Marshall and Ike: Leadership at the Highest Level

The following article is adapted from a presentation by Bob Holcomb, an adjunct staff member at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) and a retired Army lieutenant colonel.

 In late March 1945, the war in Europe was obviously won, and the critical questions for the Allies became where to strike further into Germany and how and where to link up with the Russians coming from the East. Prime Minister Churchill drove British policy, and his main goals were twofold: meet the Russians as far east as possible and get to Berlin to close out the war. Both would involve General Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group (which was augmented with the 9th U.S. Army), striking into north Germany onto Berlin.

General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, thought this unnecessary. He decided instead to drive into central Germany, towards Leipzig, and then turn south to cut off any possibility of a German southern redoubt. Ike felt that street fighting in Berlin would be horrendous and unnecessary. He also wanted the 9th Army returned to U.S. control, to be added back into General Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group, with Monty guarding Bradley’s left flank and secure the northern ports. 

Of course, the question of linking up with the Russians was critical, and nobody wanted to have a situation where two armies were barreling into one another with no Germans in between them. The situation was ripe for a disastrous fratricide situation, and so Ike needed to know where the Russians were and what their offensive plans called for.

On 28 March 1945, he wrote a dispatch to Marshal Stalin directly outlining Allied intentions and requesting Soviet plans. Copies were furnished to the Combined Chiefs of Staff and the British Chiefs of Staff. A separate message notified Montgomery, and Ike also sent a “General Marshall Eyes Only” message – all on the same day – explaining his approach. In his note to Army Chief of Staff Marshall, Ike reported that “my views agree closely with your own,” which certainly implied he and Marshall had discussed next steps at some point. 

This created a hornet’s nest of activity on the part of the British. Montgomery was apoplectic about losing the 9th Army and being assigned a “minor” role of merely guarding a flank. Churchill was apoplectic about changing the main thrust to the south and conceding Berlin to the Russians. The British Chiefs of Staff were on Montgomery’s side and immediately shot off a message to the American Chiefs, without pausing to let Churchill read it first.

Marshall wrote to Ike the following day, asking for some ammunition with which to address the British Chiefs’ apprehension. Ike responded with three salient points: First, the Russians were only 40 miles from Berlin, while the Americans were 200 miles away. They were going to get to Berlin first no matter what he did. Further, the terrain he had to cover to go to Berlin was crisscrossed by numerous lakes and waterways, making it slow going.

 Second, if he kept the 9th U.S. Army in Montgomery’s hands, then his remaining forces under Bradley would be too weak to make the punch towards Leipzig (or Berlin, for that matter). Finally, there was some intelligence evidence that the Germans were going to establish a redoubt in the south, and Ike felt he needed to have sufficient forces available to deny the Germans the chance to consolidate and establish a defense.

 In addition to the British Chiefs’ agitation, Churchill got into the act. He sent a message directly to Eisenhower on March 31. His basic complaints were three-fold: First, he felt Ike had greatly diminished Montgomery’s role and relegated 21st Army Group to insignificant tasks while the American Army won the war.

Second, he felt that Berlin was not merely a minor objective, but a very major strategic one and indeed central to defeating the Germans. He likely recalled that the failure to convince the German Army that they were truly defeated at the end of the First World War had led directly to the “stabbed in the back” narrative that the Nazis developed, and the resentment that eventually spawned the Second World War. 

Finally, he felt Ike should not have communicated directly to an allied head of state but should have coordinated his message with the U.S. and British heads of state first. Churchill also wrote to Roosevelt laying out the same points, but there appears to be no evidence that the President played any role in this discussion. Churchill in his post-war history wrote that he believed General Marshall was handling all the message traffic because of Roosevelt’s ill health, and indeed he died less than two weeks later. 

This is a considerable amount of heat generated by Churchill on Eisenhower. In preparing his responses to Churchill, Ike did uncover one interesting fact: the message describing Montgomery’s tasks had a clerical error in it that changed the meaning. His original text said, “Montgomery will be responsible for these tasks,” but as transmitted it read “Montgomery will be responsible on patrol tasks” – quite a different meaning.

Ike was able to mollify Churchill a little bit once that was cleared up, and he further gained ground by pointing out that Stalin was also the Commander in Chief of the Russian Armed Forces and directly controlled them in battle, so a commander-to-commander message dealing with operational plans to coordinate a link-up was appropriate. 

However, nothing could change the fact that Churchill felt Berlin was an important military objective and Eisenhower did not. Churchill pointed out that the Russians were about to enter Vienna and would soon enter Berlin, creating a political narrative that the Red Army was busy liberating all the capitals of Europe and crushing the German Army while the British and Americans were dilly-dallying back on the Rhine. 

Ike stuck to his guns, and the U.S. Army should be forever grateful. American commanders have traditionally felt that the enemy’s armed forces were the center of gravity and defeating them was the primary task of the Army. Deflecting towards Berlin was going to cost a lot of lives, American lives at that, and would bog Ike down in street fighting against a fanatical foe, both military and civilian, in its own capital.

Ike also pointed out to the Prime Minister that the occupation zones for each Allied nation were already delineated at the last conference between Roosevelt and Churchill, and Berlin fell in the Russian zone. Hence, any U.S. Army force that “dashed” to Berlin was going to have to eventually fall back again to their own occupation zone. In Ike’s mind, and also very much in Marshall’s mind, it made no sense to spill the precious blood of our soldiers to get into a knife-fight in Berlin, only to then meekly turn around and retreat back to our own zone of occupation. 

This episode echoes with Marshall’s words at an earlier debate with Churchill over the island of Rhodes, when Marshall finally told the Prime Minister to his face that “not a single American soldier was going to die on that goddamned beach,” thus ending the debate. No doubt he felt the same way about Berlin, and there was also no doubt that Churchill knew he was not going to bully Marshall into accepting it.

General Marshall backed up his subordinate. On March 30, he and the American Chiefs sent a strong message to the British Chiefs of Staff stating bluntly that the American Chiefs did not agree with them. Marshall was a very clear and direct man, and he communicated precisely what the American Chiefs thought, without any prevarication.

He added that the American Chiefs also did not agree with the British Chiefs that the Combined Chiefs should send a message to Marshal Stalin about Ike’s missive. “To discredit [or] certainly to lower the prestige of a highly successful commander in the field does not appear to be the proper procedure. If a clarification…is to be made, it should be communicated by General Eisenhower and not by the Combined Chiefs of Staff over his head.”

Marshall went on to say the American Chiefs agreed with General Eisenhower’s proposed major strategy, and that it did not represent any sort of change in the strategy of the war. He added, for good measure, that “The battle in Germany is now at the point where the commander in the field is the best judge of the measures which offer the earliest prospect of destroying the German armies or their power to resist.”

He added that, while there may be “important factors which are not the direct concern and responsibility of General Eisenhower, [we] consider that his strategic conception is sound from the viewpoint of crushing Germany as expeditiously as possible and should receive full support.”

This entire exchange, from Ike’s original message to the outraged British reaction to the American Chiefs message of support, took place over just three days. Considering the strong personalities and egos involved, it was astonishingly swift – even by today’s email standards.

We often view these matters in a vacuum without considering what else was going on. Spread over the same week, Marshall sent messages of equal or even greater importance on the path forward to end the war in the Pacific with McArthur; the gigantic logistics plans and effort necessary to ship enormous Army and Air Corps combat power from the European front to the Pacific Theater; and the adjustments necessary for the conversion of the war economy back to a civilian economy with the War Production Board. He also delivered a speech to the Academy of Political Science on the conduct of the war and the global strategic situation to this point. 

The conversation with the British about Ike was just one of the crises on Marshall’s full plate. This is leadership at the highest level. Here was the Army Chief of Staff – under immense pressure, covering a vital and frighteningly complex task, dealing with the fates of millions of people, even national survival – and he delegated to his subordinate the power to make big decisions.

Once Ike decided, Marshall backed him up fully, explicitly, quickly and without reservation. This episode highlights the leadership qualities of both Marshall and Ike. These giants were competent and trustworthy, showed sound judgment and firm resolve and were loyal to one another. It is hard to imagine a better team to close out the war in Europe.