity. Illustrative small detail: in 1940, when a persistent salesman was having trouble selling a new vehicle to the Army, Walter Bedell Smith, then a major, boldly interrupted a conference of generals to tell Marshall about it. Marshall listened briefly, then told him to order some. The vehicle was the Jeep.

Such tasks and decisions were as much a part of Marshall's war as buttonholing Congress for men and money and materiel, chewing out recalcitrant unions and lackadaisical manufacturers, placating the Navy and MacArthur in the Pacific and planning strategy with the British. Though he was basically calm and softspoken, Marshall's rage could be formidable when provoked, as it was when railroad unions threatened to strike at Christmas time in 1943. It would, he said, with uncharacteristic exaggeration, protract the war by six months. British strategy in the Mediterranean also roused the general's deepest ire. When Winston Churchill and the British generals at the Cairo Conference kept talking up an Allied invasion of the island of Rhodes, Marshall finally exploded. "God forbid that I should try to dictate," he said, "but not one American is going to die on that goddamned beach!"

Soft Underbelly? The British became used to Marshall's dogged persistence. They fought him for months on the question of a second front in 1944. Would it be in Southern France, as the U.S. wanted, or start on the Isrian peninsula near Trieste--the famous "soft underbelly of Europe"--and work on up through the Ljubljana Gap toward Vienna? Marshall argued that an invasion of Southern France would win valuable ports for the Allies and draw French forces into the war. The Trieste Istrian approach, he warned, could pose serious problems of supply, geography and resistance. "The soft underbelly," he wrote, "has chrome-steel sideboards."

Marshall had a genuine hatred of war. The theme that recurs most insistently throughout the book is his effort to keep in mind the human consequences of war, especially one conducted globally and on a statistical scale never before imagined.

Every few days, Marshall saw to it that F.D.R. got a casualty chart with the figures marked in color. Otherwise, the Chief of Staff explained, "you get hardened to these things and you have to be very careful to keep them in the forefront of your mind." bed of "Making roses," war in a Marshall once democracy is noted. It no is tempting, reading Pogue's rich book, to speculate on how Marshall would have survived the democratic strains of another era -- especially the bitter national divisions of the recent past. If he would not let one American die for Rhodes, could he have kept one from dying for Quang Tri or An Loc? The questions are unanswerable, though they reach toward one of the crucial is sues of Viet Nam -- the extent to which a democracy can wage a war not supported by the national will, and the extent to which such a will can be manipulated. In any case Historian Pogue proves beyond cavil that George Catlett Marshall was that relative rarity in military history, the right man in the right place at the right time. sbMayo Mohs

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