PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (15 page)

Removed from battle, Patton writhed in his Casablanca seat. Such a blow to the pride of the American army, his army, was agony. That his own son-in-law, John Waters, the husband of his eldest daughter, Bea, was now a prisoner of war added to the pain. Patton felt both neglected and useless. Then, on March 4, he picked up a telephone message from Eisenhower ordering him to leave the next day for extended field duty. He flew to Algiers, where Ike was waiting for him at the airfield. Ike was relieving Fredendall and giving Patton temporary command of II Corps. His mission was to transform the corps from a defeated army into a victorious one or, as Eisenhower put it in a formal memorandum of March 6, to effect “the rehabilitation of all American forces under your command.” In his memorandum, he made clear that Patton was “taking over a difficult task. . . . But I know you can do it and your success there is going to have far-reaching effects. . . .” He also reminded Patton of having spoken to him “about personal recklessness. Your personal courage is something you do not have to prove to me, and I want you as Corps Commander—not as a casualty.”
¹²

British general Sir Harold Alexander briefed Patton on the role of the II Corps, which, he said, was to support British forces under General Bernard Law Montgomery by threatening the Axis flank. Patton did not relish a supporting role, and he was distressed not only that it would inhibit him personally, but that it would not allow sufficient scope of action for the American army to redeem itself after the failure at Kasserine Pass. But Patton accepted that Alexander was in command, and he bit his tongue.

Patton formally replaced Fredendall on March 6 and contemplated the sloppy, demoralized, unsoldierly command the general had left to him. The soldier is the army. Plans, equipment, commanders, all are necessary, but without hard, disciplined soldiers, there could be no army, and without an army, there could be no victory. His orders were to take II Corps into action in 10 days’ time. That gave him little more than a week to transform a beaten rabble into a force of warriors absolutely determined to win.

What he did became one of the legends of the United States Army. As usual, he was everywhere, speeding about in a siren-equipped scout car accompanied by a motorcycle escort. He demanded that the officers and men of II Corps look and behave like soldiers. He ordered everyone to wear clean, pressed uniforms, complete with neckties, leggings, and helmets. He established rigorous schedules and requirements for every activity, no matter how mundane. He insisted on the strict observance of all military courtesies, including the salute. (It is said that anyone in the army could instantly recognize a “Patton man” by the sharpness of his salute.) He had his troops carefully overhaul all weapons. He instituted a strict schedule of monetary fines for the slightest infractions. The men grumbled, but they soon began to see themselves as soldiers:
Patton’s men.
While he saw to the minutiae of the troops’ discipline, he also delivered talk after personal talk, exhorting his men to fierce, aggressive action. He did not want them to die for their country, he said, but to kill for it.

Even as he demanded the utmost from II Corps, he moved heaven and earth to see that its personnel were the best-equipped and best-fed men in the U.S. Army. Even as he set the bar higher and higher, demanding more and more, he continually assured his men that they would be worthy, they would succeed, they would win. Many men hated him, but no one ignored him, and everyone, even the grumblers, was excited by what he had to say.

In the meantime, he found that he had an old comrade, Omar Bradley, to deal with. Although Ike had expressed total confidence in Patton, he sent Bradley to Patton as his personal “representative.” Patton took this to mean spy, and he responded by securing Eisenhower’s approval to appoint Bradley his deputy commander. Once the transformation of II Corps had been completed, Patton would go on to continue planning Operation Husky, as the Sicily invasion was called, and Bradley would assume command of the corps.

Patton was promoted to lieutenant general on March 12. On March 17, a II Corps division under Terry Allen took the village of Gafsa, the first objective Alexander had assigned the corps, then advanced toward the second objective, Gabes, along the way achieving a fine victory at the Battle of El Guettar. Here Allen’s division checked the advance of a German and an Italian panzer force, not once but twice. In contrast to the demoralized chaos of Kasserine Pass, the American troops fought bravely and efficiently, destroying 30 Axis tanks and driving the enemy from the field. The victory was well publicized and, on the home front, did much to exorcize the shame of Kasserine.

Less impressive was Orlando Ward’s performance at Maknassy Pass, the third of Alexander’s prescribed objectives. Bogged down in mud, Ward was at a loss. Patton, who did not believe a commander should allow himself to be defeated by mud or any other natural circumstance, ultimately relieved Ward.

In contrast to his command in France during World War I, Patton could not be everywhere at once on the battlefield. El Guettar and the Maknassy Pass were simply too far apart, and although he made frequent front-line inspections, Patton had to spend most of his time at his headquarters, between the widely dispersed divisions. It was yet another frustration.

At length, as Montgomery finally forced the German tanks out of the Mareth Line, Alexander ordered Patton to pull out of stubborn Maknassy and attack down the road toward Gabes with the object of harrying the German retreat from Mareth. Patton was resentful of the condescending tone of Alexander’s orders, which were so detailed as to leave nothing to Patton’s discretion. Hadn’t the American army proven itself at El Guettar? Nevertheless, Patton took the assignment and put together what he hoped would be another brilliant victory. In fact, the assault, under C. C. Benson, made little progress. This Patton ascribed in part to an absence of close air support from the Allied air forces, which were under the command of Alexander’s own air officer. When, on April 1, Patton’s aide, Captain Dick Jenson, the son of a family friend and a young man of whom Patton was very fond, was killed in an air attack on the general’s headquarters, Patton complained that “total lack of air cover . . . has allowed German air force to operate at will.” Air Vice Marshal Arthur Coningham responded angrily and insultingly that Patton was using the air force to excuse his own failures on the ground. Patton, in turn, demanded a public apology for this slander. Seeking to avoid an ugly breach in the alliance, three air force generals were dispatched to Patton’s headquarters to assure him that air support was forthcoming. As they spoke, the headquarters came under air attack again, and a portion of the ceiling collapsed around Patton and the air force officers. Fortunately, everyone escaped unharmed, but Patton could have said nothing that would have made his case more eloquently.

“How in hell did you manage to stage that?” someone was heard to ask.

“I’ll be damned if I know,” Patton replied, “but if I could find the sons of bitches who flew those planes, I’d mail each one of them a medal.”
¹³

Following this, Coningham agreed to send a cable retracting his remarks and closing the matter. For his part, Patton returned to the struggle on the Gabes plain. Benson was still making little headway there, so Patton visited him in his headquarters. He told Benson to keep his units moving until he either found a fight or ended up in the sea, then both men drove out to the units in the vanguard. Finding the tanks halted at the edge of a minefield, Patton, preceded by a Jeep and a scout car, drove through the mines himself, leading Benson’s tanks safely through them. It was an extreme instance of leadership by example, and it demonstrated precisely the kind of reckless courage Eisenhower had warned Patton to avoid. In any case, the gesture had not been worth the risk. By the time Benson’s tanks were rolling again, the bulk of the Axis troops had already moved on, evading any attempt to engage them.

Although disappointed by the action at Gabes, Patton felt that the victory at El Guettar was sufficient proof of II Corp’s rehabilitation. Alexander was about to commence what he intended as the final operation in Tunisia. When Patton learned that Alexander did not intend to include II

Corps in it, he protested to Alexander as well as to Eisenhower. He had given back to the unit its self-esteem and its honor, and he insisted that II Corps be given a fitting role in the culmination of the Tunisian campaign. Once Patton had secured a promise that the American army would indeed be represented in the final operation, he turned over command of the corps to Bradley and returned to his headquarters in Casablanca.

As he resumed work on plans for Operation Husky, he received congratulations from Marshall—“You have done a fine job and have justified our confidence in you”—and from Eisenhower: “I hope that you . . . personally will accept my sincere congratulations upon the outstanding example of leadership you have given us all.” In the privacy of his diary, Patton, who always craved recognition and praise from others, seemed to suggest that he had now moved beyond this need: “As I gain in experience, I do not think more of myself but less of others. Men, even so-called great men, are wonderfully weak and timid. They are too damned polite. War is very simple, direct, and ruthless. It takes a simple, direct, and ruthless man to wage war.” Then, looking at the words he had just written, Patton wrote: “Some times I wonder if I will have to laugh at myself for writing things like the above.” He must have lifted his pen from the paper and paused before adding: “But I think not.”
¹⁴

CHAPTER 8

A
s originally drawn up in
W
ashington and
L
ondon
, far from the scene of the proposed action, the plan for Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily, was admirably straightforward. The British Eighth Army (designated the Eastern Task Force), under Bernard Law Montgomery, would land around Catania on the eastern shore of Sicily, and the I Armored Corps (the Western Task Force), commanded by Patton, would land near Palermo on the northern shore. The two task forces were to secure these major port cities, which would enable an orderly buildup of additional troops as the task forces drove along the eastern and northern coastal roads to link up at Messina on the northeastern tip of the island. In this way, not only would Sicily be conquered, but the Allied armies would end up in an ideal position from which to launch an invasion of the Italian mainland.

The broad, slashing strokes of this unadorned plan greatly appealed to Patton. Montgomery, however, saw it very differently. To him, it was as an egregious example of “penny-packet” warfare because the plan divided the assault forces, spreading them out over some 600 miles of Sicilian coastline. Montgomery feared that Husky would suffer the fate of the early assaults in Tunisia, which General Sir Claude Auchinleck had conducted in similarly piecemeal fashion. The plan was, he pronounced, “a dog’s breakfast,” and his criticism led to three months of tortured wrangling among the British themselves and between the British and the Americans. Patton, who must have recognized that the others regarded him as a fighter, a field commander and tactician, not a strategist, mostly stayed out of the debate, which reached a three-hour anticlimax in a meeting of April 29, 1943. Tempers flared and, as Patton wrote to Beatrice afterward, “It ended in stalemate. It was one hell of a performance. War by committee.”
¹

Then, three days later, it was all suddenly resolved.

On May 2, Montgomery strode into Allied headquarters, Algiers, asked for Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Walter Bedell Smith—universally called Beetle or Beadle—and was told he was in the lavatory. Montgomery walked into the lavatory, cornered Beadle Smith, and took him to a mirror hanging over the sink. He breathed on the mirror and, with his finger, outlined the inverted triangle of Sicily. He then traced a plan in which his Eighth Army landed at two locations on the northeast corner of Sicily on either side of Messina while Patton’s I Armored Corps (to be redesignated the Seventh U.S. Army once it landed) would make three landings below Montgomery along the eastern coast at Gela, Scoglitti, and Licata for the sole purpose of supporting Montgomery’s assault.

In an Algerian men’s room, Montgomery succeeded in doing what three months of conference-room debate had failed to do: formulate an acceptable plan for the invasion of Sicily. Patton hardly relished being cast in the shadow of Montgomery, and wrote in his diary, “The U.S. is getting gypped,” then he reminded himself that “the thing I must do is retain my SELF-CONFIDENCE. I have greater ability than these other people and it comes from, for lack of a better word, what we must call greatness of soul based on a belief—an unshakable belief—in my destiny.” For Patton, that destiny meant that “The U.S. must win—not as an ally, but as a conqueror.” To his staff, he allowed himself a rare expression of disgust with Eisenhower, complaining that Montgomery’s dominance of Operation Husky is “what you get when your Commander-in-Chief ceases to be an American and becomes an Ally.”
²