General of the Army by Ed Cray

Author:Ed Cray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cooper Square Press
Published: 1990-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

XXV

Losses

The soldier who boarded the C-54 transport at the Cairo airport on Wednesday, December 8, 1943, revealed nothing of his feelings. No word, no facial expression suggested he had just lost the one posting he most coveted, command of the field armies he had created for the invasion of France. His aide and executive secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Frank McCarthy, saw no more than he had any other morning for the past three years. “If he would have shown emotion to anybody except his wife, I think he would have shown it to me,” McCarthy later recalled. “He was really a stolid man. He was really a duty-bound man.”

The commander-in-chief had made his decision; George Catlett Marshall would obey.

For all that, Marshall was leaving Cairo and SEXTANT with new standing in the councils of government. As Time magazine put it shortly before naming the chief of staff its Man of the Year later that month, “General Marshall has now attained the stature of a military statesman.”

To some extent, Marshall’s increased authority came at the expense of Winston Churchill. With the Soviets casting the deciding vote for OVERLORD, Marshall’s plan, the American chief of staff had prevailed.

That decision made, the Imperial General Staff brimmed with the abiding confidence of true converts. At dinner on the last night in Cairo, Marshall, Dill, and Brooke each predicted Germany’s defeat by March 1945. The prime minister himself tentatively estimated that Germany might quit before the end of 1944.

Marshall victorious was not returning to the United States with the president aboard the Iowa, but instead was to fly home via the Pacific. Marshall had twice considered visiting that theater and meeting with the prickly proud MacArthur, but had twice postponed the trip. Now that he was to continue as chief of staff, the delayed visit took on new importance. MacArthur was feeling neglected.

Marshall and a small party flew first to Ceylon, then on to Australia, that second leg a 3,400-mile, seventeen-hour flight over the ocean to Port Moresby. MacArthur was not there to meet the chief of staff, but instead was visiting a forward headquarters where subordinates were drawing plans for further landings in the Southwest Pacific. A MacArthur aide took Marshall shelling at the beach for part of a day, then on a careening Jeep chase after kangaroos. Ignoring MacArthur’s snub, Marshall impatiently set out after his theater commander. On Good-enough Island off northern New Guinea, the two generals finally met.

They had not seen each other since MacArthur’s retirement as army chief of staff in 1935. Marshall was then a little known colonel training the Illinois National Guard in Chicago, MacArthur a much decorated war hero retiring full of honors. Now Marshall was chief of staff and MacArthur just one of six American theater commanders. To a man of MacArthur’s overweening pride, the role reversal was galling, the more so for his conviction that he and his theater were unfairly starved of men and materiel. MacArthur privately blamed the president and Pershing’s “Chaumont crowd” for the perceived slights.

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