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Later, cool and unhurried General Marshall explained publicly what was on his mind. Obviously counting on conscription, which has still to be voted into law, he planned to have 16 divisions fully organized by Jan. i, 1941: nine regular Army infantry, four National Guard infantry, one cavalry, two armored divisions. Not till much later—probably around April 1942—could the Army have its full P. M. P. force manned and equipped, its Air Corps program reasonably well under way.
What the U. S. actually needs for adequate defense of the hemisphere, said he, is a trained, fully equipped army of 2,000,000. For such a job, even 1,200,000 men—45 infantry divisions, plus eight armored and six cavalry divisions—is not enough. General Marshall doesn't mind saying so out loud, although he deprecates democracy's habit of blabbing its military secrets in peacetime. Says he: "We're playing poker with everyone looking at our hand."
As Chief of Staff, General Marshall is the man who will decide what the Army will do and how it will do it. Across his ornately carved desk (bought in Chicago and taken to Washington by bulletheaded Phil Sheridan after the Civil War) flow all the Army's plans, from building flying fields to modernizing tactics and weapons.
The General Staff. Long-legged George Marshall knows he is running no one-man show. The Army doctrine of the late great Chief of Staff, J. Franklin Bell, that no man, unaided, can run a division, much less an army, long ago became as explicit as Army instructors could make it.
In the past 35 years, General Bell's staff doctrines have had plenty of practical proof, mostly by the Germans, and most recently in the perfectly coordinated Nazi assaults on Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France. Nerve-centre of the U. S. Army is its General Staff, organized in its present form in 1903 (along plans already in use in the German Army) and first war-tried in 1917. The Chief of Staff is top ranker of the Army in peacetime but likely to be topped in war (as he was in 1917-18) by the field commander of the armies. Function of the Chief of Staff: under the Secretary of War to plan, develop and execute the Army's program for national defense.
Besides the Chief, the General Staff consists of six Brigadier Generals. They are the Deputy Chief, the head of the War Plans Division, the four "Gs": Personnel (G-1), Military Intelligence (G-2), Operations & Training (G3) and Supply (G-4). Unlike their boss, V. M. I.-man Marshall, all of today's General Staff's Division Chiefs are West Pointers. All are field soldiers, two have had diplomatic service in Europe or Asia, all are young as U. S. general staffs go (the youngest 55, the eldest 60). Caught between wars, soldiers of an army which was largely paper, none of them ever commanded in the field as large an outfit as a division.
As cylinders, ignition system, transmission, chassis go to make up an automobile, each of these men represents a separate part and function of the U. S. military machine. As an ABC for civilians, the parts are: