Brothers, Rivals, Victors

It wasn’t just Bradley whom George found wanting, for he was also concerned, as both friend and subordinate, with the way the pressure seemed to be getting to Ike. Waiting in Ike’s office with Bradley one afternoon, George overheard his old friend bellowing to Air Marshal Tedder, “Now, listen, Arthur, I am dealing with a lot of prima donnas. By God, you tell that bunch that if they can’t get together and stop quarreling like children, I will tell the Prime Minister to get someone else to run this damn war. I’ll quit.” George told his diary on March 1, “Ike and I dined alone and had a very pleasant time. He is drinking too much and is terribly lonely. I really feel sorry for him—I think that in his heart he knows he is not really commanding anything.” ²

But the prospect of real action in the near future blew fresh wind into his sails, and his private life was enlivened with the arrival of a four-legged aide-de-camp, a fifteen-month-old bull terrier whom he christened Willie. Like Telek, Willie was tenacious and loyal, traits George admired. Not that he was an easy dog to keep up with—Willie snored in his sleep, and amorously pursued bitches and pups alike. But he proved to be a better fighter than Ike’s scrappy Scottie. His favorite pastimes, to Patton’s delight, included chasing cars, waiting for George to flick him a table scrap, and being swung around in the air with his jaws clamped onto a tree branch. (Later, they would include hiding under the furniture whenever Germans shelled his master’s headquarters.³)

Like Bradley at II Corps, George felt at peace amid the familiar surroundings of his headquarters. In contrast to his stage persona—the helmeted general waving a riding crop at Gela—the relaxed George Patton did not march around Peover Hall ramrod straight, did not curse profusely. He ordinarily left his ivory-gripped pistols at the office and carried a small holstered automatic as his required sidearm. With Willie at his heels, he would shuffle about the grounds of Peover Hall, his beefy fists thrust into the front pockets of his overcoat, a stogie jutting from his pursed lips. He was busy, so he was happy.⁴

On April 7, the evening after Montgomery’s brilliant exposition on the OVERLORD plan, George had dinner with an elite group of U.S. officers that included Ike, McNarney, Bradley, Beetle, and Assistant Secretary McCloy. There George made a pitch for overstrength divisions, in light of the casualties he expected to take, but he could not make any headway. “That is because none of our topflight generals have ever fought,” he complained. “As usual, Bradley said nothing. He does all the getting along and does it to his own advantage. . . . All of them but me are scared to death.”⁵

As dinner progressed, the topic of conversation turned to the Inspector General’s investigation into the prisoner killings Brad had brought to George’s attention in the first days of the Sicilian operation. The lawyer for an American sergeant being tried for the murders claimed that General Patton’s fiery speeches had influenced him to kill without mercy.

George replied that he would stop giving strong speeches to the troops if Ike ordered him to do so. “Otherwise,” he said, “I will continue to influence men the only way I know, a way which has so far produced results.”

It was obvious to everyone that, in addition to his thousands of other worries, George’s next outburst loomed large in the Eisenhower windshield. Patton’s presence in England was, for the moment, a well-known secret, and his affiliation with Third Army was supposed to remain a secret for many weeks after D-Day. An open secret, George Patton, and a roving press corps was hardly a recipe for success.⁶

Over the next several weeks, George’s opinions of his fellow ground commanders ebbed and flowed according to his erratic moods. On April 11, looking back with admiration on Bradley’s accomplishments, he wrote to Beatrice, “One year ago to day I turned over to Omar in Tunisia. I did not realize how great he was going to be at least for a while.” Two days later, though, he told his diary, “I have a feeling, probably unfounded, that neither Monty or Bradley are too anxious for me to have a command. If they knew what little respect I have for the fighting ability of either of them, they would be even less anxious for me to show them up.” ⁷

Occasionally McCloy, McNarney, or Hughes would stop by Piss-Over Hall, ostensibly to see how Third Army was doing, and while there the emissaries would remind Patton of Eisenhower’s dire warnings. McCloy, for example, knew how Secretary Stimson doted on Ike’s Enfant terrible, and how “now and then when Patton would get in trouble Stimson would ask me to go out and calm him down or patch up the difficulty.”

McCloy remembered that Ike “was very partial to Patton. Eisenhower saw his virtues and his qualities, and but for his rather tenacious confidence in Patton, and also the fact that the Secretary of War several times intervened with Marshall, who I think was on the verge from time to time of at least considering whether Patton wasn’t more of a nuisance than he was worth, though Marshall was also aware of Patton’s qualities. But it was primarily Eisenhower’s confidence in Patton that kept him at the front. . . .”⁸

As McCloy recalled one incident shortly before D-Day:

Patton wasn’t scheduled to take part in the original landings and he was making all sorts of noises about it. . . . Eisenhower got hold of me one time and said, “I know you’ve helped save Patton’s skin, thanks to the Secretary of War, two or three times. . . . You go down and tell Georgie, I’m trying to get him, I’m going to get him in where he’s going to have all the fighting he wants, but in the meantime you go down there and tell him to keep his God damned mouth shut!”

McCloy duly drove out to Peover and, after a lunchtime meeting, he maneuvered Patton into a small room where they could talk one-on-one. McCloy told George he was “getting to be quite a nuisance, that he was causing Eisenhower a lot of trouble and doing himself no good.”

George drew himself up to his full height, chest out, war scowl in bright, fearsome bloom. “You’re taking a great deal of responsibility on yourself, Mr. Secretary, to come here on the eve of battle, and to destroy a man’s confidence in himself who is about to face the enemy,” he said.

McCloy was taken aback. George wasn’t supposed to argue with his superiors. After all, when Eisenhower had called him out on the carpet, George was the soul of contrition. But that, apparently, was only for Ike. Mere mortals got the Act.

George had meant what he said. After SHAEF announced General Patton’s presence in England in mid-April, he knew the press would be after him for quotes, and he knew he’d have to take particular care to keep his words from biting him where it counted most. So to play it safe, he would simply stick to kind, polite things. Positive, cheerful things. Unquotable things. Words nobody could raise a ruckus over. While he’d always be Blood and Guts to his public, he would make damned certain the public saw the benevolent side of George Patton, the affable fellow who hosted dinners for Bob Hope and loved his dog and treasured the lives of his men. The man who refused to say anything worth printing.¹⁰

Patton found an opportunity to play goodwill ambassador on April 25, when he received an invitation to speak at the opening of a Welcome Club in Knutsford. To play it safe, he showed up for the event fifteen minutes late, hoping any journalists in attendance would think he had skipped the party and would leave early. But when he arrived, he saw photographers snapping his picture, and he made them promise not to publish the photos. The austere chairwoman who introduced General Patton reiterated the unofficial nature of his visit, which George took to mean that any reporters would consider his remarks “off the record” and keep them out of the papers.¹¹

George made a few more pro forma remarks about everyone doing their part for the war effort, goodwill among allies, and so on. Then, with a smile, he ceded the floor. He shook a few hands, the band played “God Save the King,” and the audience dispersed to admire the new Welcome Club.¹³

A nondescript reporter sitting in the nondescript audience recorded Patton’s “rule the world” comment without including the words “and, of course, the Russians.” He filed his story with the censors, who passed the article because the speech raised no apparent security issues. The story was scheduled to run the next day.

Knowing nothing of the reporter or his story, George went to bed that night confident that no one could possibly misconstrue such dull, pedestrian remarks. “I was really trying to be careful,” he told his diary.¹⁴

He couldn’t believe it. Flipping to the editorial pages of The Washington Post, the capital’s most conspicuous political weather vane, he read the column on his general. The press was howling once again about General George Patton, the loose cannon who had the temerity to suggest the postwar world order. Republicans eyeing the 1944 elections seized on George’s comments as another example of the Roosevelt Administration’s inept handling of the war. Alluding to the slapping incidents, the Post editorialized, “General Patton has progressed from simple assaults on individuals to collective assault on entire nationalities.” Echoing the words of George’s father a quarter-century earlier, the influential paper declared, “We think that Lieutenant Generals . . . ought to talk with rather more dignity than this. When they do not they risk losing the respect of the men they command and the confidence of the public they serve.”¹⁵

While Ike was at Slapton Sands observing the TIGER exercise, a cable from Washington landed in his “eyes only” box in London. Beetle read the cable. It seemed George had given an informal talk to a British service club and declared that Britain and America, and not the Soviet allies, would rule the postwar world. It was, Marshall noted, not only a huge diplomatic gaffe, but it handed the Republicans a new stick with which to bludgeon the Roosevelt Administration. To make matters worse, a long list of permanent promotions—a list that included George S. Patton Jr. and Walter Bedell Smith—would be held up in the Senate indefinitely until the furor died down. “We were just about to get confirmation of permanent makes,” Marshall complained to Ike. “This I fear has killed them all.”¹⁶

Ike blew his stack when Beetle called to relay the news. Even under a secrecy injunction, George was like a bull elephant that had to trumpet every now and then, just to let everyone know he was there. When Ike had to deal with Patton’s squabble with the Navy he was merely concerned. When he brokered a peace between George and Tactical Air he was upset. When he had to pass judgment on the slapping incidents, he was anguished.¹⁷

Now he was simply tired—tired and angry. Tired of the same old story, tired of the same blister rubbing and swelling and bursting. As Supreme Commander, there were some nuisances he shouldn’t have to bear, and one of those nuisances was George’s six-month calendar of sin and penitence.¹⁸

Back at Widewing, Ike stomped around his office, swearing and chain-smoking as he decided what to do. “I’m just about fed up,” he told Bradley. “If I have to apologize publicly for George once more, I’m going to have to let him go, valuable as he is. I’m getting sick and tired of having to protect him. Life’s much too short to put up with any more of it.”¹⁹

Brad nodded. Patton had to go, he agreed, since there were plenty of other commanders in the theater who were team players, plenty of generals who wouldn’t burden their superiors with the theatrics George excelled at. Life, in or out of uniform, was indeed too short to put up with the man’s antics. It was time to get rid of him, this time for good.²⁰

On April 29, Eisenhower cabled Marshall to complain that Patton was “unable to use reasonably good sense in all those matters where senior commanders must appreciate the effect of their own actions upon public opinion and this raises doubts as to the wisdom of retaining him in high command despite his demonstrated capacity in battle leadership. . . . I have grown so weary of the trouble he constantly causes you and the War Department, to say nothing of myself, that I am seriously considering taking the most drastic action.”²¹

Through the grind and frustrations of work that day, Ike’s mind kept drifting back to George’s inability to stay quiet. Ike couldn’t get the irritation out of his head, and that afternoon he supplemented his earlier cable to Marshall with an even more blunt message:

Frankly I am exceedingly weary of his habit of getting everybody into hot water through the immature character of his public actions and statements. In this particular case investigation shows that his offense was not so serious as the newspapers would lead one to believe, and one that under the circumstances could have occurred to almost anybody. But the fact remains that he simply does not keep his mouth shut.²²

At the same time, Ike squirmed at the thought of losing a heavy hitter like George. When the Nazis counterattacked in France, Ike knew he might live to regret his decision—and some men might not live to regret Ike’s decision. Moreover, Ike’s political weather vanes didn’t seem to point toward Patton’s relief. Marshall told Eisenhower it would be the Supreme Commander’s call whether to give George the boot, though the Chief acknowledged, “Patton is the only available Army Commander for his present assignment who has had actual experience fighting Rommel and in extensive landing operations followed by a rapid campaign of exploitation.” Marshall seemed content to keep George for the good of the operation, if Ike was correctly reading between the lines, and Churchill, to whom Ike had mentioned the incident, waved it off as a tempest in a teacup; good men were hard to find. (Though he didn’t mention it to Ike, the headstrong prime minister had privately made the same boast a year earlier.²³)

George learned that his remarks had found their way into print when SHAEF’s public relations office called Hap Gay on April 26 to ask what Patton had said—and whether he had included the Russians in his “rule the world” remark. The next day, Bedell Smith, invoking Ike’s authority, called to chew him out, remarking bitterly that George’s “unfortunate remarks” had cost them both their promotions. He ordered George never to speak in public again, even to his divisions, without submitting his statements in writing to Ike’s office in advance.²⁴

George bit his tongue and played the part of a penitent sinner. He knew there was no point in arguing, and he couldn’t afford to provoke Beetle further. But after he hung up with the Hoosier, his fury erupted and he spewed venom to his confidants. “As far as I am concerned every effort is made to show lack of confidence in my judgment and at the same time, in every case of stress, great confidence in my fighting,” he wrote. “None of those at Ike’s headquarters ever go to bat for juniors, and in any argument between the British and the Americans, invariably favor the British. Benedict Arnold is a piker compared to them and that includes Lee as well as Ike and Beedle. . . . ‘God show the right’ and damn all reporters and gutless men.”²⁵

What was so frustrating was that he wasn’t guilty of this particular sin. Or at least, he didn’t think so. He immediately dispatched associates to contact several of those present at George’s speech, and obtained signed statements from the chairwoman of the event, a Royal Navy officer, and U.S. and British aides certifying that he had included the Russians in his “rule the world” reference.²⁶

The first step in Ike’s now-standard “jacking-up” process was to send George a harsh personal letter. The tone of this one was little different from the one he wrote the previous August:

My attitude with respect to this case is not so much concerned with the effects of this particular incident as it is with the implications that you simply will not guard your tongue in spite of the most drastic instructions and orders. I have warned you time and again against your impulsiveness . . . and have flatly instructed you to say nothing that could possibly be misinterpreted. . . . You first came into my command at my own insistence because I believed in your fighting qualities and your ability to lead troops in battle. At the same time I have always been fully aware of your habit of dramatizing yourself and of committing indiscretions for no other apparent purpose than of calling attention to yourself. I am thoroughly weary of your failure to control your tongue and have begun to doubt your all-round judgment, so essential in high military position.

His verbal flogging administered, Ike hedged. “My decision in the present case will not become final until I have heard from the War Department,” he told George. “I want to tell you officially and unofficially that if you are again guilty of any indiscretion in speech or action . . . I will relieve you instantly from command.”²⁷

When Ike’s letter hit George’s desk, the old soldier was horrified. Worse than enduring the humiliation of another jacking-up was the knowledge that he had imperiled other officers who were up for their hard-earned permanent promotions. To George, that was not just an indiscretion; it was a betrayal of his brother officers, and he placed a call to the reliable Ev Hughes and asked to have Ike withdraw George’s name from the promotion list. He groused, “You are probably damn fed up with me, but certainly my last alleged escapade smells strongly of having been a frame-up in view of the fact that I was told that nothing would be said, and that the thing was under the auspices of the Ministry of Information who was present. . . .”²⁸

Sinking into a great, sucking hole of self-pity, George again saw himself as a victim. He wrote his daughter Ruth Ellen, “I have caught nothing but hell for nearly a year now. All I want to do is win the war and everyone seems to think that all I want is notoriety which I despise. . . . [T]he soldiers think I am wonderful, but the Press??? Bah! Jesus only suffered one night but I have had months and months of it, and the cross is not yet in sight, though probably just around the corner.”³¹

Returning from church on the last day of April, George received a call from SHAEF ordering him to report to Ike’s office in London. The next morning, a very worried George caught a train for the five-hour trip.³²

Ike told Harry Butcher, “he was afraid Patton’s goose was cooked. Patton had violated Ike’s order, i.e., no public speeches and interviews for the press. . . . The furors raised by the Press and in Congress simply emphasized Patton’s instability and Ike was fearful that he would be unable to save him this time. In fact, Ike said Patton’s chance of retaining his command was only one in a thousand.”³³

As a tired Eisenhower told Marshall,

After a year and a half of working with him it appears hopeless to expect that he will ever completely overcome his lifelong habit of posing and self-dramatization which causes him to break out in these extraordinary ways. Starting with the incident involving censorship and Colonel Lambert in January of ’43, I have time and again earnestly advised and instructed him along this one line and finally went to the point of giving him unequivocal orders and warnings. . . . [H]is whole record combined with the explosive effect his latest outbreak is having in the United States, leads me to believe that disciplinary action must be taken. It is a pity but that is the way I feel about it, and, as I said before, my decision will be along the lines indicated except in the unlikely circumstance that Patton can produce additional mitigating evidence.

He concluded: “I have sent for Patton to allow him the opportunity to present his case personally to me. On all of the evidence now available I will relieve him from command and send him home unless some new and unforeseen information should be developed in the case.”³⁴

The “new and unforeseen information” Ike was looking for had nothing to do with George’s remarks, and everything to do with his replacement. Lucian Truscott, who commanded the Third Division in Sicily, was the obvious choice. An aggressive, old-school cavalryman who had orchestrated amphibious landings in Morocco and Sicily under Patton’s tutelage, Truscott, like George, was adept at rapid pursuit, but he didn’t have George’s political baggage. Or George’s mouth.³⁵

Old Blood and Guts squirmed nervously in Ike’s waiting room as the minutes ticked by. In his creased jacket, riding breeches, steel helmet, and tall cavalry boots, he had the look of an overdressed cadet reporting to the disciplinary board—or the guest of honor at a military funeral.

As the morning clock’s hands edged their way toward eleven, Eisenhower’s secretary ushered George into Ike’s office. The door closed, and the two men stood alone, face-to-face, Ike’s cigarette silently releasing its wispy ribbon of smoke.³⁶

His temper growing, Ike told George that General Marshall had become fed up with his lapses. The Kent Lambert incident, the hospitals in Sicily, now this. His outbursts had “shaken the confidence of the country and the War Department.” The Republican opposition was making an election issue of George’s words and outbursts, claiming that even if General Patton were the best tactician in the world, his actions plainly showed that he lacked the judgment to command large bodies of troops. Ike said he had wired Marshall to wash his hands of his old friend.³⁷

As Ike later recalled, George stood at attention during the tirade, shoulders back, eyes fixed. But as Ike drew out the moment, painting with sharp, cutting syllables a vivid picture of George’s excommunication, the older man’s emotions overcame him. His blue eyes welled with tears. Ike’s message had broken through the tough exoskeleton George had painstakingly built since childhood and was tearing his insides apart.

Toward the end of the harangue, when Ike’s tone, and perhaps hesitancy, implied some hope, George seized on it like a pauper begging his king for clemency. The old general swore he would use complete and sound discretion from that day on. Never again would he burden Ike, Marshall, or the War Department with his stupidity.

“In a gesture of almost little-boy contriteness,” Ike wrote years later, “he put his head on my shoulder. . . . This caused his helmet to fall off—a gleaming helmet I sometimes thought he wore in bed. As it rolled across the room I had the rather odd feeling that I was in the middle of a ridiculous situation . . . his helmet bounced across the floor into a corner. I prayed that no one would come in and see the scene. . . . Without apology and without embarrassment, he walked over, picked up his helmet, adjusted it, and said: ‘Sir, could I now go back to my headquarters?’ ”³⁸

Ike told a SHAEF public relations officer after Patton’s helmet fell off, fresh tears ran down George’s cheeks. “I could no longer stand it,” Ike guffawed afterward. “This was too much for me! I stretched out on the couch in my office and burst into laughter, which I now regret for it was, in retrospect, cruel. General Patton stood at strict attention, not even looking at me lying on the couch, laughing.”

After George left his office, Ike said, “I had to tell someone, so I called in Beetle and told him what had happened. It is probably the only time in all the years of my long experience with Smith that I saw Beetle really lose himself in laughter!”³⁹

The scene wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded, at least not to those who knew George. “Patton always lived at one extreme or the other of the emotional spectrum,” Ike wrote many years later. “He was either at the top of his form, laughing and full of enthusiasm, or filled with remorse and despondency.” George often wept at the sight of wounded men, of great deeds. And his own screwups.⁴⁰

George left Ike’s office, eyes rimmed red, his sagging cheeks more flushed than usual. He boarded the next train home, silently running over lines of poetry to keep his mind from drifting into black thoughts as the wheels clicked along the tracks. Although his contrition, charm, and combat value had gotten him out of an ocean of hot water since 1918, he had no idea whether Ike would have to throw him to the wolves. He scribbled in his diary, “I feel like death, but I am not out yet. If they let me fight, I will; but if not, I will resign to as to be able to talk, and then I will tell the truth, and possibly do the country more good. . . . My final thought on the matter is that I am destined to achieve some great thing—what I don’t know, but this last incident was so trivial in its nature, but so terrible in its effect, that it is not the result of an accident, but the work of God. His Will be done.”⁴¹

George spent the next day wondering whether His Will was to kick him home in disgrace. The more he contemplated his predicament, the more he must have felt like a Spanish fighting bull that has been stabbed and jabbed by the circling picadors, bloodied but unbowed, waiting for the matador to prance into the ring to deliver the final blow. From where he was standing, George couldn’t see the name stitched on the matador’s cape, but at this point the most likely name was SMITH, or perhaps MARSHALL. Maybe even EISENHOWER.⁴²

While an unconcerned Willie lounged by his desk, George slipped into another black spell of distraction and uncertainty. The day after his meeting with Ike he wrote Beatrice, “I had a pretty terrible day yesterday. . . . If I survive the next couple of days it will be O.K. . . . But still I get in a cold sweat when the phone rings. . . . Well, we ain’t dead yet.”⁴³

And he wasn’t. Though George didn’t know it, Ike was looking for a way to keep him on the team. For all George’s blasted indiscretions, when it came to attack and pursuit, Ike had more confidence in George Patton than in any other senior commander.

“The flashy, publicity-seeking type of adventurer can grab the headlines and be a hero in the eyes of the public, but he simply can’t deliver the goods in high command.” Ike had written these words during the darkest days of the Tunisian campaign. “On the other hand, the slow, methodical, ritualistic person is absolutely valueless in a key position. There must be a fine balance. . . . To find a few persons of the kinds that I have roughly described is the real job of the commander.”⁴⁴

Ike had plenty of generals, but the overwhelming majority fit the “slow, methodical,” Leavenworth mold. Most lacked Patton’s hell-for-leather drive, his willingness to berate, curse, and threaten to get his men across the finish line. They lacked the single-mindedness, the familiar comfort with risk that was second nature to Patton. Ike couldn’t find the methodical commander in George any more than he could find the flashy adventurer in Bradley. He needed both men.

On May 3, seven days after George’s ordeal had begun, Ike sent his friend another “eyes only” cable. He told George, “I am once more taking the responsibility of retaining you in command in spite of damaging repercussions resulting from a personal indiscretion. I do this solely because of my faith in you as a battle leader and from no other motives.” As Ike’s press officer remembered, Ike followed up his cable with a personal call, concluding, “I expect, George, from now on that you will please keep your goddamned mouth shut. When it is time for you to speak, I will tell you! I intend to use you to the fullest—you will have every opportunity to get into all the combat you ever dreamed of. That is all for the moment!”⁴⁵

For all Patton’s gaffes, for all the times he had stepped in horse manure, Eisenhower retained just enough confidence in his old friend’s discretion that he would allow George to make occasional low-profile remarks to his troops. He had warned him to keep his mouth shut, but he gave George just enough leash to do his job. Or hang himself.

Ike’s shadow, Commander Butcher, penned the epilogue to the Knutsford story in another entry for Eisenhower’s diary: “Patton’s skin has been saved again. Ike told me last night that he had written a blistering letter to Patton and although he told him it would be placed in his official record, actually it had not been.”⁴⁶

George’s eyes zeroed in on that sentence. When a condemned man gets to the part where the court uses the words “reprieve,” or “stay of execution,” his interest in the rest of the court’s decision drops perceptibly. He doesn’t much care about the flowery language or the rigid logic that got the court to the place where “reprieve” or “stay” comes in. The other words are abstractions; “reprieve” is his reality. So it was with George.

But he read the rest of the cable anyway, and after discovering no land mines buried within the message, he called Gay, Stiller, Gaffey, and Charlie Codman into his office for a celebratory drink. He probably would have invited Willie if Willie weren’t partial to water.

“Sometimes I am very fond of him and this is one of those times,” George remarked of Ike. Relieved, he wrote Beatrice, “Everything is again O.K. because divine destiny came through in a big way . . . but I was really badly frightened.”⁴⁷

Of course, just because George had walked down the scaffold steps didn’t mean he was off death row. There is a big difference between a reprieve and a pardon, and he had only won a reprieve. To keep his command, he understood he would have to guard his words carefully, lest anything get back to Ike, for God only knew how many more lives the California cat had left. Probably none.⁴⁸

A letter from Secretary Stimson, one of Patton’s most loyal and important supporters, drove home the message. Praising Ike’s courage in keeping George on the team, Stimson warned him, “Each time you have acted or spoke in this irresponsible, reckless, and arrogant way, you have laid an additional burden on his back. The only way you can hereafter justify yourself and your commander is to keep your mouth absolutely shut until you have reached the beachhead and then, by successful drive and successful fighting, win your reputation back again as a soldier who can contain himself as well as conquer the enemy.”⁴⁹

Every now and then, Ike would send George a reminder of his tenuous hold on command. One day, while George was in London on business, a SHAEF colonel stopped by George’s flat with a message from Ike. General Eisenhower, the colonel said, had asked the colonel to remind General Patton that he and his staff were to refrain from making any further public statements.

There was, Ike knew, one way in which Patton’s flamboyance could be put to good use. In 1943, COSSAC planners had worked up an elaborate deception plan called FORTITUDE. The premise of FORTITUDE was that the German High Command, like everyone else in Western Europe, knew the Allies intended to invade the Continent, for the preparations were being made on such a vast scale they were impossible to hide. The German High Command, or Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, knew as well as anyone that an Allied invasion would require the capture of a major French port, and that port had to lie within range of Allied air cover. That meant the Allies would either hit the French coast around Calais, or slightly south, in Normandy, near Caen or Cherbourg. Thus, the only variables Ike and his planners could hide from Hitler were the exact date of the invasion and the particular stretch of beach they would hit.⁵¹

Allied planners knew the Germans fielded fifty-five divisions in the west. While many of those divisions were understrength and immobile, a few, like the Panzer Lehr and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, were real monsters. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler had assigned command of the Atlantic Wall, deployed nine of his mobile divisions around the port city of Calais, while Rommel’s boss, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, held his heavies, the I SS Panzerkorps, farther back toward Paris. Twelve German reserve divisions was the maximum number COSSAC planners believed the Allies could take on successfully at the outset; if the panzers managed to pounce on the five divisions struggling to get off the Normandy beaches, OVERLORD would be in deep trouble.⁵²

To keep those panzers away from Normandy, Ike approved a deception plan that aimed to hold the imposing Fifteenth Army around Calais as long as possible. Tapping into Patton’s notoriety, in February SHAEF submerged his army command under a press blackout and placed Patton in command of the First U.S. Army Group, a real headquarters commanding a phony invasion force based in East Anglia. A small army of carpenters and movie propmasters augmented Patton’s force with a formidable array of inflatable tanks and trucks, stage-prop Higgins boats, empty tents, barbed-wire fences, and a constant stream of meaningless radio traffic to give German listeners the impression that something big pointed toward the Pas de Calais. Despite the skepticism of his fighting generals, Ike and his staff dearly hoped FORTITUDE would convince the Germans that the real blow would fall at Calais until Montgomery and Bradley could establish a safe beachhead.⁵³

Patton would take no part in any army group planning, and he had no authority over a single soldier in the real army group. But SHAEF’s choice of Patton was an inspired one, and George played the part magnificently, ensuring the public glimpsed him scowling for the cameras, Willie by his side. He wore his FUSAG patch and at various times he let slip tantalizing allusions to Calais as he visited real units. For military theatrics, George Patton was the best thespian this side of MacArthur.⁵⁴

The Fifteenth Army notwithstanding, it was clear to Eisenhower that, as at Casablanca and Sicily, the unpredictable monster that would give him more grief than anything else on June 5, the presumptive D-Day, was the weather. In early June, the Atlantic blows mild and it blows harsh, as high and low pressure systems clash from the Azores to the Arctic. The winds churned up from these collisions stirred waves that could swamp the stoutest landing boat. As the competing systems twisted and pirouetted, making their way east, the Allies kept a close watch on the meteorological dance steps, for they held the fate of the Allied cause.⁵⁵

To predict the weather’s path, every Monday Ike and his senior commanders would meet with their weathermen and select an imaginary D-Day a few days hence. The meteorologists would give Eisenhower their forecast for Normandy on the target date, and Ike would make his hypothetical decision to invade or stay in port. The results of these games were not encouraging, but Eisenhower came away from these exercised with a thorough understanding of factors that would dictate the clouds, waves, and winds along the coast.⁵⁶

“It is the same old story of gambling on the weather and knowing there is nothing that can be done about it,” wrote an unhappy Harry Butcher. “This has always been the most anguishing period for Ike and now is no exception.”⁵⁷

It was not hard to see the effects of the grinding stress. Ike looked old, his left eye hurt from too much reading, and he couldn’t shake a high-pitched ringing in his ear. Pressure was beginning to mount within Dwight Eisenhower again. Something would have to give, and soon.⁵⁸

Brad was smart enough to accept Patton’s obvious value as a pursuit captain, but there were limits. The Army functioned as a team; you were either on the team or you weren’t, and if you weren’t, there were a thousand general officers on the Army’s rolls who would kill to take your place. To Bradley, the question of George Patton, or for that matter, any man above lieutenant colonel, was that simple.

What galled Brad was that Ike never consulted him. After all, George Patton would be Brad’s cross to bear, not so much Ike’s, since George would be working for Brad. After railing about how life was too short to work with George Patton, the least Eisenhower could have done was talk to him about keeping the man on Bradley’s team.⁵⁹

The more he saw of Rommel’s defenses, the more Brad frowned at his chances. Allied intelligence now estimated that by the end of spring the “other fellow” would have fifty-eight divisions in France, including ten panzer and panzergrenadier divisions and fourteen to seventeen front line infantry and parachute divisions. On the American beaches, which aerial photos showed to be heavily mined and studded with obstacles, Bradley might face as many as four infantry divisions, and he would have to rush at least four batteries of heavy coastal guns. To top it off, the two American beaches were separated by the swamp-logged Vire Estuary, which would make cooperation among the assault divisions difficult.⁶⁰

The planning phase, at least, had a familiar ring to Brad. It was not so different from an Academy exercise, where obstacles were set up and overcome on paper—papers not so different from those that crossed Brad’s desk every day.

But planning was one thing. Execution—that was the rub, because the Germans had a say in how the battle would go once his men’s feet were on the sand. H-hour, Brad knew, would simply be the opening, a king’s pawn two to king’s pawn four. Then Rommel would get his turn.

The solution to this unknown—at least, the best solution Bradley knew—was to find commanders who would make the right decisions, who would react quickly and whom he could trust to fight within the framework that he and his staff laid down. That was why a team was so essential, and that was why George Smith Patton was not cut out for a Bradley team.

As D-Day approached, Brad became tired, irritable. His quiet demeanor, legendary around his staff, gave way frequently to hard questions and implied threats. It didn’t improve Bradley’s mood that he would miss his daughter Lee’s wedding in May, and around his staff he made no secret of his disdain for the unstable former Seventh Army commander whom Ike had decided to keep on the team.⁶¹

The boss’s attitude naturally filtered down through First Army’s janissaries, who loved to recall Patton’s humiliation over the slapping incidents. Brad’s aide Chet Hansen noted in his diary, “Never knew anyone in such complete disrepute as George.” The captain of the MPs, Hansen wrote, “threatened to knock him down if he as much as spoke, and everyone ducked out for dinner the night he was here, especially Red O’Hare who dislikes him violently.” During a dinner with Bradley, Hansen narrated how Brad’s staffers lampooned a publicity photo of George. “His picture was ridiculous with the wrestling belt, the pearl handled revolver, chin back, staring at the sun,” Hansen wrote. “Monk says it looks like the photos of Musso we saw in Sicily. I saw it and it does with the chin.” Bradley laughed about the picture the next day, though he did remark that he was glad Patton had spent so much time with him, as he knew George’s weaknesses better than anyone, and could keep the man in check once they were on the Continent.⁶²

To complicate an already complex plan, General Bradley requested airborne drops at Carentan, near the juncture of Utah and Omaha beaches, and at the village of Sainte-Mère-Église, behind Utah beach. The air drops made military sense to a ground commander, since his paratroopers would shield the exits from Utah beach until the 4th Division could get its boots onto green grass. But to Brad’s surprise, the air drop request put him at loggerheads with Ike’s tactical air commander, Air Chief Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory.⁶³

Leigh-Mallory, a dour sixty-four-year old Cheshire native with an acute sense of cost but little appreciation of benefits, feared the airborne landings would incur unacceptable losses and he vehemently protested the air drop portion of the operation. So much so, in fact, that at a planning meeting at Montgomery’s headquarters, Bradley and Leigh-Mallory got into a shouting argument that was settled only when Montgomery sided with Bradley.⁶⁴

Not content to let the matter rest with Montgomery, eight days before D-Day Leigh-Mallory ran to Ike with a balance sheet that projected 50 percent casualties among the paratroopers and 70 percent among the glider troops. Ike called Brad into his office and told him of Leigh-Mallory’s objections.⁶⁵

Ike, ears ringing with prophecies of doom, later reflected, “It would be difficult to conceive of a more soul-racking problem.” Once again he had to weigh two different approaches to minimize the butcher’s bill in an operation where the butcher’s bill would be unavoidably high. Between Brad’s prediction of disaster without the airborne and Leigh-Mallory’s warning of disaster with the airborne, Ike had to consider whether the Utah landings would become another Dieppe, another Kasserine, another Anzio.

Then again, Ike thought, Bradley hadn’t steered him wrong yet. Eisenhower put a lot of stock in Brad’s judgment, and when it was time to ante up, Ike would back Brad’s play. He took a deep breath and announced that the airborne landings would go as planned.⁶⁷

Brad spent his last few days in England ensuring that the plans, the arrangements, the logistics, all stuck. He visited the men who would pay victory’s price, giving words of encouragement that, in their brevity, contrasted sharply to the bombast, profanity, and fluency of Old Blood and Guts.⁶⁸

But if Patton had a history with terrible press quotes, Bradley was learning to watch his own back around the growing horde of reporters who would test the vigilance of his censors. During a visit to the 29th Division, Brad gave a pep talk to soldiers where he belittled rumored estimates of 90 percent casualties on D-Day. “This stuff about tremendous losses is tommyrot,” he told them. “Some of you won’t come back—but it’ll be very few.” Several days later he learned that his off-the-record remarks turned up in stateside papers alongside warnings of high casualties that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Marshall issued to temper public expectations. Embarrassed at the disparity, Brad punished the censor, raised hell with SHAEF’s public relations office, and resolved to watch his words in public, even when reporters didn’t seem to be hanging around.⁶⁹

On June 1, Brad and George rode over to Montgomery’s tactical headquarters outside Portsmouth for dinner with Monty and the two Commonwealth army commanders, General Crerar of the First Canadian Army and General Miles “Bimbo” Dempsey of the Second British Army. The gathering was congenial, almost lighthearted, considering the lake of blood that was to flow four days hence. It was the type of social gathering perfectly suited to George, a personality everyone took note of. There was much talk of where they would be “if all goes as planned,” a caveat Patton had learned to distrust, and buoyant Montgomery predicted that the war would be over by November 1.⁷⁰

When it was almost time to go, Monty’s orderlies brought out glasses of port, and Montgomery proposed a toast to his army commanders, to whom they all drank. When no one jumped to respond, George stepped forward and raised his glass of the sweet, tawny liquid. “As the oldest Army Commander present,” he said with a smile, “I would like to propose a toast to the health of General Montgomery and express our satisfaction in serving under him.”⁷¹

George’s compliment was not perfectly sincere—“lightning did not strike me,” he remarked with mock surprise—and the toast did not endear him to Bradley, who was, though he didn’t say it, not satisfied serving under Montgomery. But it was a fitting curtain call to an evening of Anglo-American camaraderie, a brotherhood all too likely to splinter once the men were on the Continent .⁷²

George’s good-bye to his Missouri comrade the next day was suffused with quiet emotion. His face growing red, George turned to Brad, took his hands in his own, and said, “Brad, the best of luck to you. We’ll be meeting again—soon, I hope.”⁷³

Throughout southern England, dry runs were wrapped up, and Brad’s men were herded into their staging areas, known around headquarters as “sausages” for the fat, oval shapes they made on operations maps. Though the plan called for Bradley to watch and coordinate troop movements from the U.S.S. Augusta, Patton’s old command ship for TORCH, the bulk of First Army’s command apparatus would be with Hodges aboard the converted freighter Archerner. Ike wanted Brad to stay with him at Plymouth, the invasion’s command center, but Brad politely refused. “If we run into trouble on the landing, the decisions are going to have to be made aboard Kirk’s flagship,” he pointed out. “Our communications are all tied in there and that’s where I belong.”⁷⁴

Ike nodded in agreement, and on June 3 Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley carried his duffel bags aboard the Augusta for another ride to a foreign beach. “For the first time since Sicily,” he wrote afterward, “I buckled on a pistol and bent my neck under the weight of a steel helmet.”⁷⁵

Bradley walked past a row of blue-jacketed salutes from the Augusta’s crew as his First Army “family”—chief of staff Bill Kean, intelligence chief Monk Dickson, operations head Tubby Thorson, Chet Hansen, and some signal officers—dragged up bags and footlockers stuffed with waterproof gas masks, pistols, Mae West jackets, vitamin pills, toilet paper, and sewing kits. The embarkation to Normandy was exactly as Brad wanted it to be. No ceremony, no fanfare. Just the straightforward business of war.⁷⁶