The Natural General
MARSHALL, S.L.A.
The Natural General GEORGE C. MARSHALL: EDUCATION OF A GENERAL 1880-1939 By Forrest C. Pogue with the assistance of Gordon Harrison Viking. 421 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by S.L.A....
...Due to these and other experiences, my admiration for him is boundless...
...It was his natural way, which made him the greater mystery...
...to the common eye, the chief remained coldly formidable, monolithic...
...He seemingly did not take the normal precaution of seeing that his very real achievements in the early years were documented in his personal file...
...He was a mainstay of our work at the extremes—covering the combat line and getting the history of the Supreme Command...
...It was, however, victimized by maladministration at the highest levels...
...In addition, having engineering training he grasped military topography, the open sesame to tactics, as few infantry officers grasp it...
...As they say in the service, RHIP...
...One result of this is a misplaced emphasis which will puzzle many military readers...
...Author, "Night Drop" So that my appreciation of Forrest C. Pogue's first volume on the life of George C. Marshall will be read in perspective, I must be frank about my feelings toward the author and his subject...
...maybe such a treatment is necessary in any work centered on his great protege...
...So in tying things together, there had to be excessive reliance on the memory of a superannuated and ailing man who had always been disinclined to talk about himself...
...His is a vast undertaking...
...Entering the Army after graduation, he found that he liked it and that military problems were his cup of tea—a mainspring to satisfaction and success...
...When Harry S. Truman spoke of him as the great American of our times, I had to agree...
...His AEF service, especially his direction of the complex shifting of the U.S...
...In 1925 in China, Marshall came under Brigadier General Joseph C. Castner, whom one finds described by Pogue as being of that "irritating breed of military men who pride themselves on being simple, rough, tough and blunt . . . he affected a private's unpressed trousers and rumpled, sweaty shirt...
...Still, according to Pogue's account, Pershing did not really plug hard to win preferment for Marshall...
...We hunted together...
...The behind-thescenes manipulating is supposed to have been done by Pershing...
...Another bit of folklore grew out of his rise to generalship...
...The difference lies in the public exposure...
...The first volume vindicates the judgment which placed it in his hands...
...Forrest Pogue was with me in Europe and I treasure my service with him...
...As Marshall moves up the ladder from second lieutenant to four-star general, we find Pogue stressing various actions he took either as staff officer or commander and interpreting them as indices of superior diligence and outstanding aptitude...
...So when the Allied props fell away as promptly as the fighting ended, the AEF'S lack of sound quartermastership was starkly revealed...
...He possessed the form, face and manner of a leader...
...His success in these greatly differing fields attests the range of his military knowledge...
...He was not free of foibles...
...MARSHALL Brigadier GeneraL, U.S.A...
...It seemed never to be a calculated reserve but rather the natural attitude of the full man under perfect control...
...But the Army under them never guessed these things...
...Without doubt, much of his command power derived from this remarkable presence which radiated superiority...
...He had a tremendous concern for his men and for their well-being...
...Yet despite that imposing front, he was a warm man in the same way that the late General Charles P. Summerall, once touched, revealed himself as a humanist...
...There is a familiar story, frequently seen in print, that as a junior officer in the Philippines Marshall was such a master of planning and maneuver that his superiors immediately marked him for the highest rank...
...Other comrades of his salad years responded loyally with long letters, reminiscent as well as impressionistic...
...He attended Virginia Military Institute, not as a route to soldiering, but to become an engineer, which he became...
...First Army from the Lorraine front to the Argonne in September 1918, was truly distinguished...
...Pershing comes off very well in this book, as in practically every military book which deals with him or the AEF...
...Even as when in ETO days, my friend Forrest Pogue would hand me a paper of his composition and I would have to review it for official purposes, saying what was good and where I disagreed, the same duty attends the task in hand...
...All of which left little or no chance for a strong narrative that might develop a conclusive case...
...How Marshall conducted himself on his first foreign tour is told by Pogue in elaborate detail...
...Ret...
...Pershing and the General Staff at Chaumont had tried to keep too much power in their own hands...
...it was a secret to be coveted...
...Since this book is basically a study of character, one final point must be made...
...As a staff officer in 1943, when he was Chief of Staff, I had to go to him and explain why it was impossible to carry out an order which he had given my superior...
...He trained hard because he thought no other kind of training was permissible, but he always worked himself harder than anyone else on his staff...
...But sometime, somewhere, couldn't we afford a little more objectivity...
...Nor did he range widely in his correspondence...
...Viewing these several facets of his character against the unique aura of his personality, it must seem to anyone that any definitive study of his formative years would be rich in revelation...
...it is not their fault that, by the book's end, the substance has not warranted the assumption...
...He was utterly honest, wholly incapable of affecting anything...
...soldiers had to improvise their own entertainment circuit...
...For some reason which baffles explanation, he awed me as no other great personage has done...
...Outwardly rough and bulllike in appearance, he was inwardly as sweet and simple as a child, devoted to his wife and to his men...
...Add all of these things up, and we have the potential of a general...
...It is a delicate subject...
...Though the subject looks like a better than average shavetail, it is no glory walk by Superman...
...And the surprising thing is that there is so little to explain how George C. Marshall became cast in an original mold, why he rose to greatness and whence derived his vast authority as a military commander...
...Not until six months after the Armistice were supply and support raised to normal standards...
...By his account, Marshall resented the Illinois assignment, thinking it a blow to his prestige, and there was no political design in connection with sending the Army's most brilliant colonel to a post normally filled by a routine time-server...
...This quote illustrates the difficulty of any attempt to size a personality by hearsay...
...But as one reads along, this does not stand up...
...Troops were badly fed, poorly housed, caught without fuel in the dead of winter and shorted of medical care with the flu raging...
...The difference was that Summerall assumed a false front by deliberate design after becoming an officer...
...Why Marshall was withheld from flag rank for so long in view of his proven stature has long been one of the puzzling aspects of his career...
...Disappointingly, he does not...
...I knew Castner long and well when I was a lieutenant and he was a brigadier...
...In short, such are the auspices and the thoroughness of the work at hand that the subject is drained dry forever after...
...he also got from him many reference points leading to collateral interviews...
...As a colonel, long since drinking the bitter tea of General Yen, Marshall was posted in 1933 to Illinois as senior instructor of the National Guard...
...Though never a first-rank scholar, he was ambitious even as a youth and had a tremendous belief in self...
...His head for figures began to qualify him in logistics, even when he was still a junior-grade officer...
...As Director of the Marshall Foundation, he has access to all the late General's personal and official papers...
...On the other hand, he has done a first-rate job of shattering certain Marshall myths and legends long current in the Army...
...Pogue discredits this tale altogether...
...Much of the book necessarily is devoted to the AEF period on which Marshall's career pivoted...
...General Marshall I knew very well...
...Other factors, however, factors not linked together by the author, do begin to make Marshall's drive and advance understandable...
...That he is also my friend means still more to me...
...The theme of the book makes inevitable a bound-to-rise and up-the-slope tone, which is handled judiciously by Pogue and his brilliant collaborator, Gordon Harrison...
...During the last years, he interviewed General Marshall frequently and fully...
...They have done their best to demonstrate that, from the beginning of his military career, Marshall was predestined by natural aptitude and inner genius to reach the summit...
...Our last conversation was in April 1951, when he was Secretary of Defense...
...And toward that end, Pogue has been given an unexampled opportunity...
...Just as John J. Pershing could not keep an engagement on time, Marshall could never remember anyone's name...
...The legend has it that this tour was rigged to get Marshall strong Democratic backing through the Nash-Kelly machine, thereby making him acceptable to President Roosevelt when he was put up for Chief of Staff...
...Somewhere along the line Pogue should have drawn them together...
...Give them credit for an absorbingly entertaining and highly literate try...
...The disorganization which followed the Armistice, for example, was not the consequence of troops yearning for home or of stupidity at lower command levels...
...In this, he stands out clearly, though the background is greatly confused...
...There was never a sign of this in Marshall...
...But to deal with him as gently as other critics, I would have to step out of character...
...The advantages of this undertaking were offset by obvious handicaps...
...the most telling quotes from his letters express his disappointment that promotion is so slow and his career is moving to a dead end...
...We who witnessed it ever wondered how he got that way...
...The basic requirements of morale had been neglected: There was almost no sports equipment in the theater...
...The story is not an accurate reflection of that Army as I knew it in France...
...It must be said of Marshall that when he made the top, he did far better than he had been done by...
...he heard me out patiently, sympathetically, and agreed that my chief was wrong in accepting the order...
...Yet both MacArthur and Pershing had been conspicuously favored and jumped far ahead in their day...
...Both possessed a wry sense of humor...
...They are the essentials, the sine qua non, of effective high command...
...Marshall was never a diarist...
...and when Douglas MacArthur became Chief of Staff, he left Marshall to the whim of the promotion boards who regarded seniority as a law from heaven...
...The actions are merely the normal responses that any officer worthy of his commission would make under the same circumstances...
...But his staff could rib him about this failing, and he would laugh with the others...
...Both men in personal correspondence could be wholly informal...
...That Army was steady enough to put up with the little tyrants, and it found ways to police them...
...It ran three-and-onehalf hours and was all on the business of war...
...Then in the postwar years he became Pershing's righthand and was greatly cherished by the Army's main figure...
Vol. 47 • January 1964 • No. 1
