Patton: A Genius for War

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Who Was George S. Patton?

Ask virtually any American born after World War II what immediatelycomes to mind when the name "Patton" is mentioned, and chances are they will conjure an image of a large, empty stage dominated by an enormous, oversize American flag. A tall, uniformed figure suddenly strides to its center, a large blue sash trimmed in yellow draped across his chest, an array of medals on his left breast pocket, two ivory-handled pistols strapped to his waist, and a highly polished helmet on his head on which are set the four silver stars of a full general of the U.S. Army. Standing ramrod straight, the general begins to address an unseen audience of soldiers in blunt, often colorful language. On what is clearly the eve of a battle, he explains what he expects of them and how they will survive if they follow his advice. He concludes with the admonition: "The object of war is not to die for your country. It is to make the other poor dumb bastard die for his."

As the scene fades, we begin to lose sight of the fact that the man who has just spoken is an actor named George C. Scott in his most famous role, which in 1970 earned him the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. in the film Patton. We have come to think of him as Patton himself. As one writer has accurately observed, the film "turned Patton the legend finally into Patton the folk hero. In the shape of Scott, with his dark scowling face and rasping voice, Patton had now become the essence of America's World War II. Just like the cowboy hero of the Old West, he had stepped into American mythology . . . the symbol of an older, simplistic America,untouched by social change, political doubts, [and] the uncertainties of the seventies and eighties."

Although the architects of this powerful film strove diligently to reveal Patton as he really was, there were the inevitable distortions. Nor was it possible fully to portray his complex character in a film devoted solely to his World War II exploits. Moreover, Patton was based on the bestsellingmemoir of another famous general, Omar N. Bradley, who served as thefilm's chief military adviser. It was ironical that Bradley received aconsiderable sum of money, including a percentage of the gross receipts, for his professional consultation on a film about a comrade-in-arms he despised and never understood.

What inevitably emerges in the film is the portrayal of a brash,swashbuckling, controversial warrior. Yet, as one critic noted, if the film glorified anyone, it was Omar Bradley, not Patton. Thus, for nearly half of the fifty years since his death in 1945, the primary sources of our collective knowledge of Patton are, largely, a popular film and the opinions of a general who detested him but who owed him a giant debt for his support during the final months of World War II. Add to this the fact that the image the real Patton presented to the world was a many-layered facade, and there exists ample justification for the question, Who was George S. Patton?

Although our knowledge of him is incomplete and shrouded in myth, it is indisputable that, for a variety of reasons, Gen. George S. Patton Jr. has earned a place in the pantheon of authentic American heroes. Throughoutour relatively brief history as a nation, Americans have not only come to admire (and sometimes even venerate) men and women who have attained national prominence, but we have developed our own special breed of hero, modeled on the warriors who founded and tamed this nation. The Vietnam War has spawned a present-day revulsion for war as an instrument of national policy. Nevertheless, most Americans remaincaptivated by wars and the men who fight them. Our warrior-heroes range across the spectrum of American history: George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and John J. Pershing are among those who come immediately to mind. To this distinguished list can be added the name of George S. Patton.

Yet how little we really know of this man. Was he the tough, humorless, bloodthirsty warrior depicted by George C. Scott, or was he a romantic who would have been far more at home in an earlier age? The life ofPatton is not only that of a uniquely American warrior but, paradoxically,that of a soldier who was very much out of his element in the twentieth century.

Patton was an ancestor worshiper, as we shall see, whose veneration of his forefathers verged on obsession. He saw himself as the modern embodiment of his heroic Confederate antecedents, and because of the enormously successful facade he created, the tender, romantic side of Patton was virtually unknown in his lifetime outside his circle of friends and admirers. The real Patton was an emotional and often humble man who could weep one moment, and seconds later put on his public face andcurse in the most scat-ological of terms.

Virtually unknown, too, was Patton's deeply religious nature. He prayedoften and almost always in private. "On one occasion in Palermo, Sicily,feeling in dire need to re-establish his lines of communication with theAlmighty, he went into the great Cathedral. There he knelt in prayer for asolid hour with hardly a motion of his body. George Patton was convincedthat God was on his side," and that there was indeed a god of Battles who would protect him.5 On another occasion his wife, Beatrice, found him kneeling in prayer before a polo match. "Afterward she asked what he'd been praying for. 'For help in the polo game,' he replied. 'Were you praying for a win?' she inquired. 'Hell no,' he said, 'I was praying to do my best.'"

Patton's detractors, and there are many (among them historian PaulFussell, who has characterized him as one of World War II's "masters of chickenshit" for his strict dress code in the Third Army), believe he was little more than a headline grabber, out to enhance his own reputation by expending the lives of his men in an obsessive quest for personal glory.Others simply loathed him for his harsh methods, his unbending personality,his arrogance, his profanity, and the sheer wrath of his notoriously volatiletemper.

With one major exception near the end of World War II, this perception is part of the myth of Patton as a passionate believer in providence and a man whose ambition was fueled by the convictions that "It is my destiny tolead the biggest army ever assembled under one flag," and "God isn't going to let me be killed before I do."The reality is that Patton accepted the inevitability of death in combat but strove mightily to save the lives of hismen. While it is true that Patton loved war, it was only in the pragmaticsense that he considered conflict an inevitable part of man's nature. He detested the death and devastation it wrought. However, if there werewars to be fought, he believed they ought to be conducted by the bestqualified men, such as himself.

What made Patton so remarkable was his willingness to take risks and to make crucial life-and-death decisions no one else would dare. For all his military accomplishments, George C. Scott was right when he asserted thatwhat made Patton unique was his individualism, his understanding that"You live and you die alone—he knew it and he lived it. . . . But foremost about Patton, I believe this man was an individual in the deepest sense of the word."

Patton was an authentic and flamboyant military genius whose entire life was spent in preparation for a fleeting opportunity to become one of the great captains of history. No soldier in the annals of the U.S. Army ever worked more diligently to prepare himself for high command than did Patton. However, it was not only his astonishing breadth of professional reading and writing that separated Patton from his peers, but that intangible, instinctive sense of what must be done in the heat and chaos of battle: in short, that special genius for war that has been granted to only a select few, such as Robert E. Lee and German Field Marshal ErwinRommel. Who but Patton would have tramped the back roads ofNormandy in 1913 with a Michelin map to study the terrain because hebelieved he would someday fight a major battle there?

Patton's great success on the battlefield did not come about by chance but rather from a lifetime of study and preparation. He was an authenticintellectual whose study of war, history, and the profession of arms was extraordinary. His memory was prodigious, as was his intellect. Patton not only believed in the Scriptures but could quote them at length. For hours on end, he could recite not only verses from the Bible, but from his great love, poetry. His favorites were Homer's Iliad and Kipling's verse. Heread voraciously and not only learned from what he read but managed toremember virtually all of it. As a young child, his nephew recalls sitting engrossed while Patton recited from memory lines from such diversesources as Shakespeare, the Bible, Macaulay, and Kipling'sBarrack-Room Ballads.