[Amnorix]

Originally Posted by Sofa King

Yeah that's what i was piecing together outta the deal... Be interesting to know who else he promoted like that, and if anyone had great success...

My brief review couldn't find references to the list or who was on it, though I definitely remember a few references to it sprinkled around in the book. Not like "list" is in the index, though, so...

I did, however, find a number of references to the need to weed out the old crowd, so I'll post those.

Originally Posted by Ed Cray

This blue-eyed general with a gaze that drilled incompetents had few illusions about the Army and its present capabilities. . . . As a young officer on a mapping trip three decades earlier, he had needed fourteen signatures to get rations for his men; that had hardly changed. Intelligence from General Staff to battalion level was a scorned dumping ground for misfits and time-servers.

There were plenty of those in all branches, often in high places, "conservatives" as he thought of them, resistant to reform. "I am comfing more and more to find, in the Army, taht if a thing ahs nto been done it is tremendously hard to get anyone today in favor of doing it."

Marshall differed too from toher army officers in his willingness to rely on younger men, even enlisted men.

pg. 125.

Originally Posted by Ed Cray

During a recess in the Senate appropriation eharings of August 7, Marshall delayed his return to the Munitions Building to talk privately to Senator Byrnes about a pressing problem. If he was to build an army for war, Martshall explained, he had to have troop leaders fit for combat. Now he was stymied. Four months earlier, he had appeared before the House Military Affairs Committee seeking a bill that would permit the War Department to rpomote younger officers by retiring older men no longer fit for field service. Marshall meant to wipe out the dreaded hump.

The Army was different from civilian life, Marshall had told the committee. "One does acquire experience and jdugment with the years, but also, unfortunately, we lose the resiliency of tendons and muscles. . . . We may have the wisdom of the years, but we lack -- I know I do in many respects -- the physical ruggedness of more youthful days."

In the first war, Marshall continued, he had seen 27 of the 29 divisions sent into combat, "and there were more reliefs of field officers, those above the grade of captain, due to physical reasons than for any other cause."

The House committee had been unmoved, Marshall told Byrnes. Thsoe older officers had longstanding ties with congressmen and fought back; a sympathetic Chairman Andrew J. May of Kentucky held the bill in committee. "I was accused of getting rid of all the brains in the Army," Marshall said later. "I couldn't reply that I was eliminating considerable arteriosclerosis."

Cray at 174.

Byrnes helps and Marshall gets what he wants, indirectly. He also appoints a "plucking committee" of six retired officers headed by former Chief of Staff Marlin Craig and assigned htem to review the efficiency ratings of older officers. They were to weed out the worst.

Originally Posted by Cray

No action by Marshall would cause as much bitterness as his creation fo the plucking board. In its first six months, the panel removed 195 captains, majors, lieutenant colonels and colonels; in the next five years it would ticket 500 colonels for immediate retirement. Marshall agreed in a later interview that the board had been "rutheless", but defended the retirments as necessary. Even years later, those officers forced into retirment without promotion to the rank of brigadier general, and their wives, could nto mention Marhsall's name without a curse.

. . . .

As the plucking board set to work, Marshall meanwhile drew up the first list of promotions to submti to the president. IN a year of decisions vital to the nation's rearmament, none would be more important than the selection of the Army's new leadership. Marshall would be shaping, as had Pershing before him an army in his own image.

Though he relied mainly on his prodigious memory for bothh success and failure, Marshall checked at least some of the names iwth his old mentor, General Pershing, during biweekly visits to the old man's suite at Walter Reed Hospital. The recommendations then went to Stimson for reivew.

Over a weekend at Highhold, the secretary and Marshall's old friend from Chicago, retired General Frank McCoy, examined the service records of each fo the chief of staff's nominations. Stimson was delighted, he noted in his diary, for Marhsall had tapped "several men whom McCoy and I knew to be good war men and yet who might not hav ehad as good a record on paper."

. . .

For every bitter colonel jumped by younger men, there was a more vigorous and delighted officer. Robert L. Eichelberger's happily weeping wife showed him the telegram announcing the promotion. The following day, George S. Patton, who had prviately feared his age would count against him, wired Eichelberger" "At last they have had sense enought o promote the two best damn officers in the U.S. Army."

Cray 176.