by Alan Axelrod
As is typical in war, after the plans had been carefully laid, higher command made major changes in what it wanted. Undaunted, Patton personally reconnoitered the new ground set for the attack, efficiently drew up a new set of battle plans, and saw to it that everything necessary, including some 10,000 gallons of gasoline, was delivered to the newly selected point of departure. On September 11, the day before the operation was to start, Patton spoke to his troops. Even this early in his command career, his message reads as vintage Patton. It is one of attack, advance, and attack. Use the tanks as if they were the ancient warrior’s dogs of war:
No tank is to be surrendered or abandoned to the enemy. If you are left alone in the midst of the enemy keep shooting. If your gun is disabled use your pistols and squash the enemy with your tracks. By quick changes of direction cut them with the tail of the tank. If your motor is stalled and your gun broken . . . You hang on, help will come . . .
You are the first American tanks [in combat]. You must establish the fact that AMERICAN TANKS DO NOT SURRENDER ... As long as one tank is able to move it must go forward.
Its presence will save the lives of hundreds of infantry and kill many Germans. Finally This is our BIG CHANCE; WHAT WE HAVE WORKED FOR . .. MAKE IT WORTH WHILE. 7
Patton and his tanks were part of an enormous offensive involving 550,000 U.S. soldiers and 110,000 French troops. As Pershing planned the operation, the French were to keep the Germans occupied from the west, while American units attacked northward from the south and also eastward from the western face of the salient. The object was to pinch off the bulge from three directions. The tanks supported the Americans attacking from the south. A French tank battalion supported the right of the infantry attack, while Patton’s tanks (which also included a French battalion placed under his command) supported the left. Patton assigned Captain (later Colonel) Sereno Brett to use the tanks assigned to him to lead the infantry of the 1st Division. The French battalion that was under Patton was to follow the infantry. Another contingent of American tanks, assigned by Patton to Captain Ranulf Compton, was to follow behind the 42nd Infantry Division, then pass through its ranks, and take the lead. It was a sound plan, and Patton had great faith in Brett. He was less sure of Compton, so he decided to remain closer to him during the assault.
The attack on September 12, was preceded by a four-hour artillery barrage, then stepped off at 5:00 A.M. By 6:10, Patton was positioned at a hilltop observation post, from which he could watch the action. Twenty minutes later, however, seeing some of the tanks bog down in muddy trenches, Patton walked two miles to personally attend to their extrication. This accomplished, he did not return to his command post on the hill, but, with his staff and on foot, he pressed forward with the advance. This practice would become a Patton trademark. He always led from the front. When he was told, at 9:15, that some tanks were caught in bad ground, he advanced to them in company with another officer and three runners.
Shells burst all around them. The natural impulse, of course, was to duck. Patton fought the impulse, condemning it as “the futility of dodging fate.”8 He also noticed that he was the only officer in the vanguard of the attack who had not removed the shoulder straps, which bore the oakleaf emblems of his field-grade rank. To be sure, a badge of rank made an irresistible target for sharpshooters, but Patton wanted his soldiers to see that he was unafraid to be a target.
Patton kept walking forward, always under shelling. When he encountered Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur standing on a little hill, he joined him. The “creeping barrage came along toward us,” Patton later wrote. “I think each one wanted to leave, but each hated to say so, so we let it come over us. We stood and talked but neither was much interested in what the other said.”9
From this hill, Patton moved—always forward—to another, from which he saw German troops retreating behind the village of Essey. With the town ripe for the plucking, Patton ordered five of Compton’s tanks to roll into the village. When a French soldier turned the tanks back because, he said, the village was being bombarded too heavily, Patton personally intervened, ordering the tanks to continue forward while he preceded them on foot, across the bridge leading into the village. As he stepped foot on the bridge, it occurred to Patton that the structure might be rigged with explosives, but he led the tanks across anyway.
After Essey fell to Patton, he ordered the tanks to move ahead another two miles to Pannes. Just short of this village, however, all but one tank ran out of gas. Without tanks to lead them and provide cover, the accompanying infantry balked. Patton approached the one tank that still had fuel and ordered the sergeant to lead the reluctant infantry in. When the sergeant hesitated, Patton, under fire from the village, hopped onto the outside of the tank to spur him forward. Patton rode the machine all the way through Pannes, leaping off into a shell hole for cover only after enemy fire had become intense enough to chisel the paint from the side of the tank. Realizing then that the infantry lagged some 300 yards behind him, Patton crawled out of the shell hole and dodged fire all the way back to the foot soldiers. He confronted the unit’s commander and told him to advance behind the tank up ahead. When the commander refused, Patton ran back to the tank and rapped on the back door with the heavy cane that American and British officers carried into the field. The sergeant emerged, and Patton ordered him to turn around and go back. The mission, he well knew, was to support the infantry, even if that meant moving backward. However, when another four tanks appeared, fully fueled, Patton ordered them to advance, on their own, through Pannes and into Beney, the next town. Patton followed on foot as the town fell to the Americans.
Satisfied that Compton’s battalion was performing admirably, Patton walked over to Brett’s tanks, which he found stuck in the village of Nonsard, out of gas. As a commander, Patton’s most basic belief was to do whatever needed doing when it needed doing, and what needed doing now was refueling. Therefore, he walked all the way back to the rear, ordered gas to be transported to Nonsard, then reported to corps headquarters that all of the tank units had attained their objectives and, in fact, more. Having somewhat outrun the infantry, they withdrew by night a short distance to the infantry line.
After the first day of battle, only two tanks had been lost to artillery fire. Engine failure claimed three more and broken tracks another two. Forty became stuck in trenches, and 30 were idled by lack of fuel. Eighty American and 25 French tanks fought the next day. When the battle was over, the resulting advance was significant, the Germans were in full retreat, and the St. Mihiel salient, which had endured since the very first year of the war, existed no more. U.S. forces took 150,000 German prisoners. German resistance in Patton’s sector had not been heavy, but Patton had demonstrated both the effectiveness of tanks and his effectiveness as a commander. As for that ride he took atop a tank, the newspapers gobbled it up as the exploit quickly found its way into official reports.
Colonel Rockenbach did not approve of Patton’s leaving his command post to advance personally with the attack, but a letter of congratulations addressed to him from General Pershing prompted the colonel to change his tune. He praised both Patton and his command, then quickly sent them into battle again, 60 miles to the north, to a position just west of Verdun to support I Corps in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
If there was anything Patton desperately feared, it was that the war would end before he had fought more of it. Without waiting for the Americans officially to relieve the French in the attack zone assigned to him, Patton donned a borrowed French uniform, advanced to the front lines, and, as he had done in preparation for St. Mihiel, reconnoitered the ground on which his tanks would operate. He then planned an especially aggressive attack in which his tanks would make a hard, sharply focused thrust over rough terrain through the very well defended German lines, which were some 12 miles deep. Once through these, the tanks were to spearhead a pursuit of the retreating Germans. Patton would have 140 tanks to work with.
Per standard procedure, the at
tack was preceded by “artillery preparation,” in this case a massive, steady barrage that began at 2:30 on the morning of September 26. The early-morning mist served to conceal the tanks from the enemy, but it also rendered Patton’s observation post useless. Although he knew Rockenbach would not approve of his doing so, he left the observation post with two officers and a dozen or so runners to see, close up, what was happening. As soldiers have done since the invention of gunpowder, he followed the sound of the guns and soon discovered that the tanks had made good progress, advancing some five miles. However, at about 9:00 A.M., in the hamlet of Cheppy, Patton ran into a contingent of panic-stricken soldiers making for the rear under heavy enemy fire. Exercising personal command, he stopped them, rounded them up, rallied them, and led them forward behind the advancing tanks. Then he noticed that a number of the tanks were stalled in trenches. He dispatched some men to get them moving, but, as he watched, the tanks remained motionless. Once again, Patton went forward to take charge. He quickly discovered the problem: the men would start to dig the tanks out, only to scatter for cover whenever they heard an incoming shell or a burst of machine-gun fire.
Patton’s bedrock article of faith was that soldiers have a tremendous capacity to be led, by which he meant to be led by example. After hastily organizing more effective work parties, Patton personally unstrapped shovels from the stuck tanks, making a point of exposing himself to the enemy fire, which ricocheted off the tanks. He distributed the shovels, and when a man continued to balk under fire, he hit him in his helmeted head with one. Five tanks were soon on the move again, whereupon Patton raised his walking stick, circled it slowly above his head, and shouted to the infantry behind him: “Let’s go get them. Who is with me?”
So they advanced. As they crested a rise, they were greeted by intense machine-gun fire. Everyone hit the deck. Patton later confessed to a “great desire to run.” Trembling with fear, he thought suddenly “of my progenitors and seemed to see them in a cloud over the German lines looking at me.” The vision filled him with calm, and he found himself “saying aloud, ‘It is time for another Patton to die.’” Then, much louder, he called to those around him: “Let’s go.”
A half dozen troops were gathered about him. One after another, they were cut down. Patton’s orderly, Joe Angelo, called to his commander: “We are alone.” Patton replied: “Come on anyway.”10
That is when a round dug into his left thigh, drilled through flesh and muscle, and exited near his rectum. Patton went down. Angelo pulled him into a shell hole, cut his trousers, and tightly bandaged the hemorrhaging wound. Once Angelo had stanched the flow, Patton ordered him to run toward some approaching tanks and direct their fire against the enemy machine guns. After Angelo had done this and returned, Patton was approached by a sergeant. He instructed the man to find Brett, tell him about his wound, and tell him that he had to take command. He ordered the sergeant not to send anyone to take care of him, because the firing was too intense. Turning now to Angelo again, he gave orders for him to point out more targets for the advancing tanks. When a medic came by, Patton motioned for him to change his bandage, but then sent him on to continue tending to other wounded. More than an hour passed before the enemy fire had been suppressed sufficiently to allow three stretcher bearers to approach. Carried two miles to an ambulance, Patton ordered the vehicle to stop at division headquarters so that he could make his report before being taken to the evacuation hospital.
Even before Patton was transferred from that hospital to a base hospital near Dijon, the newspapers were reporting how he had led a battle while bleeding in a shell hole. Wounded on September 30, he was promoted to colonel (with Rockenbach’s enthusiastic endorsement) on October 17 and was not released from the hospital until October 28, his wound having healed satisfactorily. His tankers, trained by him, continued to fight in the Meuse-Argonne campaign through the middle of the month.
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.”11 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.
CHAPTER 5
At War with Peace
THE 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, bu
t 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.
