George C. Marshall in World War II

George C. Marshall, U.S. Army
15th Chief of Staff

George C. Marshall (1880-1959), a 1901 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute,[1] was an officer in the United States Army who notably served during World War I as General John J. Pershing’s aide de camp and, during World War II, as the Army’s chief of staff, appointed to the latter position by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Marshall became chief of staff on 1 September 1939, the same day the German army invaded Poland;[2] and “at the time, the U.S. had only 180,000 troops (by some accounts, it was even less), which ranked it sixteenth militarily in the world.”[3]

During the war, as the time for the invasion of France drew near, it was thought by many that President Roosevelt would name Marshall, because of his tremendous ability and prestige, as the commander of the operation that would ultimately decide the war in Europe. Even Marshall, himself felt that he should be so appointed, though he steadfastly refused to put forward his own name for consideration. Ultimately, however, it was Eisenhower who was chosen to be the Supreme Allied Commander. FDR’s rational for not selecting Marshall was that he felt that he “could not sleep at night with [Marshall] out of the country.”[4] So, instead of commanding the armies of Normandy, Marshall continued as Chief of Staff for the war’s remainder, but also, as his biographer, Forrest Pogue described him, in his capacity as the “organizer of victory.”[5]

As the organizer of victory, Marshall built the Army. Building the Army included the mobilization of enough men to give the operational commanders what they needed, the mobilization of American industry to supply those men with the materials required, the construction of bases at which to train the men, and ships to transport them to the theaters of war. By spring of 1944, under Marshall’s leadership, “the United States … was shipping [nearly] that number of soldiers to Great Britain each month … By nightfall [on D-day] the Allies had landed 165,000 men, more than eight divisions, a force larger in size than the entire U.S. Army when Marshall too command in 1939.”[6]

In December, 1944, before the war’s conclusion, Marshall was promoted to “General of the Army” and given his fifth star.[7] At the time, only one other officer had been pinned with five stars, Marshall’s mentor, General Pershing. Pershing, who was still living at the time, bore the title of “General of the Armies.” Marshall insisted that his be limited to “General of the Army,” because he felt it wrong to be considered Pershing’s equal. After the war, Marshal served as President Harry S Truman’s ambassador to China, then later as Truman’s secretary of state. 

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[1] History of the Virginia Military Institute, Virginia Military Institute, http://www.vmi.edu/uploadedFiles/VMI/Communications_Marketing/Media_Relations/fact_sheets/
VMI_History_Fact_Sheet_021709.pdf (accessed 25 July 2012).

[2] Detailed Marshall Chronology, George C. Marshall Foundation, http://www.marshallfoundation.
org/about/chronology.html (accessed 24 July 2012).

[3] Timeline of Marshall’s Life, George C. Marshall Foundation, http://www.marshallfoundation.
org/about/timeline/ww2.html (accessed 25 July 2012).

[4] Ibid., 13.

[5] Marshall Bibliography: Selected Works, George C. Marshall Foundation, http://www.marshall
foundation.org/about/bibliography.html (accessed 25 July 2012).

[6] Ed Cray, General of the Army: George C. Marshall, Soldier and Statesman, (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990), 453-455.

[7] Marshall Chronology, Op Cit.

1942: Year of Decision for the Third Reich

German-controlled territory, 1942

The year 1941 had not gone well for Germany. She “had staked all on [operation] BARBAROSSA, but that operation had failed. That failure had significantly blunted her military capabilities and placed all her war aims in jeopardy. Thus the following year, 1942, was a year of decision.

Historians Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet note that “the strategic decisions and the outcome of the battles of 1942 [would determine] the final course of the war.”[1] The whole question was, as they put it, “whether the Reich could patch together sufficient military forces to finish the war, or whether the United States and Britain, desperately arming to make up for [lost time], and the Soviet Union, grievously wounded in 1941, could hold on long enough for their economic strength to prevail.”[2] The answer to that great question would depend upon the outcomes of the battles in North Africa and on the eastern front—particularly at Stalingrad and Kursk.

Despite his intent to avoid Germany’s catastrophic error of the First World War, of having to fight a war on two fronts, one to her east and one to her west, Hitler found himself in 1942 entangled in what quite possibly was an even worse situation. Despite his best intentions, he found himself still fighting the Soviet Union, even after BARBAROSSA, while at the same time he was having to defend against a British assault against Axis possessions in east North Africa. Britain’s fight against Italian forces in Egypt and in Libya threated Germany’s control of the Mediterranean and, hence, her lines of supply. Hitler seemed to have to have little choice but to dispatch an entire corps, led by one of his ablest commanders, to restore a rapidly degrading situation on the northern coasts of the continent of Africa. Thus, the Mediterranean became a second theater of operations for Germany.

Operational Warfare and the Second World War

Excellent overview of WWII

Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, students of how wars are fought, define military operations as “the violent actions undertaken by armed forces in the pursuit of strategic objectives.”[1] The pair describe the revolutionary nature of that era between the world wars as the “origins of a catastrophe.”[2] Gregor Dallas, a student of how wars end, notes that in post-World War II England “war rationing was at its height in 1948 (not 1945) and ended only 1954.”[3] England had been victorious in that war. Imagine, then, how it must have been in Germany, between the wars, in a country that had tasted defeat. 

Most of us have always believed that the First World War was concluded on the eleventh of November, 1918 with the signing of the Armistice, and that the terms of the peace were set out in the Treaty of Versailles. In fact, except for that brief pause that November, the fighting continued—in the east, while the Allies withdrew back to the west from whence they had come. A state of war continued between Germany and Poland. In Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution was proceeding apace. The old empires of the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs seethed as they came apart at the seams. Lines on maps were redrawn. Populations were in upheaval. Governments across Europe rose and fell and were replaced by yet other governments. 

Most of us believe also that the seeds of the Second World War were sown by the First and that the conclusion of the first one furnished the reasons for the one that followed barely two decades later. “From the moment he grabbed power,” observes Gregor Dallas, “Hitler promised Germans that there would never be another 1918.”[4] Versailles had imposed a harsh “peace” upon Germany. “The peace of 1919,” write Murray and Millet, “collapsed because the Allies, whose interest demanded that they defend it, did not, while the defeated powers had no intention of abiding the results.”[5]

Chiang Kai-Shek

Chiang

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was the prominent leader the Nationalists in China, also known as the Kuomintang, in the late 1920s. “In 1927 [Chiang’s forces] “marched north from Canton to unify the country,” causing a fear of “anti-foreign attacks” among the small U.S. contingent that had been based in that country after the conclusion of World War I.[1] In the run up to World War II Chiang was the Chinese leader whom the Roosevelt administration had placed its hopes upon for thwarting Japanese imperialistic designs on the Chinese mainland and the corresponding threat to U.S. interests in the region. During the war, Chiang was a burdensome ally, demanding ever more resources from the United States, but never actually delivering on his promises to fight the Japanese. His relationships with the commander of U.S. ground forces in the region, Lt. Gen. Joseph Stillwell, and “U.S. General Claire Chennault, commander of the Fourteenth Air Force,”[2] waxed hot and cold, mostly cold. The two U.S. commanders disagreed as to the best way to defend China against the Japanese. Each preferred the capabilities of his own service. Air power, being at that time regarded by many international leaders as the ‘thing to have,’ was naturally preferred by Chiang who tended to side with Chennault. His designs of an air defense of the Chinese mainland never materialized, as Stillwell surmised, because Chiang was never serious enough about ‘boots on the ground’ to properly defend Chinese air fields. The Japanese overran them.[3] Chiang’s weakness forced the Allies to expend scarce resources in the Pacific theater and prolonged the fighting there. 

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[1] John Whiteclay Chambers, II, Ed., The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

The Cherry Society

Hashimoto

The Cherry Society, also known as “Sakura” was “formed secretly [in 1930] under [Japanese] Lieutenant Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto and [Captain] Isamu Cho,” both active duty [military] staff officers.[1] Their goal was political reform. They sought “the elimination of party government by a coup d’état and the establishment of a new cabinet based upon state socialism, in order to stamp out Japan's allegedly corrupt politics, economy, and thought.”[2] Reportedly, the group’s membership numbered “several hundreds” by October 1931, shortly before their attempted overthrow of the government. Their plans (which may have been patterned after Hitler’s failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923) called for the instigation of “massive riots in Tokyo [which they deduced would cause] the call-out of troops, the proclamation of martial law, and [ultimately] the execution of a coup d’état.”[3] Also included in their plans was “to form a cabinet under the premiership of the then-War Minister, General Ugaki.” But their coup failed and their cause came to nothing.[4] The group’s socialist bent may have contributed to Prince Konoe’s government to conclude a Neutrality Pact with the Soviet Union, in April 1941, just prior to the Second World War.[5] That agreement had the effect of removing the threat of attack from the Soviet Union, thereby allowing the Japanese to concentrate on their thrusts to the southwest, into China, and to the south and southeast, against the United States. Historians Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet did not include mention of the Cherry Society in their joint history of World War II because their stated intent was to “concentrate on the conduct of operations by the military organizations that waged the war.”[6]

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[1]Saburo Hayashi, “Kogun: The Japanese Army in the Pacific War (Marine Corps Association, 1959), http://www.tecom.usmc.mil/utm/kogun.txt (accessed 29 June 2012).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 166.

[6] Ibid., x.

Stalin vs. His Own Military

Tukhachevsky

Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, fearing opposition to his rule from within his military, purged his senior office ranks in the 1930s.  Among those slain were officers M. N. Tukhachevsky and V. K. Triandafillov.  These two “had pioneered the … ideas of deep battle and deep operations … concepts that involved mechanized forces penetrating [to the] heart” of an opposing force’s strength.[1]  

Triandafillov

These two officers represented the core of new conceptual thinking about operational warfare in the Red Army.  They, along with many of the others who perished, had what was sorely lacking in Stalin’s forces after the purge—battlefield experience.  (Ironically, their concepts were incorporated into the U.S. Army ‘AirLand Battle’ doctrine in the 1980s, the operational doctrine employed to such great effect in the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s forces in the Persian Gulf War, and which probably had, in the late 1980s, a sobering effect on Soviet military thinking, and may have contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991). Their loss precipitated the immediate “reorganization of the Red Army and [the] breakup of armored formations.[2]  The cost of their loss to the Red Army was not fully realized until the onset of Germany’s operation BARBAROSSA in World War II.  To defend against the assault, Stalin, lacking the operation insight of comrades Tukhachevsky and Triandafillov, placed his heavy forces at the very front of his defenses, thereby blunting their effectiveness and ensuring their destruction.

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 112.

[2] Ibid.

The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact

Stalin

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was a World War II political agreement—a treaty--enacted on 23 August 1939 between Hitler and Stalin, which Hitler flagrantly violated on 22 June 1941 when he ordered Nazi troops to invade Soviet territory. 

Hitler

Ostensibly, the pact was intended, by Hitler, to prevent a possible Soviet intervention on the side of Britain and of France should these two nations “honor their treaty obligations to come to the aid of Poland in case she were attacked.”[1] For Hitler, it meant that, a week later when his forces fell upon Poland, the Russians would not take up arms nor assist in any material way, French or British efforts to retrieve the situation. For Stalin, it meant concessions from Hitler of large tracts of territory, or at least a German concession of Soviet “rights” in certain countries of Eastern Europe, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia, for example. In effect, it gave Stalin a ‘buffer zone’ between the Soviet frontier and German-controlled territory. After a period during which the Germans seemed to holding the pact in little regard, Hitler violated its terms with the operational commencement of operation Barbarossa, Germany’s 1941 blitzkrieg attack on the Soviet Union.

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[1] William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 541.

Decisive Operations: The Normandy Campaign and the Fate of Hitler’s Germany

General Eisenhower

“Decisive operations,” according to the United States Army doctrine, “lead directly to the accomplishment of a commander’s purpose.”[1] The problem with the Army manual from whence that statement is lifted is that it uses the word “decisive” twenty-two times but never defines it. That one sentence, just quoted, is the closest it comes. The absence of a clear definition of the term leaves readers to interpret it as they see fit. Decisiveness, then, probably has much in common with beauty: its quality seems to mostly in the eyes of its beholder.

Like beholders of beauty, observers of military history can and do offer compelling descriptions of what they see. ‘Decisiveness’ seems to be one of their favorite terms, though some may be hesitant to use it overmuch. One historian, Williamson Murray, avoided the term ‘decisive’ in all his analyses of the Normandy campaign, though he did refer to it as “a great success.”[2] In calling the campaign a “flawed triumph,” it was almost as if Murray was saying that OVERLORD could have been decisive if it hadn’t been for the generals that fought it—““It was in the tragic nature of life,” he wrote, “and in the fact that no general can ever make perfect decisions that victory in Europe would not come until May 1945.” Max Hastings, on the other hand, called OVERLORD “the decisive western battle of the Second World War, the last moment at which the German army might conceivably have saved Hitler from catastrophe.”[3]

Still another historian, Cornelius Ryan, also believed that D-Day, the start of the Normandy campaign, was the decisive battle of the war. He called it “the battle … that ended Hitler’s insane gamble to dominate the world.”[4] More expansively, he observed that—

“Germany was still far from beaten, but the Allied invasion would be the decisive battle. Nothing less than the future of Germany was at stake, and no one knew it better than Rommel.”[5]

Why Auschwitz was Never Bombed

Auschwitz

In the Second World War, there was a day in the Pacific theater that, for Americans, shall forever live in ‘infamy.’ If that be so, there was a space of about four and a half years, in the European theater that, for all rational peoples of the Earth, shall forever live in the shock of horrific astonishment. That space of time, from 14 June 1940 to January 1945,[1] marks the period of operation of Nazi Germany’s most notorious extermination camp—Auschwitz. That which brought infamy, in the former instance, was ultimately buried underneath the radioactive rubble of two atomic bombs. In the latter, no bombs were dropped; not atomic ones, not conventional ones, not candy bombs, not even the first leaflet. No pilot flew over it to take pictures. The debate over whether to bomb Auschwitz—or at least the rail access to the camp—surfaced during the last months of the war and continues to this day. Why wasn’t it bombed? Should the Allies have done so? Though the issues are complicated, the possible answers can be summed up under three heads—those given strictly from the standpoint of military operations, those that stem from political considerations, and those that proceed from moral judgments.

As to the first, if we may skip straight to the bottom line, an Allied military strike upon Auschwitz was not an operational imperative. By the summer of 1944, quite a bit was known about German concentration camps, in general, and the Auschwitz camp, in particular. Reports on these camps had been carried in many western newspapers. Typical of these was an August 1944 London Times article concerning Oswiecim—the Polish version of the name Auschwitz.[2] Among the sources for Allied information was the Polish government in exile in London, which “had informed the Allied governments about the existence of Auschwitz as a concentration camp for Poles and about the executions that had taken place there in May 1941.”[3] Other significant information was obtained from a Polish agent in January 1944, much of whose report remains[4] classified,[5] part of which stated that—

Favorite TV Shows of the Past: Perry Mason

Paulus at Stalingrad

Paulus

The question is sometimes asked, in reference to the German defeat at Stalingrad, was Nazi General Friedrich Paulus the right man for the job; could someone else have pulled off a defense or a breakout?

Paulus enters the story relatively late and some historians have labeled him a “question mark,” noting his success in a string of staff assignments, but also that he had never held an operational command.[1] A telling indication of his abilities is in the apparent concern of his peers about his “disposition,” and that this, along with his lack of command experience could be problematic for Sixth Army, “under Hitler’s thumb” as it was.[2] His competency, at first at least, appears to be beyond question as Soviet forces retreated before his army on the southwest front as operation BLAU got underway. The question seems to be, as General Bock was then warning[3]—before being fired—was whether this was due to the general success of the operation, or whether the new Soviet tactic of trading space for time merely gave German commanders the illusion of success when, in reality, danger loomed.

My assumption is that Paulus was working from a position of some disadvantage, in a strategic sense, owing to Hitler’s fuzzy thinking relative to the campaign’s operational objectives. He seems to have been given the Stalingrad mission late in the game as well as suddenly—for that is how the situation is described, that “suddenly, on 19 July, Hitler reoriented the offensive from the Caucasus to Stalingrad.”[4] Moreover, he was provided “relatively weak” reinforcements and was, like everyone else, blind to the reality of Soviet defenses in and around the city.[5] All of this would naturally have had a corrosive effect on his own operational planning. To this may be added the observation that, while the Germans seemed more oriented towards conquering territory, the Soviets were actually, by this time, focused on destroying the Wehrmacht and, with it, Germany’s war fighting capability. Indeed, this was the central objective of the two major operations, URANUS and MARS, unleashed in September.[6]

Hitler's Colossal Display of Military Incompetence at Stalingrad

A Stalingrad is what happens whenever Austrian corporals start running things.

What could the Germans have done to save the Stalingrad Campaign? The short answer is practically anything different from what they actually did. The most obvious thing that Germany could have, indeed, should have done differently was to have avoided the leadership issues that beset her military command structure—which was all Hitler’s doing, of course. Failures of leadership exacerbated each and every other problem the Germans had.

One of the first inklings we have that a disaster named Stalingrad was waiting to happen is when we read Williamson Murray’s and Allan R. Millet’s analysis of the prelude to operation BLUE. “The target of the upcoming offensive, write the two historians, would be the Caucasus oil field, in order to cripple the Soviets and relieve the petroleum shortages that had plagued the Reich’s war effort.”[1] Okay, so far, so good—a legitimate strategic objective and, given the operational circumstances, a reasonable course of action. But then we read, “Stalingrad was also an objective …” (emphasis added).[2]

This indicates, as do so many of his decisions, that Adolf Hitler, the former Austrian corporal, as Churchill often described him, was clearly in over his head when it came to conducting military operations. The suggestion is that, with the Fuehrer, Stalingrad was an after-thought: that he was of two minds about what he wanted to accomplish in operation BLUE; that he could do two things at once and do both of them well. This, despite his dwindling resources, despite the setbacks of the previous year’s much heralded operation BARBAROSSA, despite the growing contention amongst his senior commanders, despite the sandy foundations of his government’s legitimacy—a fanatically misguided faith in German racial superiority—and despite his stubborn refusal to recognize that, in war, the enemy always has a say-so in what transpires. As Messrs. Murray and Millet put it, the fuzziness over the operational objectives—the “divergence of the [simultaneous] drives … east and … south” was producing a “malignant influence” over the Wehrmacht’s operations.[3]

Everything rises or falls on leadership; and, to make matters worse, there were other issues amongst Hitler’s senior officers. There was probably considerable jealousy towards Manstein—there usually is whenever a single officer is simply, and inarguably, more competent than his peers. But that was by no means all. “There was,” according to Murray and Millet, “in ordinate squabbling in the German high command.”[4] Bock, Halder, and Keitel were at each other. Somewhere between 9 and 16 July—in the middle of a major operation—Hitler fired Bock, his “overall field commander”—for the second time in less than a year! [5] That was still not all. If Hitler’s operational command of the German Army wasn’t bad enough for Germany, on 16 July the Austrian corporal relocated the command elements of the German high command (OKW) and the Army (OKH) “to Vinnitsa in the Ukraine” so that he could assume direct control of “both Army groups.”[6] This would be like President Obama, in addition to his duties and responsibilities as president, were to also name himself chief of staff of the U.S. Army as well as secretary of defense and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Unimaginable! In all this, by the way, Hitler was making the very same mule-headed mistakes he made in the wake of outcome of BARBAROSSA beginning to tip against him. To the Fuehrer, BARBAROSSA’s failure was his generals’ fault—not reality slapping him in the face—so he fired them and started running their commands himself—which is actually what he was doing anyway, which is exactly why they were failing. (He would do the same thing yet again, in 1944, as his “Atlantic Wall” crumbled and he began to lose Western Europe to the Allies).

Hitler could perhaps have spent a little less time taking in the air and scenery at Berchtesgaden, especially whenever major combat operations were in progress. (This tendency of his shows up again on D-Day when he was again at his mountain retreat and could not be reached for several hours—letting an opportunity slip by). There was an instance, early in the battle for Stalingrad, where Hitler, beginning to appreciate the seriousness of the situation, decided to return to his headquarters in East Prussia, in Rastenburg. His travel took two days during which time he was “out of contact with the OKH,” his senior army commanders—in the middle of one of the most significant battles of the war.[7]

It would have helped things tremendously if Hitler had not gotten the Wehrmacht involved in hot wars on two fronts—not in Eastern and Western, which situation he wanted to avoid at all costs, but in Eastern Europe and North Africa. Think of the tremendous strain on his lines of communications. Field Marshal Jodl described it this way, when he was put in overall charge of the east—“The Wehrmacht was exhausted … the territory they had seized was more than could be held by the size of the army which occupied it.”[8]

Among other things that could have helped retrieve the situation, Hitler should not have sent Paulus’ 6th Army into the city. His attacking forces were of insufficient strength to overcome Soviet defenses. Of course, he had no idea of Soviet strength in and around the city because of the failures of his intelligence apparatus. At any rate, once the situation with Paulus in the city became known, Hitler should have authorized their withdrawal immediately … but retreat was anathema to Hitler. The decision to airlift continuous support to them until such time that they could effect a breakout only ensured that there would be no breakout, for the Luftwaffe was too under-resourced to bring off that kind of an operation.

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[1] Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millet, A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2000), 275.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 281.
[4] Ibid, 280.
[5] Ibid, 279.
[6] Ibid, 280.
[7] Ibid, 287.
[8] Nikolai Poroskov, “Stalingrad: The Battle that Broke Hitler’s Back,” Russian Life 45, No. 6 (2002), 34-44, http://search.proquest.com/docview/224002619?accountid=8289, (accessed 25 June 2012).