PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (20 page)

D-Day, June 6, 1944, came and went. In England, Patton could only wait. Jean Gordon, the young woman with whom Patton almost certainly had an affair in Hawaii in 1936, arrived in London at the beginning ofJuly 1944 and was assigned to the Third Army as a Red Cross “doughnut dolly,” a volunteer who dispensed doughnuts and coffee to G.I.’s. According to Everett Hughes, one of Eisenhower’s logistics officers, Patton told him that the beautiful young woman had been “mine for twelve years.” Others who knew Patton, Jean Gordon, or both denied that anything other than an uncle-niece relationship existed between them. Beatrice, however, clearly believed the two were romantically involved. She wrote anxiously to her husband about Jean. He replied on August 3: “We are in the middle of a battle, so don’t meet people so don’t worry.”
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In early July, the Third Army was quietly relocated from England to Normandy. Even though the invasion had begun nearly a month earlier, many in the German high command still believed that the principal landings were yet to come, at Pas de Calais and led by Patton. Accordingly, the Germans continued to maintain their entire Fifteenth Army in that sector. Hoping to keep the deception going, Patton remained in England while his army started to move across the channel. Finally, on July 6, exactly one month after D-Day, he and his staff flew across the Channel in a C—47. On landing, his first order of business was to set up a headquarters. But no sooner had he touched down than the secret of his arrival was out. Correspondents as well as ordinary soldiers and sailors mobbed him. Patton rose to the occasion: “I’m proud to be here to fight beside you. Now let’s cut the guts out of those Krauts and get the hell to Berlin. And when we get to Berlin”—Patton conspicuously wore his ivory-handled revolver—“I am going to personally shoot that paper-hanging goddamned son of a bitch just like I would a snake.” As one naval lieutenant who witnessed his arrival remarked, “When you see General Patton . . . you get the same feeling as when you saw Babe Ruth striding up to the plate. Here’s a big guy who’s going to kick hell out of something.”
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But Patton had yet to step up to the plate. Now, even in France, the waiting continued. When word reached Patton of the July 20 attempt to assassinate Hitler, he ran in panic to Bradley’s headquarters: “For God’s sake, Brad, you’ve got to get me into this fight before the war is over.” On July 22, he wrote to Beatrice: “It is three weeks yesterday since I got here and still no war.” Rain, unremitting rain, delayed Operation Cobra, Bradley’s plan for breaking out from the deadly hedgerow country and into the open plain beyond it. In his diary, Patton complained about Bradley’s timidity, Courtney Hodges’s incompetence, and Eisenhower’s lack of “the stuff.”
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On July 24, Bradley attempted to punch through an area between the villages of La Chapelle-Enjuger and Hebecrevon, just north of the main road between Saint-Lo and Coutances.

Allied bombers accidentally dropped ordnance on American front lines, killing or wounding 150 men. But on the next day 1,500 B—17s and B—24s let fall torrents of high explosives precisely on target. This bombardment was followed by medium bombers and fighter bombers dropping napalm. The combined air assault blew a hole in the German line, and the ground forces of Operation Cobra exploded through it. On July 27, Bradley asked Patton to take unofficial command of Troy Middleton’s VII Corps and head toward Avranches. After 11 months, he was finally in the war again.

BRADLEY’S ORIGINAL PLAN HAD BEEN to put the Third Army—and Patton—into action after the fall of Avranches, a key port on the Gulf of St. Malo and the gateway to Brittany. After much heartbreaking and bloody delay in the treacherous
bocage
(hedgerow country)—countryside networked by ancient stone walls overgrown with hedges, which presented formidable obstacles to the advance of men and vehicles alike—the Cobra breakthrough had been so sudden that it occurred before Avranches could be taken. It must have given Patton considerable pleasure to be called on to capture this important objective, even before his entire army had been officially activated in France. Patton mounted one of his trademark hell-on-wheels advances, using two armored divisions, running side by side, as the point of a spear aimed at the town. Within three days, Patton’s troops were in Avranches. On the fourth day, they took the bridge at Pontaubault, which gave the American army access to three principal roads, one leading south to the Loire, one leading east to the Seine and Paris, and the other opening onto Brittany and the west. Cobra had possession of the major arteries for breakout into all France.

On August 1, Bradley became commander of the 12th Army Group, which included (as initially constituted) the First Army, under Courtney Hodges, and the Third, under Patton. Nearly two months after it had begun, Patton was fully joining the battle in France. As he saw it, this was his misfortune, but, more objectively, it was actually a stroke of luck, which may well have enhanced the general’s subsequent reputation. By the time he came into action, the dreadful rains of June and early July had cleared, and Bradley had finally broken through the crippling hedgerow country. This was precisely the moment highly mobile warfare was most needed and, at the same time, had finally become possible. Now, at the beginning of August, the war in France was just the kind of war Patton had prepared himself and Third Army for and for which he was, by temperament and genius, best suited.

Under orders from Bradley, Patton deployed Troy Middleton with VIII Corps to advance through Brittany, which was rather lightly defended, most of the German force having left Brittany to meet the landings at Normandy. (Remarkably, however, the entire Fifteenth German Army was still up the coast at Pas de Calais, still anticipating more Allied landings. Although Patton’s arrival in France was hardly secret any longer, Eisenhower insisted that news stories refrain from mentioning the general’s name. He hoped to keep the Germans guessing—and their Fifteenth Army out of the action—as long as possible.) Whereas Patton’s Third Army had remarkable freedom of movement, Hodges’s First, Dempsey’s Second British, and Crerar’s First Canadian were stalled in fierce engagements with the stronger German presence to the northeast of Patton’s area of operation. Bradley therefore ordered three corps of Third Army to head out of Avranches and advance to the east and the southeast, to the Seine and the Loire, to draw off pressure from the other Allied armies. Simultaneously, Patton sent one armored division via Rennes to take Lorient (on the Bay of Biscay, the south coast of Brittany, some 100 miles from Avranches) and another to take Brest (at the western tip of the Brittany coast, 200 miles away). From the beginning, then, Patton’s army operated across a broad swath of France north of the Loire. These sweeping movements were vintage Patton, fostered in the Louisiana and Texas maneuvers, which taught him to think in terms of swift drives over long distances.

Middleton, who unlike Patton was a conventional commander, diverted the division assigned to Brest to attack a German concentration at St. Malo. As mentioned, one of Patton’s directives to his officers was that issuing orders constituted 10 percent of a commander’s job and seeing to their proper execution the other 90 percent, so Patton followed up on his order concerning Brest, immediately rescinded Middleton’s diversion, and ensured that the division drove on to the objective he had assigned. Instead of tying down an armored division at St. Malo, Patton sent an infantry division to lay siege to the town. Fast armor was best reserved for remote objectives, such as Brest, whereas St. Malo, a short distance from Avranches, could be addressed by infantry. Although Patton had responded quickly, there was a price to pay for the delay that Middleton had caused. By the time the armor reached Brest, the city’s garrison had been reinforced. Instead of folding rapidly, Brest would not yield until early September. Fighting a war of speed required a high degree of coordination, with every subordinate commander partaking of the chief’s unwavering aggressiveness. Conventional commanders, no matter how competent, were weak links who could bring about disproportionately costly delays.

The division Patton had sent breezed through Rennes, but found Lo-rient very strongly garrisoned. American infantry were deployed around the city, which was thereby cut off, but Lorient did not surrender until the very end of the war.

Patton did not allow himself to become preoccupied with Brest and Lorient. In compliance with Bradley’s orders, he sent his XV Corps in a long end run southeast and east around the open end of the German position. Simultaneously, he sent XX Corps to the Loire. Under their aggressive commanders, Wade Haislip and Walton H. Walker, these two corps swept everything out of their way and disrupted German rear-echelon units. Haislip reached Le Mans within a week.

At about this time, German commanders began to realize the magnitude of the Normandy invasion and sought permission from Hitler to withdraw from Normandy altogether. Hitler not only refused permission for a withdrawal, he ordered a counterattack. Thanks to Ultra, the Allies’ extraordinary code-breaking operation, the counterattack orders were intercepted. Patton frequently expressed his belief that he possessed what he called a sixth sense in combat, and it was on this, not on any high-tech decrypts, that he placed most of his reliance. However, the Ultra information was sufficiently convincing to prompt him, albeit reluctantly, to halt one of his divisions and retain it defensively near Avranches, ready for movement to nearby Mortain, in case an attack actually materialized. When it did, Patton revised his thinking about Ultra and, from that point on, insisted on daily briefings from Melvin Helfers, his Ultra officer. This was typical Patton—a dyed-in-the-wool cavalryman with a well-nigh mystical belief in his own intuition, he had nevertheless embraced the most modern technology once its value was demonstrated. He had earlier given up horses for tanks, and now he was willing to supplement intuition with advanced cryptanalysis. Thus the division Patton left was available to assist the First U.S. Army when it was attacked at Mortain on August 8. Assuming a defensive posture was anathema to Patton, but he nevertheless deployed his forces in a pattern of deep defense that drew the attackers in and then annihilated them.

Patton, however, regarded Mortain as a sideshow. Acting on orders from Eisenhower and Montgomery, Bradley next ordered Patton to turn Haislip at Le Mans from the east to the north. The idea was to narrow the gap between the Americans and the Canadians at Falaise, through which German units withdrawing from Normandy would have to pass. This would create a situation ideal for a double envelopment, the classic winning strategy Hannibal had used during the Second Punic War at the Battle of Cannae, 216 B.C., which every West Point cadet studied thoroughly. Patton liked the idea of emulating a great general of the ancient world, but, as usual, he wanted to up the ante. He wanted to let both Haislip and Walker drive deeper to the east, perhaps even as far as the Seine, before making the turn north, thereby bagging all the Germans in a very wide area. Predictably, Patton was overruled, and Bradley, Montgomery, and Eisenhower agreed that a safer and more conservative shallow encirclement, hooking at Argentan and Falaise, would take a sufficient bite out the enemy forces. Patton, who must have sighed inwardly, followed orders.

He also followed orders when Bradley, on August 13, instructed him to halt Haislip short of Argentan so that Bradley’s army group would not encroach on territory reserved for Montgomery’s army group. It was a controversial decision. Fearful that the Germans would attack between Patton and Hodges, hammering at Haislip’s exposed flank, Bradley decided to hold Haislip safely back and not release him until Montgomery gave the all-clear and invited him to cross the boundary between the two army groups. In the meantime, the Canadians were delayed in their advance to Falaise. But, unknown to Bradley, the Germans were also suffering a delay. Instead of making good use of the slowdown in the Allied encirclement by immediately moving out through the still-open Agentan-Falaise gap, they were fighting to hold the so-called Falaise pocket while awaiting Hitler’s permission to withdraw. And to Hitler, withdrawal was not an option.

Patton, seeing that the Germans were still vulnerable, was itching to move. On August 14, he talked Bradley into allowing part of Haislip’s XV Corps as well as Walker’s XX Corps and the XII Corps, under Manton Eddy, to move east to destinations along a broad north-south line: Haislip to Dreux, Walker to Chartres, and Eddy to Orleans. The very next day, however, as Patton noted in his diary, Bradley, “suffering from nerves,” met with Patton in Patton’s headquarters. Worried about a rumor that five panzer divisions were at Argentan, Bradley called for Patton to hold his drive east. “His motto seems to be, ‘In case of doubt, halt.’” But Patton managed to persuade Bradley to allow him to continue, and all three corps reached their objectives by the sixteenth. “I wish I were Supreme Commander,” Patton scrawled in his diary.
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In a run characterized by speed and coordination and employing the advance-attack-advance-and-attack-again formula, Patton consummated the transformation of Bradley’s modestly conventional Operation Cobra into a spectacular breakout. Recognizing this, Eisenhower wasted no time in releasing Patton’s name to the press, and, immediately, the pages of every paper in the nation were crowded with accounts of how, in just two weeks, Patton had led a massive advance from the Cotentin peninsula, through Normandy, pursuing and encircling thousands of Germans while liberating a huge expanse of France, from Brest in the west to some 250 miles eastward. To Beatrice, Patton wrote on August 16: “I supposed you had guessed it. We took Brittany, Nantes, Angers, LeMans, and Alencon and several other places still secret.” He did complain, however, that what he ungrammatically called “the fear of they” had “stopped us on what was the best run yet ... I feel that if [I were] only unaided I could win this war.”
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