H-Ref-GM-EC

Extracts from “General Marshall” by  Ed Cray

The Make

Chapter VII

            Wall Street's bravado of October 1929 had vanished. Now even the affluent men who so confidently had waved aside the successive crashes as a temporary pause in the march to continuous prosperity were screwed tight. Cone too was the superheated excitement of the twenties, replaced by a gray pessimism and the insecurity of men who waited fearfully for pink slips in their pay envelopes.

            A once proud army had been reduced to a budget-starved anti-riot force. President Hoover sent a secret message to Republican leaders in the Senate in June 1932 asking them to delete army and navy enlisted personnel from a proposed two percent pay cut for all government employees; he did not want to have to rely on a military unhappy with lower wages in case of internal disorder. Congress cut anyway.

            The Army's new chief of staff, Douglas MacArthur, continually reviewed War Plan White, the mobilization to suppress domestic rebellion. To the anxious men in the White House, the threat was real. Dynamite wars and night ambushes wracked the dark and bloody ground of Harlan County, Kentucky, through the bitter winter of 1931. Miners in West Virginia had broken into company stores, stealing food and supplies for their families after the mines closed. In Oklahoma, dirt farmers and the unemployed rioted for food. Miners and scabs fought pitched battles in southern Illinois; the nervous governor had called out the National Guard.

            The tension spread to Washington itself, when 20,000 rag-tag members of the Bonus Expeditionary Force marched on the capital, seeking early payment of their veterans' bonuses. President Hoover sat silent in the White House, then on July 28, 1932, ordered the Army to disperse the marchers and their families squatting peacefully in a "Hooverville" thrown up at Anacostia Flats.

            That night, a tight-lipped president watched from the Lincoln Study as the shacks burned. The crimson glow lighted the Capitol, and doomed Hoover to one term.

            MacArthur defended his troops, asserting the "mob" smelled of "the essence of revolution." The Washington News was closer to the mark: "What a pitiful spectacle is that of the great American Government, mightiest in the world, chasing unarmed men, women and children with Army tanks. If the Army must be called out to make war on unarmed citizens, this is no longer America."

            Herbert Hoover, radiating defeat and the paralysis of will that had affected his administration, merely went through the motions of campaigning that fall. Dismissed earlier by the lordly columnist Waiter Lippmann as a "kind of amiable boy scout," Franklin Delano Roosevelt swept into office in a landslide.

            In the capital for a meeting of the Civilian Military Education Fund, Marshall watched Roosevelt's inauguration parade on March 4, 1933 and was caught short himself after lending an acquaintance five dollars when the new president suddenly announced a bank holiday the next morning. Otherwise temporary Colonel George C. Marshall was yet untouched by the social cataclysm of the Depression. The Marshalls were comfortably established. They were able to live on his reduced pay as a lieutenant colonel, while Mrs. Marshall enrolled her children in private schools and sent Molly on a year-long, round-the-world trip.

            The younger officers and enlisted men of Marshall's new command if the 8th Infantry were not as fortunate. Congress had mandated furloughs without pay, and a freeze on pay raises with promotions and

seniority. The practical effect was to reduce a second lieutenant's monthly salary to $119, almost one fifth less than he might have received twenty five years earlier. The ranks were even harder hit; privates suffered reductions in pay as high as 44.7 percent, sergeants from 20 to 23 percent.

            In his first months at Fort Screven, the new regimental commander worked to alleviate the straitened circumstances of his 400-man battalion. He personally oversaw the laying out of vegetable gardens and the erection of chicken coops and hog pens to help feed the families of the troops. He ordered the mess officer to prepare larger portions of the midday meal, then permitted his men to buy at cost hot meals to take home to their families; ten cents would feed a soldier's family regardless of size that summer at Fort Screven. "We ate this mid-day dinner ourselves until the custom was well-established," Mrs. Marshall recalled, "so that he might know what the men were getting ." The colonel's presence would throttle any prideful resistance to "taking charity" as well.

            Meanwhile, he began dressing up the post. On his morning horseback tours he noted places where planting or a paintbrush would improve appearances. When the commanding officer and his lady began tidying up the yard around their cottagelike home, younger officers too decided camp, excellence of the mess, morale of the men and work done in the woods.... I would be compelled to protect the interests of 200 boys, rather than one reserve officer."

            The War Department too discovered the benefits of the popular CCC, which was to enroll 2.5 million men in its ranks before it was ended. Quite quickly the onerous and distasteful work, as the acting chief of infantry had described it, put an end to congressional discussions of cutting the regular officer corps by another 4,000. Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur publicly suggested the CCC volunteers could be the trained nucleus of the enlisted reserve created by the half-forgotten Army Reorganization Act; such pacifist-minded figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Dewey lobbied that to a sudden death in the White House. Assistant Secretary of War Harry H. Woodring proposed the Army take control of the entire program, from training through service, creating "economic storm troops." Woodring suffered Roosevelt's reprimand; the president wanted nothing smacking of war talk. The new chancellor of Germany, Herr Hitler, had pulled his country from the League of Nations, condemned the inequities of the Versailles Treaty, and announced a military rearmament effort.

            Colonel Marshall was deeply engrossed in the CCC work and refurbishing Fort Moultrie when he suddenly received orders in October 1933 transferring him to Chicago as chief of staff of the National Guard's 33rd Division.

            The change of assignment came as a shock; the Marshalls had anticipated at least a two-year tour of duty at Moultrie in a delightful home looking out on the ocean. Even as the orders arrived, a van of Katherine's antique furniture awaited unloading before their repainted quarters.

            Professionally, the blow was even worse. He was to be removed once more from a troop command, the way of promotion. Moreover, he would not be with Regulars but with the National Guard, which, for all its influence in state politics, was still considered no more than a dumping ground for poor officers. Finally, the Marshalls would be moving from a comparatively small post, offering ample outdoor pleasures, to the nation's second largest city. Just when it appeared he was on his way to that first star, he had been shunted aside.

            Marshall had been assigned to the 33rd Division at the request of its commander, Major General Boy D. Keehn, a man of influence in Washington by virtue of his civilian job as attorney for William Randolph Hearst's interests in Chicago. In addition, he was prominent in Democratic Party politics and within the nationwide National Guard Association. When Robert W. McCormick's powerful Chicago Tribune had charged Keehn's division was not capable of coping with expected strikes in the mines of southern Illinois or with massive hunger marches that winter, party, Army, and administration moved decisively to choke off the bad press.

            Keehn had asked for a new chief of staff to improve the division's shoddy training and performance. Chief of Staff MacArthur selected Marshall's name, despite the notation that the new colonel preferred to stay at Mouitrie. MacArthur wired Keehn, suggesting Marshall: "He has no superior among Infantry colonels." Keehn looked no further.

            For the first time in his career, Marshall sought special consideration. Detached service once more, after a long stint at Fort Benning, would be detrimental to his career, he argued in a letter to MacArthur. He asked to remain with his regiment.

            In what Marshall thought "a very sympathetic manner," MacArthur only reaffirmed the colonel's transfer.

            His career stalled, the frustrated Marshall reported as chief training officer of the Illinois National Guard. "Those first months in Chicago I shall never forget," Katherine Marshall wrote later. "George had a grey, drawn look which I had never seen before, and have seldom seen since." By December, his enthusiasm had returned, she recalled, but some bitterness remained during his entire tour in the city.

            His hopes for the first star dwindled. When Rose Page visited, she asked how long before her beloved "Colonel" would be army chief of staff.

            "Well, Rosie, it looks now as if I never will," he acknowledged. "If I don't make brigadier general soon, I'll be so far behind in seniority I won't even be in the running ."

            Angered by his doubts, the young woman scolded him. Marshall leaned over and kissed her. "Thank you for your confidence." He had little himself.

            Though the National Guard had been called out during the fall and winter of 1932, the threatened civil disorders and the hunger strikes of 1933 never materialized. Chicago remained a grimy city weighted by Depression. Just half of it's wage earners were employed; the city's welfare efforts had dried up with the adjournment of a heedless state legislature in Springfield.

            For Marshall personally, there were few friends; Chicago contained no companions from former assignments until Major General Frank R. McCoy took command of the VI Corps Area, headquartered in the city. The McCoys rented an apartment across the hall from the Marshalls and the two couples spent frequent evenings together. Frances McCoy and Katherine Marshall also went bargain-hunting at auctions, "but the only trouble is, they usually come back with something other than what they went after. We drew a pool table in one of the recent events," Marshall complained good-naturedly.

            With the companionship of the McCoys, Marshall's depression gradually lifted. Within months the demanding colonel had organized instruction courses for officers and senior enlisted men of the lackluster

division and installed tactical exercises. By the summer of 1934, he had turned the division around; army examiners rated the unit satisfactory or better in all departments, the first such passing grade the division had earned in years.

            The demands upon a senior instructor of the National Guard were not burdensome. Even the sense of urgency, which had compelled his assignment to Chicago, had evaporated. Plan White for civil insurrections went hack into the War Department's vaults. Marshall found time to ride horses available at the armory, and to go hunting on at least one occasion with newly elected Representative Scott Lucas, a colonel in the division.

            However slow the pace of national recovery -- the gross national product would not surpass 1929's record until 1940 -- the Marshalls lived comfortably. They had full-time help, "our colored man"; Molly, back from her world cruise, managed the house. They spent a large part of the summer at Fire Island, the colonel joining his family after the obligatory summer maneuvers, while young Allen, a student at the University of Virginia, worked as a lifeguard.

            Through it all, Marshall had but one concern: timely promotion. There was little doubt he would eventually be nominated for his first star; simple seniority would assure that in due course. For Marshall, the question was whether he would be promoted soon enough to be eligible for a second star and the chief of staff's position. The Army's unwritten rule held that a prospective chief of staff must have four years to serve before he reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four. Dozens of good men had been passed over, yet even Pershing, who favored promotion on merit rather than age, felt the four-year rule sound.

            Marshall's frustration burst his usual reserve. "Two or three BG [brigadier general] vacancies now exist," he pointed out to Pershing late in 1934. "I want one of them. As I will soon be 54 I must get started if I am going anywhere in the Army."

            Promotion was ostensibly based on seniority alone, but politics both military and civilian could speed a favored officer along. Marshall had influential friends willing to drop a quiet word on his behalf; unsolicited, Generals George Van Horn Moseley and Johnson Hagood had already braced Roosevelt's Secretary of War, George Dern. Lack of professional recognition was not the barrier, either; a seniority system that promoted deadwood blocked Marshall's advancement. "I have had the discouraging experience of seeing the man I relieved in France as G-3 of the army, promoted years ago, and my assistant as G-3 of the army similarly advanced six years ago," he complained to Pershing. "I think I am entitled to some consideration now."

            Rather than solicit letters from senior officers on his behalf, for "such letters as a rule do not mean much, because the War Department is flooded with them," Marshall asked the former AEF commander only to present the colonel's efficiency reports since 1915 to the Secretary of War. "I am prepared to gamble on my written record in the War Department before, during and since the war, for I have been told no one else in the list of colonels can match mine."

            Pershing, whose name alone opened doors, went one better; he spoke to the president of the United States. On May 24, 1 935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent a memorandum to his Secretary of War:

 

            General Pershing asks very strongly that Colonel George C. Marshall (Infantry) be promoted to Brigadier.

 

            Can we put him on list of next promotions? He is fifty-four years old.

                                                                  F.D.R.

 

            Even the president's request would not help. Either Dern, MacArthur, or the selection board kept Marshall from the 1935 list. Discouraged, he wrote Pershing, "I can but wait, grow older, and hope for a more favorable situation in Washington."

            Pershing pressed his suit at the White House and War Department, learning that MacArthur intended to appoint Marshall as chief of infantry. While that appointment carried with it a major general's star, it was not expected to open for two years. Further, it was a staff position and the staff did not produce chiefs of staff; they came from field commands.

            Pershing then turned to John Callan O'Laughlin, publisher of the authoritative, if unofficial, Army and Navy Journal. O'Laughlin button holed MacArthur on behalf of Pershing's "outstanding man," then reported that the chief of staff still wanted Marshall to wait for the chief of infantry slot. But, to please his old AEF commander, MacArthur would recommend Marshall for promotion when the Secretary of War returned from a tour of the Philippines.

            MacArthur never had an opportunity to speak to Dern. President Roosevelt abruptly announced on October 2 that MacArthur, already held over in the chief's office for a year, was to become military adviser to the planned defense force of the newly established Commonwealth of the Philippines. The new chief of staff would be Malin Craig.[1] 

            Craig's appointment seemed at first to create just the more favorable situation in Washington Marshall had hoped for. The two men were friends of thirty years' standing. It was cavalry Captain Malin Craig to whom Second Lieutenant Marshall reported at the end of the long-ago mapping expedition along the Peens River bottom. Craig and Marshall had served together in France as members of Pershing's headquarters staff, and Craig just the year before sat on a selection board that had recommended Marshall for his first star.

            However much the new chief opposed the practice of appointment by seniority alone, however much he wanted Marshall promoted, Craig could not prevail on this year's board to advance the colonel by jumping files. Marshall's disappointment was all the more keen, he confessed to Pershing. "Every one of these men made was junior to me in position in France.... I'm fast getting too old to have any future of importance in the army."

            In April 1936, his former Chicago apartment mate General Frank McCoy and Major General Charles Herron, a friend since their Leavenworth days together, arranged for Marshall to meet privately with Secretary of War Dern. Dern had already "heard from many sources," he told Katherine Marshall, "of the brilliance of my husband's work." The unrecorded conversation between Dern and Marshall was decisive; in May, Pershing wrote the colonel that the first star, delayed for sixteen years, was "positively and definitely" to come in September.

            Marshall received formal notice in August, and his reassignment, as commander of the Fifth Brigade of the 3rd Division stationed at Vancouver Barracks, Washington, on October 1. Thirty-four years of achievement capped by three years of insistent lobbying on his behalf had finally won for Marshall the coveted star. Neither accomplishment nor pressure had meant much more than accelerating Marshall's promotion by little more than a month. On November 1, 1936, the two colonels immediately below Marshall on the seniority list duly received their promotions.

            Marshall had taken the last hurdle, and was back with troops. Perhaps any post would have looked beautiful to the newly minted general, but historic Vancouver Barracks across the Columbia River from Portland offered special attractions when the Marshalls arrived after a cross-country tour in their new Packard. Their much-remodeled Queen Anne house with its witch's-cap tower was "palatial" in size. From her bedroom window Katherine could see snow-covered Mount Hood, an hour and a halfs drive away. Fir trees bounded the parade ground and the airfield beyond; a venerable cherry tree flourished in the front yard of the Marshall's home, along with more than sixty varieties of roses planted by successive commandants. "All is in delightful contrast to the institution like appearance of many army posts," Marshall wrote enthusiastically.

            Equally enticing were the thirty-five CCC camps for which he was also responsible, each set in an idyllic surrounding. He could often combine his inspections through the CCC camps of Oregon and southern Washington with fishing for steelhead salmon; at home, he fished for dinner in the Columbia River which bordered the airfield.

            The CCC's progress was gratifying, the education aspects of it especially satisfying. "This matter of schooling," he wrote in his comments about one inspection tour in June 1937.

            outside of the forestry, soil conversation, or other work of the companies, is in my opinion the most important phase of the CCC program at the present time. The work in the woods, on the trails or otherwise, is the justification for the camps; but their primary purpose is to fit young men, now out of employment, to become more valuable and self-supporting citizens. On every side it has become glaringly apparent during the past two years of business revival, that hereafter the unskilled man will have a desperately hard time succeeding, much harder than ever before.

            Marshall also made special efforts to find jobs for CCC graduates. Many would stay in the Northwest, launched with jobs Marshall found for them, rather than return to their homes.

            The new general's paternalism extended to a number of junior officers, especially those who like himself were stagnating "with brilliancy and talent damned by lack of rank to obscurity." He corresponded with these younger men, somewhat stiffly, as if awkward in the trust and respect these self-styled "Marshall's men" accorded him. He exchanged organizational and tactical theories, advocated reforms, or often offered a sympathetic ear to their complaints. Even with his first star, he was still very junior himself, and could do little "to help unblock a system which leaves men like yourself to languish," he wrote one future major general, then a mere captain.

            As pleased as he was with his new assignment, Marshall had one grave concern. Just before he left Chicago, his thyroid began troubling him; his normal pulse of 72 irregularly shot up to 1 00. Marshall gave up smoking, gained weight, and saw private doctors in Portland in December 1936. The diagnosis was pressure from an enlarged thyroid, a condition similar to Lily's almost a decade before.

            The diagnosis confirmed at the Army's Letterman General Hospital Marshall went there only after confidential assurances that an operation would provide a complete cure in mid-February 1937, he underwent a subtotal thyroidectomy. He spent five weeks in the hospital before returning to duty, twelve pounds heavier, his pulse back to normal, confronting a tendency to gain weight for the first time since his college days. "I am in splendid shape now, registering normal in every respect except probably, you would say, in some of my personal idiosyncrasies, which no operation could alter," he wrote a Chicago friend.

            Lest rumors undermine his career, Marshall was at some pains to demonstrate for the next months he had fully recovered. He spent a month on maneuvers in May, but gingerly extending himself so as to make sure there were no relapses. He rode, and as the year went on, played tennis with Molly and younger officers on the post.

            If there were any lingering doubts about his fitness, they should have been dispelled on June 20, 1937, when three Russian fliers, making the first non-stop transpolar flight from Moscow to the United States, unceremoniously settled on the airfield just beyond the parade ground of Vancouver Barracks.

            The three weary pilots appeared on the Marshalls' doorstep at eight thirty on a Sunday morning, unwashed, unfed, and, for the moment, unfeted. Marshall posted guards around his house and in front of the bedrooms in which the officers slept while sixty or more newspaper reporters and photographers clamored for interviews with the sudden celebrities. Marshall knowingly fed the reporters information; his years with Pershing had trained him well. By that evening, the Russian ambassador and his staff of six had arrived, Marshall had routed out tailors and dry goods merchants to provide civilian clothing for the pilots, had taken fourteen phone calls from Moscow, and entertained the unexpected guests.

            The following day, Marshall mounted a parade in the pilots' honor, then accompanied them to a hastily arranged Portland Chamber of Commerce luncheon. By evening, fliers, ambassador, and staff were on their way to Washington. The visit had generated the first nationwide publicity Marshall received and reminded a handful of military planners that the modern airplane could leap America's defensive water barriers.

            Marshall himself was to follow the Russians to Washington soon enough. Army Chief of Staff Malin Craig was emphatically pressing the White House to increase military appropriations, to upgrade an army that ranked just nineteenth in size in the world, behind such powers as Bulgaria and Portugal. Craig felt a special urgency, for any reading of European politics, as the United States military attache in Poland wrote Marshall informally, suggested "though no one wants a war there is a general conviction that a German attack must be faced before many years."

            Herr Hitler had begun rearming Germany in March 1935, the Allies of old raising only feeble diplomatic response to Germany's defiance of the Versailles Treaty. The following year Hitter sent a token three battalions into the Rhineland, demilitarized by the treaty; as he had anticipated, Britain and France did no more than telegraph limp protests. In October 1936, Hitler and Italian premier Benito Mussolini reached a secret agreement aligning their foreign policies in "an axis round which all European states animated by the will to collaboration and peace can also collaborate." War came to Europe once more less than eighteen years after the bloodiest conflict in recorded history when General Francisco Franco and his Spanish Moroccan legions marched in Jan 1936 against the Socialist government of Spain. Italy, emboldened by its conquest of hapless Ethiopia and a desire for empire, joined Germany in supporting Franco's Nationalists; only the Soviet Union openly rallied to the Loyalists, while France covertly sent supplies to the government. On the plains before Madrid the Russians experimented with the massed tank attacks of the blitzkrieg while in the skies over the Basque city of Guernica Germany's "volunteer" Condor Legion tested its new Junkers bombers.

            Half a world away, Japan expanded its incursions into China, despite the amalgamation of warlords under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. On the night of July 7-8, 1937, soldiers of the Imperial Army demanded the right to search a suburb of Peking for the alleged murderers of a Japanese soldier, then marched across the Marco Polo Bridge into the capital. Within days Japanese reinforcements had landed, and before the end of the month troops of the Kwantung Army had taken first Marshall's old post at Tientsin, then Peking. Meanwhile, Japan joined Germany in an "anti-Comintern" agreement, squeezing the nervous Soviet Union between two increasingly aggressive powers.

            The United States was no more effective than Great Britain and France had been in dousing the fires of war. Twice the State Department offered its "good services" to negotiate the Sino-Japanese disputes; twice its offer was rejected. At the end of a week-long political tour of the West -- on which Brigadier General Marshall met Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the first time since 1928 -- the president proposed a "quarantine" to contain "the epidemic of world lawlessness.. " But the president had no plan, and the hostile press reaction assured none would be forthcoming; Roosevelt could not yet risk his political capital. Ground between the prevailing public sentiment favoring isolationism and the influence of big business in Congress, Roosevelt could do little more than enforce the successive Neutrality Acts Congress passed however onerous they were of the previous eleven deputies had made the jump 'since the post was created in 1921. Moreover, at age fifty-seven, he had but one more chance to become chief of staff, when Craig retired in 1939. After that, he would lack the requisite four years to serve before he too reached mandatory retirement.

            Marshall was going to Washington with as broad a training an officer could receive in the military. He had thirty-six years in uniform, and, despite his recurrent staff positions, had served with troops more than fourteen years, as lieutenant, major, lieutenant colonel, colonel, and brigadier general. Oddly, for a man so closely linked to professional education, he had himself attended only two years of army schools, from 1906 to 1908 at Fort Leavenworth. He had never attended the prestigious War College, though once assigned there as an instructor.

            This blue-eyed general with a gaze that drilled incompetents had few illusions about the Army and its present capacities. They were still fumbling their way to the smaller triangular division upon which an entirely new concept of land warfare was to be based. Even at the platoon and company level, those actual fighting units that won battles, "much, a tremendous amount... taught at Benning will not hold water as a practical proposition in a warfare maneuver." The Air Corps existed as an under appreciated, underutilized force, yet to learn about close support of infantry, fascinated instead with bombers. Logistics, from industrial procurement down to the company supply room, was a paper-choked channel that grudgingly washed up shoddy clothing and tools. As a young officer on a mapping trip three decades earlier, he had needed fourteen signatures to get rations for his men; that had hardly changed. Intelligence from General Staff to battalion level was a scorned dumping ground for misfits and time-servers.

            There were plenty of those in all branches, often in high places, "conservatives" as he thought of them, resistant to reform. "I am coming more and more to find, in the Army, that if a thing has not been done it is tremendously hard to get anyone today in favor of doing it....

            Marshall differed too from other army officers in his willingness to rely on younger men, even enlisted men. "We are so damned conservative in peace as to who can do what," he complained, "that we seldom do otherwise; and the hour war is declared we take a boy out of high school and give him a couple of thousand men."

            In the Great War Marshall also had learned civilians could assume military responsibilities; Wall Street lawyers might heroically lead "Lost Battalions." He had served two tours with the National Guard and knew its worth. He had set up dozens of CCC camps, mobilizing unlikely youths into effective work forces, no more than a mass call-up in time of war would require. And no one knew better that the most promising men did not always wear high rank in the Regular Army.

 

The Last Lesson

Chapter VIII

July 1937 -- July 1939

            Washington sweltered in the humidity of a Potomac summer when George Marshall, in wilted suit and straw boater, reported for duty at the War Department on July 7, 1938. He was to spend three months in the War Plans Division familiarizing himself with the plans and budgets of a skeletal army battling cautious president and niggardly Congress for appropriations to ready itself for war.

            Craig himself was to retire a year later and wanted Marshall to succeed him; the transfer to Washington was calculated not only to give Marshall a grasp of current War Department planning, but to introduce him to the one man whose opinion mattered in the selection of the next chief, the president of the United States. Craig also needed help, he privately admitted. "Thank God, George, you have come to hold up my trembling hands," Craig greeted his friend from AEF days.

            However meteoric Marshall's sudden ascension appeared, it also posed a problem, for Craig and Marshall alike. As deputy chief of staff, Marshall would be giving orders to three dozen generals senior to him, a sticking point in an army bound by protocol. Those orders would be obeyed, but the resentment could corrode Marshall's support from the military establishment and undermine his candidacy for the chief of staff post.

            Marshall took up his duties in a War Department scored by rivalries. The Air Corps' younger officers were impatient with the earthbound generals who ran the department, those generals scornful of both airpower and the young men who argued the bomber would change the nature of warfare. Army-Navy cooperation rested on a 1903 agreement both the lordlings of seapower and war disdained. Craig owed his trembling hands to his two immediate superiors, new Secretary of War Harry Woodring and the, assistant secretary, Louis Johnson. Woodring, who had succeeded George Dern in 1936, and the outspoken Johnson agreed on little more than the choice of Marshall as Craig's successor.

            Woodring was a turn-of-the-century farmlands progressive, a former governor of Kansas whose social insularity compelled him toward isolationism. Wary of the president's real politik, Woodring recognized that he had risen to the top post with Dern's death only because Roosevelt believed an isolationist in that position would dampen the suspicions of a hostile Congress.

            FDR intended to placate the right wing, not capitulate to it. To balance Woodring, Roosevelt installed as assistant secretary Louis Johnson, a former national commander of the American Legion and irrepressible spokesman for preparedness. Johnson was a headstrong political brawler who openly, repeatedly clashed with his nominal superior.

            The two men bickered through this congressional election year, President Roosevelt unwilling or unable to relieve either without undercutting his party in Congress. Instead he left the two to squabble, grinding fine Malin Craig between them. "I shall never forgive Washington," Mrs. Craig threatened, as she explained to Katherine Marshall the toll the chief of staffs job had taken on her husband.

            Marshall intended nothing more than to walk a fine line between the two. He burrowed into the War Plans Division while his wife and Molly, accompanied by the general's enlisted orderly, escaped their home at 2118 Wyoming Avenue for Fire Island. The summer and their ocean side vacation ended simultaneously in a hurricane that rammed through the East Coast and Fire Island on September 21.

            First news reports stated the island had been hit hard, the casualty toll high. Unable to reach the cottage by telephone, Marshall quickly commandeered an Air Corps bomber and pilot. They flew northward, along the track of the hurricane, flying in low over the resort in the storm whipped Atlantic. From the air he could see the small cottage still stood, though many of the neighboring homes had been smashed by the 90 mile-an-hour winds, or blown off their foundations into the leeward bay.

            Unable to land on the island, the pilot flew to Mitchel Field on Long Island where he and the worried general exchanged their bomber for a smaller, two-seat, open trainer. Flying back to the island, the pilot picked his way to a landing on the debris-strewn beach. Still in flying togs and goggles, Marshall hurried to the battered cottage.

            "In the doorway stood a weird apparition," Mrs. Marshall recalled. "It looked like a deep-sea diver." She, her sister, and Molly had spent a sleepless, miserable night, exhausted but safe under the guard of Marshall's orderly.

            "Can't you speak? Say something!" the goggle-eyed apparition commanded.

            "Is that you? Why, you are the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!" she gasped.

            Grinning relief, Marshall turned to the waiting orderly. "Sergeant, order another hurricane."

            Not all of Marshall's anxieties were so quickly erased. Having appointed himself manager of Marshall's ascension to the chief of staff post, Assistant Secretary Johnson and his none-too-subtle efforts provoked a wallow of speculation in a town that relished gossip. "Rumor is destroying me, I fear," Marshall worried in a letter to General Pershing, the one man to whom he could reveal himself. "I am announced by Tom, Dick and Harry as deputy chief of staff to be, the assistant secretary makes similar announcements. Probably antagonizing Woodring and Craig ."

            As part of his campaign, Johnson arranged for Marshall to address the state convention of the American Legion in Johnson's hometown of Clarksburg, West Virginia. If Marshall was reluctant to become so visible an army spokesman, he could hardly refuse for fear of alienating Johnson.

            In an address to the convention of world war veterans, Marshall argued for military preparedness, a theme that would run through his public statements for the next two years. It took time as long as five years to design a new fighter or bomber, and another year to put that design into production. The manufacture of even such comparatively simple items as bombs required a year, artillery pieces longer. While the first appropriations of necessary dies and jigs had been made the previous year, manufacturers were critically short of machine tools to take on defense contracts. Preparedness must begin now. And it was costly. "We never have, nor can we get, money enough to buy everything....

            By the end of September 1938, the $250 million War Department budget appeared even less adequate. Hitler mobilized Germany's thirteen divisions over the protests of his General Staff, then demanded that Czechoslovakia return the German-speaking Sudentenland and Ostrava to Germany. Those border provinces, carved out of the Kaiser's reich at the end of the world war and awarded to the newly created nation of Czechoslovakia, were the last territorial claims Hitler had in Europe, or so the German chancellor assured the world.

            The Czech Army mobilized. France directly and Great Britain indirectly were pledged to defend the Czech borders; twenty years after the armistice the specter of war again shadowed Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay.

            But the victors of World War I had neither the desire nor the will for a second. Rather than stand up to Hitter's threat, Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier brought pressure on hapless Czechoslovakia to surrender the claimed territory, and with it the nation's border defenses.

            Lacking French and British military aid, the Czechs were left to twist slowly in the wind. At a hastily summoned two-day conference in Munich's Fuehrerbau, the two ministers met with Hitler and Mussolini, while a delegation of Czechs waited anxiously in an anteroom to learn the fate of their nation. The French and British agreed to Hitter's "last" demand.

            The much relieved Chamberlain returned to London triumphant, appearing on the balcony at 10 Downing Street to tell a cheering throng he had secured "peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time." In Paris, applauding crowds met Daladier; the Chamber of Deputies approved the Munich agreement 535 to 75. The House of Commons, despite Winston Churchill's assertion that the settlement was "a disaster of the first magnitude," approved Chamberlain's pact 366 to 144. If the prime minister was an appeaser, so too were majorities in both France and Great Britain.

            Through the month-long crisis, official Washington watched and waited. Publicly, the president said he shared the universal "sense of relief," and wired Chamberlain, "Good man." Privately, he told the cabinet that Britain and France would "wash the blood from their Judas Iscariot hands." The League of Nations had been done in by ineffectual dithering over Japan's invasion of Manchuria, then Italy's attack on Ethiopia. Now the Versailles Treaty and Europe's intricate web of mutual defense treaties had collapsed. Hitter's territorial assurances notwithstanding, back bencher Winston Churchill warned Germany would return for more. Munich was "only the beginning of the reckoning."

            The Munich crisis triggered a worldwide rush to armament. President Roosevelt hinted on October 11 he would seek another $300 million for national defense. Just how the money would be spent, if it was appropriated, the president determined on the night of October 14, 1938, when he met with his ambassador to France, William C. Bullitt.

            Briefed by French intelligence, Francophile, Bullitt came to the White House sounding alarms. The Germans "would be able to bomb Paris at will"; France had but seventeen modern airplanes, he told the president, and desperately needed all the United States could build. The two men talked late into the night; by the time Bullitt left, Roosevelt the secret interventionist had become an airpower advocate.

            The next day, FDR told reporters he would seek .$500 million in additional defense funds, and ordered Assistant Secretary of War Johnson -- Woodring was absent from Washington -- to prepare plans for a major expansion of the Air Corps. The president casually settled upon the production of 15,000 planes a year.

            The president's order was one to make the General Staff break out in a cold sweat. Aircraft were needed, but so too were modern tanks, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and a thousand other tools of war. Disproportionate expenditures for planes would not prepare the Army to defend American shores.

            Craig moved to call a meeting of the War Council, but Johnson interfered. There was no deputy chief of staff, the one man most responsible for the Army's budget, Johnson pointed out, and there had been none for two weeks, since Major General Stanley Embick assumed command of the IV Corps in Atlanta. Never mind that Marshall was junior to so many generals, as Craig had agonized: Johnson wanted Marshall appointed immediately to the vacancy. If not, Johnson would cancel the meetings of the council until it was done. Given a direct order, one that would mute criticism of Marshall as overweening, the chief of staff left the office briefly, and returned to say the orders had been issued. Marshall was now the Army's foremost budget expert.

            He anticipated problems. The day of his elevation he wrote Major General Keehn of the Illinois National Guard, "I fear that this will carry with it a great deal of grief, because it will be my job to struggle with the budget.... " It would be "a continuous matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. In one sense, the Army runs on a shoe-string," he complained to another.

            Marshall immediately confronted the question of meeting the president's call for a massive increase in airpower. "What are we going to do with 15,000 planes?" Craig fumed. Who would fly them, and from what fields? Where were the ground crews to maintain them? Craig, Marshall, even the newly named chief of the Air Corps, Brigadier General Henry "Hap" Arnold, favored a balance between ground and air forces, between weapons and barracks, airfields and training facilities.

            Marshall had little detailed knowledge of Air Corps problems when he arrived in Washington in July 1938. He deliberately set out to learn what he could, taking a week-long, 8,000-mile flying tour of aircraft factories and Air Corps installations. Across the country Marshall listened to the complaints of mostly younger men frustrated by the lack of representation on the General Staff, by the lack of interest in Air Corps problems by the War Department itself. He returned to Washington aware of construction snarls in industry, of the shortage of training planes, and acutely conscious of the lack of either a tactical or strategic concept in the use of airplanes.

            Marshall proposed a number of reforms planned to give the Air Corps parity with the fast-developing air forces of Europe. Though he never accepted the "victory through air power" concept, Marshall was to become one of the three men outside of the Air Corps itself Hap Arnold believed most helpful in building the vast squadrons to come.

            In a speech at the Air Corps' tactical training school at Maxwell Field, Alabama, Marshall cautioned the young pilots, "Military victories are not gained by a single arm though the failures of an arm or service might well be disastrous but are achieved through the efforts of all arms and services welded into an Army team."

            Because of the United States' geographical location, Marshall continued, no one could predict who would be the enemy in the next war, where it would be fought, and even with what weapons. The only sensible policy for the War Department then was to maintain a balanced force to defend the nation. (In truth, Marshall remained an infantryman at heart. In a speech on March 3, 1939, he detailed a long list of military innovations that supposedly would dominate the battlefields of history: chariots, then elephants, the mounted hordes of Genghis Khan, armored knights, artillery, tanks, and now the airplane. "But in all these struggles, as the smoke cleared away, it was the man with the sword, or the crossbow, or the rifle who settled the final issue on the field.")

            "A balanced force" became the watchword for the War Department as it struggled to shape a $500 million budget for supplemental military appropriations in 1939. A balanced force also set Craig and Marshall on a collision course with the equally firm-minded president.

            On November 14, FDR summoned Johnson, Craig, Marshall, and Arnold to the White House for a discussion of the 15,000-airplane procurement plan. Waiting in the president's office, in addition to Roosevelt, were the secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau; his solicitor Herman Oliphant; Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson; and Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins, New Dealers all, men who wanted what the president wanted, because the president wanted it. One man was conspicuously absent: Secretary of War Woodring. Roosevelt would not miss Woodring's isolationist opinions.

            The president "did the major portion of the talking," Marshall recalled. Sitting behind the large desk strewn with mementos, gifts, and knickknacks, FDR quickly dismissed the Army's proposal for a balanced force. "A well-rounded ground army of even 400,000" --authorized strength now stood at 174,000 -- "could not be considered a deterrent for any foreign power whereas a heavy striking force of aircraft would." As Hap Arnold rephrased it, Hitler would not be frightened by new barracks in Wyoming.

            For the first time since the Holy Alliance of 1818, the New World faced possible attack, Roosevelt continued, "This demands our providing immediately a huge air force so that we do not need a huge army....." Besides, sending American boys to defend South America was not possible politically. "Had we had this summer 5,000 planes and the capacity immediately to produce 10,000 per year... Hitler would not have dared to take the stand he did."

            Talking steadily, stopping only to fit another cigarette to the holder, Roosevelt proposed an air force of 20,000 planes and production capacity of 24,000 per year. Because Congress was sure to trim that gargantuan figure, the president ordered Craig to begin planning for a fleet of 10,000 planes. Four fifths of these were to be built in existing airframe factories; the Works Progress Administration was to build seven more installations, two to be placed into immediate production, the remaining five held as reserve capacity.

            When the president had concluded, he asked each of the men in the room for their opinion. "Most of them agreed with him entirely, and had very little to say, and were very soothing in their comments," Marshall remembered. Finally, the president turned to the deputy chief of staff sitting on a lounge against the wall, and asked, "Don't you think so, George?"

            Irritated by what seemed the president's glib, even irresponsible presentation, then by the presumed familiarity, Marshall replied coldly, "Mr. President, I am sorry, but I don't agree with that at all."

            Startled, the president looked at Marshall, then abruptly dismissed the meeting. Just as in 1917, when he challenged General Pershing, George Marshall once more had bearded the lion.

            As they filed from the president's office, "they all bade me good-by and said my tour in Washington was over," Marshall recalled.

            Arguing for a balanced force, Marshall discovered, was militarily and personally expedient at the same time. The fewer planes produced in the United States, the more those aircraft appeared to be defensive weapons; thus Marshall appeared as a non-interventionist, a man of Woodring's mettle. Yet he could equally well appear as favoring increased armaments for other branches of the Army, a position Johnson advocated. Among the military decision makers, President Roosevelt stood alone, but then his was the only vote that counted.

            If Marshall was on soft ground with the president, both he and Johnson ignored it. The day after the White House meeting, the assistant secretary ordered Chief of Staff Craig to prepare budget estimates for a major rearmament of a balanced force. Johnson hoped to piggyback increased funding for ground troops with the boost in Air Corps appropriations. Preparing that budget, then putting it in the form of a draft bill, fell to Marshall.

            Here was another burden in what Marshall considered "the most pressing job in the W.D.," as he conceded in a letter to his personal doctor, Colonel Morrison C. Slayer.

            The pressure of managing the emergency appropriations bills, of apportioning funds between the competing branches, of lining up support in Congress and testifying repeatedly before various committees had exacted a toll. Slayer began visiting Washington and his secret patient in late 1938, prescribing medicine for the recurrent arrhythmia of Marshall's heartbeat.

            As the time of his annual physical examination approached, Marshall grew more cautious. On Morrison's advice, he planned to take the medication for a week prior to the physical, and rest the morning before.

            It was not to be. While eating lunch in the chief of staffs office, Craig suddenly recommended that Marshall not wait for his scheduled appointment, but instead squeeze in the physical that afternoon. They would be busy for some days to come with the president's emergency appropriation bill, Craig said between bites on a sandwich. The chief of staff promptly picked up the telephone and made an immediate appointment. A half hour later, the deputy chief of staff was on his way to Fort Myer.

            Marshall may well have driven across the Potomac River more agitated than he let on. He had been on Slayer's medication for just one day. The quiet morning before the planned physical had not materialized; instead, they had spent "a tumultuous morning, with much emphatic argument." Suddenly, after thirty-seven years, with the great prize of the chief of staffs office so close, he risked being washed out for medical reasons.

            The physical examination was as thorough as Marshall could recall. "I do not know yet how I got by," he wrote Slayer with obvious relief. The doctor noted a slight irregularity in Marshall's pulse prior to exercise, but none afterwards. "If you wrote your own ticket, you could not beat that," the examining physician concluded.

            The irregularity of the pulse the doctor attributed to smoking, until Marshall said he no longer smoked. Instead, Marshall suggested, "It was due to too much desk and too little exercise of the type to which I had been accustomed." The doctor agreed, adding that Marshall would have to fight "desk belly." The general would hear no more about his irregular pulse.

            Relieved, Marshall returned to his new office in the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue to line up political support for the huge budget increase and discovered an improbable ally in the White House itself.

            Harry Hopkins was arguably the most hated man in Washington, and probably the second most powerful. Even his sometime rival, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, conceded as much, if only to his private diary. "Harry Hopkins is described as the person who is closest to the President and there is no doubt that this is the fact. He is extraordinarily close. He all but lives in the White House and he seems to be in the complete confidence of the President."

            Tall, lantern-jawed, Hopkins was a demanding taskrnaster who had ramrodded the New Deal's Emergency Relief effort and the CCC, then had taken charge of the Works Progress Administration. Born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1890, a social worker by training, Hopkins had worked his way through a succession of public welfare jobs, eventually winding up in New York City as director of the Tuberculosis and Health Association. It was there he met New York's future governor, Franklin D. Rooseveit. Roosevelt, the Hudson River patrician, genial and elegant, took an instant liking to Hopkins, the son of a harness maker, blunt, sarcastic, looking like "something of the ill-fed horse at the end of a hard day."

            Hopkins was a hard-boiled visionary who had spent his entire life working on behalf of that "one-third of the nation" the president later described as ill-nourished, ill-clad, and ill-housed. (The phrase itself was Hopkins's.) With the national economy paralyzed, New York Governor Roosevelt in 1931 had appointed the hard-driving Hopkins as director of the state Relief Administration. Hopkins was to manage a work relief program that spent $140 million in just two years, an effort that validated the governor's concern for the poor, and more than any other turned him into a serious presidential candidate.

            That $140 million would be the merest beginning. As head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the former social worker administered $8.5 billion in a bewildering array of federal relief efforts. He became "history's greatest spender," one magazine decided.

            Hopkins was also impious, impolitic, and impassioned. Not one to suffer fools, the man Winston Churchill would later dub "Lord Root of the Matter" for his ability to clearly define problems and propose solutions, scored his critics as "too dumb to understand."

            Probably no man in Washington was more disliked. "He was generally regarded as a sinister figure, a backstairs intriguer," his friend Robert Sherwood wrote. Yet the "strange, gnomelike creature," as the equally salty Joseph Stilwell described him, got things done. Now.

            Looking ahead to the 1940 election, FDR seriously considered tapping Hopkins to run on the party ticket. In mid-1938, the president began inviting Hopkins to sit in on White House meetings on a wide range of topics; in December of that year, the president appointed him secretary of commerce, on the theory that familiarity would erase some of the animosity the conservative business community held toward the man.

            Hopkins was to be the War Department's most important ally in putting forward Marshall's balanced-force budget. Marshall had earlier talked with Hopkins, knew the lanky man in the ill-fitting suits had the president's ear, and that Hopkins had secretly arranged to divert WPA funds to buy $2 million in machine tools necessary for the production of small arms ammunition. Moreover, with Hopkins's approval, some $250 million in CCC funds had gone toward construction on military posts, especially barracks for CCC volunteers, buildings the Army would need for a mass mobilization, but buildings Congress had refused to fund over the years.

            In the last week of 1938, Hopkins telephoned Marshall, asking to visit the deputy chief. Instead, Marshall deferentially chose to meet Hopkins at the Department of Commerce. There the two men discussed the balanced-force concept, Hopkins asking the keen questions that so terrorized bureaucrats, Marshall answering precisely, tersely.

            Though relatively brief, their private conversation apparently left each man profoundly impressed with the other. Marshall's description of the woeful state of the Army and the nation's defenses, especially in antiaircraft weapons, alarmed the secretary. To Hopkins's urgings that Marshall take his care for a balanced force directly to the president, Marshall demurred. He was not yet chief of staff, lacked that titular authority, but more importantly, did not have the president's confidence. Marshall preferred that the influential Hopkins deliver the message.

            The resolution came in the last days of 1938 at a second meeting in the White House, with the president working over his annual State of the Union address. FDR began the meeting by complaining that the Army was offering him everything except the airplanes he wanted. Hopkins, Johnson, Craig, and Marshall, one after the other, countered: Airplanes without trained pilots, crews, and ground support would be useless. Even if they were to sell planes to Great Britain and France and the Neutrality Act barred such sales at the moment they lacked hangars to store the planes and test pilots to check them out prior to delivery. In the end, the president yielded; he would ask Congress for an emergency defense appropriation of $552 million, $180 million of that budgeted for 3,000 of the airplanes Roosevelt wanted "to impress Germany."

            Hopkins's aid to Marshall continued as the two men crossed the boundary between colleague and friend in the next months. From "Mr. Secretary" and "General," they became "Harry" and "George," a rare concession that Marshall would not permit even the president of the United States. Each perceived in the other a quality of selflessness, a dedication to a larger cause, in Hopkins's case a commitment that would ultimately ruin his health. For all their seeming dissimilarities Hopkins casual, Marshall precise; Hopkins the political operator, Marshall the good soldier; Hopkins in threadbare suits bought off the rack, Marshall in fashionable civilian clothes or well-pressed uniform they were much alike in ways they deemed important. Both men were, at heart, reformers. They also shared a pleasure in their accomplishments with the CCC. Both had a capacity to distill great amounts of information into a succinct, cogent statement of a problem. Both were unimpressed with either exterior appearances or mere rank; neither man had patience for incompetents.

            Through a series of discussions in the early months of 1 939, Marshall continued Hopkins's military briefing, stressing the need for preparedness in the event of war. The muddles of 1898, when food rotted on the docks of Florida and needed equipment never reached the troops, could not be repeated against a modern, well-equipped enemy. The Great War's year-long delay in fielding even a single American division in France was time they would not have in an age of airplanes and fast-moving tanks. Yet the structure of the nation's next mass mobilization existed only on paper; facilities and equipment, not to mention modern weapons, simply did not exist. Despite three years of record military spending, they were no better than half-equipped to mobilize the 1 million men called for on M-Day. Even then it would take them eight months to put all million into the field. Facts, figures, timetables, Marshall carried them all in his head and delivered them precisely, coolly.

            Hopkins understood now that they were working against time. Hitler's military budget had steadily increased to 184 billion marks this year, 60 percent of the national budget. The German military had been able to outfit its divisions with the most modern equipment and weaponry. No one doubted German intentions any longer; the only question was when the blow would fall. From Berlin the United States military attaché wrote privately to Marshall, "We have lived more or less on a volcano here and the strain on one's nerves has been tremendous."

            Halfway around the world, Japanese troops had continued their advances in China, and gained control of the lower Yangtze. The Japanese Foreign Ministry had proposed a "new order" for the Far East, one that would bind together Japan, China, and Manchuria economically and make colonies of Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

            In Europe, German soldiers crossed into the remainder of quartered Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. Four days later Hitler annexed the city of Memel in Lithuania, then demanded the Poles cede the Free State of Danzig. Italy blustered about its border with France, demanding territorial concessions, then invaded tiny Albania. French Foreign Minister Ceorges Bonnet, once as eager as any to appease Hitler, lamented, "It is five minutes before twelve."

            Neville Chamberlain abandoned his tattered policy of appeasement, and asked Parliament on April 26 to authorize military conscription. "Nothing would so impress the world with the determination of this country to offer firm resistance to any attempt at general domination."

            President Roosevelt could only watch in frustration. Neutrality laws could operate unfairly, he had lectured a hostile Congress in his State of the Union address on January 4. The democracies "cannot forever let pass, without effective protest, acts of aggression against sister nations acts which automatically undermine us all.... We have learned that when we deliberately try to legislate neutrality, our neutrality laws may operate unevenly and unfairly may actually give aid to an aggressor and deny it to the victim. The instinct of self-preservation should warn us that we ought not to let that happen anymore."

            Three months later, Roosevelt told reporters the Neutrality Act had to be revised. As he complained privately to Senator Tom Connally of the Foreign Relations Committee, "If Germany invades a country and declares war, we'll be on the side of Hitler by invoking the act. If we could get rid of the arms embargo, it wouldn't be so bad." FDR had learned the harsh lesson of neutrality in Spain, where the Nationalists had driven the last of unaided Loyalists across the French border, and Francisco Franco promptly joined the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, Italy, Japan, and Hungary.

            Despite odds he calculated as but one in five, President Roosevelt appealed in a worldwide broadcast to Hitler and Mussolini to ease the "constant fear of a new war." Would they assure peace by respecting the borders and territorities of thirty-one nations for the next ten years? Hitler, who had already fixed the date for the invasion of Poland, and Mussolini both flatly rejected Roosevelt's approach.

            With some satisfaction, California Senator Hiram Johnson, reflecting the prevailing Republican view, decided, "Roosevelt put his chin out and got a resounding whack. I have reached the conclusion there will be no war." The president, Johnson rumbled on, wanted "to knock down two dictators in Europe so that one may be firmly implanted in America." Congress might appropriate millions for defense, but not one cent for Roosevelt's foreign adventures.

            The world had gone mad in that spring of 1939 as FDR turned to the question of a successor to Chief of Staff Malin Craig. Craig was to take his terminal leave at the end of June, formally retiring on August 31. The president would select Craig's successor from the list of senior officers with at least four years to serve before they reached the mandatory retirement age of sixty-four.

            Thirty-three generals outranked Marshall on the Army's seniority lists before this four-years-to-serve rule was applied. With the superannuated pared from the roll, Brigadier General Marshall ranked fifth in seniority behind Major Generals Hugh Drum, John L. DeWitt, Frank Rowell, and Waiter Krueger. Official Washington and much of the press considered Drum the likely choice.

            At eighteen the youngest lieutenant in the United States Army, Drum had held a succession of key posts through his career. During World War I he was Marshall's superior as chief of staff of the I Corps. Promoted to brigadier general in 1922, he was a major general by 1930, while Marshall was still a lieutenant colonel. In just the last ten years he had served as inspector general of the Army, as deputy chief of staff for MacArthur, as commander of the Hawaiian Department, and finally as commander of the prestigious II Corps headquartered on Governor's Island in New York Harbor. At every turn he led Marshall, indeed, everyone on the eligible list.

            Drum sorely wanted the Army's highest rank, and had campaigned vigorously for the appointment. He had been considered in 1930, only to be passed over for MacArthur; he had been on the list again in 1934, only to be frustrated when the president held MacArthur over for a year; then he had lost out to Craig in 1935.

            This would be his last try for the chief of staffs post. He curried newsmen, prompting fulsome articles in national magazines. He asked influential visitors to write the president on his behalf, lined up politicians, and solicited others for endorsements. Drum had secured at least one major supporter beyond the Army, Postmaster General James A. Farley, twice the president's national campaign manager. Army circles considered Farley's endorsement a virtual guarantee that Hugh Drum would finally reach the pinnacle.

            Marshall had significant support himself. Woodring, Johnson, and Craig all favored his selection, though Marshall feared if either the feuding Woodring or Johnson publicly announced for him, the other would find an alternative candidate. Craig claimed no influence at the White House other than that which his office conferred, but his backing implied Marshall would be acceptable to the Army at large. Pershing supported him, carrying the ghostly endorsement of military tradition. Marshall's long years with the National Guard and the Reserve Officers Training Corps garnered him support from those politically powerful sources as well. Beyond these, Marshall knew a number of senators and representatives, notably South Carolina's Senator James F. Byrnes, a staunch New Dealer with access to the White House. "My problem," he wryly told his young friend Rose Page, "is not lining up backers, but stopping the well-wishers who want to intercede for me."

            In calculated contrast to Drum, Marshall wanted no overt campaign on his behalf. The very fact he had been appointed deputy chief of staff "while a brigadier general, junior to other generals of the general staff, makes me conspicuous in the Army. Too conspicuous, as a matter of fact." Rather, he wrote Leo A. Farrell, the political editor of the Atlanta Constitution,

            My strength with the Army has rested on the well known fact that I attended strictly to business and enlisted no influence of any sort at any time. That, in Army circles, has been my greatest strength in this matter of future appointment, especially as it is in strong contrast with other most energetic activities in organizing a campaign and in securing voluminous publicity. Therefore, it seems to me that at this time the complete absence of any publicity about me would be my greatest asset, particularly with the President. And the Army would resent it, even some of those now ardently for me.

            Any press attention troubled him. Stories in Hearst's New York Mirror speculating on the next chief of staff made him fretful. In January he declined a prestigious speaking engagement, confidentially explaining he desired to avoid publicity; talk of his becoming chief of staff was "distasteful and I think equally harmful."

            Most of all, he wanted nothing smacking of a campaign. Outside pressure was an irritant and merely stiffened resistance, Marshall cautioned Colonel Slayer, who was himself seeking a transfer. That advice was a cautious prescription for his own campaign.

            He might not have worried. So long as Marshall did not himself encourage either the publicity or the recommendations, Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave little thought to what appeared in the newspapers about the chief of staffs successor. A canny politician himself, Roosevelt recognized an orchestrated campaign when he was its target.

            For all of Drum's qualifications, and his effort, he made little headway. The presumably influential support of James Farley counted for nothing since the president considered Farley a poor judge of anything beyond practical politics.

            In addition, Drum's unusually high opinion of himself damaged his chances. Capable and hardworking he was, but Hugh Drum was also pompous, stuffed with self-importance. The president disliked such graceless pretensions.

            Marshall meanwhile had the persistent backing of Hopkins, the resident Rasputin. If Marshall remained his own man, no matter; all three of the president's closest friends and advisors, speech writer Sam Rosenman, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and Hopkins, were men who spoke their minds, frequently profanely.

            Some combination of Pershing's endorsement and Hopkins's insistence decided the matter. On Sunday, April 23, 1939, the president summoned Brigadier General George Catlett Marshall to his second floor study in the White House. Roosevelt had made his choice of a new chief of staff.

            Their conversation amid the president's forty stamp albums and stacks of dealers' catalogues was brief, Marshall recalled. The presidents as usual, did most of the talking during the half-hour interview. The new appointee managed to outline some of his own conceptions of the nation's defense problems, but "in very sketchy form." Marshall told the president he wanted to be able to speak his mind, and it would not always be palatable.

            "Is that all right?" the soldier asked.

            "Yes," the commander-in-chief replied from behind the row of stamp albums.

            "You said `yes' pleasantly, but it may be unpleasant," Marshall warned.

            Roosevelt smiled as the new four-star general stood up. "I feel deeply honored, sir, and I will give you the best I have," Marshall promised.

            This would be no easy task, Marshall realized. The president had selected him, the general believed, with little confidence, only as "the best of a bad bargain" among officers with little vision and less interest than Roosevelt in airpower. It was not precisely the promotion on merit alone he had coveted, but he had nonetheless gained the Army's highest rank. He would have to earn the president's respect.

            At Marshall's request, the White House delayed the announcement of his appointment until April 27, when he was safely beyond the reach of Washington reporters on an inspection tour. Flying between Dayton and Denver, he wrote a brief note to Leo Farrell of the Atlanta Constitution to thank him for his unflagging support.

            The next chief of staff of the Army of the United States added a hasty last line: "I will need your prayers for the next few years."

 

The Island Alone

Chapter IX

            They had a special reason to celebrate. The following morning, Brigadier General George C. Marshall was to be sworn in as chief of staff, putting on the temporary rank of four stars that went with the Army's highest office. Even if the ceremony was only a formality brought on by Malin Craig's retirement, here was a moment for the Marshalls to savor.

            The couple looked forward that August 31, 1939, to a pleasurable evening at the home of justice and Mrs. Harlan Stone, drinks -- Marshall would nurse a well-watered highball -- dinner, and conversation, no doubt about the unsettling news from Europe. Germany and the Soviet Union had concluded a non-aggression pact the week before. Poland stood nervously defiant between those unlikely allies. France and Great Britain had mobilized; Poland had called up its reserves. Perhaps the Army's new chief of staff had secret word just how close Europe was to war, but the Stones and their guests knew better than to ask.

            The telephone call came midway through the dinner. The general excused himself momentarily, then returned to the table grim-faced. The duty officer in the Munitions Building had called to inform him that Hitler had massed the Wehrmacht at the Polish frontier, apparently to reinforce his demand for the return of Danzig to Germany. With Britain and France pledged to protect Poland's borders, a second great war in a generation loomed.

            The second telephone call awakened the chief of staff at three o'clock in the morning. German dive bombers had attacked Warsaw. Marshall hung up the telephone and turned to his sleepy wife. "Well, it's come," he told her, and began dressing.

            When he returned to Fort Myer late on the night of September 1, he was officially chief of staff of the seventeenth largest army in the world, sworn in during a hasty ceremony by Secretary of War Woodring in the middle of a tumultuous day.

            Marshall's installation came as a relief to long-stalled younger officers, particularly Colonel George S. Patton,Jr., who went so far as to send the new chief a set of insignia ordered from a New York jeweler. Marshall accepted "that whole firmament of stars" stiffly, perhaps aware that the wealthy Patton was anxious to ingratiate himself.

            In contrast to the Army's acceptance, Washington and the reporters who covered the newly awakened village knew little about the chief of staff. More importantly, neither did the president; FDR had relied on Harry Hopkins's recommendation in naming the chief of staff. As Marshall himself realized, "I had not been proven. He appointed me without any large war experience, except being with General Pershing in the first world war... ." Though no one else on active duty had any greater experience, "it was quite a while before he built up confidence in me....

            For his part, the new chief of staff had little more regard for the president. Roosevelt appeared mercurial, even slippery, a man to gloss over problems such as the "sorry state of the War Department" with its ongoing squabble between Secretary of War Woodring and the assistant secretary, Louis Johnson. As an administrator, Roosevelt improvised freely, violating the rules Marshall held sacrosanct: tables of organization, channels of communication, fixed authority, and final responsibility. Only later would Marshall appreciate the president's nerve and his true leadership capacities.

            More than unfamiliarity separated these two men. A president who joked with his staff, teased his cabinet officers, and bantered with friendly newsmen during twice-weekly press conferences would not appeal to the formally correct soldier. Marshall deliberately kept his relationship with his commander-in-chief distant, refusing even to laugh at the president's jokes; laughter only encouraged Roosevelt to filibuster his way around difficult questions needing immediate answers. Moreover, to be on a first name basis with the president would be to misrepresent their relation ship, Marshall felt.

            The general also grappled with other problems. The Woodring-Johnson feud, isolationist versus internationalist, left the chief of staff with out firm civilian policy direction. The lack of presidential guidance, infact, the seemingly aimless leadership as the threat of war grew over that last summer of fretful peace, frustrated Marshall. The token military appropriations for a force of just 174,000 officers and men held them well below the authorized strength of the Army Reorganization Act, now almost two decades old. That was the big problem he confronted; the petty irritants he could overlook, as he had when dealing with French officers during the Meuse-Argonne transfer so long ago. "I never haggled with the president," Marshall explained later. "I swallowed the little things so that I could go to bat on the big ones. I never handled a matter apologetically and I was never contentious. It took me a long time to get to him. When he thought I was not going for publicity and doing things for publication -- he liked it."

            Insulated from partisan politics like most military men of that day Marshall had never even voted he had only the most general under standing of either political realities or political possibilities. Roosevelt would lead, but only when he recognized the public was ready to follow. To

rush into preparations for war when the threat seemed so remote, so purely a European business, was in Roosevelt's view to risk permanent loss of a public mandate when it would be needed.

            Furthermore, the president was not only commander-in-chief, he was also leader of a political party in an election year. At the moment, he did not know if he could run again. The load was grueling, he told his visiting ambassador to the Court of Saint James, Joseph Kennedy. "I'm tired. I can't take it. What I need is a year's rest.... I just won't go for a third term unless we are in war." Then, remembering the strongly isolationist sentiments of the ambassador, Roosevelt added, "Even then, I'll never send an army over. We'll help them, but with supplies."

            The coming of war in Europe had little impact on most Americans. The stock market jumped four points on September 1 with the Stuka assault on Poland, investors anticipating a rush of defense orders. Within days, shipyards had splashed camouflage paint on English, Danish, and Norwegian freighters. American ships blossomed with large Stars and Stripes painted on the hull; sardonic merchant mariners judged them "bulls eyes."

            Europe remained remote, despite the dire news. Within days the German Panzers had slaughtered the foolhardy Polish cavalry while the Luftwaffe obliterated Polish air forces. Day by day the Wehrmacht drove eastward. Poland was dying as forlorn guides at the Polish pavilion at the New York World's Fair urged visitors to enter the essay contest, "I would like to visit Poland because.. ." First prize was a vacation in Warsaw.

            Through the summer the president had urged revision of fee Neutrality Act, which barred the sale of arms to belligerents. On September 3, just hours after France and Great Britain declared war on Germany, Roosevelt took to the radio for another of his Fireside Chats.

            "This nation will remain a neutral nation," he assured his unseen audience. But to a flexible president, the concept of neutrality might be flexible too. "I cannot ask that every American remain neutral in thought.... Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or conscience."

            The coming of war did what presidential exhortation could not. Within a week of the German invasion, the White House had a sense that congressional opposition to neutrality reform was shifting. For the first time, congressmen and senators could vote not only their district, but their conscience. A Fortune magazine poll indicated as many as seven out of ten Americans now favored selling munitions to England and Francs on a cash and carry basis.

            On September 13, the president called a special legislative session to consider revision of the Neutrality Act. Strict neutrality aided the aggressors, the president argued as the Red Army marched across Poland's eastern provinces to link with the Wehrmacht along the Bug River. Organized resistance in Poland shriveled while isolationists Charles A. Lindbergh and the influential radio priest Father Charles Coughlin exhorted their followers to avoid foreign wars. Privately, the White House encouraged a counter campaign by a Non-Partisan Committee for Peace Through Revision of the Neutrality Act.

            Marshall's own sense of urgency increased with events in Poland. His army had languished since the 1918 armistice, starved first by a complacent Congress, then by administrations concerned more with domestic than foreign affairs. Not only was this army under strength only four of its nine infantry divisions could muster even half of the troops that tables of organization called for it was poorly equipped. The bolt-action 1903 Springfield that served as the basic infantry rifle was obsolescent. Artillery dated from the first war; mortars, machine guns, and the automatic rifle were of similar vintage. Army Ordnance had designed or approved newer weapons, but Congress had not appropriated procurement monies.

            Virtually everywhere Marshall looked he discovered the inadequacies that made the Army a poor match for the Wehrmacht if war came. Mechanization and especially infantry-tank tactics and training had not yet recovered from the setback delivered when Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur in 1931 ordered early experiments abandoned. The Air Corps had fared no better, for while aircraft design and performance improved dramatically during the inter war period, procurement had not kept pace. Plans for a succession of new bombers, dive bombers, and pursuit planes were complete, but only two, the Boeing B-17 bomber and the Curtiss P-40 fighter, had gone into production. Early models of these aircraft, as the British would discover, were unsuitable for combat, lacking sufficient armoring for the crews and self-sealing gas tanks.

            Organizationally, Marshall's army was an unstitched patchwork. Some 45,000 of its 174,000 enlisted men were stationed in Panama, the Philippines, and Hawaii. The balance was scattered among more than 100 stateside posts and camps. The lack of motor transportation made it impossible to bring entire divisions together for maneuvers. Corps and general headquarters command units existed only on charts in the Munitions Building.

            The appropriations bill for fiscal 1940 had increased the authorized troop strength to 210,000, but the new troops were entirely absorbed by the Panama Canal command and the Air Corps. The parallel increase to an authorized strength of 5,500 airplanes was also an encouragement, but the planes did not exist as of September 1, 1939, and the invasion of Poland.

            In that first week of war, President Roosevelt declared a state of national emergency. Yielding to Marshall, he authorized the expansion of the Army by another 17,000 men, and the National Guard to 235,000. He also approved $ 12 million in emergency funds to buy desperately needed trucks. Still, the Army was no more than "that of a third-rate power," Marshall warned.

            Barely settled in quarters No. 1 at Fort Myer, Marshall moved quickly. He approved Malin Craig's long-shelved plans to reorganize World War I's cumbersome quadrangular division into a three-regiment, triangular configuration. Where once he had three serviceable if unfilled divisions composed of twelve regiments, he now had five made up of fifteen all under strength.

            "Time -- time more than anything else" was the dominant factor now, the chief of staff fretted. Everything they needed -- the Garand semiautomatic rifle, heavy machine guns, even cannons for the new Stuart tank -- required a year or more to produce. "A billion dollars the day war is declared will not buy ten cents worth of such material for quick delivery," he told an interviewer for The New York Times.

            Time and immediate supplemental appropriations he would not get. While the president groped for a coalition to repeal the Neutrality Act before Hitler turned to the West, the White House would hear no appeals from the War Department; larger appropriations for ground forces implied that Roosevelt would send America's sons to fight in Europe. Mere sales of armaments could be justified as good works and good business.

            The surrender of hapless remnants of a once proud Polish Army on September 12 and the uneasy truce that settled over Europe seemingly removed some of the urgency in any event; public and congressional opinion, so eager to build up defenses at the first part of the month,

began to flag by the end of September.

            Poland lay subdued, divided between Germany and the Soviet Union. Russian troops reoccupied the old czarist provinces of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania, creating an additional buffer between Germany and the Soviet Union. The French Army and British Expeditionary Force waited

restively along the French frontiers as Europe settled into the tense interlude known as the Phony War. Wary of public opinion, the president hewed to his first priority, revision of the Neutrality Act, which prevented the United States from supplying those who were to do the fighting. While Congress debated repeal, Roosevelt cautiously curtailed expansion of the Army by one half and suspended White House consideration of the 1941 military budget. "Have you noticed that... I have been trying to kill all war talk?" he wrote Chicago newspaper publisher Frank Knox, the Republican vice-presidential nominee of three years before.

            The drone of congressional debate turned to outrage on October 9 when the German pocket battleship Deutschland intercepted the American cargo ship City of Flint en route to Great Britain. The steamer was carrying contraband tractors, fruit, and grain, the German captain claimed as he put a prize crew aboard the unarmed freighter. Like the mis-timed naval depredations of World War I, the City of Flint incident tipped public opinion in favor of repeal of the act.

            For another month isolationist senators fought a rearguard battle against any revision. On October 27, the Senate approved a compromise revision of the Neutrality Act, 63-30. The next day an unyielding Secretary of War Woodring assured the nation, "There is no man in public office today who is more determined than your Secretary of War that your sons and my sons shall not march forth to war." So reassured that revision was merely good business and not a declaration of war, a week later the House too voted for revision, 243 to 181. America could sell arms to belligerents on a cash and carry basis.

            Through the fall, Marshall's efforts to increase the pace of the nation's rearmament remained low-key, hobbled by respect for the constitution ally mandated role of the president as commander-in-chief. Moreover, he was caught between the feuding Woodring and Johnson.

            The chief of staff tried to remain neutral. Demanding loyalty himself, he was prepared to give it, Marshall told the irritated secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau. "Everybody in town is shooting at Woodring and trying to put him on the spot and I don't want to see him get on the spot. Everybody is trying to get him out of there and I am not going to be a party to it."

            Marshall's impartiality infuriated Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson, who believed he had a claim on the chief for supporting Marshall for that post. Strong-willed, petulant, and ambitious, Johnson had maneuvered himself to the leadership of the American Legion, and with that organization's backing had secured the assistant secretariat. Now he wanted to be secretary, and was calling in his political debts.

            When Johnson reproved Marshall, the chief of staff snapped, "Listen, Mr. Secretary, I was appointed chief of staff and I think you had some thing to do with it. But Mr. Woodring [is] Secretary of War and I owe loyalty to him.... I can't expect loyalty from the Army if I do not give it."

            With the civilian leadership of the department at loggerheads, Marshall had no effective entree to the White House. The influential Harry Hopkins, so helpful earlier, was hospitalized for treatment of hemochromatosis, failure of the intestines to leach nutrients from food. The president meanwhile seemed little interested in the Army's problems.

            The chief of staff confronted not only Roosevelt's seeming indifferent, but a president who considered himself a navy man. A lifelong sailor, Roosevelt had served as assistant secretary of the navy during World War 1. He understood the fleet, knew its ships and men, and even took a hand in its day-to-day administration. Yet if Chief of Naval Operations Harold Stark was irritated, he still had ready access to the White House and to a president more than happy to discuss navy problems. Marshall stood outside the president's circle, because he was in the Army; because he deliberately refused to cultivate FDR's friendship; because he was a formal, austere man distancing himself from an administration that ran on improvisations, good humor, and political cunning.

            In one sense he was fortunate, for the president left the chief of staff alone to deal with the emergency. Still there was much to do, and too few of them to do it. Despite Marshall's widely quoted assertion that "nobody had an original thought after 3 p.m.," he often worked long hours in these hectic months following the German invasion of Poland.    A man of routine and habit, he attempted to follow a schedule even as the situation in Europe worsened. He rose at 6:30 a.m., and was at the breakfast table by seven. A half hour later he was at his desk in the Munitions Building. He often recrossed the Potomac in his chauffeur driven staff car for lunch, frequently now with guests; the cook grew adept at stretching meals for two into repasts for four.

            Marshall expected his household to run with drill-like precision. Alerted by a secretary as the chief of staff left the building, Marshall's cook had lunch waiting for him. "I walk right to the lunch table... from the car, and then I have a half hour or more to relax in a more restful atmosphere than here at the office or at the Army and Navy Club," he wrote Malin Craig. If he had no guests, he would nap on a chaise-lounge in the second-floor sun room. Acutely conscious of his health, Marshall

sought to conserve his energy.

            Whenever he could, but never before the basket of papers on his desk had been emptied, Marshall left at four o'clock. Before nightfall he went riding with Molly; in the summer of 1940 he began to take Katherine for a picnic dinner on a lazy canoe ride down the Potomac or on leisurely walks through peaceful Arlington Cemetery. He kept his entertainments simple: dinner with the handful of personal friends to whom he was closest; biweekly visits with the elderly Pershing at the general's suite in the Hotel Carleton or at Walter Reed Hospital. The Marshalls attended movies at the post theater where seats were reserved for him in case he should turn up; westerns were certain to lure them from Quarters No. 1. Whenever he could, he avoided formal social gatherings, attending as few as possible and leaving early, his highball unfinished. In gossiping Washington, it only added to his reputation for austerity; columnists had already noted he drove his own car when off-duty and had refused to adopt the beribboned, comic-opera dress uniform designed by his predecessor. Katherine Marshall had also ordered the two cannons removed from the front lawn of their home. The only symbol of the chief of staff's residence in quarters No. 1 was a small brass plate on the door, a souvenir of his Tientsin service, that read in Chinese characters: "Marshall, Officer of the Beautiful Country's Army."

            Conscious of her husband's need for a retreat, Katherine in the spring of 1940 bought a colonial house in Leesburg, Virginia, as a weekend and summer home. Though Dodona Manor, built in 1786 by a nephew of George Washington, was but thirty-five miles from Washington, it was some months before the busy general was able to break away to see the brick house with its fluted columns and front portico. When Marshall finally made his way to the small town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he apparently discovered as Katherine had guessed his long-desired haven, what for him would be home. Amid the elms and oaks that towered over the white house at the edge of town, he was to spend frequent weekends, puttering about the four acres, pruning trees. He began a noisome compost pit that would rival the virile properties of his boyhood stable; he eventually laid in a splendid garden that yielded beets "no one would eat," Katherine teased; birds got the raspberries before the Marshalls did. It was a satisfying refuge from the realities of the Munitions Building.

            At Dodona Manor or Fort Myer, the chief generally retired at ten o'clock. He discouraged telephone calls from the War Department after dinner; two duty officers screened messages, decided which were to be relayed to the chief of staff immediately and which would wait. They tended to err on the side of delay.

            As work in the War Department piled up, Marshall sought ways to handle the flow of paper. Sixty or more men reported directly to him, far too many, he told a luncheon guest. He would prefer just three or four deputies to whom were funneled all documents. While he could summarily order a reorganization, the blow to morale "would do much more harm than good would be accomplished from an organizational standpoint. The men who would be relieved and retired have given the best they had to the army."

            Those who reported to him were expected to be prompt and succinct. The unprepared would find themselves on the way to new posts; the longwinded he cut off. He insisted memoranda be terse; staff officers learned how to write letters and reports, just as Marshall had earlier for Pershing, needing little editing before the chief of staff signed them. Only by the strictest of personal discipline, and by shifting large amounts of work to others, could he possibly keep pace.

            His hardworking staff tended to hold him in awe, or fear, or both. Those who performed well among them Omar Bradley, Maxwell Taylor, J. Lawton Collins, Walter Bedell Smith, and Orlando Ward he marked for promotion. Less competent officers found themselves reassigned and forgotten.

            Marshall was swift in his judgments, and an opinion once formed about an individual rarely changed. Those who sought preference he deliberately held back; fawning George Patton was to wait a full year before Marshall arranged his transfer from the cavalry to the tanks corps and awarded him a first star.

            In dealing with his staff, in assigning officers to new tasks, his constant effort was to encourage independent thought. "Whenever I find these fellows who seem to have ability and a certain amount of disagreement with what we are doing, I am always interested in seeing them, and getting first hand impressions," he advised.

            Marshall intended to overhaul the ossified army he commanded. He arranged the assignment of old friend Brigadier General Lesley J. McNair as the reform-minded commandant of Leavenworth's hallowed Command and General Staff School and instructed him to immediately revise the outmoded tactical training. "We must be prepared the next time we are involved in war, to fight immediately, that is within a few weeks, somewhere and somehow," he wrote McNair. They could expect "open warfare will be the rule rather than the exception," and it was for that Leavenworth had to train its students. The first days were critical; they had to "survive the first three or four months" before they could complete mobilization of the troops necessary to defend the continental United States.

            Such internal reform he could accomplish with his own devices. Building the Army to adequate strength required White House and congressional cooperation. As the "sitzkrieg" wore on through the winter of 1939-40, Marshall waited impatiently. It was out of their hands, he advised his congressional liaison office in February 1940. "Events in Europe will develop in such a way as to affect congressional action." Marshall how ever came as close to pleading as his pride would permit on February 23 in an appearance before the House Appropriations Committee. "If Europe blazes in the late spring or early summer," he warned, "we must put our house in order before the sparks reach the Western Hemisphere."

            His appeal fell on parsimonious men eyeing the June primaries. The committee trimmed by 10 percent the president's request of $850 million for the Army, chopping funds for an air base in Anchorage, Alaska, and leaving only 57 of the 166 airplanes Marshall sought in the budget.

            Six days later, the Wehrmacht invaded Norway and Denmark. The Phony War had ended.    Increasingly nervous, Marshall had sought to get at least the $ 12 million for the Alaskan air base restored. In desperation, he turned to an old acquaintance, Bernard Baruch, the head of the war mobilization effort during the first war, more recently the self-styled park bench sage and influential "elder statesman number one" of Washington. Baruch was a demanding ally; his advice, freely given, was to be counted the wisest of counsel even when it was, frequently, useless. Baruch had tried Pershing sorely, not to mention a succession of presidents, but Marshall needed him now.

            "The Army has never gotten its real story over," Baruch told Marshall. He suggested a private dinner with a handful of pivotal senators invited by James Byrnes, Marshall's acquaintance from Fort Moultrie, now one of the New Deal's spokesmen in the upper house. On the night of April 10, with Denmark's surrender the afternoon headline, Marshall, Baruch, Byrnes, and a handful of the Senate's leaders sat down to dinner and dealing.

            The meeting lasted well into the early morning hours. After first suggesting that Baruch discuss the Army's needs, Marshall interrupted, moved by a passion Baruch had not seen before in the chief of staff. Marshall spoke eloquently, heatedly, of shortages and more shortages, of the lack of weapons, transportation, of even such elemental requirements as blankets. On and on he went, until suddenly the catalogue was ended. Exhausted, Marshall confessed, "I feel culpable. My job as Chief of Staff is to convince you of our needs and I have utterly failed. I don't know what to do." He looked from one to another of the stone-faced legislators.

            Colorado's Democratic Senator Alva Adams, a leader in Senate caucuses and the man Marshall most hoped to convince, sat silently for a long moment. Then he nodded, his decision made. "You get every God damn thing you want," he promised.

            Not everything, though Baruch decided that meeting was "a turning point in convincing such critics as Senator Adams of the urgent need for speeding the rebuilding of our defenses."

            The speed was only relative. Appearing before the Senate subcommittee weighing the president's request for supplemental appropriations on May 1, Marshall suppressed his own sense of urgency to placate skeptics on the panel. Arms purchases were prudent now, "before we become involved in a real emergency," he advised. They might ponder the fact that the United States at that moment had fewer anti-aircraft guns than the British had mounted to defend just the City of London.

            "I am more of a pacifist than you think," Marshall assured the subcommittee. "I went through one war, and I do not want to see another. My idea, however, as to the sound basis for peace may differ from others."

            Sitting at the end of the committee table, the senator from Missouri interrupted. "General, I think that all of us who were in it feel that way," said Harry S. Truman, a former field artillery captain in France.

            "I saw it from the start, and I do not want to see it again," Marshall reiterated."... I say this in all sincerity. I do not believe there is a group of people in the United States who are more unanimous in their earnest desire to avoid involvement in this ghastly war than the officers of the War Department. There is not the slightest thought in any of our minds of trying to utilize this emergency to aggrandize the Army, or of making exorbitant demands to put something over, as it were, under the pressure of the situation. We occupy most of our time trying to find some more economical method of improving the national defense, and the unanimous opinion of the officers I have talked with and come in contact with in the War Department is that we must do everything possible to make it that much more certain that we will not be drawn into this world tragedy."

            Two weeks later, the Senate subcommittee was still dithering about restoration of the House of Representative cuts, spending hours scrutinizing the number of dentists' chairs the Army needed, even questioning the architect's designs for a new army building in Washington. But the Senate's mood had shifted; Senator Cart Harden of Arizona felt compelled to "state for the record" that his subcommittee "was anxious and willing to undertake what the War Department wanted....

            Marshall still had to convince the White House of the Army's inadequacies, of the necessity for a balanced force. With Hopkins hospitalized, the chief of staff turned to the second of the president's close friends, fellow Hudson River squire Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the treasury.

            Morgenthau had known FDR for a quarter century, since he first became a gentleman farmer on his 1,000 acres near Fishkill, New York, then publisher of the influential American Agriculturalist. The two discovered their mutual love of the Hudson River Valley, and became constant companions. Morgenthau had taken on a variety of chores in Albany for Roosevelt the governor, and had come along to Washington in the first days of the New Deal, ultimately filling the sensitive post of secretary of the treasury. Morgenthau and Hopkins were the two men the president most trusted to handle difficult tasks.

            Morgenthau had gained some sense of defense needs while coordinating British and French aircraft purchases in the United States. He wanted the full picture, for the mistake until now, he told Marshall, had been in "feeding the President little pieces here and little pieces there."

            They met in Morgenthau's office on May 11, one day after Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands became the sixth, seventh, and eighth nations to fall to Hitler since the Anschluss. Neville Chamberlain's government had fallen; the discredited prime minister had bowed out in favor of a new coalition cabinet headed by Winston Churchill. Churchill immediately pledged his government to "victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be." As for himself, he could offer only "blood, toil, tears and sweat."

            As news wires clattered the debacle in the Lowlands, Marshall sketched for Morgenthau the Army's present mobilization plan. It called for a total of 1.25 million men under arms, combat-ready, within six months of M-Day. At the moment they had less than one quarter of that number on active duty, and only 75,000 could be said to have modern weapons. At best, a War Department report on the president's desk that day noted, they could equip 500,000 men with any arms at all. They needed every thing, but the shortage of modern fighters and bombers was especially acute.

            "I don't scare easily," Morgenthau said. "I am not scared yet."

            The immediate cost, Marshall estimated, was an additional $650 million, more than twice the Army appropriation the president had asked in January. "It makes me dizzy," Marshall acknowledged.

            "It makes me dizzy if we don't get it," Morgenthau retorted.

            Airplanes alone would be insufficient, Morgenthau realized. He agreed to be Marshall's advocate when the president reviewed the "basic war plans" in two days, but urged Marshall to speak out himself. "Stand right up and tell him what you think.... There are too few people who do it and he likes it."

            The subsequent White House meeting of May 13, 1940, was pivotal, Marshall believed, "an incredible performance," he later decided. The War Department delegation of Woodring, Johnson, and Marshall was sharply divided. Johnson favored the president's airplane plan, now fixed at an unheard-of 50,000-plane capacity per year, that figure plucked as casually from the president's fancy as Marshall's closely figured budgets were carefully drawn. Secretary Woodring, disapproving of any mobilization, sat silent.

            Morgenthau opened the meeting, only to run into the president's feigned disinterest, then disdain. FDR joked, teasing his old friend, ever the harbinger of gloom; he talked on, dominating the meeting, rambling to deflect the secretary's appeal. Finally the president said no.

            "Well, I still think you are wrong," Morgenthau insisted.

            "Well, you filed your protest," the president snapped.

            The meeting wound on inconclusively. Just as Roosevelt was to dismiss them, Morgenthau asked him to hear out the chief of staff.

            "I know exactly what he will say," Roosevelt demurred. "There is no necessity for me to hear him at all."

            The control Marshall so prided himself upon snapped. The chief of staff stood seething in the cold fury subordinates had learned to fear. "Mr. President, may I have three minutes?"

            The words spilled out, precisely at first, then in a rush of frustrations. Barracks; rations, weapons, all in short supply. New artillery and antiaircraft guns designed but not in production. Headquarters units unorganized, leaving this an army that could effectively throw no more than 15,000 men into combat at a time. The Germans had 2 million men in 140 divisions massed in the West. What were their five against that horde? On and on, well past the three minutes he had asked for, the chief of staff ticked off his army's deficiencies.

            Two decades earlier he had confronted General Pershing in the muddy field of Gondrecourt; now he challenged the president of the United States. National policy remained vague, rudderless. They lacked coordination in their defense purchases; the Army and the Navy could not even agree to purchase the same brooms. There were no clear priorities: was steel for new naval vessels more important than steel for tanks? Military production was an afterthought of big business; at the moment, only the E. I. duPont powder works might be described as on a war footing, and only because of British orders for smokeless powder. The United States was no more than a step ahead of the pace set prior to World War I, when it had taken them eighteen months to organize a field army. Hitler was not going to permit them such a leisurely schedule. Finally, his anger dissipated, Marshall subsided, "If you don't do something...and do it right away, I don't know what is going to happen to this country."

            There was a long silence. "He stood right up to the president," a delighted Morgenthau chortled in his diary that night.

            Just a month earlier, Marshall had been unable to get $12 million for an airfield in Anchorage, Alaska. Now President Roosevelt, plainly stunned by the chief of staffs vehemence, was asking Marshall to return the next day to discuss a supplemental army appropriation of $657 million. Morgenthau estimated the general might get three quarters of what he said the Army needed.

            That meeting was the turning point, Marshall later decided. As the president worked over the chief of staffs requests on May 14 and 15, German troops crossed the Belgium border into France, driving toward Sedan; haunted names of World War I battlefields datelined the news from Europe once again. Panzer General Heinz Guderian's tanks pivoted westward, racing for the English Channel to close the noose on the British Expeditionary Force in Belgium; 200,000 men, the very heart of the British Army, began a grudging, punishing retreat to a small resort on the sea, Dunkirk.

            While Roosevelt balanced congressional reaction to the news bulletins against the size of the supplemental appropriation, the newly installed British prime minister sat at his desk on the second floor of Number 10 Downing Street writing the president:

            As you are no doubt aware, the scene has darkened swiftly. The enemy have a marked preponderance in the air, and their new technique is making a deep impression upon the French.... The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like match wood. We must expect, though it is not yet certain, that Mussolini will hurry in to share the loot of civilization. We expect to be attacked here ourselves, both from the air and by parachute and air borne troops in the near future, and are getting ready for them. If necessary, we shall continue the war alone and we are not afraid of that. But I trust you realize, Mr. President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated, Nazified Europe established with astounding swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.

            The prime minister asked for American aid "with everything short of actually engaging armed forces." The immediate needs were the loan of forty to fifty destroyers of World War I vintage to keep the sealanes to North America and the Middle East open; "several hundred of the latest types of aircraft"; anti-aircraft guns and ammunition; steel and other raw materials. In addition, he wrote, "I am looking to you to keep that Japanese dog quiet in the Pacific, using Singapore in any way convenient."

            Churchill's message underscoring the importance of airpower in this new war of maneuver apparently confirmed the president in his decision to ask Congress for $300 million to fund production capacity for 50,000 airplanes a year. But Great Britain's other needs, desperate as they were, would have to compete with Marshall's. Roosevelt settled on a supplemental appropriation request on May 15, seeking only the bare minimum for a "thoroughly rounded Army": 200 new B-17 bombers; supplies to equip 1.25 million men on M-Day; and funds for the training of more pilots. The total, including another $250 million for the Navy, came to $1.8 billion.

            "I know you can get them to accept it; they can't evade it," Marshall reassured the president. The chief of staff himself drafted the president's message to Congress that would accompany the request on May 16.

            Congressional resistance wilted before news reports from Europe. German troops marched into the Belgian port of Antwerp and the French cathedral city of Amiens on May 17; in a week Guderian had accomplished with massed armor what Ludendorffs infantry had failed to gain in four years. The Wehrmacht rammed a fifty-mile-wide gap in the lines of a French Army believed by many Americans to be the best in Europe. Those British and French troops still in unit formations fought through to the Channel.

            On May 26, the British began evacuating the troops who had made their way to the coast. Cloudy weather obstructed Luftwaffe bombers as a motley fleet of Royal Navy warships, ferry boats, and privately owned vessels began boarding weary men from the beaches and quai. Through eight days of round-the-clock rescue efforts, the fleet managed to save from captivity 225,000 British and 1 13,000 French soldiers. As gallant as the effort was, it was equally costly. The Royal Air Force lost 180 aircraft; French and British soldiers left behind 11,000 machine guns, 2,400 artillery and anti-aircraft guns, and 75,000 vehicles. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Edmund Ironsides, watched the hollow eyed survivors entrain from the Channel ports in England and groaned, "This is the end of the British Empire."

            As England in 1588 awaited the Spanish Armada with a "militia of Dogberries, Bottoms, Mouldies, Shadows, Warts, Feebles and Bullcalfs," so half-armed Great Britain in 1940 confronted Hitler. The French Army crouched demoralized in hastily dug defense positions north of Paris as Prime Minister Churchill promised Commons on June 4:

            We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender! And even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it, were subjugated and starving, then our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle until in God's good time the New World, with all its power and might, steps forward to the rescue of the old.

            Churchill had little more than words to fling at Hitler. France's premier, Paul Bernard, appealed for fighter planes. Churchill declined; he preferred to hoard his air force for the coming invasion, rather than expend it in a futile gesture to a doomed ally. Marshal Petain, the revered hero of Verdun a generation before and now vice-premier, told the cabinet, "An armistice is, in my view, the necessary condition for the survival of eternal France."

            Confronted by the disaster in Europe, Congress abruptly opened the public purse to defend the continental United States. Within two weeks of the president's supplemental appropriations request, both House and Senate had voted $ 1.5 billion, $300 million more than the president had sought. It took but another four weeks to authorize an additional $ 1.7 billion in June after "the almost incredible events of the past two weeks."

            Marshall's major problem now was not so much the lack of modern equipment, but keeping what he had. Almost daily he confronted the president's insistence that the United States provide some of the arms Churchill's purchasing agents sought.

            Churchill's plea for arms "has a tragic similarity to the pressure for American men in 1917," Marshall confided to Morgenthau, but Marshall of 1940 was less sure than was Pershing of 1917-18. Reflecting the widespread military opinion that England would not hold, Major Walter Bedell Smith, a member of Marshall's handpicked personal staff, warned the chief: "If we were required to mobilize after having released guns necessary for this mobilization and were found to be short... everyone who was a party to the deal might hope to be hanging from a lamp post....

            Marshall himself had doubts whether Churchill's island alone could withstand assault. The Wehrmacht's campaigns in Poland, in Denmark and Norway, through the Low Countries and then into France were disciplined, well-coordinated efforts linked by radio, and supported by efficient engineering and supply units. "The tanks made the holes, the planes ran beautiful interference, and the infantry carried the ball," Marshall, the onetime VMI football player, told journalist A. J. Liebling. Thus far the British Army had demonstrated nothing more than a capacity for the orderly retreat, the most difficult of all military maneuvers, but not one to win battles or wars.

            Well before the Dunkirk evacuation, Marshall chose caution. If England collapsed, even with American airpower, the United States would be half-armed, he argued. On May 18, he warned Morgenthau against "submitting" to British requests for aircraft.

            Yet his decision troubled him enough that he repeatedly sought to rationalize his no-aid stance. In a heated discussion with the secretary of the treasury on May 22, 1940, Marshall asked Air Corps Chief of Staff Hap Arnold what it would mean to release 100 of his newest aircraft to the British. A hundred planes, Arnold estimated, would replace but three days' combat losses at present rates, while setting back Arnold's training program by six months. The United States had just 260 pilots qualified to fly its combat-worthy air force of 160 fighters and 52 bombers. Obsolete bombers he could let go, but release of the new B-17s Churchill sought would seriously hamper North American defense.

            As the Dunkirk evacuation began, Marshall relented in part, prodded perhaps by a May 29 cable from London asking for pistols and submachine guns "required to meet parachute attacks expected in the early future." In army warehouses reeking of Cosmoline lay half a million Enfield rifles, hundreds of artillery pieces, mortars, and machine guns, all of World War I vintage. The weapons, though obsolescent, might bolster British defenses.

            It was no longer a matter of conscience, but of Great Britain's survival, and the survival of its fleet to protect the Atlantic Ocean. At first Marshall hoped Secretary Woodring would yield to White House pressure; later the general ignored Woodring's protests and on June 3 approved a long shopping list of weapons presented by the British. To complete the transfer, Marshall used a loophole in the Neutrality Act stretched wide by Attorney General Francis Biddle. Though the law barred government sales to belligerents, the Army could sell the arms to United States Steel Exporting Co. That private firm, responsible to Marshall's friend Ed Stettinius, would do what the government could not. Once again Marshall had creatively avoided an onerous rule. By June 11, stevedores were loading the long-warehoused World War I weapons and supplies of ammunition on British bottoms.

            No single shipment could slake Britain's need. Marshall and his staff were to devote thousands of hours over the next two years resupplying the British Army. For Marshall and Stark, the problem of conscience would be compounded the following month when Congress, suspicious of President Roosevelt's intentions, adopted a bill requiring the two service chiefs to certify that goods sold overseas were not essential to national defense.

            His task of readying the Army for war now more difficult than ever, Marshall spent long hours at his richly carved desk once used by the legendary Philip Sheridan. Weekends blurred into weekdays, especially for his hard-pressed staff. (Marshall had a habit of assigning tasks late in the day, either forgetting or heedless that his staff would have to work through the night to have the finished report on his desk the next morning. Occasionally he would comment that the drained men around him needed to get out and exercise, to spend some time in the sun.)

            Marshall himself could spend only two days away from Washington when stepson Alien, working for a small radio station in Poughkeepsie, New York, married late in June. Concerned until then that the young man had not settled on a permanent line of work radio seemed rather insubstantial Marshall thought the new bride would be a "splendid stabilizer" for the boy he had accepted as his own son.

            Allen's wedding was but a brief interlude in a month of tension. The end of France was near. Paris fell on June 14. From the temporary capital of Bordeaux, Petain asked for an armistice. In Great Britain, a little known French general, Charles de Caulle, broadcast reassurance to his countrymen: "France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war."    The rush of events in Europe during June convinced President Roosevelt he must run for a third term. Until now he had waffled, mindful of the two-term tradition, yet worried that his successor, Republican or Democrat, would not stand with Great Britain. The threat of a triumphant Germany commanding the Atlantic while upstart Japan ranged the Pacific impelled him to run once more.

            To do so, he had to put his own house in order, beginning with the cabinet. As early as September 1939, he had weighed finding posts for the 1936 Republican ticket, Alfred Landon and Frank Knox, to create a bipartisan cabinet in time of war. London flatly declined to be FDR's "catspaw," but Knox, the internationally minded publisher of the Chicago Daily News, told the president on December 10 that he would take the offered post of secretary of the navy when public opinion recognized the emergency.

            Secretary of War Woodring's resistance to British aid early in June sealed his fate. To replace him, the president turned at the suggestion of Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter to Henry L. Stimson, former secretary of state under Herbert Hoover. On June 19, Roosevelt telephoned Stimson at his apartment in New York's Pierre Hotel. Stimson was needed once more in Washington where "everybody is running around at loose ends," the president said. Stimson "would be a stabilizing factor in whom both the Army and the public would have confidence." At age seventy-two, Stimson might have declined the offer with good reason. Instead, he discussed the appointment with his wife, then called the White House to accept.

            The appointments represented a shrewd political move. Bipartisan ship muzzled at least some Republicans who otherwise would be quick to charge the dismissal of Woodring as another Roosevelt step to war.

            Both Woodring, who chose to resign rather than be dismissed, and Assistant Secretary Louis Johnson were furious with Stimson's appointment, the one for his ouster, the other for the denied promotion, promised "not once but many times" by the president. Smarting from the dismissal, Woodring told the hometown Topeka Capital he was the victim of "a small clique of international financiers who want the United States to declare war and get into the European mess with everything we have, including our manpower.... They don't like me because I am against stripping our own defenses for the sake of trying to stop Hitler 3,000 miles away."

            Both Woodring and Johnson believed Marshall had influenced the president's decision; fourteen years later Woodring wrote that Marshall "would sell out his grandmother for personal advantage; that he would sell out his policies, beliefs, and standards to maintain his political and military position with the powers that be." In fact, Marshall had nothing to do with the shift, however relieved he was to have the Woodring Johnson feud behind him.

            Henry Stimson was all Woodring was not. A Yale graduate who had gone on to Harvard Law School, Stimson was of that nineteenth-century social class that considered leadership an obligation 'and a right. Secure themselves, and well placed, men like Stimson -- who had served every president since William Howard Taft -- moved easily back and forth from their law offices, banks, and corporate boardrooms to government positions, emulating the British upper classes as they went. Even Stimson's recreations were those of the British gentry: riding to hounds, three and four-day weekends for multitudes of guests on his Long Island estate, or polite croquet matches on the lawns of his Washington home, Woodley.

            Fresh from Harvard, Stimson had joined the influential Wall Street law firm headed by sometime cabinet officer and diplomat Elihu Root, and within two years had been elected a partner. As United States Attorney for the prestigious Southern District of New York, in 1906 he had taken on the young Felix Frankfurter as a deputy. The two men had remained close through the years, Frankfurter the upwardly mobile Jewish Democrat, Stimson the Presbyterian Republican, member of Yale's Skull and Bones, pillar of New York's select Century Club.

            In snaring Stimson and Knox for his cabinet, Roosevelt was enlisting the internationally minded wing of the Republican Party, a faction alienated by the GOP's isolationism since the end of World War I. As far as Stimson was from the isolationist wing of his own party, that worldly Wall Street lawyer was close to the privately held views of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Knox's paper similarly had called for rearmament in a page one editorial and the former Rough Rider himself had demanded all out aid for the French and British short of sending troops to Europe. To men such as these, partisanship never interfered with public duty.

            For all his experience as a diplomat, most recently as Herbert Hoover's secretary of state, Stimson cherished a special passion for the Army. As secretary of war from 1911 to 1913, Stimson had acquired the nick name of "Light Horse Harry," in part for his habit of riding daily, in part for the speed with which he worked. He had served at the age of fifty as colonel in the 31st Field Artillery during World War I; he still preferred to be addressed by the comparatively lowly rank of "Colonel" rather than "Mr. Ambassador" or "Mr. Secretary."

            As secretary of war, once more the civilian head of the Army he loved, Stimson brought to the Munitions Building the flinty integrity of "a new England conscience on two legs." One wary colonel, confronted by Stimson's majestic rectitude, left the new secretary's office muttering, "I never heard the Lord God speak before."

            This croquet-playing crony of Secretary of State Cordell Hull recruited three civilian deputies, internationalists like himself, influential and sophisticated: Robert A. Patterson, a federal judge who resigned from the bench to take Johnson's position; John J. McCloy, at first an expert in subversive activities, later an assistant secretary; and Robert A. Lovett, a navy flier during the first war and more lately a Wall Street investment banker, who was to be assistant secretary for air.

            All were military-minded. An infantryman in the first war, Patterson had killed two Germans in close combat while on a patrol in No-Man's Land. He still wore the belt taken from one of the bodies.

            Stimson and Marshall knew each other largely by reputation. They had met in France during the war, and Stimson had later included Colonel Marshall on a private list of the best officers in the Army. About the War Department itself, Stimson and his assistants were less sure. Stimson's candid diary for the last six months of 1940 contained no less than sixteen entries regarding organization problems, in particular the inadequacies of the intelligence service. Lovett, a man of wry wit, decided the General Staff was so heavy with deadwood it was a fire hazard.

            Marshall took pains to accommodate his new secretary, each of them sensitive to the peculiar triangular relationship of the chief of staff, the secretary of war, and the president. Stimson held the secretary's role to be military adviser to the president; communication between the War Department and the White House was to receive his "critical attention," he insisted. When Marshall pressed him, however, Stimson reluctantly agreed that the president "should have the constant right to consult" the chief of staff directly.

            Each respecting the other's position, Marshall and Stimson were to work out a pragmatic modus operandi. They communicated frequently through "the door that was always open" between their adjoining offices in the Munitions Building, and though President Roosevelt frequently by-passed the secretary to talk directly with the chief of staff, Marshall briefed Stimson after each visit to the White House. When Stimson later complained he felt removed from strategic planning, Marshall immediately invited him to attend the daily military staff meetings. Stimson would never change his first assessment of Marshall as "always anxious to help....very loyal and faithful."

            In deferring to Stimson, Marshall was acknowledging what he termed "the wisdom of the founders of our government in subordinating the military to the civilian authority." That conviction anchored his relationship with Stimson. Deferential to the office and the man alike, Marshall later said his only disagreements with Stimson came when the secretary asked for Marshall's opinion on what the chief of staff believed were purely civilian questions. "It will be made by the civilian head," Stimson retorted, "when he has had the benefit of the military head, of his military alter ego's best judgment."

            For all that might have separated the two men, they shared a binding sense of duty. Stimson neither needed nor sought further honors, and he risked ignominious removal if the Republicans captured the presidency in November. He might have lived on in semi-retirement, idly following world affairs from the porch of his Long Island mansion, Highhold. Instead, he had accepted his president's summons, ignoring the partisan implications, to be of service in time of crisis.

            The Stimson and Knox appointments were announced as the GOP gathered in Philadelphia for its nominating convention. The news shook the delegates. Senator Robert Tail charged: "Their selection indicates that the Democratic Party is rapidly becoming a war party."

            Prime Minister Churchill, scrambling to meld his Dogberries and Feebles into an island defense, could only hope it was true. Across the Channel, just six minutes' flying time from the limestone cliffs of Dover, the Luftwaffe was scraping airfields out of French farmland. In the evenings, Londoners could hear an earnest children's choir on Berlin Radio singing a new song, "Wir Fahren gegen England"

 

So give me your hand, your pretty white hand,

For tonight we march against England.

 

The Most Businesslike Manner

Chapter X

            Through July, August, and September 1940, Great Britain endured. Pummeled almost nightly by three Luftflotten totaling 2,800 bombers and covering fighters, the island absorbed an onslaught Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering had promised would leave it hapless.

            Despite fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing, people in sandbag muffled London gamely went about their daily business. The Blitz wore on, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary in early September, "but all reports indicated that the morale of the British is holding out.... It is very interesting to see how the tide of opinion has swung in favor of the eventual victory of the British. The reports of our observers on the other side have changed and are quite optimistic."

            Though Great Britain had weathered one summer's crisis, Stimson and President Roosevelt recognized that next spring would bring a renewed threat. American aid was critical.

            Through the summer Roosevelt had kept one eye on the November elections -- Harry Hopkins had manipulated a third-term "draft" -- and with the other eye followed the progress of the German Army on a map set up in the Oval Office. Whatever he proposed to supply the British, he had to reckon with public opinion and the isolationist bloc.

            The isolationists were formidable, especially in the Republican Party, led by an Old Guard of men whose bullish patriotism blinded them to new realities. They were joined by the privileged, who scorned Roosevelt as a traitor to his class, who opposed aid to Great Britain merely because that man sought it.

            Elsewhere there were also powerful voices: the Radio Priest, as Father Charles Coughlin called himself, broadcasting from Detroit to an audience of millions across the country; the idolized Charles A. Lindbergh, ostensibly a non-political expert on aviation, in actuality an awed Germanophile; and such influential men as Wall Street attorney John Foster Dulles.

            Bonded together as America First, they formed the core of opposition to both Roosevelt's reelection and aid to the Allies. At least 40 percent of the public in spring 1940, the Gallup Poll reported, believed aid to Britain and France a mistaken first step toward direct American involvement in Europe's war. In early June, public opinion churned by a massive public relations struggle was about evenly divided on aid and the presidency alike.

            Like France and the Lowlands, the isolationists too were crushed in the assault of Hitler's Panzers. "Two months ago," one Republican strategist warned in mid-June, "an isolationist was a sound fellow who minded his own business." With the fall of France, an isolationist had become "one who believes we have no interest in the European mess and is willing to sit back and watch Nazi aggression conquer the world by terror."

            In Washington, a chief of staff increasingly sensitive to political realities also weighed the public mood. Learning quickly, Marshall timed what he termed a great many proposals with the actions of Hitler's government. He would wait the right moment to seek funding, meanwhile dealing with internal War Department problems.

            Emboldened by President Roosevelt's call for the production of 50,000 aircraft, young Air Corps officers argued that great bombers alone would determine the outcome of future wars. Their partisans in Congress and the press assailed Marshall's "outmoded" concept of balanced air and ground forces. The chief of staff asked for such mundane items as barracks and blankets, neither of which won wars nor would impress Hitler, while the president sought bombers. Still Marshall refused to back down. If the United States went to war, the issue would be decided in a great land battle, not in the air, he believed. He wanted no repetition of the Spanish-American War's massive supply snarls, or the lack of winter clothing that confronted Pershing in France were his army seat into the field. Furthermore, Marshall asked pointedly, what good were airplanes when they lacked pilots to fly them?

            Marshall did not oppose a build-up of the Air Corps as such. He insisted, however, that it come about rationally, coordinated with the needs of other branches. Both the chief and the younger flying officers could look to the European war for proof of their arguments.

            Airpower would be essential, Marshall acknowledged. In the early months of 1940, he had reviewed a staff proposal calling for 54 air groups, some 5,000 planes, with all the training facilities, landing fields, air bases, and technical installations needed to support such an air fleet. After listening to young Major Laurence Kuter's presentation, Marshall asked only, "Why is this a fifty-four group program? Why not fifty-six, or sixty four, or more?"

            Surprised, Kuter said no one had ever asked him that question before. Fifty-four groups was all the Air Corps could effectively manage at the moment, he replied.

            Marshall nodded. "The program is approved. Let's get on with it."

            For all he had accomplished, Marshall could take no satisfaction in the pace of rearmament. Accepting an honorary degree in one 1940 from Pennsylvania Military College, he told the graduates the nation had begun preparing for war and was now far more advanced than it had been in 1917. But how much further along to the prescribed Protective Mobilization Force would they be had Congress funded the peacetime Army conceived in 1921? "Then there was plenty of time and little money, and now there is plenty of money and very little time."

            As Marshall anticipated, events in Europe opened the Treasury as domestic appeals could not. Admiral Harold Stark, chief of naval operations, would place the largest naval procurement order in history before the end of summer, calling for construction of 210 ships, including twelve aircraft carriers and seven battleships. By mid-year, the total army and navy appropriations would top $17 billion, more than nine times the 1939 figure.

            The Army's appropriations were to pay for a multi-layered preparedness program. Marshall sought to equip a combat-ready ground force of 1 million men, while simultaneously stockpiling "important long [lead] time items" such as tanks and anti-aircraft guns sufficient for an army of 2 million. At the same time, army procurement was to build up an industrial base to supply an army of 4 million men.

            The program was ambitious, but suddenly possible. Congress cheered when the president sought funding for his 50,000 airplanes, sending FDR back to the White House contemplating yet another $4 billion appropriation for defense. An economy what had resisted all the ministrations of Roosevelt's "Dr. New Deal" would dramatically turn about with the cures of "Dr. Win-the-War."

            These weapons of war would be important, when deliveries began, but they raised the question of expanding the Army from its authorized 255,000-man strength. Even the most isolationist of officeholders could rationalize a vote for arms purchases or military construction; that added to the local economy. Manpower levies on the other hand subtracted men from their families, wage earners from the community, and votes from election returns.

            For just that reason, President Roosevelt refused to advocate conscription; any such move would inevitably appear to be the first step to sending American boys to rescue the British Empire. The president wanted to appear to be " `attacked' for inactivity and thus `goaded' into action by public demand." Roosevelt's briar-patch gamble rested on the expectation that public opinion would veer toward mobilization before the nation found itself at war, without an army to defend it.

            Instead, the nation's first peacetime conscription bill sprang from one of the more remarkable, if little remembered men of his time, Grenville Clark. Once Henry Stimson's law partner, Clark had advocated military preparedness since World War I and the Plattsburg experience. In the spring of 1940, as the "sitzkrieg" exploded into war, Clark approached Marshall with a model selective service bill, seeking the chief of staff's support.

            Marshall declined to endorse the bill introduced at Clark's behest by New York Republican Congressman James Wadsworth and Democratic Senator Edward R. Burke of Nebraska. As chief of staff, he was technically independent of the "political" executive branch, free to render such professional judgments as he considered in the nation's best interest. Nonetheless, to support the bill risked a White House confrontation over the president's calculated strategy, and squandering his modest influence with FDR. However much he wanted to increase the size of the Army's long-planned Protective Mobilization Force, however certain the eventual passage of a draft bill, Marshall's first priority was to build up stocks of supplies for those draftees. He too needed time.

            Two other political considerations figured in his decision: endorsement of a bill Democratic floor leader James Byrnes said did not have a "Chinaman's chance" in the Senate would undercut his growing authority with Congress. Finally, he was acutely aware that his backing of a draft bill would be widely interpreted as a move to increase his own power. The Burke-Wadsworth bill, one senator had already complained to Marshall, was "one of the most stupid and outrageous things that `the generals' had ever perpetrated on Congress."

            Marshall preferred to make haste slowly. An immediate draft would force him to strip his five partially mobilized, triangular divisions of men to train the inductees. The Army would be left, literally, with no effective infantry. Instead of an immediate draft, he favored an enlarged volunteer army of 375,000, the 120,000 new recruits used to bring the nine planned infantry divisions to full strength.

            Draftees would require clothing, vehicles, weapons; even housing was in short supply. To outfit the new troops now, Marshall would be forced to strip National Guard units across the country, just when increased training had measurably improved their combat efficiency. By terms of the long-standing mobilization plan, those 241,000 guardsmen needed further training, not abandonment in favor of raw levies.

            Undaunted, Clark pressed on, riding the crest of events in Europe. The appointment of his law partner Henry Stimson on June 20, 1940, as secretary of war gave him a dedicated ally lobbying effectively within the administration. Stimson set to clearing away the opposition to the draft bill.

            While Washington sweltered in the heat of the hottest July in memory, Stimson first dissuaded the president from openly backing Marshall's volunteer-only plan, arguing it was inadequate. The president's endorsement of a volunteer army, however appealing the plan was politically, would give anti-draft legislators a weapon with which to beat the Clark bill to death.

            Stimson and Clark together convinced Marshall on the morning of July 8 that his all-volunteer army would not be sufficient. Even as they talked, enlistments lagged. Compulsory service was the only solution in a period of crisis, and Clark's plan for a national lottery "the only fair, efficient and democratic way to raise an army."

            Marshall needed little urging. He wanted civilians to initiate proposals to conscript civilians for service in his army. If he led off, he later acknowledged, "I would have defeated myself before I started and I was very conscious of that feeling." If the initiative came from civilians, how ever, the army chief of staff "could take up the cudgels....

            At least some of their manpower problems might have been eased were Marshall and Stimson less men of their times. Approximately 10 percent of the nation's population was black, generally undereducated and greatly under employed. Many sought to enlist but encountered quotas and discouragement.

            Black troops had served in segregated units since the Civil War, occasionally with distinction, but usually under white officers. During the first war, President Wilson had yielded to political pressure and appointed some black junior officers to serve with the 92nd Division (colored), as the Army formally designated it. They had not done well, General Pershing noted, "owing to the lower capacity and lack of education of the personnel" and because they themselves were hastily trained.

            Marshall, unquestioning, shared Pershing's opinion. Never overtly hostile to blacks, he was instead patronizing. In at least one letter, written in 1941 to a childhood friend, he referred to a "darkey soldier." While such an attitude was hardly cruel bigotry, it would do nothing to enlarge the limited role assigned to black troops by men like Marshall.

            Reflecting the society at large, magnifying that society because of the high percentage of southerners in uniform, the Army was a segregated institution. How else when even the Red Cross labeled blood plasma "colored" and "white"    Marshall saw no irony, only a righteous sense of even-handed treatment in the Army's separate but equal policy. He assured one complainant that four black soldiers had suffered no discrimination when compelled to eat at a separate table in the kitchen at a California air base.

            White cooks and mess attendants customarily eat in the kitchen, and the food and service are the same as those provided in the main dining room. It is felt that no discrimination was intended.

            Upon the arrival of twenty additional negro soldiers at the school on October 4, all were fed in the main dining room with white troops. Since October to a separate dining room and mess hall has been provided for them.

            Discrimination in the Army against men of any color or race is not sanctioned by the War Department, and I thank you for bringing this matter to my personal attention.

            The Army's separate but equal policies produced waste. When Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming pointed out that Negroes were turned away from the Air Corps, Marshall responded,

            It has been the policy -- and I think it is a necessary one -- that we do not have mixed units.... I have had the question asked me why, in advertising for recruits, more effort was not made toward procuring colored recruits. As a matter of fact, the usual reenlistments for the white organizations have been on the basis of about 40 percent; for the colored organizations they are about 80 percent reenlistments. All colored units have a waiting list. We do not have to make any effort to recruit for those units. No one proposed creating additional black units, even though white enlistments continued to lag.

            Other policies might change, however. The fall of France had galvanized public sentiment in favor of preparedness, and the draft bill once given only a "Chinaman's chance" appeared now a good bet.

            Still FDR raised no public voice in support of the bill. At the same time, he permitted Marshall to quietly lobby individual congressmen. "The Army played politics," Marshall candidly admitted in a later interview.

            Not until July 31, with the Luftwaffe swarming the skies over England, did the president sanction administration support of the draft bill. Stimson immediately issued a statement advising Congress, "We've got to very radically revise our prejudices about our first line of defense. A prudent trustee must take into consideration that in another thirty days Great Britain may be conquered and her fleet come under enemy control. Across the Pacific there is a powerful Japan in sympathy with Italy and Germany."

            With the president's approval, Marshall endorsed the Selective Service bill in testimony before the House Committee on Military Affairs on the afternoon of July 24, 1940. Testifying in the swelter of the high-ceilinged hearing room, Marshall warned the committee, "We cannot afford, under the present conditions, to speculate with the national defense. We certainly are not doing too much, but I think it would be far, far better that we do too much... than that we underrate the hazard of the very critical situation in the world at the present time, as it affects us."

            Was not the Army asking for too much -- 1.4 million men to serve eighteen months -- Congressman R. Ewing Thomason demanded.   "I might say my relief of mind would be tremendous if we just had too much of something besides patriotism and spirit," Marshall sighed.

            Masking his impatience with politic gestures, Marshall acceded to a series of amendments the White House believed necessary to get the draft bill adopted. The first trimmed the term of service from eighteen to just twelve months, with a clause permitting extension if Congress were to declare a state of national emergency. Marshall also accepted an amendment limiting the number of inductees to 900,000 per year, thus avoiding a drain on the national economy some congressmen feared. Finally, to appease isolationists, he silently accepted another amendment barring use of draftees outside the western hemisphere.

            Speaking candidly, with some deference always, Marshall appeared repeatedly before congressional committees through the summer. His sober demeanor deflected charges he was an alarmist. His frankness guaranteed he was not merely the president's henchman.

            On August 7, with a torpid Congress seemingly stunned by the record heat wave of that summer, Marshall took a bold step, one that had the effect of establishing his reputation as a professional rather than a political soldier. Appearing before the crucial Senate Appropriations Committee's military subcommittee, the chief of staff asked for a second supplemental military appropriation of $4 billion. The Army's portion of the money was to be used, he candidly told the senators, to outfit and house the long-planned Protective Mobilization Force of 1.2 million men and 800,000 reserves. For the moment his Army and National Guard together mustered only a quarter of that; the additional manpower he hoped to secure through the draft, pending in Congress. They had to act now, even before approval of the Selective Service bill, if the Army was to be ready for the first call-up. "The weeks have come and gone and we have been unable to make a start" on construction, he reminded the senators.

            Marshall made no attempt to soften the blow, relying instead on candor. "I think it is tragic that we find ourselves in a situation which requires the spending of these colossal amounts of money for purely a war-making purpose," he told the senators.

            "I think it is indeed unfortunate that the so-called enlightened peoples of the world should be engaged in devoting such a large part of their resources to nonproductive, war-making purposes."

            Marshall would not flinch from responsibility. Neither would he permit the senators to slip the burden. "We must meet the situation that is facing us, and I see no way of doing that except by preparing. Huge sums of money must be spent, but that spending must be done in the most businesslike manner possible. There must be no undue waste. Hasty and ill-considered expenditures must be avoided."

            In speaking so frankly, Marshall risked appearing presumptuous, as if assuming the Selective Service bill, wending its own way through the Congress, would be adopted. Because legislators resented assumptions of how they might decide an issue, the general could destroy his growing rapport with Congress, and with it his own effectiveness as chief of staff.

            He might have ducked the issue entirely, putting off the funding request until passage of the draft bill. That strategy assured delaying inductions until facilities could be built for the draftees.

            Isolationist Senator Gerald P. Nye, who had built an international reputation investigating World War I's munitions industry, deemed the bill hasty. "Of course, General, we can entertain a hope that developments abroad in the next few months will be such that we can abandon a considerable part of this program, can we not?"

            The general shook his head. "Senator, I am sorry that I cannot entertain any such hope at present. My fear is not that I am recommending too much but rather that I may find at some time in the future that I recommended too little. In fact, if I could feel now that I might expect some day to face an investigation for having recommended too much, my mind would be more at rest than it is at present."

            Marshall spoke bluntly, refusing to temporize. The Protective Mobilization Force was but a "first essential requirement. It would furnish the covering force behind which we would have to prepare additional forces for a larger effort to maintain the integrity of the Western Hemisphere." A planned army composed of 27 infantry divisions, two armored divisions, six cavalry divisions, and an Air Corps of 11,000 planes would still "be inadequate to wage a successful war with a fully prepared foreign power."

            Persuaded by Marshall, the subcommittee voted its do-pass to the appropriations bill just as the end of the heat wave released Congress from lethargy. At the same time, public opinion polls reported that seven of ten Americans now favored the draft, and deemed preparedness the best defense in the current crisis. Then Wendell Willkie, the independent who had become the Republicans' presidential nominee, surprisingly endorsed the concept of selective service, and thereby removed the bill from partisan dispute. That slow, inefficient thing termed a democracy had reached a decision; suddenly, America determined to arm, and on August 27, both houses of Congress authorized the call-up of the National Guard for one year.

            The Army's affairs would improve even more. On September 14, the House of Representatives turned back a last effort to postpone the draft until after the election, and adopted the Senate version of the Burke Wadsworth bill. Two days later, the first of the federalized National Guard units reporting for duty, President Roosevelt signed the Selective Service Act. The measure that would form the basis for the United States' war effort was law.

            On Wednesday, October 16, 16,316,908 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six lined up for "R-Day" at schools, public buildings, and churches to enroll in what The New York Times's Cabell Phillips called "an historic muster." The draft swept democratically across economic and social class lines. The president's second son, Franklin Delano Junior, turned up to register at an Indianapolis firehouse, listing his occupation as "unemployed." The intervention-minded son of the isolationist Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, twenty-three-year-old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, registered in Stanford, California, where he was spending a year in pre-law and racing his red Buick convertible about the Bay Area. FDR Junior, John Kennedy, and each of the other 16,316,906 men who signed up on Registration Day was assigned a number from 1 to 6,175 by his draft board. That number was to govern the lives of an entire generation.

            Thirteen days later, a blindfolded Secretary of War Henry Stimson dipped a ladle carved from a beam taken from Independence Hall into a huge glass bowl containing bright blue capsules. He handed the first containing its fateful number to President Roosevelt, who opened it and read, "One hundred fifty-eight."

            On paper at least, Chief of Staff George Marshall finally had his army: 500,000 were Regulars, 270,000 were from the National Guard, and 630,000 were to be draftees, inducted at the rate of 20,000 to 50,000 per month over the next year. Together they would form five Regular Army and four National Guard divisions, all at full strength finally; two cavalry divisions; one experimental, barely equipped armored brigade; an air force with 5,000 planes; and support troops. At the end of October 1940, the first 16,000 draftees reported to twenty-nine induction centers set up across the country. Ten million more would follow in the next five years.

            Mobilization aggravated Marshall's supply problems in the fall and early winter. Continued British requests for ever more armaments jeopardized his caches and left the chief of staff confronting the president.

            When Great Britain requested delivery of fifteen B-17s earlier disdained in favor of the Royal Air Force's Lancaster bomber, President Roosevelt suggested to Marshall he comply. The new bombers thus could be tested under battle conditions, Roosevelt recommended; surely that was essential to America's defense.

            Marshall bridled. Congress had charged him with the responsibility of certifying that military equipment was not essential to the Army before it could be released to the British. Marshall agonized. "I was a little ashamed of this," he acknowledged later, "because I felt that I was straining at the subject in order to get around the resolution of Congress." Marshall strained, finally accepting whatever rationalization was necessary to provide the British with the fifteen bombers.

            Still the president wanted more than tokens. Advocating an "even Stephen" division of bombers as they came off the assembly line, FDR summoned a White House meeting on September 27. State, Treasury, Army, Navy, they gathered in the Oval Office.

            Marshall did the talking for the Army, the secretary wrote in his diary that night. "And he did it well. We had only 49 bombing planes fit for duty outside of those in the insular possessions -- the garrisons of Panama and Hawaii -- and the president's head went back as if someone had hit him in the chest when this fact was brought out."

            They were dusting empty shelves, yet the British need was acute. In mid-October, the British Purchasing Commission presented a shopping list of supplies necessary to outfit ten divisions by the end of 1941. More over, Great Britain wanted to increase its airplane orders from 14,000 to 26,000 of all types. None of this would have been beyond American industrial capacity, but for the U.S. Army's own swelling needs.

            Marshall was to constantly reevaluate his commitment to arming the British in light of international developments. As the Battle of Britain waned, Marshall grew more optimistic. But the September 27, 1940, announcement that Japan had affiliated with the Berlin-Rome axis stirred new anxieties in him. Germany and Italy posed no immediate threat to the United States, but assertive Japan could easily move on the Philippines if provoked by American opposition to Japanese economic expansion.

            For the moment, Marshall had not the forces to prevent Japanese expansion anywhere. The secretary of war, once a governor general of the islands, had declined to approve an increase in the number of Philippine Scouts a month earlier. The increase would be far too small to make any difference should Japan attack the Philippines.

            Marshall's only option in the face of a looming threat from Japan was to urge the president not to take any action that might provoke the Japanese to attack the Philippines until the Army was better equipped and trained. For the next year Marshall would find himself pitted against Secretary of State Cordell Hull petulantly urging strong counters to Japanese territorial ambition. Heeding Hull one day, booming welcome to Marshall the next, President Roosevelt played for time in the Far East.

            Like the president, the chief of staff was capable of the clever stratagem, however much he preferred to deal openly. A combination of overt and covert tactics during these months wrought what may well have been Marshall's greatest contribution to the United States Army.

            During a recess in the Senate appropriations hearings of August 7, Marshall delayed his return to the Munitions Building to talk privately to Senator Byrnes about a pressing problem. If he was to build an army for war, Marshall explained, he had to have troop leaders fit for combat. Now he was stymied. Four months earlier, he had appeared before the House Military Affairs Committee seeking a bill that would permit the War Department to promote younger officers by retiring older men no longer fit for field service. Marshall meant to wipe out the dreaded hump.

            The Army was different from civilian life, Marshall had told the committee. "One does acquire experience and judgment with the years, but also, unfortunately, we lose the resiliency of tendons and muscles.... We may have the wisdom of the years, but we lack I know I do in many respects the physical raggedness of more youthful days."

            In the first war, Marshall continued, he had seen twenty-seven of the twenty-nine divisions sent into combat, "and there were more reliefs of field officers, those above the grade of captain, due to physical reasons than for any other cause."

            A second war now loomed; Marshall needed younger officers commanding regiments and battalions, yet was stuck with superannuated colonels waiting eventual retirement.

            The House committee had been unmoved, Marshall told Byrnes. Those older officers had long-standing ties with congressmen, and fought back; a sympathetic Chairman Andrew J. May of Kentucky held the hill in committee. "I was accused of getting rid of all the brains in the Army," Marshall later said. "I couldn't reply that I was eliminating considerable arteriosclerosis."

            Byrnes agreed to help. When the appropriations bill came up for Senate consideration, he inserted an innocuous-sounding amendment drafted by the War Department: "In time of war or national emergency determined by the President, any officer of the Regular Army may be appointed to higher temporary grade without vacating his permanent appointment." (The president had declared a "state of unlimited national emergency" on May 27, 1940.)

            Byrnes's amendment passed easily, and became law with the adoption of the Second Supplemental Appropriation Act of 1940. Chairman May not only voted for the amendment, but did not learn he had been effectively outmaneuvered for some days. The chief of staff would have to spend a considerable amount of time soothing May's injured pride.

            Vested with the authority to promote the younger men he considered deserving, Marshall set about making vacancies for them. He created a "plucking committee" of six retired officers headed by former Chief of Staff Malin Craig and assigned them the task of reviewing the efficiency ratings of older officers. They were to weed out the worst, he instructed, to make room for younger men.

            No action by Marshall would cause as much bitterness as his creation of the plucking board. In its first six months, the panel removed 195 captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels; in the next five years it would ticket 500 colonels for immediate retirement. (Marshall agreed in a later interview that the board had been "ruthless," but defended the retirements as necessary. Even years later, those officers forced into retirement without promotion to the rank of brigadier general, and their wives, could not mention Marshall's name without a curse.)

            Marshall himself was to turn sixty at the end of the year, reaching the age he had established for mandatory retirement of older officers no longer able to stand the strain. Should not he too be subjected to the same standard, he wondered.

            Even before Malin Craig's review board began its work, the chief of staff paid one of his infrequent visits to the White House. After explaining the amendment, and no doubt preparing the president for the public outcry that would surely follow the enforced retirements, Marshall offered his own resignation to FDR.

            Roosevelt, himself fifty-eight, made no comment. He could afford to wait. If the press rallied to the superannuated colonels and turned its editorial fire on the president, FDR would be able to announce Marshall's own resignation as both an example for others to follow and a propitiating sacrifice.

            After two weeks, with only the anti-New Deal McCormick and Patterson papers sounding alarms, and still no word from the White House, Marshall called Harry Hopkins.

            Hopkins was amused. "The President just laughs at you," he told the chief of staff. "He says no politician ever resigns a job and that's just talk."

            Not to Marshall. A second time he marched to the White House to offer his resignation. This time he suggested he train his successor for two or three months, and then step down. A second time the president listened impassively.

            McCormick's Chicago Tribune and Cissy Patterson's Washington Times Herald found no support elsewhere. Their editorial protest sputtered impotently; the retired colonels were forgotten. Once more Hopkins explained by telephone that the president had ignored his chief of staff's offer to retire. Marshall would stay on.

            As the plucking board set to work, Marshall meanwhile drew up the first list of promotions to submit to the president. In a year of decisions vital to the nation's rearmament, none would be more important than the selection of the Army's new leadership. Marshall would be shaping, as had Pershing before him, an army in his own image.

            Though he relied mainly on his prodigious memory for both success and failure, Marshall checked at least some of the names with his old mentor, General Pershing, during biweekly visits to the old man's suite at Waiter Reed Hospital. The recommendations then went to Stimson for review.

            Over a weekend at Highhold, the secretary and Marshall's old friend from Chicago, retired General Frank McCoy, examined the service records of each of the chief of staff's nominations. Stimson was delighted, he noted in his diary, for Marshall had tapped "several men whom McCoy and I knew to be good war men and yet who might have not have had as good a record on paper."

            The first list of hundreds to come bumped seventy-nine colonels and two lieutenant colonels to the rank of brigadier general. While a number were to achieve distinction as combat commanders, the majority of the promotions went to men who would provide the training and logistical spine of the new army Marshall was building. Throughout, Marshall maintained, "I have been absolutely cold-blooded in this business."

            For every bitter colonel jumped by younger men, there was a more vigorous and delighted officer. Robert L. Eichelberger's happily weeping wife showed him the telegram announcing his promotion. The following day, George S. Patton, who had privately feared his age would count against him, wired Eichelberger: "At last they have had sense enough to promote the two best damn officers in the U.S. Army ."

            The question of senior commanders addressed, Marshall took on the problem of providing the junior officers necessary to lead the expected draft levies. That matter was to provoke the first major clash between the chief of staff and the secretary of war, even as it raised once again the unresolved issue of who set policy for the War Department, the military chief or the civilian secretary.

            Stimson and his closest advisers, Judge Patterson and Grenville Clark notably, favored the Plattsburg system of World War I, copied from the British. Commissions would go to college graduates after a short period of military training.

            Marshall had once supported the concept, but had recently changed his mind. He never explained precisely what inspired his conversion. Perhaps his own experience with the CCC during the grim years of the Depression made him realize the injustice and the wastefulness of a system that structurally favored those who could afford to attend college. Certainly leadership did not flow from a diploma. Moreover, the prospective draft was to be democratic in operation; the resulting army could not be led by a social elite if it was to reflect the best of a democracy.

            Instead, Marshall endorsed a far broader selection process in which Regular Army cadres would tap exceptional men from the ranks for further training at Officers Candidate School. Both Regular Army enlistees and Selective Service draftees, when they came, were to be eligible. Direct commissions for the favored, the socially conscious Navy's favored method, were to be limited. Marshall would bend only to offer a slight compromise: college men would have their commissions confirmed only after taking basic training. At least, he argued, they would have had a taste of the enlisted man's lot, and thus would be more sensitive to the needs of the troops.

            The secretary of war could be as rigid as his chief of staff. When Stimson held out for the Plattsburg system of direct commissions, Marshall exploded. "I tell you I am going to resign the day you do it!"

            Stunned as much by the vehemence as the threat itself, Stimson backed down, to the irritation of Patterson and Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCIoy. They insisted the General Staff's opposition was "simply a mark of incompetence and narrow-mindedness." Marshall had prevailed, but threats alone would not resolve the larger question of who set policy for the War Department. The issue would rise again.

            In pressing the Officers Candidate confrontation, the chief of staff was groping his way to shaping a vast citizen army, democratically selected by a random draft. Its combat leaders, the platoon, company, and battalion commanders, were to be chosen not by social privilege as in armies of the past but by personal qualifications. The Army he envisioned required a new form of discipline as well, one that discarded the "monotonous drilling, which, to be honest, achieved obedience at the expense of initiative. It excluded `thought' of any kind."

            That would not do in Marshall's new army. He wanted military discipline to grow out of "respect rather than fear; on the effect of good example given by officers; on the intelligent comprehension by all ranks of why an order has to be and why it must be carried out; on a sense of duty, on esprit de corps."

            Marshall had seen discipline based upon blind obedience in wartime, and had seen it fail with the abortive mutiny in the Fifth and Sixth French Armies in 1917. He had also seen the destruction of morale by officers insensitive to the needs of their men, and whole armies that sought to substitute rigid discipline for the will to win. "It is morale that wins the victory," he argued. "It is steadfastness and courage and hope. It is confidence and zeal and loyalty. It is elan, esprit de corps, and determination. It is staying power, spirit which endures to the end....

            The great destroyers of morale -- inadequate creature comforts, boredom, and a sense of unfair treatment -- Marshall sought to alleviate. He encouraged experiments in the design of uniforms, including a change from World War I's steel helmet to the ubiquitous, all-purpose "pot" of World War II that would cut down on neck and head wounds. More than one field commander was sharply rebuked for the poor quality of his mess after an inspection by the chief of staff. When Marshall discovered on another trip that units were short of clothing, he tersely dismissed the Quartermaster's excuses in Washington, "I am interested in the soldier having his pants."

            The shortage of recreation facilities led him to make an unannounced visit in civilian clothes to a small town in the South inundated with idle troops from the nearby army post. Troops swarmed through the town, taxing the small restaurants, crowding the streets as they wandered away a rare day of leave. Forced to wait four hours for a seat at a lunch counter, and then served "some warmed-over biscuits and things of that sort," Marshall returned to Washington to establish a committee to plan recreational activities for his army. Out of that directly grew the United Services Organization, more familiar as the USO, a joint military-civilian enterprise that was eventually to become the largest theatrical booking agency in the world, and manager of an equally impressive number of recreational centers for troops on passes.

            Marshall made it a part of his routine to spend perhaps twenty minutes a day reading through letters of complaint from parents and soldiers alike, answering them himself, or forwarding them to commanders with orders that the matter be corrected. He would not remove all the injustices, nor correct all the grievances, but his example was meaningful. Even a private soldier in this democratically selected Army of the United States was to have the right to petition for a redress of grievances.

            The accelerating pace of military mobilization took its toll on the man responsible for the build-up. Marshall worked long days, his four o'clock quitting time ignored, his weekends in Quarters No. 1 interrupted by telephone calls or additional hours in his office over the entryway of the Munitions Building. Despite delegating responsibility, too many questions came to his desk for decision the timing of legislation, the curbing of presidential enthusiasm for airpower alone, the wooing of key legislators and influential newsmen. Unable to put aside his anxieties at night, he slept poorly.

            Mrs. Marshall became concerned. Aware that her husband -- who still followed the fortunes of VMI's football team -- had hoped to squeeze in time to attend one game that season, she paid a call on Secretary Stimson. The result was one of the more unusual orders issued by the War Department:

            The President of the United States directs that General George C. Marshall during the period between Friday, October 11th, and Monday, October 14th, shall visit the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, for the purpose of making a report upon the comparative skill and valor of the football teams of Davidson and Virginia Military Institute.

            During said period he shall be under the exclusive control and direction of Mrs. Marshall and shall be protected against all interruptions, particularly by members of the War Department and of the Congress.

 By virtue of the Secretary of War's order, Marshall saw the game. VMI won, 13 to 7.

            Marshall returned to a Washington caught up in the 1940 presidential election campaign. Republican nominee Wendell Willkie, who had defused aid to Britain as a partisan issue by endorsing it, suddenly changed course. Trailing in the polls, unable to make capital of the third-term issue, Willkie succumbed to the urgings of party professionals and abandoned the concept of a bipartisan foreign policy.

            The United States would be involved in the war within five months were Roosevelt reelected, Willkie charged. The sons of American mothers were already on the boat; wives and sweethearts would be heir to wooden crosses; American boys would die defending Great Britain's cowering Empire. By constant repetition, Willkie stirred fears across the country, and dramatically reversed the polls. Alarmed messages from Democratic National Headquarters pleaded for FDR to pledge to stay clear of foreign wars. If he did not, the Democratic ticket would lose. By the end of October, when the first draft call underscored Willkie's charges, the Republican candidate had closed to within four percentage points of the president. Perhaps for the first time in his political career, Roosevelt himself became rattled.

            On a campaign train to Boston, he bowed to pleadings of party regulars. Into the draft of a speech he was to give that night, FDR inserted a pledge "addressed to you mothers and fathers... I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars."

            On election night, Roosevelt took refuge in his home at Hyde Park to await the outcome. Willkie ran well in early returns, mostly from the Republican Northeast, but by 10:00 p. m., Roosevelt had rolled up a safe margin. His tie loosened, the president sat at the dining-room table noting the state-by-state totals as they were reported, laying down his pencil only when he had marked up 27.2 million votes to Willkie's 22.3 million. The Republican had carried only ten states, but the margin was the smallest since Woodrow Wilson's narrow defeat of Charles Evans Hughes in 1916. The Boston speech with its reassurance had been enough to stem Willkie's rush.

            In London, a relieved Winston Churchill composed a telegram at his desk in the underground war room three stories below Storey Gate. "I did not think it right for me as a foreigner to express any opinion upon American politics while the election was on but now I feel that you will not mind my saying that I prayed for your success and that I am truly thankful for it."

            The king's first minister sorely needed Roosevelt's support. Winter's overcast skies had given Londoners some respite from the Blitz, though the Luftwaffe managed to drop some 4,300 tons of bombs on England in December. The submarine assaults in the North Atlantic had increased through the year; U-boats had already sunk 4 million tons of shipping, choking off part of the vital supply line to Great Britain. "It is now very clear that England will not be able to hold out very much longer against it unless some defense is found," Stimson confided to his diary.

            The few bright spots for the Allies were all in peripheral actions. Greek forces had rallied to drive invading Italians back into Albania. In Egypt, the British Western Desert Force outflanked an Italian army at Sidi Barrani, capturing 38,000 Italians and Libyans. Yet the power of the Wehrmacht stood untouched, arrayed along the Channel facing the Dover coast. London and Washington expected Hitler's Operation Sealion in the spring.

            On December 16, Stimson and Marshall met with Secretary of the Navy Knox and Admiral Stark to assess the year's accomplishments. The four men agreed "this emergency could hardly be passed over without this country being drawn into the war eventually," Stimson wrote in his diary. A growing minority of Americans concurred, whatever their hope that the United States could stay out of the conflict.

 

Oranges, Purples, and Rainbows

Chapter XIII

            The Year of the Dragon gave way to the Year of the Snake. Aboard the massive battleship Nagato anchored in ironclad serenity in Hiroshima Bay, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, weighed his plan conceived late in December 1940. A bold thinker, Yamamoto intended to radically revise traditional naval strategy, to shift the Kantai Kessen or Great All-Out Battle from the western Pacific eastward, to change its character from a defensive sea encounter fought near the Japanese homeland to an offensive strike at the enemy wherever its fleet might be.

            The stocky, thick-chested admiral, then sixty-four, had no great desire for that battle, or for the long war he knew would inevitably follow. As a Harvard undergraduate, then as naval attache in Washington, he had seen the massive power of, American industry, and the vast natural resources that Japan lacked. The younger officers on the Naval General Staff, so cocky, so certain of victory, could boast of Japan's growing naval power, but Admiral Yamamoto was not so deluded. If war came, he wrote a former classmate at the naval academy, "I shall run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third year."

            Like so many senior naval officers, Yamamoto wanted to avoid that conflict. Yet if it came, if Japan's claims upon Southeast Asia and the resources of the Indies were rebuffed and his country thereby doomed to the status of a second-class power, the admiral would fight. He had already asked for command of the fleet that sought out the American Navy according to his plans.

            Yamamoto's conception was simple: a preemptive strike upon the American fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. Two to four aircraft carriers were "to launch a forced or surprise attack with all their air strength, risking themselves on a moonlight night or at dawn." Then in direct support of invasion forces moving toward Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, "a forestalling and surprise attack on enemy air forces in the Philippines and Singapore should definitely be made almost at the same time as the attacks against Hawaii "

            The key was the elimination of America's Pacific Fleet before it could strike a flank attack on Japanese forces moving toward Southeast Asia. The British had proved such an aerial assault possible; twenty obsolete biplanes carrying special torpedoes had flown off the carrier Illustrious on the morning of November 11, 1940, then at an altitude of just 35 feet swooped upon the Italian fleet anchored in the naval roadstead on the Ionian Sea at Taranto. The torpedos slipped under nets across the mouth of the harbor and struck no less than three battleships. Half the effective force of the Italian Navy was in repair. Control of the eastern Mediterranean had passed to the British at a cost of two planes in this, the first successful attack on warships by carrier-launched planes.

            To perfect his plan, Admiral Yamamoto turned to Commodore Minoru Genda, a brilliant advocate of naval airpower who had long argued for massed air attacks on surface ships rather than the classic sea war between hulking battleships. Genda set to work solving two problems: how to deploy large numbers of attacking bombers in the narrow confines of Pearl Harbor, and the development of a torpedo, like the British, effective at short range in shallow waters.

            Yamamoto considered his a contingency plan, in case diplomacy failed to secure the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere Japan prized. He much preferred the peaceful way, even in the face of the Americans' provocative behavior.

            First the Americans had decided not to renew the twenty-year-old Treaty of Trade and Navigation with Japan. Though trade had not been injured, the non-renewal on the grounds of Japan's continued war with an American ally, China, set the two nations on a diplomatic collision course.

            Then the United States had announced an embargo on aviation fuel shipments and Number 1 grade scrap iron used to make steel. Japan might still buy crude oil, but its refinery capacity was small, too small to meet the projected need of a nation mobilizing its armed forces. Successive restrictions on other raw materials President Roosevelt said were used in the bombing of the Chinese only made matters worse.

            Such embargos were tokens of America's emnity, and signals to the expansion-minded that Japan's future lay with the Axis. Prodded by impatient army leaders, a new premier, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, installed the former chief of staff of the bellicose Kwantung Army as Minister of War. The ascension of the man known as "Razor Brain," General Hideki Tojo, was an ominous setback for the peace party in Tokyo.

            The new foreign minister, Yosuke Matsuoka, quickly concluded a Tri partite Pact with Germany and Italy. By terms of the agreement approved on September 26, 1940, Germany and Italy were to hold sway in Europe, Japan to dominate "a new order in Greater East Asia." Further, the three signators agreed to "undertake to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three Contracting Parties is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European War or in the Sino-Japanese Conflict."

            Japan's New Order was to stretch from the mid-Pacific to New Zealand and Australia, across the Malay Peninsula to swallow Indochina, Burma, Thailand, and India. The home islands, Korea, Manchuria, and China were to be the core of the largest empire the world had ever known.

            Japan first meant to secure the center, or at least to isolate the enfeebled Nationalist armies of Chiang Kaishek. In July 1940, Japanese pressure forced the British temporarily to close the oneIane road through the Yunnan Mountains over which traveled the meager supplies Chiang could secure in the West. The threat to China mounted when Vichy France, at German orders, yielded to Japan the right to maintain troops and airfields in the northern portion of French Indochina. A second arm of the pincers thus closed on Chiang, paralyzing his lethargic divisions by mere threat of assault.

            The broad outlines of Japanese policy stood out clearly enough in Washington. The precise details would flow from the work of the son of an immigrant sewing machine salesman in the Pittsburgh area.

            Since 1918 the largely self-taught William F. Friedman had been the one-man core of a small code section tucked away in the Munitions Building, devising secure systems for the Army and cracking the codes of other nations. In February 1939, Friedman's team of cryptanalysts -- the word itself coined by him -- began work on a new Japanese diplomatic code. Eighteen months later, the day after his forty-eighth birth day, he decoded his first complete message transmitted in the code they had nicknamed "Purple." Friedman had pulled off one of the two great intelligence coups of the war. From September 25, 1940, the Japanese had no diplomatic, and few military secrets from the United States. The intercepted messages, code-named MAGIC in the War Department, were to be one of the most tightly held secrets of the war.

            Intercepting, decoding, and translating the Japanese signals was a joint venture of the Army's Signal Intelligence Service and the Navy's OP-20-C. The process was neither simple nor speedy, though SIS had grown from a bare dozen people to well over 300 in the last year. Friedman had built just eight of the Purple machines; four more with their "intricate rat's nest of wiring," were on order. Under close guard, four of the machines were in Washington, two each assigned to the Army and Navy. Another was in the Philippines, the remaining three in London, where the British monitored Japanese signals as well.

            Even with eight machines at work, the cryptanalysts were busy. An average of twenty-six signals in the diplomatic code arrived from the listening posts each day. The messages not only had to be decoded into Japanese, but then translated, no small problem. Both services were short on men or women with sufficient knowledge of Japanese culture and language to precisely, delicately translate the nuances of formal diplomatic language. To solve some of the backlog, the Army took responsibility for messages originating on even-numbered days in Tokyo, the Navy the odd.

            Beyond those working in the closely guarded code rooms, at Marshall's orders access was severely limited to MAGIC. Five army people alone saw the original translations; the list of navy recipients was no longer. "Need to know" -- as determined entirely by Marshall and Stark -- governed admission to this inner circle in the interest of protecting the secret of MAGIC. Distribution overseas was limited to MacArthur and three members of his staff in Manila, and a similar handful of British officers in Singapore.

            All-knowing MAGIC had secretly followed the negotiations of the Tri partite Pact from afar. Announcement of the treaty's signing on September 26, 1940, led Secretary of State Hull to issue a warning to American civilians to leave the Far East "in view of abnormal conditions in those areas."

            Those abnormal conditions, and especially the increased threat to China, provoked a Roosevelt gesture of disapproval. The Treasury Department on his orders tightened the embargo by adding vital copper, brass, bronze, zinc, nickel, and potash to the list of proscribed materials.

            Prime Minister Konoye groped for an accommodation with Washington on the Chinese question by changing ambassadors. Twice his choice turned the offer down, and only with the added urgings of moderate naval officers and industrialists who feared war with the United States did retired Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura agree to take up the portfolio.

            At another time, Admiral Nomura might have been the ideal ambassador of peace. Nomura, tall by Japanese standards at six feet, liked the United States and spoke English well, though deliberately, as if relearning it. During World War I, he had served as naval attache in Washington and had befriended Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The admiral also had a number of other friends in the United States, especially among naval officers.

            Nomura was now sixty-four, blinded in his right eye, partially deaf, and crippled with a limp -- all the result of a bomb thrown by a Chinese Nationalist in Shanghai in 1932. He was also burdened by the certainty that the Imperial Conference meant to go to war if necessary to expand the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Greater East Asia. Later, in recalling his futile eleven-month ministry, he would recite the Japanese proverb: "When a big house falls, one pillar cannot stop it."

            Four days after Nomura departed for Washington in January 1941, United States Ambassador Joseph Grew passed on persistent, "fantastic" reports circulating in Tokyo that Japan had begun planning an attack on Pearl Harbor. The following day, Foreign Minister Matsuoka told a budget committee of the Diet that Japan must dominate the western Pacific. "I wish to declare," the pugnacious, outspoken Matsuoka said, "that if America does not understand Japan's rightful claims and actions, then there is not the slightest hope of improvement of Japanese-American relations."

            In the War Department, the chief of staff watched these Far Eastern developments with wary eye fixed on their Pacific bases. Nine months before, he had visited the Hawaiian Islands to observe an army alert. He returned to the United States satisfied, perhaps lulled, his official biographer concluded, by the Army's defenses on the island. Marshall judged the Hawaiian Department in "excellent shape," lacking only some anti aircraft weapons. He would dispatch an anti-aircraft regiment to plug that hole in the defense.

            An island chain lying 2,000 nautical miles from the mainland athwart the Tropic of Cancer, Hawaii and especially the Big Island of Oahu sat as a volcanic outpost of American seapower. Fortified and refortified over the years, the naval base at Pearl Harbor was the linchpin in any defense of the Pacific. From here, rather than its home port of San Diego, the Pacific Fleet would sortie in the event of war, and here it would return for refitting and repairs. The Army's responsibility, Marshall instructed the new Hawaiian Department commander in February 1941, was "to protect the base and the naval concentration.... Fullest protection of the fleet is the rather than a major consideration for us."

            The Navy too was reviewing the defenses at Pearl Harbor. On January 24, 1941, Knox wrote to Stimson that the "dangers envisaged in their order of importance and probability are considered to be: (1) air bombing attack; (2) air torpedo plane attack; (3) sabotage; (4) submarine attack; (5) mining; (6) bombardment by gun fire." Because air defense was primarily an army responsibility, Marshall moved to beef up the paltry fighter plane complement. By stripping squadrons in the United States, reducing them to just three planes each, Marshall was able to round up by March 15 another thirty-one of the obsolescent P-36s. He was down to "seed corn, and that left us nothing back here at all," he wrote Stark. It slowed pilot training, he noted later, but the shipment gave Brigadier General Frederick L. Martin, the Air Corps commander in Hawaii, the nucleus of a defense force. Another fifty of the faster P-40s, plagued with engine failures early in the year, would follow in October 1941, when production reached a total of eight per day.

            Weapons could not assure invulnerability. For a decade or more the Navy War College had studied the possibility of a surprise attack on the islands, concluding again and again the Japanese would launch an attack from the air when their carriers were less than 500 miles to the north or northwest of the chain. In January 1938, a War Department estimate of the islands' defenses stipulated would attack without warning if war came, adding, "There can be little doubt that the Hawaiian Islands will be the initial scene of action."

            Three years later, Air Corps General Martin joined the naval air commander in a report to Washington on March 31, reiterating, "In the past ORANGE has never preceded hostile actions by a declaration of war. A successful, sudden raid against our ships and naval installations on Oahu might prevent effective offensive action by our forces in the western Pacific for a long period.... It appears possible that ORANGE submarines and/or an ORANGE fast raiding force might arrive in Hawaiian waters with no prior warning from our Intelligence service." The two airmen reminded their superiors: "It appears that the most likely and dangerous form of attack on Oahu would be an air attack. It is believed that at present such an attack would most likely be launched from one or more carriers which would probably approach inside of 300 miles."

            Keeping the Hawaiian Department on the mark, in a state of partial if not full alert, was critical. That was the major factor in Marshall's selection of Major General Waiter Campbell Short to replace the retiring Charles D. Herron in February 1941.

            An Illinois native, Short had joined the Army in 1902, after graduating the state university. He met the future chief of staff at Fort Reno four years later, then soldiered in the Mexican campaign. Like Marshall, he had served with the 1st Division in France, winning a Distinguished Service Medal for his efforts during the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne campaigns when he trained "machine gun outfits at every available opportunity during rest periods." Like Marshall too, he did not return to the United States until after the victory celebrations in Paris and London. He had pulled two routine tours in Washington during the inter war period, attended the War College, taught at Leavenworth, and earned his first star in 1937. He was "old Army" at age sixty-one, unimaginative and conscientious, a man drilling his way doggedly through the book. Those who had served with him thought him a decent sort, if cool and authoritarian. Much of his career devoted to teaching and training, he was just the man to bring the Army's largest overseas garrison up to full alert, Marshall believed.

            In a letter of instruction to Short, Marshall laid out his "impression of the Hawaiian problem" on February 7. The "real perils [are] the risk of sabotage and the risk of surprise attack by Air" from the "Japanese carrier-based pursuit plane." Complaints of the new Pacific Fleet commander, Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, about the state of the Army's air defenses were to be handled tactfully. "What Kimmel does not realize is that we are tragically lacking in this materiel throughout the Army and that Hawaii is on a far better basis than any other command in the Army."

            Short was instructed to cooperate fully with Kimmel, to put aside "old Army and Navy feuds engendered from fights over appropriations." True, "Mustapha" Kimmel was a difficult man, sometimes even tactless, but the closest cooperation between the services was necessary. "We must be completely impersonal in these matters, at least so far as our own nerves and irritations are concerned," Marshall cautioned in a rare personal aside to his usually formal correspondence. "Fortunately, and happily I might say, Stark and I are on the most intimate personal basis, and that relationship has enabled us to avoid many serious difficulties."

            Once Short was in place and the island's air defense reinforced, Hawaii slipped from Marshall's close attention. The air units had been strengthened, the anti-aircraft batteries increased by one third. New radar would be shipped by June, giving the Army an all-seeing eye 130 miles to sea, day and night. "The hazards are too great" for the Japanese to risk an attack on the fortified island of Oahu, he concluded.

            The airplane was to be the backbone of Hawaiian defenses, for Marshall's faith in the new B-17 and B-24 bombers was that of the converted true believer. When President Roosevelt as early as April 23, 1941, decided to retain the Pacific Fleet in Hawaii rather than transfer it to the North Atlantic, a disappointed Marshall told Stimson, "With our heavy bombers and our fine new pursuit planes, the land forces [alone] could put up such a defense that the Japs wouldn't dare attack Hawaii.... " Sabotage remained a bigger problem in Marshall's mind. "It would be highly desirable to set up a military control of the islands prior to the likelihood of our involvement in the Far East," Marshall wrote in an aide-memoire for the president early in May.

            Three weeks later, General Short confirmed Marshall in his opinion, reporting a combined army-navy exercise in which Short's bombers located imaginary Japanese carriers 250 miles at sea, then bombed them `just as one carrier was in the act of sending a flight of planes off her decks, maneuver authorities said."

            Bombers then were to be the guarantee of the island's defense, Short was confident. "Here in Hawaii we all live in a citadel or gigantically fortified island."

            The reinforcement of Hawaii was coming none too soon, for events in the Pacific loomed ominous. Early in February, the British Admiralty advised the American military attache in London that it had reason to believe Japan planned a large-scale offensive in either Indochina, the Malay Peninsula, or the Indies, perhaps in all three places, by the 10th. Though the Admiralty revised its estimate of the timing, Prime Minister Churchill on February 15 cabled POTUS, President of the United States:

 

            Many drifting straws seem to indicate Japanese intention to make war on us or do something that would force us to make war on them in the next few weeks or months. I am not myself convinced that this is not a war of nerves designed to cover Japanese encroachments in Siam and Indochina. However, I think I ought to let you know that the weight of the Japanese navy, if thrown against us, would confront us with situations beyond the scope of our naval resources.

 

            Churchill estimated the Japanese would first strike for the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies, then attack Singapore. Raids on New Zealand and Australia would force the withdrawal of those Dominion troops from the Middle East to protect their homelands. Japanese raiders in the western Pacific and Indian Oceans would force the British to send the Mediterranean Fleet in pursuit -- sacrificing at least the eastern end of that Once British sea to the Axis.

            Churchill doubted the Japanese would wish to fight both the United States and Great Britain simultaneously, "but no one can tell. Everything that you can do to inspire the Japanese with fear of a double war may avert the danger. If however they come in against us and we are alone, the grave character of the consequences cannot easily be overstated."

            However much Roosevelt, Churchill, and the moderate faction in Tokyo wished to avoid hostilities in the Pacific, the militant General Tojo and Foreign Minister Matsuoka determined otherwise. On February 25, Matsuoka cast a covetous eye upon Oceania, proclaiming, "This region has sufficient natural resources to support 600,000,000 to 800,000,000 people. I believe we have a natural right to migrate there." On March to, Vichy France succumbed to Japan's demand for a monopoly on rice produced in Indochina, and the use of the airfield at Saigon. Three weeks later, Japan proclaimed a similar monopoly on rubber exports from Thailand and Indochina. The threatened Netherlands East Indies opted for appeasement, grudgingly, yielding a portion of its vital raw rubber crop to Japanese buyers. In June, Japan turned back to Indochina, demanding Vichy grant the use of eight army and navy bases in that Southeast Asian colony. Indochina was the key to Japanese expansion; if Vichy, the nominal puppet of Japan's ally, denied use of those bases, the cabinet resolved, "We shall attain our objective by force of arms."

            The Japanese game was cunning, and solely its own. Matsuoka turned aside Hitler's urgings that the Japanese attack the British in the Pacific and bring about precisely that scenario Churchill most feared. In a meeting in Berlin on April 4, Hitler assured the Japanese foreign minister that the Americans posed no threat, that Germany would declare war on the United States if Japan went to war.

            Japan was not to be rushed. Matsuoka instead negotiated a treaty of neutrality with the Soviet Union, assuring each of the mutually suspicious signatories a protected flank. The Imperial Army could redeploy troops in Manchuria southward.

            On June 25, the Japanese war cabinet ratified Admiral Yamamoto's Pearl Harbor strategy. Naval exercises in the previous two months had confirmed the feasibility of the overall plan and the air assault devised by Commander Genda. Those remaining admirals opposing a war with the United States either fell into line or found themselves ostracized. The navy was to stage a preemptive strike on the American Pacific Fleet while the army invested the first outposts of the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere.

            Washington learned of the decisions in Tokyo on July 14. Japanese officials using the vulnerable Purple code radioed from Canton to Tokyo acknowledgment of earlier orders:

 

            We will endeavor to the last to occupy French Indo-China peacefully but, if resistance is offered, we will crush it by force, occupy the country and set up martial law. After the occupation of French Indo-China, next on schedule is the sending of an ultimatum to the Netherlands Indies. In the seizing of Singapore the Navy will play the principal part.... We will once and for all crush Anglo American military power and their ability to assist in any schemes against us.

 

            The Purple decrypt made U.S.-Japanese discussions all the more difficult. One American ally, China, was immediately threatened, two others, Britain and the Netherlands, placed in jeopardy. With both the United States and Japan seeking to avert an immediate crisis, each for its own reasons, into the fragile Washington negotiations cruised the vacation bound American motorist.

            Late in the spring of 1941, largely because of the lack of available tankers, oil supplies began to run scarce on the Eastern seaboard. The shortage was posted first on gasoline prices at service stations, just as drivers began thinking about vacation travel, then in dire warnings from oil executives of a scarcity of heating oil come winter. The public protest was sharp.

            Reacting to the outcry, the president imposed an embargo on foreign oil shipments from Eastern and Gulf of Mexico ports except to Britain. The only other major customer was Japan, buying oil on East and West coasts to build up its reserves.

            At the urging of Marshall and Stark, still bargaining for time, President Roosevelt declined to impose a total ban on oil exports to Japan. "The Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves and have been for the past week -- trying to decide which way they are going to jump -- attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us," Roosevelt wrote to his petroleum administrator. "No one knows what the decision will be but, as you know, it is terribly important for the control of the Atlantic for us to help to keep peace in the Pacific. I simply have not got enough Navy to go around and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic."

            The partial ban on oil inadvertently became total in response to Vichy's yielding bases to Japan in Indochina -- proof of Japan's "policy of force and conquest," in Roosevelt's words. On July 25, an executive order issued from the Summer White House at Hyde Park announced the freezing of all Japanese assets in the United States. The instant effect was to end all remaining trade between the two countries.

            The freezing of Japanese assets forced the issue. In Tokyo, the Naval General Staff weighed the eighteen-month supply of oil on hand against the still incomplete training of Genda's squadrons. The longer they postponed a decision, the less oil Japan would have to follow up a victory at Pearl Harbor. The enforced compromise settlement they sought, with the Pacific divided between the two nations, would be harder to achieve if they delayed. The decision was to rush the pilots' training.

            The announcement of the freeze marked one of the few times the president was to disregard the advice of his two military commanders. Both Marshall and Stark had argued against it, asking for more time to build their defenses, aware that oil-poor Japan would feel all the more impelled to go to war to secure the black lifeblood of a modern military machine. [2]

            The night before the president's announcement, Marshall and Stark radioed word of the economic sanctions to Admiral Kimmel and General Short on Oahu. "CNO and COS do not anticipate immediate hostile reaction by Japan through the use of military means but you are furnished this information in order that you may take appropriate precautionary measures against possible eventualities." The following day, Marshall recalled Douglas Arthur MacArthur to active duty. The decision had been long weighed, long delayed.

            Each Japanese diplomatic ploy had compelled the War Department to reevaluate its position, to attempt to conjure a Pacific defense out of little more than broomstick rifles and stovepipe cannons. So it was that General Douglas A. MacArthur, United States Army, Retired, livinging the sumptuous six-room penthouse atop the Manila Hotel, returned to active duty.

            MacArthur had angled for the assignment. Great things were afoot, yet he was effectively sidelined as military adviser to the Commonwealth of the Philippines. He was "field marshal of a state and an army neither of which has, as yet, independent existence," as General Pershing noted. With MacArthur's offer to the president to become Philippine high commissioner ignored, the general was left "a more or less ridiculous" figure.

            On February 1, 1941, MacArthur wrote a thinly disguised reminder of his availability to the chief of staff, his former subordinate. MacArthur's letter detailed a projected fight for the archipelago. His forces, he wrote Marshall, would "provide an adequate defense at the beach against a landing operation of 100,000, which is estimated to be the maximum initial effort of the most powerful potential enemy." Still Washington remained silent.

            Six weeks later, he tried another gambit. In a letter to FDR's press secretary, Steve Early, an old friend, the retired general again suggested he be appointed high commissioner:

            I hold the complete confidence of the Filipinos, having served here during four different tours, a total period of twelve years. I know local conditions, especially military and naval affairs, as possibly no one else does.

            From Vladivostok to Singapore I am thoroughly familiar with the most intimate details, political, military and commercial. I have a personal acquaintance with everyone of importance in the Orient and I believe no American holds the friendship and respect of this part of the world more than myself. In the present situation these are assets which the president might utilize in his co-ordination of the Pacific problems. I can respond to any call here or elsewhere.

 

MacArthur closed with fulsome praise for Roosevelt, "not only our greatest statesman but what to me is even more thrilling, our greatest military strategist."

 

            This time he received an answer. The president's military aide, Major General Edwin Watson, assured the restless MacArthur that "in all discussions as to the availability of various active and retired officers, your name is always outstanding and most seriously considered."

            Marshall did discuss MacArthur's future role with the secretary of war. On May 21, Stimson wrote in his diary, "Marshall incidentally told me that in case of trouble out there they intended to recall General Mac Arthur into service again and place him in command." Until then, he would be informed of all army planning.

            Half-promises would not soothe MacArthur's ambition. He tried a new tack. He made reservations, then wrote Marshall on May 29, with a copy to Early, saying he was going to resign as military adviser to the Philippine government and return to the United States. MacArthur won.

            On June 20, Marshall replied that he and Stimson had discussed MacArthur's role three months earlier and

 

            It was decided that your outstanding qualifications and vast experience in the Philippines make you the logical choice for the army commander in the Far East should the situation approach a crisis. The Secretary has delayed recommending your appointment as he does not feel the time has arrived for such action. However, he has authorized me to tell you that, at the proper time, he will recommend to the President that you be appointed. It is my impression that the President will approve his recommendation.

 

            The Japanese incursions into Indochina and the resulting freeze of Japanese assets in the United States decided the matter. On July 27, Marshall cabled MacArthur in Manila he was to take over a newly formed United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). His command would consist of 10,000 Regular Army officers and men, 12,000 crack Philippine Scouts trained by American troops, and twelve half-formed, under-equipped, and poorly trained Philippine infantry regiments. He was authorized to spend $10 million on defenses. MacArthur was no longer a bystander, but once more in the pit.

            Still, there was the problem of MacArthur's rank. Recalled at his permanent rank of major general, he was on the next day "given the rank of lieutenant general, although my retired rank was that of a full general," he complained. Such presumed slights -- federal law provided for just one full general in the Army, the chief of staff -- chipped away at MacArthur's always fragile sense of ego.

            MacArthur's appointment as commander of USAFFE was to provide the chief of staff with irritants aplenty once their initial enthusiasm wore off. But to ignore MacArthur in a time of national emergency was unthinkable. At sixty-one, he was still vigorous, the father of a three year-old son born to his second wife, a woman twenty years his junior. He was the heir of a great military tradition, son of a Medal of Honor winning father. Guided first by father, then by doting mother, Douglas MacArthur had held virtually every post of honor the United States Army could offer. He had, he once thought, climaxed a distinguished military career with a five-year tour as chief of staff, longer than any man in history.

            War now threatened in the Far East. MacArthur, an adopted child of the Orient, could not be permitted to remain in retirement, especially were he to return to the United States. A genuine hero, a favorite of the conservative press and a man with active political contacts in the Republican Party, MacArthur in America would be the cuckoo in the nest.

            Then and later, MacArthur was to prove difficult. Once chief of staff himself, he found it impossible to subordinate himself to a man who had been a mere colonel under his command. Moreover, the War Department in MacArthur's judgment was staffed with civilians in uniform who toadied to the president, who favored accommodation with the Russians, who overruled his sound military-political decisions -- three great errors MacArthur could not condone.

            MacArthur's arrogance, his currying of publicity, his very theatricality made the man a prickly subject in the Munitions Building. "I think Stimson was impatient of MacArthur because Stimson was a Marshall man and Marshall had a lot of trouble with MacArthur, too. So Stimson would share the impatience of the general staff," decided Harvey Bandy, a Boston Brahmin called to service in the War Department. That Beacon Street lawyer concluded MacArthur "was an opera star and everything had to be his way."

            Perhaps, as Marshall's official biographer decided, the differences between the opera star and the chief of staff "lay more in their temperments and styles than in ancient quarrels and fancied injuries." Mac Arthur's biographers, even those with a critical eye for their subject, on the other hand credit some personal ill-feeling between the two men for the difficulties that would come. For all of Marshall's deference to him, MacArthur was to complain frequently to his staff of presumed slights; his own sense of self-esteem magnified any field commander's natural belief that his theater was the most needy, the most important, and the most slighted. For all of Marshall's efforts to supply men and munitions to the Philippines commander, MacArthur blamed shortfalls not on higher priorities elsewhere, but on personal bias, on "secret plans and commitments to Britain and Russia," on anything but the reality. If their antagonism was one-sided -- the chief of staff did have an ability to personally distance himself from issues -- it was no less real.

            The two men began cordially enough, MacArthur fired with his grand plans, the chief of staff straining to provide the troops and weapons MacArthur sought. Fourteen companies of infantry arrived on September 26 aboard the chartered President Coolidge. More than 450 officers to train the Filipino regiments followed, then a tank battalion, then the understrength 4th Marine Regiment from Shanghai.

            By October, MacArthur was radiating an optimism that would spread as a contagion in Washington, 10,000 miles away. His recall had inspired the Philippines, the Netherlands East Indies, Malaya, and China to "complete jubilation," he wrote. "It was the sign they had been waiting for." With his new army, almost 200,000 strong when fully mobilized, MacArthur was "confident that we can successfully resist any effort that may be made against us." The War Department had offered him "splendid support," he added, and "no field commander could have received better support from a chief of staff than I have from Marshall."

            If his defenses had a weakness, it was in the air, the new Far East commander reported to Washington. Reinforce his air force and he could indefinitely hold the islands in the event of Japanese attack, until relief convoys fought their way through, he pledged. It was a brave conception, a brass-bright piece of optimism in the gloom of defeats elsewhere.

            At Marshall's orders, General Arnold allocated to the Far East Air Force four bomber groups of 70 planes each, and 260 fighters. Despite standing agreements to supply the British, not to mention training needs, MacArthur was to have priority. Arnold began transferring air groups from the Hawaiian Islands and Panama, then earmarked for the Philippines 165 of the 220 B-17s to be delivered from factories before February 1, 1942. By December 1, MacArthur's air arm included half of all heavy bombers and one sixth of all fighters the Army had overseas.

            Those air reinforcements and MacArthur's pledge were pivotal in Marshall's ordering a revision of the Army's long standing Pacific strategy. First informed of the tentative agreement on RAINBOW 5 in early October, MacArthur protested the planners' decision to fight only a holding action in the Philippines by defending Manila Bay. In part, MacArthur's objection was motivated by a refusal to accept what inevitably would be a defeat if large forces invaded. In part, his objections were spurred by pride. Added to that was what his biographer termed MacArthur's "overconfidence and unjustified optimism as to the abilities of himself, his staff, and the untried Filipino soldiers." But a bigger part of MacArthur's criticism of RAINBOW 5's "citadel" notion was a burgeoning confidence in the ability of heavy bombers to attack and sink an invasion fleet. MacArthur instead boldly proposed an all-out defense of a Philippine bastion of 7,100 islands with a coastline 10,850 miles long.

            Logic might have insisted otherwise, but Marshall and Stimson alike were willingly seduced. Marshall had served two tours in the islands, and felt some of the paternal fondness for the Filipino common in the Regular Army. Stimson too had close ties with the protectorate. As governor-general of the islands from 1927 to 1929, he had encouraged economic development, modeling himself as a benign father figure to Filipino independence. Later, as secretary of state, he had taken a strong stand against Japanese aggression in Manchuria, partly on the ground that Japanese expansion there inevitably foreshadowed the loss of the Philippines.

            As in all seductions, delusion played a part. Marshall and Stimson were dazzled by inflated estimates of the performance of improved B-17s the Boeing Aircraft Company was now producing. As MacArthur argued, airpower suddenly seemed an alternative to reinforced land units; any ground troops they sent were virtual hostages should war come. Bombers ferried over a new route that circled the Japanese-mandate islands in the mid-Pacific were an offensive weapon that tipped the balance in their favor.

            However misplaced his trust, Marshall ordered the Philippines defended. The joint planners revised RAINBOW 5 in early November to incorporate an all-out defense of the islands, from southern Mindanao to northern Luzon, 800 miles away.

            At home, the pace of rearmament quickened. The chief of staff, once so conscious of his heart murmur and Morrison Slayer's advice to make time to relax, could not escape the Munitions Building, questions pursued him.

            In early September, the Marshalls finally managed to slip away to Leesburg for the first time since the Fourth of July. The general was looking forward to a chore he found gratifying, pruning his apple trees.

            No sooner had he climbed to the dead branch of a tree with rope and saw in hand than the telephone rang. The duty officer at the Munitions Building was calling to report a German raider sighted in the Caribbean. Marshall immediately called the president in Hyde Park, asking him to secure permission from exiled Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands to implace coastal guns and aircraft near the vital refineries at Aruba and Curacao. That done, back he climbed to the dead limb.

            A second time the telephone rang, and a second time Marshall picked his way to the ground to take the president's call for more information. Marshall dictated a proposed radiogram to the queen, then returned to the tree.

            Finally, straddling the trunk once more, he began sawing. He was halfway through the dead limb when the telephone rang a third time. "General Marshall," his orderly called, "War Department calling ." War Plans wanted instructions on the refinery's defense.

            Marshall sat there high above the garden for a moment, sighing in frustration, then yelled to his orderly: "Call the car. I am leaving for Washington." The dead limb hung there forgotten through the winter.

            Marshall had more urgent concerns as muggy August turned to muggy September. Virtually alone, the chief of staff had argued in the White House and beyond that a second world war could end decisively only with huge land armies eventually colliding in western Europe. His was the politically unpalatable, costly conflict, with none of the lower-risk, lower-casualty appeal of a naval or air war, certainly none of the glamour. Blockade and bombardment alone, he stressed, would eventually sap German will, but were Germany's armies left essentially intact, they would remain a threat to peace. The chief of staff found himself fending off foreign ally and American Navy alike, each coveting the materiel an invasion army, a large army, would need.

            Washington Post columnist Ernest K. Lindley and the influential syndicated columnist Waiter Lippmann got wind of the debate over "the case for a smaller army." American power, Lippmann wrote in a September column, lay "on the seas and in the air and in the factory -- not on the battlefields of Europe and Asia.... Our most effective part in this war is now, and for any predictable future, to help hold the seas and to be the arsenal of those fighting aggression."

            With England safe from immediate danger of invasion, the 1.5-million-man Army Marshall had brought into being was no longer necessary, Lippmann decided. Instead, he proposed shrinking the Army to increase its efficiency, while putting more money into Lend-Lease and the Navy.

            The British, the Navy, even the Air Corps he had sponsored pressed Marshall hard. "The British, for example, were very intense in their efforts to get more metal, to get more tanks from us, to get more weapons from us -- and they opposed a lot of our proposals -- particularly my proposals," Marshall acknowledged. "I notified the British -- their representatives -- confidentially once or twice that if they didn't stop this business I would have to come out and pillory them publicly."

            Summoned to the White House on September 22, the chief of staff carried with him a four-page aide-memoire arguing his case, militarily, politically, morally. Noting that they had just secured passage of the draft extension, "to sound an alarm and an all-clear at virtually the same time can only add to national confusion and disrupt the national unity we are struggling to achieve." To disband the Army so painstakingly built was "wholly reckless." Marshall then, apparently for the first time, acknowledged the inevitability of American forces fighting in Europe, of the isolationist dread, an American Expeditionary Force. "British man power alone is insufficient to accomplish complete victory and to protect their interests as well as ours. Military opinion including that of the British high command itself as expressed in off-the-record statements has frequently pointed out that while materiel assistance alone from the U.S. in sufficient quantity may enable them to maintain a stalemate, active American participation will ultimately be needed for a decisive victory within a foreseeable time."

            The chief of staff prevailed for the moment. Even so, his insistence that they prepare for a future land war grew more difficult as the war at sea intensified from patrolling, to convoying, to armed defense.

            In the abstract, Americans favored freedom of the seas, yet hoped for a deliverance from evil in Europe. At the same time, public sentiment overwhelmingly favored support for China in its now three-year-old struggle with Japan. The ambivalence lay rooted in history.

            Since the turn of the century, Americans had viewed China and the Chinese with equal parts protective benevolence and Christian charity. Through missionaries and evangelical fervor, William Jennings Bryan had proposed building "a new Chinese civilization... founded on the Christian movement." Forty years later, Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry had pledged, "With God's help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City." All China seemed fertile ground for Christianity and good works. Was not Chiang Kai-shek himself a Methodist, and his beautiful wife educated in the United States? Sympathy for the embattled Chinese ran high, fostered by Henry Lace's Time and Life, by Pearl Buck's best-selling The Good Earth and Alice Tisdale Hobart's Oil for the Lamps of China.

            A pro-Chinese public grew ever more impatient with the administration's caution in the Far East. Editorial writers across the country demanded some action that would slap down the upstart "Nips," to step in and put them in their place. Most Americans believed the United States could do it with one hand tied behind its back.

            Such naivete and ambivalence disturbed Marshall and Stimson, particularly the national lack of resolve. The defense effort "will function as far as the sentiment of the people will spur it on," Stimson told an air port press conference in Denver in August. Speaking for himself and the chief of staff at his side, Stimson added: "It is not functioning the way we should like to see it. If there was the same sharp objective that we had twenty-three years ago, there would be a different story."

            Without clear purpose, their army of civilians oozed discontent. "0.H.I.0." threatened from barracks walls. Time magazine determined, through Henry Luce's delphic powers, that two thirds of the Army was suffering a morale problem. Its companion magazine, Life, interviewed 400 men in five National Guard divisions and reported half said they would desert in October, when their one-year call-up was ended. Life quoted one private: "To hell with Roosevelt and Marshall and the Army and especially this goddam hole and the Germans and the Russians and the British. I want to get the hell out of this hole." A reporter for the Nation, a magazine as opposed to intervention as Time-Life favored it, found similar sentiments in a Times Square poll of men in uniform.             Marshall's own spirit suffered as well. The change that had overtaken his army, he wrote Bernard Baruch a week after the House vote on extension, was "quite tragic." The long debate had undercut morale. "Individual soldiers were taught to feel sorry for themselves."

            Even as he wrote to Baruch, his resolved stiffened once more:

            I have always felt surprised that in our democracy we were able to achieve a selective service system late last summer, but I guess it was hoping too much to think that we could continue the strenuous preparation to meet this emergency without great difficulties. There is no more delicate problem than troop morale, and with such a slender margin of public approval to back us, it is no easy matter to build up the highly trained and seasoned fighting force that we must have available as quickly as possible. However, we are going to do it if too many of us do not lose our tempers.

 

            Marshall was to lose his, lashing out against "misinformed individuals" in a speech before the American Legion in September. "It is impossible to develop an efficient army if decisions purely of a military nature are continuously subjected to investigation, cross-examination, debate, ridicule and public discussion." For perhaps the only time in his career Marshall forgot he was a soldier in a democracy. It was a token of his own anxiety and weariness.

            Out of that anxiety, Marshall wrote to the president on September 6:

 

            While the troops in 90 percent of the organizations have weathered the storm in excellent shape as a matter of fact in every instance where we have had good leadership in the higher command nevertheless the home influence presents a continuing difficulty. Parents have been so confused as to the facts or logic of the situation and so influenced by what they read of a critical nature that something must be done to bring them to an understanding of the national emergency and of the necessity for a highly trained Army.

 

            The president wrote "Dear George" a tart reply:

 

            In effect you say: (a) The boys in camp are O.K. (b) The parental influence hurts the morale of many of them. (c) Please, Mr. President, do something about this weakness on the part of the civilian population. Got any ideas?

 

            While Marshall agonized, over Toso Bay on the southern coast of Shikoku, Japanese naval pilots completed practice for an attack that would inadvertently eliminate that worry. On November 5, 1941, the Naval General Staff ordered preparations for war to be completed. Two days later, Admiral Yamamoto issued his combined fleet operations order: "The Task Force will launch a surprise attack at the outset of the war upon the U.S. Pacific Fleet supposed to be in Hawaiian waters, and destroy it.... The date of starting the operation is tentatively set forth as December 8, 1941."

 

 


[1]   MacArthur had earlier accepted the Philippines assignment at White House urging, yet the president's unexpected announcement was a calculated slap. FDR had delayed almost a year in picking a successor for MacArthur as chief of staff, to make certain that MacArthur's choice of a malleable successor would not have the requisite four years to serve. MacArthur had antagonized Roosevelt with his arrogance and self-aggrandizement, as well as public appeals to Congress for larger military budgets. Roosevelt once considered MacArthur and Louisiana Senator Huey Long "the two most dangerous men in the United States today." The Kingfish was dead, assassinated by a Louisiana doctor on September 8, 1935: the general now was to be placed safely out of the country, with no surrogate in his place. See Schlesinger, Crisis, pp. 417-418, and Petillo, pp. 17a174.

[2]   0il played the crucial role in precipitating the timing of war. As far back as 1918, Clemenceau had walked about Versailles muttering, "Oil governs everything," while the Associated Powers divided up the postwar world. By World War II, the Allies controlled 86 percent of the world's oil supplies.