PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (3 page)

Beginning in childhood, the past, in the form of vivid ghosts of heroism and ageless models of command, was always present for Patton. The historical figures of whom he read were superimposed upon his own experience. Lifelong, he devoured libraries of history, especially the history of ancient conquest, general military history, and the memoirs of celebrated generals. Prior to flying into Normandy to assume command of the Third Army a month after D-Day, he “read
The Norman Conquest
by Freeman, paying particular attention to the roads William the Conqueror used in his operations in Normandy and Brittany.” When he proposed crossing the Seine at Melun, it was entirely natural for him to toss off the observation that the “Melun crossing is the same as that used by Labienus with his Tenth Legion about 55 B.C.” His absorption in military history was more than intellectual or even professional, for he made no secret of his belief in reincarnation. In 1943, before the Allies stepped off from North Africa to invade Sicily, British general Sir Harold Alexander admiringly observed, “You know, George, you would have made a great marshal for Napoleon if you had lived in the 19th century.” Patton replied dryly: “But I did.” He was never embarrassed to confess his belief in reincarnation, his conviction that he had marched with Napoleon or with Bohemia’s John the Blind against the Turks in the fourteenth century, or even that, as a Roman legionnaire, “Perhaps I stabbed our Savior / In His sacred helpless side.”
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The past, for Patton, was not all in books or even in lives earlier lived. It was his very birthright. After he had proposed to Beatrice during Christmas of 1908, he wrote a letter to her father, Frederick Ayer, justifying his choice of career. Patton admitted that there was no rational reason for embarking on a life so financially unrewarding as that of an officer in the U.S. Army, but, he explained, “I only feel it inside. It is as natural for me to be a soldier as it is to breathe and would be as hard to give up all thought of it as it would to stop breathing.”
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The very first childhood game he remembered playing was “soldiers,” with his sister Anne, called Nita, assuming the rank of major “while I claimed to be a private which I thought was superior,” Patton recalled. Their father joined in, snapping a salute to brother and sister each morning and asking “how the private and major were.” Not much later, George came to understand that “private” was superior to nothing, and he began referring to himself as “Georgie S. Patton, Jr., Lieutenant General.”
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Out of doors in the golden California sunshine, George learned to ride early. While Papa happily fashioned wooden swords for his son and taught him how to build forts, he could not keep up with the boy’s energy, drive, and endless craving for exercise and endless activity.

Family heritage, the reading of heroic tales and military history, love of horses, boundless energy, and exuberant play—these were the elements of George Patton’s boyhood, and the adult Patton would never leave them far behind. There is no evidence that he ever seriously thought about becoming anything other than a soldier. More to the point, all the evidence reveals an early and ever-growing desire to be a leader, a commander, a winner of great glory and universal recognition. During the six years he spent at Clark’s School for Boys, he strove to excel despite his dyslexia, which earned him the ridicule of fellow students whenever he stumbled over words he read aloud or wrote on the blackboard. It must have been painful for him, but he was never discouraged. Raised on the romance of his Scots and Confederate ancestors, people beaten but unbowed, he saw defeat as a challenge to win
next time
or to triumph
in the end.
Later, as a mature commander, he would inscribe, using all uppercase letters, in one of his field notebooks: “YOU ARE NOT BEATEN UNTIL YOU ADMIT IT. HENCE DON’T.”
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In any event, no matter what happened to him, his adoring father and mother never allowed him to feel defeated.

But for the limitations of dyslexia, George Smith Patton Jr. was, as he himself later recalled, “the happiest boy in the world,”
⁵
and the idyll was made complete by summers spent on Catalina Island, which the sons of B. D. Wilson’s business partner Phineas Banning had purchased in 1892 to turn into an upscale vacation resort. There is where the Pattons had a summer place, and it was there, in 1902, that 17-year-old George met Beatrice Banning Ayer, privileged daughter of a Boston industrialist named Frederick Ayer and his second wife, Ellen Barrows Banning, niece of Phineas Banning. Beatrice had arrived in California with her parents to visit the Bannings. George was smitten. In some ways, it was an instance of the attraction of opposites. George was tall, muscular, and rough, whereas 16-year-old Beatrice was small, slender, and graceful. Yet, in other ways, they were perfectly matched: the only thing she loved more than sailing was horseback riding, which she did fiercely and fearlessly, despite a nearsightedness so severe that she could barely see where she was going.

After that Catalina summer, when Beatrice had returned to Boston, the two began writing one another, and, come Christmas, Beatrice sent George a tiepin. “Please believe me when I say that it was the very thing I most wanted,” Patton wrote in a letter ofJanuary 10, 1903, “and that when I first wore it and looked into a glass to see if it was in straight, I involuntarily raised my hat.”
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Before meeting Beatrice, George had shown little interest in girls. Clearly, new he was growing up. Not only did he have a girlfriend, who, eight years later, he would marry, but, by the fall of 1902, he was ready to tell his parents that he had definitely decided on his life’s work. He would become an officer in the United States Army.

From the moment his son made the decision, Papa embarked on a tireless campaign to obtain for him an appointment to West Point. On September 29, he wrote to Senator Thomas R. Bard, who had the power to recommend the boy for a cadet slot. He then set about appealing to his many prominent and influential friends to prevail upon Senator Bard on his boy’s behalf. Despite all of the campaigning, the best that could be elicited from Bard was a promise that he would allow George to compete with other young men in an examination, which would determine his choice of nominee.

Mr. Patton loved his son, but he was a realist. On spelling alone, George would likely fail the exam. To cover all bases, he looked into the University of Arizona, where the corps of cadets was commanded by his cousin, and at ROTC programs at Princeton and Cornell. He also looked into securing for his son another year of pre-college education at the Morristown Preparatory School in New Jersey. And then there was VMI—his alma mater and that of his father and two uncles. The faculty was populated by Patton friends and relatives, and it occurred to him that the Virginia Military Institute would perhaps be the ideal place for George to gain a year of training, education, and maturity before he applied for entrance to West Point “by certificate,” which would allow him to bypass the entrance examination.

Bombarded by Mr. Patton’s letters, Senator Bard never said no, but he did not say yes, either. In June, Princeton accepted George (despite his having failed the plane geometry portion of the entrance examination), but Mr. Patton decided to enroll his son at VMI. If Bard suddenly called him in for the examination, he could always return to California in the spring.

The trip to Virginia that September, to his ancestral and spiritual home, as well as the far-off focus of his boyish imaginings, was George’s very first journey outside of California. Two dozen years later, Patton recalled: “Just before I went away to the V.M.I. I was walking with Uncle Glassell Patton and told him that I feared that I might be cowardly. He told me that no Patton could be a coward.” Characteristically, George confided this exchange to his father, who obligingly interpreted his uncle’s words for him. “While ages of gentility might make a man of [your] breeding reluctant to engage in a fist fight,” he told his son, “the same breeding made him perfectly willing to face death from weapons with a smile.” That hardly ended Patton’s inner debate over issues of courage. He would question himself, and even doubt himself, on the subject for his entire life. Yet, almost hopefully, some 24 years later, he wrote of Papa’s explanation: “I think that this is true.”
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AS A SOLDIER, GEORGE S. PATTON JR. WOULD LIVE AND FIGHT in many climes and countries, but his most dramatic journey came in 1903 and took him from the sharp brown hills of southern California to the lush, green, low, and rolling folds of the Blue Ridge that formed the backdrop to the Virginia Military Institute’s campus of crenellated gothic buildings outside of Lexington, Virginia. Later in life, Patton would recall how “Papa and Mama took me east to enter the V.M.I. . . . Papa went with me to report. The First Captain, Ragland, was in the room on the left of the salley port which had been Papa’s when he was Sergeant Major.” So there it was, in this strange, new place: the presence of the past. Papa (VMI, 1877) and his father (VMI, 1852) before him had been cadets here, as had great-uncles John Mercer Patton Jr. (VMI 1846) and Waller Tazewell Patton (VMI 1855). George signed the enrollment papers, and Ragland looked toward Papa: “‘Of course you realize Mr. Patton that now your son is a cadet he cannot leave the grounds.’ Papa said ‘Of course.’ I never felt lower in my life.”
¹

As far as the faculty and cadets of VMI were concerned, that was precisely the feeling appropriate to a first-year cadet. They were called
rats.
But George had an additional disadvantage. His dyslexia caused him to stumble over a handwritten “no hazing pledge” all incoming cadets were required to read aloud in an assembly. As usual, he kept no secret from his Papa, who wrote on September 27, 1903: “I do not see how you are going to over-come this difficulty, except by practicing reading all kinds of writing.” And the words that follow could have been written by General Patton himself. “Do not give up,” Papa wrote, “but when you start to read any thing keep at it till you work it out.” He continued, helpfully and practically, by pointing out that “hazing” had been misspelled as “hazeing” in his son’s letter. “The verb is ‘to haze’ and you should remember the general rule—to drop the final ‘e’ before ‘ing.’”
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There was never anything pompous or empty in what Papa told his son, but always a mixture of warm encouragement and practical advice. This was at the root of Patton’s own command style. A stern and intimidating presence, Patton nevertheless celebrated the high performance of subordinates and, when he corrected them, he did so with concrete criticism and practical advice.

As comforting as communication with his father was, Cadet Patton was even more delighted when he presented himself to the school tailor, who not only recognized him as a Patton, but remarked that his uniform measurements were exactly those of his father and his grandfather. He soon felt as if he belonged there, almost as if he had come home. Papa advised him (as Patton recalled years later) “that the first thing was to be a good soldier, next a good scholar.” Cadet Patton became a model soldier, flawless in appearance and in his execution of every movement of every drill. He memorized VMI regulations and followed them to the letter. An outside of observer might have thought his devotion obsessive, even fanatical, but there were no outsiders at VMI. A third-generation cadet, he had marched into his birthright, as had many of his classmates. They did not think him a grind or a fanatic; they respected and admired him. He had a natural talent for behaving like “one of the fellows,” but he never broke the rules or, as he gleefully admitted to Papa, never allowed himself to get caught. He was the first in his class to be initiated into “K.A.,” a secret fraternity, which immediately resulted in upperclassmen treating him “almost as an equal.” Possessed of a thoroughly sympathetic understanding of the caste system at VMI, George wrote Papa: “Theoretically, I do not approve” of being coddled by upperclassmen, “but practically I do.” In this, in his ability to go unwaveringly by the book yet also manage to be popular, was foreshadowed the future commander. General Patton was a stickler for protocol, regulations, impeccable uniforms, and the flawless practice of military courtesy, yet he nurtured within himself an unconventional boldness and an insatiable appetite for glory.
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Even as he flourished at VMI, neither George nor Papa took their eyes off the real prize: an appointment to West Point. Papa’s ceaseless barrage of letters to Senator Bard and those who could exert influence on the senator finally yielded fruit when, in February 1904, Bard invited George to his office in Los Angeles for an informal examination. He used the long train ride west to study, concentrating on geography and spelling. At home, he greeted his family warmly, then dived back into his books, not emerging until the examination was over and done. He then returned to VMI, playing and replaying the examination in his mind until word came on February 18 that George S. Patton Jr. was among three candidates recommended to Senator Bard.