PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (4 page)

He had made the first cut. Now Papa swung into action again, calling on a host of his prominent and influential friends to pepper Bard with their letters. The senator at last waved a white flag in the form of a telegram to Mr. Patton on March 3, 1904, announcing his son’s nomination. An ecstatic Papa in turn fired off the good news in a telegram to his son then followed up with a letter: “You cannot know,” he wrote, “how proud we feel—and how gratified that you have won your first promotion in the battle of life. . . . You have in you good soldier blood.”
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George S. Patton Jr. left VMI for West Point with a sterling record, grades averaging well above 90 percent, and characterized by VMI commandant Major L. H. Strother as “a young man of exemplary habits and excellent mental ability and attainments. . . . He has an aptitude for military life.” Moreover, Major Strother informed him that, had he stayed, he would have been made first corporal, the highest appointment for second-year cadets.
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First-year cadets were called
plebes
at the Point, and many a plebe was profoundly shocked by his first year—the rules, the discipline, the hard riding by upperclassmen, and most of all, the nonstop tempo. However, the only thing that bothered Cadet Patton, as he wrote in his first letter home, was the necessity of rising at 5 A.M. and the fact that they “make us shave every day and the only time we get to do this is before rev[eille],” which was also “the only time we are allowed or have time to write except on Sunday.” A nightly bath was also required, and cadets were permitted “but eight minutes to take it in.” The food was “fine” with “lots of variety,” and the “table-cloth is changed every day.”
That
was clearly important to Cadet Patton, fine southern gentleman that he saw himself to be, but what disappointed him was the academy’s apparent dearth of “gentlemen” of his own caliber. His two roommates were “very nice and work hard and try to keep the room and them selves clean but they are not gentlemen in the sence of being refined and using good grammar. They are just very respectable middle class fellows.”
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Patton was never a tolerant man. Throughout his life, diaries and letters are laced with racism, anti-Semitism, and miscellaneous xenophobia. To a modern conscience and consciousness, these attitudes are repugnant, yet they reveal as much about the social milieu in which Patton was raised—a prosperous Anglo California household staffed by servants of Mexican descent, a family tree rooted in chivalrous, slave-holding Vir-ginia—and the America of his day than they do about Patton the man. As a lowly plebe, he was indeed a social snob; that is what his entire childhood and his year at VMI had produced. But as George saw it, his social identity ran deeper than mere training or upbringing. It was a matter of
breeding,
in the literal sense; it was a matter of blood. On July 3, 1904, he wrote to Papa about a Fourth of July oration he had just attended in Cullum Hall. The subject was “the modern soldier and what he stood for.” The entire audience applauded, and “I believe they all agreed with the speaker. I didn’t.”

Infact from what I have seen here and at the [Virginia Military] Institute I belong to a different class a class perhaps almost extinct or one which may have never existed yet as far removed from these lazy, patriotic, or peace soldiers as heaven is from hell. I know that my ambition is selfish and cold yet it is not a selfishnes for instead of sparing me, it makes me exert my self to the utter most to attain an end which will do neither me nor any one else any good. Of course I may be a dreamer but I have a firm conviction I am not and in any case I will do my best to attain what I consider—wrongly perhaps—my destiny.
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Young Patton’s self-understanding was mature beyond his years and, in fact, was at a level few adults ever attain. His snobbery was a mere symptom of his perception of a special “destiny” (it was a word he would use often in speaking of himself), a destiny compounded of something ancient and archaic (“perhaps almost extinct”) or something entirely mythic (“may have never existed”), a destiny that set him apart from anything like the “modern” soldier (as far apart as “heaven is from hell”), a destiny that made him coldly ambitious, apparently selfish, yet utterly unsparing of himself.

Realizing one’s destiny, it seems, required a patience that Cadet Patton did not possess in abundance. His goal was to graduate as cadet adjutant, the top senior upperclassman, and by the end of his first year, he wanted to be cadet corporal. At first Patton thought that this might not be so hard to do, for he judged his fellow cadets harshly. They seemed to him lazy, beset by “a languid lacitude—or careless indifference or hazy uncertainty,” whereas he, Cadet Patton, was at all times sharp as a razor. But he soon discovered that the academic work was much harder at West Point than at VMI. By November, he was struggling and wrote to his father: “I actually think that if I don’t get a corp [promotion to cadet corporal] I will die ... I fancy that there is no one in my class who so hates to be last or who tries so hard to be first and who so utterly fails. . . . Infact the sum total of me is that I am a character-less, lazy, stupid yet ambitious dreamer; who will degenerate into a third rate second lieutenant and never command any thing more than a platoon.” (In adult life, Patton’s theatrical arrogance and blustering self-confidence would—sometimes transpar-ently—mask his persistent self-doubts.) His class report for December 1 put him at number 42 in mathematics, 71 in English, and 30 in drill regulations out of a class of 152. In January, he wrote Papa that it was “beastly discouraging to get worse marks than men who you know have less grey matter and not half the ambition.” In June, he failed his final French examination, which meant (according to the arcane rules of the academy) that he also had to take an examination in mathematics. On June 12, he dispatched a telegram to Papa: “Did not pass math turned back to next class probably furlough this summer will wire definitely.” Mr. Patton sent a return telegram the very next day: “It is all right my boy and all for best God bless you.”
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Patton returned to California to lick his wounds, and, while vacationing with his family on Catalina, he studied on his own and also worked with a tutor. As if determined to discipline his very thoughts, he bought a notebook so that no passing idea could escape him. Entry number one was: “Do your damdest always.”
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When he returned to West Point to repeat his first year, he tried out for varsity football, throwing himself so fiercely into practice that he injured his arm and was removed from the squad. That is when he took up the sword and tried out for the track team. He would excel in both. He redeemed himself academically—adequately, if not spectacularly—and he was named second corporal for the second-year class. It was both a disappointment and a vast relief.

During the summer, he was assigned to break in the plebes at summer camp. Second Corporal Patton took to command as a thirsty man to water. Although he commanded merely a company, when the first corporal was absent on other duties, Patton took over the entire battalion. His cadets drilled flawlessly, yet, to a man, they cordially despised Patton. He demanded of them no less than he demanded of himself, and that was simply too much. He withheld all praise, but noted and reported the slightest infraction. However it affected the first-year cadets, for him the result was a valuable lesson in the difference between a demanding commander and a martinet. At the conclusion of summer camp, the tactical officers demoted Patton from second to sixth corporal. As he explained in a letter to Beatrice, he had been “too d—military.”
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Later, as a mature commander, he would learn to blend praise with criticism, though he would remain a stickler for all military courtesies and usages.

During his second year (actually his third year at the Point, if we count his repeated first year), Patton clawed his way to the middle of his class, tried out for football again, was again sidelined with injuries suffered in practice, but became a star when he wielded a sword or mounted a saddle. Although he might not excel in the classroom or have the opportunity to do so on the gridiron, he must have been gratified to have found a home in more martial exploits with saber and steed. Patton pushed himself into the kind of reckless test of courage that he would repeat throughout his career. As a general, Patton believed it important to make himself conspicuous in the front lines, “to show the soldiers that generals could get shot at.” As a cadet, while crouching in the target trench on the rifle range—his job was to raise the targets for shooting, then lower them for scoring—Patton decided to discover for himself what it was like to get shot at. Would he have the courage that his father had spoken to him of, the courage to “face death from weapons with a smile”? He suddenly sprang up from the safety of the trench and stood at attention facing the firing line as the bullets zinged about him. He was not afraid. What others thought of this experiment is not recorded.
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By the spring of his sophomore year, Patton regained his post as second corporal and, for his junior year, was promoted to cadet sergeant major. This would position him for a plum promotion as a senior. Then, in February 1908, came a wonderful harbinger of destiny itself. He was named cadet adjutant for the following—senior—year. It was not just evidence of achievement, but an opportunity for further glory. The cadet adjutant was the leader of the class and the central figure on the parade ground, the cadet who, every day, marched to the center of the field and read out the orders of the day. All eyes were fixed on him and on him alone.

Almost simultaneously with his appointment as cadet adjutant dawned the realization that he was in love with Beatrice Ayer. The two events seemed intertwined. Responding to Beatrice’s congratulations on his promotion, he wrote on February 22: “Do you remember long ago when ... I said I would like to be adjutant but feared I never would be and you said I would[?]”
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And while there had been other girls during his West Point years—including one Kate, a beautiful heiress from Vassar, to whom he was briefly attracted by her looks as well as her money—he wrote his father that Beatrice was
the
one. Yet the young man who as a commander would be so swiftly decisive on the field of battle could not bring himself to propose. On a visit to the Ayers during Christmas vacation, he spoke to Beatrice of his love and told her that he wanted to marry her, but he asked her not to answer—not yet. He held the matter of marriage in abeyance, and Beatrice complied, as he completed his final year and threw himself into the knotty problem of what branch of the service to opt for. In the army of the day, there were infantry, cavalry, artillery, and the engineers. The last two were easily discounted. Patton had neither the aptitude nor the academic grades for a posting with the engineers, and, as for the artillery, the big guns were generally well back from the front lines, the region of greatest danger and greatest glory. That left infantry and cavalry. Infantry was the “queen of battle,” the branch in which promotion could be expected to come fastest, yet cavalry seemed naturally more suited to Patton, a lover of horses and an outstanding horseman. The branch was more elite than the infantry, its officers typically a better, more uniform class of “gentlemen,” like himself. And then there was the historical fact that knights always rode horses while the rabble marched on foot. Nevertheless, Patton wore out anyone who would listen with the pros and cons until he finally decided. He would be a cavalryman.

On June 11, 1909, George Smith Patton Jr. graduated from the United States Military Academy 46 out of 103, a ranking not based (as in civilian colleges) on academic standing alone, but “according to general merit.” Cadet Patton’s mediocre standing was not, of course, predictive of his military career. J. C. H. Lee, whose imperious and uncooperative ways as Eisenhower’s chief of Services and Supply in World War II earned him the nickname “Jesus Christ Himself,” graduated number 12 in 1909. Number 39, Jacob L. Devers, whom the other cadets thought incurably lazy, went on to command 6th Army Group in Europe. Robert Eichelberger, ranked 68th, became Douglas MacArthur’s most brilliant general, commander of the Eighth Army in the Pacific. And William H. Simpson, 101 of 103, went on to command the Ninth Army in Europe. More telling than the numbers or Patton’s own self-evaluation was how his classmates regarded him. It was at best with paradoxically respectful condescension. It was hard not to admire his zeal and effort, but it was also hard to take seriously his interminable talk of glory. That it was spoken of in all candor and earnestness made it even harder to accept without a grin or a grimace. Among his classmates, he had no close friends, but there was genuine affection in one of his West Point nicknames, Georgie (which was also used later by the circle of fellow senior commanders in World War II); his other nickname, Quill, betrayed a resentment just as genuine. In cadet jargon, “to quill” was to gratuitously “skin” a fellow cadet—that is, to report him for an offense. The point was not that Cadet Patton was a snitch or vindictive or sadistic but that he was impossibly hard on underclassmen, demanding a level of performance few, if any, could deliver. That he was hardest on himself probably escaped few of his classmates, and that fact saved him from universal condemnation.

In all candor, Patton doubtless admitted all aspects of his classmates’ estimate of himself, just as he seems to have accepted the necessity of defending his choice of profession. Beatrice’s father, Frederick Ayer, was quite properly concerned about his daughter’s dim future as an army wife, moving from one rude military outpost to another, often living among social inferiors, and tied to a man who would never have much money of his own. In a February 16, 1909, letter to Beatrice, Patton explained that sometimes “I get violent with my self in defence of my profession which to me seems very good. It is the oldest and at one time was the only business that was proper. ... I dare say that for every man remembered for acts of peace there are fifteen made immortal by war and since in my mind all life is a struggle to perpetuate your name war is naturally my choice.”
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