One of a Kind
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
One ofa Kind General of the Army: George C. Marshall— Soldier and Statesman By Ed Cray Norton. 847 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers; author,...
...No better person could have been chosen for the job...
...Marshall never went so far as General H. H. "Hap" Arnold and the other "bomber barons," who maintained that strategic bombardment would win the War by itself...
...Had the USSR taken most of Europe, the virtually certain result of additional delay, the Cold War might well have turned out diferently...
...As Chief of Staff of the Army he was, as Winston Churchill said, the organizer of victory in World War II...
...This is not to take away from his achievements, which were incomparable...
...Throughout Marshall remained characteristically stoic, refusing to dignify these absurd accusations by denying them...
...But he was not perfect, and to some students of history his mistakes will always be one of the most important reasons for studying Marshall's career...
...Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin charged Marshall with being the center of a conspiracy to sell out America to the Reds, and William E. Jenner, the unspeakable Senator from Indiana, called him a "living he" and a front man for traitors...
...In what was possibly the most dishonorable act of his life, Dwight D. Eisenhower acquiesced in this campaign of vilification, appearing on the same platform with Jenner and deleting a passage of support for Marshall from a speech he delivered in Milwaukee during his 1952 Presidential campaign...
...More than any other American, he was responsible for the Normandy landings in 1944 that liberated Western Europe from Nazism and simultaneously prevented a Soviet occupation...
...There was much else, however...
...History would be on his side, as he doubtlessly knew, and his record would speak for itself...
...Perhaps it was no coincidence that the 1930s and '40s, the most difficult decades of this century for the United States, produced a disproportionate number of outstanding Americans...
...Japan attacked before the authorized number of four-engined B-17 Flying Fortresses were sent to General Douglas MacArthur...
...When told of Jenner's tirade on the Senate floor Marshall blandly replied: "Jenner...
...But the blame has to be widely distributed, for few Americans at the time raised their voices in protest...
...Having been an early and staunch advocate of aerial bombardment, Marshall cannot escape his share of the blame for this...
...It led the War Department to reverse an earlier, and correct, assessment that the Philippine Islands could not be held...
...Marshall did not write his memoirs, apparently feeling that it was too much like talking out of school...
...it is only to say there is an intellectual challenge in attempting to determine where and why he went wrong...
...Furthermore, most of Marshall's time and attention were devoted to the ground fighting, and in particular to organizing a massive invasion of France at the earliest possible opportunity...
...The finest military manager in our history, he developed a tiny U.S...
...Accordingly, mighty air fleets were formed that laid waste to Germany and Japan, killing many noncombatants without appreciably shortening the conflict...
...He received numerous well-deserved honors...
...author, "American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945-1960" George C. MARSHALL was one of the greatest public servants this country has ever produced...
...Where he can be faulted was in succumbing to the siren call of air power...
...This impression has been confirmed by his chief biographer, Forrest G. Pogue, whose definitive four-volume study proves beyond a doubt that in private Marshall was warmer but fundamentally the same as in public...
...Fortunately he did consent to be interviewed by Forrest Pogue, so we know more about him than we do about FDR, who talked all the time and revealed nothing...
...Marshall was one of a kind, yet also part of a remarkable group of leaders...
...Following a singularly thankless tour in China attempting to arrange a cease-fire between the Communists and Nationalists, the General returned home to become Secretary of State just at the moment Soviet-American relations were turning sour...
...Instead, a fantastic scheme was concocted: A heavy bomber force would smash attacking enemy fleets, hold the so-called "Malay Barrier" and visit retribution upon Japan by staging raids from bases in China—or Siberia...
...in helping the West meet new challenges he never forgot the dangers of acting provocatively...
...At a time when leadership is in such short supply this has to give us pause for thought...
...In addition, experience would show that B-17s could not hit a moving target...
...Army and Army Air Corps into a mighty force of 8 million men and women in just four years...
...From the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt's death until his own in 1959, Marshall was regarded by many as the greatest living American...
...An embarrassing one came after the General made an inspection trip to Hawaii in 1941 and proclaimed American defenses to be in "excellent shape...
...For all his energy and alertness, he could not wholly escape the complacency that marked the prewar military...
...Although a soldier, Marshall was not a militarist...
...I do not believe I know the man...
...He was right that Germany could not be defeated by bombing alone, or by operations in the Mediterranean, as the British persistently argued...
...Bradley dubbed them...
...Worse still, Marshall, again like most leaders, saw nothing wrong with the fact that high-altitude bombing must inevitably kill a large number of enemy civilians...
...Jenner...
...Those who require a touch of scandal or vice or at least some petty personal defect to make a biography worth reading will be disappointed by Ed Cray's new work, too, for Marshall's deportment was spotless...
...On the other hand, Army doctrine required that most decisions be left to local commanders, and it was no fault of Marshall's that when the Japanese struck the Army Air Corps put up almost no resistance...
...Crayis not really interested in that kind of analysis, but he has written an honest as well as a useful book and is candid about Marshall's lapses of judgment...
...According to Dean Rusk, then a young State Department officer, a favorite maxim of the Secretary was: "Gentlemen, let us not discuss this as a military problem...
...Marshall made the containment doctrine a reality, and despite the mistakes that marked its implementation, containment did succeed in preserving the structure of freedom...
...But he was the victim, too, of an astonishing campaign of slander and abuse from the radical Right, the "neanderthals" as General OmarN...
...Yet even if the bomber force had been up to strength it would have been destroyed, because there were not enough modern fighter planes available to protect it...
...It was not until long after the War that strategic bombing came to be seen as overrated and inhumane...
...For this, if nothing else, Marshall's name deserves always to be green in our memory...
...Noted for his impeccable character and devotion to duty, the General often seemed to be more monument than man...
...Besides profiting fromPogue's work, Cray has read widely to give us a well-rounded and highly satisfying one-volume biography that meets a longstanding need...
...The whole scheme was an illusion, the product of desperation, wishful thinking and bomber mania...
...Along with most American leaders, though, he did inflate the value of heavy bombers and the consequences of this were grave...
...to do so turns it into a military problem...
...Later, as Secretary of State, he helped frame America's postwar foreign policy and gave his name to the Marshall Plan, our most successful peacetime aid program and the key to Western Europe's recovery...
Vol. 73 • September 1990 • No. 11
