George Marshall: A Biography

Debi & Irwin Unger, “George Marshall: A Biography”, HarperCollins., (2014) 490 pp.

The Unger’s biography of George C. Marshall follows his life from childhood in Western Pennsylvania, his military training at the Virginia Military Institute, to his role during and after World War II and his death in 1959 at the age of seventy-eight.  The book explores Marshall’s relationships with the Washington political establishment, military brass, and foreign leaders, from Harry Truman to Chiang Kai-shek. It explains his successes and failures during World War II, and his contributions through two critical years of the emerging Cold War—including the transformative Marshall Plan, which saved Western Europe from Soviet domination, and the failed, and impossible task, to unite China’s nationalists and communists.

I previously believed that General Marshall was probably the greatest leader to live in the twentieth century.  After reading this book, I am now convinced he was one of the most decent men of the century, loyal and trustworthy to a fault.  Marshall was Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1945, he was a great organizer but not a great military planner.   He was essential, as was Eisenhower, in keeping the allied coalition together under one commander in the European conflict.  On the other hand, Marshall could not, or did not, get control of Admiral King and General MacArthur in the Pacific, never putting one or the other in charge.  Apparently MacArthur was judged to have too many political backers as well as the press; MacArthur had been made, unfairly, into a national hero and could not be set aside.  In any event, Dean Acheson probably summed up Marshall’s character best when he emphasized Marshall’s persona, not his accomplishments.  Among the men Acheson had personally known, he wrote, Marshall ranked with the revered Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes of the Supreme Court as a man endowed with 'greatness,’ which Acheson described as ‘a quality of character,’ not ‘the result of circumstances.  It had ‘to do with grandeur and with completeness of character.’

My Notes:

Pg. 35:  In late January 1917, the Imperial German government concluded that the war (WWI) would end before the U.S. could bring its military weight to bear, resumed unrestricted submarine warfare against neutral shipping.  On April 6, 1917, the U.S. declared war on Germany.

Pg. 39:  General Pershing chastised General Sibert in front of his men for the unit’s failings.  Captain Marshall was offended by Pershing’s charges and his breach of courtesy.  As the general turned to leave, Captain Marshall confronted the general, putting his hand on his arm and recited the extenuating circumstances for the unit’s deficiencies and noted that some of them were the result of failings at Pershing’s headquarters.  Shaking off the insubordinate captain, Pershing walked off.  The encounter horrified all who witnessed it.  In the end, the incident worked to Marshall’s advantage; whenever Pershing visited the unit, he took Captain Marshall aside to question him about the state of affairs.  Eventually Pershing would make Marshall his top aide and become his sponsor and patron throughout Marshall’s career.

Pg. 40:  In the final months of the war in 1918, American forces helped to check the German offensive by a successful First Division counterattack at Cantigny, a village in the Somme district.  Marshall did much of the elaborate staff planning for the assault.  Marshall acquired valuable knowledge of how to organize, manage, and sustain large bodies of troops for, and in, combat.  He had also honed the useful skill of dealing with difficult allies.  His expertise as a staff officer was widely recognized. 

Pg. 52:  In 1924 Marshall was assigned to duty in Tientsin, China.  (His wife Lily died in 1927). 

In 1929 he met Katherine Tupper Brown, a rich widow with three children who George treated as his own.

In 1936, after a sixteen-year-wait, Marshall received notice that he had been promoted to brigadier general. 

Pg. 91:  In 1940 Marshall wanted Congress to fund a mountain of new equipment sufficient for an eventual force of about a million men.  Instead the House committee slashed the armed forces budget by close to 10 percent.

Pg. 123:  The Japanese armada attacking Pearl Harbor consisted of six of Japan’s most modern aircraft carriers and several battleships, along with a flock of cruisers, destroyers, and submarines as escorts.  Aboard the carriers were more than four hundred planes.  They launched from three hundred miles north of Hawaii in two waves.  The U.S. Navy’s Pacific carrier force was, fortunately, at sea.  In two hours the Japanese sank four U.S. battleships and crippled four others; destroyed a small armada of lesser vessels; demolished 188 planes, and damaged another 155.  The attack killed 2,345 American servicemen and wounded 1,274 others.  The U.S. was now prevented from responding effectively against the major Japanese offensive against the British, Dutch, and American possessions in East Asia that now unfolded. 

Pg. 131:  The attack on Pearl Harbor had mysteriously failed to impress MacArthur to imminent danger.  Just hours after news of the Pearl Harbor attack arrived in Manila, the general’s entire air force, parked wing-to-wing on Clark Field was wiped out by the Japanese swooping in from Formosa.  

Pg. 188:  The 1942 Torch landings, at nine different sites, commenced on November 8^th when the Allied forces converged on the ports of Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers. 

Pg. 234:  On July 10, 1943, two Allied armies came ashore in Sicily, the large, populous island off the toe of the Italian boot.  It repeated the pattern of Anglo-American rivalry, with Patton and Montgomery clashing over military objectives and routes of attack and in the end allowing the German commander , Marshal Kesselring, to evacuate his troops and equipment across the Strait of Messina to fight another day.  In the five weeks of battle sixty thousand Germans had managed to hold off eight times their number of Allied troops as they organized a successful evacuation.  Following that, the invasion of mainland Italy would be a bloody twenty-four-month-long slog up the Italian boot that would cost the Allies more than three hundred thousand casualties, including 23,500 American military deaths. 

Pg. 251:  Whatever its military virtues, the Pacific two-pronged strategy also met an important political need.  Today historians generally judge deficient MacArthur’s defense of the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, but the contemporary media had made the bitter struggle at Bataan and Corregidor into an intrepid epic and MacArthur into a national hero. 

Pg. 270:  Admiral King’s proposed plan in the Pacific made the long-planned attack on Rabaul irrelevant.  Now, instead of risking the high cost of subduing sixty to one hundred thousand entrenched, battle-hardened Japanese troops, the base would simply be bypassed.  MacArthur subsequently claimed credit for this ‘leapfrogging’ tactic, though MacArthur would employ the tactic to good effect in his advance toward the Philippines in later months. 

Pg. 347:  The tiny island of Iwo Jima was defended by more than 22,000 Japanese soldiers.  In the thirty-five-day battle all but 236 of them died.  However, Iwo Jima was the only Marine battle where the American casualties, 26,000, exceeded the Japanese, with 6,800 American servicemen killed

Pg. 337:  Marshall and Eisenhower were criticized for not taking Berlin, which they judged not worth the casualties.  Events would vindicate them.  In the battles to capture the German capital the Red Army would suffer more than 350,000 casualties, including 78,000 deaths.  Pg. 348: Yet, worse would follow at Okinawa, with its thousands of civilian inhabitants, it proved to be the worst killing field for American forces in the whole Pacific war.  In the eighty-two-day land battle American casualties totaled 62,000, with more than 12,000 killed.  The Japanese military lost one hundred thousand men.  And Japanese civilian casualties reached into the tens of thousands, more than one-third of the total civilian population.  Additionally, at Okinawa, the Japanese air force deployed its kamikazes to lethal effect.  In some fifteen hundred suicide attacks the fanatical pilots damaged over 360 Allied ships, sinking 28 and killing almost four thousand U.S. sailors, the worst navy battle casualty list of the entire war. 

Curtis LeMay adapted the new B-29 superbombers to low-flying area incendiary attacks that turned Japanese cities into infernos, incinerating thousands of flimsy Japanese houses along with thousands of Japanese civilians.  A 334-bomber raid on Tokyo on March 9, 1945, burned out almost sixteen square miles of the city, killing 84,000 civilians and injuring another 41,000.  In the next eight days they attacked four more Japanese cities, reducing to ashes thirty-two square miles of their centers.  It is estimated that raids in late 1944 and 1945 killed between 240,000 and 300,000 enemy civilians and destroyed 2.5 million homes.  An estimated eight million Japanese civilians were turned into homeless refugees in their own country. 

Pg. 350:  Marshall brooded over the costs to America should they have to invade the Japanese homeland.  At the end of May 1945, as a gauge of his anxiety, he seriously proposed using mustard gas or some other chemical weapon against suicidal pockets of Japanese military resistance and selected enemy manufacturing centers (from which the civilian population would be warned to leave).  Truman vetoed this scheme as a violation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol.  The estimated U.S. casualties to invade Japan was approximated at 1.2 million casualties with 260,000 fatalities.  (For whatever reason, Marshall had come up with an absurd optimistic estimate of 70,000).  Of course, the problem was solved on August 6^th and August 9^th with the Atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which together killed 129,000.  On August 8^th the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and invaded Manchuria.  On August 15^th Hirohito, in an unprecedented radio broadcast, announced to his people that Japan agreed to cease fighting.

Pg. 413:  In April 1948 the Marshall Plan (The European Recovery Plan—ERP) was passed by Congress and authorized a total of $13.3 billion to be doled out, in the form of loans and gifts (often of commodities rather than cash) in yearly installments, the first one of $5 billion.  (Truman insisted the plan be named after Marshall as it would never pass in an election year with Truman’s name on it).  In brief, the Marshall Plan checked the Communist threat and solidified the West’s struggle to prevail in the Cold War.  Marshall had hired George Kennan to plan for the State Department and encouraged him to express his views frankly on the European recovery issue.   He also absorbed the contributions of Acheson, Clayton, and Bohlen and melded them into a roughly coherent whole, and this became the Marshall Plan.  Particular praise should also go to Senator Vandenberg, who worked undauntedly for ERP’s passage.

Pg. 419:  Marshall was one American who favored a liberal policy of admitting refugees, including Jews, to the U.S. as a partial solution to the postwar displaced persons problem. 

Pg. 440:  The Soviet decision to force the Western powers out of Berlin completely was triggered by the American-British-French decision in early June 1948 to unify their German occupation zones as a step toward creating a future West German state.  The Soviets saw these moves as threats to their status in Germany and their continued domination of Eastern Europe.  On June 24 they halted all passenger trains and all motor traffic on the autobahn into the city, leaving untouched only the air corridors, which they considered incapable of supplying Berlin with sufficient food and coal.  The blockade lasted until May 1949 when the Russians, convinced that they could not starve the city out, finally agreed to lift the land blockade. 

Pg. 457:  In January 1950, in a speech, Secretary Acheson made a point of excluding both Nationalist Formosa and South Korea from the boundaries of a strategic defense perimeter in East Asia that the U.S. pledged to protect with its military forces.  Kim IL Sung may well have seen this as an opportunity to forcibly unite the two Koreas under Communist rule.  Stalin gave Kim’s proposal to attack South Korea his reluctant approval and on June 25, 1950, the North Korean army crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, attacking South Korea.