Marshall on Managing a Global War

Another gem of a speech delivered to a group of governors in Columbus, Ohio shortly after the establishment of a second front in North Africa, November 1942.

This time, Marshall expresses frank and candid concerns over a variety of minutiae: Logistical challenges like shipbuilding and landing-craft availability, the allocation of finite resources determined with exactitude months, if not years in advance, the importance of secrecy, and much, much more. The sheer weightiness of the problems his War Department grappled with on a daily basis absolutely boggles the mind.

Here’s some of the key excerpts:

On Committing to a Second Front in the West

You’re committed to this thing [the second front]. You must carry it through and what is most difficult of all in this country, you must keep it secret…It isn’t inspirational, it isn’t the spur of the moment. It’s a carefully thought out thing months and months and months in advance. Goes back to production in certain things sometimes a year in advance, and all of that must be brought to a head in due course and due time having all of these various interests of various countries and sovereign powers we’re dealing with, brought into accord and agreement.

Now we have succeeded in this war starting with our entry of the war in December 1941, in organizing a basis for securing unity of action. We don’t talk about it, ladies and gentlemen we do it.¹

And I think the greatest thing we’ve done, the greatest thing we’ve accomplished, the most potent factor in this war today is the fact that we have secured a method of arriving at unity, of operations among the Allies. That is extraordinarily difficult as you know in your own affairs and in your political organizations (Laughter). I don’t know whether I mean what you mean or not (Laughter).²

I might give you some idea of the intricacies of these problems if I tell you how one of these conferences that you read about, like Casablanca, or the recent one in Washington, or some of the earlier ones, go about it–we’ve gradually, of course, evolved into pretty well determined procedure. It generally takes us about a week, sometimes a day or two less, to arrive at a tentative idea of what we think we might do, which we all agree about. But that’s only a tentative affair and it takes about a week to arrive at that because it covers the entire world. Then it takes us almost a week longer, having arrived at a tentative agreement on that, to calculate whether that can be done. You are now involved in ships, cargo, dry cargo, wet cargo, troop lift. You’re involved in escort vessels because for every movement you require so many escorts. They’re just so many and no more. The security of these convoys depend on that. You’re involved in most operations in landing affairs, that means landing crafts, special landing crafts, that means so many engines, so many this, so many that. That means the transportation of these awkward crafts to this or that place. You can’t ship them around, change your mind at any minute–that thing all has to be calculated far in advance. You get all the compromises. You figure the turn around in the boats. They’re so long to this place, and they’re so long in that.

I’ll give you an idea of how complicated that is, when we were in the middle of the great crisis of the [British] Eighth Army, when it was driven almost to Egypt–did get up to the Alamein line and the question was [whether] we might send troops there, or would we send equipment there–which was the quickest[?] There were certain troops there without any equipment….” [He continues and talks about stripping 105mm cannons from units that had just received them days earlier to give them to their British allies. No explanation. Just compliance. He also mentions deliberations over whether the United States should deploy troops to the Middle East to assist Eighth Army during its crisis in Egypt, and grappling with not only the tyranny of distance, but port allowances, inland infrastructure, local labor pools, and the fact these are issues journalists “settle in the paper in the morning but we can’t settle it in 3-4 months.”]

On the Orderly and Precise Systems Required to Manage a Global War

Because in a war of this nature which literally covers the globe the complications are beyond description. But we’ve developed an orderly precision, [an] orderly method for doing this thing.

We know each other well, know each other intimately. One of the most surprising things of all, if you go out there to Africa and find this combined staff [Eisenhower’s Allied Force Headquarters], you can hardly tell, unless you look at the uniform closely which service, which nation the officer represents.

You will find in General Eisenhower’s home a British Planning Officer living there with him. You will find next door to him [in Algiers] Admiral Cunningham living there. All these people close together–this staff all combined–with just one single idea, with one purpose; the whole thing integrated and developed to the point where they can get by the vicissitudes which always occur in a campaign and I might say in any fight, we have a fixed–we have a–not a fixed rule–but there’s an axiom almost, that no division ever admitted that the division on its right or left were abreast of it and if it happens to be from another country why that makes it very much worse.³ They’re always still further behind. And that produces a reaction which troubles morale and which you have to defeat.

So we’ve succeeded in bringing about a great unity of purpose. And I can’t emphasize too much of what vast importance that is.