#2-183
To General Malin Craig
May 29, 1940 [Washington, D.C.]
Dear Craig:
I am really sorry I missed you yesterday, but I was in about ten places at once throughout the day and in each of them handling pretty important matters. Today will be even worse, beginning with the Appropriation Committee, going on to see Mr. Morgenthau and then to the President regarding the 50,000 planes. As a rule I have to educate myself on each subject while riding back and forth. My difficulty now is that I have only about an hour and a half at my desk, and have to treat things with such rapidity that I have little chance to digest them. However, in a week or two I hope to have all these trickles, streams, and rivers of energy flowing into well organized channels with a definite basis of appropriation or law for us to handle things.
I was delighted to see that they had you on the Knox Board. I think if it had not been for you, McCoy and Palmer, one way or another, we would have been sunk by enthusiasms.
Bryden took over completely yesterday afternoon and has been buried ever since.1
Hastily yours,
Document Copy Text Source: George C. Marshall Papers, Pentagon Office Collection, Selected Materials, George C. Marshall Research Library, Lexington, Virginia.
Document Format: Typed letter.
1. On June 1, 1940, Brigadier General William Bryden (U.S.M.A., 1904) was officially to replace Brigadier General Lorenzo D. Gasser, who was retiring at the end of May, as deputy chief of staff. During the first half of General Craig’s term as army chief of staff, Bryden served in the Mobilization Branch of G-3 (August 1935 to September 1937). He then commanded the Sixteenth Infantry (September 1937 to May 1938) and the Thirteenth Field Artillery (May 1938 to May 1940).
Recommended Citation: The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, ed. Larry I. Bland, Sharon Ritenour Stevens, and Clarence E. Wunderlin, Jr. (Lexington, Va.: The George C. Marshall Foundation, 1981– ). Electronic version based on The Papers of George Catlett Marshall, vol. 2, “We Cannot Delay,” July 1, 1939-December 6, 1941 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 227–228.