The Supreme Professional

GEORGE C. MARSHALL: ORDEAL AND HOPE 1939-42 by Forrest C. Pogue. 491 pages. Viking. $8.95.

Modern generals win paper monuments. Roman triumphs and imperial purple are out; the dead great don't even get purple prose. Olive-drab words backed by properly inspected facts do the honors. Today's armies, those huge agglomerations of men and machines required for warfare by great industrial states, still need platoon leaders and even heroes; but above all they need a military bureaucrat, a lord of the files.

George C. Marshall, a five-star general, rates a four-volume biography, and this second volume does much to make clear why the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army during its worst military situation since 1812 deserved the high esteem in which he was held by official Washington, by his profession and by the public. As the nation's top duty officer, he showed that his chief qualities were probity and unselfish service.

The book begins with Marshall's appointment as Chief of Staff on Sept. 1, 1939, the day Hitler's armor moved into Poland, and ends on Dec. 31, 1942, with his 62nd birthday party (sherry and cake) in the Pentagon--and with Rommel still in Africa and the Red army just hanging on at Stalingrad. Between those dates lay a Pikes Peak of paper. This has been industriously mined and smelted down by his official historian, Dr. Forrest C. Pogue, combat historian in World War II and currently director of the George C. Marshall Research Center, a private foundation at Lexington, Va., housing Marshall papers and memorabilia. Pogue can be relied upon to commit no injustice to the general. He can also be relied upon to use no fresh trope when the combat-tested cliche is available. But the book is read able for those who like the record plainly laid out.

Fixed Character. Readers who experienced World War II and were directly, if remotely, affected by General Marshall's performance will be particularly interested in the psychology of the man whom Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has called "the supreme professional American soldier of this century." His character had long been fixed when Marshall became Chief of Staff. The interest lies in seeing it in action on a world war scene of inconceivable complexity.

He was not a clever man in the usual sense. He was certainly no intellectual and read little but the Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest and a western or two. He was not imaginative, and perhaps this was just as well; unlike his friend George Patton, he never developed fantasies of being a reincarnation of one of Alexander the Great's captains. Nor could he speak, as Douglas MacArthur could, like Henry V before Harfleur. Yet the conclusion is inevitable that the war was too serious to be left to anyone but this general.

Only a computer could master his tremendous achievements during the twelve months after Pearl Harbor, when the number of active Army divisions all but doubled, air combat groups almost tripled, and U.S. troop strength overseas rose from 192,000 to a million--the first of 8,000,000. Marshall had commanded a company in the Philippines and won commendations for coolness, and later for tactical brilliance in maneuvers. His equally cool competence in staff work became his great asset.

Squeak to Victory. Marshall could make mistakes, and his biographer follows the general's admirable practice of admitting them. For example, before Pearl Harbor, he told an incredulous correspondent, TIME'S Robert Sherrod, that in a future Pacific war, the role of heavy long-range bombers would be decisive. As it turned out, the B-17s produced no early miracles. After the Battle of Midway ("the closest squeak and the greatest victory"), it was clear to Marshall that the Navy's carrier-based fighter-bombers were the big weapon against Japan.

In the European theater, he continually opposed the dangerous dispersion of U.S. forces on peripheral operations. He did not disguise the fact that he found hair-raising some brilliantly improvised British plans for commando-type raids on the German-held coasts of Europe. He felt that they might dissipate the grand design that culminated in the huge assault on the beachheads of Normandy. He was not a commando-minded man--and it was just as well.

He knew the upper echelons of the Army like the back of his hand, and it was the back of his hand they sometimes got. When General "Hap" Arnold complained that the Air Force was not getting the large share of credit it claimed, Marshall told him pretty sharply to pipe down. Nor was he the man to ease the jolt when it came to jumping talent over seniority, as when Lieut. Colonel Eisenhower was promoted over numberless brigadiers. He kept a "little Black Book" for duds, and stars would never fall on those listed therein.

Always a soldier's soldier, he also had to make sense to civilians. In Henry Stimson, a lawyer and a courtly gentleman, he found a perfect Secretary of War, but by no means a complaisant one. Stimson and Marshall both policed the perimeter of their authority and never let develop the kind of abrasive relations that were common in Washington between politician and the military.

Pride & Genius. In handling the impossible military problems and improbable personality of Douglas MacArthur, Marshall was superb. A minefield of difficulties had to be threaded before MacArthur could be moved from the Philippines to Australia and establish a new international command on the ruins of the shattered U.S.-British-Dutch-Australian setup. He had to respect MacArthur's legitimate pride and ignore the inexplicable pettiness that moved MacArthur to fight against a Medal of Honor for his comrade, Jonathan Wainwright, destined for a Japanese prison camp. Throughout, Marshall never wavered in his belief in MacArthur's military genius.

So it went with George Patton. Temperamentally Marshall had nothing in common with the gaudy, poeticizing, rich, vain, bombastic, blasphemous fire eater. Once, Patton pressed his luck too far. At a private dinner, he used his friendship with Marshall to plead for a demoted colonel who had criticized the War Department. Said Marshall: "I am speaking now as the Chief of Staff to General Patton, not to my friend General Patton. You have encouraged the colonel in his attacks, and you have destroyed him. I will not promote him; never mention it to me again."

George Marshall may not have been the most brilliant of dinner-table conversationalists, but it could be said that men hung on his words.

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