Robert Payne - The Marshall Story: A Biography of General George C. Marshall

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Text originally published in 1951 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE MARSHALL STORY:

A BIOGRAPHY OF GENERAL GEORGE C. MARSHALL

BY

ROBERT PAYNE

Contents

When he was fifteen or twenty years old

He snatched a wild ponys bridle, then rode away.

In the mountains he killed a tiger with a white forehead:

Once with his sword he stopped a million men.

Swift as the blaze of lightning were his troops.

Today his left elbow is knotted like willows,

And by the roadside he sells ripe melons.

Dark green are the ancient trees beside his house,

And the winter hills shine on his window.

See, he still polishes his armor till it shines like snow,

And brandishes his jewelled sword like a flashing star.

Do not think lightly of the old general

Who still may fight a battle to keep his laurel green.

WANG WEI (about 740 A.D.)

The photographs in this book have been made available through the courtesy of the United States Army.

This book is more concerned with the mind of General Marshall than with a recital of his day by day activities, and though the general form of a biography has been followed, it is not in the strict sense a biography at all. I have attempted to discover what kind of man he is, why he developed in the way he did, and how he became a legend. The examination of legends presents obvious difficulties, for legends acquire forces over which men have little or no control, and we are tempted to bow before legends when we would refuse to bow before men. The historian concerned with great historical figures must perpetually ask himself: Where does the legend end? Where does the man begin? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these questions, and historical characters themselves are often confounded by their own legends.

I imagine that the pathways of the mind are a little like the terrible roads of the Pentagon. These roads seem to have been designed for the special purpose of ensuring that men lose themselves in a maze. Bays, rings, corridors, ramps, stairs, a profusion of colored pillars, conflicting direction signs, passages which seem endless and others which end abruptly, these are the things we may expect to find in the mind of a modern general. The difficulty is to find where the minds core is. General Marshall, more complex than most American generals, and far more subtle, tends to disappear in the heart of the maze. Sometimes a mirror flashes; sometimes we catch a glimpse of him, but not for long. He eludes us, as perhaps he eludes himself. His real power is something that can be felt rather than described.

There are dangers in writing a study of a modern general: the same kind of dangers which confront those who deal with high explosives. The modern general is a new species. Nothing quite like him has ever existed before. He wields such vast and deadly forces that he becomes more than human, removed from the preoccupations of ordinary mortals. Catastrophe or triumph are at his command: he can not only defeat, but he can annihilate whole populations in a moment of time. He can lay waste whole areas of the earth, sink islands below the level of the seas, sweep centuries of history away with an order dictated calmly over the telephone, and simply because he possesses these powers, he is continually tempted to use them. By 1945 the powers of a general had become so prodigious that the game of war was hardly worth the playing; war itself had reached a crisis, and was in danger of becoming something else altogether. A new vocabulary was needed to describe the stresses and strains operating on the minds of men who wield such incalculable powers. In the absence of a new vocabulary, it should be realized that in the chapters concerning Marshalls direction of the war, the ordinary words sometimes fail to convey the requisite meaning. Marshall likes to use the word tremendous. The Fathers of the Western Church spoke of the tremendum Dei , the earth-shattering terror which is a portion of the mercy of God. Sometimes, when Marshall uses the word tremendous, it would be wise to remember the medieval meaning.

If the modern general is almost superhuman, he is alsofar more often than he suspectsless than human. The historian concerned with the career of Marshall inevitably finds himself reading the autobiographies of the lesser generals. They are not always pleasant reading. Too often the military autobiographers suffer from the first of the seven deadly sins, which is pride; they ascribe their successes to their superb intelligence, their occasional failures to the unkindly fates. They speak of the soldiers under their command as one might speak of robots, and they very rarely speak of the soldiers. They forget that the mistakes of generals are never small. General Bradley boasted frankly of his successes, but he had little to say about the disaster in the Ardennes which resulted in fifty-nine thousand American casualties, a disaster which was due to his own failure in tactics. (He noted that the command sometimes makes mistakes.) Humility is not a characteristic of generals, but it is reasonable to suggest that generals should in future be examined for their humility, for fear that their overweening pride lead them to errors and a mental disturbance which is not far removed from madness. General Eisenhower once remarked that the occupational disease of generals is an exalted belief in their own importance. This is a belief which is rarely shared by the soldiers, who do not die to glorify their generals, but in the hope that their deaths will help their country to live.

We live in a sacrificial age, and generals are the executioners. Even the best of them by the very nature of their profession are tainted with guilt, for no man has the right to traffic with the lives of human beings. So there can be no end to war until there is an end to the officer caste, and no peace as long as the military virtues of cunning and ruthlessness are acclaimed. General Marshall wrote somewhere that the historians have failed in their task: they should have been able to discover and reveal the causes of war and make war impossible. It is more likely that wars arise because ruthlessness, cunning, and the desire for power over their fellow men, the qualities which are indispensable in a general, are still regarded as conventionally desirable. To find the causes of war we should dissect the minds of generals.