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"As Army chief of staff from late 1939 through the end of World War II, Gen. George C. Marshal displayed organizational and logistical genius in shepherding a tiny, ill-equipped, and outdated army of fewer than 200,000 (in 1939 the American army ranked in size with Bulgaria’s and Portugal’s) into a trained and well-armed citizen army of more than 8 million by the end of 1942. Winston Churchill called Marshall “the organizer of victory” with good reason. The complications and sheer density of logistical, cultural, and political difficulties involved in producing millions of fighting men out of civilians, who before the war had never suspected that places with names like Tobruk, Dunkirk, or Guadalcanal even existed, were enough to make a room full super computers blow their tubes.
Statesman and General
"But we didn’t have supercomputers in 1939 and 1945. We had Marshall, who didn’t fire a shot or hear the cannon’s roar during that largest and most destructive war in human history. Instead, he won the critical Battle of Washington. His victory not only gave America its needed warriors, but with a mobilized American industry, it provided the planes, guns, tanks, ships, and let’s not forget, the Spam and C-rations, required to take the battle to determined, formidable enemies and prevail.
"Like Dwight Eisenhower, Marshall’s service to his country didn’t end when he took off his uniform. He served first as secretary of state and then secretary of defense in the Truman administration. He was a statesman as well as a general.
"As the secretary of state, Marshall was the driver behind the European recovery program — better known as the Marshall Plan — which channeled $13.3 billion ($173 billion in 2023 dollars) to Western Europe. The purpose of the program was to give an economic lift to countries devastated by the war to help ensure that they did not fall into the Soviet orbit. Marshall’s contribution to the program and its success won him the 1953 Nobel Peace Prize.
"These accomplishments are dazzling and well-known to those versed in history. They’re covered in detail in numerous volumes detailing Marshall’s wartime contributions, as well as his hand in picking up the pieces after the guns went silent. But these are not Josiah Bunting’s beat in Making of a Leader. Instead, Bunting takes readers through Marshall’s pre-WWII life to show how he became the man needed and available at America’s most dangerous moment." . . .
(RELATED: West Point: Still Duty and Honor, but Maybe Not Country)
