From FPRI:
GEN. GEORGE C. MARSHALL
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PROFESSIONAL MILITARY ETHIC
by Josiah Bunting III
Vol. 16, No. 4
June 2011
Josiah Bunting III is President of The Harry Frank
Guggenheim Foundation in New York City. Earlier, he served
as Superintendent of his alma mater, the Virginia Military
Institute in Lexington, Virginia. Among his books is a
biography written for Arthur Schlesinger's presidential
series on Ulysses S. Grant. He is currently completing a
biography of George C. Marshall. This essay is a slightly
revised version of his presentation at a History Institute
on "Civilian Control of the Military and American
Democracy," held April 2-3, 2011, sponsored by FPRI's
Wachman Center, in association with the McCormick
Foundation's First Division Museum at Cantigny in Wheaton,
Illinois.
Available on the web and in pdf format at:
http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/1604.201105.bunting.marshall_militaryethic.html
Audio and video of this presentation available at:
http://www.fpri.org/multimedia/20110403.bunting.georgemarshall.html
GEN. GEORGE C. MARSHALL
AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF A PROFESSIONAL MILITARY ETHIC
by Josiah Bunting III
I want to say, first of all, that you are the saints of your
profession. Most of you are high school teachers. This is
the most important period of education in the life of a
young person-13 to 17, as opposed to 18 to 22. This is where
you can really inculcate the fire, the love of learning, and
the habits that will last over a lifetime.
A common story, which most of us have heard, features a
prominent citizen's death in a small town, probably in the
American Heartland. He is in his mid-80s, perhaps even a
little bit older. His best friend gives the eulogy. When the
eulogist mentions that the man who has died served at
Normandy, there is a great deal of whispering in the church.
What are the people attending the funeral saying to each
other? Well, it's perfectly obvious-"I never knew that." The
extraordinary feature of that generation, with which we are
losing contact at the rate of about 1,200 a day, is that
they did what they did and didn't think, or talk much about
it. We are losing physical touch slowly with that
generation.
Alexis de Tocqueville noted in the 1830s, when visiting the
United States that the last signer of the Declaration had
died. This was the only Catholic signer, as it happens,
Charles Carroll of Maryland. And Tocqueville was struck by
the country's sense of loss of its "physical touch" with one
of the founders. And I think many of us feel that way about
"the greatest generation." Which raises the question: Why
are we, as amateur scholars of the military-military
buffs-fixated on two wars in particular, the Civil War and
the World War II? Americans know a great deal about these
two conflicts and very little about the Great War in
between, the war in France, in which America's participation
was quite brief, and in which U.S. casualties relative to
those of the Germans, the French and the British were quite
small. But you may remember, during the last six weeks of
the war in France, from September 26 until the armistice,
26,500 Americans were killed and 105,000 wounded. Our actual
experience of combat was brief, but extremely costly. And
yet, most people have forgotten World War I.
There are many links between the Civil War and the World War
II. We tend to forget them. I'm going to talk a little about
George Marshall within his generation. Marshall was born in
1880, the same year as Douglas MacArthur. He grew up in a
small town, a suburb of Pittsburgh, surrounded by veterans
of the Civil War. For that generation, that was their "great
generation." If you were 20 years old and had fought at
Chancellorsville or Antietam or Gettysburg, you were still a
relatively young person in the early 1890s. You'd be in your
middle or late 40s. So if you were a doctor, a lawyer, an
executive, a teacher in small town America, you were the
person that people looked up to. Yet, the great military
figures of that war were the people you aspired to be if you
had any interest in the military.
Some of the links between the two wars are quite charming
and unexpected. For example, Henry "Hap" Arnold, the chief
of the Air Corps in World War II, was decorating workers at
a B-29 factory in Wichita in 1943, and the foreman
introduced a woman in her 70s, saying, "This is our best
worker" The woman was Helen Longstreet, widow of the Civil
War solider James Longstreet. He had lived a long life and
married a young woman. Consequently, you still had people
serving in World War II who had those connections to the
Civil War
Many of you, if you are historians, know the word
"prosopography," an alluring subset of history concerned
with the study of groups united in some purpose or by some
chronology. The prosopography of Civil War leadership is
very interesting. The most important prosopography in our
history is that of the American founders. Henry Steele
Commager talked about periods of extraordinary fluorescence
in human leadership and human talent in history. He detailed
the Athens of Pericles, Elizabethan England, Renaissance
Italy, and particularly the American founders. How was it
that at that time in our history we had a number of people
born roughly between 1730 and 1750 who grew to be such
extraordinary human beings allied in a common purpose-people
of astounding versatility? Where did they come from?
Commager makes the point that once you clear away the debris
of great challenges bringing forth great leadership, you
have to look very seriously at the way people were raised
and how they were educated. What did they study? What did
they read? What were their parents' expectations for them?
They were not obsessed with SAT scores, there were no
Blackberries, no one cared if you went to Princeton or the
University of Virginia. You went up to your room at 7:00 at
night, and if you were John Adams, you read Plutarch, and
you were given no rewards for reading Plutarch. This is
essentially Commager's thesis.
The generation of George Marshall, the American generation
born between roughly 1880 and 1900 or 1905, was also such a
generation. The British historian Paul Johnson considers it
the "ablest in our history, almost as good as that of the
American founders." This is the generation bounded roughly
by 1880 extending all the way up to include the people that
led the United States during the Cold War, Walter Isaacson's
so-called "wise men."
Before discussing Marshall, in particular, I need to begin
with a personal story. In September of 1997, I was in the
Stonewall Jackson Memorial Hall at the Virginia Military
Institute. I was looking at the Corps of Cadets who were
sitting at rapt attention and listening very earnestly to a
speaker who was the president of the first class at that
time, or the senior class. The Corps was in a sulfurous
mood. After a nine-year progress through the courts, the
Supreme Court had ruled-by a vote of seven to one-that the
Institute must admit women. (I don't know how many of you
have been through situations in which your college or your
school which was all-women's or all-men's goes coed, but it
absolutely unhinges people. They become irrational and very
hard to manage. It is as though Western civilization has
been threatened itself.) In this case, the opposition to
female students had been very strong. This young man stood
up, looked at his classmates and friends and quoted
Marshall.
In the story, Marshall had been asked what he had learned
working for John Pershing in World War I. Marshall said the
most important was that if you were a subordinate officer,
when you were given an order with which you disagreed, you
must call yourself to account to execute that order with re-
doubled and visible enthusiasm and efficiency. That was
your obligation. This is what the British call "hard
cheese." This was a brave act by this young cadet. The issue
was fought; VMI had fought the good fight for a long time.
It had become a very emotional issue. But to see this young
man remind his fellow Cadets that they were to behave
themselves and do it properly, which they did, was an
interesting reflection on the influence and impact that
Marshall still had at that school.
George Marshall was born in 1880, and was an exact
contemporary of his imputed rival Douglas MacArthur.
Marshall, incidentally, did not do rivalry but subsequent
historians have imputed some kind of a rivalry there. His
provenance was Virginian. He was a collateral descendant of
Chief Justice John Marshall, and interestingly, a grand-
nephew of Charles Marshall, who was one of General Robert E.
Lee's young men. Lee traveled with a group of three or four
young men who looked after him, wrote his speeches, among
other things. Charles Marshall had the same relationship to
Lee essentially that Abraham Lincoln had with John Hay. It
is useful to remember, as I have said, that Marshall grew up
in the shadow of the Civil War. He knew many veterans of the
Civil War.
When he was a cadet himself at the Virginia Military
Institute, he was surrounded by veterans,. His early living
heroes were members of the returning National Guard unit
from western Pennsylvania coming back from Cuba, and later
on, from the Philippines during the Spanish-American War.
Watching this, we think, confirmed Marshall's early romantic
impulse to become a soldier. After commissioning, Marshall's
first assignment was in the Philippines where he was
responsible for the security of the island of Mindoro; a
place the size of Connecticut. He was a second lieutenant
and had just one associate. The war was over. He was dealing
with the insurrection. He was more or less alone. Mail came
every six weeks. Here is the school of responsibility and
self-reliance. No expectation of reward except General Lee's
famous general orders number nine. "It will take with you
the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of
duty faithfully performed." That's it! No house in the
Hamptons, no BMW, your kids don't get into Princeton- none
of the appurtenances of success in this country. Instead,
"You did it, and you know you did it." A rapid sequence of
assignments, mainly to schools and National Guard units,
followed. On one occasion, as a first lieutenant, Marshall
took charge of an Army division in maneuvers and
successfully defeated the enemy aggressor. The general
watching all of this said that Marshall was a military
genius, and his reputation would one day threaten that of
Stonewall Jackson. (Imagine if you were a lieutenant and
somebody said that to you.)
In 1917, as Operations Officer of the First Division,
Marshall sailed to France. Before that, he had an experience
that made a profound impression and significantly influenced
him early in World War II. He was working as an aide to
General Franklin Bell at Governors Island in New York, First
U.S. Army Headquarters. Through the First U.S. Army, a
number of early units were sent over to France. Five or six
young lieutenants came by one day and asked to see General
Bell. Major Marshall said, "He's not available. May I help
you?" "Yes, sir, all of us have been married in the last
couple of weeks. We're hoping for an extra two days of
furlough before we sail for France to be with our young
wives." Permission was, of course, granted. Within four
months, all were dead. Marshall took from that the following
lesson: to commission young men who have been to what we
would call "high class Eastern colleges," and who were well-
born, simply because they were the beneficiaries of that
kind of privilege, and perhaps had had two or three weeks of
drilling with a rifle in Plattsburg, was not a good way to
train young officers. First of all, it was undemocratic, but
secondly, however brave, however ardent you might be, if you
were not properly trained and had not proven yourself as an
enlisted man, you should not be commissioned. And Marshall
believed that until he died. During the early days in World
War II, he and Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, had a long
argument about this. Stimson wanted to continue
commissioning people that way. Marshall, on the other hand,
insisted that the only people to receive commissions-aside
from medical doctors, chaplains, perhaps dentists-should be
West Point graduates or people who have been through Officer
Candidates School (OCS). And he had Omar Bradley, one of his
prot‚g‚s, went down to Fort Benning and established OCS.
Stimson was extremely angry. (A stout-hearted Republican,
Stimson was Secretary of War under Franklin Roosevelt from
age of 74 to 78. Roosevelt hired him because he was good,
and he had been Secretary of War 35 years earlier under
William Howard Taft. At the age of 51, Colonel Stimson
volunteered, and went to France as an artillery battery
commander. This gives you a sense of what he was like.)
In the mid-1950s, several volumes of a lengthy study of
Civil War leadership appeared by historian Kenneth Williams.
It was entitled "Lincoln Finds a General." Ulysses Grant was
not "brought east," as they used to say, until 1864. He was
then made commanding general of all Union forces, and
promoted to the grade of lieutenant general, our first to
have a regular appointment as a three-star general since
George Washington. My point is that it took President
Lincoln some three years to find, consider, hire and promote
Grant to his new eminence. This appointment soon led to the
accelerated promotion of men like William T. Sherman and
Philip Sheridan. Now hold that thought just for a moment.
In the summer of 1942, less than six months after Pearl
Harbor, the Army was preparing for what would be its first
offensive in the Atlantic theater, operation towards the
invasion of North Africa. The retinue of senior American
generals at the start of the war, on active service,
comprised Douglas MacArthur, Charles Marshall, Joseph
Stilwell, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley,
Courtney Hodges, Walter Bedell Smith, Robert Eichelberger,
Walter Krueger, Mark Clark, Lucian Truscott, and a coterie
of colonels soon to command divisions, among them Albert
Wedemeyer, J. Lawton Collins, Matthew B. Ridgway, Forrest
Harding, James M. Gavin. They were all there in positions of
responsibility at the start of the war-that array of talent.
How were they, to borrow a phrase, all present at creation?
The Army of the 1920s and the '30s was what Marshall called
"a little sketchy thing." Its average strength was 130,000
soldiers and 13,000 officers. The latter were almost never
promoted. Among them, men who had fought in France and who
had become majors and lieutenant colonels were all reduced
in grade two ranks in 1919. In other words, you were a
lieutenant colonel, now you're a captain. Your pay was
suitably adjusted downward. Those who were commissioned
right after the Armistice were to park in the grade of first
lieutenant for between 15 and 18 years. They called their
insignia the "bar sinister." Yet, consider this. When the
West Point class of 1915 assembled in June 1940 for its 25th
reunion, only a month after the Germans had invaded the low
countries, only some five percent of that class had left the
Army. The equivalent for the West Point classes of 2000-2005
of people who have left of attrition is between 50 and 60
percent. I draw no conclusions, but it is interesting to
compare those numbers.
Those who had remained during this slack, arid, inter-war
period studied, learned and taught their profession. They
heard their calling. They learned each other. They had
leisure to think, to ponder, to write. Much of the time was
uninterrupted The culture of what we may call "visible
busyness" had not yet infected the way that we live-soldiers
and civilians both. Since there were so few commands
available, officers exploited unusual interests and
eccentricities. Joseph Stilwell had three tours of duty in
China; he learned Mandarin fluently. Eisenhower spent time
working for General Pershing on his memoirs, as well as
learning industrial management. Forrest Harding, working for
Marshall, put together an important compendium of World War
I tactical situations-infantry and battle. Wedemeyer spent
two years at the German Kriegsakademie. During Marshall's
tenure as assistant commandant of the infantry school from
1927-1932, about 1,200 students passed through the school.
Two hundred became general officers in the 1940s. Do the
math. If you were a captain and you were 27 or 28 years old
at the Infantry School in 1927, in 1943 you were the perfect
age to be a general in the Army. Napoleon said the perfect
age for a general was 40. Somebody reminded Grant of that,
and for one of the few times in his life, Grant smiled.
The important thing is that during this period in the 1920s
and '30s, this fallow period, powerful and ethical lessons
were taught. As a student at the Infantry School, you were
expected to stand up and argue your solution to tactical
problems no matter how far they deviated from the expected
norms and the conventional -the school solution. Originality
was encouraged and rewarded. Writing or arguing the
conventional, the safe answer, did not make people think you
were smart. It made them, Marshall in particular, think you
were dull. In making officer students better students and
scholars of the profession, he was teaching them essentially
an ethical lesson, Specifically, saying things to please
superiors, responding to the goad of ambition rather than
answering the calls and claims of truth will get you nowhere
in the Army as it should be. Marshall had understood that
the worst source of lessons in how to fight a German enemy,
if the enemy was to be Germany once again, were the lessons
presented by America's brief experience at the end of World
War I. Independent thinking-rather than mute allegiance to
doctrine-was the whole purpose of the Infantry School.
Students were expected to respond under pressure to
difficult tactical problems, and to explain their solutions
without notes. Professors were not allowed to use notes when
they lectured. They were to be self-reliant, and self-
reliance in leadership depends upon courage, which is
habitually called upon.
The ethical leadership of George Marshall provided many
lesson including: an officer never is to take the counsel of
his ambition. He became the intellectual tutor of Dwight
Eisenhower. You do not angle for assignments, for
promotions, or for choice positions. When the Secretary of
War asked Joseph Stilwell if he was ready to take up what
would become a mission impossible in China in 1942-the
winter of 1941-1942-Stilwell said simply, "I'll go where I'm
sent." That's the kind of answer that people like Stimson
and Marshall liked to hear. Marshall himself, during the
full length of the war, would not permit himself to receive
a decoration. He refused all honorary degrees and any
tributes, honorifics, or decorations. He told his aides that
if any was given him, they would be fired. When Admiral
Ernest King, Chief of Naval Operations, sought five-star
rank for the most senior officers of the Navy and the Army,
Marshall discouraged him abruptly. King wished to call
himself "arch admiral." That was his suggested term. This
provoked ill-concealed merriment among many people in
Washington. Marshall, of course, did not want to be called
"Marshall Marshall." There was some suggestion that we
should have field marshalls, as well as generals. Against
the advice of his aide-the young Dwight Eisenhower-Douglas
MacArthur allowed himself to be given the title "Field
Marshall" by the Philippines in 1937.
In his short biography of his father-in-law, Agricola (the
pro-consul in Britain in the first century B.C.), the Roman
historian Tacitus remarks that "To praise him for his acts
of courage was to insult him and to misunderstand him.
Choices and decisions which many men would labor over,
finally choosing the harder or more dangerous right over the
easier wrong, were to Agricola simple matters of execution.
That was the way he was. He had consciously made himself
that way." Like Agricola, Marshall, a Victorian, was very
much an artifact of his own conscious making and his life-
long superintendence. Selflessness was one of the things he
taught himself. In the Army, this selflessness meant doing
one's work without calculation of risk or reward.
There are many famous demonstrations of this selflessness. I
will highlight just two of them. One is interesting and in a
way, quite funny, and involves General Pershing and another
general, William Siebert. In the early fall of 1917,
Pershing was in France visiting the First Division. This was
the only division in France at that time and Pershing liked
to visit troops. If you were in the First Division, you
could expect that Pershing would come to see you often.
Pershing was a very formidable presence-stern, unbending,
very direct on duty. He concluded his visit, by asking to be
shown a demonstration called "battalion in the capture of a
trench." And watching the whole division in a review, he
concluded his visit by asking General Siebert to assemble
all of the officers of the division so he could speak to
them. He then said, "I have rarely seen a poorer
demonstration. I am ashamed of you. I am disappointed by the
division's efficiency, ashamed, and I don't think I've ever
seen anything worse in the U.S. Army." He looked around the
officers, stared at them, and then turned from the assembly
and began to walk toward his limousine. "Just a minute,
General. There's something that needs to be said, and if
nobody else will, I guess I'd better." "Who are you?" "Major
Marshall, sir, Operations Officer." "What do you have to say
for yourself?" "Nothing for myself, but you need to know the
reasons for our difficulties for what you have seen. This
division marched almost 30 miles overnight to give you your
review. We have done everything in our power with very
little to work with in a very brief amount of time."
Pershing resumes his walk to the limousine to hear Marshall
say as he's walking away from him, "I'm not finished." The
great man turns around, more of the same. Pershing makes a
lame, almost apologetic farewell and says something like,
"Well, we have our troubles, too, up at Headquarters," and
he leaves. All of the officers gather around Marshall.
General Siebert puts an arm around his shoulder. All are
certain he will be sent away immediately. On the contrary,
on his next visit, and every visit thereafter, Pershing
insisted that Marshall brief him before he did anything.
Five months later, he made him his senior aide, a position
that Marshall held for five years. Incidentally, Pershing
was a very great military commander, but he hated
administration. He couldn't stand being in the office and
going through papers. So, when Pershing was chief of staff,
Marshall was a lieutenant colonel, virtually every piece of
paper that went into Pershing's office came back with a
notation "LTC Marshall," meaning "Please George, do this for
me so I can go out and do other things." I say this only to
indicate that Marshall was receiving an extraordinarily high
level of political military education as Pershing's aide.
Another incident occurred on November 14, 1938. Marshall was
now a Brigadier General. He was the Deputy Chief of Staff,
very much the junior man in an audience which had been
assembled at the White House, about 14 senior people
including the Secretaries of War and Navy-to listen to
Franklin Roosevelt pronounce on an important element of the
country beginning to prepare itself for what might come. The
President had made an enthusiastic argument for a huge
increase in the production and procurement of what, in those
days, were called war planes. "We must have 10,000 planes as
soon as they can be manufactured. The planes will act as a
deterrent. They do not require hundreds of thousands of
soldiers. We will not use them unless someone attacks us.
Everyone OK with that?" Everyone nodded. "What about you,
George?" Marshall was sitting by himself down at the end of
a sofa. "Do you agree?" "No, Mr. President, I don't agree at
all." The same Pershing-like sequence was repeated.
Marshall's colleagues were shocked. As they left the Oval
Office together they said, "Nice knowing you. Have you ever
been to Guam?" Marshall later said that he was offended by
the President's "first naming" him. Marshall was quite a
starchy person. "I objected to this misrepresentation of our
intimacy. Within six months, FDR had asked Marshall, junior
to all of the obvious candidates, to be the head of the
Army. Now, he did not make a habit of boldly challenging
authority in ways which were discourteous, but he always
spoke out when he had the facts.
Marshall, as a representative of the military before
Congress-one of the important elements of military
leadership in those days and today-was to act as an advocate
for the administration's policies. Remember that in those
days there was no hoard of frisking deputy assistants. There
was Marshall, Admiral King, Mr. Stimson, Frank Knox, and the
President. That's how things operated. And they did pretty
well. He was always an austere presence at the witness
table, but calmly and pleasantly responsive to questions
from Senators and Congressmen. No aide was allowed to
accompany him. No papers were visible. He assumed his
questioners were American patriots and men as anxious to see
the war finished as quickly and cheaply as he was. He wore
almost no ribbons or decorations. Speaker of the House Sam
Rayburn noticed that Marshall habitually offered evidence
that hurt his own case when such evidence seemed demanded,
if you were completely honest. Later in his career, as
Secretary of State, making his presentation in behalf of the
plan for European recovery- the Marshall Plan--which is how
most people remember him, he stressed the huge costs and the
sacrifices that would be demanded of all, and indeed, the
uncertainty of success.
This was a period of extraordinary accomplishment in U.S.
foreign policy, the administration was strongly Democratic,
and the Congress, both Houses, was strongly Republican. By
now, Marshall's reputation for rectitude, uprightness, self-
mastery and sheer wisdom virtually guaranteed that the
things he advocated would receive an earnest and usually
favorable reception from Democrats and Republicans alike. By
executive order in March, 1942, Marshall was made principal
advisor to the President on matters of strategy. His
position vis-…-vis the President was the same as Admiral
King's was for the Navy. There was a much smaller
scaffolding of Defense Department so-called "defense
intellectuals" than today. Incidentally, Marshall, according
to Peter Drucker, was the greatest "picker of men" in
American history. His ability to identify people of talent
when they were very young and move them ahead so that they
would be in important positions when the time came for their
services was unsurpassed.
In any community of persons brought together for some common
purpose-schools and colleges, as well as military
organizations-leaders emerge. By far the most potent means
of creating an ethical environment is the power and
authority of one's own example. Marshall's was an example
which represented the standards of the Army-an army
appropriate to an American Democracy, as it should be. He
was austere, committed to doing the mission with the minimum
of cost necessary to complete it, and in which advancement
within was to be achieved only by demonstrated mastery of
duty. Marshall was to the Army of 1945 what Grant had been
to the Union Army and the Duke of Wellington had been to the
British Army. He was its exemplar, and he was known and
admired as such.
It's interesting that of all of the great World War II
figures, Marshall is the one least well-remembered. In fact,
when David McCullough, the most popular and excellent
historian of our time, ran a seminar at Dartmouth College,
not a single member of the seminar he taught could identify
George Marshall. Mercy.
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