On the Background of the Jeep and its impact on WWII
George Marshall: An American for All Seasons
From: 2005 Heroes of History Lecture
By Josiah Bunting III
Boris Pasternak, the great Russian writer, wrote that "Man is born to live, not to prepare for life." George Marshall's
life, in full retrospective, appears to have been a life in preparation for the mighty tasks that it might have to undertake later.
He was born at the right time, 1880, for what was to be asked of him. The array of his assignments, the character of each of
them and their range, made for a great preparation and a lifetime's education. And Marshall, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Lincoln, "grew
with each new challenge, however large." Like his own great hero, Benjamin Franklin, he made himself a continuous student with a lifelong
instinct for what was new: new ideas, new men and women, new and useful things.
This is the general who interrupted a meeting in 1942 to hear a two-minute presentation in the hallway by a senior aide, Walter
Bedell Smith. Smith said, "This new vehicle is simple, mobile, and hardy and I think we ought to go ahead and contract for it." Marshall
looked at him and said simply, "Go ahead and do it." Six hundred and forty thousand of these new vehicles were manufactured during the
war. It was the Jeep. No study. No committee. No memoranda. Just do it.
Read the rest of this lecture at
http://www.wethepeople.gov/heroes/buntinglecture.html
George Rogers Clark - Privately funded an army, and recruited the native Indian to help defeat the British attempt to start a ‘western front’ along the Wabash River on what is now the Illinois-Indiana border during the Revolutionary War.
General Mitchell - Now the patriarch of the Air Force, was originally court-martialed for disobeying orders and successfully sinking a ship by bombing from an airplane. He used a larger bomb and flew lower than the Admirals requested for the demonstration.
Andrew Higgins - Louisiana boat designer, despite the military’s lack of interest in his shallow draft design, bought up (with private money) much of the plywood production out of Malaysia before the Japanese occupation, so that we would have landing craft (the Higgins boat) for D-Day and all the ‘Island-Hopping’ landings in the Pacific.
Brig. General Olds - Three time WWII Ace (once again in Vietnam), retrained ‘dogfighter’ tactics to Air Force in the 1960’s after the establishment thought dog-fighting was a thing of the past. So strong was the opinion that Phantom jet was designed without machineguns or cannon. In one of his first missions, by deceiving the North into thinking his Phantoms were the slower ’Thud’ fighter-bombers, his fighter wing shot down nearly half of the North Vietnams fleet of Mig-21s.
Flying Tigers - A group of fighter pilots who volunteered to fight the Japanese in China before Pearl Harbor.
Captain Doolittle - Volunteered to fly his bombers off the deck off aircraft carriers, despite the fact neither were designed for it, or even tested, in the first retaliatory strike on Japanese soil after Pearl Harbor.
Teddy Roosevelt - His ‘Rough Riders’ made one of the first uses of the Gatlin Gun, emboldening his troops and scattering the enemy in fear, and Observation balloon (although a bust, pardon the pun) in actual combat at San Juan Hill.
