PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY

by Alan Axelrod

  For Patton, leadership was never simply about making plans and giving orders. It was about transforming oneself into a symbol, a kind of totem or talisman with which the group identified and, indeed, in which the group invested and merged their individual identities. The men of the 2nd Armored Division were nicknamed Hell on Wheels, but mostly they referred to themselves as “Patton’s men.”

  No sooner were the Tennessee maneuvers completed than Patton began planning for the even bigger war games to be staged across a vast area of Louisiana and Texas during September 1941. These were, and they remain today, the most ambitious maneuvers in the history of the United States Army. Four hundred thousand troops were engaged in a “war” between the Red Army and the Blue. In Phase I of the maneuvers, Patton found himself on the losing side as part of Lieutenant General Benjamin Lear’s Red Army. In Phase II, his 2nd Armored Division was assigned to the Blue Army, which was commanded by the brilliant Lieutenant General Walter Krueger (whose chief of staff was Patton’s old friend, Dwight D. Eisenhower). This time, Patton was at the point of a bold attack against the Red Army flank and led a spectacular 400-mile end run around the enemy so that he could strike Shreveport (which the Red Army was defending) from the rear. The movement was audacious and fully exploited the mobility of a mechanized force. Adding to the audacity of the attack was Patton’s refusal to do the conventional thing by waiting for all his massive forces to arrive at the point of the attack. Deeming surprise the overriding objective, he attacked with what he had when he had it. This was a Patton trademark. War is not about perfection, which is timeless, it is about opportunity, which is chained to time. The best, Patton frequently said, is the enemy of the good. It is always better to execute a good plan violently and immediately than it is to sacrifice fleeting opportunity by waiting for perfection.

  Not only did Patton win, he won the kind of victory that could be achieved only with tanks. There were plenty of congratulations to go around, but also some cries of foul from officers on the losing side. To make his end run, Patton briefly led the 2nd Division outside of the designated maneuver area, and when he ran out of gas he paid local filling stations to refuel his thirsty vehicles. Rumor had it that the cash was Patton’s own, and he never denied the rumor. Nor did Patton argue with those who protested that he had broken the rules. He merely responded that winning was ultimately the only rule in war. General Marshall and the rest of the senior command agreed. The Louisiana maneuvers made Patton the star of American armor.

  These maneuvers were quickly followed in October and November by maneuvers in the Carolinas, in which Patton and his men not only performed brilliantly but even captured the commander of the opposing army, Hugh Drum, who had been Patton’s commanding officer during his tour in Hawaii and whom Patton resented for having nearly ejected him from the Inter-Island Polo Championship in 1935 because of ungentlemanly behavior. Best of all, the culminating phase of the maneuvers was personally witnessed by Chief of Staff George Marshall, who came away more impressed than ever by Patton’s performance.

  Patton knew that, as a result of the three sets of war games, he was most advantageously positioned to get an important command once America finally entered the war. He assumed that, as was the case in World War I, he would be among the first to go overseas, and the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor gave him hope, which seemed perfectly justified when Marshall elevated Patton, on January 15, 1942, to command of I Armored Corps. Now he awaited his marching orders.

  He did not have to wait long. In February, Patton was assigned to create and command a desert training center. Marshall and the other army planners knew that the first fighting would be against the dreaded German Afrika Korps under the brilliant Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the deserts of North Africa. They also knew that, aside from police actions against Indians and Pancho Villa, the United States Army had never fought in such an environment, let alone with tanks. Patton had to locate a site for a large desert training area, had to put it together, then had to train America’s first generation of desert warriors. It was an urgently important assignment, but Patton, who craved combat, was profoundly disappointed by it. Orders, however, were orders, and, in March, Patton flew a Piper Cub over an extensive area of California, Nevada, and Arizona, looking for a large, uninhabited tract of desert that simulated conditions in North Africa. Ultimately, he settled on 16,200 square miles of desolation adjacent to the California hamlet of Indio, some 200 miles east of Los Angeles. After surveying the site from the air, Patton and a small party ranged over it on horseback. Officially the United States Army Desert Training Center (today called the National Training Center), the installation was dubbed “Little Libya,” and offered sand, cactus, rocks, rattlers, and midday temperatures pushing 130 degrees in the summer with winter nights that plunged near or even below freezing.

  It was a hard place, and that is exactly what Patton wanted. There was plenty of room for realistic maneuver and live-fire exercises, and the harsh conditions would test machines as well as men. Instead of barracks, everyone, including the commanding general, would live in tents. There would be no electricity, no running water, no hot water, no heat. There would be daily conditioning runs: one mile in 10 minutes. There would be marching: eight miles in 2 hours. Patton made it as hard as possible, because he wanted it to be as real as possible. Making it real would build effective desert soldiers and save lives.

  Patton formally arrived at Indio on April 10. Training commenced within a week. However much he longed to be fighting overseas, Patton threw his heart, soul, and intellect into the work at hand. As always, he commanded in the field. Although he had an observation post atop a hill that his men called King’s Throne, he rarely stayed there for long, preferring to move about among his troops and tanks, traveling by Jeep, tank, half-track, and light plane. Patton saw his mission as twofold: he had to train and harden his men—some 60,000 would pass through Indio during his tenure, which began in April and ended in July of 1942—and he also had to formulate desert tank doctrine. He experimented extensively with tank formations, and he developed specifications for a new vehicle, the tank retriever, which was specifically designed to recover damaged or broken-down tanks from the field, under fire. He also innovated the use of light aircraft not just for reconnaissance, but as a command platform from which the commander could issue real-time movement orders by voice radio. Above all, he put everything up for discussion. Once an order was issued, Patton expected obedience born of perfect discipline. But up to the moment of the order, he wanted to hear all sides on each important issue. The Desert Training Center became the focus of lively discussion and debate, in which Patton listened, argued, and questioned. From these debates, Patton harvested whatever ideas seemed most promising, and he sent them on to higher headquarters, with a request that they be circulated for further comment.

  Despite his commitment to the work at Indio, Patton continually reminded his two commanding officers, Lesley McNair and Jacob Devers, that he wanted to fight. These men, like Marshall, knew from World War I experience that Patton was highly effective in combat, but they were also convinced that, as a great trainer and motivator as well as the army’s foremost exponent of tank warfare, Patton was more useful building an armored force and doctrine than on the field. It was July 1942 before Patton received a summons to Washington to receive a combat assignment at last. On the thirtieth of the month, the very day of his departure from the Desert Training Center, he wrote a summary of lessons learned. Today such “lessons learned” summaries are standard procedure in the military and exist in abundance. Patton drew up his summary on his own initiative, believing that those who would be assigned to fight in the desert would find it useful. He wrote:

  Formation and material are of very secondary importance compared to discipline, the ability to shoot rapidly and accurately with the proper weapon at the proper target, and the irresistible desire to close with the enemy with the purpose of killing and destroying him.

  He further adv
ised commanding from the air in a liaison plane via two-way radio, and he closed, pithily, with: “Sitting on a tank watching the show is fatuous—killing wins wars.”6

  Patton had been in such a hurry to leave that he did not have the time to assemble his men for a formal farewell. He wrote to Major General Alvan Gillem, the officer who replaced him at Indio, with a request that he publish to the men a message he enclosed. What he wrote was vintage Patton:

  Soldiers: Owing to circumstances beyond my control, I left you so hastily that I was unable to speak to you personally. However, I would be lacking in gratitude if, even at this late date, I failed to tell you of my sincere appreciation of the magnificent conduct of each and everyone of you whom I had the honor to command.

  Having shared your labors, I know the extreme difficulties under which we worked and I know also how splendidly and self-sacrificingly you did your full duty.

  I thank you and congratulate you—it was an unparalleled honor to have commanded such men.7

  Now, in Washington, he was told that he would command the Western Task Force in an operation code named Torch. His mission was to invade North Africa.

  CHAPTER 7

  From African Defeat to African Victory

  PATTON ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON ON JULY 30 and was quickly briefed on Operation Torch, the proposed invasion of North Africa. He put together a small staff of officers and set himself up in an office in the Munitions Building on Constitution Avenue, where he and his staff spent the next several days poring over maps, preliminary plans, and reports on climate, terrain, and other conditions. Then, on August 5, Patton flew to the London headquarters of Dwight D. Eisenhower, whom General Marshall had chosen over 366 more senior officers, among them Patton himself, to assume the role of commander of the European Theater of Operations and Allied commander for Torch.

  Ike was thrilled to see him, for Patton brimmed with all the confidence, energy, and eagerness for battle that Eisenhower, under the present circumstances, wished he had. Not only was he buried under the myriad details of a highly complex amphibious operation spread out across the Atlantic shore of Morocco and the Mediterranean shore of Algeria, he lacked faith in the very idea of Operation Torch. The United States entered World War II because the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The American people wanted, first and foremost, to avenge that “sneak attack,” but President Roosevelt and his senior military planners agreed with Winston Churchill that the first order of business had to be dealing with Hitler and Mussolini in Europe. Where the military commanders and the political leaders parted company, however, was in how to go about this. Like most of their uniformed colleagues, Generals Marshall and Eisenhower favored a rapid buildup of American and British forces in England for an invasion of France across the English Channel. Having barely recovered from the catastrophes of Dunkirk and Dieppe, both premature actions on the Continent, Prime Minister Churchill argued that the Allies were not ready for a cross-channel invasion and that the only viable alternative was to begin by invading Europe through what he called its “soft underbelly.” His idea was to defeat the Germans and Italians in North Africa, then leap off to landings in Sicily and then mainland Italy and elsewhere in Mediterranean Europe. This strategy, Churchill argued, would draw off German forces from the Eastern Front, giving Stalin’s Red Army some immediate relief. In the meantime, preparations could continue for a later cross-channel invasion. Both Marshall and Eisenhower objected that this indirect approach would sacrifice valuable time and resources. President Roosevelt, however, believed that building up to a cross-channel invasion would take time, and he wanted to get America into the fighting as soon as possible. Good soldiers that they were, Marshall and Eisenhower followed orders and prepared for Torch.

  After a long night of conversation with Eisenhower, Patton noted in his diary that we “both feel that the operation is bad and is mostly political. However, we are told to do it and intend to succeed or die in the attempt.” Yet where Eisenhower’s response to Torch emphasized the near impossibility of its success, Patton fell back on the innate fatalism born of his sense of personal destiny: in the worst case, Operation Torch would be “an impossible show . . . but, with a little luck it can be done at a high price . . . and it might be a cinch.”1

  In fact, it is by no means certain that Patton was displeased with the plan. For all his aggressiveness, he never favored the simple head-on approach, what the maverick cold war-era air force fighter pilot and military theorist John Boyd famously derided as the army’s customary “hi-diddle-diddle-right-up-the-middle” mind-set. Instead, Patton frequently spoke of “holding the enemy by the nose . . . and kicking him in the pants.” He intended this as tactical advice—use part of your forces to hold the enemy at the front with fire while moving the rest of your forces around his flank— rather than as strategic philosophy, but it is quite likely that Patton saw a value in Torch that Eisenhower and even Marshall did not see. In a grand strategic sense, much as Churchill suggested, the soft underbelly approach could serve to hold the enemy by the nose and thereby give a later attack from the west, from across the English Channel, a better chance of succeeding. In any case, Patton was just happy to get into a fight—any fight, even if it was in North Africa and not across the English Channel.2

  Nevertheless, Patton’s initial euphoria quickly ebbed, not because of the plan, but because of the personalities responsible for its execution. He was disappointed—and jealous—that Eisenhower chose Mark Clark, a major general with eight years less experience than Patton, as his deputy commander for the operation. Patton feared Clark might get in his way and be “too intrusive.” But he also began to doubt Eisenhower himself: “Ike is not as rugged mentally as I thought; he vacillates and is not a realist.” Moreover, he was disturbed by what he saw as the undue deference the American officers paid to their British counterparts. “It is very noticeable,” he recorded in his diary on August 11, “that most of the American officers here are pro-British, even Ike ... I am not, repeat not, pro-British.”3

  Outside the pages of his diary, however, Patton did not complain, but worked hard and cooperatively with Eisenhower and Clark to plan the operation. The deeper they got into it, the more dubious the project seemed. Both Eisenhower and Clark worried that the odds were stacked too high against success, and Patton went so far as to quantify the matter, calculating that the actual odds were “52 to 48 against us.” In contrast to the other men, however, he favored going on. “I feel,” he noted in his diary, “that we should fight... I feel that I am the only true gambler in the whole outfit.” Always, Patton’s controlling imperative was action, however imperfect: “We must do something now,” he wrote.4

  After three weeks of meeting and planning in London, Patton returned to Washington. There he hammered out with the navy the details of the landings. The pessimism of the naval officers greatly aggravated Patton, who frequently exploded in fits of frustration. Despite this, by September 24, Patton had completed his portion of the plan and confided to his diary that he now felt “very calm and contented.” Even though the operation could be “a very desperate venture ... I have a feeling we will win.”5

  Operation Torch would consist of three major landings. The Eastern and Central Task Forces, which would sail from Britain, would land at Algiers and Oran, respectively; the Western Task Force, under Patton, would sail from the States and land near Casablanca. Patton subdivided the Western Task Force into three task groups. His trusted friend Lucian Truscott would land near Mehdia and take Port Lyautey. The other two groups, commanded by Jonathan W. Anderson and Ernest N. Harmon, would land at Fedala and Safi, then converge on the city of Casablanca, which they would capture.

  On October 20, Patton wrote a series of sentimental valedictory letters, directing that they be posted only after the invasion had begun. He wrote to his childhood nurse, Mary Scally, who now lived with his sister Nita: “When Nita gives you this letter, I will either be dead or not. If I am, please put on a good Irish wake.” To Mrs. Francis C.
Marshall, the widow of his first company commander at Fort Sheridan, he wrote to express his conviction “that whatever success I have attained, I owe largely to the influence of you and the General.” To Andre W. Brewster, a fellow member of Pershing’s World War I staff, he wrote: “Before starting on the Second World War I wish to bid goodbye to one of the men who in the First War did so much for me.” To James G. Harbord, who had been Pershing’s chief of staff, he wrote that he had “been one of the chief inspirations of my military life.” To his brother-in-law Frederick Ayer, Patton expressed gratitude and admiration. He explained that his task would be “about as desperate a venture as has ever been undertaken by any force in the world’s history,” and he enclosed a sealed letter for Beatrice, to be given to her only “if I am definitely reported dead.” He allowed that this “all sounds very gloomy, but it is not really so bad. All my life I have wanted to lead a lot of men in a desperate battle; I am going to do it.”6

  On October 24 at 8:10 A.M., Patton sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, with 24,000 men in 100 ships. He passed the long voyage in exercising, writing in his diary, and reading the Koran, which he found both “good” and “interesting.” The quickest way to prepare himself for combat in the Islamic world was to discover something of its very soul. Patton also spent time “giving everyone a simplified directive of war. Use steamroller strategy; that is, make up your mind on course and direction of action, and stick to it. But in tactics, do not steamroller. Attack weakness. Hold them by the nose and kick them in the pants.”7