Alex’s Reviews > The Partnership: George Marshall, Henry Stimson, and the Extraordinary Collaboration That Won World War II > Status Update

This is wild: The Selective Service Act was set to expire in Sep 1941. If it lapsed, the small army the US had built (still only 1/5th the size of Germany’s) would disappear. Marshall thought this would be “fatal” for the US military. An Act to extend the Draft passed in Aug by a vote of 203 to 202. That single vote—one vote!—was the difference when Pearl Harbor was attacked just over three months later.

On the day WWII started with Germany’s invasion of Poland, the US only had the 19th largest army in the world—a mere 170,000 troops—just ahead of Bulgaria. Wow.

“In what was arguably the greatest personnel decision with the most far-reaching consequences ever made by a United States president…Franklin D. Roosevelt paired Stimson up with Marshall in the summer of 1940…these two giants of the twentieth century, with the exception of FDR himself, were more responsible than any other Americans in contributing to the defeat of Hitler and his armies.”