Picture George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower and you see generals, a secretary of state and defense, and a president. But before they liberated Western Europe and East Asia and led the free world in the Cold War, they were middle-aged men with uncertain futures.
Ben Runkle illuminates the hidden lives of these future commanders between World War I and World War II in Generals in the Making.
Runkle is uniquely qualified to write this story. There may be another Harvard Ph.D. who worked for the House Armed Services Committee, National Security Council, and secretary of defense. None first served as an artillery officer with the 82nd Airborne and earned a Bronze Star in Iraq.
Runkle knows the Army and its soldiers, as shown by his mastery of the primary and secondary literature about these great captains and his acknowledgment that there are flesh-and-blood men beneath the uniforms. Runkle writes elegantly and for a broad readership, yet avid readers of military history will still learn new things.
(Full disclosure: Runkle had to put up with me as an ROTC classmate many years ago.)
In 1919, Patton returned from France wounded, MacArthur highly-decorated, and Marshall a valued but invisible staff officer. Eisenhower, despite his best efforts, remained stateside and failed to see combat. Each faced midcareer Army downsizing, from 2.4 million soldiers in 1918 to 200,000 men in 1920.
Patton, Marshall, and Eisenhower were reduced to captain from colonel or lieutenant colonel. Each of them, and MacArthur, considered resigning their commissions in the interwar period.
The most touching parts of Generals in the Making concern these men’s personal lives.
Patton suffers from post-traumatic stress and a traumatic brain injury, which he medicates with alcohol and then has an affair with his wife’s niece.
MacArthur is divorced and takes a 16-year-old lover, about which he is blackmailed by a columnist before remarrying.
Marshall’s beloved first wife dies, driving him to depression; he remarries and his stepson is killed in World War II.
Eisenhower loses a 3-year-old son (“the greatest disappointment and disaster of my life, the one I have never been able to forget completely”), is under financial stress, and is nearly court-martialed twice.
Runkle details these men’s experiences with the professional military education system. Eisenhower and Patton graduate at or near the top of their classes, respectively, from the Command and General Staff School and attend War College. MacArthur modernizes West Point, and Marshall does the same for the Infantry School.
The future generals serve in colorful, long since-forgotten Army posts in China, the Philippines, and Panama, usually as staff officers. Most spend little time in the command assignments that are the bedrock of promotion in today’s Army.
Runkle ably retells stories of key incidents involving the interwar Army.
MacArthur sits on the 1925 court-martial panel that, with a lone dissenter, convicted maverick Air Corps Maj. Gen. Billy Mitchell. It is still unknown if MacArthur voted “guilty.”
MacArthur and Marshall build political equity for the Army with President Franklin Roosevelt and train cadres for future military leadership by making a success of his New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933.
In the 1932 Bonus March, MacArthur ignores the good advice of his aide Eisenhower and, dressed as if for a parade, accompanies troops (including Patton) who rout an encampment of fellow veterans from Washington, D.C. It was an ugly scene, often used against MacArthur by his enemies. Patton poignantly refused to acknowledge among the destitute a soldier who saved his life in France in 1918.
Readers who know of the contentious relationships between these protagonists during the 1940s and 1950s may be surprised by just how closely they were associated between the wars.
As supreme allied commander, Eisenhower nearly relieved Patton of command of the Seventh Army, sidelined him from participation in the Normandy invasion, and finally did relieve him of command of the Third Army. They were friends, literally next-door neighbors, and Patton had recommended Eisenhower to a crucial mentor, Maj. Gen. Fox Conner.
As chief of war plans in 1941-42, Eisenhower denied MacArthur desperately requested reinforcements in the Philippines. Eisenhower had worked directly for MacArthur for six years.
As secretary of defense, Marshall recommended the relief of MacArthur by President Harry Truman. The two men had been rivals, in MacArthur’s view, since they were both in France in 1918.
While running for president in 1952, Eisenhower failed to publicly defend Marshall from scurrilous charges of communist sympathy and treason by Republican Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Marshall had plucked Eisenhower from obscurity in 1941, defended him when he faltered in North Africa, and refused the opportunity to supplant him and lead the Normandy invasion.
Patton and MacArthur were always controversial, and even Marshall and Eisenhower have undergone critical reevaluations in recent decades. Runkle is judicious in his conclusions about the effect of these men’s long careers.
Several of these officers received poor evaluations at times during the interwar period. Together with their private struggles, it is worth asking whether some of them would be retained in the puritanical, risk-averse, “zero-defects” Army of 2019. Have potential future leaders such as these left the Army due to bureaucratically limited opportunities for promotion after service in Afghanistan or Iraq?
Today’s conventional “big Army” leaders might ask whether they would seek to rehabilitate the drinking, adultery, financial problems, and poor evaluations which beset some of these future conquering heroes in the 1920s and 1930s. Would they prefer politically correct, vanilla subordinates to high-risk/high-reward officers?
(Or, to be fair, did interwar critics see clearly early problems with Patton and MacArthur that would manifest and lead to their justifiable reliefs in 1945 and 1951?)
Would political leaders in the Pentagon and White House today risk giving wartime command to Eisenhower? He had never led anything larger than a battalion and lacked any combat experience until 1942. Or make Marshall, who had never led anything larger than a brigade or any unit in combat, Army chief of staff? Roosevelt did, and his gambles paid off handsomely.
Runkle’s book is ultimately inspiring. Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, and Eisenhower had personal and professional problems with which many empathize or sympathize. They bounced back and came through for America when it counted the most. They led an Army of 190,000 soldiers in 1939 to become one of 8.3 million men in 1945 and triumphed over evil to defeat Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.
Generals in the Making is an important new addition to our knowledge of these flawed and great men.
Kevin Carroll served with the US Army in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.
