The Yanks Are Coming! by H. W. Crocker III

Author:H. W. Crocker, III [Crocker, H. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621572794
Publisher: Regnery Publishing

“A MAN WHO WAS GOING TO BE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE ARMY ONE DAY”

Bearing a recommendation from the superintendent at VMI and from New York senator John Wise (a native Virginian, VMI graduate, and Republican ally of President William McKinley), Marshall strode into President McKinley’s office without an appointment (covertly attaching himself to a father and daughter who had one) and strode out with an invitation to sit the examination to become an officer in the United States Army. He received his commission in January 1903, married in February, and reported for duty at Fort Myer with orders to join the 30th Infantry in the Philippines. Before the end of the year, he was back stateside, if not yet reunited with his wife, whose health was considered too fragile for the Philippines and, at least initially, for the Oklahoma Territory. He was stationed at Fort Reno. It was here, of all places, Marshall endured “the hardest service I ever had in the army,”1 mapping the southwestern desert of Texas. The expedition, launched in the scorching heat of June 1905 and lasting until the end of August, left him sunburnt and thirty-five pounds lighter than when he started.

The formerly less-than-studious Marshall applied to the Infantry and Cavalry School (or Army School of the Line, as it was soon to be called) at Fort Leavenworth, hoping that additional training would advance his prospects for promotion. He aced the qualifying examination, and in August 1906 entered the school. No student worked harder than Marshall. In 1907, he was promoted first lieutenant and finished his first academic year at Leavenworth at the top of his class. After his second year, he was one of five officers invited to stay and become an instructor. In the Philippines, he had taken to riding as a form of exercise and a relief from the tedium of the tropics, when he wasn’t fording crocodile-infested streams. At Leavenworth, riding became his chief recreation. Horses and dogs and the habits of a Virginia gentleman became his own on the plains of Kansas.

In 1910, he finished his tour of duty at Leavenworth and, given leave, took his wife on a tour of Europe. The intervening years until the United States entered the First World War were spent as a typically itinerant officer moving from one post to the next—from New York to Texas, Massachusetts to Arkansas, Washington to the Philippines to California and elsewhere—but Marshall had already impressed his superiors with his talents as a staff officer, a man who was expert and expeditious at organizing and training troops and drawing up plans for field exercises. Indeed, another young officer serving in the Philippines, Hap Arnold, after watching First Lieutenant George Marshall issuing orders during a training exercise, “told my wife I had met a man who was going to be chief of staff of the army one day.”2 Other officers, including generals, were nearly as flattering, marking Marshall out as an exceptional officer—Lieutenant Colonel Johnson Hagood going so far as to say, in an efficiency report on Marshall, that “he is a military genius.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.