“No one can live under the awful responsibility that I have
without Divine help.”

On August 23, 1923, during a summer vacation at his in-laws’ beachfront estate in Massachusetts, Patton and his wife went sailing in a two-person runabout. They heard cries for help from three small boys whose boat had overturned. They raced over to the boys who were in the water waving their arms. When they hauled the boys into the boat, Patton’s tiny sailboat hung dangerously low in the water. His wife urged him to drop the sail and row home, thinking it would be safer than risking capsizing by sailing. Patton felt the boys would catch pneumonia if they did not get to shore quickly. “We must sail!” Patton declared, “I’ve done all I can, and if there is anyone in this boat worth saving, the Lord will have to help us now.” The boat reached the shore safely.¹

Patton received the Life Saving Medal of Honor from the Treasury Department for rescuing the boys. One of his best friends, Walter Dillingham, wrote to congratulate Patton: “I am prepared to decorate the whole family for bravery on general principles, but I had always thought of your special forte as being one of killing rather than saving lives. It must be a fine sensation to know that one is a well rounded hero.”²

The incident captures Patton’s lifelong belief that in any moment of danger, whether it be a violent engagement with the enemy on a battlefield or a moment of personal danger in a sailboat, the Lord would protect him. In countless journal entries, personal letters, and conversations, he unfailingly spoke of placing his destiny in the hands of God.

The American and British invasion of French North Africa, known as Operation Torch, began on November 8, 1942. The Allies’ plan was to invade northwest Africa—Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—and advance eastward to attack German forces from behind. The invasion was split into three different task forces—Western, Center, and Eastern. Patton headed the Western Task Force, targeting Casablanca. Before the Operation Torch landings in North Africa in 1942, Patton wrote the following in his diary:

In forty hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur of the moment will have to make most momentous decisions, but I believe that one’s spirit enlarges with responsibility and that, with God’s help, I shall make them and make them right. It seems that my whole life has been pointed to this moment. When this job is done, I presume I will be pointed to the next step in the ladder of destiny. If I do my duty, the rest will take care of itself.

The invasion was a success, and Patton was soon promoted to major general.

Giving thanks to God was also a ritual Patton faithfully observed. After the successful landing of his task force in Morocco in November 1942, Patton wrote that he was forced to believe that his “proverbial luck or more probably the direct intervention of the Lord was responsible.” He then addressed a letter to all of his commanding officers:

It is my firm conviction that the great success attending the hazardous operations carried out on sea and on land by the Western Task Force could only have been possible through the intervention of Divine Providence manifested in many ways. Therefore, I should be pleased if, in so far as circumstances and conditions permit, our grateful thanks be expressed today in appropriate religious services.³

In his diary entry for November 22, 1942, Patton noted that he went to church. “Keyes⁴ and I went to mass this morning. I at least had reason to take a little time off to thank God. There were quite a lot of widows, made by us, in the church. They cried a good deal but did not glare at us.”

Patton turned to God for help in dealing not only with the enemy but also with his own senior commanders and allies. Patton’s aggressive style of warfare sometimes produced friction with his superiors, who often insisted on a slower, more cautious approach. He also fought over allocations of supplies between competing army groups. Before meetings to discuss strategy, Patton would enlist God’s support for his approach. As he wrote to Beatrice on August 21, 1944,

We jumped seventy miles to day and took Sens, Montereau, and Melun so fast the bridges were not blown. If I can keep on the way I want to go I will be quite a fellow....

We are going so fast that I am quite safe. My only worries are my relations and not my enemies.

Well I will stop and read the Bible so as to be ready to have celestial help in my argument tomorrow to keep moving.⁵

On February 4, 1945, he wrote to her, “You may hear that I am on the defensive but it was not the enemy who put me there. I don’t see much future for me in this war. There are too many ‘safety first’ people running it. However, I have felt this way before and something has always turned up. I will go to church and see what can be done. . . .”

Sometimes his superiors’ resistance to his aggressive strategy and the competition from his British allies for supplies seemed to equal what he had to contend with from the enemy. He confided to Beatrice in September 1944, “If I only had the Germans to fight, it would be a cinch.... God deliver us from our friends. We can handle the enemy.”⁶

Patton had faith in the comforting power of Scripture. On D-Day, while he waited impatiently for his opportunity to join the action, he wrote to Beatrice,

Ike broadcast to occupied Europe and did it well.

None of the troops of this army are in yet and in fact I doubt if the enemy knows of its existence. We will try to give him quite a surprise....

I can’t tell when I will go in.... However I have had my bag packed for some time just in case.

It is Hell to be on the side lines and see all the glory eluding me, but I guess there will be enough for all....

I guess I will read the Bible.⁷

In his own provocative way, Patton once encouraged his friend General Johnny Lucas to read the Bible. Before the landings at Anzio, Italy, in January 1944, which Lucas led, Patton advised him, “John, there is no one in this Army I hate to see killed as much as you, but you can’t get out of this alive. Of course, you might only be wounded. No one ever blames a wounded general for anything.” Patton instructed the worried Lucas to “read the Bible when the going gets tough.” Then Patton took one of his aides aside and said, apparently seriously, “Look here, if things get too bad, shoot the old man in the back end, but don’t you dare kill the old bastard.” After Lucas found out about the remark, he admitted being afraid to turn his back on Patton from D-Day on.⁸

It was impossible, Patton believed, to bear the burden of command and the incomparable stresses of war without divine guidance:

Went to church.... [W]e had a new preacher, at my insistence, who was good. He preached on the willingness to accept responsibility, even to your own hurt. That ability is what we need and what Ike lacks. But I do feel that I don’t. I pray daily to do my duty, retain my self-confidence, and accomplish my destiny. No one can live under the awful responsibility that I have without Divine help. Frequently I feel that I don’t rate it.⁹

Though Patton assured his troops that biblical teachings were fully consistent with their mission to kill the enemy, he privately conceded the difficulty of reconciling the essential message of Christianity with the terrible exigencies of warfare. Recalling the first mass he attended in Europe after the D-Day landings, Patton wrote in his diary, “As we knelt in the mud in the slight drizzle, we could distinctly hear the roar of the guns, and the whole sky was filled with airplanes on their missions of destruction... quite at variance with the teachings of the religion we were practicing.” The French countryside was dotted with crossroad crucifixes, which the Army Signal Corps found useful as makeshift telephone poles. “While the crosses were in no way injured,” Patton recorded, “I could not help thinking of the incongruity of the lethal messages passing over the wires.”

D’Este has described Patton’s most dreadful challenge:

how to motivate decent young men raised on the precepts of the Bible, the sanctity of human life, and the immorality of killing to become an efficient cog in a gigantic killing machine such as an armored division. While it was enough to make their mothers cringe, the only method whereby a Patton . . . could succeed on a battlefield was to trespass on the inherent decency of Americans by training and motivating their men to survive by killing others whose task was to kill them. Patton did it as well or better than virtually anyone else.

Patton sought to overcome his troops’ reluctance to kill with a dramatic motivational speech that he had composed himself and would deliver from memory. The speech became his trademark. It comprised elements of Scripture, chivalry, poetry, and the principles of war. “The only good enemy is a dead enemy,” he assured his men. “Misses do not kill, but a bullet in the heart or a bayonet in the guts does.... Battle is not a terrifying ordeal to be endured. It is a magnificent experience wherein all the elements that have made man superior to the beasts are present: courage, self-sacrifice, loyalty, help to others, devotion to duty.”

“Patton,” the editor of his personal papers writes, “never lost sight of his ultimate goal, to prepare his men for combat. He concentrated on teaching his men to kill efficiently, instinctively. He presented a speaker with these words: ‘Men, I want to introduce to you the noblest work of God—a killer!’”¹⁰

CHAPLAINS

Patton thought chaplains were essential to his army’s effectiveness in combat, and he pushed them as hard as any other soldiers under his command. “He wanted a chaplain to be above average in courage, leadership and example, particularly the example of his life,” the Third Army’s head chaplain, Monsignor James H. O’Neill, remembered. “And in time of battle, he wanted the chaplains up front, where the men were dying. And that’s where the Third Army chaplains went—up front. We lost more chaplains, proportionately, than any other group.” Patton’s insistence on discipline and standards of dress also applied to the chaplains and the services they conducted. All chaplains had to be neatly uniformed, the altars appropriately arranged and the services orderly. The men needed to be at their best when “talking with God.”¹¹

The greatest failing of a chaplain in Patton’s eyes was not tending to front-line troops who were wounded or dying. On a visit to the 47th Regiment, Patton cursed the chaplain for not being at the front with his troops. An eyewitness to the one-sided exchange observed, “When I say cussed, I mean he used every bit of invective in his expansive vocabulary.”¹²

In the speech that he used so effectively to motivate and inspire his troops, Patton paid his peculiar homage to the chaplains:

Every single man in the Army plays a vital part. Every little job is essential to the whole scheme. What if every truck driver suddenly decided that he didn’t like the whine of those shells and turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? He could say to himself, “They won’t miss me—just one guy in thousands.” What if every man said that? Where in the hell would we be now? No, thank God, Americans don’t say that. Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit is important to the vast scheme of things. The Ordnance is needed to supply the guns, the Quartermaster is needed to bring up the food and clothes for us—for where we are going there isn’t a hell of a lot to steal. Every last damn man in the mess hall, even the one who heats the water to keep us from getting diarrhea, has a job to do. Even the Chaplain is important, for if we get killed and he is not there to bury us, we would all go to hell.¹³

The chaplains’ efforts on behalf of his army were not merely incidental. Monsignor O’Neill recalled that the most impressive speech he ever witnessed was Patton’s announcement to his senior commanders of his plans for the counterattack during the Battle of the Bulge. Standing in front of a large map, Patton described the ninety-degree turn by which the Third Army would stop the German advance and rescue the 101st Airborne, which was encircled at Bastogne:

Gentlemen, this is a hell of a Christmas present, but it was handed to me and I pass it on to you. Tonight the Third Army turns and attacks north. I would have much preferred to have continued our attack to the east as planned, but I am a soldier. I fight where I am told, and I win where I fight! There is one encouraging factor in our favor, however. The bastards will be easier to kill coming at us above ground than they would be skulking in their holes. You have all done a grand job so far, but I expect more of you now.¹⁴

As Patton concluded, he suddenly looked to the back of the large room and cried out, “Padre, are you back there?”

“Yes, sir,” replied a surprised O’Neill.
“Now you get to work,” barked Patton.¹⁵

Courage was a virtue that Patton carefully cultivated as a cadet, as a young officer, and throughout his life. He constantly challenged himself and tested his own courage. His favorite description of courage came from his personal chaplain, the Episcopalian George R. Metcalf, who joined the Third Army in November 1944 as assistant head chaplain: “Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”¹⁶

Prior to World War II, Patton was posted to Fort Myer in Virginia, near Washington, D.C. A regular churchgoer, he summoned the chaplain and bluntly told him that his sermons were too long. “I don’t yield to any man in my reverence to the Lord, but God damn it, no sermon needs to take longer than ten minutes. I’m sure you can make your point in that time.” The following Sunday Patton sat in the front pew. When the chaplain began his sermon, Patton ostentatiously took out his watch. Not surprisingly, the chaplain concluded his sermon exactly ten minutes later.¹⁷

Patton made the same point a few years later, after the invasion of Sicily: “I had all the non-Catholic chaplains in the other day and gave them hell for having uninteresting services.... I told them that I was going to relieve any preacher who talked more than ten minutes on any subject. I will probably get slapped down by the Church union.”¹⁸

He would not tolerate defeatism in prayers or sermons. Preachers who committed that particular sin he called “pulpit killers.” Clergymen who insisted “thou shalt not kill” knew less about the Bible than he did, Patton argued. He insisted it was not a sin to kill if one served on the side of God, citing the Old Testament story of David slaying Goliath. Patton would swiftly communicate his displeasure at sermons that dwelt on death or families whose sons would never return home. Instead he demanded sermons and prayers which emphasized courage and victory.¹⁹

Confident in his own religious convictions and his knowledge of the Bible, Patton did not hesitate publicly to contradict a chaplain’s sermon, as this diary entry for Armistice Day, 1943, reveals:

We went to a Memorial Service at the cemetery at 1100. The Chaplain preached a sermon on sacrifice and the usual bull, so as I put the wreath at the foot of the flagpole, I said, “I consider it no sacrifice to die for my country. In my mind we came here to thank God that men like these have lived rather than to regret that they have died.”²⁰

Coy Eklund, an officer on Patton’s staff, confirms a story about Patton’s insistence on inspirational sermons:

It is no myth that one Sunday morning, after attending church services as he always did, he stalked into my office in the Army barracks in Nancy, France, where I was the senior duty officer.

“Eklund,” he demanded, “do you know Chaplain So-and-so?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Well get rid of the son of a bitch. He can’t preach!”

And we got rid of him.²¹

Patton himself tells a similar story in his diary entry for November 12, 1944: “Went to church where I heard the worst service yet. Sent for the Chief of Chaplains to have the offender removed and get a new chaplain. . . .”²²

He was not always unhappy with his chaplains’ preaching, however. The biographer Martin Blumenson describes an episode during the Third Army’s breakout across France: “Patton went to church with the black troops of a quartermaster truck battalion. The dignity of the service and the music by the choir were impressive. ‘The colored preacher preached the best sermon I have ever heard during this war.’”²³ Given the standards to which Patton held his chaplains, that was high praise indeed.

REINCARNATION

Although George Patton was a devout Christian, he also believed in reincarnation. From childhood he had a sense of prior lives that seemed to be more than a mere heightened sense of déjà vu and not just the product of his extensive study of history. His past lives extended across a number of historical periods, but there was one constant—he was always a soldier. Patton believed that after he died he would one day be reborn to lead men in battle.

One of Patton’s favorite poems was Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” with its theme of an everlasting soul:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

As a boy, Patton organized an “attack,” enlisting his young cousins to take an abandoned farm wagon, which they hauled to the top of a small hill. The boys crouched in the wagon, imagining their sticks were spears and arrows and clutching the lids of wooden wine barrels for shields. As the wagon careened down the hill, it encountered its unsuspecting “enemy,” a flock of turkeys. Several of the enemy were killed and mangled. When his mother asked him what in the world he was doing, George replied that he was copying the famous war wagons of John the Blind of Bohemia, who won many victories this way in the fifteenth century. How did the boy know this? “Oh, I was there,” he answered. The boy’s mysterious response did not spare him from punishment for the destruction of the turkeys. ²⁴

D’Este describes an occasion in World War I when Patton “remembered” an incident from a past life:

Patton was ordered to a secret destination in a part of France where he had never been.... [N]ear the top of a hill Patton leaned forward and asked his driver “if the camp wasn’t out of sight just over the hill and to the right. The driver replied, ‘No sir. . . but there is an old Roman camp over there to the right. . . .” As Patton was leaving the camp he asked an officer: “Your theater is over here straight ahead isn’t it?” The officer responded, “We have no theater here, but . . . there is an old Roman theater only about three hundred yards away.”²⁵

Patton’s grandson remembered conversations about reincarnation. “If discussing reincarnation (one of his favorite topics), he would offer up as evidence pertinent bits of the Bhagavad Gita²⁶ (‘For sure is the death of him that is born, and sure the birth of him that is dead’), and his old standby, Revelation 3:12: ‘Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out.’”²⁷

PATTON’S POETRY

“What manner of man was this who took equal pleasure and pride in writing a poem and in killing an enemy soldier with his pistol?” asks Martin Blumenson. Patton had a lifelong interest in literature, including poetry. Kipling appears to have been his favorite poet. Throughout his campaigns in World War II, Patton carried with him a Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Caesar’s Commentaries, and a complete set of Kipling’s poetry. He could quote poetry appropriate for a variety of occasions.

Patton wrote poetry for most of his adult life. The most common themes of his compositions are bawdiness, chivalry, religion, and warfare, and sometimes all of these themes appear in one work. His poetry is of mixed quality, and is best appreciated as an unvarnished expression of his philosophy of life and war, offering insights into his character and beliefs. “Through a Glass Darkly,” ²⁸ which he wrote in 1922, deals with the soul, reincarnation, and God.

Through the travail of the ages
Midst the pomp and toil of war
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.
In the form of many peoples
In all panoplies of time
Have I seen the luring vision
Of the victory Maid sublime.
I have battled for fresh mammoth
I have warred for pastures new
I have listened to the whispers
When the race track instinct grew.
I have known the call to battle
In each changeless changing shape
From the high-souled voice of conscience
To the beastly lust for rape.
I have sinned and I have suffered
Played the hero and the knave
Fought for the belly, shame or country
And for each have found a grave.
I cannot name my battles
For the visions are not clear
Yet I see the twisted faces
And feel the rending spear.
Perhaps I stabbed our Saviour
In his sacred helpless side.
Yet I’ve called His name in blessing
When in after times I died.
In the dimness of the shadows
Where we hairy heathens warred
I can taste in thought the life blood—
We used teeth before the sword.
While in later clearer vision
I can sense the coppery sweat
Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery
Where our phalanx Cyrus met.
Hear the rattle of the harness
Where the Persian darts bounced clear
See the chariots wheel in panic
From the Hoplite leveled spear.
See the mole grow monthly longer
Reaching for the walls of Tyre
Hear the crash of tons of granite
Smell the quenchless eastern fire.
Still more clearly as a Roman
Can I see the Legion close
As our third rank moved in forward
And the short sword found our foes.
Once again I feel the anguish
Of that blistering treeless plain
When the Parthian showered death bolts
And our discipline was in vain.
I remember all the suffering
Of those arrows in my neck
Yet I stabbed a grinning savage
As I died upon my back.
Once again I smell the heat sparks
When my Flemish plate gave way
And the lance ripped through my entrails
As on Crecy’s field I lay.
In the windless blinding stillness
Of the glittering tropic sea
I can see the bubbles rising
Where we set the captives free.
Midst the spume of half a tempest
I have heard the bulwarks go
When the crashing, point-blank round shot
Sent destruction to our foe.
I have fought with gun and cutlass
On the red and slippery deck
With all Hell aflame within me
And a rope around my neck.
And still later as a general
Have I galloped with Murat
While we laughed at death and numbers
Trusting in the Emperor’s star.
Till at last our star had faded
And we shouted to our doom
Where the sunken road of Ohain
Closed us in its quivering gloom.
So but now with Tanks aclatter
Have I waddled on the foe
Belching death at twenty paces
By the starshell’s ghastly glow.
So as through a glass and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names—but always me.
And when I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought
But as God rules o’er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.
So for ever in the future
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter
But to die again once more.

GOD OF OUR FATHERS

From Patton’s speech to the Second Armored Division, December 1941

I shall be delighted to lead you against any enemy, confident in the fact that your disciplined valor and high training will bring victory.

Put your heart and soul into being expert killers with your weapons. The only good enemy is a dead enemy. Misses do not kill, but a bullet in the heart or a bayonet in the guts do. Let every bullet find its billet—it is the body of your foes.... Battle is not a terrifying ordeal to be endured. It is a magnificent experience wherein all the elements that have made man superior to the beasts are present: courage, self-sacrifice, loyalty, help to others, devotion to duty.

Remember that these enemies, whom we shall have the honor to destroy, are good soldiers and stark fighters. To beat such men, you must not despise their ability, but you must be confident in your own superiority.... Remember too that your God is with you.

God of our Fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine ...²⁹
The earth is full of anger,
The seas are dark with wrath,
The Nations in their harness
Go up against our path:
Ere yet we loose the legions—
Ere yet we draw the blade,
Jehovah of the Thunders,
Lord God of Battles, aid!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
E’en now their vanguard gathers,
E’en now their vanguard gathers,
E’en now we face the fray—
As Thou didst help our fathers,
Help Thou our host today!
Fulfilled of signs and wonders,
In life, in death made clear—
Jehovah of the Thunders,
Lord God of Battles, hear!³⁰

The inexperienced American army’s first major encounter with the Germans resulted in a resounding defeat at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. On February 14, 1943, Rommel’s Tenth and Twenty-first Panzer Divisions of the Afrika Korps launched an attack against the U.S. position. The II Corps, under the command of Major General Lloyd Fredendall, was driven back twenty-one miles in nine days. One hundred ninety-two men were killed, 2,624 wounded, and 2,459 were captured or went missing. The encounter seemed to confirm Hitler’s contempt for the battle-worthiness of American soldiers.

Two weeks later, Patton took over command of II Corps from Fredendall and wrote this letter to the troops now under his command:

All of us have been in battle. But due to circumstances beyond the control of anyone, we have heretofore fought separately. In our next battle we shall, for the first time on this continent, have many thousands of Americans united in one command.... In union there is strength!

Our duty... is plain. We must utterly defeat the enemy. Fortunately for our fame as soldiers, our enemy is worthy of us. The German is a war-trained veteran—confident, brave, ruthless. We are brave. We are better-equipped, better fed, and in the place of his blood-gutted Woten, we have with us the God of our fathers known of old. The justice of our cause and not the greatness of our race makes us confident. But we are not ruthless, not vicious, not aggressive, therein lies our weakness.

Children of a free and sheltered people who have lived a generous life, we have not the pugnacious disposition of those oppressed beasts our enemies, who must fight or starve. Our bravery is too negative. We talk too much of sacrifice, of the glory of dying that freedom may live. Of course we are willing to die but that is not enough. We must be eager to kill, to inflict on the enemy—the hated enemy—wounds, death and destruction. If we die killing, well and good, but if we fight hard enough, viciously enough, we will kill and live. Live to return to our family and our girl as conquering heroes—men of Mars.

The reputation of our army, the future of our race, your own glory rests in your hands. I know you will be worthy.³¹

One month after the disaster at Kasserine Pass, Patton led the American army at the battle of Gafsa and El Guettar. The night before, March 15, he recorded his thoughts in his diary:

A horrible [day].... Everything there was time to do has been done. Not enough, but all there is time for. Now it is up to others [to fight] and I have not too much confidence in any of them. Wish I were triplets and could personally command two divisions and the corps. Bradley, Gaffey, and Lambert are a great comfort.

God help me and see to it that I do my duty, but I must have Your help. I am the best there is, but of myself I am not enough. “Give us the victory, Lord.”

Went to bed and slept well till 0600.

Patton’s army was victorious at El Guettar, and the Germans learned that the United States Army, led by its new commander, was no longer to be taken lightly.

After the invasion of Sicily, the Protestant Patton began worshipping at Catholic churches, as he explained in a letter to his father-in-law, Frederick Ayer: “Ever since I got to Sicily I have been going to Catholic Churches, largely for political reasons but also as a means of worshipping God because I think he is quite impartial as to the form in which he is approached.”³²

Many Americans had a hard time reconciling newspaper accounts of Patton’s colorful language and hell-raising style with the traditional image of a devout Christian. Patton wrote to his wife, “I had a letter... from a preacher.... He hoped I thought about Jesus and reminded me that I would die and go to hell if I did not. I wrote him that I was amazed at his temerity in writing me such a letter when I was a far better Christian than he was.”³³

He protested his Christian bona fides in a letter to Donald M. Taylor of Peoria, Illinois, dated May 30, 1943:

In spite of the efforts of the newspapers to paint me as a most profane and ungodly man, I am probably just as religious as you are. I am a Communicant of the Episcopal Church and attend services every Sunday.

I have received several letters from people making an earnest effort to save my soul, which, personally, I do not believe is in any grave danger.³⁴

Monsignor O’Neill, the Third Army’s head chaplain, recognized that profanity was Patton’s way of grabbing the attention of his troops. “When the hard-talking commander swore at men lingering on the beaches, he did so because he wanted to be immediately understood, and because he wanted to save men’s lives.” Patton’s aide Lieutenant Colonel Charles Codman insisted that, despite Patton’s flair for profanity, “I have never heard the General tell a really sacrilegious or dirty story or encourage the telling of one.”³⁵

Patton himself relished mixing the sacred and the profane. In August 1944, in the middle of the European campaign, a family friend in Pasadena wrote to him requesting that he be the godfather for their newborn son. Patton replied, “I should certainly consider it a great honor to be little Dick’s Godfather. I am sure that he could never find a more God-fearing, God-damning Godfather than myself.”³⁶

Harry H. Semmes, who served under Patton in both world wars, appreciated the uniqueness of Patton’s religious conviction:

From his adolescence, he had always read the Bible, particularly the life of Christ and the wars of the Old Testament. He knew by heart the order of morning prayer of the Episcopal Church. His thoughts, as demonstrated daily to those close to him, repeatedly indicated that his life was dominated by a feeling of dependence on God. . . . [H]e turned to God for comfort in adversity and to give thanks in success. General Patton was an unusual mixture of a profane and highly religious man.³⁷

Coy Eklund recalled Patton’s delight in shocking the pious:

On one occasion I escorted a group of U.S. Congressmen, about a dozen of them—including Clare Boothe Luce³⁸—visiting the war zone. I phoned him [Patton] and then escorted them to his house trailer where a cordial visit ensued. When Luce noticed a Bible on Patton’s camp table she asked excitedly, “General, do you read the Bible?”

“Every goddamned day,” he replied.³⁹

After Patton’s army landed in Sicily he attended a private mass in the chapel of a castle, which he described in a letter to his wife, dated August 2, 1943:

The middle part of the castle was built before 1000 and there is a chapel in it built by a Norman duke in 1040. The old Monsenieur [sic] who runs it told me that it was reserved for royalty but insisted on having a mass for me so I went all alone. He wanted to make it a Tedium [Te Deum] mass, but I insisted on a low one as not knowing the rules, I decided to kneel all the time. It was not too bad, as I had a royal red velvet priedieu. He is a fine old man and hates Mus[solini].

The walls are covered with frescoes and the part back of the altar is full of pictures made of inlaid stones. The head of Christ is the finest I have ever seen. All conquerors have made up to the priests of the conquered. . . .⁴⁰

Mindful of ecclesiastical courtesy, Patton had recently visited the archbishop of Palermo. He wrote about the meeting in his diary on July 26:

Called on the Cardinal. He lives in a convent as his palace was bombed. He is very small and quite intelligent. They took a lot of pictures of us in the bosom of the church. I offered to kiss his ring but Keyes⁴¹ said no, that only the faithful did that—he did it. We went into a chapel and prayed. The Mother Superior is a French woman and we talked a little.... I feel that he [the cardinal] is on our side and this fact will have a good effect on the inhabitants.⁴²

Patton invited Eisenhower’s chauffeur, Kay Summersby, and Ruth Briggs, the secretary of Eisenhower’s chief of staff, to visit him in Sicily. He gave them a personal tour that ended at a medieval church near Palermo. After delivering a brief lecture on medieval architecture, Summersby wrote, Patton “sank to his knees and prayed aloud for the success of his troops, for the health and happiness of his family and for a safe flight back for Ruth and me. He was completely unselfconscious.” ⁴³

A former NATO commander, General John R. Galvin, tells the story of a priest who in 1945 came upon Patton in a medieval church in the historic southern German town of Bad Wimpfen am Berg. According to the cleric, “Patton was doing a most unusual thing for a man of such a reputation. The warrior, with notebook and pencil in hand, was calmly sketching the stained-glass windows.”⁴⁴

Prayer was a serious undertaking for Patton, who distinguished between his prayers in sport and his prayers in war. When his young daughters saw him on his knees praying before a horse show in which he was competing, they asked if he was praying to win. Patton seemed offended by the question. “That would be insulting to God,” he responded. “I just pray to do my best.”⁴⁵ In war, however, he always asked for victory. Patton required his children to read a verse of the Bible each night and give him their interpretation of it at breakfast. After listening, he would share with them his own thoughts on the passages they had chosen.⁴⁶