MacArthur was willing enough, provided his military record merited it. From Walter Trohan’s documented personal files comes information that Marshall’s record lacked sufficient time served with troops. “MacArthur proposed to remedy this,” says Trohan, “by giving him command of the Eighth Regiment at Fort Screven, Ga., one of the finest regiments in the Army.” Marshall was moved up from lieutenant-colonel to colonel, but his way to a general’s stars appeared to be blocked forever when the Inspector General reported that under one year of Marshall’s command the Eighth Regiment had dropped from “one of the best to one of the worst.” It was mandatory, therefore, that MacArthur decline the promotion. Is it any wonder, today, that Truman’s action in removing MacArthur from the military scene should be most pleasing to the Secretary of Defense?
Of course, this is not the whole story, for Pershing was a persevering soldier and had no intention of giving up his determination to see Marshall become a general. In 1936, he bypassed the Army entirely, and went directly to the White House where he succeeded in persuading President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to “appoint” Marshall a general. Later, Marshall had proved himself so “acceptable” to Roosevelt that, over the heads of “twenty senior major generals and fourteen senior brigadier generals, Roosevelt made him Chief of Staff.”
I believe that the “tragedy” implied by Walter Trohan concerning Marshall lies in the current knowledge that Marshall, despite personal bravery, even stoicism, was sadly lacking in vision to match it. Thus, he became a willing tool in the hands of the opposition. He trusted Russia as an ally and, contrary to the Churchill belief, he did not care how much of Europe Stalin took, so long as we sent Russia enough tanks and ammunition to crush the German Army. He was easy prey to the insidious propaganda put out by Hiss, Acheson, Lattimore, Jessup and others who, misguided or otherwise, permitted American lives to be sacrificed to make both Europe and Asia “safe for Communism.”
We know now what was in the Wedemeyer Report. Because it disagreed with Marshall’s ideas he, personally, suppressed it. In contrast to his decision, Wedemeyer had advocated a strong defense against Communism in China, and had gained the Generalissimo’s complete approval for American supervision of all aid, financial, military, psychological—that would have been forthcoming if the report had been approved.
Marshall, as was Pershing, is for an enormous army—for pitting manpower, our most precious commodity, against the enemy, in place of our superb technological and psychological know-how. General MacArthur has shown the absurdity and the tragedy of any such commitment on our part. Should Marshall, with Anna Rosenberg at his side, be allowed to continue with plans to fight the Asiatic hordes thusly, we are, indeed, doomed. May God forbid!
Once again, in retrospect, it appears that American foreign policy had been to support the Generalissimo as long as he fought the Japanese, but to do nothing that might offend the Communists at any time. For the past ten years, or more, our Government seems to have had its bets on Communism in China—if not in all Eurasia—to win. The facts are against any other conclusion, and we must, again, assume that Marshall, the President, and the State Department know what they are doing. And if they know what they are doing, they must be doing it deliberately.
From 1946 through 1948, Marshall ordered destroyed all of the reserves of ammunition earmarked for Chiang Kai-shek. These had been stored in India and could easily have been transferred to China at the end of the war in 1945. Marshall also ordered our military mission to refuse further training and aid to the Nationalist armies.
On leaving China, General Marshall was overheard to remark enthusiastically, “There is a definite liberal group among the Communist Chinese.” This particular group included China’s “Front Man,” Chou En-lai, Communist Foreign Minister since October, 1948, and his assistant, Chiao Kuan-Hua, spokesman for the Communist delegation that was entertained in late 1950 by the United Nations, and which was housed and fed at the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria in New York City.
It is not difficult to see how Marshall contributed to Chiang’s capitulation to the Communists. How can we answer for our refusal to accept the 30,000 Chinese Nationalist troops on Formosa, initially offered by the Generalissimo to the United Nations for combat in Korea or in South China? We accepted units, even token ones, from other members of the U.N., but not from Nationalist China, who is still an official member. Of course, I know the answer is couched in the language of “Peace, peace.” But Stalin will not be provoked into full-scale war until Russia is ready for it, and the danger of letting Chiang attack south China is no more than a blind.
How can we have aided the Russians more, or brought greater tragedy to ourselves than we already have by our own actions?