Military Brains

(See Cover)

But it's "Thin red line of 'eroes" when the drums begin to roll. . . .

The moral, blunt as a rifle butt, of Kipling's ballad, is that in peacetime democracies keep their little armies on starvation rations and hard words, and when war comes, wish they hadn't. After every war the U. S. has fought, it has disassembled its fighting machine, on the theory that there would be no more wars. Result is that most U. S. wars have been fought wastefully (with unnecessary loss of life) and "heroically" (inefficiently) by bungling, unkempt armies. Exception was World War I, where the A. E. F. gave a good account of itself. But even then, to get a U. S. army into the field as a fighting unit took 16 months, and only the Allies' ability to hold the Germans gave a small corps of U. S. professional officers time to whip a huge citizen army into reasonably presentable shape.

Today U. S. military history has again come full cycle. Against the threat of the most powerful war machine in the world a small professional army (214,927 in 1939) is the nucleus under a Protective Mobilization Plan (P. M. P.) for development of a force of 1,200,000. To the U. S.'s 14,079 professional Army officers, bogged for years in a slow promotion list, consistently shortchanged on military appropriations, a war-frightened Congress has this session voted $3,007,988,155, is readying $3,911,995,417 more in appropriations and authorizations. With Britain backed to the wall before Adolf Hitler's armies on land and in the air, the job of transforming those dollars into a field army must be done quickly--perhaps, if 30 Britain should lose or surrender her fleet, within six months. While President Roosevelt's Defense Commission and U. S. industry carry out their own vast mobilization, the Army must: i) list its needs, from quinine to tanks and airplanes; 2) carry out a vast building program; 3) train close to a million raw and semi-expert troops; 4) feed them, doctor them, fit them to the most complicated set of weapons in the history of warfare; 5) educate a citizenry--accustomed to regard its soldiers alternately as romantic heroes or expensive jingoistic nuisances--in what its Army (really a specialized public service like a police or fire department) is and needs to be.

Last week Civilian Aides from 44 States, nine corps areas were called to Washington to be educated by Secretary of War Stimson. In Army headquarters in the rambling wartime Munitions Building on Washington's Constitution Avenue, they also met and listened to the Army's No. 1 soldier, General George Catlett Marshall. What they saw was a rangy, lean (182 Ib.) six-footer in negligently neat mufti, a field soldier with reflective blue eyes, a short, pugnacious nose, broad, humorous mouth, a stubborn upper lip. What they heard was a dry, impersonal voice, setting out with simple precision the necessities of the U. S.'s No. 1 modern military crisis, the work that has to be done to meet it.

Later, cool and unhurried General Marshall explained publicly what was on his mind. Obviously counting on conscription, which has still to be voted into law, he planned to have 16 divisions fully organized by Jan. i, 1941: nine regular Army infantry, four National Guard infantry, one cavalry, two armored divisions. Not till much later--probably around April 1942--could the Army have its full P. M. P. force manned and equipped, its Air Corps program reasonably well under way.

What the U. S. actually needs for adequate defense of the hemisphere, said he, is a trained, fully equipped army of 2,000,000. For such a job, even 1,200,000 men--45 infantry divisions, plus eight armored and six cavalry divisions--is not enough. General Marshall doesn't mind saying so out loud, although he deprecates democracy's habit of blabbing its military secrets in peacetime. Says he: "We're playing poker with everyone looking at our hand."

As Chief of Staff, General Marshall is the man who will decide what the Army will do and how it will do it. Across his ornately carved desk (bought in Chicago and taken to Washington by bulletheaded Phil Sheridan after the Civil War) flow all the Army's plans, from building flying fields to modernizing tactics and weapons.

The General Staff. Long-legged George Marshall knows he is running no one-man show. The Army doctrine of the late great Chief of Staff, J. Franklin Bell, that no man, unaided, can run a division, much less an army, long ago became as explicit as Army instructors could make it.

In the past 35 years, General Bell's staff doctrines have had plenty of practical proof, mostly by the Germans, and most recently in the perfectly coordinated Nazi assaults on Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France. Nerve-centre of the U. S. Army is its General Staff, organized in its present form in 1903 (along plans already in use in the German Army) and first war-tried in 1917. The Chief of Staff is top ranker of the Army in peacetime but likely to be topped in war (as he was in 1917-18) by the field commander of the armies. Function of the Chief of Staff: under the Secretary of War to plan, develop and execute the Army's program for national defense.

Besides the Chief, the General Staff consists of six Brigadier Generals. They are the Deputy Chief, the head of the War Plans Division, the four "Gs": Personnel (G-1), Military Intelligence (G-2), Operations & Training (G3) and Supply (G-4). Unlike their boss, V. M. I.-man Marshall, all of today's General Staff's Division Chiefs are West Pointers. All are field soldiers, two have had diplomatic service in Europe or Asia, all are young as U. S. general staffs go (the youngest 55, the eldest 60). Caught between wars, soldiers of an army which was largely paper, none of them ever commanded in the field as large an outfit as a division.

As cylinders, ignition system, transmission, chassis go to make up an automobile, each of these men represents a separate part and function of the U. S. military machine. As an ABC for civilians, the parts are:

GI. Job of the first division of the General Staff is preparation of plans and policies for personnel from recruiting to discharge. Its sphere includes Army pay, promotion, regulations, recreation, religion. Boss of G-1 is handsome, polished 55-year-old Brigadier General William Edgar Shedd Jr., a coast artilleryman who has served in Hawaii and the Philippines, taught mathematics at West Point, directed the A. E. F.'s Heavy Artillery School in France.

G2. A honeypot for newsbees, an inspiration to fictioneers, the Military Intelligence Division collects, analyzes and supplies military information to the rest of the Army. The hush-hush province of ciphers, codes, spies and their works is all G-2's: bald, husky Brigadier General Sherman Miles, whose ancestry and career are as glamorous as any in the Army. His father was the late Lieut. General Nelson A. Miles, his grandfather William Tecumseh Sherman. In the first months of World War I he was military observer with the Russian armies, later served as a military intelligence officer with the A. E. F., was sent to Constantinople in 1922 as an attache and was recalled in 1925 to be converted into an artilleryman. He was in command of Field Artillery School troops at Fort Sill, Okla., when he was sent to London as military attache in 1939, returned to the U. S. last April to join George Marshall's staff.

G3. For end results, most important man on the General Staff is G3. His job is training the Army and operating it in the field. When George Marshall was appointed Chief of Staff, he set the conservatives of the Army back on their heels by picking for G-3 the first Air Corps officer ever to head a General Staff division: deep-chested, friendly Frank Maxwell Andrews. Onetime cavalryman, Frank Andrews was the first head of the GHQ Air Force as temporary Major General, went back to a colonelcy when his tour of duty was over, came back as a permanent brigadier general of the line. A top-flight pilot at 56, Frank Andrews still flies his own plane, pokes his iron-grey head into thick weather along with the youngsters of the Air Corps.

G-4's job--supply--is the least glorious job in the Army and one of the most necessary, entailing endless complications, endless bookkeeping. Supply officer in the General Staff is friendly, competent Brigadier General Richard Curtis Moore, topflight student at West Point and an engineer officer since he graduated in 1903.

Besides supplying the thousands of items, from picket pins to tanks, that go into the Army lists, G-4 builds and maintains buildings, leases and buys land, has charge of transportation, traffic, is accountable for all Army property. All this is right up the professional alley of Dick Moore, who has been a supervising engineer on the U. S.'s great rivers, had a detail to Peru with the United States Naval Mission in 1928-30, commanded combat engineers and headed up the Atlantic Sector of the Canal Zone. A general officer since 1938, he was in command of the 18th Infantry Brigade in the Zone when George Marshall tapped him.

W. P. D. Fifth division of the staff is the War Plans Division. Its job: making plans for use of the Army in war, making estimates of the size of the Army needed for any wartime situation. W. P. D.'s top man is longheaded, ambassadorial George Veazey Strong. Like Sherman Miles, he has been as much an Army diplomat as a field soldier, is as much at home in Geneva as he is in Washington. Cavalryman to start, George Strong fought Ute Indians in the West, Moros in the Philippines, went to Tokyo in 1908 as military attache.

He was graduated from Northwestern University's law school, became an Army lawyer before he went overseas in 1918, became a troop movement officer and later a Judge Advocate (Army for lawyer) for the Service of Supply. Later he was professor of law at West Point, adviser to a succession of international military conferences in Geneva between 1925 and 1932. Biggest military feather in his cap: handling of the troop movements of the A. E. F. for the St. Mihiel offensive, of the movements of the Fourth Corps into the Argonne. For this job he got the Distinguished Service Medal. At 60, spectacled General Strong sits at the ornate desk once owned by General Sherman, likes to show visitors its empty whiskey compartment (capacity: 15 quarts).

Deputy. Alter ego of the Chief of Staff is his deputy, who acts as adjutant between the Chief and the rest of the staff and bosses the show when the Chief is away. In the past 14 months, he has made six circuits of the continental U. S., side trips (mostly by air) to Hawaii, Panama, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and his deputy, balding 60-year-old Brigadier General William Bryden, has had plenty to do. Crack Artilleryman Bryden commanded artillery brigades in 1917-18, is the only member of the staff who was a general officer in World War I. When George Marshall called him he was C. O. of the 13th Field Artillery Brigade.

The Chief. Most military men think the U. S. is very lucky in the man who happened to boss its Army A.D. 1940. A stern disciplinarian but no martinet, the Army's Chief of Staff has been a soldier's soldier since the day he left V. M. I. a senior cadet captain and all-Southern tackle. Honor graduate of the old Infantry-Cavalry School in 1907, he showed his administrative stuff as a student in the Staff School, stayed on at Leavenworth as an instructor for three years. General Bell, mightily impressed at the ease with which young Marshall tossed off astute, clearly written orders to cover tactical situations in maneuvers, called him the greatest U. S. military genius since Stonewall Jackson. Modest George Marshall has been trying to forget this heavy praise ever since. But General Bell was not alone in his high opinion. Able, erratic, spectacular General Johnson Hagood once wrote, on a Marshall efficiency report: "This officer [then a lieutenant] is well qualified to command a division with the rank of major general, in time of war, and I would like very much to serve under his command." "Black Jack" Pershing, asked who was the best soldier in the Army, replied, "Colonel Marshall, of course."

Such words buttered no parsnips for George Marshall while the slowness of peacetime promotion held him back. When World War I began he was only a captain. Overseas, in charge of operations of the famed First Division, Infantryman Marshall was upped to lieutenant colonel; later, as colonel and operations chief for the First Army, he moved 500,000 men and 2,700 pieces of artillery into the Argonne offensive without a hitch. It was an action for which George Marshall and many another old grad of the Command and Staff School were peculiarly fitted. As student and instructor, Marshall had studied and lectured on operations based on German maps of the area around Metz. When the First Army moved in, many of its officers knew every road and lane of the area they had studied but never seen before.

When peace, as it must to all U. S. Armies, brought reduction and penury, Infantryman Marshall was dropped back to a majority. He did not get back his colonelcy until 1933. Meanwhile he had served a tour with the Fifteenth Infantry at Tientsin, China, had been aide to General Pershing, instructor for the Illinois National Guard. He became a general officer in 1936--much too late for so good a soldier, many officers thought--and moved into Washington in 1938 as head W. P. D. in the General Staff.

George Marshall has a lot of respect for Army system. He also has a healthy disrespect for red tape, but adds: "When you cut it you've got to be deadly accurate." Convinced that the Army, in plan and theory, is well prepared for the emergency it faces now, he likes to point out that its mobilization and fighting plans have been worked over continuously for the past 20 years by the Army's best brains, have been changed from what he calls "semi-siege warfare" (the type of 1914-18) to a plan for more simplified, offensive tactics resembling those used by the Germans today.

The Big Job. Today General Marshall has a terrific job. Up with the sun, he trots away from his quarters at Fort Meyer, Va. every morning for a half hour on horseback, gets to his office in the Munitions Building between 7:30 and 7:45, finds only one subordinate who regularly beats him to work: greying, kindly Miss Maude A. Young, who has been secretary to every Chief of Staff since Peyton March. With General Bryden riding herd on the detail of the staff, he confers with his four Gs, submits himself to visiting Congressmen and Senators, many another caller, has frequent meetings with State and Treasury Departments and the President. Of late he has often appeared before Senate and House committees, where he talks so fluently and rapidly about Army plans that stenographers have a hard time keeping up with him.

Early to rise, George Marshall also likes to get to bed early, reads himself to sleep. He has no patience with formal military parties, would rather sit and swap stories --of the Philippines, China, Hawaii, the A. E. F.--with Army cronies who consider ii o'clock a late hour. Today the Army and its Chief of Staff often work late perforce, sometimes clear around the clock. George Marshall recognizes the necessity, but deprecates it. "Nobody," says he, "ever has an original thought after 3 p.m."

And General Marshall has a tremendous amount of work to do before 3 p.m.--usually more than he can get through by bedtime. For the U. S. may well be marching to the greatest defense crisis in its history, and men like George Marshall, working to meet it, do not yet know its scope, do not know where the blow must be parried, nor when--or whether--it will be struck. Thus the Army plans, trains and equips for an invasion it may have to meet before its long-range defense objectives have been reached.

In such days there are no idle moments for the hundreds of officers of the General Staff Corps, the arms and the services who sweat in shirt-sleeves in the rabbit warrens of the Munitions Building. Far more complicated, far graver are the responsibilities of the man sitting at Phil Sheridan's desk. While his Army is reaching its first objective--16 divisions of well-armed troops --the crisis may be upon him. Soldiers have said, and soldiers still say that there is not another like George Marshall, but the Chief of Staff, a humble man, reddens at such talk. Uncomplaining--because he is a thoroughgoing democrat himself--about the strange uses of U. S. democracy where its Army is concerned, he is in a spot where history may well judge how well he serves. No one knows that better than George Marshall himself.

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