Profiles in Military Leadership

...There was the same ability to arrive at quick and confident decisions...

...After the War he served as a diplomat, secretary of state, and secretary of defense...

...Still, Partners in Command is a superb account of the relationship between Marshall and Eisenhower, of the strained but never broken relations between Britain and the United States, and of Eisenhower’s brilliant leadership of the wartime coalition...

...Reviewed by William L. O’Neill Professor emeritus of history, Rutgers...

...This was by no means easy, for the British deeply resented their growing dependence on the U.S...

...If it had been up to the British there would have been no Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France, which secured undamaged the great port of Marseilles at a time when supplies from the United States were trickling in over the open beaches of Normandy...

...author, “A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II” THE APPEARANCE of two new books on great American World War II commanders who have already been extensively studied raises a question: How much more remains to be said about them...

...On the actual D-Day, after aircraft failed to silence German artillery pieces overlooking Omaha Beach, American destroyer commanders brought their ships close to shore and took them out with direct fire from their 5-inch guns...

...Head of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee (similar to our Joint Chiefs of Staff) for most of the War, he shared the feeling of most British generals that the Americans increasingly got their way only through sheer force of numbers and masses of material...

...they believed, practically to a man it seems, that Eisenhower favored Britain at America’s expense...

...Moreover, his thesis that Marshall and Eisenhower were partners, rather than commander and subordinate, provides a different way of looking at a much studied relationship...

...Of the more than 100 communiques issued by his Southwest Pacific Area Command— most written by himself—not one mentioned anyone else’s name...

...29.95...

...One can best get a sense of how difficult the British were by reading the published diaries of Lord Alanbrooke—The Turn of the Tide (1957) and Triumph in the West (1959...

...Yes, he botched the defense of the Philippines in just about every possible way...

...Even at the time people noted his low casualty rates, compared to the staggering losses the Marines experienced assaulting small, heavily fortified islands in the central Pacific...

...Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace By Mark Perry Penguin...

...Of course, it did not...

...In the case of 15 Stars the answer is not much...

...they were really earthen walls tied together with the roots of bushes and trees...

...Corlett pointed out, to cite one example, that naval gunf ire was more effective than aerial bombardment in reducing underground bunkers and gun positions...

...Marking the boundaries of fields, they not only offered protection from wind and foul weather but were fabulous defensive positions for German infantrymen...

...Hedgerows is something of a misnomer...

...He staged more amphibious landings than any commander in history, and every one succeeded at relatively small costs...

...No other American, including Marshall himself, could have done nearly as well...

...No one paid any attention to him...

...Russell F. Weigley, in his classic Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, writes that the Norman Bocage, because it favored the defense and deprived the Allies of their strongest asset, mobility, should have “caused second thoughts about the very choice of invasion beaches...

...Weintraub is usually right about Marshall, though, but is consistently unfair to General Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Furthermore, Perry points out, “both men spent most of their careers in staff assignments and understood the value of astute planning...

...For instance, he calls the planning for Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, “nearly flawless...

...In addition, his first campaign in New Guinea featured very high casualties in relation to the rather small size of the Japanese garrisons at Buna and Gona...

...The British, generations of whom had vacationed in Normandy, simply disregarded the enormous operational problems the hedgerows would pose...

...Army conducted a great many amphibious assaults...

...But Weintraub leans heavily on standard histories and familiar biographies, so scholars and buffs will find little of interest...

...Marshall was also struck by Eisenhower’s initiative and drive, and he did not disappoint...

...Nor did it help that their premier ground commander, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, was an insufferable opportunist and glory hound whom every American general despised wholeheartedly...

...Alanbrooke particularly looked down upon Eisenhower, who obviously had no aptitude for strategy since he disagreed with the British, and who ought to have let Montgomery run the Western Front—a recipe for disaster if ever there was one...

...Things can go wrong during any military operation, but the mistakes made in planning Overlord would fill several pages...

...both men admired the same predecessors (Robert E. Lee and Benjamin Franklin would later be mentioned by both as the greatest Americans...

...Conner had three maxims that Eisenhower took to heart as supreme commander and later as President: Never fight unless you have to, never fight alone, and never fight for long...

...A man of towering intellect and integrity, he dedicated himself to the nation’s service as an Army officer...

...In partial explanation, Mark Perry quotes the impressions of Lucian K. Truscott Jr., one of America’s great fighting generals and an old friend of Ike, after they had not seen each other for some time: “Every problem was carefully analyzed...

...Instead of Dragoon the British wanted to invade Yugoslavia, a pointless enterprise that they lobbied for almost to the War’s end, no doubt in an effort to justify the agonizingly painful Italian campaign they had insisted on and would never recognize as one of the biggest strategic mistakes of the conflict...

...He learned to integrate air, naval and ground operations to surprise the Japanese and keep them off balance, bypassing and isolating fortresses like Truk Although the troops did not like MacArthur, he kept more of them alive than most generals did...

...This would do the Soviets little good while inflicting great harm on the Allied cause...

...They note that Allied intelligence completely failed to grasp the tactical difficulties posed by the “hedgerows” of Normandy...

...Yet Marshall did not keep MacArthur in charge of an important theater because conservative Republicans loved him, although they did or because his name came up frequently as a possible GOP nominee for President...

...There was the same extraordinary ability to place his finger at once on the crucial fact in any problem or the weak point in any proposition...

...and fought over strategy every step of the way...

...both men were schooled by the same generation of commanders—Fox Conner and John J. Pershing...

...Stanley Weintraub is an experienced historian and a good writer...

...Perry convincingly argues that the notoriously hard to please Marshall picked Eisenhower to be supreme commander because Ike took a visionary view of warfare and looked forward not backward in contrast to so many general officers...

...His personal failings notwithstanding, MacArthur remains one of the great American military leaders...

...MacArthur was the opposite of Marshall: vain, egotistical, self-promoting, a man who not only sought glory but monopolized it...

...He anticipated World War II, knew the United States would have to get along with its allies to win it, and chose the still young and very junior Eisenhower to carry on his teachings...

...Marshall kept him there because ultimately he earned his pay...

...The problem with Sledgehammer, as the British saw clearly, was that the Allied forces would be heavily outnumbered by the German garrison in France and would surely be killed or captured to the last man...

...As a result, of the 32 amphibious Sherman tanks dropped in the Channel on D-Day, all except three promptly sank...

...But afterward MacArthur told his staff there would be no more Bunas, a promise he largely kept...

...Many historians differ...

...As with virtually everyone who studies General Douglas MacArthur at any length, Weintraub can’t stand him...

...From his gossipy account you do not get the slightest sense of the qualities that led Marshall to jump Eisenhower over hundreds of senior generals and make him the supreme commander in Europe...

...The author is certainly right, too, in maintaining that Marshall worked more closely with Eisenhower than with any other officer, even after Ike went overseas and they no longer saw each other daily as they did when he served as Marshall’s chief planner...

...It is a measure of his evenhandedness that each side believed Ike favored the other...

...And the same charming manner and unfailing good temper...

...472 pp...

...and both men had an innate feel for what could reasonably be asked of America’s soldiers and of the American people...

...Meanwhile, Ike had to put up with much bitterness from American generals...

...He also has curious omissions where his three principals are concerned...

...Even the well-informed will read this book with pleasure...

...both men believed in the doctrine of combined-service warfare operating within a coalition in which there was joint command...

...He also relies on largely familiar sources, but he brings a fresh eye to many of them...

...Army’s fight against Germany and Japan this book might serve as a good place to begin learning...

...Corlett’s attempt to persuade the planners that they did not have to limit their assaults to sandy beaches because amphibious tractors could carry troops ashore on rocky and otherwise unpromising terrain apt to be more lightly guarded, and at the same time provide covering fire with their 37mm guns, fell on deaf ears as well...

...the planners regarded the Pacific theaters as the “bush league...

...Stern, austere, remote, Marshall was the noblest Roman of them all...

...Like all who have studied the life and career of General George C. Marshall, Weintraub is in awe of him...

...It entailed landing a small number of divisions on the coast of France to take pressure off the Soviet Union and establish the much needed Second Front...

...To Marshall, Eisenhower’s singular quality was that he believed completely in cooperating with the Allies, especially Great Britain...

...He was a brilliant supreme commander...

...They also ignored the advice of Major General Charles H. Corlett, who had commanded troops in the Pacific where the U.S...

...Since Britain would have had to provide most of the men, planes and ships for the misbegotten venture, it died stillborn, despite Marshall’s repeated efforts to bring Sledgehammer back to life...

...The planners did not listen either when Corlett said wrapping tanks in canvas to achieve seaworthiness made no sense...

...Mark Perry’s Partners in Command puts us on much firmer ground...

...INEVITABLY, readers will disagree with some of Perry’s judgments...

...Eisenhower himself said his most valuable postgraduate education was at the hands of Major General Conner, General Pershing’s chief of operations in World War I. Though Conner retired before World War II broke out, he influenced it through his tutelage of Eisenhower, whom he brought to the Panama Canal Zone in the 1920s for that very purpose...

...Marshall sent him to England for precisely that reason, assuming that Overlord planners would want to take advantage of what had been learned with such difficulty in the Pacific...

...Contrary to what Weintraub implies, however, Marshall, being human, fell short of perfection...

...to someone who does not know much about the U.S...

...An example is the proposed Operation Sledgehammer that Marshall wanted to launch in 1942...