became acting chief of staff. President Roosevelt favored Marshall because he was more supportive of New Deal liberalism than the conservative Douglas MacArthur, and because of the recommendations of Pershing, Craig, Louis A. Johnson, and most importantly Roosevelt's close advisor Harry Hopkins. Marshall was sworn in as chief of staff on September 1, 1939, just hours after the Wehrmacht launched its invasion of Poland. He held this post until retiring in November 1945. On May 11, 1940, the United States Congress cut $10 million from a $28 million appropriation budget for equipment to detect Imperial Japanese Armed Forces aircraft off the West Coast of the United States. Marshall met with Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. and they went to see Roosevelt; Marshall emphasized the supreme importance of getting the full amount and told Roosevelt "you have got to do something and you've got to do it today". Marshall's advocacy worked and he got "all he wanted and more". In 1941, Marshall became a Freemason, raised "at sight" by the Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the District of Columbia. ("At sight" is the procedure by which a Grand Master confers on a candidate all three Masonic degrees - Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master - at one time.) World War II As Chief of Staff, Marshall organized the largest military expansion in U.S. history, inheriting an outmoded, poorly equipped army of 189,000 men and, partly drawing from his experience teaching and developing techniques of modern warfare as an instructor at the Army War College, coordinated the large-scale expansion and modernization of the U.S. Army. Under his name were produced significant works of doctrine such as Field Manual 100-5. During his first week in office he advised Roosevelt to issue an executive order expanding the Regular Army to 227,000 troops and the National Guard to 235,000 reservists, although the President could not immediately act because the United States Congress still favored isolationism. Marshall's efforts to expand the United States Armed Forces began to have more success after the Axis powers conquered most of Western Europe in the Battle of France. Beginning in July 1940, he was greatly assisted in this effort by newly appointed Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who Marshall would gradually displace as the most significant leader of the U.S. military apparatus in a deviation from the United States' tradition of civilian control of the military. Though he