PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (18 page)

Again, those who witnessed the outburst saw an act of almost incomprehensible brutality. What actually occurred, however, was an episode of raw emotion. Patton resumed touring the tent wards, but he kept talking about Bennett and was on the verge of tears himself when he was heard to say “I can’t help it, but it makes my blood boil to think of a yellow bastard being babied.” He clearly saw cowardice as an infectious disease (to which, doubtless, he was as vulnerable as anyone): “I wont have those cowardly bastards hanging around our hospitals,” Patton said to the hospital commander, Colonel Donald E. Currier. “We’ll probably have to shoot them some time anyway, or we’ll raise a breed of morons.”
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It was the second incident, coming as it did just days after the first, that motivated the medical officer to send a report through army medical channels to Omar Bradley, who was now commanding officer of II Corps. Doubtless out of loyalty to Patton and a sense of his importance to the war, Bradley did nothing more than lock the report in his safe. But the medical officers also sent a report directly to Eisenhower, who received it on August 16. The very next day, Ike wrote Patton what Patton himself described as “a very nasty letter,” in which he pulled no punches: “if there is a very considerable element of truth in the allegations ... I must so seriously question your good judgment and your self discipline as to raise serious doubts in my mind as to your future usefulness.” However, Eisenhower took pains to make it clear that the incident had not been entered into the records of Allied Headquarters. He did not want to bring Patton up on official charges, and when Demaree Bess, a correspondent for the
Saturday Evening Post,
and other reporters heard about the incident, they complied with Eisenhower’s request to bury the story because, Ike explained, the American war effort could not afford to lose Patton.
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Contrary to some accounts, Eisenhower did not order Patton to make a round of apologies for his outburst. Patton himself decided that such amends were necessary, albeit mainly to placate his commander: “I hate to make Ike mad when it is my earnest study to please him,” he wrote in his diary on August 20. Patton made his first apologies to the doctors and nurses of the hospitals involved, then to Kuhl and Bennett personally and in private (he insisted on their shaking hands with him), and, in September, to a body of troops assembled for a USO show. Each time, he spoke sincerely, if defensively, insisting that while his method had been, beyond question, wrong, his motive had been unimpeachable. To the group of doctors and nurses, he even told a story about a World War I friend who had lost his nerve in battle and subsequently committed suicide. Patton suggested that, had someone slapped sense into him in a timely manner, his life might have been saved. As for Kuhl and Bennett, Patton explained that he was urgently trying to return them to an understanding of “their obligation as men and soldiers.” When he addressed the large assembly of troops in September, Patton offered humor. “I thought I would stand here,” he said as he took the stage, “and let you see what a son of a bitch looks like and whether I am as big a son of a bitch as you think I am.”
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The troops ate it up. But Patton remained in the doghouse.

Clark, not he, was leading the Fifth Army on the Italian mainland. Bradley, not he, had been chosen by Eisenhower to organize an army for the cross-channel invasion. Patton remained on Sicily overseeing the dismemberment of the Seventh Army. Soon his entire command, nothing more than a headquarters and antiaircraft batteries, consisted of just 5,000 men, down from 200,000.

The newspapers, which had been filled with stories about Patton, now rarely mentioned him. Only in German headquarters was the name of Patton constantly in the air. What was he doing? What army and operation would he lead next? When would his attack come? He was one of the few Allied officers the German generals truly feared, not only for his consummate skill on the field, but because they saw clearly what he was: a warrior.

Eisenhower made good use of Patton’s reputation—among the Germans. Knowing that the Germans would hear about it all, he sent Patton on high-profile trips to Algiers, Tunis, Corsica, Cairo, Jerusalem, and Malta, all places from which Allied operations were plausible. By using Patton as a decoy to keep the enemy guessing, the Allies sought to force the Germans to spread themselves thin and to waste effort and resources moving from one place to the next. It was a useful role, playing decoy, even as it was utterly humiliating.

The weeks and then the months passed. Suddenly, late in November 1943, during a Sunday-evening radio broadcast from Washington, the popular columnist Drew Pearson made the slapping incidents public. Earlier in the year, Patton had been a media hero. Then he faded from the headlines, only to reemerge, in the wake of the broadcast, demonized as the darkest of villains and nastiest of bullies, the very kind of tyrant the Allied armies were fighting against. All the worse for Patton, Pearson leveled his criticism against Eisenhower as well, for having failed to issue an official reprimand. Sensitive to public sentiment, senators and congressmen clamored for Patton’s dismissal, some freely comparing him to Adolf Hitler. Secretary of War Stimson asked Eisenhower for a full report. A man of lesser character than Eisenhower might have been tempted to seek relief by turning against Patton and yielding to the public and political demand for the general’s head on a platter. Instead, he defended Patton on the basis of his record and explained that the personal, nonofficial form of reprimand had been intended to preserve a highly effective fighting commander, a leader whose skill, courage, and efficiency were not only effective against the enemy, but certainly saved the lives of the soldiers under his command.

Through much of November and into December, the public and political uproar continued, then began to subside. Letters continued to pour into the office of the president and of the secretary of war, but their tenor shifted by the middle of December. Increasingly, they voiced support for Patton and forgiveness for his outburst. Some even suggested a promotion was due. Clearly, given time for reflection, most of the American public realized it wanted one thing above all else—to win the war—and Patton, with all his flaws, was a commander capable of doing just that.

In the wake of the slapping incidents, Ike stood by Patton, but he made it clear that, had General Marshall asked for Patton’s relief, he would not have offered an argument. As Patton saw it, the slapping incidents were the reason he was passed over as commander of the American forces in Operation Overlord, the Normandy “D-Day” invasion. The incidents must certainly have reaffirmed in Eisenhower’s mind that Bradley, not Patton, was the better choice for the job, but that decision had been made months before the incidents became public knowledge. Eisenhower judged that Patton was a great combat commander, who possessed the rare faculty of always thinking in terms of attack. Yet the very qualities that made him fast and aggressive also created a certain instability and volatility, which, Ike believed, were barely under control. For the overall job of Overlord, from planning, through landings, to initial deployment, the unassuming and even drab Omar Bradley was the safer choice. However, Eisenhower reasoned, once the landings had been accomplished and the beachheads established—once the likelihood of out-and-out disaster had been reduced—Patton was just the man to lead an army in the breakout from the beachhead and the advance into the enemy’s heart. Whatever his liabilities, Patton would bring to the invasion the one asset without which it could never in the long run succeed: unremitting drive.

Thus it is a myth that slapping two G.I.’s. cost Patton leadership of Overlord. The truth is that Eisenhower would never have chosen him for the job. But it is also true that, after the Sicily operation, Patton—whom the enemy considered America’s most formidable general—was put on the shelf. For 11 months following the capture of Messina, he was not present on the field of battle. Patton’s superiors were never quite sure what to do with him in the absence of an ongoing campaign, but the slapping incidents led them to lengthen his hiatus during a critical period in the war. In a very real sense, Patton had become a casualty of war, just as if he had suffered a disabling physical wound. It was the price of carrying within him the emotional equipment that drove him swiftly, daringly, and hungrily in combat and that, at the same time, rendered him vulnerable to the stress of warfare fought with the ceaseless intensity he himself created. The cost to Patton is known: 11 months on the sidelines. The cost to the Allied war effort can only be guessed.

CHAPTER 10

M
essina fell to the
S
eventh
A
rmy
on August 17, 1943. As of that day, strictly on the basis of his record, George S. Patton Jr. was widely regarded as America’s best combat general, the conqueror of Sicily. Even more important in the long run, he had created an effective and victorious army, a splendid example of American military prowess and valor. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine how he felt when most of the Seventh was turned over to Mark Clark and he himself was left as a garrison officer in what had become an obscure corner of the war, facing the all-too-real prospect of being relieved of command altogether.

It was January 1944 before the suspense was at least partially eased. On the twenty-second, Patton was ordered from Sicily to London, where, on the twenty-sixth, he was told that he had been named to command a new force, the Third United States Army. Now the only question was what he would be assigned to do with this outfit. The biggest, greatest, most consequential operation of the war, the invasion of Hitler’s Fortress Europe, was being planned—by Eisenhower, Bradley, and others, without Patton. Grateful to be out of Sicily at last, Patton was nevertheless anxious to know just how long he would be staying at his new headquarters in the sleepy little Cheshire town of Knutsford, five hours outside London, as the war continued to swirl about the rest of the world.

Patton wanted nothing so much as an immediate assignment to command an army already in combat; however, there were advantages to building an army from scratch. Although it was true, as he wrote to his wife, that “this thing of imitating God and creating new worlds out of thin air is wearing,” Patton did have the opportunity to mold the Third in his image, from the very beginning, instead of merely “rehabilitating” a unit, as he had done in North Africa with II Corps. He immediately requested Jacob L. Devers, now the senior U.S. commander in the Mediterranean theater, to transfer his principal staff officers from the Seventh Army to the Third. Devers obliged, and thus Patton had a staff he knew, trusted, and thoroughly controlled. For their part, his top staff, Hugh Gaffey and Hobart “Hap” Gay (chief and assistant chief of staff, respectively), and his key personal aides, Charles Codman and Alexander Stiller, plus his African-American orderly, Sergeant George Meeks, and his chief medical officer, Charles B. Odom, were fiercely loyal and quite willing to subject themselves to the total control of their boss. Patton considered these men his military family, and since no family is complete without a pet, he also acquired an English bull terrier, which he christened William the Conqueror. To his master’s chagrin, however, the dog soon proved itself timid and was especially terrified of bombardment and shell fire. As soon as he discovered this, Patton renamed him Willie. A coward, the dog also behaved with singular rudeness in the presence of women, mounting their legs and pushing his wet nose up their skirts. It is not clear how Patton felt about this, but he doted on the dog because, as he wrote to Beatrice, he “took to me like a duck to water.”
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With his “family” established at Peover Hall, “a huge house last repaired in 1627 or there abouts,”
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Patton chose a code name for Third Army headquarters: Lucky. That portion of headquarters consisting of himself and his key officers was Lucky Forward, while the administrative section was Lucky Rear. Patton’s personal code name was Lucky 6. Throughout the war, the size of Third Army would vary from about 100,000 to a peak strength of 437,860 as its final campaign ended on May 8, 1945.

As he had done in his previous commands, Patton began shaping his army by creating “perfect discipline,” beginning with the details of spit and polish—impeccably maintained uniforms complete with leggings and neckties (both of which enlisted men detested), observance of every military courtesy, precision in every movement and item of drill—then proceeding to intensive combat training, which Patton personally supervised. As usual, he was rarely in his headquarters and could instead be found regularly out in the field, appearing everywhere officers and men were being trained to do anything at all. To create officers in his image, he lectured frequently and issued a series of letters of instruction, perhaps the most important of which was the first, dated March 6, 1944. In it, his cardinal instruction was to “lead in person” and to take full responsibility for obtaining assigned objectives. Failing this, an officer who is “not dead or severely wounded has not done his full duty.” More specifically, commanders as well as staff officers (accustomed to working in the relative safety of a more or less remote headquarters) were to “visit the front daily.” There they were to “observe, not to meddle.” The leader’s “primary mission ... is to see with your own eyes and be seen by your troops while engaged in personal reconnaissance.” At the front, “praise is more valuable than blame,” and a good officer provides plenty of positive reinforcement for specific achievements. In addition, a personal presence at the front, Patton wrote, is essential to ensuring the effective execution of orders. Merely issuing an order counted for about 10 percent of a commander’s job. “The remaining 90 percent consists in assuring . . . proper and vigorous execution.”
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