In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Conscript: George Catlett Marshall
  • Stanley Weintraub (bio)
Bland, Larry ISharon Ritenour Stevens, eds. The Papers of George Catlett Marshall. Vol. 5. “The Finest Soldier,” January 1, 1945–January 7, 1947. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

But for his ineligibility by rank, George Catlett Marshall was worthy of the ubiquitous Good Conduct Medal. On 8 May 1945 — V-E Day — Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson called Marshall to his office, where principal members of the General Staff had gathered. “I told him in a few words,” Stimson recalled in his diary, “of the debt of gratitude which I felt we all owed to him for the victory announced this day and my own strong personal feeling for his unselfishness, integrity, and ability. He responded with about two sentences and the thing was over.”

From Stimson’s “few words” comes the subtitle for the meticulously edited and indexed fifth volume of the Marshall papers comprising two crowded years (1945–46) of a career unique not only for its achievements but also for the subject’s complete selflessness: “I have seen a great many soldiers in my lifetime and you, sir, are the finest soldier I have ever known.” (Henry Stimson, On Active Service in Peace and War, ed. McGeorge Bundy [New York: Harper, 1947]) Stimson was not prone to exaggeration, and was himself a paragon of selflessness. In a long and distinguished career, in which he was a field artillery colonel in France [End Page 911] and later gave up a lucrative law practice for fiscally unrewarding public service, he worked with five presidents, and was a secretary of state and twice secretary of war. A lifelong Republican, he nevertheless joined the Roosevelt Cabinet in 1940 to validate the nonpartisan necessity of rearmament.

Marshall’s “two sentences” were characteristic of him. “Mr. Secretary,” he replied — only a handful of people in his lifetime were ever addressed informally by a first name — “you have paid me the finest tribute I could ever receive. You have been a buttress of integrity and resolute determination behind me. I am deeply grateful.” That was it.

The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, volume 5, “The Finest Soldier,” January 1, 1945–January 7, 1947 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), edited by Larry I. Bland and Sharon Ritenour Stevens, is the final volume currently in print representing Bland’s extraordinary decades with the Marshall Foundation and the Marshall Papers. Perhaps no one knew more about Marshall than Bland — even the general himself. This reappraisal of what the best editors can do to evoke a personality, here that of the greatest soldier-statesman since George Washington, is offered as a posthumous tribute to Larry Bland. All quotations from Marshall’s letters in the volume are dated in the text, and other documentation is cited under the date of the relevant letter or the page number of the editorial comments.

Medals galore were proliferating in the war then drawing to a close as Volume 5 begins. For political reasons early on, President Franklin D. Roosevelt awarded a dubiously earned but politically essential Medal of Honor to Douglas MacArthur, who coveted the bauble — and Marshall wrote the citation, perhaps his only work of fiction in a lifetime. MacArthur himself gifted toadies who had hardly heard a shot fired in anger (such as his intelligence chief, Charles Willoughby) with the Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award for valor. Such trinkets were, too often, cheap. At war’s end, as one of his final acts, Stimson pressed Congress to award a special medal to Marshall, but all that the general received from a grateful nation on his retirement late in 1945 was an Oak Leaf Cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal earned in 1918. No comment from him is on the record about it other than his allegedly profound gratitude. Rather — it again was in character — he used the award ceremony at the Pentagon (26 November 1945) to talk about “the great problem of maintaining the peace” in terms that foreshadowed the rescue of the European economy in what became known (and certainly not by him) as the Marshall Plan. For that, in 1953, at the close...

pdf

Share