George Marshall

George Marshall married Elizabeth Carter Coles in 1902. She died in 1927.

His second marriage was to Katherine Boyce Tupper in 1930. She was the widow of Baltimore lawyer Clifton Stevenson Brown and the mother of three children.

He died at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C. on 16 October 1959. He was 78.

George Catlett Marshall, Jr. was born on 31 December 1880, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania into a middle-class family as one of the three children of George Catlett Marshall, Sr. and Laura Emily. His father owned a prosperous coal business in Pennsylvania.

He decided early on that he wanted a career in the army and enrolled at the Virginia Military Institute in 1897, graduating in 1901 as senior first captain of the Corps of Cadets.

He served in several posts in the Philippines and the United States over the next few years and went on to graduate with honors from the Infantry-Cavalry School at Fort Leavenworth, in 1907, and from the Army Staff College, in 1908.

During the World War I, he was assigned important roles as a planner of both training and operations. As the director of training and planning for the 1st Division in France, he planned the first American attack and victory of the war at Cantigny in May 1918. He was also instrumental in the planning and coordination of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive the same year.

Once the World War I ended, he was made an aide-de-camp to General John J. Pershing, in 1919. Marshall focused on training and teaching modern, mechanized warfare to the Army in this position.

He was a key planner and writer in the War Department and taught at the Army War College. He was appointed assistant commandant of Fort Benning in 1927 and from June 1932 to June 1933 he was the Commanding Officer at Fort Screven, Savannah Beach, Georgia.

A much respected military officer by now, he was promoted to brigadier general in October 1936. Marshall was assigned to the War Plans Division in Washington D.C. in 1938 and subsequently reassigned as Deputy Chief of Staff.

George Marshall was instrumental in designing and implementing the European Recovery Program in the years following the World War II. The program which became known as the Marshall Plan aimed at implementing major economic reforms in European countries for rebuilding the economy after the devastation caused by the war. The plan was implemented in 1948, and the next four years saw the fastest period of growth in European history.