Twelve Desperate Miles (6 page)

That trip to Europe came in about 1912, when Patton was chosen to represent the United States Olympic team as a member of the pentathlon squad, a sport that combined five of the primary skills of a
cavalry officer, including fencing, swimming, equestrian steeplechase riding, cross-country running, and pistol shooting. Patton finished in fifth place overall in the competition, which was marked by some controversy. Patton scored an unexpectedly poor twenty-seventh in pistol shooting, though it was later claimed by some witnesses that a miss of Patton’s was actually caused by the fact that he’d hit the target in the precise same spot twice, one bullet burying the next.

Patton’s flair and take-no-prisoners reputation was enhanced during service in Mexico, where he chased Pancho Villa under the command of Brigadier General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing. In one incident, which became legendary, Patton, along with half a dozen infantrymen, drove to the hideout of a General Cardenas from Villa’s staff. A shootout ensued, during which Patton shot and killed two of the Mexicans, including Cardenas, with his ivory-handled pistol. He drove back to Pershing’s headquarters with the bodies strapped to the hood of his steaming army car. The story was widely covered in the national press, making Patton a minor celebrity of the incursion into Mexico.

Pershing took a shine to “Georgie,” seeing in him many of the same instincts for combat he saw in himself. When Pershing was appointed commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in Europe after the U.S. entry into World War I, he asked that Patton accompany him to France and serve in his headquarters. Then based with the AEF in Paris and recently promoted to captain, Patton became headquarters commandant. Among many new acquaintances, he met Captain George Marshall soon after his arrival.

Patton, however, chafed at headquarters duties and was soon lobbying to move to some position that would offer a chance for more action. When Pershing decided to establish an American corps of tanks, a weapon that was new to the war and just coming into its own, Patton was asked if he’d like to serve under its commander, Colonel Samuel Rockenbach. George asked his father for advice on the matter and was told to “
select the weapon with which you can inflict the most punishment while
suffering the least casualties.” Sound counsel, in Patton’s estimation, and off he went to study this new armed vehicle at both French and British training centers.

Patton established himself as the American army’s leading expert and proponent of the machinery. He learned how to operate the tanks, trained others in the newly formed tank brigade, and ultimately, in September 1918, led his corps into battle at Saint-Mihiel and then Meuse-Argonne, where he was wounded on the first day of action. Patton won a battlefield promotion to colonel and earned a Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart for his service and wounds.

Patton became one of the most visible and highly regarded young officers in the war. He developed a style of personal leadership that would carry over into the next war and would soon be apparent in North Africa. He was no remote, commanding figure to his troops; whether in training or combat, he was there among them on a daily basis, cursing, exhorting, letting them know in no uncertain terms that his role was to make them better and braver soldiers. He was hardly beloved by his soldiers, but he was respected; and Patton gained a reputation as a fighter and a strict disciplinarian who was capable of leading and inspiring his troops.
He also liked to see a salute snapped off with a smart style that came to be known in the ranks as a “George Patton.”

His eccentricities were also becoming legend within the army. Patton liked to write poetry on what he called “
the manly virtues [that war] engenders.” It was also in France that he became relatively open about his belief in his own reincarnations. One of the young lieutenants under his command in the tank corps in France, Harry Semmes (who would subsequently serve with Patton in North Africa and write a biography of the general after World War II), recorded an instance when Patton was driving through the French countryside in an area he’d never seen before to visit an American station. He had an odd feeling that he’d been in this same locale as a soldier in another life. “
As the car approached the top of a hill,” Semmes wrote, “Captain Patton, to whom the vicinity was entirely unfamiliar, reached forward and asked the soldier driver if the
camp wasn’t out of sight and just over the hill to the right. The driver replied, ‘No sir … but there is an old Roman camp where we are going over there to the right. I have seen it myself.’ ” According to Semmes, Patton proceeded to the camp but, once there, had another intuition.
Wasn’t their theater of action straight ahead? He asked at the station headquarters. It was nighttime, and Patton had no way of knowing where the fighting was. “ ‘We have no theater [there],’ ” Patton was told, “ ‘but I do know that there is an old Roman theater only about three hundred yards away.’ ”

After the war, Patton was stationed near Washington, at Camp Meade, Maryland, and spent much of his time, with limited success, petitioning Congress for funds to build the army’s armored forces. It was during these years that he first met and became friends with “Ike” Eisenhower, another West Point grad and rising star in the U.S. Army who, like Patton, had settled into an underfunded and often undervalued peacetime army.
The two would spend a year together at Fort Riley in the mid-1920s, as well as study at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth. Patton also graduated from the Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which was required education at the time for any officer hoping for advancement in the army.

From Fort Riley, Patton took Beatrice and his family to the first of two interwar postings in Hawaii, where, among other duties, he wrote a plan for the defense of the island should she be attacked by air. He also honed his polo-playing skills. Back near Washington, at Fort Myer in Virginia in the early 1930s, Patton was reunited with his friend Eisenhower under the command of General Douglas MacArthur. Here he met for the first time Captain Lucian K. Truscott, another officer who would become a crucial figure in the career of George Patton and one with whom he was about to become reacquainted in London. All four were involved in the notorious squashing of the 1932 Bonus March.

In July of that year, thousands of World War I vets, financially devastated by the Great Depression, marched on Washington, demanding payment on bonuses that had been promised them as veterans of the
Great War. The problem was that the soldiers had been given bonds that weren’t due to be redeemed for another dozen years, and the federal government had neither the means nor the inclination to hurry the payments.

The order to clear the marchers from Washington was passed from the administration to the army, and MacArthur personally oversaw the routing of the vets and their families. Eisenhower, MacArthur’s aide, was at his side, embarrassed by what followed. Patton, who commanded the cavalry, including Lucian Truscott, was in charge of much of the dirty work. Two vets were killed in the mayhem, and the camp erected by the marchers was burned to the ground. It was a moment of which no officer involved was overly proud.

As the Second World War approached, the U.S. Army began the process of sorting out just what kind of military it needed to be and who might be its most accomplished commanders. One of the chief bones of contention was the use of armored divisions. Despite the obvious success of German blitzkrieg tactics in Europe, there were many in the United States who felt that one of the principal weapons of those attacks, the tank, was still a work in progress, that its most important function, at which it had shown only partial effectiveness in World War I, was in support of infantry. Tanks, which in the First World War had been subject to frequent breakdowns and terrain-induced stalls, were still not ready to lead troops into combat went this line of thinking. Some even assumed the horse would be a continued and important component of the war. In fact, it wasn’t until 1940 that the U.S. Army created its First and Second Armored Divisions.

In the spring of 1941, newly promoted Major General George Patton was named commanding general of one of those divisions, the Second, and he led this force through a pair of successful war games in Louisiana and South Carolina that year. Again, however, his successes did not come without detractors. While Patton viewed his aggressive use of armored vehicles as an effective display of their capabilities, others in the exercises felt he was skirting the spirit of the games and disrupting important tests of the army’s infantry for showboating purposes. The importance
of these exercises was heightened for the commanders involved because, as Patton himself well knew, they were an opportunity to shine and impress. Making the cover of
Life
magazine didn’t guarantee success in the prewar army, but in the fierce jockeying for consequential command in the coming war, a little national publicity didn’t hurt either.

While there was no consensus on the character of George Patton within the army, there didn’t need to be for him to have a seat on that August 1942 flight to London. In Eisenhower and Marshall he had the two most powerful supporters he could have within the European Command. And if his impulsiveness, his lack of patience, his inability to step lightly around the abilities and egos of other men in the U.S. Army had created a whole slew of rivals—well, as he would have suggested, war had begun, and the time for the political niceties and privileges of the interwar high command had passed. This battle would be won by blood and guts alone.

Of course, to the British high command, General George Patton, like all American commanders, was essentially an untested commodity in the sort of war that was being waged in Europe. He and Doolittle, along with Eisenhower, who’d flown to England in June, and George Marshall, who had hitched a ride on this same Stratoliner three weeks earlier, were all novices and had a steep climb up the learning curve to reach the point where they would know as much about the intricacies of World War II as their hosts.
And the British were more than a little put off by the fact that the Americans were not inclined to be tutored.

From a strategic point of view, Marshall’s journey, beginning on July 18, was one of the most momentous of the war. He had flown with Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King; FDR’s eyes and ears, Harry Hopkins; and an accompanying crew of military brass from each branch of the service. The heavy hitters had come to meet with their Allied counterparts, the chiefs of staff of the British services, as well as Marshall’s man in England, Eisenhower. This was the colloquy that would outline the
direction the Allies in Europe were to travel through the coming months of 1942 and, by extension, the whole war. The entry of the United States into the fighting—the engagement that everyone from New York Harbor to the Golden Gate Bridge had been expecting for months now—was about to begin, the particulars to be hashed out by Marshall and company in England.

For months, the two governments had been trying to settle a basic dispute about how to fight the war against Nazi Germany. The simple facts were that Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union were in desperate need of some relief from the onslaught that they faced from Germany. They had been imploring the United States and Great Britain to open a second front from the moment the United States had entered the war. No one, East or West, was certain how long the Soviets could last against Hitler’s attack, but the dire straits and desperate conditions of the Russian people after a year of massive assault were well known. Already hundreds of thousands were dead on the eastern front, and earlier that summer Germany had begun to mount another offensive aimed at the heart of the Soviet nation.

The question was what strategy the Allies should pursue to wage war and alleviate the situation in the east. Marshall, Eisenhower, and most of the U.S. Army command favored a cross-channel assault against Germany in France. With typical American brio and a strategy that had been prevalent in the American army since the days of U. S. Grant and the American Civil War, their central idea was simply to pursue the enemy directly and with as much force as possible. If an attack against Germany in France in 1942 was now unlikely, given the quickly advancing calendar, then it should be made the following spring. Eisenhower himself had outlined the strategy, labeled Operation Roundup, while working under Marshall in the spring of 1942, still in Washington.

The British were dead set against the idea. It was premature, they said. The Americans were naive to think that they could mount a successful battle on the beaches of France against an already entrenched and
powerful Nazi force. It would be slaughter, and since the initial invasion would have to be carried out largely by British forces, due to American army inexperience and the need for the United States to become further mobilized, Her Majesty’s high command was not enthusiastic, to say the least. To his daily log, Marshall’s counterpart, General Alan Brooke, called Marshall’s notion of a cross-channel attack “
just fantastic.” The British proposed instead to attack the Wehrmacht through Norway, through North Africa, or by means of relentless bombings of Germany spiced by strategic commando raids against Nazi defenses in France that would force the Third Reich to stretch its defenses to razor-thin peril across two thousand miles of European coastline.