CHAPTER TWO

MASTER OF THE SWORD

The attack in a corner of northeastern France was stalled and Colonel George S. Patton of the American Expeditionary Forces went forward from his command post, on foot, in a heavy fog, to see what was the matter with his tanks. As he—along with an entourage of several officers and half a dozen enlisted men for runners (also hauling a detachment of carrier pigeons)—neared the front lines, the racket of the battle became terrific. Later, at least twenty-five German machine-gun nests that were firing on the American soldiers had been identified (and destroyed), their bullets constant little winks of flame that stabbed through the shrouding gloom, while larger flashes marked the explosions of enemy artillery shells that were now booming and ranging in.

Earlier, more than 2,800 large guns had lashed for three hours at the German front lines, which appeared to the American fighter ace Eddie Rickenbacker, tooling along above the fray in his French-built Spad, like a giant switchboard “which emanated thousands of electric flashes as invisible hands manipulated the plugs,” and a U.S. major general compared the racket to “the collision of a million express trains.”¹ For his part Patton, said to be the richest officer in the U.S. Army, later wrote home that the noise blended into a sound not unlike a lawn mower—the one without a muffler—that had once cut the grass back at his family’s estate in California.

The date was September 26, 1918, the first day of the Big Push by the U.S. Army in World War I, a clash that would go down in history as the Battle of the Argonne Forest—the bloodiest battle ever fought by U.S. armed forces before or since. By the time it was over, 26,277 American soldiers would be dead and 95,786 wounded.

Patton’s tanks were supporting the U.S. 28th and 35th Infantry Divisions, about 27,000-strong, both of them green National Guard outfits from Pennsylvania and Kansas–Missouri, respectively—including future president Harry S. Truman’s artillery battery with the 35th. Their role in the offensive was to move in a northerly direction through the Argonne Forest and the narrow valley of the Aire River past the towns of Varennes and Cheppy toward Charpentry, about ten miles distant—the first day’s objective.

The Meuse-Argonne Campaign, the planning of which was carried out by Colonel George C. Marshall, involved first secretly replacing hundreds of thousands of French troops at the front with American divisions in what was then considered a “quiet” part of the line (despite being in the Verdun sector where in 1916 a million soldiers had fallen in battle).

The day before the offensive was to open, Patton reconnoitered the area where his tanks were to go, dressed in the blue uniform and helmet of a French soldier so as not to give away the deception and wrote this to his wife that evening: “I will have two battalions and a group of French tanks in the show … We go up a stinking river valley which will not be at all a comfortable place in a few hours,” he said, referring to the upcoming artillery barrage.

AS PATTON AND HIS ENTOURAGE reached the scene of the foul-up, about three hundred yards from Germany’s infamous Hindenburg Line that ran through the village of Cheppy, the fog lifted and it became immediately apparent to Patton what had gone wrong. One of his lead tanks had become stuck on the precipice of a long, deep, wide trench. It was an old German combat trench, but it made an excellent tank trap because none could cross it without falling inside. It required the tankers to dig furiously and then level out a cut or breach on either side of the trench so that the tanks would not simply drop into the pit but could also crawl out of it.

Men had been sent to do this, but when Patton found them cowering at the bottom of the trench he did not hesitate to resolve the situation. Here, during the next few hours, according to biographer Carlo D’Este, “the legend of George S. Patton the warrior was born.”

He appeared on the parapet of the excavation, pointedly exposing himself to the “intense enemy gunfire that came from the front, flanks, and sometimes from the rear,” according to the official report, and looked down. Earlier the men in the trench had begun hacking at the walls but each time a shell burst nearby or machine-gun bullets kicked up dust, they jumped back inside for cover.

The situation was developing into a catastrophe. More tanks had begun to arrive and a colossal armored traffic jam was in the making. Worse, as the fog lifted, German spotters got the range and enemy artillery began furiously shelling these valuable targets.

“To hell with them, they can’t hit me!” Patton roared, ordering the soldiers out of the trench to resume work. (Later he wrote to his wife that he “had probably killed one of them” who refused to obey by hitting him over the head with a shovel.) Patton stormed over to a company of stalled American tanks waiting for the obstacle to be cleared and personally began removing shovels and picks that were strapped to their sides. With enemy bullets pinging and ricocheting off the tanks, he ordered the Americans out of their vehicles to assist in the excavation and continued to march atop the parapet of the trench as soldiers with shovels were being shot down on all sides, exhorting the men and ridiculing the Germans’ marksmanship with a flood of horrible profanity.

Colonel Patton, who only a year earlier had been Lieutenant Patton, was the commanding officer of the First U.S. Tank Brigade, consisting of approximately 140 tanks. They were French-built machines, so-called light tanks that Patton, an old cavalryman, preferred to the much larger, heavier (and less maneuverable) armored vehicles being built in England.

Patton’s tanks were made by Renault, the French automobile company. A 50-hp engine could propel them about 4.5 miles per hour, and their revolving turret was armed with either a 37mm cannon or a 9mm machine gun. The two-man crew consisted of a driver, who sat below, and the gunner/tank commander (the only one who could actually see out) who gave steering directions to the driver by kicking him in the back, head, or shoulders.

WHEN THE ENEMY TRENCH was at last made fit for passing Patton ordered his tanks forward, telling them to silence the German machine guns. Then he went back to the reverse slope of another small hill where more than a hundred American soldiers had been shrinking against the enemy fire when the fog lifted, having become separated or lost from their units. As the armored vehicles began to clear the crest of the low rise ahead Patton told these fugitives to form up and follow him behind the tanks. “Let’s go get them,” he shouted. “Who’s with me,” and he began walking forward, cursing and waving his walking stick over his head.^*

Most of the men rose up enthusiastically and took off after Patton, but when they, too, cleared the crest of the hill they were met with a furious hail of enemy machine-gun fire that killed and wounded many, and everyone flung himself to the ground. The fire came from nearly every direction; the Germans, it seems, not wanting to tangle with the tanks, had gone to ground and let them pass by unmolested—and the infantry as well—before opening up. Many of the Americans were thus shot in the back and lay in sad, promiscuous heaps upon the ground.

Patton later wrote to his father that he had been trembling with fear and at that point “felt a great desire to run” when amid all the firing an apparition suddenly appeared before him in the clouds above the German lines, he said—a kind of panorama of his heroic ancestors who had died in American wars from the Revolution to the Civil War. They spoke to him in soothing tones, which calmed him, Patton wrote, and, saying aloud to himself, “It is time for another Patton to die,” he rose up and again shouted for volunteers to go forward into “what I honestly believed was certain death.”

“Six men went with me,” he said, “five were killed and I was wounded, so I was not much in error.”

Patton and his little entourage, including his orderly Private First Class Joseph Angelo, plunged into the maelstrom headlong, but every dozen steps or so one of the soldiers would fall to the ground after being struck by German bullets, until at last there was only Patton and Angelo moving in the ghastly and dangerous landscape “like Don Quixote and his faithful servant Sancho Panza,” according to biographer Martin Blumenson.

At one point Angelo said to his boss, “We are alone.”

“Come on anyway,” Patton replied, but a few seconds later he was struck in the thigh by a bullet and soon collapsed to the ground.

What was Patton thinking, marching into such danger? It certainly wasn’t what his headquarters superiors expected of him; in fact, they would have been horrified, if not furious—Patton was the commander of the First U.S. Tank Brigade.

It was nearly inconceivable that a field officer of Patton’s stature would expose himself in such a reckless manner but it was neither the first time nor the last. His explanation for it, gleaned from letters he wrote over time to his wife, father, and other family members, seems to indicate some abstract and almost perverse need to prove his nerve or bravery under fire. That he had led the five men with him to their deaths seems not to have occurred to him. What was more important to Patton was to demonstrate to himself that he was not a coward, but fearless and/or bulletproof.

Having now disproved the latter, Patton and Angelo lay in a shallow shell hole as bullets and shrapnel skimmed overhead and kicked up dust in the drying mud. Angelo sliced open Patton’s trousers and saw that a German machine-gun bullet had entered his left thigh and come out his buttock near the rectum, “leaving a hole the size of a teacup.”² The orderly dressed the wound with his own first aid kit and also one he took off a dead soldier lying near.

By then the Germans had maneuvered into a railroad cut about fifty yards distant, where they set up a machine gun. They were so close that Patton and Angelo could hear them talking. Sometime within a half hour Patton’s sergeant, who had been frantically looking for his commander, came scrambling and panting into the shallow shell depression, where he further attended to the wound. Patton then ordered him to find Major Serano Brett and tell him he was now in command of the brigade, but also said that no attempt to remove him should be made until the enemy machine guns ahead were silenced.

An hour passed, possibly more, and Patton remained half in shock but conscious during the ordeal with the enemy machine guns constantly sweeping the battlefield. At one point Patton told Angelo to go out and find his tankers and tell them where the German guns were located. As more U.S. soldiers came up Patton’s tanks began maneuvering with the infantry to knock out the German emplacements. When another company of Patton’s tanks came up, he once again told Angelo to go out and tell them about the enemy emplacements. Meantime, word got back to the communications squad and a pigeon was released with a message that Patton had been wounded.³ During this time, Patton said, “One of my tanks [sat] guarding me like a watchdog.”⁴

Finally, at about 1 p.m., tanks and infantry managed to silence most of the enemy guns so that Patton could be rescued. He gave his last order sending a lieutenant in search of Major Brett, who had not yet been located. Then he was placed on a stretcher and evacuated to an aid station two miles to the rear, an experience, Patton said, that “was not at all pleasant.”

For his actions that day—personally breaking up the tank logjam under fire, and directing the attack on the machine guns after being badly wounded—Colonel George S. Patton, age thirty-two, received the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest award for valor.

GEORGE SMITH PATTON JR. was born November 11, 1885, at Lake Vineyard, his family’s 1,300-acre winery and citrus estate in what is now Pasadena, California, in the shadows of the 10,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains. Like George Marshall, Patton came from a long line of illustrious ancestors who settled in Virginia in the 1700s after arriving from the British Isles.

His great-grandfather Robert Patton immigrated to America from Scotland in 1750 and became a successful merchant in international trade. He settled in Culpeper, Virginia, then moved to Fredericksburg and married Anne Gordon Mercer, daughter of Dr. (Brigadier General) Hugh Mercer, a close friend of George Washington’s who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Princeton during the Revolution—“the first of the Patton ancestors to combine erudition and valor in his bloodstream.”⁵ (Bayoneted and left to die by the British, General Mercer told an aide who rushed up to carry him away to instead follow the Continental Army, saying, “It needs your services more than I do.”)

Their son John Mercer Patton, one of seven children, was in turn a physician, lawyer, and U.S. congressman, and for a time governor of Virginia. He married Margaret French Williams and fathered twelve children, including seven sons all of whom but one^† became Confederate officers during the Civil War.

A story some historians use to point out the strain of obstinacy in the Patton family stems from an incident that took place in the first decade of the nineteenth century. John Mercer Patton threatened in a letter to his father “to kill himself by cutting his throat” because his father insisted that he go to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania instead of studying law. Several days later came the reply: a package containing “a freshly honed straight razor and a note that said: ‘Go ahead. Your devoted father.’ ” In the end he became both a doctor and a lawyer and famously wound up writing the Virginia Legal Code.⁶

Four of his sons, including Patton’s grandfather the first George Smith Patton, graduated from the Virginia Military Institute. He was second in his class, which was also filled with various ancestors of George C. Marshall, and afterward studied law with his father before marrying the wealthy Susan Thornton Glassell, whose family claimed to descend from George Washington’s great-grandfather, as well as from several of the English barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. The union of George S. Patton and Susan Glassell produced nine children including, in 1856, Patton’s father, George Smith Patton.

This George Smith Patton cut a rakish, elegant, romantic figure in antebellum Virginia society, well known for his wit, wisdom, and repartee. A fervent believer in secession, by the eve of Fort Sumter George S. Patton had become the commander of H Company of the 22nd Virginia Regiment, and he and many of his brothers, sisters, and cousins moved into the magnificent Patton ancestral home, Spring Farm, in Culpeper, where they prepared for war.

The matriarch of the Patton family and owner of Spring Farm was the widow of John Mercer Patton, the former Margaret French Williams, who had a hatred of Yankees that was almost obscene. (During the war she is said to have cried upon learning of the wounding of one of her sons but afterward said it was only because she had no more sons to send to the fight.) After the war had ended, the story goes that she was riding from church one Sunday with a former Confederate colonel and inquired if he had said “Amen” when the minister prayed for the president of the United States. When the answer was affirmative, she lashed him across the face with her buggy whip.⁷

To say that the Civil War was unkind to the Patton family is a vast understatement. Waller Tazewell Patton was the first of the Patton boys to die. A VMI graduate and lawyer, “Taz” was badly wounded at Second Manassas but recuperated in time for the Battle of Gettysburg where, as the colonel commanding the Seventh Virginia Infantry, he was shot through the mouth at the stone wall during Pickett’s Charge. He lived long enough to write a note to his mother reaffirming his love for her, and “my God and my Country,” before dying on July 23, 1863, at the age of twenty-nine. The two youngest brothers, Hugh Mercer and James French Patton, were both lieutenants and both wounded but survived.

May 15, 1864, became a kind of Patton watershed in the Civil War when no fewer than four Pattons, including some attending VMI, clashed with the Union Army in the Shenandoah Valley at the Battle of New Market. The VMI cadet corps—mostly fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—were called out to fight for the Confederacy.

Colonel George S. Patton, Patton’s grandfather, now commanding a brigade, managed to extract his cousin Colonel George Hugh Smith’s 62nd Virginia Regiment from a Union trap, then turned to face and repel a Federal cavalry attack on his flank.

Although the Battle of New Market was a Rebel victory, this particular Patton’s luck ran out on September 19, 1864, at the Battle of Opequon, also known as the Third (last) Battle of Winchester, when Federals under Philip Sheridan attacked and crushed the army of General Jubal A. Early.

That spring the Patton family had been forced to move owing to the presence of Federal armies in northern Virginia; they chose the home of John Mercer Patton, the Meadows, in Albemarle County in central Virginia, near Charlottesville. There, Susan Patton received a letter from her husband, George, saying he would be on a train with the army of General Early whose tracks passed nearby the Meadows’ garden.

His son George Smith Patton, then a boy of eight, poignantly recalled his father in a memoir dictated the year of his own death in 1927: “He got off and stayed with us for several hours … then the last train with flat cars loaded with artillery stopped for him. I remember seeing a soldier on a car giving him a hand to get aboard and as the train moved out he was leaning against a gun and waved us goodbye. I never saw him again.”⁸

By then George S. Patton had become the commander of “Patton’s Brigade” and his promotion to brigadier general was approved by the Confederate Congress.^‡ Patton’s men were in the thick of the fighting and as usual he was in their midst when the fatal bullet struck him. He lingered alive for a few days at the home of Mary Williams, a cousin by marriage, before expiring on September 25 at the age of thirty-one.^§

SEVEN MONTHS LATER THE WAR WAS OVER and the Pattons were thrown into the direst poverty. With no income and all the family savings gone, they had almost starved during the winter of 1864. Susan Patton had gone to Goochland, north of Richmond, to care for her blind father who, like most Virginians, had lost everything to the Confederate cause. All livestock had been driven away by the depredations of the Yankee general George Stoneman and his cavalry.

The state was utterly devastated; railroads, bridges, waterways, and other infrastructure were wrecked. Administrative offices such as the postal system had collapsed and Richmond had burned to the ground. Land had gone fallow; fences were trampled down, fields were choked with weeds, homes were in a state of decay. Tens of thousands of Virginia’s men were dead or maimed and with emancipation there was no one to work the fields. Four years of war had left people destitute; trade had virtually ceased during the conflict and remained stagnant afterward. Confederate money and bonds were worthless and most families had sold off what gold, silver, or furniture they had to buy food or other necessities. The stench of death and privation lay heavily across the state.

The Patton family next moved in with other Pattons, who were trying to maintain a corn patch and truck farm in a river bottom, but there was little or no future in Virginia for now, if ever. Then Susan Patton received a letter from her brother Andrew Glassell, an attorney who had made his way to California before the war. It contained money for their passage to that mysterious and faraway place.

They pooled what little they had and sold it, save for Susan’s dead husband’s “sword, saddle, gold watch, and bible,” and boarded a steamer for Panama, where they crossed the fever-plagued isthmus and boarded a ship for Los Angeles. As George Patton’s sister put it nearly 150 years later, “There was nothing left for them in the ruins of their politics and their plantations—and their way of life.”⁹

They must have been an extraordinary-looking party, the Pattons: the beautiful thirty-one-year-old widow and her four children, her blind father, as well as her brother the gallant Commander William Glassell, who was dying of tuberculosis contracted in a Union prison camp after being captured during the Battle of Charleston Harbor. Nevertheless, they arrived in California just before Christmas 1866, to a warm welcome from not only Andrew Glassell and his large family but also other Patton cousins, including Williamses who had also immigrated to the new American frontier.

For Susan Patton, Los Angeles was a rude, un-American kind of place, only sixteen years free of Mexican rule, populated mostly by Mexicans, Indians—some of them hostile—and a clique of Spanish landholders right out of the age of Zorro. With its strange Mediterranean climate and barren hills, California was the antithesis of the verdant fertile farmland of her native Virginia, but Susan eventually acclimated and started a small school for girls until, as her granddaughter put it, “Up from Mexico came the knight in shining armor—and that he was to anyone who ever knew him.”¹⁰

He was Colonel George Hugh Smith, first cousin, beloved friend, and VMI classmate of the late George S. Patton. A native Philadelphian whose family had resettled in Virginia, Smith had secretly been in love with Susan for years and for that reason had remained a bachelor. A lawyer by trade, he refused to take the loyalty oath when the war ended and went to Mexico where he engaged in cotton growing and surveying for a living, before ultimately returning to the United States via California.^ǁ

Smith joined Andrew Glassell’s law firm and began a courtship of Susan that resulted in their marriage in 1870. He adopted her four children and brought them up as his own. According to his step-granddaughter he was much beloved and regaled the children with heroic stories of their dead father. By all appearances they led a happy, successful, if not wealthy life until 1883 when Susan died of cancer at the age of forty-eight.

By that time her son twenty-seven-year-old George Smith Patton II was a well-established lawyer and political figure in Los Angeles. Like his father before him he had attended VMI, which offered free appointments to the sons of alumni who had fallen in the Civil War. He became an outstanding student, first in his senior year and the ranking cadet officer in the class of 1877. It was said that when he went out riding one day in White Sulphur Springs in his cadet uniform, a former Confederate general mistook him for his father.¹¹

Back in Los Angeles he studied law with his stepfather and uncle and passed the bar exam and joined the firm, which also placed him among the most eligible young bachelors in town. In 1884, a year after his mother’s death, he fell in love and married twenty-three-year-old Ruth Wilson, daughter of the fabled Benjamin Davis “Don Benito” Wilson, a former mountain man out of Tennessee who had become one of the wealthiest landowners in California.

Don Benito’s story is a book in itself, as he rode, trapped, explored, and fought Indians with the likes of Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and Jedediah Smith. He was “a tenacious warrior who feared neither man nor beast,” slaying grizzly bears and Indians alike who crossed his “frightful temper.” He also married well, taking for his bride, in 1844, Ramona Yorba, the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the wealthiest estate holders in Southern California.¹²

That marriage was cut short by Ramona’s tragic death at the age of twenty-one, but in 1853 Wilson married Margaret Short Hereford, an Alabama-born widow of a doctor, who gave him two children. One of them, Ruth, married George Smith Patton and became the mother of George Smith Patton Jr.—the subject of this story—and the other, Annie, “a lifelong spinster,” became Patton’s beloved Aunt Nannie.¹³

DON BENITO WILSON HAD BEEN instrumental in the California revolution, conversion to U.S. territory, and eventual statehood in 1850. In 1851 he was elected mayor of Los Angeles and was later a two-term California state senator. At one point he held more than fourteen thousand acres in and around Los Angeles County, including a sheep ranch that is today the campus of UCLA. But it was Lake Vineyard, Wilson’s residence amidst thirteen hundred acres of well-tended grapevines and fruit orchards, that he cherished above all else.^a The home was of the large “raised hacienda” style with steep front steps, a slate roof, and a long, wide veranda surrounded by fruit and flower trees as well as towering pines and eucalyptus.

Don Benito had also gained a reputation as one of California’s leading horticulturists. In 1873 his combined harvest produced 75,000 gallons of wine and 5,000 gallons of brandy. Some 600,000 oranges and 75,000 lemons were produced and it was estimated that at least as many remained on the trees unharvested. A decade later the San Gabriel Wine Company had become one of the largest in the world, capable of turning out 1.5 million gallons a year. In any event, from the mid-nineteenth century on, the Wilsons were high on the list of frontier aristocracy in the state of California.

Don Benito passed away in 1878, so young George Smith Patton Jr., born seven years later, never got to know his legendary mountain-man grandfather. Still, Patton Jr. was regaled with enough heroic stories from Hugh Smith about his gallant Confederate grandfather to put notions of a military career into his head at an early age. Among Hugh Smith’s friends was John Singleton Mosby, a member of the prewar Virginia gentry who had served as a major under the Confederate cavalry leader J.E.B. Stuart until, in 1863, he was promoted to colonel and founded the 43rd Virginia Regiment of partisan rangers, in which he spent the rest of the war infamously harassing Union forces in Virginia with tactics that bordered on terrorism. (Once he captured a Union general by entering his tent at night, waking him with a slap of saber on his bare behind, and roaring, “Have you heard of Mosby?” When the response was affirmative, he again roared, “I am Mosby!”)

Mosby had come to California as an attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad company and had business with the Glassell-Smith-Patton law firm. He and the young “Georgie” Patton, as he was known, would play on the lawns of Lake Vineyard for hours, reenacting Civil War battles with Georgie playing Robert E. Lee atop his Shetland pony Peach Blossom and Mosby playing himself.

On chilly nights, by the great fireside at Lake Vineyard, George Patton Sr. would read to the children from classics such as Pope’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which Georgie came to know almost by heart, as he did the Bible, which was also read daily. Moreover, Papa Patton frequently read aloud from Plutarch’s Lives, Caesar’s Commentaries, biographies of Napoleon and Alexander the Great, the poetry of the English Romantics, and Shakespeare.¹⁴

His father did not believe in formal education for young children, but thought they would be better rounded by roaming in the wilds and at the same time fed a steady diet of works by the great writers, such as Kipling, who was frequently recited to Georgie and his sister, Anne (also known as Nita), by another family friend, retired major Arthur Thompson, formerly of His Majesty’s Royal Lancers, who had served in battle at the notorious Khyber Pass on the North West Frontier of India.

The Patton children’s early tutor was their Aunt Nannie, Ruth’s sister, who soon revealed a terrible secret: Georgie was “slow to learn,” in reading, writing, and mathematics, and showed few signs of improvement. What is known now through medical examination of his correspondence is that Patton was dyslexic, a condition then unknown, and even today much misunderstood. The most apparent affliction of dyslexia is an inability to spell, reversing some letters or spelling phonetically, and a confusion of numbers in math. Patton got by with a terrific effort at memorizing things, but his poor spelling plagued him all his life. He once joked about it as a grown-up saying to someone who had questioned his spelling, “Well, any idiot can spell a word the same way every time. But it takes imagination to spell it many different ways as I do.” Once he famously told his troops, “I have trouble with the AB and—what do you call that other letter?”¹⁵

As Patton biographer D’Este points out, dyslexia brings with it a wide variety of other difficult symptoms that include self-contempt, impulsiveness, mood swings, obsessiveness, and hyperactivity. At one time or another, D’Este says, “virtually every symptom of dyslexia described above applied to Patton. During his plebe year at West Point he would write to his future wife Beatrice Banning Ayer, ‘I am either very lazy or very stupid, or both, because it is beastly hard for me to learn and as a natural result I hate to study.’ ”¹⁶

All of that notwithstanding, Nannie also captivated Georgie and his sister by reading to them from exciting and powerful works such as Beowulf, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Washington Irving’s The Alhambra, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in addition to Ivanhoe and other heroic tales by Sir Walter Scott—and this was not to mention children’s adventure books such as Lee in Virginia. Patton liked to tell a story, perhaps apocryphal, about himself. When he was young he used to kneel and pray with his mother, who kept pictures of God and Jesus on the wall by her bedside. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he found out they were actually etchings of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.¹⁷

Aunt Nannie (Annie Wilson) was three years older than Georgie’s mother, and since their early childhood she had established herself as something of an eccentric. In part by virtue of being the eldest she was able to dominate Ruth in ways large and small. Growing up at Lake Vineyard the girls had been privately tutored in languages, literature, and the piano. While Ruth seemed to thrive in the placid, bucolic atmosphere, Nannie felt restive. According to her distant nephew Robert H. Patton, she feared staying at the ranch would turn her into “a cross, unloved, unloving old maid.” Earlier she had told her diary that she would not marry since “the kind of man I would marry, and could love, I am afraid would never care for me.” She went on to predict that rather than settle for the love of someone “less worthy,” she would instead adore “my ideal” from afar, “and never have him care a bit for me.”¹⁸

It has been someplace noted that the deadliest trap is the one you set for yourself, which seems precisely the case with Nannie Wilson when George S. Patton Sr. came calling on her sister Ruth. Nannie found him fascinating, highly intelligent, witty, and extremely handsome (“a splendid talker, he is so smart and well read”). She could not see how he could possibly fall for her little sister who was not nearly so well read and pretty as herself. So she hovered on the periphery, not as a tiger stalking prey but more like an aloof observer wanting to be part of the party but content to wait outside.

Not as a wholly “detached” observer, however. When on December 10, 1884, Ruth wed George Patton and the couple prepared to board the train for their honeymoon in New Orleans, who should they find waiting on the platform, baggage packed, but sister Nannie, intending to accompany them on the trip.

Talked out of proceeding, that night as she sat to write in the diary she’d kept every day since childhood, Nannie recalled an entry of seven years previous: “My youth is slipping by fast and I am beginning to feel old already … Oh I wonder if I shall always go on this same way!” Then she closed the book without writing a word and never resumed it. As her distant nephew would observe a hundred years later, “Nannie was well on her way toward becoming a very strange woman.”¹⁹

Nannie would be a looming presence in the Pattons’ lives over the years, especially from the moment little Georgie was born, when she immediately assumed the role of surrogate mother. He was a large “almost painfully beautiful” child, Nannie said, “curly golden hair, big blue eyes, a lovely nose and sensitive tender mouth.”

THROUGHOUT HIS YOUTH GEORGIE PATTON’S pursuits revolved around horses, guns, and the military—especially the latter, when he would dress up in a blue uniform and march around the house and grounds brandishing a homemade wooden sword. On the blade he had prophetically carved “Lt. Gen. G.S. Patton.” He learned to ride (his mother was an excellent horsewoman) on the same McClellan saddle that his grandfather had been killed on, and even reckoned that a dark stain around its pommel was actually his grandfather’s blood. At about the age of ten his father gave him an English saddle and two blooded horses, Marmion and Galahad, whom he sometimes slept next to in the Lake Vineyard stables.²⁰

When he was old enough to lift the .22 rifle that his father bought him, he used it to prove his marksmanship by knocking oranges off of fence posts. Around that same time he got a sixteen-gauge double-hammer shotgun for shooting quail, and when he reached age twelve his father scrambled to come up with enough cash to buy him a twelve-gauge hammerless Lefever, one of the best-built and most expensive American shotguns of the day. When it came to engraving its hard leather case Georgie later wrote he made his father “leave the Jr. off so that he could use it if he wanted to.”

Money, in fact, had become a problematic subject at Lake Vineyard as the nineteenth century came to a close. Following the death of Don Benito Wilson, management of his estate, including the properties, vineries, and citrus groves, fell to his son-in-law the sybaritic James de Barthe Shoub, while Wilson’s stepson George Patton Sr. continued his practice in the law.²¹

But Shoub turned out to be a profligate spendthrift and idler who squandered his own property and the great winery through inept speculation and nearly threw the Wilson/Patton fortune into bankruptcy as well. Patton Sr. found it necessary to leave the practice of law and his post at the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to see to affairs at Lake Vineyard and the other vast Wilson properties, which were intermittently plagued with agricultural diseases and drought. While the Pattons were far from indigent, they were at times “land poor,” and cash was not easy to come by. “Papa never economized so far as his family were concerned,” George Jr. wrote in 1927, “but would get nothing for himself.”²²

That never stopped them, however, from living the lives of American aristocrats. The Pattons’ cousins the Bannings were a wealthy clan who made their fortune first in stagecoach and freight transportation and later in shipping. They owned, among other things, most of Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California. The Pattons had a “cottage” there, and during the long summers the Patton children played with the Bannings as well as with the Ayer children, who were also distant relatives—the scions of a great New England textile fortune.

Georgie had learned to swim at the age of eight in the waters of the Greenbriar at White Sulphur Springs in (now West) Virginia on a trip “back east” with his father. But on Catalina he sharpened his swimming skills to an extent that would one day win him a place on the 1912 U.S. Olympic team. In Catalina’s rocky hills Georgie and other youngsters were taken by his father to hunt mountain goats that were in danger of overrunning the island. On his first hunt he shot and killed five of these. When Georgie was thirteen, Papa Patton had a sailboat built for him, which led to his enduring fascination with sailing and boats.

The two of them often sailed around the island, stopping to hunt, fish, and camp for the night in some of the many craggy coves. Patton later recorded in a lengthy paper entitled “My Father as I Knew Him and of Him from Memory and Legend” that “[Papa] hated both hunting and sea fishing but he went even when I was a grown man.”

With such constant attention being lavished upon him, one might be tempted to conclude that Patton had been spoiled. That he was doted on is without question, but from Patton’s letters and writings he seems to have appreciated the affection for what it was and returned it in full measure. He was precocious to be sure, and hogged the limelight even with all of his self-deprecation.

His father, while not particularly stern, was acutely tuned to instruct young Georgie in the manner of an aristocratic Virginia gentleman, which he was, or had been. He missed no occasion to point out his son’s shortcomings, such as the time when at age eleven Georgie returned from a mountain goat hunt. The other children had each killed one but Georgie boasted that he had “killed several,” after which his father took him aside, saying, “Son it would have been more like a sportsman not to have mentioned the extra goats.”

IN 1897, WHEN HE WAS ELEVEN, Georgie’s parents decided to send him to the Classical School for Boys, a private institution in Pasadena run by the Clark brothers. The subjects taught were arithmetic, algebra, geometry, English, grammar, composition, declamation, as well as the languages and literature in Greek, Latin, French, and German.

But the curriculum leaned most heavily on the teaching of history. As Martin Blumenson, editor of The Patton Papers, explains it: “They taught history [as a] long conflict and clash between the personal ambitions of men—Persians, Romans and Greeks for the most part—who made good or bad decisions, who lived properly and righteously, or improperly and meanly; men who contributed to their nation’s welfare and progress or who betrayed human hopes by reason of base motivation or weak character.” It was in this realm of history that Georgie Patton flourished.

Despite his atrocious spelling and punctuation, Georgie even at his young age would avidly analyze the battles of the ancient world, dissecting the strategies of Alexander the Great or the Greeks at Marathon, or probe the tactics of Sir Walter Scott’s Black Knight versus the Normans.

The brothers Clark emphasized character, patriotism, and self-sacrifice just as Papa Patton always had. Georgie took these virtues to heart from an early age, making such notations in his schoolboy notebook as: “John Alden was a weak character and timid as is shown by his not having told Standish at first that he was in love with Priscilla,” or, “[On Themistocles] He was egotistical and had a right to be. He was unscrupiolos in ataining his ends and did not hesitate to decieve his best friends,” adding perceptively that “Cimon[’s] ideals were greater than Themistocles but he was not.”²³

Georgie also found time for pithy asides unconnected—or at least ancillary—to his lessons, such as, “The common people of ancient times were very ignorant, as is the case with many in modern times also.”

Or, “A pair of the least fly-catcher, the bird which says chebec, chebec, and is a small edition of the peewee one season built their nest where I had them for many hours each day under my observation.”

In the summer of 1902, eight of the Banning-Patton-Ayer children had formed a company of players they called the Eight Cousins and staged a play, Undine, for their families and their guests. Beatrice Banning Ayer, one of Georgie’s distant cousins by marriage, played the guileless Undine, a water spirit; Georgie played Kuhlborn, her terrifying uncle. It was love at first sight for them both.

IT HAD LONG BEEN DECIDED by Georgie Patton that he would become a great soldier in the footsteps of his slain grandfather and other family heroes whose exploits his father regularly touted. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was the obvious path to becoming an officer in the regular army, but there were pitfalls from the beginning—not the least of which was the fact that Papa Patton was a prominent Democrat.

A congressman could appoint a candidate to West Point but was entitled under the rules to have only one cadet from his district at the academy at any given time. Unfortunately, the Pattons’ local congressman had already appointed a cadet the previous year. The best bet for Georgie then became California’s Senator Thomas R. Bard, who could appoint a cadet from the state at large. Bard, however, was a Republican and it thus fell on the senior Patton to pull out every stop in persuading this political rival to nominate his son to West Point.

Letters of recommendation from the most eminent Californians inundated Bard’s office, nearly all of them stressing Patton’s martial ancestry: “If ‘blood tells’ in boys as it does in colts, you will always be proud of having nominated [him],” wrote a prominent Los Angeles doctor.

Georgie’s uncle George H. Smith informed the senator, “If inheritance counts, the young man ought to have all the qualifications required in a soldier.”

“If blood counts for anything, he certainly comes of fighting stock …” wrote a well-known Los Angeles judge.

In return, Senator Bard acknowledged that Patton Jr. “possesses a strain of blood which ought to result in a successful army career,” but nevertheless insisted that Georgie “present himself for examination in competition with other applicants for my recommendation.”

Here was the rub: Papa Patton was well aware of his son’s deficiencies in certain academic areas—in particular mathematics, languages, and of course his abysmal spelling. They cast around for prep schools but finally decided on VMI, where generations of Pattons had been educated. The school prided itself on having a curriculum similar to West Point’s, and a military program even more strenuous than that at the celebrated military academy. A year at VMI seemed to be the logical entrée for prepping for West Point. Thus, in the autumn of 1903, seventeen-year-old Georgie Patton once and for all dropped the “ie” from his nickname and entered the forbidding, gray fortress-like facade of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

CADET PATTON TOOK TO the harsh military routine as if it were a normal way of life. Unlike many of his classmates, he seemed to thrive on the starkness, austerity, and hazing—and like George Marshall he accepted his place as a “rat” with magnanimity if not actual appreciativeness.

He was delighted, for instance, to learn when being fitted for his uniform that the tailor was the same man who had fitted not only his father but also his grandfather, fifty years on. Upon taking his measurements, the tailor looked in his book and informed George Patton Jr. that he was exactly the same uniform size as both of those stellar VMI graduates.²⁴

Cadet Patton was genial, but not particularly close with his classmates. He was, in fact, a kind of snob in the way that only people who have spent any time in Virginia can appreciate. If there is anything approaching a self-acknowledged American version of aristocracy it will be found among the so-called First Families of Virginia—more so (in their estimation) even than among descendants of the Mayflower. From the time he began to talk and listen it was stressed to George Patton Jr. that his ancestors were among the top of these FFVs, as they have come to be known. In truth, the Patton ancestors, with a few notable exceptions, were not ranked particularly high in the pecking order of the landed Virginia gentry, but the fact that his grandfather had died for it certainly raised them a notch or two.

In letters home to his father, Patton expressed dismay when he discovered that certain of his fellow students were not “gentlemen,” in the sense that he grew up understanding the term. Their values, he noted, as well as their manners, were different. While he nevertheless treated them as equals, he knew the distinction and did not hesitate to say so in private.

In his academic courses he struggled as he always had but persevered with hard study and ranked in the top third of his class. He went out for the football team and, like George Marshall before him, accepted a bid to join the KA fraternity in secret, since it was not permitted for cadets to be members. Beatrice wrote him to join her family at Thanksgiving dinner in Boston, but cadets were not allowed off campus; instead he spent Thanksgiving at the home of the VMI commandant then, afterward, ate figs while sitting on the grave of Stonewall Jackson.

The romance with Beatrice was humming right along, but why a young woman from Boston with such immense wealth and high social standing would have fallen for a California boy and expatriated southerner who claimed he wanted to become a soldier has become a topic for conversation from then until now. For Christmas she sent him a fox head tie pin and inquired as to how “Kuhlborn” was doing, receiving this in reply: “As to Kuhlborns self there is little to say except that owing to his immortal nature he lived through football season and did not break even a single bon[e] and that he is now devoting more time than he should to making a polo team (for above all things he is desirous of an early and glorious death).”²⁵

Robert H. Patton, who naturally has had extraordinary access to Patton family lore, attributes his grandmother’s infatuation with George Patton to a “quirky streak” and asserts that she was drawn to the kind of “self-mockery and drama” contained in his reply to her letter.^b

Patton managed to get through his year at VMI with respectable grades and an excellent military rating and on May 24, 1904, he was at last accepted into West Point, which prompted a remarkable letter from his father, “to my boy,” telling him, in part: “From that day eighteen years ago when you first saw the light of this world you have been a comfort and a joy to me—and now that we have come to a new point of departure I feel neither regret, nor fear, nor doubt.” The letter goes on to caution him about selfishness and self-seeking, predicts the First World War or something like it, and prophesies that “Providence shall throw upon you the great responsibility by which you may quit yourself like a man. If you do this it matters not whether you achieve the fleeting applause of the unthinking multitude or not. You will have fulfilled your destiny—and played nobly your part in the drama of life.”²⁶

West Point, however, was far more of an ordeal for Patton than VMI. He considered the latter school harsher in its military discipline and again bemoaned the dearth of “gentlemen” among his classmates. But the academic work at West Point was harder, especially in mathematics and science and of course his old bugaboo English. He went through the daily grind but no amount of extra preparation could overcome his dyslexic tendency to transpose letters, revert to phonetics, or confuse numbers. It is almost heartbreaking when he asks his father in a letter, “Is my spelling still as bad as it was? I hope not for I heare WP is getting strict about that.”^c

He went out for the football and fencing teams with little success in either, a worrisome burden on his ego and mushrooming ambition. He had already set his sights at becoming cadet adjutant by his senior year, second in rank only to first captain. “I have lived 19 years but … amount to very little more than when I was a baby,” he told his father as Thanksgiving approached. “I am fare in every thing but good in nothing. It seems to be that for a person to amount to some thing they should be good in at least one thing. I some times fear that I am one of these darned dreamers … who is always going to succeed but never does,” adding that if that were the case “it would have been far more merciful if I had died ten years ago than to be forced to live—a failure.”²⁷

At least on paper the romance with Beatrice was going well but it had to have been hard on Patton that she was coming out in Boston’s winter debutant season while he was cooped up a plebe at West Point with no off-post leave privileges. He wrote her, “Really the fact that you liked my flowers well enough to wear them [at your coming out party] gives me a great deal more pleasure than they could possibly have given you, so instead of your thanking me I should be grateful to you.”

Patton at last got to see her on March 4, 1905, when the West Point cadet corps marched in the inaugural parade of President Theodore Roosevelt. That evening he got to dance with Beatrice at the inaugural ball. “I had the finest time in the world,” he told her. He invited her in June to the graduation dance at the academy, but that turned out not to be necessary. On June 3, during a track meet, he was in the lead but tripped over the seventh hurdle and finished last and on that same day was “turned out” (failed) in his French class. The next week he failed math and was “turned back” academically, a full year. It was the unkindest blow. He would have to start all over again.

ALTHOUGH BEING “TURNED BACK” was a tremendous disappointment, it undoubtedly saved George Patton’s career. By the end of October, of 155 cadets in the class of 1909, he stood 14 in mathematics, 37 in English, number 1 in drill regulations, and had accumulated but one demerit. He achieved this by dint of terrific study and a prodigious memory so that, especially in math, he managed to memorize by rote the solutions to entire problems. On the football team he played third string but broke a bone in his arm that finished him for the season. When promotions were announced that spring he was named second corporal for the upcoming year, meaning that only one cadet in his class had scored higher in military science and conduct.

The next year was more of the same. Patton passed all of his subjects at about the middle of his class except for military bearing at which he excelled, when he entered his junior year as cadet sergeant major, the highest-ranked military office for the second class. Beatrice remained a romantic figure in his life and being an upperclassman he was now afforded more opportunity to see her on holidays. He went out for the 1907 football season and made the team but never got into a game.

He wrote in a notebook he kept: “Characteristics of a cavalry leader 1. Indomitable courage 2. Quick perception of right moment to attack 3. Capacity of inspiring confidence in troops,” adding, “always work like Hell at all things and all times.” In something at least prophetic and at best a minor miracle, when promotion time rolled around Patton was selected adjutant of the West Point Cadet Corps for his senior year, the position he’d aspired to ever since he’d been a first year plebe. Once more he went out for the football team but early on again broke a small bone in his arm, which put him out of action for the season.

Except for his tribulations on the football field, by that time Patton at last had become the athlete he always wanted to be. He was an accomplished swordsman on the fencing team, especially with the broadsword, as well as a stellar rider/jumper on the equestrian team. Not only that, but at the Annual West Point Field Day he also broke the school record in the 220-yard low hurdles, won the 159-yard high hurdles, and was second in the 220-yard dash.

By then he was revealing his deepest thoughts in his letters to Beatrice, many of them philosophical musings on war, peace, battle, and dreams of battle. At one point he told her, “Perhaps I said things though true that sound rather strange. But I am rather strange too, I fear.”

In January 1909 he asked her to marry him; or rather, he asked her father’s permission to ask her, which was given hesitantly, but magnanimously, considering that Frederick Ayer was eighty-six years old and could not but be dismayed at the prospect of his youngest daughter going off to who knows where with a lowly second lieutenant in the army. Even Ayer could not help being impressed, however, when upon a sparkling Sunday morning with the family gathered on the terrace of Avalon in Prides Crossing, who should come ascending the twenty-six stone steps to the spectacular mansion overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic on the rocks below, riding on a large white charger, but Lieutenant George S. Patton Jr. When he reached the terrace, he clattered up toward Beatrice, who was seated in a chair, and proceeded to have the horse bow in front of her, doffing his cap in a sweeping flourish. Ayer told him this in a letter: “All right. You let me worry about making the money, and you worry about getting the glory.”²⁸

As far as career choice Patton, who rode as though he was born in the saddle, had concluded that “cavalry as mounted infantry is the arm of the future,” in the army, and chose that branch above all others—not the least because his academic record was such as to exclude him from the more elite branches, such as engineers.

Blumenson writes that, judging from remarks about him in the West Point magazine, his class Furlough Book, and the West Point yearbook, Patton’s classmates regarded Patton “with some ambivalent emotions. They accepted him generally with affection and admiration for his sincerity, candor, and fairness. They smiled in condescension over his naïve earnestness and enthusiasm. They believed that he tried too hard, had too much spirit, and they were uncomfortable with his excessive concern for future glory.”

Upon graduation Patton had hoped to be posted to Fort Myer, Virginia, right across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., with the 15th Cavalry. Instead he was relegated to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, a rather bleak outpost near Chicago, where a part of the 15th was stationed. His duties were menial but typical for a new second lieutenant: guard duty, stable duty, and duty at the post stockade, rifle and pistol practice (at which he attained the grade of “expert”), and occasional maneuvers. He was scheduled to marry Beatrice at the end of May and worried over the quarters they had been assigned on the post. He went into Chicago to shop for furnishings—chairs, sofas, lamps, and carpets.

In the first week of March 1910, a little of the Patton legend was put on show when his horse threw a conniption fit while he was drilling a formation of his troops. The horse suddenly began bucking fiercely and threw the surprised Patton off, but he immediately got back on. The animal began to buck again, reared, and fell down on the ground. But Patton stayed on, “[standing] across him” after he had gotten his leg out from under the animal, so that when Patton got the horse up he would be in the saddle. As the horse arose, however, it suddenly jerked its head back cracking Patton in the face and opening a nasty cut above his eye that “bled like a stuck pig.”

Instead of going to the infirmary, for the next twenty minutes Patton continued drilling the men with the blood “running down [his] sleeve.” No one there could help but take note of the young lieutenant with blood all over his face and uniform, patiently drilling the troops when by all rights he should have had the cut looked after. It was good, tough stuff, the stuff of which legends are made, and those cavalry troopers saw that the story got around.

The wedding on May 26, 1910, was one of the most graceful occasions of Boston’s social season, being concluded at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms. There the bride and groom—in his elegant army dress blue uniform—emerged beneath a phalanx of crossed swords held high by Patton’s West Point classmates, who also wore full dress. The reception was held at Avalon, with special trains bringing guests from Boston. It featured a full orchestra that played on the terrace.

Beatrice’s wedding dress had been her mother’s of white handmade lace and trimmed in orange blossoms from Lake Vineyard “brought on the train by the Pattons in a box of wet cotton.”²⁹ She cut the enormous wedding cake with her husband’s sword, which was followed by army cheers and a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by the orchestra. The next day, the couple entrained for New York and the bridal suite on the SS Deutschland that would carry them to a monthlong honeymoon in England, where Patton poked around Cornwall, home to the legendary King Arthur—“People talk of him as if he were still here,” he said.

THE FIRST DAYS AT FORT SHERIDAN could not have been easy for Beatrice, who was reared in an excess of luxury. But between her drive to make a good wife and the marital bliss right off a honeymoon she seemed cheerful and happy in her letters home. Patton slowly but steadily advanced in the estimation of his military superiors, working his way to commanding officer of a machine-gun platoon and acting commanding officer of his cavalry troop. He began to salivate with news of trouble along the Mexican border—the current revolution was possibly in danger of spilling over into the United States. “There may be no war,” Patton wrote Aunt Nannie, adding, “God forbid such an eventuality.”

With assistance from the Patton and Ayer families he purchased a string of polo ponies, an expensive automobile,^d as well as several fine thoroughbreds for both flat racing and steeplechases, which he could board at the Fort Sheridan stables for free. He wrote Aunt Nannie: “We had a polo match Saturday and I won a cup a foot high. It is very pretty.” At night he began translating articles from French military journals into English, taught himself how to type, and started writing military papers for distribution within the army—the first one entitled “Saddle Drill.” A recurring theme in these papers was to “attack, push forward, attack again until the end,” which would one day become a Patton trademark.³⁰

In March 1911 Beatrice gave birth to a girl, Beatrice Smith (later changed to Ayer) Patton, of whom George soon wrote to Aunt Nannie at the end of the month, “The accursed infant has black hair is very ugly and is said by some dastardly people to resemble me which it does not because it is ugly.” Again he added: “The Mexican trouble seems dormant for the moment but … it is not for long. We shall cross the border yet. I feel sure of it.”

Some of Patton’s biographers seem to take his remarks about the baby being ugly as made seriously instead of playfully, but that hardly seems the case. From this it has been extrapolated that Patton was terribly jealous of the baby for having “intruded” on his marriage with Beatrice—but hard evidence of this is difficult to come by. Once, a neighbor, the wife of a colonel, came to Beatrice to ask if things were all right in her marriage because her husband had informed her that Lieutenant Patton that day was observed “standing on the rifle butts in between the targets” on the rifle range during a firing exercise. It has been intimated that this behavior demonstrated that Patton was despondent, even suicidal, over the arrival of the child, but that hardly seems the case either.

The way he explained it later to Beatrice was that he was standing up between the targets during the shooting to see what the sound of bullets whizzing past him would feel like. He was merely testing his courage under fire, he explained, and the targets were large, so that it would have been a fluke for a rifleman to miss one entirely. It was a very Patton thing to do.

IN DECEMBER 1911 Patton at last received the assignment he had originally wanted—a position with the other branch of the 15th Cavalry Regiment that was at Fort Myer, Virginia.

Fort Myer is the most elite post in the U.S. Army, in no small measure because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., and the political emoluments dangling there. Land that once belonged to George Washington and that was later bequeathed to Robert E. Lee’s wife, Fort Myer has stood next to Arlington National Cemetery since the Civil War. It was home to the oldest regiment in the army (the Third U.S. Infantry Regiment: “The Old Guard”) as well as the official residence of the army chief of staff, the U.S. Army Band, the Honor Guards of all three services, and Black Jack, the riderless horse used in state funeral processions.

Because of the high caliber of its polo team, Fort Myer featured the best horsemanship in the country by officers from some of the nation’s best families. Washington was a relatively small town at that time, and the officers of Fort Myer were much in demand as escorts to royalty and to national presidents and their families. They often attended balls in various exclusive clubs in Washington, Georgetown, Chevy Chase, and the Maryland and Virginia Hunt Country. More important, they were often in direct contact with such big-name figures as the secretary of war, army chief of staff, War Department staff, U.S. senators and congressmen—all of the movers and shakers that could be useful to a young officer such as George Patton, who was clearly on the make. Washington, as Blumenson describes it, was “where, in the interest of advancing his [Patton’s] prospects, he could exercise his fatal charm on those who counted and those who made the decisions.”

Patton arrived at Fort Myer with all the trappings of an aristocratic army officer of the day: a stable of fine horses, expensive dogs, and shotguns. If anyone had any doubts, George Patton soon demonstrated that he was no poseur by starring on the Fort Myer polo team and riding in various foxhunts, steeplechases, and hell-for-leather point-to-point races in the Virginia piedmont country. With both the Patton and the Ayer heritages hovering over them, George and Beatrice quickly made friends among the horsey set as well as among the doyens of Washington’s high society who inhabited the fashionable parts of the city and its suburbs.

The new officers’ quarters were a great improvement over the shabby facilities that George and Beatrice shared at Fort Sheridan, and they were able to employ a maid and a chauffeur. One day Patton was out riding on one of the many equestrian trails in and around the post when he had the good luck to encounter Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who was enjoying his daily ride. The two joined and in no time Patton’s youthful charm had won him a lifelong friend who would prove invaluable later in his career, during World War II, when his very presence in the army was in jeopardy.

IN MARCH 1912 two interesting things occurred in Patton’s career. First, he was assigned to be quartermaster for the First Squadron, 15th Cavalry Regiment. That might not seem an assignment that a man like George Patton would enjoy, but in his case it came as a compliment as it was in order for him to have more free time to practice and play polo. Second, and far more important, he was being talked about to represent the army, and the United States, in the upcoming Fifth Olympiad to be held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July.

There was an event known as the modern pentathlon that—astonishing as it may seem—encompassed all of Patton’s best skills (which few others in the United States possessed collectively). In the ancient Olympics the pentathlon was conceived as a martial event that consisted of spear throwing, wrestling, and the like. But the modern version, conceived as a test for a young officer carrying a message through hostile territory, featured these five sports: fencing, swimming 300 meters, horseback steeplechase 5,000 meters, pistol shooting 25 meters, and distance running 4,000 meters. Patton was good at all of them: he’d learned distance swimming and shooting on Catalina Island, had been on the track and fencing teams at West Point, and was, of course, a first-rate rider.

In May an invitation was offered and Patton accepted, thus becoming the first army officer to represent the United States in the modern pentathlon. There were no other American competitors nor, in that era, were there Olympic trials, and athletes trained on their own hook. In Patton’s case, according to his daughter, “He started his serious training in May 1912 and it was hard on everyone. He went on a diet of raw steak and salad; according to Ma, he was unfit for human consumption.”³¹

Patton put himself through a brutal training regimen in the five weeks he had before sailing to Europe, and when on June 14 the entire Patton family boarded the SS Finland, which carried most of the American Olympic competitors,^e he used its training facilities, including a canvas pool on deck for swimming practice.

There were forty-two contestants in the pentathlon, including eight Swedish officers. Pistol competition was first and Patton had scored a near perfect 197 out of a possible 200 in practice the day before. He was right on target to repeat it when, “surprisingly, even inexplicably,” two of his bullets missed the target entirely and he came out number 21 of his forty-two fellow shooters.^f

Despite this dreadful beginning, next day at the Royal Tennis Club he finished third in fencing, handing the ultimate victor, a Frenchman, his only defeat. By then there were only twenty-nine competitors, the rest having dropped out.

The steeplechase began at 11 a.m. July 11, with riders starting at five-minute intervals on a course marked with flags a little over three miles in length with twenty-five major jumps and fifty smaller “obstacles” (ditches, logs, low fences, etc.). Patton and two Swedish riders were judged with “perfect” performances, but the Swedes finished ahead in time and Patton came in third.

The foot race was held two days later with the remaining competitors, now down to fifteen, lined up in front of the Royal Boxes. The contestants would run separately at one-minute intervals along a roughly two-and-a-half-mile course that began on the regulation track but quickly left the stadium into heavy woods, across rocks and steep precipices, and into a forest with a swamp six inches deep in mud before finishing back in front of the Royal Boxes. For Patton it was the most grueling ordeal of the event. At the end he was fifty yards ahead of the closest Swedish competitor when, according to the Los Angeles Times, “He stopped almost to a walk as the Swede brushed by, and when [Patton] finished he dropped into a faint.”³² He had finished third.

In the final competition next day, swimming, he placed sixth. Overall, Patton’s standing in the Fifth Olympiad’s modern pentathlon was 5, a very credible showing, made somewhat bittersweet by the knowledge that in each event he had been near the top—except in pistol shooting where he was twenty-one of forty-two, and that is what cost him a possible win.

After the Olympics, Papa Patton took the family on a leisurely tour of Germany where they visited Berlin, Dresden, and Nuremberg, indulging themselves in delicate German candies, desserts, and other confections, which Patton had denied himself all through his training. Yet despite all the first-class accommodations and antique scenery Patton had other things on his mind.

In particular, he was determined to improve his swordsmanship and had discovered through inquiries at the Olympic games that the best swordsman in Europe—nay, the world—was a Monsieur l’Adjutant Clery, master of arms and instructor of fencing at the famous cavalry school at Saumur, France. He was the longtime European champion with the foil, the dueling sword, and the saber.

Patton immediately departed the family tour and journeyed to Saumur where he set up a rigorous schedule of personal instruction by M. Clery in the dueling sword and the saber for two weeks, after which time he rejoined the family for the transatlantic crossing. Upon his return, Patton presented a noteworthy report to the U.S. Adjutant General in which he observed that the French cavalry’s practice of fighting with the sticking point of the saber was both superior and safer than with the slicing edge, as American cavalry did. “It is argued that Americans being a country of axmen the edge comes more natural but from what I saw and what I was told … [it is] La pointe … toujours la pointe. It gives the advantage of reaching the enemy at least a yard sooner than ours does, of presenting only a third of the (friendly) human as target, and of instilling the desire to speed up and hit hard.”

In the days to come this newfound understanding of swordsmanship was to mean a good deal to George Patton’s career.^g

UPON HIS RETURN TO FORT MYER Patton indulged himself in equestrian pursuits—flat racing, foxhunting, steeplechase—and buying more and better horses. In early 1912 he was detached to the Office of the Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood, where he often served as an aide to Secretary of War Stimson. At the request of superior officers he also prepared military papers such as a lengthy assessment of the latest in the eternal series of wars in the Balkans, which he compared with various campaigns of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

At the same time he waited almost breathlessly for some explosion that would bring the United States into the conflict in Mexico, and in his spare time he focused on improvement of swordsmanship for U.S. troops. He wrote to Aunt Nannie about an article he had produced for the Army & Navy Journal: “It is about the sabre and I hope it does some good in educating these [troops] to get over thinking they are all occupied in a carpet-beating contest every time they get hold of a sword.” In a cavalry charge, Patton continued, “the point will always beat the edge. It gets there first.”

The article so impressed Secretary of War Stimson that he ordered the Springfield Armory to manufacture twenty thousand cavalry sabers matching precisely the model Patton designed and showed in his paper. These would become known as “Patton Sabers,” enhancing the already burgeoning career of the young second lieutenant.

In June 1913, doubtless at his own behest, Patton was ordered to return to Saumur for advanced instruction in swordsmanship with an eye toward earning the title Master of the Sword. This in turn would lead to Patton’s opening the army’s first course of instruction in swordsmanship at the Mounted Service (Cavalry) School at Fort Riley, Kansas. Thus far, Patton was doing all the right things to ensure advancement in the army.

At the end of summer, when he was finished with Saumur and M. Clery, and brandishing his new title Master of the Sword, Patton and Beatrice, who had accompanied him, took a tour by motorcar across Brittany to Saint-Malo and across the ominous hedgerows of Normandy to Caen. To Beatrice’s astonishment, George told her he had fought there before, “in an earlier life,” when the Roman legions came to conquer two thousand years ago, and that he would fight there again. Three decades later George S. Patton would renew his acquaintance with these hedgerows on a much less genial basis.³³

At Fort Riley Patton became the U.S. Army’s first Master of the Sword. He went through two years of advanced instruction at the Mounted Service School as well as instructing students himself in swordsmanship. Realizing that captains and majors attending his classes might resent being taught by a low-ranking second lieutenant, he opened his discourse this way: “Now gentlemen, I know many of you outrank me and how hard it must be to take instruction from a man you must regard as a little damp behind the ears. But gentlemen, I am about to demonstrate to you that I am an expert in the sword, if in nothing else, for at least fifteen years, and in that respect I am your senior.”³⁴

He then opened a package on the table before him and produced the two little wooden swords he and his sister Nita had played with at Lake Vineyard, brandishing them in the air to gales of laughter by his class.

Patton satisfactorily completed the Mounted Service School’s first course of instruction in the summer of 1914—the same summer that a Serbian nationalist assassinated Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, touching off World War I—and was selected to attend the second course, another feather in his cap.

Then, on February 28, 1915, at Lake Vineyard, Beatrice gave birth to Ruth Ellen Patton. While it wasn’t the boy Patton had hoped for, he telegraphed her from Fort Riley “D-E-L-I-G-H-T-E-D.” At the same time he unsuccessfully went through back channels seeking a leave of absence to get into the European war on the side of the French, being told by General Wood: “Don’t think of attempting anything of the kind … We don’t want to waste youngsters of your sort in the service of foreign nations.”

Not to be done in, Patton managed to pull enough strings to get himself reassigned to the Eighth U.S. Cavalry at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, on the Mexican border. This was a wild, untamed land of violent men, some of them wanted, and volatile relations with various Mexican armies operating just across the border. It came as close to war as possible without actually being in one, and Patton felt right at home, a man convinced that his moment had come—or at least was coming.

The United States had been moving toward war with Mexico for several years and, as tensions heightened, the War Department began organizing a force of some five thousand troops to guard the border from Texas to Arizona, commanded by Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. He was a hard-charging, no-nonsense general who had received his nickname after commanding the all-black Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry.

Patton’s job was to patrol with two cavalry troops a hundred-mile stretch between the remote outposts on the Texas end of the border that lay within the bleak 5,000-foot Sierra Blanca Mountains. There at a town called Mineral Wells he met and befriended some of the rowdiest men of the West. (“I get along with them well as I usually do with that sort of people.”) One was a man named Dave Allison, “a very quiet-looking man with white hair and a sweet face. He alone killed all the Orasco bunch [a notorious bandit gang] five of them about a month ago, and he kills several Mexicans each month. He shot Orasco and his men each in the head at sixty yards. He seems much taken with me and is going hunting with me.”

In between his hunting (deer, ducks, foxes, rabbits, and antelope), Patton chased down several false alarms of bandit gangs or Pancho Villa’s army—each instance causing him to become almost beside himself at the lost opportunity for putting his saber fighting theory into practice against actual humans. (“We were all disgusted at not finding the Mexicans. It was fine to see how pleased the men were at the prospect of a fight. I had great hopes of seeing how my sabers would work but better luck next time.”)

At some point, during this period in Mineral Wells, Patton had an embarrassing incident with his pistol that nearly unmanned him. The Colt Model 11 .45 semiautomatic had become the standard sidearm of the U.S. Army. But unlike a revolver, which is fairly simple, the automatic can be tricky sometimes, as Patton found when it went off unexpectedly. He had been wearing it “in his trouser fly—like all the local gunmen did … and that in sitting down or moving around he had somehow triggered it off and it had shot a hole right through his trouser leg and into the floor.” Being a man of action, Patton immediately switched to a Colt .45 Model 78 single-action ivory-handled revolver, which remained his sidearm of choice from then on.³⁵

At Christmas 1915 Beatrice came out to Fort Bliss when Patton’s duties afforded him no leave and went to Mineral Wells, where she moved into the only house in town for rent. She roughed it, even with the babies along with their nurse. She and Patton hunted together, riding thirty miles one day along the Rio Grande and sleeping under the stars. (“We got thirteen duck most of them mallard and B. killed two of them besides a quail and a pluver [plover] so she had a fine time.”)

During this period of his career, Patton seemed to lead a charmed life. His attractive twenty-nine-year-old unmarried sister Nita came to Fort Bliss with Beatrice. She was “a tall, blond Amazon with enormous capabilities of love and loyalty and great good sense.” At a dance on the post she was introduced to General Pershing who had recently lost his wife and three daughters in a tragic fire in his quarters in San Francisco. The two were instantly attracted to each other.³⁶ Eventually they would become lovers, which of course put Lieutenant Patton in Pershing’s spotlight as well.

BY EARLY 1916 PANCHO VILLA had turned murderous against Americans after President Woodrow Wilson refused to sell him guns and ammunition. His people kidnapped sixteen American mining engineers off a train and burned them alive. They murdered and mutilated an American ranch manager and kidnapped and raped his wife. Gathering strength as it moved north toward the border, Villa’s army left in its wake a horror of looting, hanging, burning, and raping, before at last it staged an attack on the sleepy border town of Columbus, New Mexico, about a hundred miles west of El Paso, killing eighteen Americans. At last Wilson ordered Pershing to organize a punitive expedition into Mexico to run Pancho Villa to ground.

Patton was thrilled almost beyond words until it was announced that his Eighth Cavalry Regiment was not going on the expedition. This, he said, was because Pershing insisted his officers and men maintain a state of good physical fitness, and the colonel commanding the Eighth was rotund. “There should be a law killing fat colonels on sight,” Patton wrote sourly to his father.³⁷

Immediately he applied to Pershing to be taken on his staff, but the general had all the aides he was authorized. Patton managed to talk his way into going anyway, essentially because Pershing liked his company—and there was, of course, sister Nita too.

Patton at once made himself indispensable—carrying messages, seeing after the clerks, the mess, logistics, newspaper reporters, the animals, automobiles, and anything else that needed tending, including Pershing’s hankering for engaging conversation on the trail. There were more than five thousand cavalrymen on the hunt for Pancho Villa, most on horseback but some in motorcars, as well as six flying machines for dispatch and reconnaissance—the first use of American aircraft on an actual combat mission.^h

Pershing’s party took the train from El Paso to Columbus and started to track down Villa from there. It was Patton’s opinion that finding and punishing Villa was not going to be easy. His men had fought well at Columbus and the Mexican terrain was hard on U.S. troops. There were few roads, no maps, and no water for the first hundred miles, Patton told his father. “They can’t beat us, but they will kill a lot of us. Not me,” he added.

The punitive expedition was doomed to failure from the start; Pancho Villa simply had too many places to hide in the vast canyons of the Sierra Madre. Bands of Villistas would frequently ambush American convoys or pick off lone soldiers, then vanish into the murky wastes of the mountains. On March 30, 1916, the Seventh Cavalry killed about thirty Villistas in a gunfight near Guerrero, but other than that it was maddening between the boredom and the bugs, snakes, rats, tarantulas, nighttime cold, sleet, rain, and snow, daytime heat, dust, and high winds (“the windiest place in the world,” Patton said)—they were on the edge of the Great Chihuahuan Desert at 4,000 feet of altitude with Mexicans taking potshots at them all the time.

Patton was constantly nagging Pershing to let him ride out on search missions; one of these, in early May, led to a famous incident that got Patton headlines in newspapers across America. Patton was part of a party from the 13th Cavalry that raided the San Miguel Ranch in search of Villa’s top lieutenant, General Julio Cárdenas. They did not find Cárdenas but they did find his wife, baby, and, nearby, his uncle who, Patton wrote in his diary, “was a very brave man and nearly died before he would tell me anything.”

A week later, Patton was sent by Pershing to the town of Rubio to purchase corn for the headquarters staff’s horses. After doing so he decided on his own to return to the scene of the previous raid to see if he could catch General Cárdenas unawares. He had at his disposal ten armed men from the Eighth Infantry and two armed guides in three open touring cars.

Patton gathered the men around him and explained his plan, which was to surround the rancho where they had previously found Cárdenas’s wife and child so that no one could leave without being seen. The raid was carried out at straight-up noon on May 14, and resembled, according to one historian, “a Mexican-American version of the gunfight at the OK Corral.”

Patton approached the rancho from the front on a low rise from which his automobile could not be seen from the compound until he was relatively near it. Then as he topped the rise he gunned the motor and before anyone inside the rancho could react he and his men were out brandishing weapons. Outside the house were four men skinning a cow, who did not stop, even with the guns, but kept at their task as if nothing were happening.

As he rounded the corner of the walled patio, Patton was startled to see “three armed men [dash] out on horseback.” Patton hollered “Halt,” but instead the three shot at him, the bullets hitting the wall about a foot over his head and spattering him with adobe chips. One of the armed horsemen rode right in front of Patton, who was about to shoot him with his pistol but suddenly remembered something Dave Allison (the old lawman in Mineral Wells who had gunned down the Orasco gang) had told him: “Always shoot the horse of an escaping man.” Patton did this and the horse fell with a broken hip; when the rider rose with his pistol, Patton and others of his party shot him “and he crumpled up.”

The second man was on the verge of escaping when he was brought down in a hail of rifle bullets from the Americans, including Patton. The third man, witnessing this, had reentered the patio and was trying to escape on foot when he was spied by one of Patton’s men and brought down at a distance of nearly three hundred yards. Wounded, he was approached by one of the guides and drew his pistol and fired but missed, then the guide “blew out his brains.”

During all of this activity the four men skinning the cow had continued resolutely at their task. They stopped, however, long enough to identify for Patton the corpses of General Cárdenas and his aide, a colonel in Villa’s army, and a private.

They slung the bloody corpses over the hoods of the motorcars and strapped them down like grisly hunting trophies. When they returned triumphantly to Pershing’s headquarters, the general let Patton retain Cárdenas’s fancy silver mounted saddle and saber, and the newspaper reporters went into a frenzy over finally having a story worthy of the name. Across the country, headlines lauded Patton as a hero, including the New York Times, which blared: “Dramatic Fight At Ranch—Lieut. Patton and Ten Men Killed Three Bandits—Peons Kept Skinning a Beef.” He wrote Beatrice, “I have at last succeeded in getting into a fight … I have always expected to be scared but was not nor was I excited. I was afraid they would get away.”

A few days afterward, outside his tent, he shot two rattlesnakes with his pistol and was teased for not killing them with his saber. He told Beatrice that it was improper to use a saber while on foot, and added, “You are probably wondering if my conscience hurts me for killing a man, it does not. I feel about it just as I did when I got my first sword fish, surprised at my luck.”

On May 23, after seven years of service, he was at last promoted to first lieutenant. Not long after, Papa Patton had decided to run for the Senate as a Democrat from California, while at the same time campaigning for President Wilson. Patton despised Wilson as “that unspeakable ass,” without “the backbone of a jellyfish,” who had left the army unprepared for a major war that he was sure the United States would be drawn into in Europe despite Wilson’s denials.

THE PUNITIVE EXPEDITION against the elusive Villa seemed to take on a life of its own, with mountains of supplies arriving in Dublán and daily cavalry patrols returning empty-handed. Boredom set in and Patton began reflecting that he was thirty-two years old with no prospects in sight for the greatness he expected to achieve. He worried about losing his hair and kept trying on his cadet uniform to see if it still fit. His father lost the Senate race, which depressed Patton even more—he had thought that having a father in the Senate would be good for his career.

Pershing, meanwhile, pursued Nita with ever growing ardor. In early 1917 he traveled to Lake Vineyard to ask Papa Patton for her hand, but was met outwardly with “grave doubts” over the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages. What Patton Sr. kept to himself was that he did not think Pershing “was good enough” for his daughter because, among other things, Pershing’s father had been a brakeman on the railroad.³⁸

Both Mrs. Patton and Nita were “set on it,” however, and Pershing left with the understanding that he and Nita would be married soon. There the matter stood until, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I, precipitating the dispatch of more than two million American soldiers into what was at the time the most terrible conflagration in world history—and the bittersweet end of the hopes of marriage between Nita Patton and General John J. Pershing.

^* Patton used the walking stick, or cane, to bang on the sides of his tanks during maneuvers to let them know it was him outside.

^† He was Robert Patton, the eldest, a former navy officer and alcoholic who died of excessive drink.

^‡ Because the official orders remained to be cut before his death, the promotion was not awarded.

^§ A decade later Colonel George S. Patton and his brother Colonel Waller Tazewell Patton were disinterred and reburied together, covered by a Confederate flag, in a midnight ceremony attended by many old Confederate soldiers, illegally in their uniforms, as well as his son George S. Patton II, then in the uniform of a VMI cadet.

^ǁ A number of Confederate officers and soldiers went to Mexico or to Central or South American countries after the war. Most returned but some stayed, most famously in Brazil, where there remains today a large colony of the descendants of Southern Confederates who successfully colonized there.

^a Today it is the site of the widely respected Caltech.

^b Robert Patton notes in his excellent book The Pattons a most un-bluestocking side of Beatrice, such as the time when, on a cruise along the Nile at the age of eleven, she “bribed their Egyptian boatman with ten dollars to bring her to a local tattoo parlor where she hoped to receive a tattoo just like the boatman’s: a full-rigged ship across the chest.” Frustrated in this attempt, she then surreptitiously snapped the big toe off a two-thousand-year-old mummy during a tour of a recently discovered ancient tomb and kept it in a jelly jar for a souvenir.

^c Spelling continued to be a frustration for Patton, as is evident in his diaries and correspondence. His misspellings have been maintained in quotes and excerpts throughout this book.

^d A five-passenger Stevens-Duryea listed at $1,750—about $45,000 in today’s money.

^e Including the great American Indian athlete Jim Thorpe.

^f Some biographers, as well as the eight Swedes in the competition, insisted the bullets must have passed through previous holes, which is possible, but rules were rules.

^g In 1912 the cavalry saber was still considered a potent weapon in the arsenal of small arms throughout the armies of the world.

^h These were Curtiss JN-2 “Jennies,” all of which crashed within the first month—two in the first week.