Edward
But I do know that Marshall had a great influence on General Eisenhower, who
admired and respected Marshall. At any rate, after Marshall left the Pentagon,
Eisenhower pursued the idea of demobilizing troops rapidly after VJ Day.
Q ..
What was General Norstad's thinking about rapid demobilization?
Norstad did not think rapid demobilization was a wise policy. He believed that the
A
military had important political goals to achieve following our having won the war.
He believed that defeating the enemy was only part of what the military needed to
do. Norstad thought what we should do was to assess where we were and how to
position ourselves for the next round of political objectives. He believed you either
had to fill power vacuums or prevent a potential enemy from filling them.
Norstad had very much in mind, of course, what the Soviet leaders planned to do.
His ideas had a great deal of appeal for us in the Strategic Plans Section. We felt
that the military in general, and the Army in particular, had not really assessed the
proper role of military force and how it should be used in the postwar period. We
believed that it was essential that the U.S. win the war as quickly and efficiently
as possible. But we also believed we should posture ourselves to prevent a future
war or be in a position to win one if it occurred. We agreed with Norstad that our
mission was to try to anticipate what would happen in the world and to use our
military force to enhance U.S. political objectives. We believed that a great power
like the United States should play an active role in world affairs and not simply
leave things to chance. The United States had gotten into World War I and World
War II by not positioning itself properly, we did not use our military force to the
best advantage in peacetime. These ideas appealed to me particularly. It was the
main reason I wanted to study international relations.
There was another aspect to our postwar situation. We realized that the atom bomb
would change the influence our of warfare and influence our strategy. Having
atomic weapons would open up an entirely new relationship with other nations. In
the mid-1940s we had proposed the Baruch Plan under which we would put our
nuclear weapons under the control of the United Nations. But the plan was
torpedoed by the Soviet Union. Now, in the late 1940s we began to study how
best to integrate nuclear weapons into our foreign policy.
There was still another important development underway which had its genesis in
the War Department's Operations Division IOPD]. OPD sowed the first seeds of
the Marshall Plan which General Marshall, as Secretary of State, carried out.
Andy Goodpaster was brought back from Princeton and made an assistant to
Gruenther traveled throughout
General Gruenther [Alfred M., Class of
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