by Alan Axelrod
On June 12, 1937, Patton, Beatrice, and their son George sailed the family yacht from Honolulu back to Los Angeles, arriving on July 12. They sold the craft, then traveled to their Massachusetts home for an extended leave. During this time, while Patton was out riding with Beatrice, her horse kicked him in the leg, fracturing it in two places. The injury laid Patton up for six months, during which time he developed phlebitis—a blood clot condition—which nearly killed him. Even after he was out of immediate danger, there were serious questions about his ability to resume active duty. In 1938, army physicians decided to assign him to limited administrative duty for a time in the Academic Department of the Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas. It turned out to be a salubrious assignment and a much-needed tonic for Patton’s physical as well as emotional health.
CHAPTER 6
Restless Mentor
AFTER SIX MONTHS OF LIGHT DUTY, HIS LEG fully recovered, Patton was promoted to regular army colonel and, on July 24, given command of the 5th Cavalry at Fort Clark. For the middle-age trooper, it was a kind of second youth or, at least, a return to the Wild West range riding he had enjoyed at the Sierra Blanca outpost during the Punitive Expedition of 1916—1917. Not only was Patton able to enjoy roughing it in the saddle, he quickly established connections with the Texas equivalent of Washington’s social elite: the prosperous ranchers in the countryside surrounding Fort Clark. He was as happy as he could be—in the absence of a war.
Patton had a reputation not only as one of the army’s ablest and most “colorful” officers, but also, quite possibly, thanks to his marriage with Beatrice, as its wealthiest. And that aspect of his notoriety was about to cost him. Colonel Jonathan Wainwright, who would earn grim fame in the coming war as the commander of doomed Bataan, was going broke as commanding officer of Fort Myer. The army’s showplace installation, which most officers considered a plum assignment, made inordinate social demands on senior commanders, who were expected to finance endless entertainment expenses from their own pockets. Wainwright’s pockets were empty, and he requested a transfer. The army turned to what it knew were the deep pockets of Patton. In December, Major General John Herr personally called at the Patton home to tell him that he was being reassigned to Fort Myer. Patton had enjoyed Fort Myer, but the real army, he felt, was at places like Fort Clark. To Herr he could only reply Yes, sir, but to Beatrice he vented his wrathful disappointment. “You and your money have ruined my career,” he snapped at her, and the two argued bitterly as they packed for the trip east.1
The Fort Riley and Fort Clark interlude had been a tonic to the Pattons’ often turbulent marriage. Reassignment to Fort Myer brought not only a return of discontent, but an intensification of it. Dark as Patton’s mood was, the posting adjacent to Washington, D.C., hardly “ruined” his career. On the contrary, it gave Patton an opportunity to come within the orbit of George C. Marshall, who, in the spring of 1939, became the acting chief of staff, the army’s senior officer. Patton and Marshall were both stationed at Fort Myer, and when Marshall’s on-post house was being repaired and repainted, Patton invited him to share his family’s house for the duration of the work. Marshall accepted the invitation, but it was certainly Patton’s record as a leader of troops, not his hospitality, that moved Marshall to ensure his eligibility for promotion to brigadier general. Eligibility, however, was one thing, and actual promotion another. Commanding a cavalry regiment was a colonel’s job. As along as that job was his, Patton would remain a colonel, and as long as peace prevailed, commanding a regiment would probably be his job. Then, on September 1, 1939, two momentous events occurred. George C. Marshall was permanently and formally elevated to Army Chief of Staff, and, after counterfeiting a Polish assault on a German border radio transmitter, the armies of Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, beginning a new world war.
Patton must have scented blood. He also must have felt a certain grim vindication in the spectacle of the German blitzkrieg through Poland, the kind of fast, highly mobile, unremittingly aggressive warfare he, as a tank pioneer, had advocated, in which masses of armor punched through the enemy’s front-line defenses, then wreaked havoc in the rear as infantry broadened the assault into an overwhelming general attack. Yet far from feeling himself at the center of power in Fort Myer, Patton feared that he had been sidelined in a primarily ceremonial and social role. Nevertheless, under Marshall, the army prepared for war, and Patton continued to curry the chief’s favor. When news came of the chief of staff’s promotion to full general, Patton purchased a double set of four sterling silver stars from a New York jeweler and had them delivered to Marshall. Never one to succumb to such blandishments, Marshall was nonetheless gracious in his reply of thanks: “I will wear these stars with satisfaction and honor to the Army.”2 Patton need not have cajoled the chief in this fashion. Marshall had taken note of Patton as early as the end of World War I and had begun thinking of him for command of an armored division or corps if another war ever developed. As was Marshall’s way, he just did not tell Patton about it.
In the spring of 1940, Patton served as an umpire in the Third Army war games in Louisiana. What he saw confirmed what he already knew: cavalry did not stand a chance against a mechanized force. With other officers, including armor commander and highly placed champion of mechanized warfare Adna R. Chaffee Jr., Patton secretly met in the basement of an Alexandria, Louisiana, high school. These so-called basement conspirators, all advocates of armor, sought a quiet, secluded place, free from the listening ears and prying eyes of tradition-bound infantry and cavalry commanders, to set about formulating their recommendation that the army create an independent an autonomous armored force. General Marshall received the recommendation and, without consulting anyone else, approved it. He assigned Chaffee—as commander of the 7th Mechanized Brigade, the army’s senior tank officer—to command the new “Armored Force,” and Chaffee not only created the 1st and 2nd Armored Divisions, but is credited with laying the foundation of U.S. armored doctrine as well as combined arms doctrine: the coordinated employment of armor, infantry, and artillery. The credit is well deserved, but we can only guess what Patton had contributed to Chaffee’s thinking in that high school basement, for no record of the meeting was kept. That Chaffee thought highly of Patton is beyond dispute. He put him at the head of a list of officers he wanted to command a brigade within one of his armored divisions. Accordingly, on July 26, 1940, Patton reported to 2nd Armored Division at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he assumed command of the division’s 2nd Armored Brigade.
As usual, he found the officers and men of his new command in urgent need of remolding in his own military image. Through a program of drill, discipline, and the inculcation of pride, he began making Patton-style soldiers of them all. Then he worked on making them tankers. On October 2, Patton finally received his first star and was now a brigadier general in command of a brigade. The very next month, he was assigned as acting commanding general of the entire 2nd Armored Division and, on April 4, 1941, he was promoted to major general, assigned just days later as permanent commanding general of the division.
Cutting his customarily picturesque military figure while forging a model division, Patton drew much recognition. Chaffee’s growing illness— he would die of cancer in the summer of 1941—forced him to step down as commander of what was now designated I Armored Corps. This put the spotlight squarely on Patton, and he did not squander the attention he received. Under the watchful gaze of superiors and subordinates, Patton gave a bravura performance as a commander of boundless dash and limitless energy. He also addressed two critically urgent military problems: how to achieve the highest possible degree of speed and mobility in an armored force and how to transform civilians swept up by the nation’s first peacetime draft into soldiers capable of modern armored warfare.
The first problem was chiefly a matter of organization, and Patton contributed to the evolution of the armored division by streamlining it. As originally conceived, the armored division was bloated and unwieldy.
Patton began its transformation into a highly flexible unit consisting (in its final World War II incarnation) of three combat commands, which could work independently or in close coordination, depending on immediate need. The second problem yielded to a more mystical solution, and it was on the basis of this that the Patton legend crystallized and that he became one of the most compelling personalities of World War II.
George S. Patton Jr. was among the greatest trainers of troops in American military history. A superficial look at what Patton taught his soldiers is limited to an emphasis on discipline, military courtesy, military appearance, physical conditioning, unremitting drill, and so on. To be sure, all of these elements were important to Patton and occupied a prominent place in his training regimen, but the catalyst in the Patton training formula was his physical presence. He brought to his command a profound blend of military romanticism and realism and a genuine vision of effective leadership, which he conveyed in part through colorful lectures but mostly through constant modeling of the behavior and performance of every officer and every enlisted man. His limitless energy was part but never purely showmanship. A commander’s duty, he believed, was to be everywhere. As he had walked among his advancing tanks on the battlefields of World War I France, so he now circulated among his troops as they trained. He corrected them mercilessly, but also usefully, practically, and when someone showed improvement or achieved excellence, he was generous, prompt, and public with his praise. He made himself conspicuous, driving among his division’s tanks in one that had its turret specially painted in bold stripes of red, white, and blue plus a broad stripe of cavalry yellow, the army’s traditional symbol of mobility. The Jeep he used not only bore a red-and-white two-star placard in front and back, but also was equipped with a piercing siren and klaxon horn, which would announce his approach long before his actual presence.
Perhaps no modern American military commander has been more haunted by personal demons than Patton—a combination of impulsiveness, reckless personal behavior, feelings of worthlessness, and outright de-pression—yet before the officers and men of his command he never allowed himself to appear as anything other than supremely self-confident and confident of each of them. Beset by myriad doubts, Patton never allowed his subordinates to doubt him or themselves. His message was never we must succeed but always we will succeed. Imbued, however imperfectly, with a consciousness of his own destiny, Patton strove to inoculate everyone else with a similar sense. When he spoke of combat, he spoke viscerally, of blood and guts, but he also emphasized that blood and guts had to be mastered by intellect and put into the service of the great new weapon they now possessed: the tank.
As Patton extolled the virtues of the tank to his troops, he also tirelessly promoted the weapon to the public, to the press, and to politicians. Already a virtuoso in the art of personal showmanship, Patton demonstrated commensurate mastery of the public arena by staging, as an army exercise in December 1940, a mass movement of some 1,000 tanks, halftracks, and other vehicles from Columbus, Georgia, to Panama City, Florida, and back. This 400-mile round trip Patton advertised as the longest movement ever made by an armored division. To complete the blitzkrieg effect, he choreographed aircraft overflights with the caravan. Prior to the exercise, Patton mounted a publicity campaign to ensure an audience all along the route. His object was to build morale by letting his troops think of themselves as celebrities and, simultaneously, to impress civilian America with the awesome power of the tank. By getting the public to buy in to armor, Patton reasoned, he could gain stronger, more enduring support for the still-emerging service arm.
The Columbus-to-Panama City exercise drew plenty of publicity, and Patton took the opportunity to promote himself in the papers as a daring commander who “would never order men to do anything . . . that he wouldn’t do himself.”3 The demonstration went so well that, in January of the next year, Patton mounted a parade of the entire division, 1,300 vehicles in all, which thundered through the streets of Columbus to the cadence of a march composed by none other than Beatrice Patton, an amateur musician.
The hard training and the publicity paid off in recognition from higher command. Even conservative officers had to admit that armor may well have come of age. The Columbus-to-Panama City circuit had been a grand spectacle, which is precisely what Patton had wanted, but it also presented a serious practical problem. What was grand in peacetime made for an inviting target in war. Even a relatively fast-moving convoy was highly vulnerable to air attack. Furthermore, driving 1,000 tanks and assorted vehicles down a public highway in the sleepy American South was very different from driving an armored division under fire in a foreign country during war. Patton needed a way to visualize the movements of a huge mechanized force and to keep his tanks from becoming sitting ducks for enemy aircraft. How to get the big picture? How to understand the point of view of an enemy pilot? Patton purchased a light plane, took flying lessons, and, at age 55, earned a pilot’s license. During exercises, he flew over and over his tanks, looking for better ways to manage the flow of traffic and to protect the vehicles from air attack. Every lesson learned was distilled from practical experiment. A by-product of his flying observations was insight into a combat role for light, or “liaison,” aircraft as the eyes of armor and the artillery. An observer or even a commander could survey the battle situation from the air and, using two-way voice radio, direct complex tank movements in real time. Thanks in part to Patton’s early experiments, the light aircraft spotter mission would figure importantly in World War II combat.
Not all of Patton’s pioneering ideas for the armored corps were accepted. Because tankers were practitioners of war’s cutting-edge technology, Patton wanted to dress them in a uniform that was utilitarian and strikingly modern in appearance, and that conveyed elite status. He personally designed a uniform of green gabardine featuring a tightly tailored abbreviated tunic with a row of brass or white metal buttons running diagonally down the front from the right shoulder to the middle front of the hem. The trousers were thickly padded and amply supplied with all manner of pockets. Topping off the ensemble was a gold football helmet. In many ways, the uniform was very practical: the dark green material hid oil stains, the padding and the football helmet protected the tankers in the close metal quarters of rough-riding tanks, and the multiple pockets were essential in an environment in which loose objects readily became missiles. But overall the look was ridiculous, and the same newspapers that had reported enthusiastically on the convoy, the parade, and the leadership of George S. Patton now mocked him as “the Green Hornet.” Needless to say, Patton’s uniform design was rejected by the army.
In the spring of 1941, the United States was still officially neutral, and most Americans remained eager to stay out of the war. Nevertheless, President Roosevelt steered steadily closer to outright alliance with Winston Churchill’s Britain, trading 50 obsolescent destroyers for leases on British bases in the Western Hemisphere, pledging America’s industrial might as the “arsenal of democracy,” and, in March 1941, signing the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized the president to supply arms and material to any nation whose defense he deemed vital to American interests. Moreover, the peacetime draft had been under way since September 1940, and the tiny interwar army had already rapidly expanded to about 1.5 million men on the eve of Pearl Harbor. In this climate, Lesley J. McNair, who had charge of the army’s combat training, announced the first of what would be a series of three massive maneuvers—war games—the biggest and most realistic the army had ever conducted.
Patton saw war games as an extraordinary opportunity to achieve three objectives: (1) to perfect the training of his men; (2) to create, test, modify, and hone armored tactics and doctrine—mechanized warfare was, after all, a new kind of warfare; (3) simply to win. For Patton, war games were an arena second only to actual combat in which he could demonstrate his personal prowess as a warrior and, somewhat secondarily, demonstrate the effectiveness of mechanized armor as a weapon of modern war. He was
exhilarated, but also scared—not of failure (that, he knew, was not his destiny) but of being chosen, once again, as an umpire rather than as a participant.
In the lead-up to the maneuvers, Patton put aside his fears and prepared his men. He stressed three things. First, all eyes would be on the tanks. The army had plenty of old-line officers drooling at the prospect of the failure of the newfangled mechanized service. The maneuvers were make or break, a one-time opportunity to prove the value of the tank. Second, Patton hammered away at the theme of aggressive mobility. The entire division was to keep moving with a “desperate determination to go forward,” always attacking, but never pausing to attack, and always striking against weakness while blowing past strength. The tanks were not to stop. When one objective was attained, Patton admonished, “do not say ‘I have done enough,’ keep on, see what else you can do to raise the devil with the enemy.” The third point he stressed in preparation for the maneuvers was the creation of an elite identity. Under Patton’s command, the 2nd Armored Division dubbed itself “Hell on Wheels” and proudly accepted the role and identity of “blitz troopers,” the scourge of the battlefield. For Patton, creating a proud unit identity was as indispensable as the tanks themselves.4
The maneuvers took place in Tennessee in J une 1941, and, to his great relief, Patton was assigned to lead the 2nd Division. There was some initial fumbling in deployment of the division’s 12,000 troops, but once the action got under way in earnest, Patton was fully its master and drove his forces with relentless speed and efficiency, executing in a mere nine hours an exercise that had been scheduled for two-day completion. He basked briefly in both the professional and public praise his performance had garnered and made no secret of being driven by a hunger for glory won in battle. As for flamboyance, that was simply part and parcel of being a great commander. To officers who took pains to make themselves inconspicuous on the field by donning the drab uniform of an ordinary G.I., Patton would cite the example of Lord Nelson, who strode the deck of HMS Victory, under fire, wearing the full dress uniform of a Royal Navy admiral, ribbons, medals, cocked hat, and all. Glory, yes, Patton acknowledged, but never vainglory. He regarded genuine glory as bounty to be shared, and he was always generous in assigning credit to the men of his command. Among his favorite maxims, which he often repeated, was “The soldier is the army.”5 Not the plan, not the equipment, and not even the commanding general. Personal glory was important, but it was important precisely in proportion to its being more than merely personal.
