1943
George C. Marshall
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 3, 1944
In the year 1943 came a certainty: the partisans of life had grown
stronger than the mechanized conspiracy of death. The Allies had started to
break the Axis.
The Man of the Year did not live to take the bow. He died in Tunis, on
Tarawa, at Salerno, on the blood-soaked fields around Kiev, Chagsha, Kharkov.
He lost his face, his limbs and his mind before flame-throwers, in the cockpits
of blazing planes, in the insane shadows of the jungle. He had badly wanted to
live. When he died, the world had lost one particle of its meaning. But his
death added more meaning than it took: it gave the living another chance to
abolish the ugly crime of war. The soldier who died was the father of the
unborn future.
Four men gathered to name this future. From Great Britain came Winston
Churchill, who has the appetite for life; from China, Chiang Kai-shek, who has
the passion of patience; from Soviet Russia, Joseph Stalin, who has the
know-how of survival; from the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt, who has the sense of
history. And each of these four men could show some credentials as Man of the
Year.
Winston Churchill had ably guided his nation through twelve months of
perilous interlude between taking it and giving it.
Chiang Kai-shek won another round by not losing it.
Franklin Roosevelt had helped author the scheme of battle. And at the end
of 1943, the U.S. rather than England seemed to be the power that played with
Soviet Russia for the great stakes of influence in postwar Europe and Asia. But
in 1943 Roosevelt's political control of the U.S. had been reduced to a lower
margin than in any other year of his three terms. The nation endorsed his plans
for war & peace (as far as they could guess them)—but not necessarily
himself.
Of the four, Joseph Stalin had scored highest. Over the dead bodies of
thousands of Germans he had guided the Soviet armies to the reconquest of some
325 thousands of square miles of Russian ruins since the winter offensive began
in November 1942. His shadow spread longer over Eastern and Southern Europe.
But no longer was Stalin the lone winner he had been in 1942. He now sought and
acknowledged partnership with the other great powers. Gone with Russia's
isolation was her exceptional rank.
Three Men had by-passed their future. Benito Mussolini was the Man of the
Year—of a special sort. He had contributed heavily toward the sanity of the
world; the bullying menace that ended with pie all over his face. What had
entered the stage so pompously, dressed to "live like a lion" now fell through
the trapdoor in truest slapstick fashion. For a while, the trains had arrived
on time, and then the plane came almost too late.
Another man, Hideki ("The razor") Tojo, heard the thunders of retribution
only distantly. He had lost the Aleutians, the Gilberts, the southern half of
New Guinea, and most of the Solomon Islands—but between him and hara-kiri were
still Rabaul, Truk, Borneo, the Celebes, the Philippines, Java, Sumatra,
Formosa, Burma, Paramushiro and the whole coast of China. His supply lines were
thinner, Lord Louis Mountbatten was preparing the stroke at Burma, the
production of airplanes was too low for his 4-to-1 losses. But the world's
tropical wealth, and hundreds of millions of slaves, remained to be exploited
in the wearing race against time. Yet there was little future in being Tojo.
There was even less future in being Adolf Hitler. Nineteen forty-three was
the worst year of his career, and even, perhaps, the last full year. To the
stricken millions in Germany's shattered cities a stricken voice spoke of
Gotterdammerung that must not come. In 1942, German Armies were practically in
sight of Suez and 600 miles east of Kiev. At the end of 1943, they were
retreating slowly toward Rome and Minsk. Hitler's one political success of 1943
was at the same time Germany's death warrant: he had finally convinced the
Allies that the only way to beat Germany is to beat her.
What was it that had tipped the scales? For tipped they were, irrevocably.
What was it that had restored roundness and balance to the globe? The cause was
plain: the U.S. had actualized her strength. The great Republic was armed.
The Man who, more than any other, could be said to have armed the Republic
was George Catlett Marshall, Chief of Staff. Last week he returned from a
35,000-mile trip around the world. He had seen the battlefronts in both
hemispheres, and the U.S. Armies that have received the order to conquer. When
he returned to Washington, General Marshall was calm. He knew the order would
be carried out.
The American people do not, as a general rule, like or trust the military.
But they like and trust George Marshall. This is no more paradoxical than the
fact that General Marshall hates war. The secret is that American democracy is
the stuff Marshall is made of.
Hired by the U.S. people to do a job, he will be as good, as ruthless, as
tough, as this job requires. There his ambitions stop. "He has only one
interest," said one of his intimates, "to win this damned war as quick as he
can, with the fewest lives lost and money expended, and get the hell down to
Leesburg, Va., and enjoy life." He shuns all avoidable publicity, he is a man
of great personal reserve, but the U.S. people have learned why they trust
General Marshall more than they have trusted any military man since George
Washington: he is a civis Americanus.
Antic Time. General Marshall stands for duty, and for work well done in an
antic time, a time whose standards are in transition. Government pundits,
seeing the U.S. crowding six-deep at cocktail bars, hearing U.S. women complain
of the lack of elastic for girdles, denounced the nation as complacent. But the
same women were silently giving their sons and husbands; the same men who had
drunk their way into the future liquor reserves were grinding themselves
through overtime work that had already shown in the statistics of deaths over
50.
At home, the year had an air of anonymity: the people's resources had been
entirely poured into such an engulfing collective effort that few men, if any,
rose to conspicuous heights. From England daily there flew thousands of young
men to bomb Germany; their names were as unimportant as that of Britain's Air
Marshal, Sir Arthur Harris. The important facts were place names: Hamburg,
Schweinfurt, Berlin. Donald Douglas produced more planes by weight than anyone
else, Henry Kaiser broke a lot more records, Henry Ford's Willow ("Willit") Run
got going, Charles E. Wilson coordinated war production smoothly, but the
entire American business community, rather than any single hero, set the pace
and pattern. Dr. Howard Walter Florey further developed Dr. Alexander Fleming's
penicillin into a drug of marvelous effect. The year's most important
scientific discoveries and inventions were well-kept secrets of Dr. Vannevar
Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development. For the first time in
history the U.S. had an Assistant President—Jimmy Byrnes.
And while the nation performed in this depersonalized atmosphere, while
history happened 24 hours a day, the saloons, movies, theaters, nightclubs and
brothels boomed as never before. A young man named Frank Sinatra refined the
art of crooning into "swoon-crooning" and thus won fame & fortune, not so
many months after Stalingrad. The boys who died in New Guinea had lived for
months with pictures of Betty Grable's legs as their inspiration. The song of
the year was a wailing little folk song titled Pistol Packin' Mama. The U.S.
seemed rife with delinquent juveniles, the khaki-wacky V-girls. In this antic
time, there was foam and flotsam on the surface of the great flood.
But everywhere men also soberly reexamined their customs, ideas and
beliefs. A story of Christ's impression on earth, Lloyd Douglas' The Robe, was
the year's most significant best-seller. Ernie Pyle, the deliberately
inconspicuous newspaper-man, wrote himself into the heart of millions, because
he wrote, almost unknowingly, of man's fundamental nature. The raw national
nerves occasionally vibrated unexpectedly, as when a few ill-mannered moments
helped Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. to more fame than he had won on four
battlefields. General Douglas MacArthur, on severe duty in the field, was
dragged, willingly or not, into hectic pre-convention politics at home. The
deep trend against the party in power found sometimes strange expressions.
There were race frictions; the coal miners struck a nation at war; Southern
politicos filed a divorce from the Democratic party.
The flood of events was so enormous and so deep that the very street signs
were submerged; men wandered in an unfamiliar waste of circumstance, scanning
the horizons for some marker, some direction point. When no man could both
comprehend the vastness and dissect the particular, it was no wonder that men
clung to whatever seemed sound and honest. Their need was not for fascination
and awe, but for competence and integrity. Looking at George Marshall,
Americans were content.
Flicker. In the streets of Uniontown, Pa., where he was born 63 years ago,
George Marshall was known as "Flicker." (Ever since, his natural dignity has
repelled nicknames—while the first-naming President calls Admiral King
"Ernie," he always calls Marshall "General.") When Flicker set his mind on a
soldier's career, none of the Republican Congressmen was willing to recommend
the son of a stout Democrat for West Point. So George left for Virginia
Military Institute. At the end of his plebe year, he ranked 35th; (when he was
appointed Chief of Staff in 1939. he was 30th in rank). But from the very first
year until he graduated (in 1901), George was always senior officer of his
class. He always had one of the most American of virtues—a steady capacity for
growth. The boys respected the boy, as men later respected the man.
In his senior year he was All-Southern tackle, and still has the bodily
grace of muscular self-control. He has what baseball people call "a good pair
of hands"—large, capable, well- coordinated. He talks with few gestures, but
his speech is superb in exactness, his voice even but never monotonous. When he
dresses a man down, there is no profanity, no shouting, not even the chill look
of traditional military anger. But his ire burns like hell. These personal
explosions are rarely and consciously utilized tools: he can turn them on &
off like a spigot.
The Record. The 42 service years that elevated George C. Marshall from a
lieutenancy to the most responsible generalship of modern history are as
dependable, as unadventurous and as sound as the man. He served in the
Philippines and in China, ended his World War I career as Chief of Staff of the
Eighth Army Corps, was from 1919 to 1924 aide-de-camp to General Pershing,
taught extensively in various army colleges, again & again returned to
active command positions with the troops (last such assignment: commanding
general, Fifth Brigade, Vancouver, 1936- 38).
Taciturn General Pershing never concealed the fact that he considered
Marshall the A.E.F.'s outstanding staff officer. Nor was Pershing alone. Many
an Allied colleague readily admitted that Marshall, at 37, was author and
director of the most outstanding large-scale troop movement of World War I:
during two crucial weeks before the Meuse-Argonne operation he shifted more
than 500,000 men and 2,700 guns with such perfection that the Germans learned
of the maneuver an all-important 24 hours too late.
General Marshall began work in 1939 with the conviction that the army in a
democracy is the servant of the civil population. First thing he did when he
became Deputy Chief of Staff in 1938 was to study the full text of all military
hearings and debates Congress has held in the five previous years.
The Job he assumed on the day Germany invaded Poland was to transform a
worse-than-disarmed U.S. into the world's most effective military power—and in
time. In four years General Marshall was personally responsible for, at the
minimum, these seven achievements:
1) He started with an army of about 200,000 in 1939 and, against the
background of the Alice-in-Wonderlandish Congress of the '30s, shaped it into
what it is today.
2) He laid out a program of training and a schedule of equipment that are
unmatched anywhere.
3) While this was done, he held off hastily planned or ill- advised
military operations, no matter whence the clamor came.
4) Once the U.S. entered the war, more than anyone else he insisted on,
and gradually achieved, unity of command in all Allied forces in every theater
of war.
5) He refused to be panicked by nervous demands of theater commanders into
sending out green and half-equipped troops; and in this he endured through the
most extreme pressures.
6) He early recognized the importance of air power and pushed his airmen
into bigger and ever bigger programs.
7) He started to break the traditionally supercilious War Department
enmity toward innovations of equipment. New ordnance gets Marshall's immediate
attention.
These were matters of procedure. Above all, a strategy had to be shaped.
Its objectives, to be sure, were formulated by the President and by Churchill,
for this war, on both sides, is run by political leaders. Marshall's job is to
achieve these objectives. His mind, which words with an earthbound simplicity
that is the precise opposite of Hitler's "intuition," cut through all the cross
currents in this planetary war. The pattern that emerged was simple and
inescapable: first, while checking the Japanese advance, to clean Hitler out of
Africa, then push him up on the Continent, and finally hit him with everything
at once, from all possible directions. To do this required giving the Soviet
Armies that support to which Stalin has paid formal tribute.
The story of General Marshall's achievements was best told in the masterly
report to the nation he released last September. It contained also the story of
General Marshall: his saga of U.S. growth toward victory, written in mature
prose, is without a single "I."
The Team is General Marshall's concern. It is also his achievement.
Nowhere and never had a team of such complexity and scope to be created and
sustained.
The political captain of the team is the President, Commander in Chief.
General Marshall, his subordinate, has managed to act always with respect for
the President without ever losing his own authority. He is one of the rare men
to whom F.D.R. listens to learn.
In this war of global coalition, the U.S. Chief of Staff had to be a
statesman, and Marshall's relations with Churchill proved that he fits this
order too. Among the Combined Chiefs of Staff, Marshall's personal position is
unparalleled.
In his own bailiwick, Marshall is worshipped—not with the rapture evoked
by "born" leaders, but with the happy admiration of experts for the most
expert. The General even established friendly contact with the Navy.
For the staff itself, Marshall picks men he believes are the right
caliber, tells them their job and gives them authority. If they don't perform,
he busts them with a Tartar's ruthlessness. This transparent atmosphere of
personal authority in the frame of a clearly defined order is increasingly
characteristic for the gigantic U.S. Army officers'cadre. Such confidence from
the top is being reciprocated. From the commanders, to whom Marshall willingly
concedes the paraphernalia of battle glory, down to the junior lieutenants, no
officer in the field suspects that the General thinks of his place in history
rather than of getting tools to them in time.
To the millions of citizen soldiers, confidence in their technical
leadership means morale. As a civilian in uniform, who wants to go home as soon
as possible, the U.S. soldier wants to be sure that the ugly job he must do is
competently handled. Under General Marshall, he knows it is; and this is why
the U.S. soldier, in action, has proved utterly dependable and determined—the
ultimate test of morale. Before & after the battle the U.S. soldier will
proudly remain the world's champion grouser—he will beef handsomely even at
the Victory Parade.
The Link between the biggest military establishment in U.S. history and
the U.S. people, George C. Marshall was at year's end the closes thing to "the
indispensable man." Had he taken over the command of the European invasion, the
U.S. Army would have remained without the one & only U.S. citizen who (as a
Republican Congressman once suggested) could at any time get a unanimous vote
of confidence from Congress. The U.S. needed General Marshall at home.
During the months to come, when the credit the nation has extended to its
leadership will be used to the limit, General Marshall will supervise the great
invasion and at the same time remain in closest touch with the people's
representatives. Never in U.S. history has a military man enjoyed such respect
on Capitol Hill. One reason is that he (who has never cast his vote) is
completely free of political concerns. When Colorado's Senator Edwin C. Johnson
mentioned him as a Presidential possibility, General Marshall's negative
reaction was so unmistakably genuine that Congress knew: this man is a trustee
for the nation.
He had armed the Republic. He had kept faith with the people. In a
general's uniform, he stood for the civilian substance of this democratic
society. Civis Americanus, he had gained the world's undivided respect. In the
name of the soldiers who had died, General George Catlett Marshall was entitled
to accept his own nation's gratitude.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1943
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