Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/moyfiles/1943moy.001

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                                                                              ╚January 3, 1944

Man of the Year:George C. Marshall

The General



   In the year 1943 came a certainty: the partisans of life had
grown stronger than the mechanized conspiracy of death. The
Allies had started to break the Axis.

   The Man of the Year did not live to take the bow. He died in
Tunis, on Tarawa, at Salerno, on the blood-soaked fields around
Kiev, Chagsha, Kharkov. He lost his face, his limbs and his mind
before flame-throwers, in the cockpits of blazing planes, in the
insane shadows of the jungle. He had badly wanted to live. When
he died, the world had lost one particle of its meaning. But his
death added more meaning than it took: it gave the living another
chance to abolish the ugly crime of war. The soldier who died was
the father of the unborn future.

   Four men gathered to name this future. From Great Britain came
Winston Churchill, who has the appetite for life; from China,
Chiang Kai-shek, who has the passion of patience; from Soviet
Russia, Joseph Stalin, who has the know-how of survival; from the
U.S., Franklin Roosevelt, who has the sense of history. And each
of these four men could show some credentials as Man of the Year.

   Winston Churchill had ably guided his nation through twelve
months of perilous interlude between taking it and giving it.

   Chiang Kai-shek won another round by not losing it.

   Franklin Roosevelt had helped author the scheme of battle. And
at the end of 1943, the U.S. rather than England seemed to be the
power that played with Soviet Russia for the great stakes of
influence in postwar Europe and Asia. But in 1943 Roosevelt's
political control of the U.S. had been reduced to a lower margin
than in any other year of his three terms. The nation endorsed
his plans for war & peace (as far as they could guess them) --
but not necessarily himself.

   Of the four, Joseph Stalin had scored highest. Over the dead
bodies of thousands of Germans he had guided the Soviet armies to
the reconquest of some 325 thousands of square miles of Russian
ruins since the winter offensive began in November 1942. His
shadow spread longer over Eastern and Southern Europe. But no
longer was Stalin the lone winner he had been in 1942. He now
sought and acknowledged partnership with the other great powers.
Gone with Russia's isolation was her exceptional rank.

   Three Men had by-passed their future. Benito Mussolini was the
Man of the Year -- of a special sort. He had contributed heavily
toward the sanity of the world; the bullying menace that ended
with pie all over his face. What had entered the stage so
pompously, dressed to "live like a lion" now fell through the
trapdoor in truest slapstick fashion. For a while, the trains had
arrived on time, and then the plane came almost too late.

   Another man, Hideki ("The razor") Tojo, heard the thunders of
retribution only distantly. He had lost the Aleutians, the
Gilberts, the southern half of New Guinea, and most of the
Solomon Islands -- but between him and hara-kiri were still
Rabaul, Truk, Borneo, the Celebes, the Philippines, Java,
Sumatra, Formosa, Burma, Paramushiro and the whole coast of
China. His supply lines were thinner, Lord Louis Mountbatten was
preparing the stroke at Burma, the production of airplanes was
too low for his 4-to-1 losses. But the world's tropical wealth,
and hundreds of millions of slaves, remained to be exploited in
the wearing race against time. Yet there was little future in
being Tojo.

   There was even less future in being Adolf Hitler. Nineteen
forty-three was the worst year of his career, and even, perhaps,
the last full year. To the stricken millions in Germany's
shattered cities a stricken voice spoke of Gotterdammerung that
must not come. In 1942, German Armies were practically in sight
of Suez and 600 miles east of Kiev. At the end of 1943, they were
retreating slowly toward Rome and Minsk. Hitler's one political
success of 1943 was at the same time Germany's death warrant: he
had finally convinced the Allies that the only way to beat
Germany is to beat her.

   What was it that had tipped the scales? For tipped they were,
irrevocably. What was it that had restored roundness and balance
to the globe? The cause was plain: the U.S. had actualized her
strength. The great Republic was armed.

   The Man who, more than any other, could be said to have armed
the Republic was George Catlett Marshall, Chief of Staff. Last
week he returned from a 35,000-mile trip around the world. He had
seen the battlefronts in both hemispheres, and the U.S. Armies
that have received the order to conquer. When he returned to
Washington, General Marshall was calm. He knew the order would be
carried out.

   The American people do not, as a general rule, like or trust
the military. But they like and trust George Marshall. This is no
more paradoxical than the fact that General Marshall hates war.
The secret is that American democracy is the stuff Marshall is
made of.

   Hired by the U.S. people to do a job, he will be as good, as
ruthless, as tough, as this job requires. There his ambitions
stop. "He has only one interest," said one of his intimates, "to
win this damned war as quick as he can, with the fewest lives
lost and money expended, and get the hell down to Leesburg, Va.,
and enjoy life." He shuns all avoidable publicity, he is a man of
great personal reserve, but the U.S. people have learned why they
trust General Marshall more than they have trusted any military
man since George Washington: he is a civis Americanus.

   Antic Time. General Marshall stands for duty, and for work
well done in an antic time, a time whose standards are in
transition. Government pundits, seeing the U.S. crowding six-deep
at cocktail bars, hearing U.S. women complain of the lack of
elastic for girdles, denounced the nation as complacent. But the
same women were silently giving their sons and husbands; the same
men who had drunk their way into the future liquor reserves were
grinding themselves through overtime work that had already shown
in the statistics of deaths over 50.

   At home, the year had an air of anonymity: the people's
resources had been entirely poured into such an engulfing
collective effort that few men, if any, rose to conspicuous
heights. From England daily there flew thousands of young men to
bomb Germany; their names were as unimportant as that of
Britain's Air Marshal, Sir Arthur Harris. The important facts
were place names: Hamburg, Schweinfurt, Berlin. Donald Douglas
produced more planes by weight than anyone else, Henry Kaiser
broke a lot more records, Henry Ford's Willow ("Willit") Run
got going, Charles E. Wilson coordinated war production smoothly,
but the entire American business community, rather than any
single hero, set the pace and pattern. Dr. Howard Walter Florey
further developed Dr. Alexander Fleming's penicillin into a drug
of marvelous effect. The year's most important scientific
discoveries and inventions were well-kept secrets of Dr. Vannevar
Bush's Office of Scientific Research and Development. For the
first time in history the U.S. had an Assistant President --
Jimmy Byrnes.

   And while the nation performed in this depersonalized
atmosphere, while history happened 24 hours a day, the saloons,
movies, theaters, nightclubs and brothels boomed as never before.
A young man named Frank Sinatra refined the art of crooning into
"swoon-crooning" and thus won fame & fortune, not so many months
after Stalingrad. The boys who died in New Guinea had lived for
months with pictures of Betty Grable's legs as their inspiration.
The song of the year was a wailing little folk song titled Pistol
Packin' Mama. The U.S. seemed rife with delinquent juveniles, the
khaki-wacky V-girls. In this antic time, there was foam and
flotsam on the surface of the great flood.

   But everywhere men also soberly reexamined their customs,
ideas and beliefs. A story of Christ's impression on earth, Lloyd
Douglas' The Robe, was the year's most significant best-seller.
Ernie Pyle, the deliberately inconspicuous newspaper-man, wrote
himself into the heart of millions, because he wrote, almost
unknowingly, of man's fundamental nature. The raw national nerves
occasionally vibrated unexpectedly, as when a few ill-mannered
moments helped Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. to more fame
than he had won on four battlefields. General Douglas MacArthur,
on severe duty in the field, was dragged, willingly or not, into
hectic pre-convention politics at home. The deep trend against
the party in power found sometimes strange expressions. There
were race frictions; the coal miners struck a nation at war;
Southern politicos filed a divorce from the Democratic party.

   The flood of events was so enormous and so deep that the very
street signs were submerged; men wandered in an unfamiliar waste
of circumstance, scanning the horizons for some marker, some
direction point. When no man could both comprehend the vastness
and dissect the particular, it was no wonder that men clung to
whatever seemed sound and honest. Their need was not for
fascination and awe, but for competence and integrity. Looking at
George Marshall, Americans were content.

   Flicker. In the streets of Uniontown, Pa., where he was born
63 years ago, George Marshall was known as "Flicker." (Ever
since, his natural dignity has repelled nicknames -- while the
first-naming President calls Admiral King "Ernie," he always
calls Marshall "General.") When Flicker set his mind on a
soldier's career, none of the Republican Congressmen was willing
to recommend the son of a stout Democrat for West Point. So
George left for Virginia Military Institute. At the end of his
plebe year, he ranked 35th; (when he was appointed Chief of Staff
in 1939. he was 30th in rank). But from the very first year until
he graduated (in 1901), George was always senior officer of his
class. He always had one of the most American of virtues -- a
steady capacity for growth. The boys respected the boy, as men
later respected the man.

     In his senior year he was All-Southern tackle, and still has
the bodily grace of muscular self-control. He has what baseball
people call "a good pair of hands" -- large, capable, well-
coordinated. He talks with few gestures, but his speech is superb
in exactness, his voice even but never monotonous. When he
dresses a man down, there is no profanity, no shouting, not even
the chill look of traditional military anger. But his ire burns
like hell. These personal explosions are rarely and consciously
utilized tools: he can turn them on & off like a spigot.

   The Record. The 42 service years that elevated George C.
Marshall from a lieutenancy to the most responsible generalship
of modern history are as dependable, as unadventurous and as
sound as the man. He served in the Philippines and in China,
ended his World War I career as Chief of Staff of the Eighth Army
Corps, was from 1919 to 1924 aide-de-camp to General Pershing,
taught extensively in various army colleges, again & again
returned to active command positions with the troops (last such
assignment: commanding general, Fifth Brigade, Vancouver, 1936-
38).

   Taciturn General Pershing never concealed the fact that he
considered Marshall the A.E.F.'s outstanding staff officer. Nor
was Pershing alone. Many an Allied colleague readily admitted
that Marshall, at 37, was author and director of the most
outstanding large-scale troop movement of World War I: during two
crucial weeks before the Meuse-Argonne operation he shifted more
than 500,000 men and 2,700 guns with such perfection that the
Germans learned of the maneuver an all-important 24 hours too
late.

   General Marshall began work in 1939 with the conviction that
the army in a democracy is the servant of the civil population.
First thing he did when he became Deputy Chief of Staff in 1938
was to study the full text of all military hearings and debates
Congress has held in the five previous years.

   The Job he assumed on the day Germany invaded Poland was to
transform a worse-than-disarmed U.S. into the world's most
effective military power -- and in time. In four years General
Marshall was personally responsible for, at the minimum, these
seven achievements:

   1) He started with an army of about 200,000 in 1939 and,
against the background of the Alice-in-Wonderlandish Congress of
the '30s, shaped it into what it is today.

   2) He laid out a program of training and a schedule of
equipment that are unmatched anywhere.

   3) While this was done, he held off hastily planned or ill-
advised military operations, no matter whence the clamor came.

   4) Once the U.S. entered the war, more than anyone else he
insisted on, and gradually achieved, unity of command in all
Allied forces in every theater of war.

   5) He refused to be panicked by nervous demands of theater
commanders into sending out green and half-equipped troops; and
in this he endured through the most extreme pressures.

   6) He early recognized the importance of air power and pushed
his airmen into bigger and ever bigger programs.

   7) He started to break the traditionally supercilious War
Department enmity toward innovations of equipment. New ordnance
gets Marshall's immediate attention.

   These were matters of procedure. Above all, a strategy had to
be shaped. Its objectives, to be sure, were formulated by the
President and by Churchill, for this war, on both sides, is run
by political leaders. Marshall's job is to achieve these
objectives. His mind, which words with an earthbound simplicity
that is the precise opposite of Hitler's "intuition," cut through
all the cross currents in this planetary war. The pattern that
emerged was simple and inescapable: first, while checking the
Japanese advance, to clean Hitler out of Africa, then push him up
on the Continent, and finally hit him with everything at once,
from all possible directions. To do this required giving the
Soviet Armies that support to which Stalin has paid formal
tribute.

   The story of General Marshall's achievements was best told in
the masterly report to the nation he released last September. It
contained also the story of General Marshall: his saga of U.S.
growth toward victory, written in mature prose, is without a
single "I."

   The Team is General Marshall's concern. It is also his
achievement. Nowhere and never had a team of such complexity and
scope to be created and sustained.

   The political captain of the team is the President, Commander
in Chief. General Marshall, his subordinate, has managed to act
always with respect for the President without ever losing his own
authority. He is one of the rare men to whom F.D.R. listens to
learn.

   In this war of global coalition, the U.S. Chief of Staff had
to be a statesman, and Marshall's relations with Churchill proved
that he fits this order too. Among the Combined Chiefs of Staff,
Marshall's personal position is unparalleled.

   In his own bailiwick, Marshall is worshipped -- not with the
rapture evoked by "born" leaders, but with the happy admiration
of experts for the most expert. The General even established
friendly contact with the Navy.

   For the staff itself, Marshall picks men he believes are the
right caliber, tells them their job and gives them authority. If
they don't perform, he busts them with a Tartar's ruthlessness.
This transparent atmosphere of personal authority in the frame of
a clearly defined order is increasingly characteristic for the
gigantic U.S. Army officers'cadre. Such confidence from the top
is being reciprocated. From the commanders, to whom Marshall
willingly concedes the paraphernalia of battle glory, down to the
junior lieutenants, no officer in the field suspects that the
General thinks of his place in history rather than of getting
tools to them in time.

   To the millions of citizen soldiers, confidence in their
technical leadership means morale. As a civilian in uniform, who
wants to go home as soon as possible, the U.S. soldier wants to
be sure that the ugly job he must do is competently handled.
Under General Marshall, he knows it is; and this is why the U.S.
soldier, in action, has proved utterly dependable and
determined -- the ultimate test of morale. Before & after the
battle the U.S. soldier will proudly remain the world's champion
grouser -- he will beef handsomely even at the Victory Parade.

   The Link between the biggest military establishment in U.S.
history and the U.S. people, George C. Marshall was at year's end
the closes thing to "the indispensable man." Had he taken over
the command of the European invasion, the U.S. Army would have
remained without the one & only U.S. citizen who (as a Republican
Congressman once suggested) could at any time get a unanimous
vote of confidence from Congress. The U.S. needed General
Marshall at home.

   During the months to come, when the credit the nation has
extended to its leadership will be used to the limit, General
Marshall will supervise the great invasion and at the same time
remain in closest touch with the people's representatives. Never
in U.S. history has a military man enjoyed such respect on
Capitol Hill. One reason is that he (who has never cast his vote)
is completely free of political concerns. When Colorado's Senator
Edwin C. Johnson mentioned him as a Presidential possibility,
General Marshall's negative reaction was so unmistakably genuine
that Congress knew: this man is a trustee for the nation.

   He had armed the Republic. He had kept faith with the people.
In a general's uniform, he stood for the civilian substance of
this democratic society. Civis Americanus, he had gained the
world's undivided respect. In the name of the soldiers who had
died, General George Catlett Marshall was entitled to accept his
own nation's gratitude.