By MARK ATWOOD LAWRENCE
NOV. 26, 2014
Dwight D. Eisenhower and George C. Marshall in Algiers, 1943. Credit Associated Press
Where have all the great generals gone? The United States has been at war since 2001 — its longest period of uninterrupted conflict — and for considerable stretches of the last half-century. Yet during all those years the nation has produced no military commanders of undeniable greatness.
For models of generalship, historians and biographers reach further back, returning again and again to the likes of George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, John J. (Black Jack) Pershing and Dwight Eisenhower, most of whom have been the subjects of admiring and popular volumes in recent years.
But no American military leader has been so revered as George Catlett Marshall, the Army chief of staff during World War II and then secretary of state and secretary of defense. Contemporaries heaped praise on Marshall for organizing the enormous expansion of United States forces necessary to challenge the Axis powers, managing relations with America’s cantankerous allies and playing a key role in devising the military strategies that ultimately won the war. Truman called Marshall “the greatest military man that this country ever produced — or any other country for that matter.” Time magazine, which twice named Marshall its man of the year, called him simply “the indispensable man” in 1944. Later commentators have mostly echoed these judgments, holding up Marshall as a model of all that’s lacking in American commanders ever since.
Debi and Irwin Unger take exception to this heroic depiction in their elegant and iconoclastic biography, which pokes innumerable holes in Marshall’s reputation for leadership and raises intriguing questions about how such reputations get made. Marshall emerges not as the incarnation of greatness but as an ordinary, indecisive, “less than awe-inspiring” man who achieved an unexceptional mix of success and failure.
Why the discrepancy between the reputation and what “George Marshall: A Biography” claims is the reality? The answer, the Ungers assert, lies in “Americans’ yearning for a Platonic ideal of a triumphant military leader above politics, deceit and selfish ambition.” In fact, they add, a man of “unremarkable powers” was protected from the criticism he deserved by his “sterling character” and an aloof, stern bearing that kept potential critics from looking too closely. “Only a very few keen observers saw beyond the conventional wisdom,” the book concludes.
Such refreshing contrarianism comes as little surprise given the book’s team of accomplished authors. The Ungers’ co-author, the Queens College historian Stanley Hirshson, who began researching the book before his death in 2003, is best known for a remarkably favorable biography of the oft-maligned Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman and a mostly critical study of the much-celebrated World War II general George S. Patton. Irwin Unger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, and his wife, Debi, whose collaborations include several studies of reform and dissent movements of the 1960s, carried on Hirshson’s research and wrote the book.
To be sure, the Ungers credit Marshall with momentous accomplishments. He deserves praise, they note, for ceaselessly pushing against the nation’s pervasive isolationist mood in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack and demanding steps to prepare the nation for war.
They also laud Marshall’s determination, in the face of opposition from much of the American public, to prioritize the war in Europe over the fight against Japan and, over British objections, to make a major attack across the English Channel the focal point of Allied strategy rather than operations in the Mediterranean. Both choices were, the Ungers assert, pivotal to the ultimate Allied victory. Most of all, the book extols Marshall’s wisdom in insisting on unified Anglo-American commands and deftly managing relations between the two prideful militaries.
In other ways, though, Marshall comes across as nothing special. In the Ungers’ telling, Marshall’s ascent through the ranks — a slow and frustrating experience that led him to question his commitment to the Army — owed as much to good timing as to any particular genius. The expansion of the military during World War I pulled him from obscurity, and the rise of fascism in the 1930s meant that his years as chief of staff would be endowed with epochal importance.
More strikingly, the book questions Marshall on matters that have usually counted in his favor. Like his champions, the Ungers note that he presided over the stunning growth of the Army from 275,000 to more than eight million men. But they insist that the latter number was still dangerously low considering the challenges the Army faced in waging a two-front war. More damning still, they argue, Marshall failed to assure adequate training for American servicemen to fight effectively against highly skilled enemies. The consequences were unnecessary American casualties and numerous battlefield setbacks before sheer industrial prowess could compensate for the deficiencies of American troops.
Nor do the Ungers affirm Marshall’s reputation as a good judge of subordinates. In fact, they reserve some of their strongest criticism for the men Marshall chose as his field commanders, including Douglas MacArthur in the Pacific, Joseph Stilwell in China and Mark Clark in Europe. Marshall’s protégés, the book suggests, “probably varied as much in leadership quality as any random selection among the list of available officers at the time of their assignments.”
The Ungers focus less attention on Marshall’s postwar career, including his stints in Harry Truman’s cabinet during the crisis-filled years from 1947 to 1951. But here, too, their appraisal is mixed at best, even in connection with the achievement most closely associated with Marshall’s years as secretary of state, the $17 billion economic aid program to rebuild war-devastated Western Europe. The Marshall Plan was, in fact, the work of numerous officials, according to the Ungers, and Marshall’s main contribution was simply to lend his name to the effort. Recognizing that Marshall’s stature would help win congressional approval of the program, the Truman administration was happy to let him take credit.
Mostly, the Ungers’ vision of Marshall is persuasive. Praise for the general has soared so high over the years that the reality is bound to lie closer to the ground. The book also offers a useful reminder that glorification of the World War II era may tell us more about the disappointments of our own times than about an increasingly remote past when — no surprise — American leaders stumbled and were sometimes saved from their errors by the scale of the American war machine and the endurance of their allies.
Still, it seems reasonable to believe that the challenges of raising an army and fighting monumental conflicts on two fronts were so great that Marshall, whatever his flaws, deserves the praise he has received. Could someone else have done better given the constraints that would have confronted any Army chief of staff — not just isolationist sentiment and poor military preparedness but also wobbly civilian leadership, fierce interservice rivalries and a superabundance of headstrong subordinate officers?
To reckon seriously with this question would require a much broader examination of the United States at war than the Ungers provide. And it is, of course, ultimately unanswerable. But greater attention to the wider context of Marshall’s leadership might show that mediocrity pervaded the American war effort across the board, not just the performance of one man.
Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is “The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.”
A version of this review appears in print on November 30, 2014, on page BR26 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The General. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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