Profiles in Character #6: George C. Marshall, D-Day and Selfless Service

In a private lunch in Cairo on December 5, 1943, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked his Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to choose the officer who would lead the D-Day invasion of Europe, code-named Overlord.  Roosevelt had to announce this critical decision at his meeting with Stalin and Churchill by the next day. The essential second front against Hitler in Western Europe had been delayed too long and needed a commander. 

Roosevelt assumed the Supreme Allied Commander would be Marshall.  He had, with a reluctance based on knowing little about him, selected Marshall as the Army Chief of Staff in 1939 but had since grown to admire and depend heavily on his leadership.  Writing on September 20th  to retired Gen John “Black Jack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, FDR had said “The best way I can express it is to tell you that I want George to be the Pershing of the Second World War – and he cannot be if we keep him here [in Washington, D.C.]”

All Marshall had to do was ask for the command.  A master at planning and logistics with an exceptional reputation and rapport with Allied leaders, both political and military, Marshall could have easily assumed the greatest field assignment of any military figure in American history.  Dwight Eisenhower, the only other choice Roosevelt considered, was a Marshall protégé. 

Earlier in Cairo, Roosevelt had sent his personal aide, Harry Hopkins, to ask Marshall whether he wanted the command.  Though he did, Hopkins returned to the president with Marshall’s answer: “He need have no fears regarding my personal reactions” about his choice, Marshall said.  FDR would need to decide.  FDR then asked to see Marshall in person.  Here is how Marshall later recounted their meeting:

“So I went to see the president, I think after luncheon, at his villa in Cairo, and, as I recall, he asked me, after a great deal of beating around the bush, just what I wanted to do.  Evidently it was left up to me. . . . I just repeated again, in as convincing language as I could, that I wanted him to feel free to act in whatever way he felt was to the best interests of the country and to his satisfaction, and not in any way to consider my feelings.  I would cheerfully go whatever way he wanted me to go and I didn’t express any desire one way or the other.”

The next day, just before the conference ended, FDR decided on Eisenhower.  His tribute to Marshall consisted of a single sentence clothed in years of admiration: “Well, I didn’t feel that I could sleep at ease if you were out of Washington.”  Marshall could do what Eisenhower would go on to do on D-Day, but FDR did not believe Eisenhower could fill Marshall’s shoes in Washington.

FDR knew what this meant for Marshall in the pages of history.  In a meeting with Eisenhower, weeks before, Roosevelt had told him that everyone knew who Grant was after the Civil War but no one could name Lincoln’s Army Chief of Staff: “I hate to think that fifty years from now practically nobody will know who George Marshall was.”

Roosevelt proved prescient.  Eisenhower would go on to victory, become the subject of the nation’s tumultuous honors and welcome home celebration and the 34th president of the United States.  Marshall would go on to honors as well, including Secretary of State, architect of the post-war Marshall Plan and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Yet he is largely forgotten three-quarters of a century after victory in World War II.

Nevertheless, his character stands as testimony to the best in human nature, leadership and American history.  His contemporaries, beyond Roosevelt, saw this.  The day after V-E Day, on May 8, 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson lauded Marshall in front of a gathering of civilian and military leaders in the Pentagon: “No one who is thinking of himself can rise to true heights,” he said. “You have never thought of yourself.  Seldom can a man cast aside such a thing as being commanding general of the greatest field army in our history.  This decision was made by you for wholly unselfish reasons.” 

Winston Churchill would tell Marshall that “It has not fallen to your lot to command the great armies.  You have had to create them, organize them, and inspire them.”  

In 1959, on a visit to the United States, Churchill stopped at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where Marshall, who had a stroke in February, lay critically ill.  Churchill stood in the doorway of Marshall’s room, crying.   After Marshall’s death in mid-October, there was no state funeral, no eulogy, and only a few pall bearers – all this at Marshall’s insistence.  He was buried not amongst the greats at Arlington but on a hillside among the common soldiers who he treasured and where he felt he belonged.   

Photo Credit: pbs.org