Brothers, Rivals, Victors

The only break in the monotony of that lackluster fall was the arrival of a hard-charging Californian named George Patton, a colonel who had been assigned command of a light tank outfit temporarily in Ike’s care. Tall and spotless in his tailored jacket, riding breeches, and mirror-polished boots, Colonel Patton looked like he had stepped off the cover of an officer’s field manual. He carried his six-foot, one-inch frame as if the world were one great parade square. He dressed with the precision of an honor guardsman, and his blue-gray eyes squinted over a practiced scowl as he barked out commands in a high-tenored, almost feminine voice.²

The two officers could hardly have been more different. George Smith Patton Jr. was an eclectic mix of socialite patrician and profane horse soldier, a field officer whose family wealth allowed him to maintain a lifestyle even a general’s pay couldn’t support. Ike, two inches shorter and five years Patton’s junior, was an instinctively likable infantryman whose meager salary made it hard for his family to make ends meet. Patton, who had descended from Confederate and Revolutionary War heroes, believed that greatness could be bred, much like speed in racehorses or strength in bulls. Ike, whose Kansas and Pennsylvania forebears, as far as he knew, had never been more than modestly successful, could point to nothing in his lineage that would mark him for the history books.

Both men had quick, powerful tempers and cursed violently, but Eisenhower’s rough edges were softened by an easygoing charm and an infectious grin—the wide, full smile toothpaste companies pay big money to put on advertisements—while the strutting, cursing Colonel Patton remained “onstage” to anyone outside his inner circle of friends. Even their marriage partners were a study in contrasts; Beatrice Ayer Patton, the fiery, athletic, cultured Boston heiress, grew up in a world of New England privilege that Ike’s wife, the shrewd, plain Mamie Doud Eisenhower, could never understand or, for that matter, care much about.³

One personal connection they shared, a source of pride to both officers, was their alma mater. Patton had graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, in 1909, and a lanky Cadet Eisenhower had come through those same hallowed halls a half dozen years later.

But after graduation, the two men’s careers were night and day. Working his way onto the Army’s fast track, Colonel Patton had chased Pancho Villa with Pershing, carried the Army’s torch in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, redesigned the cavalry’s saber, established the Tank Corps, fought in France, and returned from Europe with a bullet wound, four battle stars, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Distinguished Service Medal, and the Croix de Guerre. Eisenhower, whose athletic career had been cut short by a knee injury, had little to show for his fifteen years in uniform beyond a fine record as a small-time football coach and a local reputation as a solid administrator. During the war, his service was all stateside and all humble, most of it near the Gettysburg battlefield where one of George’s Confederate ancestors had been killed by a Union bullet. Instead of leading men into combat, Eisenhower had spent the Great War teaching others to fight under battle captains. Men like Colonel Patton.⁴

For all his accomplishments, George Patton arrived at Camp Meade in the midst of a blue funk. Beneath his woolen tunic and flint-hard skin, George struggled with a depression that had slugged him on his thirty-third birthday, November 11, 1918. The day the guns, to his dismay, fell silent.

Months of tactical training, and years of sharpening his mind and body—everything he had worked for—had come together in just two precious days of fighting. Then Colonel Patton’s war ended, courtesy of a single, damnable Mauser bullet on the opening day of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. By the time Patton had recovered from Fate’s kick in the ass (or, more precisely, a shot through his upper thigh, which emerged from his buttocks), the thing had ended. The Great War. The war everyone had been waiting for. The adventure George had pursued all his young life.

Amidst a peace that brought broad smiles to those around him, George Patton found himself adrift in a frustrating, empty existence where the things he held dear didn’t seem to matter to anyone. War had expanded his horizons, shaped his spirit, shown him her power and majesty. But after a brief, delicious taste of smoke and fury, he was rudely dumped back into a petty world of small men. Men of peace. The men of Camp Meade, 1919.

Patton’s youngest daughter later described the land into which this disciple of Mars had returned:

[H]e was in considerable pain at the time; worried about the future in the tank corps of his creation; and having a hangover from the war, which is a very real thing. A man goes from the command of thousands of men where his judgement means victory or defeat, life or death, to the shrinking command of a handful of men, and the narrowing horizons of peacetime duty with not enough money and not enough troops, and the tender trap of home and family—and, it is a let-down. I guess things didn’t come up to Georgie’s expectations. . . .⁵

As flavorless as life had become for the two young officers, within weeks of their first meeting they managed to rekindle a fire in each other, a fire based on evolving military theory. What bound the two unlikely friends together, they discovered, was a veneration of the tank, the steel horse they conceived to be the saber’s slicing edge on the modern battlefield. As Ike summed up their early relationship, “From the beginning [George] and I got along famously. . . . Both of us were students of current military doctrine. Part of our passion was our belief in tanks—a belief derided at the time by others.”⁶

Army doctrine, based on the prevailing practice in Europe, held that a tank’s job was to support the infantry by providing cover, smashing through barbed wire and directing close fire support. A tank need not go much faster than five miles per hour, since its function was tied to the foot soldier who crouched, ducked and stumbled through No-Man’s-Land. The two young officers envisioned a new, independent role for tanks in which they would be free to drive deep into the enemy’s rear areas.

It was only a theoretical pursuit, and the two men’s fervor would remain academic until the next big war erupted—if it ever did. But in a peacetime army, the two tankers relished their role as the young, up-and-coming intellectuals. Unpersuaded by the Wilsonian crowd that war was a relic of man’s unenlightened past, they spent their evenings on porches and around heating stoves debating how tanks might create breakthroughs in imaginary battles, spinning hypotheticals and arguing solutions late into the night.⁷

Their passion for the armored breakthrough—a confluence of imagination and optimism many of their superiors lacked—forged a friendship between George and Ike that would shape their lives in ways they couldn’t begin to imagine in the fall of 1919. But the one thing they both saw clearly was the coming of another war, someday, somewhere. As Ike remembered it, “George was not only a believer, he was a flaming apostle. In idle conversations and in the studies we jointly undertook, he never said ‘if’ war might break out, it always was ‘when.’ As we worked, talked and studied together we became close friends.”⁸

As they drew close, the two friends discovered other interests that stoked their kinship. Though Ike could never dream of joining Patton in polo, a wealthy man’s sport (and one that required healthy knees), he and George, both hitting their early thirties, loved casual riding and shooting, and they craved any small-time adventure they could gin up in the pastoral Camp Meade setting.⁹

Sometimes their itch for a little excitement produced odd larks for two otherwise responsible officers. Learning that unarmed travelers on the road leading to camp were being preyed upon by highwaymen, the two officers climbed into Patton’s touring car and drove up and down the darkened road at night, hoping to draw out banditos on whom they would turn the tables with a half dozen pistols.¹⁰

Another sunny afternoon found the two officers on the machine gun range, happily blazing away with a .30-caliber Browning to determine how long they could fire the weapon before its barrel overheated and its accuracy dropped off. Patton, delighted to be the trigger man, obligingly fired several long bursts while Ike, field glasses pressed to his squinting eyes, watched the bullets arc downrange.

After George ran through part of a long ammunition belt, Ike suggested they take a break and check their targets. But they had not stepped far downrange when they heard the old Browning behind them bark. Then again. And again. The steaming gun was cooking, sending bullets flying past them with insistent pops, each of which reheated the gun.

“George, that gun’s so hot it’s just going to keep on shooting!” Ike yelled as both men dashed for cover. Sprinting clear of the buzzing .30-caliber rounds, Ike and George scampered back to the gun like two lanky characters scurrying across a Norman Rockwell canvas. Patton grabbed the ammunition belt and gave it a hard twist, and the jammed weapon fell silent.

Another time, the two self-appointed tank technicians conducted an experiment to learn whether a heavy Liberty tank could tow three light Renault tanks using steel cables. As the grunting Liberty strained forward, the cable stretched, twisted, and finally snapped, sending the frayed end slashing like a rapier just inches from both men’s heads. Realizing that “we were certainly not more than five or six inches from sudden death,” Ike later recalled, “We were too startled at the moment to realize what had happened, but then we looked at each other. I’m sure I was just as pale as George.”

The “bandit patrol,” the cooked Browning, and the tank cable incidents, though quixotic, were honest parts of Ike and George as the 1920s opened. Ike had grown up a Kansas schoolyard scrapper, while George, in a more studied way, had sought out danger, especially where “civilized” weapons were employed. As the two men goaded each other into odd little adventures—mental and physical tests in a game of “us against the world”—each impressed the other as a man’s man: tough, disciplined, ready to fight. In the bucolic days of the peacetime Army, these whimsical adventures provided a taste of the excitement George and Ike had missed during the war. They also tempered the iron in their friendship.

At Camp Meade, the Patton and Eisenhower families lived next door to each other in two abandoned barracks that the Army had permitted them to convert into officer quarters. It took a lot of work to turn an oversize wooden bunkhouse into something approaching a decent family home, but the Patton-Eisenhower barracks renovation project became another brick in their relationship. They hired off-duty enlisted men to knock out walls, rerouted plumbing, and sectioned off each building for three bedrooms, allowing the two families to accommodate the two Patton daughters, Ike’s baby boy, and guests. They repainted walls, they hung curtains, and before long, the old, rambling shacks took on a comfortable, even inviting appearance. As a homey touch, Ike and Mamie planted flowers and vegetables outside their quarters; as Ike recalled, “I had put in too many years coaxing corn and tomatoes and green grass out of the Kansas soil ever to give it up.” As their homes took shape, the two families grew close; Ike’s two-year-old son, Doud Dwight, nicknamed “Icky,” spent many hours at the Patton household playing with George’s daughters, Bea and Ruth Ellen, who idolized the charming Mamie and doted on her little boy.¹³

As was the custom among Old Army officers, George and Ike kept active social lives. Patton’s high standing within the War Department occasionally drew visitors from Washington and other parts, and George and Beatrice frequently entertained guests over lavish dinners at which Ike and Mamie were regular faces. Ike and George also played poker with their brother officers. Ike, a cardsharp, usually took the lion’s share of the pot at George’s expense, but George never complained. Patton could afford to lose, and as a gambler, he never tried very hard when the stakes were merely money. He was hoarding his luck for bigger stakes.¹⁴

While Ike and George were becoming fast friends, their robust personalities occasionally threw off sparks. Ike remembered that the two had “heated, sometimes almost screaming, arguments over matters that more often than not were doctrinal and academic rather than personal or material.” One rocking-chair topic on which they would never agree, for instance, was the unanswerable question of the most vital condition to military victory. George, a romantic at heart, argued vehemently that battlefield leadership trumped all other factors. His heroes—Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, Stonewall Jackson—had triumphed over incredible odds through audacity, boldness, and conspicuous leadership, the kind of showmanship that puts fire into the ranks and keeps rational men advancing into steel and fire. From his childhood study of history to his battlefield experience in France, everything Patton knew insisted that leadership wins battles. And battles decide wars.¹⁵

Ike, a Midwesterner who hailed from a land of interdependent farming and mercantile communities, felt that personal leadership was just one of several ingredients that influence a battle’s outcome. While personal leadership was important, he thought George too willing to denigrate the mundane—logistics and alliances, for instance—in favor of the warrior-king’s more picturesque role of plunging into battle, broadsword swinging. Men-at-arms had to be organized, fed, and supplied with effective weapons to be useful on the battlefield, he argued. Ike agreed with Voltaire that God is on the side of bigger battalions, but he believed a general at the head of a starving mob would lose his war, no matter how inspiring his personal deportment might be. This philosophy was an integral part of Ike Eisenhower, the product of his upbringing in turn-of-the-century Kansas as much as his formal studies.

In late 1920, the Patton-Eisenhower collaboration reached its peak as each wrote scholarly articles predicting that tanks would play an independent role in future conflicts. In May 1920, Colonel Patton published an article in the highly respected Infantry Journal entitled “Tanks in Future Wars,” in which he debunked the Army’s prevailing doctrine that the sole place of the tank was to support the infantry. “The tank corps grafted onto infantry, cavalry, artillery, or engineers will be like a third leg to a duck,” he wrote, “worthless for control, for combat impotent.”

Later that year Ike, also writing for the Infantry Journal, proposed that American tanks be fitted with heavier guns. He predicted that in future wars, tanks would use their mobility and firepower to crush the enemy from the flanks. As Ike would recall late in life, their theories were “the beginnings of a comprehensive tank doctrine that in George Patton’s case would make him a legend. Naturally, as enthusiasts, we tried to win converts. This wasn’t easy but George and I had the enthusiasm of zealots.”¹⁶

In arguing for the supremacy of armor over infantry, Eisenhower and Patton were not indulging in mere refinement. Their ideas, if put into practice, would take the tank out of its supporting role and place it on center stage in the next war, giving the snorting, ornery beasts the shock role once held by the armored knights of the Middle Ages. They were advocating revolution, pure and simple, and they were proselytizing in the infantry, the most conservative branch of the nation’s most conservative institution.

This sort of talk was anathema to the infantry overlord, Major General Charles Farnsworth, who could not believe any responsible officer would willingly advocate an armored force as something other than fire support for the foot soldier. Farnsworth abruptly summoned Eisenhower to Washington, and in a short but icy interview, the Chief of Infantry threatened to break Ike’s career if he wrote any further on the subject.¹⁷

A chastened Ike conceded the point—outwardly, at least. He recanted his heresy and penned an unpublished essay that concluded, “tanks can never take over the mission of the infantry, no matter to what degree developed.” But inside, this military Galileo was still a believer. Whatever hidebound old generals like Farnsworth might say, Ike knew tanks would change the way nations fought wars.¹⁸

Patton, for his part, never lacked for shrill enthusiasm, but in the rigid confines of a shrinking army, shrill enthusiasm didn’t count for much, and at this stage in his life, he knew enough to stop bucking the system. He and Ike might hack with all their might at the roots and branches of the “infantry first” doctrine, but in the end the tree stood: tall, solid, and unbent.¹⁹

The injunction from Washington’s khaki cardinals was a blow to the Patton-Eisenhower crusade, but as with most persecutions, the disciples simply circled their wagons and stuck quietly to their beliefs. They cursed and joked about brain atrophy among the top brass, and they filled their days riding, studying, and debating wars of the future, without openly trying to convert the unsaved.²⁰

Months of debate, practice, drill, and theory—as well as poker, persecution, and the occasional odd adventure—cemented a friendship that would last nearly a lifetime. Life was stimulating and enjoyable, and the two talented officers had many a good year ahead of them in the Tank Corps, so they thought. But in 1920 the War Department folded the Tank Corps into the infantry branch under a law reorganizing the peacetime Army. George’s heart led him back to the cavalry, his first love, while Ike, an infantryman by training, remained with the tanks. Separated into different branches, the two friends, both reduced to their permanent ranks, would see little of each other over the next two decades. But, as is common in Army life, they kept the fire of their friendship stoked with infrequent but heartfelt correspondence.²¹

By the time George and Ike parted ways in October of 1920, each man had developed a vague understanding of his place in the next big war, which they saw as the inevitable result of the Treaty of Versailles. George, the senior man, did not want to run the whole show; that involved too much staff work, too much paperwork, not enough battlefield leadership. No, he would let Ike handle the planning. In the next war, Patton would lead flesh-and-blood men to victory on horseback—or, perhaps, in a tank. As Ike recalled:

In all his speculative ramblings George always saw himself as commander of highly mobile troops. Initially he likened himself to Ashby, the brilliant cavalry leader under Stonewall Jackson. But he soon raised his sights. “Ike,” he’d say, “This war may happen just about twenty years from now. This is what we’ll do. I’ll be Jackson, you’ll be Lee. I don’t want to do the heavy thinking; you do that and I’ll get loose among our #%&%$# enemies.” This thought was repeated time and time again.²²

George’s brash words may have been the bemused ramblings of two buddies drinking beer on the front porch. But a small yet supremely convinced voice told George and Ike they would do something together, something big. As Ike summed up those heady days, “In our outlook on the future we were always partners; in those days it never occurred to either that we might, in war, become separated from each other.”²³

The dark-eyed Missourian had left West Point in July 1915 with the accoutrements of a newly minted officer: a .45 Colt pistol, a broad-brimmed campaign hat, a marginally useful sword, and a pair of six-power field glasses. For the succeeding two years, Omar Nelson Bradley had crisscrossed the country from New York to Washington State, leading one company of infantrymen after another, never firing a shot in anger.²⁴

The major with the taut grimace and lean athletic frame should have been commanding a battalion in Europe. There certainly was enough fighting to go around, and he had enough training and field experience under his belt to rightfully expect a combat command. But things never seemed to work out for Omar. War with Mexico came and went, and “Brad” was stranded on the sidelines. War in Europe spilled across the Atlantic, and the Army, in its unbounded wisdom, shunted Brad off to the 14th Infantry Regiment, a luckless outfit scattered across dull garrison posts from Alaska to Montana.²⁵

The 14th was a dead-end assignment, and Brad’s efforts to transfer to a fighting command came to nothing. The only battlefield he would see during the World War was near the Anaconda copper mines of central Montana, where the enemy consisted of strikers and labor agitators instead of spike-helmeted Germans. On St. Patrick’s Day, 1918, union men of the Industrial Workers of the World attempted a riot in nearby Butte. Hundreds of roughnecks armed with brass knuckles and knives marched down Main Street, and Brad ordered his ninety-one-man company out, bayonets fixed, ready to cut down anyone foolish enough to charge their lines. The look of determination on Bradley’s doughboys cooled the passions of the strikers, and the IWW left the town alone.²⁶

That was it. Four American divisions were fighting German storm troopers in France, and Brad was playing small-town sheriff in Montana. He might as well have remained in the poverty-stricken backwoods of southern Missouri he had left as a teenager.

It was an anxious time for the square-jawed left fielder, for like Ike Eisenhower, his old Academy classmate, the thing Brad feared most was to be left behind. The Great War was fast becoming what he feared most. To add to his misery, the childhood sweetheart who became his bride, Mary Quayle Bradley, delivered their first child, a son, on the day he faced the rioting miners. Stillborn. The loss of what would be his only son was a bitter blow to a man whose family had seen hard times. This particular wound would sting for the rest of Brad’s days.²⁷

The melancholy major endured six more dreary months of administrative duty before the first serious rumor of action reached his company, and in late 1918 the 14th Regiment was ordered to assemble at Camp Dodge, near Des Moines, Iowa. The order was just the news Brad longed to hear—splendid news, for it portended a quick trip to Europe. It meant fighting in France, leading men into battle. Finally, Brad thought, after years of drilling dull-witted enlisted men, processing Army paperwork, and maintaining order in one godforsaken outpost after the next, Bradley’s stoicism would be rewarded, and perhaps soon.²⁸

But the world changed again as Brad and Mary strolled down the streets of Des Moines one afternoon. Whistles began to blow. Church bells rang. A seismic wave rolled over the city. Streets began filling with people smiling, waving, spreading the good news.

While Brad could never admit that he wished the war had lasted six months longer—he was, like everyone else, relieved to see the casualty lists come to an end—he was miserable about missing his big chance at success. “I was glad the war had stopped,” he wrote later, “but I was now absolutely convinced that, having missed the war, I was professionally ruined. I could only look forward to a career lifetime of dull routine assignments and would be lucky to retire after thirty years as a lieutenant colonel.”³⁰

Facing down club-wielding strikers and busting drunken enlisted men wasn’t much to call a wartime experience, and Brad had the bittersweet pleasure of welcoming home classmates returning from France with medals, high rank, and riveting tales of fighting under the legendary “Black Jack” Pershing.

He could not hope to compete with peers who had seen the face of battle, friends whose places in the Army’s grand history were secure. Apart from a meager salary and a temporary major’s rank that would probably tumble to lieutenant once Congress demobilized the Army, the country boy from Moberly, Missouri, had nothing to show for the last five years of his life. Staring at an empty horizon, Brad shelved his hopes for adventure.

But even in peacetime, the Army still offered a regular paycheck—something his family never saw when he was a child—and Bradley had invested nine years of his life into a military career. So he considered trying his hand at military academics. Teaching was in his blood, after all—his father had been a rural schoolmaster—and in his late twenties, Brad was warming up to classroom instruction, the kind of pedagogy he and Cadet Eisenhower had blithely ignored when they roamed the yards of West Point, focusing on their athletic careers. Perhaps, Brad thought, he could make his mark as an instructor in infantry theory, or maybe even teach at his alma mater. Almost anything, he decided, was better than sweating out another hot summer in Arizona or Texas, marking a long, plodding march to retirement.

So as the 1920s opened to a nation grateful to be at peace, Omar Bradley readjusted his sights and scrounged around for new, less ambitious opportunities. With few attractive options and a young family to support, he was quietly determined to make the best of whatever the Army would give him.