George C. Marshall; Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945

New York: The Viking Press, 1973. Second Printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. xviii, 683, [3] pages. Endpaper maps. Maps. Illustrations. Bibliographical Note. Selected Bibliography. Chronology. Abbreviations. Notes. Index. DJ has some wear and soiling. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Forrest Carlisle Pogue Jr. (September 17, 1912 - October 6, 1996) was an official United States Army historian during World War II. He was a proponent of oral history techniques, and collected many oral histories from the war under the direction of chief Army historian S. L. A. Marshall. Forrest Pogue was for many years the Executive Director of the George C. Marshall Foundation as well as Director of the Marshall Library located on the campus of Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. He earned a Bronze Star for front-line combat in the European Theater of Operations during WWII. He was subsequently an Operations Research analysts with the Johns Hopkins University. In 1956, Pogue was hired by the George C. Marshall Foundation to write the official biography of George Marshall. From 1963 to 1987, he worked on the four volume biography, and read over 3.5 million pages of research material while completing his work on Marshall. A pioneer of oral-history techniques, Mr. Pogue captured on tape about 40 hours of interviews with Marshall and also recorded encounters with more than 300 people who had known him, many of them prominent figures themselves. This is the third volume in the official biography of George C. Marshall. During WWI, Marshall was assigned to the staff of the American Expeditionary Forces headquarters, he was a key planner of American operations including the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. After the war, Marshall was assigned as an aide-de-camp to John J. Pershing, who was then serving as the Army's Chief of Staff. When Chief of Staff Malin Craig retired in 1939, Marshall became acting Chief of Staff, and then Chief of Staff. He served as Chief of Staff until the end of the war in 1945. As Chief of Staff, Marshall organized the largest military expansion in U.S. history, and received promotion to five-star rank as General of the Army. Marshall coordinated Allied operations in Europe and the Pacific until the end of the war; in addition to being hailed as the organizer of Allied victory by Winston Churchill, Time magazine named Marshall its Man of the Year for 1943. Marshall retired from active service in 1945, but remained on active duty, a requirement for holders of five-star rank. Derived from a Kirkus review: The third cornerstone in Dr. Pogue's official and surely definitive George C. Marshall biography which commenced in 1963 contains a foreword by General Omar Bradley, Marshall's colleague and friend. As expected, Organizer of Victory follows the format and style established in the previous works, that is a heavily documented text which incorporates or quotes from the Marshall papers and related material. The emphasis on the professional career continues while still attempting to build a portrait of the human being behind the braid. The 1943-45 period marked Marshall's emergence as both an instantly recognizable public figure and a formidable military-political star thrown up by the war in Europe. There is, naturally, a great deal on Marshall's generalship, the intrigues surrounding the Supreme Commander position, and the pronounced Marshall philosophy of separation of political and military authority. This volume continues the detailed, stately march through that dedicated, supersubstantial call to national service which here ends with the German surrender in May of 1945 but is to be continued on the diplomatic shoals.