Who Was General George Marshall?

America's Model Soldier-Statesman in War and Uneasy Peace

Oct 16, 2009

The World War II Chief of Staff successfully managed a two-front world conflict, attempted to make peace in China, then led U.S. responses to post-war challenges.

General George C. Marshall, a graduate of Virginia Military Institute, caught the eye of U.S. World War I commander General John J. Pershing with his contributions to the planning of the crucial Meuse-Argonne campaign. After a number of postwar staff and command assignments, Marshall became head of the Army's War Plans Division in 1938 as the Roosevelt Administration was becoming increasingly concerned about German and Japanese aggressiveness. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was sufficiently impressed with the abilities he demonstrated to make him Army Chief of Staff in 1939.

Wartime Leadership

By the time Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Marshall had a sound knowledge of the nation's military assets and weaknesses and had been expediting war planning with the help of capable officers that he had placed into positions of responsibility. A respected adviser to President Roosevelt, he played a key role in the formulation of grand strategy to coordinate operations with our British allies and to massively supply the Soviet Red army, which constituted the only organized national force opposing the Nazis on the European continent.

Although he had recommended and supported General Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied forces in North Africa, Marshall had entertained some hopes of leading the ultimate invasion of western Europe which he had helped plan. Ironically, the Chief of Staff had made himself indispensable to Roosevelt as overall head of the military effort, and Eisenhower went on to lead the campaign which began with the D-Day landings.

Marshall continued in his position through the surrenders of Germany and Japan, earning the accolade of "organizer of victory" from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and then retired in November 1945.

Making and Preserving Peace

Within days, however, Roosevelt's successor, President Harry Truman, asked Marshall to go to China and attempt to end a civil war between the Nationalist Government of our wartime ally, President Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communist forces led by MaoTse-tung, which had also fought the Japanese. Despite a year-long effort, Marshall returned to the U.S. unsuccessful, and the civil war continued for three years, ending in a Communist triumph. Six years after his mission, Republican Senators Joseph McCarthy and William Jenner would accuse the General of contributing to the "loss of China".

Truman now asked the General to head the State Department as a Cold War had developed with our wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Marshall executed the emergency shipment of aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947 to combat Communist insurrection and external threats. He then announced and gave his name to a massive program of assistance to the war-ravaged economies of western Europe designed to restore their prosperity and resist integration into the Soviet orbit. The Marshall Plan won the General the Nobel Peace Prize.

After a renewed attempt at retirement lasted just one year, Marshall answered another call from Truman to serve as Secretary of Defense as U.S. forces had to respond to a Communist invasion of South Korea and became bogged down in an Asian land war.

After serving as President of the American Red Cross, and having earned the nearly universal admiration and gratitude of the American people, Marshall died in 1959, to be remembered as the ideal soldier-statesman.

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