From the outset, Marshall made it clear that he would not run the Army for the benefit of its senior officers. He informed Roosevelt that he was ready to get rid of those who did not measure up. In a real war, he later wrote, the needs of the enlisted men came first. He believed that the Army owed its soldiers competent leadership above all.
Marshall came to the job with a mission to prevent the errors of 1917–18, when he had planned offensive operations as a member of Pershing’s staff. Not only had Marshall’s position allowed him to witness the brutality and waste of war, but he had seen firsthand the limitations of a poorly prepared force. In September 1918, he helped orchestrate two U.S. operations in France—an attack on Saint-Mihiel and an offensive in the Meuse-Argonne region—both of which, though successful, resulted in the massive loss of American lives. According to Marshall, “the young officers did not know how to regroup their men after the initial advance . . . and when the time came to push on, they were unable to carry out their mission.”6
Marshall was a man of strong opinion based on that wartime experience. While still an aide to Pershing, he had published an article entitled “Profiting by War Experiences” that addressed the matter of orders issued in combat. Marshall took the position that a “hastily prepared order” was often better than a “model” one, particularly if the model order failed to reach frontline commanders in a timely fashion. According to Marshall, “Our troops suffered much from the delays involved in preparing long and complicated orders due to the failure of the staff concerned to recognize that speed was more important than technique.”7
Initially, the personal relationship between Roosevelt and Marshall was a cool one. Before the formal appointment, when FDR called him George, Marshall took it as a show of disrespect and insisted on being addressed as General. Roosevelt would never make the same mistake again. For his part, Marshall worked hard to keep his distance from Roosevelt; he even made a point not to laugh at FDR’s jokes.
Later in the day that he was formally given the job, the Washington, D.C., Evening Star reported that in the space of three minutes, Brigadier General Marshall had accepted two promotions and three additional stars—the first as a major general in the Regular Army and two more as he took the oath of chief of staff, an automatic promotion to the rank of four stars, normally the highest rank attainable in the U.S. Army in peacetime. Marshall made no statements in connection with the promotions and declined “for political reasons” a request from newsreel photographers to pose in front of a map of Europe. The last thing Marshall wanted at that moment was to give the impression that he and the president he served were scheming to get the nation involved in the conflict in Europe.8
“My day of induction was momentous,” Marshall later wrote to a friend, “with the starting of what appears to be a world war.”9
On September 3, two days after Marshall’s swearing in and the Third Reich’s invasion of Poland, France and Great Britain declared war on Germany and the Second World War was fully underway in Europe. That night, Roosevelt took to the radio waves in one of his customary fireside chats with the American people to lament the situation in Europe. He then added: “I hope the United States will keep out of this war. I believe that it will. And I give you assurance and reassurance that every effort of your Government will be directed toward that end.” Roosevelt then uttered his oft-quoted thought about war: “I have said not once but many times that I have seen war and that I hate war. I say that again and again.”10
What Roosevelt did not say that night was that if and when the nation was drawn into this war, the United States Army was not even prepared to wage a defensive battle to protect North America, let alone stage an offensive campaign on the other side of the Atlantic. But of this both he and Marshall were fully aware.
In France and Great Britain, the few days between Germany’s invasion of Poland and the declaration of war had been spent preparing for the hostilities to come. This was most dramatic in London, where more than 1.5 million people, mostly children, had been moved to the countryside in four days, and all schools located in areas felt to be prime targets for Nazi bombers were closed for the duration of the war. London-based CBS Radio reporter Edward R. Murrow told his American audience that he found it difficult to describe a city in which there were no youngsters shouting on their way home from school or playing in the parks. Responding to the belief that the bombs were about to rain down, London veterinarians opened their offices so that people could come in to have their dogs put to sleep. “Outside the vets’ surgeries,” said one eyewitness, “the slain lay in heaps.”11
As the Nazi conquest of Poland played out, the world absorbed the lesson that Hitler had violated Western rules of warfare that had stood for centuries. “There had been no time allowed to redress the grievances before the invasion, no declaration of war by the aggressor, no will to honor commitments on the part of the Allies, no time for the ponderous machinery of the democracies’ military might, no refusal to hurt civilians, and no courteous treatment of a vanquished enemy,” as one historian summed it up.12
At the time of the invasion of Poland, the German army had 1.7 million men divided into 98 infantry divisions, including nine Panzer divisions, each of which had 328 tanks, eight support battalions, and six artillery batteries.
In stark contrast, the U.S. Army, comprising 189,839 regular troops and officers, in 1939 was ranked 17th in the world, behind the army of Portugal. Furthermore, the Regular Army was dispersed to 130 camps, posts, and stations. Some 50,000 of the troops were stationed outside the United States, including the forces that occupied the Philippines and guarded the Panama Canal. The Army was, as one observer described it, “all bone and no muscle.” The United States Marine Corps stood at a mere 19,432 officers and men, fewer than the number of people employed by the New York City Police Department.13
The United States did have Reserve officers and the National Guard, which required its members to attend 48 training nights and two weeks of field duty per year to fulfill their obligation, but this was hardly enough to prepare them for combat without sustained additional training. Making matters worse, an attempt to get former soldiers to sign up for the Army Reserve, begun in 1938, was failing. Fewer than 5,000 men signed up within the first year, despite the fact they did not have to go to camps or drill but only to agree to be ready in an emergency. The pay was meager but not insignificant during the Depression: $24 a month. The Army even issued special recruiting posters for these soldiers, calling them Modern Minute Men.14
At the end of World War I, the Army had contained more than two million men; since then it had been neglected and allowed to shrink in both size and stature. General Peyton C. March, the Army’s chief of staff at the end of that war, was of the opinion that the United States had rendered itself “weaker voluntarily than the Treaty of Versailles had made Germany.” He concluded that the country had made itself “militarily impotent.”15
The meager budget needed to run the Army dwindled as the Great Depression deepened. In 1935, the Army’s annual budget bottomed out at $250 million, and the force had declined to 118,750, at which point Douglas MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, observed that the entire Regular Army could be placed inside Yankee Stadium.16
“Let me give you a specific example of the effect of these reductions upon the efficiency of the Army,” George C. Marshall later observed. “During this period I commanded a post which had for its garrison a battalion of infantry, the basic fighting unit of every army. It was a battalion only in name, for it could muster barely 200 men in ranks when every available man, including cooks, clerks, and kitchen police, [was] present for the little field training that could be accomplished with available funds. The normal strength of a battalion in most armies of the world varies from 800 to 1,000 men.”17
American troops were learning obsolete skills and preparing for defensive warfare on a small scale. As military historian Carlo D’Este wrote: “So sorry was the state of the U.S. Army in 1939 that had Pancho Villa been alive to raid the southwestern United States it would have been as ill prepared to repulse or punish him as it had been in 1916.”18
The Army had