George C. Marshall was an unsung hero as well as a Nobel Prize winner.
If that’s a difficult concept, just remember that there was a 35-year span between those two chapters of Marshall’s career.
Right in the middle of those biographical bookends, Gen. Marshall commanded Vancouver Barracks’ 5th Infantry Brigade from 1936 to 1938. He and his wife lived in the home on Officers Row that now bears his name before becoming Army chief of staff in World War II.
As secretary of state, he was awarded the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize for rebuilding Europe.
Marshall prepared for both challenges during World War I, when he was on the staff of Gen. John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force.
“Marshall was an unsung hero” of WWI, said Mitchell Yockelson, keynote speaker at the World War I Centennial Conference over Memorial Day weekend.
In writing about how Pershing brought an end to WWI, Yockelson described how Marshall contributed to the victory. It wasn’t by leading troops against German trenches. While fellow officers George Patton and Douglas MacArthur established their leadership credentials during WWI, Marshall became invaluable as a planner.
As a Library of Congress website entry explains, “Marshall was a problem-solver, so his superiors wanted him to plan the battles, not fight them.”
“He was there when divisions had to be shifted. When Pershing felt they were not holding their ground, Marshall was the one who had get all of that done,” Yockelson said. An American division, including supplies, could take up 20 miles of road, he wrote.
In setting up one pivotal breakthrough, Marshall “was able get all the troops from all over the Western Front, marshal them together and put them on three shell-pocked roads in the middle of night so German observers wouldn’t see them.
“He got them to the front in crappy weather — cold and rainy — and on the line and ready for jump-off.”
In the book “Forty-Seven Days: How Pershing’s Warriors Came of Age To Defeat the German Army in World War I” he defines the task. Marshall had to move 500,000 troops, 2,000 pieces of artillery and 900,000 tons of ammunition and supplies 50 miles to the jump-off point for the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne. But first, 200,000 French troops had to vacate the area.
During WWII, Marshall’s planning skills were again considered his most valuable asset. When President Franklin Roosevelt was considering who should command the Normandy invasion, he picked Gen. Dwight Eisenhower.
According to the George C. Marshall Foundation, FDR told Marshall: “I feel I could not sleep at night with you out of the country.”
As a planner for the 1918 St. Mihiel campaign, Marshall might have helped introduce some signature terminology that became linked forever to Normandy. It refers to the day an operation would begin, although the date might not be officially scheduled.
According to the Army’s Center of Military History, the 1918 battle orders were the first time the U.S. Army referred to D-Day.
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