Patton

Soon after his birth, Patton developed the croup. Fearing that he would die unchristened, his nurse, a devout Irish Catholic woman named Mary Scally, secretly baptized him by sprinkling water on his brow when she was alone with the child.¹^, ² He was eventually re-baptized into his family’s Episcopal church. The Pattons had been Episcopalians from the time of George’s great-great-grandfather, Robert Patton, who served as a vestryman of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

As a child, Georgie Patton would get on his knees beside his mother’s chair to recite his nightly prayers before going to bed. On the wall behind her hung two portraits. One was a somber man with white hair and beard. The other figure was also bearded but younger and with brown hair. Young Patton assumed they were God and Jesus. With upturned eyes, he would look at these faces while he prayed. On his seventh birthday, Patton announced that instead of becoming a fireman, he would become a soldier when he grew up. Eventually he learned that the two figures he had prayed before were not God and Jesus but Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.³ Years later, Patton would half-jokingly speculate that the notion of a military career had been inspired by his nightly prayers before these two portraits.

Patton’s aunt Annie Wilson read to him three to four hours a day from the Bible. She told the boy that the Old Testament was a “manual of survival” which told “the folklore and history of a tough and single-minded race who had survived every kind of persecution from gods and men.” When she read from the New Testament and discussed it with Georgie, she portrayed Jesus as a hero in the context of Roman history. She also read to him from John Bunyan’s Christian allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress. As she sat beside him at church each Sunday, Annie, known as Aunt Nannie, recited aloud from the Book of Common Prayer along with the preacher.⁴

Aunt Nannie had been in love with Patton’s father. She was prettier than her sister, Ruth, and thought to be more intelligent, and when George S. Patton II chose to marry her sister, Nannie was devastated. As the newlyweds boarded a train for their honeymoon in New Orleans, Nannie arrived unexpectedly at the station, luggage in hand. She was somehow persuaded that a chaperone was unnecessary. According to family lore, the diary that Nannie had kept faithfully until that night was left blank and never resumed.⁵

In her memoirs many years later, Ruth Ellen Patton reflected on Aunt Nannie’s role in the household:

[I]n the 1870s, both the Wilson girls... fell in love with... young George Patton . . . [who] chose Ruth Wilson. . . . When the Pattons finally built their own home in 1900, Aunt Nannie . . . moved right in with them. So, all her life she lived in the house with the only man she had ever loved and she lived vicariously in his son, Georgie.⁶

Growing up, Patton dreaded with great anxiety that he would “get the Call”—an irresistible divine summons to the ministry. Every night he would dutifully pray to Jesus not to call him because he wanted to be a soldier .⁷ As he grew older, his ambition grew to be not just a soldier but a great soldier, and he was willing to subjugate even his gentle nature to achieve it. In his journal he wrote, “Remember you have placed all on war. . . . Therefore you must never fail.... If you do not die a soldier and having had a chance to be one I pray to God to dam [sic] you George Patton. . . . Never Never Never stop being ambitious. You have but one life. Live it to the full of glory and be willing to pay.” His ambition was consistent with one of his favorite biblical verses, Proverbs 23:7: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.”⁸

Patton had an overwhelming sense that he had a destiny to fulfill. While at West Point he wrote to his father, “I know that my ambition is selfish and cold yet it is not a selfishness [sic] for instead of sparing me, it makes me exert my self.... Of course I may be a dreamer but I have a firm conviction I am not and in any case I will do my best to attain what I consider—wrongly perhaps—my destiny.”⁹

That destiny, he believed, was guided by a higher power. In another letter to his father from West Point, Patton wrote:

Now don’t think that I don’t like the army for... it is the only place I would be worth a darn. But either I must get into another army and fight or else wait until the trampled worm [the United States] turns into an avenging dragon.... This sounds funny from a person who has never yet done anything but God willing I can and, given the chance, I will carve my name on something bigger than a section room bench.¹⁰

Patton recognized that in order to fulfill his destiny he needed the intervention of God to provide a war in which he could exercise his talents. In a letter to Beatrice, his future wife, he wrote from West Point:

Now this is a rash thing to say and if twenty years from now with no war and no promotions someone should say, “I thought you were going to teach the world?” why it would hurt. But if there were no dreamers I honestly think there would be little advance and even dreams may, no must, come true if a man gives his life for what he believes. Of course it is hard for anyone particularly for me who has never done much to give reasons why he believes in myself but foolish as it seems I do believe in myself. . . . I know that if there is a war “which God grant” I will make a name or at worse an end.¹¹

In 1927, when his aging father was near death, Patton recalled how his father had fueled his belief that fate guided his son’s footsteps:

He had always expressed to me his belief that the very fortunate career I had had in the army was Fate and that I was being specially prepared for some special work. He and Mr. Gaffey felt that the end of our Civilization was at hand and that war was sure. When I used to bemoan the fact that wars were getting scarce and that all the time I had spent getting ready would be wasted for lack of opportunity he used to assure me with the greatest confidence that I would yet be in the greatest war in history. He was most convincing and I believed him, particularly as I have always felt the same thing concerning myself. . . .¹²

“A man must know his destiny,” Patton believed. “If he does not recognize it, then he is lost. By this I mean, once, twice, or at the very most, three times, fate will reach out and tap a man on the shoulder. If he has the imagination, he will turn around and fate will point out to him what fork in the road he should take, if he has the guts, he will take it.”¹³

Beatrice too believed that her husband was destined for some great achievement. On December 2, 1942, she wrote:

I feel, as you do, that all your life has pointed to this and that you still have many big things ahead, and that God is with you and guiding your every move. I can’t even think about your personal ambition or promotion any more than you can, for I feel sure that you are marked by destiny and that I am willing to wait on God for that.¹⁴

Patton once described himself as “a passenger floating on a river of destiny.”¹⁵ Although events during World War II occasionally tested his belief in his divinely ordained destiny, he always returned to it. After a treacherous flight in North Africa in which his aircraft came perilously close to hitting a mountain, Patton said he was frightened “until I thought of my destiny. That calmed me.”¹⁶ Before the invasion of Sicily, when he was forced into a role subordinate to the British commander General Bernard L. Montgomery, Patton retained his self-confidence, writing, “I have greater ability than these other people and it comes from, for lack of a better word, what we must call greatness of soul based on a belief—an unshakable belief—in my destiny.” ¹⁷

Although he was a devout Christian throughout his life, Patton was also very interested in other religions. During the Punitive Expedition in Mexico, Patton first met Mormons. Some Mexican bandits were harassing American Mormons who had built farms across the border, and the U.S. troops were escorting those who wished to leave. Patton borrowed a copy of the Book of Mormon from one of the faithful and read it with great interest. One of the families he protected was that of Bishop Crow. Patton said that the “old procreator” had four wives at least, because every time he went to escort a Mrs. Crow across the border, it was a different lady. ¹⁸

Decades later, while stationed in Hawaii, the Pattons were invited to a party thrown by the Mormons on the windward side of Oahu to celebrate the visit of some church elders from Salt Lake City. Mrs. Patton was seated near the head of the table near a taciturn and sour-looking elder whom she could not engage in small talk. Finally she noted the name on his place card and said hopefully, “Are you by any chance related to that nice Bishop Crow and his lovely wives that Colonel Patton escorted out of Mexican territory in 1914 when we were having trouble with Pancho Villa?” The surprised elder turned to her and said, “He was my father, madam, but Bishop Crow is now one of the Twelve Apostles.” When her husband tried to explain that the “Twelve Apostles” referred to the governing body of the Mormon Church, Mrs. Patton waved him away, not wanting to spoil the thrill that she had evidently entertained about sitting next to the son of one of Christ’s disciples.¹⁹