Marshall, General George C. (1880–1959)

Abstract

Abstract George Catlett Marshall, a professional army officer, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953 for his role in the reconstruction of western Europe after World War II. As US army chief of staff throughout that conflict, he had overseen the transformation of a small peacetime army to a force of eight million deployed around the world, while he shaped and executed Allied strategy as an influential member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Anglo‐American Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS). When Marshall stepped down after the war's end in 1945, the retirement he had planned was delayed by a series of complex assignments from President Harry S. Truman, who first dispatched him to mediate between Mao Zedong (Mao Tse‐tung) and Chiang Kai‐shek (Jiang Jieshi) in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1947), and then appointed him secretary of state (1947–1949), head of the American Red Cross (1949–1950), and secretary of defense (1950–1951).