• DOI:10.2307/3093261
• Corpus ID: 163803120

1947-48: When Marshall Kept the U.S. Out of War in China

@article{May2002194748WM,
  title={1947-48: When Marshall Kept the U.S. Out of War in China},
  author={Ernest R. May},
  journal={The Journal of Military History},
  year={2002},
  volume={66},
  pages={1001}
}

• Ernest R. May
• Published 1 October 2002
• History
• The Journal of Military History

\NYONE who studies history has to confront questions about the relaj t \ . tionship between individual choices and anonymous forces beyond the control of any individual. No one can contend that history is simply a product of individual choices. Even Thomas Carlyle, author of the famous statement, "history is the biography of great men," wrote also, in his history of the French Revolution, "wauld-have-beens are mostly a vanity; and the World's History could never in the least be what it would, or might, or should, by any manner of potentiality, but simply and altogether what it is."' Even Karl Marx and his disciples conceded that actions by individuals, or at least accidents to individuals, could divert in some degree the near term outcomes dictated by dialeetical materialism. Trotsky asserted in retrospect that the post-Lenin Soviet Union would probably have been guided by him rather than Stalin had he not had the misfortune to fall ill of fever as a result of a duck shooting expedition.^ And there are many positions in between these two extremes.