PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (10 page)

Patton returned to the tank brigade at Bourg, issued on his arrival one of his trademark orders enforcing military appearance and deportment, then set about drawing up recommendations for the decoration of the Meuse-Ar-gonne tank heroes. While he was still in the hospital, he had written to Beatrice: “Peace looks possible, but I rather hope not for I would like to have a few more fights.”
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He would not get them, however, not in this war. On his thirty-third birthday, November 11, 1918, the guns fell silent in an armistice that would bring to the world a peace as welcome as it was all too brief and, to Patton, one that proved both hateful and far too long.

T
he EPIC EXPLOITS AND LEGENDARY FOIBLES
of Patton in World War II overshadow his extraordinary achievements during the briefer and more limited compass of World War I. In combat, he simultaneously proved the viability of the tank as a weapon and tested the effectiveness of the doctrine and tactics he had formulated and taught just months, weeks, and even days before. He showed himself to be an efficient and charismatic leader of troops. And he was recognized—he entered the war as a captain and came out a colonel. He was decorated—for his wound, there would be a Purple Heart (though the award was delayed for more than a decade—not uncommon during the post—World War I bureaucratic backlog). For his leadership of the tank school and in the field, he received the Distinguished Service Medal. For his personal courage, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. Patton’s achievements were real. His decorations were real. The war had been real. But there was another reality: the peacetime army. On his return to the States, Patton soon found himself wallowing in it.

After the armistice, the nation was not just war weary, it was utterly satiated with violent death and wanted no more of sacrifice, no matter how noble. As President Wilson labored in Paris to remake the postwar world and ensure that the United States would be a controlling force in it, a growing majority of Americans turned their backs on Europe, retreating into what the Republican candidate for president promised: “a return to normalcy.” Portly, handsome, benign, dimwitted, and utterly pliable, Warren Gamaliel Harding was elected in 1920, told the American people that they need have nothing to do with the airy idealism of the League of Nations, and, in effect, announced his intention to do exactly what his Republican handlers had put him into the White House to do: make sure America just minded its own business. Because a nation minding its own business had no need of a big army, the military services set about dismantling themselves. By June 1920, an army of 4.5 million had been reduced to an authorized strength of 280,000 men and by 1922 stood at about 140,000. Now, at age 33, Patton feared that this might have been “his” war, his only war.

It was hardly enough. Patton left France on March 2, 1919 and arrived in Brooklyn on the seventeenth. He was briefly assigned to Camp Meade, Maryland, then was transferred to temporary duty in Washington. His promised Distinguished Service Medal finally came through in June, he returned to Camp Meade in the fall, and on June 30, 1920, like so many other officers rapidly promoted overseas in what was known as the National Army, he reverted to his prewar Regular Army rank of captain. One day later, however, he was promoted to major.

He worked now as a staff officer and cordially hated the duty. Good staff officers are vital to the operation of a modern army, because they serve as the middle layer between headquarters command and the commanders in the field, ensuring that high-command decisions are implemented by the front-line commanders. But George S. Patton Jr. had no desire to be a “middle layer.” Staff officers did not get medals.

In the American army between the wars, men, money, and machines were in short supply. Time, however, was ample, and Patton used it systematically to review his own combat experience and everything else he had seen and heard during the war. He wrote technical papers and gave speeches at the General Staff College. In this work, he came to one very important and consequential conclusion concerning tank doctrine: it was a mistake to tie the tank to infantry. During the war, he himself had preached the subordination of the tank to the foot soldier, but his own combat experience had taught him that it was folly to slow a machine to the pace of a man. Better to set the tanks free, allow them to punch through enemy lines and wreak havoc clear through to the enemy’s rear positions, creating not only a front-line breach but demoralized chaos in the rear, which a massive follow-on infantry attack could then exploit. Unknown to Patton, German military thinkers, even in defeat, were already beginning to pursue precisely this line of thought. The end product, in the case of the German army, would be called blitzkrieg—“lightning war”— and it would set Europe afire. Patton’s writings prepared American military planners to understand blitzkrieg when it came, and thus the United States was able to enter World War II with a viable armored force and the doctrine by which to guide its deployment.

Yet this important insight aside, Patton never blossomed into a theorist. His technical papers were invariably pragmatic, practical, and limited in scope. He read voraciously, collecting from his brother officers in French and British units the training documents they used and gorging himself on their after-action reports, always looking for ways to use tanks most effectively in the future. He also pored over the texts of citations for bravery issued during the war. His purpose was to analyze and distill the very nature of heroism. He knew that by studying the movements and results of combat, he could learn to make the most of mechanized warfare. By examining official accounts of heroic behavior, perhaps he also thought that he could learn how to
create
heroism itself.

During his temporary duty assignment in Washington in the spring of 1919, Patton was named to a board tasked with writing a comprehensive manual for tank operations, and he served on a committee charged with making recommendations for improving the tanks themselves. In the course of his committee work, Patton met J. Walter Christie, a former technician with the U.S. Army Ordnance Department and now a race-car builder, driver, and all-round inventor. Patton and his former subordinate, Sereno Brett, were among a group that traveled to Hoboken, New Jersey, to look at Christie’s M1919, a tank that could reach 60 miles per hour, climb a two-and-a-half-foot wall, and leap a seven-foot-wide ditch. Patton and the others were impressed, and Patton personally championed the Christie design at the War Department. By 1924, however, interwar funding cutbacks ended the department’s involvement in developing the M1919 into a viable weapon. Nevertheless, it is likely (though no documentary evidence exists) that Patton continued personally to help finance Christie’s ongoing work with his own money. Whether this is true or not, Patton was instrumental in developing mechanical concepts that would figure prominently in the American army’s tracked armored vehicles of World War II, including the amphibious tanks that played vital roles in operations from the beaches of Normandy to the islands of the Pacific.

Yet even working with Christie, whose company Patton enjoyed and whom he greatly admired, could not take the place of fighting in war— war, “the only place where a man really lives.”
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Patton worried that he was growing fat and lazy. He complained of having difficulty waking up in the morning. His malaise may have been aggravated somewhat by news about Pershing and Nita. The couple had been separated during the war, then were briefly reunited in London after the armistice. Now Patton learned that the relationship had been broken off. Whether the decision to end the affair was mutual is not known, but the facts are that Pershing never saw Nita again, he remained a single widower, and she lived the rest of her life as an unmarried woman.

Patton threw himself passionately into polo, the closest thing he could find to combat, and, like many another man prematurely entering a midlife crisis, he bought himself a powerful car. It was a Pierce Arrow, as costly as it was beautiful (I “believe in enjoying myself between wars,” Patton remarked
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), and he set out in it to visit Joe Angelo, the faithful orderly who had saved his life at the Meuse-Argonne.

In addition to the technical papers he wrote in the months after his return from France, Patton also delivered a lecture to junior officers titled “The Obligation of Being an Officer.” The man who was quite literally involved in the nuts and bolts of the latest, most advanced military weapon spoke of today’s army officers as “the modern representatives of the demigods and heroes of antiquity,” standing at the head of “a line of men whose acts of valor, self-sacrifice and of service have been the theme of song and story since long before recorded history began.” His speech rose to a pitch of romantic eloquence—“Our calling is most ancient and like all other old things it has amassed through the ages certain customs and traditions which decorate and ennoble it”—only to penetrate abruptly to the hard bedrock of starkest reality: these customs and traditions “render beautiful the otherwise prosaic occupation of being professional men-at-arms: killers.”
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The fiercest of American warriors who had fought before Patton—Grant, Sherman, and Nathan Bedford Forrest—were willing to face the reality, but Patton embraced both reality and, unapologetically, the romance of his calling.

The National Defense Act of 1920 left little room for romantics in the military. The strength of the army was capped at 280,000, and tanks were permanently attached, by force of the new law, to the infantry, where their development was sure to remain stunted as an auxiliary to combat. At Camp Meade, Patton had met another new apostle of the tank, junior to himself, Major Dwight David Eisenhower, West Point Class of 1915. Although Eisenhower (to his consternation) had been assigned to stateside training duty during the war and had not served overseas, Patton recognized in him a superb and energetic officer, a kindred spirit, and the two established a warm friendship. In the months before the cost-cutting measures mandated by the National Defense Act were implemented, the pair avidly discussed the promising future of tanks. But after the budgetary axe fell, both Ike and Patton left the grossly underfunded Tank Corps, which now seemed a dead end for any U.S. Army career.

On September 30, 1920, Patton officially relinquished command of the 304th Tank Brigade and, on October 3, returned to the cavalry as commanding officer, 3rd Squadron, 3rd Cavalry, Fort Myer, Virginia. It was not war, to be sure, but it was one of the best places for a career army officer to spend time between wars. Patton and Beatrice picked up the thread of Washington high society where they had dropped it back in 1913, when they left Fort Myer for Fort Riley, Kansas.

In 1923, Patton attended the Field Officers Course at the Cavalry School at Fort Riley. Beatrice and her daughters stayed with her parents in Massachusetts, where, on Christmas Eve 1923, she gave birth to a son, whom she named George Smith Patton IV. Patton continued his professional education at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, graduating in the top quarter of the class of 1924. This earned him a temporary appointment to the General Staff Corps in Boston, where he could be with Beatrice and their children. More important, the assignment was a prestigious one reserved for the most promising soon-to-be-senior officers. In March 1925, Patton was reassigned to the army’s Hawaiian Division at Schofield Barracks, Honolulu, as G—1 (officer in charge of personnel) and G—2 (officer in charge of intelligence). Beatrice, who was still recovering from the difficult birth of George, remained in Massachusetts with the children. For obvious reasons, assignment to a tropical paradise was a plum posting, and Patton made the most of it. The climate was such that he could ride and play polo virtually every day of the year, which not only satisfied Patton’s appetite for violent exercise and warlike sport, but brought him into contact with the moneyed American aristocracy of the islands. For Patton, a military commander was an officer
and
a gentleman, and that meant someone who was welcome at the highest and most exclusive levels of society.

During this period, Patton conducted a lively correspondence with Eisenhower, to whom he generously sent his full set of “Leavenworth notes” when Ike enrolled after him at the Command and General Staff College. The two wrote back and forth on the nature of combat, command, and Patton’s favorite subject, courage. Patton wrote that courage was the product of leadership and that it was the commander’s job to transform mere soldiers into heroes. The soldiers would not become heroes on their own. Whatever Eisenhower thought about this theory, he avidly studied Patton’s notes and ended up graduating from the college number one in his class. Patton congratulated Ike, but was quick to credit his notes for his friend’s success.

By the end of 1925, Beatrice and the children joined Patton in Hawaii, and the next year he added the responsibilities of G—3 to his Hawaiian Department portfolio. Director of plans and training, G—3 was the only General Staff post Patton truly relished, one from which he could make himself heard on doctrine, strategy, and tactics. Yet in this post, Patton, now 41 years old, behaved much as he had when he was a West Point second corporal. He became “too damned military,” riding subordinate and fellow officers mercilessly for every error or questionable judgment. Within months, G—3 was taken from him. To this demotion was added the blow of Papa’s death, in June 1927, from the combined ravages of tuberculosis and cirrhosis of the liver. Patton was “absolutely undone” by the telegram announcing his father’s death, and he displayed what even Beatrice called “almost unreasonable grief.”
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When his mother, Ruth Wilson, died the following year, Patton seems not to have been profoundly affected; however, he later expressed regret that neither she nor his Papa would live to see him truly prove himself as a soldier.