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It was November of 1943. The Second World War was in its fourth year. American troops, who had joined the struggle just a year earlier, had acquitted themselves well. Fighting with their allies on the battlefields of North Africa and Italy, they had driven the Nazis back and liberated countries. But the real test lay ahead.

The allies were going to attempt a cross-channel invasion of France in the summer of 1944. Some 24,000 allied troops were going to land on the beaches under what was expected to be heavy German resistance. The question before the President of the United States was who to tap to lead the operation. The answer seemed obvious, and it was not Dwight D. Eisenhower.

 

The Greatest American You Never Heard of

George C. Marshall had been the architect of the policy that led to Operation OVERLORD, the code name for the cross-channel invasion. Against foot dragging and opposition, he had pushed the operation forward. When British prime minister Winston Churchill pressed for attacking Germany through the Balkans instead, Marshall held firm. More than anyone else, George C. Marshall made Operation OVERLORD a reality. It only made sense that he would command it.

But President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had other ideas. He needed Marshall in Washington to continue his vital role as Army Chief of Staff. Still, the President knew how much it would mean to Marshall to be given the command, and what it would mean to his stature in history. FDR said, “I hate to think that 50 years from now practically nobody will know who George C. Marshall was.”

In the end he left it up to Marshall to decide. He asked him directly if he wanted the command of OVERLORD. Marshall’s answer spoke volumes about his character. He told the President he should “feel free to act in whatever way he felt was in the best interests of the country … and not in any way to consider my feelings.”

FDR gave the command to Eisenhower, and, as a result, Eisenhower became a national hero, a beloved figure, and eventually the President.

As for George C. Marshall, he has been largely forgotten, the greatest American you probably never heard of.

 

Dodona Manor

I arrived at George C. Marshall’s home in Leesburg, Virginia on a rainy spring morning in May. Mine was the only car in the parking lot. As I moved around to the front of the house, it seemed the place was closed. When I rang the bell, I felt sure no one would answer. I was surprised when someone did. A smiling docent said, “Welcome to Dodona Manor. You must be Malcolm Logan.” She knew who I was because I was the only one who had made an appointment that day.

She let me in and we got acquainted. We were in no hurry. We could take as much time as we liked. No one else would be coming.

The George C. Marshall home, which is named after the Greek oracle Dodona, is one of several historic homes in northern Virginia. Within a two hour drive one can tour George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, James Madison’s Montpelier, as well as the homes of Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert E. Lee.

For most tourists, Dodona Manor is at the bottom of that list. And for good reason. Ask any random group of five people who George C. Marshall is and you’re likely to get a blank stare, which is a shame, because George C. Marshall changed the world, not just once, but several times.

 

The Meuse-Argonne Offensive

Imagine how the world would be different if Germany had not been forced to sue for peace in World War I. The armistice that ended World War I forced humiliating terms on Germany that lit a simmering resentment that led to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the horrors of World War II. Things would have been quite different if the Meuse-Argonne Offensive in 1918 had not succeeded in capturing the German railway hub at Sedan and breaking the main German supply lines, forcing Germany to sue for peace. An armistice would likely have come about anyway, but not one that resulted in Germany’s disgrace.

And the Meuse-Argonne Offensive could not have succeeded unless American forces had been able to execute a tricky sixty-mile nighttime movement of more than half a million men, together with guns and supplies, so that they could be in place to contribute to the battle. The chief operations officer responsible for the success of that movement was George C. Marshall.

 

Speaking Truth to Power

By the time Marshall was given responsibility for the logistics in France he had already risen to become a staff officer for General John J. Pershing, a position he had earned by boldly speaking truth to power.

One day when Pershing was feeling short-tempered he was reviewing troops when he lit into a local division commander for a lack of preparedness. Thirty-eight-year-old staff officer George C. Marshall was standing nearby and took exception. He angrily told the general in no uncertain terms why the troops were unprepared and then staunchly defended them against Pershing’s insults. Pershing was impressed. He took Marshall onto his staff and made him his protégé, which launched his career.

Number 17

After World War I, Marshall served in a series of training roles that saw him organize and codify much of what he’d learned in battle, eventually writing a book on infantry tactics that is still in use today. All along, he rose steadily through the ranks. By the time World War II broke out he was Army Chief of Staff, the highest ranking position in the army.

The day after Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7^th, 1941 the United States army ranked 17^th in size in the world, behind the armies of Portugal and Bulgaria. Marshall was tasked with building it back up again, and he was given less than a year to do it.

The situation couldn’t have been more dire. America’s foremost ally Great Britain had been holding out alone against the Nazis for more than two years. The Japanese were hop-scotching across the Pacific, taking island after island, pushing into China and Southeast Asia, and threatening India and Australia. The allies were at a huge disadvantage. But Marshall took the task onto his shoulders. In ten months, he built an army capable of taking on the best armies in the world. Then the question became where to meet them.

 

Germany First

From the start, Marshall was a staunch advocate for a “Germany First” policy. He believed the allies should concentrate their forces in Europe—in France, specifically—and drive for the German homeland with the object of defeating the Nazis and knocking them out of the war, before turning their attention to the Japanese. Others disagreed. After much debate, a few wobbly commitments, and a fair amount of backtracking on the part of the British, Marshall finally got his way.

But FDR was reluctant to put green American soldiers up against seasoned Nazi veterans in such a heavily fortified theater. Against Marshall’s objections, he decided to attack Germany by a roundabout method.

On November 8^th, 1942 American soldiers first set foot on enemy soil. They landed in Vichy-held French North Africa and drove across Morocco and Algiers to confront the enemy in Tunisia. Seven months later the allies had succeeded in driving the Nazis out of North Africa. Then they turned their sights on Sicily.

Sicily fell to the allies in August of 1943. The Nazis retreated into Italy. The allies landed in Italy in September of 1943, and a week later the Italian government called for an armistice. With Italy out of the war, the Nazis fought on alone, opposing the allies every step of the way. But with the cream of the German army tied down in Russia, the Nazis could do little more than hold on in Italy. In the summer of 1944 George C. Marshall suddenly eased their burden by withdrawing thousands of troops from the Italian theater and moving them to Great Britain for the cross-channel invasion he had been advocating for so long, Operation OVERLORD.

 

Forcing a Commitment

In hindsight it’s easy to see why Churchill favored invading Germany from the south. The allies had spent a great deal in blood and treasure taking the Italian peninsula, and it seemed to make sense to keep the campaign going, driving north into the soft underbelly of Germany. But logistically it would be hard. All agreed it would be foolhardy to try to cross the Alps, which meant allied armies would have to swing far to the east into the Balkans to accomplish an invasion from the south.

Marshall was adamantly against it. Doing so could prolong the war, which would mean thousands of additional lives lost. He put his foot down and threatened to resign if Churchill didn’t commit to OVERLORD once and for all. Churchill committed.

The allies landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6^th, 1944. By the winter of 1945 they had pressed the Germans back to the Rhine. In March of 1945 they crossed into Germany. Four months later, on April 30^th, 1945 Hitler committed suicide and Germany surrendered.

From the first day allied boots landed on French soil it took just eleven months to defeat Nazi Germany. Marshall’s strategy worked. It had been the right strategy all along.

 

Saving Lives with Aggressive Measures

Like the best military leaders of every generation George C. Marshall regarded war as a disease that had to be treated by aggressive measures in order to end it as quickly as possible. For that reason, too, he supported the use of the Atomic bomb. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 forced a Japanese surrender that saved a projected 30 million lives, lives that would have been lost if the allies had had to invade the Japanese homeland by conventional methods.

The war was over and George C. Marshall came to be recognized as a peacemaker, a designation seemingly at odds with his role as Army Chief of Staff, but one that would prove apt in light of his most enduring accomplishment, something without precedent in modern history.

 

Unpretentious Surroundings

George C. Marshall’s Dodona is a manor house, not a mansion. When Marshall bought it in 1941, it was a country home surrounded by hundreds of acres. Now it’s hemmed in by the town of Leesburg.

The house was already 135 years old when Marshall bought it. Starting out as a three room brick dwelling in 1805, it has been added onto many times over the years. Today it is a handsome sixteen room house in the Federal style with fluted columns, a gabled roof, and a full length Victorian porch. Like its former owner, it is unpretentious, neither overstated or affected, yet it gets the job done admirably well.

My tour began with an eight-minute orientation film in an upstairs room that provided background on the career and accomplishments of George C. Marshall. Then I toured the upstairs bedrooms. One bedroom is notable for having been the guest room of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the wife of the former Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, who stayed with the Marshalls at their home in 1949, an auspicious yet ultimately unsuccessful visit.

 

A Visit from Madame Chiang

After the war in 1945 Marshall was sent to China as a special envoy to avert an ongoing civil war between the Chinese Nationalist forces and the Communist Chinese forces under Mao Zedong. Upon his arrival, the Nationalists held the upper hand and paid only lip service to Marshall’s repeated efforts to broker a peace. But when the Communists gained the upper hand, the Nationalists became fully committed, only to see the Communists renege. It went back and forth like that with cease fires repeatedly agreed to and broken until Marshall had had enough. When he was given a chance to return to Washington to become Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman, he leaped at the chance.

With characteristic humility Marshall blamed himself for failing to save China from its fate. In September 1949 Mao’s forces gained control and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. Chiang Kai-Shek and his nationalist forces escaped to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) where they set up a separate government.

In December of 1949, after the Nationalists had been forced to flee the mainland, Madame Chiang made a visit to George C. Marshall as he was recuperating from kidney surgery. She made a last ditch plea for arms and money. As she lobbied Marshall she resided at Dodona as a friend of the family. But friend or not Marshall was not one to make the same mistake twice. He told her gently but firmly that the time had passed when the US would be willing to commit money and arms to Nationalist China. As a result, China remained communist, which was red meat to conservatives like Joseph McCarthy.

 

Conspiracy Theories, the Prequel

To understand the achievement of George C. Marshall in pushing through the historic legislation that would bear his name, it helps to understand the amount of vitriol aimed at him and the Truman administration by conservatives in 1948. By that year the Republican party had been out of power for sixteen years and had been the minority party in congress for most of that time. They were desperate. Then as now they turned to conspiracy theories as a way to try to win back the electorate. As a man whose achievements were above reproach, they set their sights on George C. Marshall.

In 1944, even as the war raged on, congressional conservatives latched on to a conspiracy theory that alleged that Marshall knew about Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor beforehand, arguing that he let it happen so he could win public support for entering the war.

To make their point the conservatives intended to reveal that the army had cracked the Japanese codes and seen dispatches revealing Japanese intentions. It was true that the army had cracked the codes, but it was not true that they understood that Pearl Harbor was about to be attacked.

In a headlong effort to score political points, the conservatives were threatening to reveal the army’s knowledge of the codes, which would have set back the war effort and endangered American lives. It took every ounce of diplomatic savvy Marshall had at his disposal to keep the conservatives in check, but he pulled it off. The conservatives did the right thing, and suffered politically as a result, which only made them more bitter and determined to get even.

 

Hysterical Ranting

Joseph McCarthy stood as the high water mark of conservative outrage and willingness to resort to propaganda. In 1950 he alleged that Communist spies had infiltrated the State Department, a State Department headed by George C. Marshall. McCarthy had no proof.

Marshall’s cool aplomb in the face of these scurrilous accusations stands in stark contrast to the hysterical ranting of McCarthy. In due course McCarthy was discredited and censured. But it is significant to note that it was against this ugly backdrop that Marshall achieved his greatest legislative achievement with the help of congressional Republicans, an achievement that involved literally giving billions of dollars to other countries, something that would be unheard of today.

 

A Generous Way to Resist

The downstairs rooms at Dodona Manor are comfortable and tasteful. Most of the furnishings are original, having been donated by Marshall’s step-daughter who inherited the house after his passing. The dining room is especially impressive. It was here that the Marshalls entertained their guests, including Arthur Vandenburg, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, who at first opposed Marshall’s ambitious plan.

The idea was to thwart Soviet expansionism in Europe. After meeting with Joseph Stalin in Moscow in 1947, Marshall became convinced that the Soviets meant to keep post-war Europe weak and in a state of dependency, the better to lure them into the Soviet orbit. Marshall proposed pouring billions of dollars into rebuilding western Europe as a way to make it self-sufficient and able to resist Soviet pressure. Yet there must’ve been another reason for Marshall’s generosity.

He had seen what happened to Europe after the First World War. Having orchestrated the nighttime movement of more than half a million men during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive that had brought the war to an early conclusion, he watched in dismay as French and British leaders proceeded to punish Germany with heavy reparations, breeding the bitterness and hatred that led to World War II. He did not want that to happen again. Unfortunately, that was just what the Soviets were proposing.

 

The Marshall Plan

Having suffered immeasurably during the war, the Soviets were out for revenge. They intended to exact punishing reparations on Germany with the purpose of making it a supplicant at the doorstep of Soviet communism. Marshall’s plan was designed to prevent that from happening. By pouring billions of dollars into the rebuilding of Germany and the rest of Western Europe, the United States could supplant bitterness and resentment with magnanimity and contentment and have strong allies far into the future. It was an inspired vision. But first Marshall had to persuade the conservatives in congress.

It wasn’t easy. With the likes of Joseph McCarthy in their ranks, the conservatives were no fans of George C. Marshall. For many their bitterness and resentment overrode any other consideration. But for others a policy that stood to benefit the United States at the expense of the Soviet Union made perfect sense. After months of negotiation, George C. Marshall and Republican Senator Vandenberg hammered out the details, and the Marshall Plan became a reality.

 

How to Measure a Great Leader

Looking back, the Marshall Plan was one of the greatest policy initiatives in American history. Not only did it revitalize Western Europe and create a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, it set a new precedent for how to deal with vanquished enemies. Rather than grind Germany into the dirt, it reached out a hand to help them up, a gesture whose fruition was seen forty years later when the Berlin wall fell and millions of people in the Soviet East made their preferences known by crossing into the West. The Marshall Plan made that happen.

It’s not too much to say that George C. Marshall saved the world from another European War. It has been 75 years since the end of the Second World War, and with the exception of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990’s (which happened in the former Soviet East) there have been no more European wars.

Marshall can also be credited with shortening the duration of the Second World War. And he deserves credit for the nighttime movement that led to the end of the First World War. If you measure the greatness of a leader by the number of lives he saved by his decisions and actions, few men can measure up to George C. Marshall.

 

Serenity

In addition to his strategic brilliance and abiding humanity, you can add his astonishing humility. Here was a man who put the good of the nation ahead of his own personal ambitions. When FDR asked him if he wanted to command OVERLORD, he could have answered truthfully by saying yes. Instead, he told FDR to do what he judged best for the country. When FDR gave the command to Eisenhower, Marshall sent Eisenhower a note of congratulations. There was not a hint of resentment in it. He was sincere in commitment to the nation, regardless of the cost to him personally.

The price he paid was anonymity. FDR mused that without a high profile command Marshall might be forgotten in fifty years. Judging by my visit to Dodona Manor, FDR was right.

As I wrapped up my visit and said goodbye to the docent, I was struck by the serenity of the place. As I walked back to my car, pink flowers drifted down from flowering cherry trees and scattered across the lawn. It was a peaceful scene, just the way Marshall would’ve liked it.

He died in 1959, having given instructions that his funeral be private. No lying in state, no horse-drawn caisson, no muffled drums, no eulogies. Unpretentious and self-effacing to the end, George C. Marshall died as he had lived, the Greatest American you never heard of.

 

 

Previous Stop on the Odyssey:  The Blue Ridge Parkway
Next Stop on the Odyssey: Ghost Towns of New Jersey

 

My American Odyssey Route Map

 

Sources

Roll, David L. George C. Marshall. Defender of the Republic. Dutton Caliber, 2019.

 

Image credits

Marshall making a point as Secretary of State, The George C. Marshall Foundation

Portrait of George C. Marshall at Dodona Manor, Malcolm Logan

Marshall with FDR 1944, The George C. Marshall Foundation

Dodona Manor exterior, Acroterion

Dodona Manor walkway, Malcolm Logan

Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Public domain

Marshall in World War I, The George C. Marshall Foundation

Infantry in Battle, Marine Corp Association

Tanks in North Africa, Public domain

Churchill and Marshall 1944, The George C. Marshall Foundation

US assault troops approach Omaha Beach 1944, Public domain

Operation OVERLORD aerial image, Public domain

Madame Chiang’s guest room, Malcolm Logan

Madame Chiang and Chiang Kai-Shek in 1947, Public domain

Mao proclaiming the People’s Republic of China, Orihara1 cc BY-SA 4.o

USS Nevada under attack at Pearl Habor, Public domain

Joseph McCarthy, Public domain

Dining room at Dodona Manor, Malcolm Logan

Library at Dodona Manor, Malcolm Logan

Arthur Vandenberg and George C. Marshall, The Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies

Float honoring George C. Marshall, The George C. Marshall Foundation

US aid to Greece, Public domain

Cherry blossoms, Pascal Debrunner on Unsplash