About this ebook
“This work on Marshall continues to be the fine scholarly product that one expects from its author.” — C. P. Stacey, International Journal
“Dr. Pogue has written a splendid account of the army high command in World War II. It makes an important contribution to the history of our times and complements previously-published memoirs and official histories. The military specialist will be impressed by the systematic coverage Dr. Pogue gives to the way in which Marshall used his staff and managed the war. General readers will be fascinated by the new information provided about the characters and wartime actions of such leaders as Roosevelt, Churchill, MacArthur, and Eisenhower... This is a thoroughly satisfying book and a splendid companion to the first volume.” — H. A. De Weerd, The Virginia Quarterly Review
“The United States, [Sir John Dill] told General Brooke, ‘has not — repeat not — the slightest conception of what the war means, and their armed forces are more unready for war than it is possible to imagine.’ Mr. Pogue has as his subject the movement of the country from such material and spiritual limitation to the landings in North Africa and as his special thesis the contribution of General George C. Marshall in the production of this remarkable transition... What General Marshall did was to plan, negotiate, organize, and, above all, decide... [Mr. Pogue’s] narrative is lean, clear, and well controlled... What so often he is dealing with in these pages is the resolution of endless conflicts of prejudice and interest. His capacity to recognize and define the issues in debate, to expose with clinical balance the motives and feelings of the debaters, to weigh out honestly the merits and defects of the conclusions reached is impressive and a valuable aid to fuller understanding. Mr. Pogue succeeds as well in giving the reader a good feeling for the administrative situation in which General Marshall spent most of his time — how policies were developed, officers selected for special tasks, decisions taken, and all the rest of it... [A] solidly constructed, carefully developed book.” — Elting E. Morison, The Journal of Southern History
“This second volume of Forrest Pogue’s long-awaited authorized biography of General George C. Marshall has reached the period of Marshall’s first three years as Chief of Staff... when [he] initiated the vast expansion of the US Army for World War II... Excellent footnotes and detailed appendixes, interviews, and bibliographical notes will ensure Pogue’s Marshall a permanent place in US military history and biography.” — Trumbull Higgins, The American Historical Review
About the author
Born in Eddyville, Kentucky, Forrest Carlisle Pogue Jr. (1912-1996) attended Murray State College in Oklahoma, received his master's degree from the University of Kentucky, and a doctorate from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1939. Pogue worked at Murray State, teaching history from June 1933 to May 1942, was drafted into the Army in 1942 and promoted to sergeant. After basic training, he was reassigned to a historical unit and made responsible for writing a history of the Second United States Army; in 1944 he was sent to England and to Normandy where he interviewed wounded soldiers over a period of eleven months; he was present at the Battle of the Bulge. For his work, he was awarded the Bronze Star Medal and Croix de Guerre. He was discharged in October 1945, and hired as a civilian, with the pay of a colonel.
Pogue was first assigned to write a history of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force from 1945 to 1946. In July he was assigned by Dwight D. Eisenhower to write an official history of the Supreme Command in Europe, for which he interviewed Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, Charles de Gaulle, Alan Brooke and others. Pogue then spent seven years as a military historian, and two years conducting operations research at United States Army Garrison Heidelberg with the Operations Research Office at Johns Hopkins University. He contributed to The Meaning of Yalta among several other books, returning to Murray State in 1954.
In 1956, Pogue was hired by the George C. Marshall Foundation to write the official biography of George C. Marshall in four volumes on which he worked from 1963 to 1987. He became director of the Marshall Foundation in 1956, leaving in 1974 to become director of the Eisenhower Institute for Historical Research. Pogue retired in 1984. He served as a guest lecturer at George Washington University and the United States Army War College, held the Mary Moody Northen chair in Arts and Sciences at Virginia Military Institute in 1972. Pogue was on the Advisory boards for the Office of Naval History, the Naval Historical Office, the United States Army Center of Military History, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, president of the Oral History Association and the American Military Institute and other organizations. The Pogue Library at Murray State is named after him.
Born and raised in Missouri, Omar N. Bradley (1893-1981) worked as a boilermaker before entering the US Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1915 alongside Dwight D. Eisenhower. During World War I, Bradley guarded copper mines in Montana. After the war, Bradley taught at West Point and served in other roles before taking a position at the War Department under General George Marshall who noticed him. In 1941, Bradley became commander of the US Army Infantry School.
After the US entered World War II, Bradley oversaw the transformation of the 82nd Infantry Division into the first American airborne division. He received his first front-line command in Operation Torch in North Africa, serving under General George S. Patton. After Patton was reassigned, Bradley commanded II Corps in the Tunisia Campaign and the Allied invasion of Sicily. He commanded the First US Army during the Invasion of Normandy, which landed at Utah and Omaha beaches. After the breakout from Normandy, he took command of the Twelfth US Army Group, which ultimately comprised 43 divisions and 1.3 million men, the largest body of American soldiers ever to serve under a single field commander: Bradley, the senior commander of American ground forces, linked up with Marshal Koniev of the Soviet Union on the banks of the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, sealing the defeat of Nazi forces. He was known as the “G.I.’s General” because of his concern for the ordinary soldier.
After the war, Bradley headed the Veterans Administration. He became Chief of Staff of the US Army in 1948 and the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1949. In 1950, Bradley was promoted to the rank of General of the Army, becoming the last of only nine people to be promoted to five-star rank in the US Armed Forces. Bradley was the senior military commander at the start of the Korean War, supported President Truman’s wartime policy of containment and was instrumental in persuading Truman to dismiss General Douglas MacArthur in 1951 after MacArthur resisted administration attempts to scale back the war’s strategic objectives.
Bradley left active duty in 1953 (though remaining on “active retirement” for the next 27 years as a five-star Army general), then continued to serve in public and business roles, including at the Bulova Watch Company, until his death.
