The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall
By Josiah Bunting III
(Alfred A. Knopf, 245 pages, $30)
At a time when the United States Military Academy removed “duty, honor, country” from its mission statement in favor of an abstract word salad about “Army values,” it was refreshing to read of an uber-competent man who lived that motto every day of his long life and career, benefitting America and the world immeasurably. (RELATED: West Point: Still Duty and Honor, but Maybe Not Country)
As Army chief of staff from late 1939 through the end of World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall displayed organizational and logistical genius in shepherding a tiny, ill-equipped, and outdated army of fewer than 200,000 (in 1939 the American army ranked in size with Bulgaria’s and Portugal’s) into a trained and well-armed citizen army of more than 8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. (RELATED: West Point Leadership Turns Its Back on ‘Duty, Honor, Country’)
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.
Learning Honor, Duty, Country
Born in 1880 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania to a business executive father, Marshall was drawn to the martial values and virtues of discipline, tenacity of purpose, integrity, self-command, courage, and service over self — values and virtues that, alas, seem to be nearly extinct in America today. He attended the Virginia Military Institute, where, always more interested in the practical than the academic, he excelled in military practices. He followed the profession of arms, which was not a popular or well-respected career in America in 1902 when he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.
Marshall’s earliest duty in the Philippine uprising following the Spanish-American war and his service in some of the outdated Army forts in the West would have discouraged a lesser man. Army duty was not well paid, promotion was slow, and the military was small, ill-equipped, and often ill-disciplined. But Marshall took advantage of each posting to perfect his profession. When America entered The Great War, Marshall was ready and his organizational talents were recognized by General John “Black Jack” Pershing, commanding general of the American Expeditionary Force. He put Major Marshall in charge of planning and was rewarded with the strategy and logistics of the highly successful Meuse-Argonne offensive in September 1918 which involved more than a half million American troops and contributed directly to Allied victory.
Marshall stayed with Pershing after the war when Pershing became Army chief of staff. He then went on to a long series of postings in the much-diminished army of the inter-war years, perfecting his skills at each stop. Throughout America’s history, until after the Korean War, there was no large, standing defense force. As war loomed in Europe and Asia in 1940, America found itself as unprepared for a world war as it had been in 1917. Marshall became the prime mover in seeing that America had the Army it needed as the times required.
Bunting is well suited to tell the story of one of America’s greatest and somewhat enigmatic generals. A graduate of VMI himself, he served as its superintendent from 1995 to 2003. He also served as an Army officer in Vietnam with the 9th Infantry Division in 1968. He left the Army for academics after six years at the rank of major. Holding an M.A. degree from Oxford, Bunting has taught at several universities and served as the president of two. But this should not trouble potential readers — he doesn’t write like a professor. His prose is clear, economical, and free of academic jargon. It’s also free of politics. The Making of a Leader is a real contribution to understanding a great American and the American Century.
Making is Bunting’s eighth book. His fourth non-fiction work to go with four novels. The Lionheads, based on his experience in Vietnam, was selected by Time magazine as one of the 10 best novels of 1973.