CHAPTER 3

George Patton

The specialist

T he Marshall template for generalship was not a rigid mold. It made room for exceptions, especially at higher levels of command. Marshall would put up with George Patton and some other outliers because their combat effectiveness made them irreplaceable.

Even now, more than six decades after his death, Patton remains one of our most remarkable generals. “You have no balance at all,” Marshall’s wife once scolded the young Patton, correctly, years before World War II. Maj. Gen. Ernest Harmon, one of his peers, wrote that he was “strange, brilliant, moody.” The blustery Patton behaved in ways that would have gotten other officers relieved, but he was kept on because he was seen, accurately, as a man of unusual flaws and exceptional strengths. Marshall concluded that Patton was both a buffoon and a natural and skillful fighter. Ike cast himself as Patton’s defender, writing to Marshall early in the war that “General Patton has . . . approached all his work in a very businesslike, sane but enthusiastic attitude.” It is hardly usual to go out of one’s way to reassure a superior that a subordinate is “sane.”

The closest Patton came to disgrace was in mid-1943, as the Sicily campaign wound down, when he mistreated two hospitalized privates, one of them recovering from battle fatigue (what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). On August 3, 1943, Patton walked into the tent of the 15th Evacuation Hospital and asked Pvt. Charles Kuhl of the 1st Infantry Division what his ailment was. “I guess I can’t take it,” responded Kuhl. Then, according to a report filed at the time by Lt. Col. Perrin Long, a Medical Corps officer, “The General immediately flared up, cursed the soldier, called him all types of a coward, then slapped him across the face with his gloves and finally grabbed the soldier by the scruff of his neck and kicked him out of the tent. The soldier was immediately picked up by corpsmen and taken to a ward tent.” Kuhl ultimately was diagnosed as suffering from chronic dysentery and malaria. It was a display of extreme indiscipline by an officer who was expected to set an example. It also was flatly un-American.

On August 10, Patton subjected Pvt. Paul Bennett to similar harsh treatment. Bennett actually had been evacuated against his wishes and had asked to return to his artillery unit, even though he was “huddled and shivering.” Patton asked him what he was suffering from. “It’s my nerves,” Bennett said.

“Your nerves, hell, you are just a goddamned coward,” Patton shouted. He then slapped Bennett and said, “Shut up the goddamned crying. I won’t have these brave men here who have been shot at seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying.” He then slapped him again, Long recounted, so hard that the private’s helmet liner was knocked into the next tent. Patton ordered a hospital officer to discharge Bennett back to the front. “You’re going to fight,” he told Bennett. “If you don’t, I’ll stand you up against a wall and have a firing squad kill you on purpose.” Patton then reached for his pistol and said, “I ought to shoot you myself, you goddamned whimpering coward.”

There was little question about the facts of the matter. Patton had proudly recorded both incidents in his diary, writing of Pvt. Bennett that “I may have saved his soul, if he had one.”

Patton’s obtuseness about striking soldiers might be better understood if we recall that both he and Eisenhower had observed the exploits of Douglas MacArthur. Both men had been present in July 1932 when MacArthur, then the Army chief of staff, presided over something far harsher than a slap: the teargassing and routing of “Bonus Marchers,” Depression-stricken World War I veterans who came to Washington by the thousands to demonstrate in favor of early payment of a cash bonus not due until 1945. MacArthur exceeded or perhaps ignored his orders, not only clearing out the marchers but burning their encampment, not far from the U.S. Capitol. MacArthur would contend that “not more than one in ten” was a veteran, and those who were tended to be “hard-core” Communists, drunks, and criminals. For his part, Eisenhower said that he had advised MacArthur against getting involved. He also said that when he informed MacArthur at the time that orders had arrived from President Hoover instructing MacArthur not to cross the Anacostia River to the marchers’ camp, MacArthur responded, “I don’t want to hear them and I don’t want to see them,” and then crossed over the bridge.

Eisenhower went out of his way in 1943 to save Patton, though there were ample grounds for his relief. In addition to the slapping incidents, Patton had violated Marshall’s insistence on teamwork with the Allies in Sicily by shooting out ahead of his orders and launching a questionable drive through the western end of the island when the German foe was concentrated in the eastern end. Despite these blunders, Eisenhower hoped to sidestep Patton’s removal. He wrote a harsh letter to Patton instead, demanding that he apologize to his troops. Ike pocketed the contrite letter Patton wrote to him in response and also persuaded three reporters who knew about these incidents not to file stories about them. Just a few days later, Eisenhower was lobbying Marshall to promote Patton to the permanent rank of major general, which was approved. “George Patton continues to exhibit some of those unfortunate personal traits of which you and I have always known and which during this campaign caused me some most uncomfortable days,” he wrote to Marshall. “His habit of impulsive bawling out of subordinates, extending even to personal abuse of individuals, was noted in at least two specific cases. I have had to take the most drastic steps; and if he is not cured now, there is no hope for him. Personally, I believe that he is cured.”

Months later, in November 1943, news of the slapping incidents leaked. In a war being fought in the name of democracy, it was devastating to have an American general behaving like a barroom bully. Eisenhower had recognized this when he ordered Patton to apologize to his enlisted men and to tell them that he “respected their positions as fighting soldiers of a democratic nation.”

Despite Ike’s hopes, Patton was not cured. In the spring of 1944, with the slapping controversy barely past, Patton again made headlines, wisecracking at a public event in Knutsford, England, that it was “the evident destiny of the British and Americans to rule the world.” In the wake of that outburst and the headlines it provoked, Ike commented to Marshall of Patton that “apparently he is unable to use reasonably good sense in all those matters where senior commanders must appreciate the effect of their own actions upon public opinion.” Ike made it clear to Patton that he was on the thinnest of ice, informing his old friend, “I am thoroughly weary of your failure to control your tongue and have begun to doubt your all-round judgment, so essential in high military position.” He wrote to Marshall that “frankly I am exceedingly weary of his habit of getting everybody into hot water.”

But again, Ike did not remove Patton, explaining to Marshall that he found his colleague “admittedly unbalanced but nevertheless aggressive,” and so useful to the cause. James Gavin, who knew Patton and served under him in Sicily, concluded that Eisenhower probably would have been justified in relieving Patton, “but he couldn’t spare him. Generalship in that high echelon is a rare commodity, and Georgie had it. Patton had it.”

There also was an oddly personal element in Eisenhower’s handling of Patton. Ike seemed to take a certain pride in protecting the old cavalryman. Part of this was due to their long-standing friendship, and no doubt a sense of obligation. When the war began, it had been Patton who looked out for Eisenhower. As Ike’s colleague Wedemeyer reportedly said to Eisenhower during an argument about what to do with Patton, “Hell, get on to yourself, Ike—you didn’t make him, he made you.” Patton also told Eisenhower early in 1942, “You are about my oldest friend,” and a year later Eisenhower used the same phrase in return. But Gavin was correct: Most of all, Ike knew he needed Patton as a matter of military effectiveness.

Ike’s appreciation of his old friend would always be far more limited than that of German officers, who reportedly saw Patton as one of the best overall Allied generals. “He is the most modern general and the best commander of armored and infantry combined,” a German prisoner of war, Lt. Col. Freiherr von Wangenheim, told his captors.

Eisenhower’s final word on Patton would come more than two decades later, in his last memoir, At Ease. There he repeatedly praised Patton as “a master of fast and overwhelming pursuit” and “the finest leader in military pursuit that the United States Army has known.” It is a revealing superlative, at once lofty and limited. That is, he calls Patton the best, but at something that is described narrowly. He doesn’t call Patton the best general or the best combat leader, nor even the best at waging offensive warfare; he makes it clear that in his view Patton excelled at the single task of hounding a retreating enemy. Narrow as that mission is, it was precisely the job the American military faced in Europe in late 1944 and early 1945, and that is likely the primary reason Patton was never sent home in disgrace. On balance, Eisenhower was right to keep him. And the modern American military probably is worse for not having a few senior commanders with a dose of Patton’s dynamism and color in them.