TWELVE
AVALANCHE
Georgie is one of the best generals I have, but he’s just like a time bomb. You can never be sure when he’s going to go off. All you can be sure of is that it will probably be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
—Ike to Kay Summersby
A GRAPHIC REMINDER OF THE COSTS OF HIS DECISIONS, the hospital tent is a place no general is eager to visit.
In the safe confines of headquarters, casualty returns prepared by company commanders—present, absent, killed, wounded, missing—represent a running ledger of the unit’s business. Of men lost, some for a time, some forever. But those tabulations are silent numbers, recorded on clean sheaves of neatly lined paper—paper that can be filed in a drawer, or handed off to the adjutant general, or passed up the chain to someone else, like so many other reports that cross a general’s desk each day.
Inside the warm canvas walls of the field hospital, a commander cannot pretend the price of his calculations is a mathematical abstraction. In the receiving tent, a man sees, hears, and smells the butcher’s bill, splashed in blood, in stench, in sickening sights and cries wrenching to the ear. The field hospital houses no glory; it offers none of the distractions of battle. It is simply a warehouse of misery.
But George’s emotions always lurked just below his leathery skin. His tears flowed easily at the sight of suffering—tears of admiration as much as sorrow—and the passions swirling within his warrior’s breast were hardest to control when he saw younger men maimed and dying. One of his diary entries described a typical visit:
“Stopped at an Evacuation hospital and talked to 350 newly wounded. One poor fellow who had lost his right arm cried; another lost a leg. All were brave and cheerful.” During another visit, George wrote,
“One man had the top of his head blown off and they were just waiting for him to die. He was a horrid bloody mess and was not good to look at, or I might develop personal feelings about sending men to battle. That would be fatal for a General.” At one hospital filled with bandaged amputees, he excused himself to the latrine, where an orderly found him sobbing uncontrollably.
2
Visits to the hospital were an ordeal to the spirit, but George felt they were expected of a great general. No less than fearlessness in battle, he believed compassion for the wounded was part of the example a commander must set. So when George, John Lucas, and a few aides showed up at the receiving tent of II Corps’s 15th Evacuation Hospital near Nicosia around noon on August 3, Patton expected that the commanding general’s presence would encourage the brave men, alleviate a bit of their suffering. Show them their leader cared for them and respected their valor.
3
He moved deliberately from bed to bed, chatting genially with men wrapped in bandages, men hooked to plasma bottles, men missing limbs. Soon he came to a forlorn-looking private from Indiana named Charles Kuhl. Amid antiseptic and oxygen masks, the man seemed out of place. He sat upright, looking feverish and exhausted, but showed no visible signs of injury.
Frowning, George asked him what was the matter.
“I guess I can’t take it,” Kuhl said.
Can’t take it?
To George, the man’s words were a bald confession of guilt—of treason, even—and they took a moment to sink in. But sink in they did, and George’s pulse began to race; his eyes narrowed, his breath became shallow. Inside his head one could almost hear the click of a gun being cocked to fire.
Two or three heartbeats later, the monster roared.
Leaning his six-foot frame into the young man, George began screaming at the bewildered private. Cursing, calling him every type of blasphemous coward in the endless Patton lexicon, George slapped Kuhl across the face with his gloves. Working himself into a frenzy, George grabbed Kuhl by the collar, yanked him to his feet, and shoved him out the tent’s doorway, swinging his boot-clad leg into the lad’s backside and sending him into the arms of some nearby corpsmen, yelling and cursing all the while.
4
Can’t take it, indeed.
After a few moments, George’s breathing slowed, his pulse relaxed, his fury ebbed. He stood quietly in the midst of the shocked hospital staff until, with an imperious air, he marched out of the tent, ignoring indignant looks and shaking heads in his wake.
That night, taking up a heavy, emphatic pen, George told his diary:
In the hospital I also met the only arrant coward I have ever seen in this army. This man was sitting, trying to look as if he had been wounded. I asked him what was the matter, and he said he just couldn’t take it. I gave him the devil, slapped his face with my gloves, and kicked him out of the hospital. Companies should deal with such men, and if they shirk their duty, they should be tried for cowardice and shot.5
On the afternoon of August 10, as a tired, frustrated General Patton was trying to goad Bradley and Truscott into the Brolo landings, he paid an impromptu visit to the 93rd Evacuation Hospital at Sant’Agata di Militello, midway between Palermo and Messina. This time, his eyes lit on a twenty-one-year-old named Paul Bennett, an artilleryman who had been ordered to the rear by his battery’s medical officer. Bennett, like other skulkers George had seen, was sitting on the bed, huddled up and shivering, but still in uniform, even wearing his helmet liner. There wasn’t a damned thing wrong with him. George knew a cowardly rat when he saw one, and he was looking at one now.
6
George strode up to him, halted, and asked him what was wrong.
“It’s my nerves,” Bennett said, his face tightening up.
George’s face tightened up, too. “What did you say?” he demanded, his adenoidal voice rising.
The private sat at attention. “It’s my nerves,” he said. “I can’t stand the shelling anymore.” Bennett’s eyes fluttered, and sitting there he began to cry.
George wheeled on the admitting doctor. “What’s this man talking about? What’s wrong with him, if anything?”
Without waiting for an answer, George, working himself into a full-bloom rage, spun on the young patient. “YOUR NERVES, HELL!” he bellowed. “YOU ARE JUST A GODDAMNED COWARD, YOU YELLOW SON-OF-A-BITCH!!”
Bennett sat there, tears running down his cheeks as George leaned over him and slapped him across the face. Bennett sobbed.
“Shut up that Goddamned crying!!” Patton roared. “I won’t have these brave men who have been shot at seeing a yellow bastard sitting here crying!!”
The livid general swiveled back to the stunned admitting officer and screamed, “Don’t admit this yellow bastard; there’s nothing the matter with him! I won’t have the hospitals cluttered up with these sons of bitches who haven’t got the guts to fight!”
His blue-gray eyes burned as he turned them back on the pitiful man. “YOU’RE GOING BACK TO THE FRONT LINES AND YOU MAY GET SHOT AND KILLED, BUT YOU’RE GOING TO FIGHT. IF YOU DON’T I’LL STAND YOU UP AGAINST A WALL AND HAVE A FIRING SQUAD KILL YOU ON PURPOSE!
“IN FACT,” he continued, reaching for his pistol, “I OUGHT TO SHOOT YOU MYSELF, YOU GODDAMNED WHIMPERING COWARD!” The hospital’s commander, Colonel Donald Currier, came running to the scene of the ruckus. What he saw took him completely off guard.
“I WANT YOU TO GET THAT MAN OUT OF HERE RIGHT A WAY!” George was bellowing to everyone and to no one. “I WON’T HAVE THESE BRAVE BOYS SEEING SUCH A BASTARD BABIED!!”
George began to storm off as Bennett sobbed harder. After a few steps, his mind frozen, he turned back and lunged at the bawling private, slapping Bennett so hard his helmet liner rolled across the floor.
The medical staff, nurses, and patients stared at the three-starred maniac, stunned. Dr. Currier, an old friend of Beatrice’s family, slid between George and his patient and guided the general to the door with respectful, soothing assurances. But George was in no mood to be soothed, and he left the place in a cloud of curses, Currier following close behind. He continued to scream, to no one in particular,
“SEND THAT YELLOW SON-OF-A-BITCH BACK TO THE FRONT LINE!!!” until he had passed from view.
7
His temper receding, Patton completed his hospital tour without incident. But before leaving, he warned Currier, “I meant what I said about getting that coward out of there. I won’t have these cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals. We’ll probably have to shoot them some time anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.”
8
Back at Palermo’s dark palace that night, George truly did not know what to make of the unnamed man he had so violently excoriated.
“Saw another alleged nervous patient,” he told his diary.
“Really a coward. I told the doctor to return him to his company and he began to cry so I cursed him well and he shut up. I may have saved his soul if he had one.”9
Two days after Patton’s visit, Brad’s chief of staff, Brigadier General William Kean, brought his boss a report from an outraged doctor in the 93rd Evacuation Hospital. It was a complaint against the Seventh Army’s commanding general.
Brad read the summary.
George had done it this time. Slapping an enlisted man, kicking him out of the hospital tent? Striking an enlisted soldier was a court-martialing offense. What could George have been thinking?
More to the point, what was he to do with the report?
Had it been up to Bradley, he would have fired George on the spot. But it wasn’t up to him. Army procedure called for General Bradley to forward the report to his superior, General Patton. Of course, that would do nothing except circulate the incident to a larger staff within Seventh Army headquarters, creating problems, gossip, and no solutions.
10
He could bypass Patton and send the report directly to Eisenhower. That would ensure the matter was treated properly, and it would probably mean the end of George Patton’s career. But, reflecting further, Brad felt he couldn’t do that to him. George had pulled him into Sicily, and George had lavishly commended his work in Africa. For all Patton’s exasperating flaws, for every time Brad’s blood pressure shot up over one of his stupid, vainglorious orders, Brad was not going to take the drastic step of bypassing his superior and cutting his throat. He owed George more than that.
He locked the report in his office safe and left it there.
11
Back in sunbaked Algiers, Ike was wrestling with a barrel of problems that ranged from the profound to the mundane. His bowels were recovering from a hideous case of the African trots. The invasion of Italy would take place the next month—a good bit later than Churchill and Marshall desired—and Ike had to make sure Clark’s Fifth Army was ready for that daunting task. Churchill, FDR, Stimson, and Harry Hopkins were pulling him in different directions over the Balkans, De Gaulle, Giraud, and the French coast. Press relations were a never-ending chore, administrative work was piling up, and the country seemed to have naively assumed the war in the Mediterranean was as good as over.
Then, on the morning of August 17, about the time Patton’s scout car was rolling through Messina, Brigadier General Frederick Blessé, AFHQ’s chief surgeon, asked for a moment of the Supreme Commander’s scarce time to talk about a rumor Ike had asked him to check out.
12
General Patton, it seemed, had caused a row at a pair of II Corps hospitals, cursing and striking two enlisted men and riling up the doctors and nurses. Blessé handed Ike a detailed investigative report by a II Corps surgeon describing one of George’s tirades. The report, and the problem, now sat in Ike’s lap.
Dammit, Georgie. Can’t you stay out of trouble for one campaign?
All right, Ike told Blessé. “I guess I’ll have to give George Patton a jacking up.” Standard procedure for bringing the old cuss back into line. Ike said he’d look at the report and take care of the situation, thank you very much.
13
But the more Ike thought about it, the more the incident bothered him. His thin lips curling downward, he ordered Blessé to keep the episode under wraps, at least for now. “If this thing ever gets out,” he cautioned Blessé, “they’ll be howling for Patton’s scalp, and that will be the end of Georgie’s service in this war.”
14
Leaning back into his desk chair, Ike put on his reading glasses and pored over the report, turning it over in his hands as he considered what to do. The document described Patton’s outburst in clinical detail, slap by slap, curse by curse. Set out on paper, the incident was more damning than it had first sounded; his old friend had committed a court-martialing offense, and Ike realized George would need more than just a garden-variety jacking up. Over the next three days an unsettled Ike flailed, smoked, paced, and talked to himself as he tried to figure out what he should do.
It should have been an easy matter to replace George, or to wash his hands of the incident with a quick referral to the War Department—which would be the same as replacing George, though the hands gripping the ax haft would belong to a Department IG man, not Ike.
15
But to Ike, it wasn’t that simple. And it wasn’t just that their friendship went back more than two decades, or that George had been the first general to offer Ike the combat command he had desperately craved before the war.
No, it was a hard call because the Allied crusade needed a difficult man like George Patton. A man who would bull through any obstacle just to prove he was America’s greatest battlefield general. A man whom Ike would one day call “the finest leader in military pursuit that the United States Army has known.”
16
What was it Ike had said before the war? That he could judge a unit merely by knowing its commander intimately? If that were the case, and Ike firmly believed it was, then any army commanded by George Patton would be a formidable one.
17
Distilling George’s value into concrete terms, Ike explained to Harry Butcher that “in any army one-third of the soldiers are natural fighters and brave. Two-thirds inherently are cowards and skulkers. By making the two-thirds fear possible public upbraiding such as Patton gave during the campaign, the skulkers are forced to fight. . . .” George’s method, he said, “was deplorable but his result was excellent.” Ike had even told Dr. Blessé that “Patton is indispensable to the war effort. One of the guarantors of our victory.”
18
It was an extraordinary word, “indispensable,” since an article of Army faith dictates that no man is indispensable. Arlington Cemetery, they say, is filled with indispensable men.
But in Ike’s estimation, George came pretty close. Sure, he might bruise morale from time to time with his martinet act, but most of the grousing, Ike figured, was nothing more serious than the normal soldier complaints. Patton was a successful general, and the bottom line, he told Butcher, was that “soldiers love and respect a successful leader. Nothing breeds confidence like success.”
19
But something had to be done about this outburst, and Ike saw that as clearly as anyone. If the press got wind of this—to say nothing of what Marshall would do when he found out—George Patton would be finished.
Of course the press got wind of it. It always did. General Patton was a popular hero, a man larger than life, and the cycle of great American fables was to build up a hero, then tear him down, then—maybe—raise him up again.
Patton himself had recognized this cycle back in Tunisia when he had written Beatrice in April,
“I am too popular with the press but now I think they will take a crack at me.” Four months later, they had their chance. Hot on the heels of Ike’s meeting with Blessé, a trio of correspondents—Demaree Bess of the
Saturday Evening Post, “Red” Mueller of NBC, and Quentin Reynolds of
Collier’s—rang up Eisenhower’s headquarters, demanding that Butcher set up an appointment with the Supreme Commander to discuss a serious matter involving General Patton.
20
“I know what you’re coming to see him about,” Butcher told them as he penciled in the time. “The general hasn’t slept for two nights worrying about it.”
21
On August 20, the newsmen met with Eisenhower behind closed doors. The press, they said, was in an uproar over Patton’s abuse of his enlisted men. It wasn’t just a sanctimonious feeling of indignation on the part of liberal journals, they stressed; Patton had committed serious a court-martialing offense, and he was becoming a drain on the army’s morale. Quent Reynolds even went so far to claim that “there are at least 50,000 American soldiers who would shoot Patton if they had the slightest chance.” To the reporters covering the Mediterranean theater, it was not about a witch-hunt, or even good copy for their papers. It was a question of Patton’s fitness to command .
22
Eisenhower and the press had enjoyed a relationship of trust going back to the Louisiana exercises of 1941, where his judicious censorship policies had convinced the newsmen that the man from Abilene was an honest fellow who would not squelch the truth, even if it meant revealing problems that gave Uncle Sam’s army the occasional black eye. And despite their addiction to stories of military incompetence and abuse, the newsmen accredited to the theater were patriots who, as much as the foot solider, understood that the overriding goal of everyone was the defeat of Hitler and his Nazi thugs.
Sitting behind his desk, Ike pored over the political landscape like a general surveying his battlefield. Then he took a calculated risk. “You men have got yourselves good stories,” he said, cracking a knowing smile, “and as you know, there’s no question of censorship involved.” He assured the newsmen he would not quash any reports they chose to file about the incident. Then he sat back quietly and awaited their response.
23
The gambit worked. The journalists were proud of the role they had been selected to play, and they wanted to show Eisenhower that the guardians of the Fourth Estate were just as committed to the war effort as the men in uniform. They rallied around Eisenhower’s standard, and they met him more than halfway. Bess, speaking for the pool of forty-plus reporters, emphasized that they were Americans first and journalists second. If Eisenhower felt the story would damage the war effort, he said, they would kill it. Red Mueller went even further, adding, “They were not only going to kill the story but deny it if any of the correspondents broke it.”
24
For the moment, Patton’s skin was intact. Ike had exerted no pressure on the press, made no threats, held out no offers. He simply read the journalists like bridge players and played square with them, knowing they would respond with fair play of their own. A grin and an unspoken request were all Ike needed to save Patton’s career.
A tired Ike shuffled back to his villa that night, sipping nervously a potent cocktail of frustration and worry. Although he sent George the “sternest letter of reprimand he had ever written an officer,” he fretted over what would happen to them on the inevitable day of reckoning, the day when word leaked out and they both had to face the music. Even with his deal with the reporters, he might, he confessed, “have to send Patton home in disgrace.”
25
But what else could he do? Patton had just orchestrated one of the most brilliant military operations of all time, a campaign Ike predicted would be studied as “a model of swift conquest by future classes in the War College.” George was the best ground-gainer in the Allied army, precisely because he demanded so much from his grumbling GIs and their shrugging officers. Friendship aside, Ike believed the Allies couldn’t afford to lose a valuable asset like George. Once victory was assured, and only then, George’s many flaws could catch up with him. But not yet. Not if Ike could help it.
26
As George perused telegrams of congratulation in his crimson-carpeted palace, General Blessé arrived from Algiers with a personal package from Ike. The packet contained a short report. It also contained a terse letter that sent a stab of pain through George’s chest:
Dear General Patton:
I am attaching a report which is shocking in its allegations against your personal conduct. I hope you can assure me that none of them is true, but the detailed circumstances communicated to me lead to the belief that some ground for the charges must exist. I am well aware of the necessity for hardness and toughness on the battlefield. I clearly understand that firm and drastic measures were at times necessary in order to secure the desired objectives. But this does not excuse brutality, abuse of the sick, nor Exhibition of uncontrollable temper in front of subordinates. . . .
[I]t is acutely distressing to me to have such charges as these made against you at the very moment when the American Army under your leadership has attained a success of which I am extremely proud. I feel that the personal services you have rendered the United States and the Allied cause during the past weeks are of incalculable value; but nevertheless if there is a very considerable element of truth in the allegations accompanying this letter, I must so seriously question your good judgment and your self-discipline, as to raise serious doubt in my mind as to your future usefulness. . . . In Allied Headquarters there is no record of the attached report or of my letter to you, except in my own secret files. I will expect your answer to be sent to me personally and secretly. Moreover, I strongly advise that, provided there is any semblance of truth in the allegations in the accompanying report, you make in the form of apology or such other personal amends to the individuals concerned as may be within your power, and that you do this before submitting your letter to me.
No letter that I have been called upon to write in my military career has caused me the mental anguish of this one, not only because of my long and deep personal friendship for you but because of my admiration for your military qualities; but I assure you that conduct such as described in the accompanying report will not be tolerated in this theater no matter who the offender may be.
Sincerely, Dwight D. Eisenhower27
Leaning back into his desk chair, George removed his reading glasses and turned Ike’s letter over in his hands as he considered what to do.
28
George, you really screwed up this time.
Sitting before his diary that evening, George penned a half confession on the subject:
General Blesse, Chief Surgeon AFHQ, brought me a very nasty letter from Ike with reference to the two soldiers I cussed out for what I considered cowardice. Evidently I acted precipitatly and on insufficient knowledge. My motive was correct because one cannot permit skulking to Exist. It is just like a communicable disease. I freely admit that my method was wrong and I shall make what amends I can. I regret the incident as I hate to make Ike mad when it is my earnest study to please him. . . . I feel very low. 29
The next day came an “eyes only” cable from Algiers, which read:
GENERAL LUCAS WILL ARRIVE AT PALERMO AIRFIELD BETWEEN FIVE AND FIVE THIRTY THIS AFTERNOON. IT IS HIGHLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU PERSONALLY MEET GENERAL LUCAS AND GIVE YOUR FULL ATTENTION TO THE MESSAGE THAT HE WILL BRING YOU. IN THE EVENT THAT IT IS ABSOLUTELY IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU TO MEET HIM PERSONALLY, BE CERTAIN TO HAVE TRANSPORTATION AWAITING HIM AND LEAVE WORD AS TO THE PLACE WHERE HE CAN REACH YOU QUICKEST.
30
That didn’t sound good.
George sped to the airport and waited. And waited. After an hour, an ungainly olive drab transport appeared in the distance. It waddled down to the runway and rolled to a reluctant stop. Out from the gangway came Johnny Lucas.
31
In sympathetic but firm tones, Lucas told Patton he had royally screwed up. Ike had called the outbursts in the hospital tents inexcusable, and the press was screaming for his scalp. Lucas described the torch-and-pitchfork mob calling for his head, and he warned his friend not to underestimate the trouble he was in. It was exceedingly unlikely his career could survive this blow, he said, even with Seventh Army’s victories at Palermo and Messina, unless he fixed a massive public relations problem.
George swallowed hard. What was he supposed to do?
Apologize, Lucas told him. Apologize to the enlisted men, the doctors, the nurses, and, though Ike didn’t ask for it, to every damned division in the Seventh Army, since they all probably knew about it anyway. And don’t ever, ever,
ever let it happen again, he said, or Ike would bust him to permanent rank and send him home for trial.
32
A sickened George Patton replayed those words as Sergeant Mims drove him back to the palace. He understood the gravity of the matter, or so he thought, although he still didn’t fully appreciate the grease pit into which he had dropped his friend and commander.
Fighting off a thundercloud of self-pity, Patton quietly ordered his aides to track down Private Bennett and bring him to his opulent office. On Saturday, August 21, beneath rococo frescoes of cherubs and angels, George Patton commenced his apology tour.
He first met with Bennett. As he told his diary,
“I explained to him that I had cussed him out in the hope of restoring his manhood, that I was sorry, and that if he cared, I would like to shake hands with him. We shook.” The transaction completed with the warmth of a real estate closing, George’s aides had Bennett sent back to his unit.
33
The next morning, Patton had the doctors, nurses, and enlisted men who witnessed the affairs report to his office. Dr. Currier grumbled that from behind Patton’s “impressive desk” he offered what seemed to be “no apology at all,” but simply “an attempt to justify what he had done.” On Monday, George called in Private Kuhl and apologized to him, too.
34
Wondering whether Ike would throw him to the wolves, George sat in his office, a badly shaken man. To George, it wasn’t just the humiliation of an apology, for he had been apologizing to enlisted men since his second lieutenant days at Fort Sheridan, and his ego was big enough to say “sorry” to an inferior grade. What haunted him was the fear that the skulkers, pressmen, and bedpan commandos would get him crucified. That the big show would go on in Europe without him. That he would be left out of the greatest fight in man’s long, violent history.
35
To contain the flying shrapnel, George tried a little quiet public relations work of his own. The night after his apology session with Private Bennett, George turned on his most ingratiating, self-effacing charm at a dinner with USO comedian Bob Hope’s entertainment troupe, which was working the Mediterranean and foxhole circuits and happened to be in Sicily. Afterward, Hope recalled Patton taking him aside and asking him in a somber voice, “I want you to tell the people that I love my men.”
The comedian said, “I looked at this guy and I thought he was suffering from some kind of battle fatigue. And I said, ‘You’re the biggest general in our country. You’re in the headlines all the time. . . . You don’t have to worry about anything.’ He said, ‘No, I want you to go on radio when you get back. I want the people to know that I love my men.’ ”
36
His apologies made, his contrition expressed, George hoped his fencemending efforts would kill the controversy. He hoped Ike wouldn’t be too sore at him.
He hoped he hadn’t blown his chance at Army Group command.
To make certain Ike knew he was duly penitent, George took Lucas’s advice and made a whirlwind tour of the entire Seventh Army. He gave his divisions a stump speech that was part pep talk, part eulogy to the fallen, and part vague reference to certain regrettable actions.
He didn’t have to spell it out for the men, for the grapevine’s shoots extend deep into the field, and his soldiers knew exactly what he meant. At some assemblies the men cheered him, but in most cases they didn’t much care; they simply stared, waited for their commanding general to ride off in his big staff car, then went back to their campsites to resume their daily lives.
37
George completed his sentence in purgatory by writing one final, expiatory letter to his commander. Disregarding the advice of Everett Hughes, who warned him not to justify his dumb conduct with dumb excuses, George wrote,
I want to commence by thanking you for this additional illustration of your fairness and generous consideration in making your communication personal. I am at a loss to find words with which to express my chagrin and grief at having given you, a man to whom I owe everything and for whom I would gladly lay down my life, cause for displeasure with me. I assure you that I had no intention of being either harsh or cruel in my treatment of the two soldiers in question. My sole purpose was to try and restore in them a just appreciation of their obligation as men and soldiers. In World War I, I had a dear friend and former schoolmate who lost his nerve in an Exactly analogous manner, and who, after years of mental anguish, committed suicide. Both my friend and the medical men with whom I discussed his case assured me that had he been roundly checked at the time of his first misbehavior, he would have been restored to a normal state. Naturally, this memory actuated me when I inaptly tried to apply the remedies suggested. After each incident I stated to officers with me that I felt I had probably saved an immortal soul.38
Mercifully, by the end of August it looked as if George had cleared his name, at least for the moment. On August 30, he met Ike, Bradley, Montgomery, Keyes, Truscott, and a gaggle of lesser luminaries at Catania for a victory luncheon hosted by General Montgomery. After Eisenhower decorated Monty with the Legion of Merit, George slipped Ike his letter of explanation.
“He just put it in his pocket,” George wrote, concluding with a literary sigh,
“Well, that was a near thing, but I feel much better.”39
Taking Patton aside, Ike asked him to visit Wayne Clark, who was neck-deep in planning for the Italian operation. The implied message, that he might step in as Fifth Army’s deputy commander, boosted George’s spirits.
“[Ike] said that he may lose Bradley, Clark may be killed, and I will have to take over,” George wrote, his confidence returning.
“I seem to be third choice but will End up on top.”
40
Although he had managed to keep the Patton problem within the “Mediterranean family,” Ike continued to toss and turn over what to tell Marshall. Debating the question with his inner circle, Butch wrote, “Ike said Patton’s method was deplorable but his result was excellent. He cited history to show that great military leaders had practically gone crazy in their zeal to win the fight. Patton is like this. . . . Yet Ike feels that Patton is motivated by selfishness. He thinks Patton would prefer to have the war go on if it means further aggrandizement for him. Neither does he mind sacrificing lives if by doing so he can gain greater fame. So Ike is in a tough spot; Patton is one of his best friends . . . but friendships must be brushed aside.”
41
Friendships brushed aside, General Marshall would want Ike’s recommendations on Patton, Bradley, and his other commanders, so the War Department could decide where to place them for the next big show. With Patton, Ike knew he had to walk a very fine line. He could not whitewash the slapping incidents, but he didn’t want to raise too many red flags, either.
Thinking it over carefully, he drafted an accurate but discreet letter to the Chief that did not hide the incidents, but it did not draw too much attention to them, either. In his report he told Marshall that Patton
has conducted a campaign where the brilliant successes scored must be attributed directly to his energy, determination and unflagging aggressiveness. The operations of the Seventh Army in Sicily are going to be classed as a model of swift conquest by future classes in the War College and Leavenworth. The prodigious marches, the incessant attacks, the refusal to be halted by appalling difficulties in communications and terrain, are really something to enthuse about. This has stemmed mainly from Patton. . . . Now in spite of all this—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. His habit of impulsively 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—not only because of his great personal loyalty to you and me but because fundamentally he is so avid for recognition as a great military commander that he will ruthlessly suppress any habit of his own that will tend to jeopardize it. Aside from this one thing, he has qualities that we cannot afford to lose unless he ruins himself.
42
The shock waves of the slapping incidents would continue to rumble and clang for the next few months. Around the first of September, Ed Kennedy, the AP’s local bureau chief, perked Ike’s nervous ears with some harsh comments he had picked up from stateside journalists about General Patton. Kennedy told Ike he was worried that the press corps in Algiers would be accused of whitewashing the slapping scandal, which it had, or that AFHQ would be accused of censoring the story, which it hadn’t.
Though Kennedy and most other journalists accepted Ike’s word that Patton was too valuable to cashier over this double incident, Ike, shaken by Kennedy’s comments, mulled over the idea of making Patton hold a news conference to explain what happened, to tell his side of the story, and to apologize once again. But Butcher, calculating the news cycles, convinced Ike that a press conference would do more harm than good. After all, he pointed out, the next few months would create fresh headlines that would push the slapping story off the front pages.
43
So Ike let the matter go for the moment, hoping it would drift away. But he continued to toss and turn over the repercussions among George’s men. Lucas, back in Algiers, wrote in his diary:
Ike is still worried about George. The rumor is spreading all over North Africa, he says, that George is brutal to his men. The newsmen may have started the story, I don’t know, but there it is. . . . [I]f the higher ups and, above all, the lower-downs, lose confidence in him, his usefulness will be impaired, to say the least. As Ike says, George has never grown up.44
Ike gave George his final trip to the woodshed on September 2, a 105-minute lecture in Algiers that covered the waterfront of judgment errors and verbal slips that he would no longer tolerate. Over lunch with Lucas and Everett Hughes, another trusted friend who, like Lucas, acted as an Eisenhower-Patton intermediary from time to time, George unloaded his troubles, stressing other reasons for his temporary residence in Ike’s doghouse. “Ike has ordered him to apologize to Montgomery for losing his temper,” an astonished Hughes told his diary afterward. “Ike says that Geo. has ruined Monty’s career by getting Messina first, that Ike is going to send an IG to Sicily to ask soldiers what they think about their Army commander.”
45
The story about Monty was undoubtedly one of George’s occasional exaggerations, but the Inspector General’s investigation was real enough. The IG report urged Ike to forward the whole story to Marshall, and Lucas spoke to Eisenhower about the morale problem their friend was wallowing in. Ike’s reply was terse: “Tell George to sit tight and behave himself.”
46
For all the lingering fury over the slapping incidents, as far as Ike was concerned, the gnawing question of his prodigal brother was settled. Ike continued to promote his friend’s interests, and on September 6, when he cabled Marshall on the subject of permanent promotions, he wrote, “With respect to Patton, I do not see how you could possibly submit a list for permanent Major Generals, on combat performance to date, and omit his name. His job of rehabilitating the Second Corps in Tunisia was quickly and magnificently done. Beyond this, his leadership of the Seventh Army was close to the best of our classic examples.”
George’s battlefield performance was exemplary. But given his personal track record, Ike felt he had to edge a bit closer to full disclosure. So he penned an important caveat:
It is possible that in the future some ill-advised action of his might cause you to regret his promotion. You know his weaknesses as well as his strength, but I am confident that I have eliminated some of the former. His intense loyalty to you and me makes it possible for me to treat him much more roughly than I could any other senior commander, unless my action were followed immediately by the individual’s relief. In the last campaign he, under stress it is true, indulged his temper in certain instances toward individual subordinates who, in General Patton’s opinion of the moment, were guilty of malingering. I took immediate and drastic measures, and I am quite certain this sort of thing will never happen again. You have in him a truly aggressive commander and, moreover, one with sufficient brains to do his work in splendid fashion.
47
There, he thought. He had made a clean breast of it, more or less. In Ike’s view, if the Chief wanted to know more about Patton, he could ask. Otherwise, Ike would let the matter drop.
The more Ike reflected on George, the more he was sold on Patton’s unique value to the Allied team. A few weeks later, he sent Marshall a follow-up cable. “[In England],” he suggested, “I gather you are to have
two Armies. I think you should consider Patton for command of one of those Armies.” Patton’s strength, he explained, “is that he thinks only in terms of attack as long as there is a single battalion that can keep advancing. Moreover, the man has a native shrewdness that operates in such that his troops always seem to have ammunition and sufficient food no matter where they are.”
48
But a recommendation for army command, Patton’s position in Sicily, was as high as Ike would go. An army commander’s job was to take largescale objectives as directed by the army group commander. Here’s a city; capture it. Here are the enemy; kill them. An army command in ordinary circumstances required a cup of finesse and a bucketful of drive.
An army group commander’s duties, by contrast, required diplomatic forbearance, strategic farsightedness, and an ability to balance. These salubrious qualities George Patton plainly lacked, at least in the same quantities other men seemed to possess. So Ike told Marshall, “Personally, I doubt that I would ever consider Patton for an army group commander or for any higher position, but as an army commander under a man who is sound and solid, and who has sense enough to use Patton’s good qualities without becoming blinded by his love of showmanship and histrionics, he should do as fine a job as he did in Sicily.”
49
While George and Ike were drawing fire over the slapping incidents, Omar Bradley was savoring the fruits of a beautifully executed campaign. His performance had evidently pleased General Patton, and despite their arguments over the Brolo landings, George sent the Missourian a formal letter expressing his
“admiration for and appreciation of the magnificent loyalty and superior tactical ability you have evinced throughout the Campaign of Sicily.” With considerable exaggeration, George wrote,
“Beyond question, your capture of Troina is the outstanding tactical operation of the Campaign, and is so far as I am aware the most important military victory gained so far during World War II.” 50
Eisenhower’s confidence in his old classmate also bloomed. A week after Messina fell, Ike reported to Marshall, “There is very little I need to tell you about [Bradley] because he is running absolutely true to form all the time. He has brains, a fine capacity for leadership and a thorough understanding of the requirements of modern battle. He has never caused me one moment of worry. He is perfectly capable of commanding an Army. He has the respect of all his associates, including all the British officers that I have met. I am very anxious to keep him in this theater as long as we have any major operations to carry out.” Two weeks later, when discussing permanent rank promotions with the Chief, Ike said of Bradley, “He is, in my opinion, the best rounded combat leader I have yet met in our service. While he possibly lacks some of the extraordinary and ruthless driving power that Patton can exert at critical moments, he still has such force and determination that even in this characteristic he is among our best. In all other things he is a jewel to have around. . . .” By the time Ike was through singing Brad’s praises, the Army’s schoolmaster was being considered for the biggest show of all: next spring’s invasion of France.
51
As the smoke cleared over Messina, Bradley’s public reputation seemed to break out of the confining shadow of Old Blood and Guts. News stories by Ernie Pyle, Hanson Baldwin, and other big-name journalists put the “GI’s General” under the blazing spotlight of public view for the first time in his life.
Time praised the “tall, tough commander of the Army II Corps in Tunisia and Sicily,” and before the end of the year the provincial from Missouri would find himself invited to Buckingham Palace for an elegant gala thrown by King George VI. Even his daughter, Elizabeth, a junior at Vassar College, had become a minor celebrity as word of her now-famous father spread, and her name, and Mary’s, began turning up in news and society columns. The chickens, on which Bradley had never been able to count, were finally hatching.
52
Now all Brad had to do was get away from the rooster in Palermo.
Eisenhower’s letters to Marshall had driven home one point: Both Bradley and Patton were eminently capable of commanding armies. But at the army group level, where logistics had to be balanced among competing armies, where moves had to be coordinated with allies, teamwork was paramount. An army group commander, Ike knew, needed diplomacy and perspective as much as tactical expertise. More, in fact.
This was where, in Ike’s mind, Bradley made the better choice. Ike and Brad had learned to work together on the Academy’s football squad so many years before, and Brad, like Ike, had grown up on baseball, a team sport. Brad’s outlook reflected team play, the kind of play Ike appreciated. George, by contrast, was a track runner and a fencer, a one-man show whose prodigious energies worked in one direction and in one gear. Patton would run fast and strike hard, but his talents, impressive though they were, had to be harnessed within the broader framework of Allied strategy to be useful, for Ike knew the upcoming campaign would be a team effort dominated, in the end, by team-oriented American generals. If the Battle of Waterloo had been won on the cricket fields of Eton, the Battle for Europe would be won on the gridiron of West Point.
Marshall agreed Bradley was the better choice for an army group, though for the moment that particular appointment could be deferred. Right now he needed someone setting up an army headquarters in England, and he knew who that someone would be. On August 25, eight days after the last shots were fired in Sicily, he named the man he wanted to set up the American army headquarters in England. “My choice has been Bradley,” he said. “Could you release Bradley for this command? ”
53
Although he had suggested the appointment, Ike was reluctant to see Brad go to England. He had done a damned fine job as George’s understudy in Tunisia and Sicily, and he was a formidable commander in his own right. Ike was learning to rely on Brad, both in and out of the formal command chain, and he wished he could keep the Missourian in his back pocket in case something should happen to Clark in Italy, just as he had considered moving Bradley into the top spot in Sicily once George had set his GIs down on HUSKY’s beaches.
54
So in his response letter to Marshall, Ike backtracked a bit, cautioning the Chief that Bradley “has some little experience in planning amphibious operations, but his function in preparing for the Sicilian show was a subordinate one, especially with respect to all the intricate cooperations with Navy and ground forces.” To remain completely candid, he added, “As you can see, I am personally distressed at the thought of losing Bradley because I have come to lean on him so heavily in absorbing part of the burdens that would otherwise fall directly upon me. . . . This very reason probably makes him your obvious choice for the other job; but if you should take Clark, I could shove Bradley into command of Fifth Army.”
55
The day after sending Marshall his cable, Ike reconsidered his lukewarm comments about Bradley and his disingenuous suggestion that Marshall take Clark instead. To clear his conscience, he dictated an addendum: “The truth of the matter is that you should take Bradley and, moreover, I will make him available on any date you say. I will get along. I hope my former telegram did not sound weaseling to you.”
56
Why not Patton for the army post? After all, Patton had commanded the Casablanca and Sicily landings, the latter as a coequal with Montgomery. His Seventh Army had captured over 122,000 enemy soldiers and liberated most of the island, and he had executed three tactical landings along Sicily’s north shore. A Francophile with experience fighting in the Ardennes, George seemed a natural for a job of commanding mobile armies in France; it would be like handing Tommy Dorsey a fifteen-piece band and telling him to blow the house down. At the very least, George deserved to be in the discussion.
Problem was, Ike didn’t think much of Patton’s planning or logistical skills. George did little to make his peers believe he cared about logistics beyond the current day’s stock of ammunition, and Brad’s complaints to John Lucas, as well as Ike’s personal observations, had convinced Ike that Patton was a limited asset outside an attack-and-pursuit role. Downplaying his work in the TORCH and HUSKY planning phases, he wrote Marshall, “[Patton] has planned two operations but, as you know, he is not as strong in that phase of the work as he is in the actual attack.”
57
So Brad, not George, was going to England.
The morning of September 2 found an unsuspecting Omar Bradley bouncing up the coastal road toward Messina. He was going to meet Lieutenant General Oliver Leese, a decent enough Britisher whom Brad had gotten to know during the Sicilian campaign. Leese’s XXX Corps staff had informed Bradley that the corps artillery would be firing across the Strait of Messina in support of Monty’s army, and Leese cordially invited Brad to watch the fireworks.
Four hours after his two-jeep convoy set out for Messina, it was buzzed by the
Missouri Mule, Brad’s personal Piper Cub. The
Mule landed in a nearby field, and Chet Hansen jumped out with an urgent message from Army HQ; Bradley was to return to his command post immediately, where General Patton would send him instructions about a “short trip.”
58
It was not what Bradley had been expecting, but few things about the Army were predictable, even for an old foot soldier. Well, he mused, Leese’s arm-droppers would have to start the show without him.
59
Hitching a ride aboard the
Mule to his headquarters at Campofelice, Brad telephoned Patton, who told him Ike wanted to meet with him the next day. George was in fine fettle, notwithstanding his woodshed trip to Algiers, and he offered Brad the use of his C-47 to make the trip. Bradley got up at four thirty the next morning, and drove to Palermo for breakfast with George before flying out.
60
When Patton’s Gooney Bird lumbered to a stop on the runway at Cassibile, near Syracuse, Bradley climbed out and Eisenhower’s aides escorted him to a cluster of camouflaged tents that formed the Fifteenth Army Group’s command post. Bradley waited patiently for Ike, chatting amiably with a disheveled Bedell Smith, who had been wrangling with Italian emissaries over the terms of a secret armistice.
After a while, Ike emerged from a tent and apologized to Brad for keeping him waiting. With a grin he came straight to the point: “I’ve got good news for you, Brad. You’ve got a fancy new job.”
61
“I guess I’m the luckiest man in the world,” Brad told Tex Lee. And he might have been, at least for that moment. He had just won one of the war’s top prizes: command of the First United States Army, the spearhead of the Allied invasion of Western Europe, the invasion everyone had been talking about for years. For staff he would get his pick of the litter, and he was at last out from under Patton’s heavy thumb. Brad was holding a winning hand, and all that remained was to play out the final round. He issued orders to himself to report to Eisenhower on “temporary duty,” and, as a courtesy, he called on George Patton, to let him know he was moving on with his life.
62
While Brad’s visits with George always remained outwardly cordial, behind those steel-rimmed glasses the Missouri sharpshooter held a quiet loathing for his former mentor. The man’s strengths were exaggerated, and his faults—
gosh! how he detested those faults—were a ball and chain to Bradley and his loyal staffers. In the swirl of the slapping incidents, Brad’s aide Chet Hansen penned his own feelings of disgust, feelings that undoubtedly mirrored those of his boss:
Hoped the seventh army would be disbanded and repudiated. . . . Talk of army is now smoldering and vicious. Even the nurses in for dinner are swapping stories on Patton, all of them bad. Klotz from 1st tells of Pat. visit to that Division and the stony silence that greeted him. Profanity and vulgarity. Men don’t like it. Officers detest it. Hospital story resulted in rumor that General Patton would be court martialed. Officers ask us. Glad above everything else to get out from under his army as is everyone else. They all ask why aren’t people wise to the Green Hornet—newspaper men are. They roundly dislike him.63
Stopping at Carthage on the first leg of his roundabout trip to England, Bradley caught up with Ike at his villa overlooking the Gulf of Tunis, where he found Ike “in a dither” over the Salerno operation. They shared a late lunch, in which Ike gave Brad some last-minute guidance, and Brad flew to Algiers, where he met Bedell Smith, who plied him with more advice. Armed with this accumulation of wisdom, Brad boarded his plane and took the monotonous, winding journey to the United Kingdom via Marrakesh and the eastern Atlantic.
64 Arriving in Prestwick, Scotland, Brad, Bill Kean, and Chet Hansen hopped a short commuter flight to London. The welcoming committee that met them at the airport included the current head of ETOUSA, Lieutenant General Jacob L. Devers. Over several conversations with Devers, Brad learned that an invasion of northern France—formerly ROUNDUP, now rechristened OVERLORD—had been developed over the preceding year by a group called Chief of Staff, Supreme Allied Commander, or COSSAC. Working from the COSSAC outline, Devers and Bradley began putting meat on the plan’s loose-jointed bones.
65
Although he had known Jakie Devers since his West Point days, when a youthful Lieutenant Devers had managed the Point’s varsity baseball team, Bradley was underwhelmed with the man who had become the highest-ranking American soldier in Britain. For one thing, Eisenhower had despised Devers ever since he published writings in Washington critical of Ike’s handling of North African operations. Ike’s distaste for Devers rubbed off on Brad, who later described the artilleryman as “overly garrulous (saying little of importance), egotistical, shallow, intolerant, not very smart, and much too inclined to run off half cocked.” Another thing that bothered Bradley was that Devers gave the impression of a highly ambitious man who was trying to parlay his position at ETOUSA into a monopoly over the invasion’s forces.
66
In addition to refining the American side of the OVERLORD plan, Bradley’s other job was to prefabricate an army group headquarters that would direct U.S. operations once the Americans fielded two full armies on French soil, which planners estimated to occur about a month or so after D-Day. To prepare for this, Brad’s advance men would spend the next several weeks trucking their charts, file drawers, typewriters, and maps over to Bryanston Square in London’s West End, where they became the advance guard of the First U.S. Army Group, abbreviated FUSAG. Other staffers, working under tighter deadlines, invaded the Gothic halls of Clifton College at Bristol, on England’s western coast, where they set up the First U.S. Army headquarters, or FUSA. Bradley’s driver, the faithful Alex Stoute, drove Brad to Bristol to survey First Army’s new bivouac in one of the college’s large boarding houses. As he rode to Bristol crisp Channel winds already growing cold, Bradley found himself startled to hear the rare sound of church bells ringing throughout the countryside.
67
The idea of landing in Italy had never appealed to the Americans. To Marshall, King, Ike, and others, an Italian adventure was just another uncertain step into a Mediterranean sinkhole that would siphon off resources needed for an invasion of France. But it took until the spring of 1943 before the Americans could wring from Churchill and the British chiefs a commitment to launch OVERLORD by the spring of 1944.
68
The price of Churchill’s commitment to OVERLORD was an invasion of Italy, which was a logical next step after HUSKY, anyway. The Combined Chiefs ordered Eisenhower to land an army as far up the Italian boot as air cover would allow, with an eye toward the capture of Rome and its large, strategic air bases. This order meant an Apennine-size mountain of work for the Supreme Commander and his beleaguered staffers as they analyzed the composition of available forces, leaders, landing craft, and objectives. After weeks of studies by Eisenhower, Alexander, Clark, Montgomery, and their staffs, the CCOS settled on landings at two sites. The first operation, code-named BAYTOWN, would put the Eighth Army ashore at Calabria, on the toe of the Italian boot opposite Messina. A week later, Clark’s Fifth Army would land at Salerno, take Naples and the nearby Foggia airfields, then push on to Rome. The code name for Clark’s operation was AVALANCHE.
69
The many problems these landings posed, both logistical and tactical, put Ike under another dreadful strain. Landing craft were in dangerously short supply, and Ike’s veteran divisions had not fully recovered from Sicily. Clark’s battle plan was particularly troubling; Wayne intended to throw out two corps, the U.S. VI and the British X, along a thirty-six-mile front around Salerno, with the two halves of his army divided by the Sele River. The strategy, which sounded ominously similar to McClellan’s disastrous Peninsula Campaign strategy in the American Civil War, kept the two wings of his Fifth Army from supporting each other in case of a German counterattack .
70
To make matters worse, Ike would not receive the air support he felt he needed for the landings. He had asked the Combined Chiefs to allocate him four squadrons of medium bombers to provide tactical bombing for Clark’s invading infantry, but General Devers, head of ETOUSA, argued against the transfer and it was refused. To Ike’s fury, a self-important Devers told the Supreme Allied Commander, “I must consider the overall war effort”—as if there were much to the war effort in September 1943 of greater importance than the invasion of Italy. To add to Ike’s troubles, the Combined Chiefs turned down his request to use an additional eighteen LSTs en route to England from India, which would have allowed Clark to land additional armored units behind the first assault waves. To Eisenhower, this much belt-tightening by the high command left his men with an uncomfortably thin margin .
71
Political uncertainties also clouded Ike’s forecast, just as they had before TORCH. Although Mussolini’s successor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, was negotiating with Beetle over Italy’s surrender, the Chiefs had given Ike a very tall diplomatic order: He was to induce the Italian government to sign “unconditional surrender” instruments at a time when German divisions were streaming over the Bremer Pass into northern Italy.
72 On September 3, Badoglio’s emissaries finally signed secret surrender documents, though it took some hard-nosed threats from Ike and Beetle to force a frightened Badoglio to stick to the agreement. The Italian marshal, his eyes fixed along the Alps passes, knew any armistice would turn his country into a battlefield if the Allies couldn’t move north and eject the Nazis
molto presto.73
The public announcement of Italy’s capitulation five days later was greeted with joy among the Allies, and it was a victory, though a messy one, for Eisenhower. Throughout England church bells—including those of the Bristol cathedral near Bradley’s headquarters—pealed in celebration. In Italy, they rang out in alarm.
Montgomery’s BAYTOWN invasion, launched on September 3, went reasonably well; his force met little resistance, and by September 9, the day Clark’s force landed, Montgomery controlled the peninsular foot from toe to heel. But Clark’s army, hitting the lower shin, had a hard, bitter struggle from the beginning. The Germans held the high ground around the beaches and pounded the invaders with their heavy guns, while panzers moved up to contain the landing zone. Kesselring’s LXXVI Corps quickly exploited a six-mile gap between the British and American forces along the Sele River; Allied losses mounted, and an anxious General Clark began contingency planning to evacuate the U.S. VI Corps, under Major General Ernest Dawley. Over four stomach-churning days, VI Corps fought for its life, and Clark convinced Eisenhower to call in the 82nd Airborne to bolster Clark’s thinning ranks. The American line, out of immediate danger, settled in for a long, violent struggle with Hitler’s men in gray.
74
As Allied casualty lists lengthened and Clark sent back pessimistic situation reports, Ike grew “tremendously worried” that Clark might be pushed off the peninsula. He told the Combined Chiefs that Salerno would be “a matter of touch and go for the next few days,” and he openly fretted that Clark was losing his nerve, grumbling to confidants that he would be “out” as Supreme Commander if Clark were driven into the sea.
75
As his eyes swept over the situation map in central Italy, Ike quietly wondered whether he had made a mistake in using Clark instead of Patton. By September 16, Clark’s army had taken some nine thousand casualties—over a third the number lost during George’s entire Moroccan, Tunisian, and Sicilian campaigns combined—and as Ike’s companion Harry Butcher pointed out, “In case of evacuation, it would have suited Patton’s personality and philosophy as a fighter to have been the last off the beach, if indeed he came off at all as he would prefer to die fighting.” For his poor showing at Salerno, Ike busted General Dawley to his peacetime rank and sent him home. Having made that human sacrifice at the corps level, he tried to protect Clark’s flanks as best he could in his reports back to General Marshall. But the best thing Ike could say to the Chief was that while Clark was “not so good as Bradley in winning, almost without effort, the complete confidence of everyone around him,” and while Clark was “not the equal of Patton in his refusal to see anything but victory,” he was, at the moment, “carrying his full weight and has, so far, fully justified his selection.” For Eisenhower, it was a thin, strained endorsement.
76
The Chief didn’t buy it. He hadn’t become head coach of the American team by allowing his quarterbacks to throw to receivers who couldn’t catch the ball. On September 23, he shot back a sharp cable chiding Ike for failing to get his beachhead pushed out before the enemy could box him in. He offered no encouragement or support, because so far he saw nothing tangible to validate Ike’s feeble hopes.
77
Marshall’s rebuke stung. Already under tremendous strain from the uncertainty of the invasion and the certainty of heavy casualties, Ike lost his appetite after he received the cable. Just as George coveted Ike’s praise from time to time—and became sullen when he didn’t get it—when the chips were down Ike needed a good word from the man he most respected. Butcher and Beetle spent a good part of the afternoon trying to cheer him up.
78
Unfortunately for Ike, criticism of Clark’s generalship would mount, and sharp cables from Marshall began landing on Eisenhower’s desk with distressing regularity. That dismal autumn, the Italian front would unfold in slow, bloody steps that Ike would be obliged to recount to the Combined Chiefs in painful detail. In October, when the Allies finally captured Naples, Eisenhower warned the Chiefs that even with the Foggia air bases in Allied hands, “there will be very hard and bitter fighting before we can reach Rome.” His natural optimism more subdued than ever, he ordered his staff to plan new landings around the coastal town of Anzio, thirty-five miles southwest of the Italian capital.
79
“We are fiddeling while Rome burns, but only in metaphor, for I doubt if she burns—not for quite a while any how. ” 80
That was how George Patton saw the struggle up the bloody stump of the Italian leg during the fall of 1943. While Clark’s men were slugging it out at Salerno, and Brad was assembling his new staff in England, George sat on the sidelines, stuffed into his antique home like a dusty old book no one cared to read.
On September 2, Eisenhower’s headquarters informed Patton that the Seventh Army would be formally dispersed, its troops parsed out to First and Fifth Armies. General Bradley, the message told him, would be sent to England to plan the cross-Channel invasion.
George took the blow hard. He spent the next two days in his gilded cage recovering from his trip, hoping against long odds that Ike’s words were simply predictions of which way the wind might blow—winds that could change at any moment if his destiny, and Divine Destiny, remained in his corner. To get back in Ike’s good graces, he even tried to convince Harry Butcher to come to Sicily on leave, where George could wine and dine the Supreme Commander’s shadow from exile. (Butch, who admired Patton, dryly commented, “As I have no desire either for a leave or, if I had one, to spend it in Sicily, I rejected the suggestion when it was related to me by Ike.”
81)
In a blue funk, George told Beatrice,
“It always takes me about three days to get over a trip to Alger. One should war chain mail to avoid the knife thrusts. . . . I was told that I was too impetuous to do what Omar has to do apparently I am a man of deeds not words. except when I talk too much. Speaking of which reminds me that some of the damndest lies are being circulated about me. . . . Ike has been fine but if George [Marshall] ever believes half the lies I will probably be in position to recommission the ‘When and If.’ ” 82
George’s hopes for battle command, fragile as they were, collapsed like logs on a dying fire when two coded messages arrived from AFHQ on September 6. The first told him in no uncertain terms that the Seventh Army would not be reconstituted. The second confirmed that Bradley would get the top U.S. combat command in England.
83
It was this second message, George wrote, that “ruined me.” By all rights Lieutenant General Patton, the man who had led the TORCH and HUSKY invasions, the man who had pushed his way into the history books by capturing nearly all of Sicily, the man who had picked up a stumbling corps in Tunisia and pushed it to victory, should lead that invasion. Not his understudy.
84
As if George didn’t have enough misery for one day, his bitter cup ran over that same afternoon when two investigators from AFHQ showed up to grill him about the slapping incidents and Seventh Army’s care of Italian prisoners in its custody.
“[Ike] said he did it on my behalf, to counteract untrue stories,” George wrote dubiously.
“I think this may be true but fear that it is to protect Ike.” To an old friend of Charlie Codman he spat, “You know what’s happened to me now? I’ve just had my ears pinned back. All they do is pin my ears back. You know what they’ve pinned them back for? It seems I haven’t given the Italian prisoners enough latrines. God damn it, they didn’t know what a latrine was until I built one for them.”
85
In a shaking hand that night, he flipped open his diary and scribbled,
“It is very heartbreaking. The only time I have felt worse was the night of December 9th, 1942 when Clark got the Fifth Army.” 86
The next day, when Brad came by to pay his respects before leaving for England, he found Patton wallowing in a full-blown depression. George kept up a pleasant front during the interview—he arranged for an honor guard and a band to salute Bradley, hosted a luncheon for him, shared some ideas about the Normandy invasion, and generally tried to send his former deputy off to England on a positive note. It was not just a matter of friendship or good manners, they both knew.
“Bradley has a chance to help or hurt me with General Marshall,” he told his diary.
“I hope he chooses the former course, but I did not ask him to.” 87
It was not much for George to pin his hopes on, and he knew it. His goose might not have been cooked, but it was sitting in a cast-iron pot next to a warm stove. In the evening’s personal sitrep, he wrote,
“I have to keep working on my belief in destiny, and poor old destiny may have to put in some extra time to get me out of my present slump. ” 88
The saturnine general spent the next two months coming to grips with his status as an unemployed soldier, and he spent much of his time battling lethargy, anger, and depression—as well as his inability to understand why he was being shelved. His life took on the suspended pattern of those achingly dull months at Casablanca, but his days were made infinitely worse by the gnawing fear that his indiscretions at the hospitals had condemned him to the sidelines for the rest of the war. He complained frequently, disliked his surroundings, and told his brother-in-law,
“Sicily is the dirtiest place I have ever been, its inhabitants of the lowest type. I feel that I must return to Africa to apologize to the Arabs for what I thought of them.” With the steady departure of his field commanders, sent off to other adventures, he told Bea,
“I felt like the Ancient Mariner: ‘Alone alone all all alone. . . .’ I am approaching an irreducable minimum but it has happened before and I have survived.” 89
As weeks passed with no urgent calls from Algiers, George desperately scrounged around AFHQ for a ticket to the battlefield. He wrote wildly obsequious letters to Beetle Smith, and he tried to ingratiate himself with members of Ike’s inner circle, beckoning several to come visit him in Sicily. But he only managed to cajole a visit from Kay, whom he favored with gifts of liberated silk stockings, drinks aplenty—the “Patton 75,” a mongrel concoction akin to fraternity punch—and a tour of ancient Palermo.
90
George’s depression deepened every day he was overlooked by his superiors—something a showman such as himself could not bear for long. Added to his frustration was the miserable fact that no one else seemed to understand was that George was a fighting bull, an animal specially bred animal for the plaza de toros, not the pasture. Despairing of holding high command again, he asked his friend for the unthinkable. “I told Ike I was willing to fight a corps under Clark,” he wrote in his diary on September 17. “I would serve under the Devil to get a fight.”
Ike demurred. A glum George told his diary, his slashing script softening:
“He said Clark and I were not soul mates so he could not do it.” 91
A fair point, but one that didn’t make George feel any better.
George’s confidence revived itself in early October, when President Roosevelt nominated him to the permanent rank of major general, a promotion the Senate would likely take up the following month. Ike, who had accurately if reluctantly referred to George as “surplus in this theater,” sensed the acute pain his friend had endured for the previous six weeks. In early October Ike sent him a cable to lift his spirits.
“I am highly delighted that the War Department and the President have recognized the value of your war contributions by nominating you as a permanent major general,” he told George on the day he learned of Patton’s nomination.
“You have lived up to every one of the expectations I have held for you during the past 25 years, and I know that every job the government may give you during this war will be performed with the same dash, energy, and determination that have characterized all your action during the past 10 months.” 92
Warming up to Ike again, George replied with a theme he had voiced in early 1942:
“It is my personal conviction that you, and you alone, are responsible for the promotion, as you have been for every other promotion I have received. I have run out of proper words to thank you, so you can just put the nth power on my remarks and let it go at that.” 93
While Ike was quick to praise Patton to General Marshall, he also saw in Georgie an Enfant terrible who needed to be kept on a tight leash. Occasionally, Ike would give that leash a sharp jerk, to remind George who was boss. Over dinner in Algiers one evening with George, Hughes, Kay Summersby, and Hughes’s secretary, Ike, in Patton’s words, “gave a long monologue on himself and his early training. He then said I was always acting a part, that it was probably due to my having an inferiority complex. This amused me a lot but I agreed. The truth is that I have too little of such a complex—in fact I look down my nose at the world and too often let them know it.”
George had learned not to challenge Ike at times like this, moments when the Supreme Allied Commander was flexing his muscles. Afterward Hughes told George that, in his opinion, “Ike’s trouble is that he is not humble,” and because Ike “did not dare to cuss out or criticize the British,” Hughes said Ike took it out on his American friends, proving the adage, “the better he knows a man, the more he preached to him.”
94 George agreed.
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Looking at the two old friends now, one would never know how close they were back in the days when officers wore Sam Brown belts and broad-brimmed campaign hats. By the fall of 1943, George’s run-ins with the Navy, the British, tactical air, the hospital staff, and Bradley had stripped the Patton-Eisenhower relationship of its old stability. While the friendship remained real and personal, very much a living organism, the weakened bond between them would sway one way, then the next, like a metronome, as Eisenhower absorbed oscillating rays of brilliance and imbecility from his friend.
The basic personalities of the two men hadn’t changed much since they first met. Patton was the same blustering, bloodthirsty martinet who strutted into Camp Meade in the fall of 1919. Eisenhower was still the same old chain-smoking workaholic with the effortless ability to charm.
But some things were different now.
One difference, of which their trappings reminded them every minute of every day, was the positions into which they had been thrust. As an Army commander, Patton could, in a sense, look out only for Patton. His job was simply to destroy whatever Ike told him to destroy, and in his army he ruled the roost. He was a commanding general, and cloaked in this authority, Patton held near-absolute power over anyone with the Seventh Army pyramid stitched onto his left shoulder.
Ike, by contrast, lived in a world of fewer absolutes. As Supreme Commander, he didn’t rule the Allied force the same way Patton ruled Seventh Army. In fact, he directly ruled very little. He had to cooperate, even bow to outside forces—be they physical, such as the carrying capacity of a landing ship, or political, as when Jake Devers vetoed his bomber support. Despite his lofty title, Ike’s dictatorial powers were much more circumscribed than Patton’s.
Ike’s job was also broader, for unlike Patton, Ike had to keep the whole Allied ship afloat, not just the American side of it. Neither side could afford to unbalance the other, which meant that if Patton was standing in the boat and leaning too far to one side, it was Ike’s job to whack him with an oar and tell him to sit down. Ike spent a lot of time doing that.
A second departure from the Old Days was that Ike’s way of looking at problems had matured, while George’s had not. Back when the two young officers were tinkering with Renault tanks and debating armor doctrine, George believed he knew more than anyone else about military tactics. He had, in fact, believed it since his West Point days, and he spent his succeeding years learning the same way he had learned as a child—by reading history books and listening to his inner voice, not learning from his contemporaries. That was why Patton so often flouted Army doctrine. That was why he felt free to criticize his superiors. That was why he wasn’t tops in his class at Leavenworth.
That was why the George Patton of Sicily, 1943, was little different from the George Patton of Camp Meade, 1920.
Eisenhower, a much more pliable man in many ways, was receptive to instruction. He learned from Conner; he learned from the Leavenworth faculty. He learned from politicians and he learned from sergeants. He even learned from MacArthur.
In the process of absorbing these lessons, Ike changed. He was no longer the eager, single-minded tank zealot of 1920. By 1943 General Dwight D. Eisenhower had become the hub of a military-political wheel that spun at rates Patton never tried to keep up with, much less master.
George had seen these changes coming since before the war, but he still found it hard to adjust to the differences in his old comrade. To George, Ike was like the young blond-haired boy with freckles and torn pants that a man sees and leaves and doesn’t see for another thirty years. The boy grows and matures into an adult, his belly paunches, his hair thins, his chin sags, and his talent for business or medicine or craftsmanship blossoms. But the older man still carries around in his head a picture of the young, blond-haired boy with freckles and torn pants he knew decades before. Despite all the letters and dinners and phone calls and planning sessions, despite the high rank both of them had earned, despite the late-night predictions of “I’ll be Jackson, you’ll be Lee,” George Patton was still having trouble shaking loose the picture of a young, smiling lieutenant colonel in a Sam Brown belt and broad campaign hat.
By late October, George believed Fortune had begun to smile on him again. At the very least, it winked, though Patton should have known by now how deceptive a wink can be. On October 25, nine weeks after Messina’s capture, Ike summoned George to Algiers “for a tactical reconnaissance.” In Algeria’s capital, Ike invited him to attend a play and have lunch with him, which should have been a harbinger of good news—some problem that only an old warhorse like George Patton could handle. The meal was pleasant, Ike was in a good humor, and George was anxious to get to the point of the meeting.
95
“Ike was his old self,” George remarked that night, with some relief
. “Beedle Smith told me that I am to get an Army in England. He said he had told General Marshall that I am the greatest assault general in the world and should lead the attack.” 96
Of course, there were always caveats to good news, especially when Ike brought along Beetle. The Machiavelli from Indiana related a conversation with General Marshall in which Marshall agreed with Beetle that George was the country’s best combat leader—but he added that he didn’t trust George’s staff. Beetle claimed he told Marshall, “Well, they have always succeeded,” to which the old general replied, “I have been told that in Sicily the supply was not good. I have my own means of knowing.”
“That,” concluded George, “means either Wedemeyer or Bradley or both.”
After lunch, Beetle dropped the boom on George: Instead of leading an invasion of France—or the Balkans, for that matter—the Allies would use Patton’s reputation to draw Axis attention away from the French north coast. To Corsica. George would be the decoy, not the fighter.
97
“This is the End of my hopes for war,” he muttered.
98