The Generals Read online

  About halfway through the month they were down to nothing to eat but bacon and canned meat—the onions, potatoes, and other fresh vegetables having been exhausted. At times they were out of water for nearly a day. By the end of the month they had come to the settlement of Langtry where they were able to obtain some provisions, but the sergeant predictably took to drink and scandalized the town.e In the end of August, Marshall returned to Fort Clark, Texas, to turn in the animals and wagon, the mapping mission being completed. There he met Captain Malin Craig, whose cavalry troop had lent him his horses, but Marshall recalled being so shabby-looking—“I was burnt almost black and had on an old panama hat which a mule had bitten the top out of—that Craig didn’t think I could be an officer, and talked only to my sergeant. He wouldn’t even look at me.”

  In 1906 Marshall was assigned a coveted post to the army’s Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. This was a period in which forces within the army and without were trying to change the service’s reputation as a hidebound megalith that—martinet-like—resisted all efforts to modernize it. The agent of much of this change was the secretary of war, Elihu Root, who reopened the then dormant Infantry and Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, renaming it in 1907 the Army School of the Line, a one-year course whose top graduates would be eligible to attend the Army Staff College.

  Root likewise began a reorganization of the army’s staff system. He was convinced that in modern warfare officers needed the highest quality of training and that a military education did not end at West Point (or the Virginia Military Institute, for that matter), but must be continuously evolving. He also concluded that the present staff structure in Washington was an administrative nightmare. The commanding general had virtually no power over the adjutant general or the dozen other bureaucrats who fought with and needled one another. To correct this, Root established the office of chief of staff and gave this officer almost unlimited (save for himself) jurisdiction over every aspect of the army down to and including the precise color of socks that a soldier could wear and what the army would pay for them. Many of the older officers objected to this system, but it proved to work well, with modifications, from that day to this.

  MARSHALL FOUND THE COURSEWORK at Leavenworth highly challenging but from the first remained in the top 5 percent of his class. All the discipline and dedication that had been instilled in him at VMI began to pay off and, a year later, when the course had ended, he graduated first in his class and was headed for the prestigious Army Staff College.

  Many of the problems there were theoretical and intellectual, designed to inculcate the officers to think on their own, and quickly, in fluid, developing military situations. They delved heavily in the voluminous Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, or OR, in order to reconstruct Civil War battles, some of which they then reenacted on paper to see what could be learned from them. Then they turned to practical matters. A great staff ride was prepared to help understand the complexity of the Battle of Gettysburg. Several dozen officers from the Leavenworth college rode horses along the path that Lee’s army took down the Shenandoah Valley en route to its terrific encounter with the Union Army in Pennsylvania, stopping along the way for lectures at other famous battle sites.

  In their study of topography and military art (mapmaking) the student officers assessed tactical situations around Metz during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) using German maps and reports because that was all that was available. They reviewed this material so thoroughly, in fact, that when these students became high-ranking officers in World War I they were utterly familiar with the topography around the town of Metz, a scene of heavy battle action by the American army in France, as Marshall himself recalled: “I found myself [in 1918] familiar with the names of practically every village because they were all on this Griepenkerl map … and were right in the track of these great moves we were making towards the Meuse-Argonne front. I think that of the twenty-nine combat division commanders that got into action in France, some twenty-six or twenty-seven were graduates of Leavenworth during the period [when he was there].”

  Aside from the tactical knowledge gained at the school, Marshall remembered that he also took away a sense of “thoroughness” that he might have lacked before, and which “stood me in good stead through all the clamor, excitement, [and] lack of time during the war, particularly in the Meuse-Argonne battle.”

  After he graduated, Marshall was invited to become an instructor at the Leavenworth school, and he accepted. Lily had come to be with him most of the time, and with her bad heart she seemed to like the stability of the post. Marshall was still a lieutenant, albeit a first lieutenant, and he had spent much of his spare time riding, hunting, and playing tennis and golf. While there hadn’t been much in the way of social life as a student, now that he was on staff, that world seemed to open up. Much of this was Lily’s doing, for she was a woman of much charm, gaiety, and wit who often organized small dinner parties at the couple’s duplex quarters that were surrounded by “a generous green lawn shaded by noble elms and oaks.”9

  (Leavenworth was a venerable old post built at the convergence of the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails, down which sixty years earlier General Stephen W. Kearny had marched his Army of the West to wrest the Santa Fe and California Territories from Mexico during the Mexican War. Later, it became the staging point for many of the expeditions of the Indian wars. But now it was alive with an “enthusiastic intellectual renaissance” striving hard to grasp solutions to the ever more complex military problems of the day.)

  During his four years as a teacher, Marshall associated with some of the brightest minds in the army and developed not only an unusually effective ability to impart knowledge, but also a reverence from his students that was long remembered. Once, for instance, on a grueling hot summer mapmaking field exercise that involved many hours in the saddle, Marshall’s students were flabbergasted when at last they returned to their rendezvous to find Marshall waiting there with cases of cold beer for all.

  Fifty years later, M. W. Clement, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who in the summer of 1908 had been a lieutenant with the Pennsylvania National Guard, told Marshall’s biographer Forrest Pogue that Marshall “had the ability to make everybody understand,” which must certainly rank among the highest compliments a teacher can accrue.10

  IN 1909 MARSHALL SR. DIED. In the two decades since he’d lost his fortune he had redeemed himself from near poverty but the family’s living standards had never approached the level as before. Marshall’s brother and sister had both married and his parents had left their comfortable house in the West End of Uniontown and moved into an apartment building in town known as “the skyscraper.”

  When Marshall returned to his old neighborhood, the sights that greeted him were poignant and affecting. His family home had been pulled down, the lot leveled with landfill and a movie house built on the site. The fill now clogged Coal Lick Run where he’d launched his matchbox battleship fleet as a boy. His lone nostalgic encounter came when the aged dog of a boyhood friend who’d long since died recognized him by his scent and “just went crazy.” It was, in Marshall’s words, “the most flattering thing that happened to me on that short visit home.”

  Soon after the visit home, First Lieutenant and Mrs. Marshall went abroad. They had to do it on “a shoestring,” but over the course of four months in 1910 they managed to cover six countries “while I was on half pay,” Marshall said. They saw Paris, the château country, Austria, Florence, Rome, and Algiers—visiting ruins, palaces, and so forth—and finally made it to London and then County Surrey, where Arthur Conan Doyle had set the Sir Nigel stories that Marshall heard his father read by the fireside as a child. At one point he rented a bicycle at the military town of Aldershot, thirty-seven miles southwest of London, and followed the British army on its maneuvers. It was to be the last glimmer of the old Europe and its belle époque. “In 1914,” Marshall said, “it blew up. The lights went out, and it never
was the same again.”

  IN 1912 AND STATESIDE AGAIN, Marshall was posted with the Fourth Infantry Regiment at San Antonio near the Mexican border where there had been trouble from the ongoing revolutions. Marshall was assigned to lead a signal outfit that received what was said to be the first wireless message sent on U.S. Army maneuvers. It came from the commander of the cavalry who, in reporting his position to headquarters, radioed: “I am just west of the manure pile.”

  After a year on detached duty instructing various state National Guard units, Marshall was sent back to the Philippines. In August 1913 he and Lily arrived in Manila where he joined the 13th Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort McKinley. Marshall found that the Islamist Moros in the southern islands were still in rebellion, but the main military concern now was of a possible Japanese invasion owing to a rise in Japanese imperialism following their stunning victory over the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.

  U.S. relations with Japan had become strained by anti-Japanese immigration legislation and Asian-hostile newspapers in California.f The situation was deemed critical enough that defensive emplacements with heavy artillery were being constructed with a mind to repel invaders from the beaches and harbors. A grand series of maneuvers had also been organized to test the strength of the defenses of the main island of Luzon.g The maneuver to test Luzon’s defenses against an invading force was composed of a nearly 5,000-man “White Force” (the invaders) and a more than 3,000-man “Brown Force” (the defenders). The Whites were to make an amphibious landing and the Browns were to defend Manila against capture.

  First, Marshall was assigned as adjutant and chief of staff to the White Force commander, but when the regular chief of staff became ill with malaria George Marshall got his job. The White Force commander, it seems, a soon-to-retire colonel, had been found incompetent by the inspector general; he was told by the commanding general to retire immediately or to let Marshall run the maneuver.h Marshall himself privately objected to this solution on grounds that the next in command was even worse, but an accommodation was reached in which Lieutenant George C. Marshall himself was put in command of the White Force, and neither the first nor the second in command could interfere with any orders he issued.

  Each side was briefed on what was expected of them, but the details remained to be worked out and the date of the opening of the maneuver was kept secret by the commanding general. Thus, on the morning of January 22, Marshall was summoned by headquarters from the field “in a soaking wet flannel shirt” and told that the maneuver was on.

  The situation was outlined for both White and Brown Forces. Marshall’s job was to get the 4,842-man army, with all its guns and wagons and eighteen hundred horses and mules—scattered all over Luzon—pulled together and loaded onto boats to rendezvous at Batangas at the far southern tip of Luzon. From there, they were to attack seventy-five miles up the peninsula and try to capture Manila.

  Marshall immediately realized the difficulties before him, not the least of which was the army’s parochial command system. He was a mere lieutenant ordering around superior officers who, though they had been told to obey him, often did so with the most grudging and hidebound alacrity. On the other hand, the opposing Brown Force was commanded by two full colonels who could make anyone beneath their rank hop. It would be a trying experience.

  When Marshall found that he would need to have stalls made on boats for the animals, he was informed he didn’t even have permission to see the department quartermaster, who had refused his request. Marshall threatened to go to the commanding general, adding tactfully, “to ask him what I should do now.”

  By January 29 the White Force had landed at Batangas and was making its way up toward Manila, overcoming Brown Forces along the way. At one point Lieutenant Henry H. “Hap” Arnoldi came upon his friend Lieutenant Marshall lying on his back in a stand of snaky-looking brush, surrounded by staff, unit commanders, and maneuver umpires. He was staring fervently at a map tacked to a tree above his head and dictating the order for the final assault on Manila.

  It was a long and complex order, but when he stopped speaking ten or fifteen minutes later “the group around him was awed.”11 Off the top of his head, Marshall had dictated the most complete, comprehensible, and tactically perfect order possible without notes or other references—an episode that eventually passed into one of the enduring Marshall legends.j Having witnessed this, Hap Arnold predicted to his wife that Marshall “would one day become chief of staff of the Army.”12

  Indeed, Marshall’s White Force prevailed, outflanking the Browns and marching triumphantly into Manila. Marshall received extraordinary praise from the maneuver’s umpires—so much that on January 1, 1916, he was selected to be aide-de-camp to General Hunter Liggett, who had arrived to command an infantry brigade.k

  The officer in charge of training and maneuvers in the Philippine Department advanced the opinion in his report on the exercise that Lieutenant George Marshall “was the best leader of large bodies of troops in the entire American Army without regard of age, rank, or previous experience,” and several days later, at a luncheon given for his staff, the department commander, Major General J. Franklin Bell, stated that he regarded Lieutenant Marshall as “the greatest potential wartime leader in the Army.”13

  The general’s effusive compliments notwithstanding, Marshall was set to be severely tested. The slaughter that had become the Great War in Europe—indeed the war throughout the world—had been grinding out corpses for nearly two years. In May 1915 a German submarine off the Irish coast sank the British liner Lusitania, once the largest ship in the world, drowning some 1,200 souls, including 128 Americans.

  The ensuing uproar in the United States prompted the Germans to abstain for a time from unrestricted naval warfare, but in January 1917, as Germany’s situation became increasingly desperate, the kaiser once again declared that all ships in British waters, armed or unarmed, were fair game. Three months later the United States declared war on Germany.

  * The queen and her government escaped The Hague before the Germans arrived and set up a government in exile in London.

  † So called because they were shaped like beehives.

  ‡ Approximately $5 million in today’s money.

  § What exactly happened to the Maine remains a subject of controversy. Shortly after the incident a U.S. Navy board concluded that a mine had caused the explosion. Later investigations by private interests suggested that the forward coal bunker had blown up from an excess of coal dust. In any event, in 1912, following a three-year effort, U.S. Army engineers raised the ship and removed scores of bodies, which were sent for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. The Maine was then towed out to sea and scuttled to make an offshore fishing reef.

  ǁ Spanish officials, hoping to save face, had secretly arranged with the U.S. Army to surrender after a sham battle was staged.

  a The Philippines remained in an almost constant state of insurrection from that time until after World War II when it was granted independence.

  b Her condition, Marshall said, was a heart defect called mitral regurgitation.

  c Marshall himself estimated there were about five thousand cholera deaths a day.

  d A reported 109,461 people died in the Philippines during the cholera plague.

  e Langtry was named for the odious Judge Roy Bean’s favorite singer, Lillie Langtry.

  f These were the infamous “Yellow Peril” headlines, much of them from the Hearst press.

  g Maneuvers, or “war games,” are the method the army uses to test its own effectiveness. Like a full-contact scrimmage in football, they are designed to be as realistic as possible.

  h It seems that the colonel drank. As Marshall put it, “He was a courtly gentleman, a very nice fellow. He carried a zinc-lined suitcase with him … and every time we would stop … he would refresh himself against the Philippine heat.”

  i Arnold would go on to command the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II.

  j
This was the “Standard Field Order” recently developed at Fort Leavenworth, whose various paragraphs Marshall had memorized, having only to “fill in the blanks” with pertinent information.

  k Liggett in 1917 would rise to become second in command of the American Expeditionary Forces in France.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MASTER OF THE SWORD

  The attack in a corner of northeastern France was stalled and Colonel George S. Patton of the American Expeditionary Forces went forward from his command post, on foot, in a heavy fog, to see what was the matter with his tanks. As he—along with an entourage of several officers and half a dozen enlisted men for runners (also hauling a detachment of carrier pigeons)—neared the front lines, the racket of the battle became terrific. Later, at least twenty-five German machine-gun nests that were firing on the American soldiers had been identified (and destroyed), their bullets constant little winks of flame that stabbed through the shrouding gloom, while larger flashes marked the explosions of enemy artillery shells that were now booming and ranging in.

  Earlier, more than 2,800 large guns had lashed for three hours at the German front lines, which appeared to the American fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker, tooling along above the fray in his French-built Spad, like a giant switchboard “which emanated thousands of electric flashes as invisible hands manipulated the plugs,” and a U.S. major general compared the racket to “the collision of a million express trains.”1 For his part Patton, said to be the richest officer in the U.S. Army, later wrote home that the noise blended into a sound not unlike a lawn mower—the one without a muffler—that had once cut the grass back at his family’s estate in California.

  The date was September 26, 1918, the first day of the Big Push by the U.S. Army in World War I, a clash that would go down in history as the Battle of the Argonne Forest—the bloodiest battle ever fought by U.S. armed forces before or since. By the time it was over, 26,277 American soldiers would be dead and 95,786 wounded.