A True Son of San Marino

Gen. George S. Patton Jr. spent only 391 days in combat during his entire life. What took Alexander the Great and Napoleon a decade, and took Lee and Grant at least four years, earning reputations for military genius, Patton nailed down in a year and a bit. A top British commander called Patton, quite accurately, “the greatest master of quick tactical movement that World War II developed.”

So clearly able to envision the whole battlefield, so quick to seize the moment in battle, so vital to victory in time of war, and so huge an embarrassment most of the rest of the time--these are the often contradictory qualities of a most complex and remarkable 20th century figure.

Patton captured the public’s imagination like no other top general in World War II. The press loved him and hated him. He was larger than life with his ivory-handled revolvers, Cavalry jodhpurs and lacquered helmets. We may never see his like again, especially in this time of the savage little wars of peace. Today, the stages are too small and, curiously, the stars of today’s wars are the briefers on television, not those who pull triggers and command tanks in battle.

Historians and biographers approach Patton at their own peril. Just when a historian or biographer thinks he has Patton clearly in view, that Patton vanishes and another quite different one appears. Stanley P. Hirshson, the biographer of Brigham Young and Gen. William T. Sherman, grappled with the Patton personae for 11 years and churned out more than 800 pages in his quest.

The essence of Patton distilled in “General Patton: A Soldier’s Life” is one of a deeply divided, deeply disturbing figure. The book is a fuller, more detailed study of Patton than what has come before, thanks in part to Hirshson’s exhaustive research of overlooked, forgotten archival material and newly available Patton family papers.

Hirshson concludes that there were two Pattons: “One is the Patton of public renown: poet, intellectual, reincarnationist and farsighted leader. The other is the Patton of reality: devoted son, materialist, inspiring but often cold leader, a man of narrow social and political vision.” Or as Col. Roger H. Nye, former head of history at West Point, wrote of Patton’s complex mind: He was at once broad and narrow, genteel and vulgar, receptive to new military ideas but in other ways stagnant and even regressive.

If it stopped here, Hirshson’s biography would present characteristics that could apply to many historical figures with vast ambitions. But Hirshson insinuates into his chronicle a startling suggestion that Patton, by his “bloodthirsty” speeches to his troops in World War II, was responsible for three massacres of German POWs and one slaughter of Italian civilians looting a soap factory in Sicily. His evidence that Patton is the author of these killings is thin. Similar incidents happened in other American units not under Patton’s command. Such incidents happen in wartime.

Elsewhere in this biography, the revelations are less titillating but more fascinating. Hirshson gives a detailed recounting of Patton’s family history and shows how, by blood and marriage, the Pattons were kin and friend to many of those who settled Southern California. Patton’s great-uncle migrated to California and, by 1866, was well established as a lawyer in Los Angeles. Patton’s Civil War-widowed grandmother, Sally Taylor Patton, with three children to support, married her late husband’s cousin, who joined her brother’s law firm. Patton’s maternal grandfather, Benjamin D. Wilson, arrived in California in 1841, buying Rancho Jurupa (which covered what is today Riverside) as well as large tracts in San Marino and Pasadena. Upon his daughter Ruth’s marriage to Sally’s eldest son, George, the newlyweds moved onto the San Marino property where Patton was born in 1885.

It is a little hard to imagine the future warrior enjoying a sunny California childhood on the sprawling Lake Vineyard Rancho (as it was called), getting his first horse at 4, his first gun at 5. The young George was a child of privilege. Summers were spent on Santa Catalina, riding, fishing and sailing. In his teens, George’s eye was caught by Beatrice Banning Ayer, the daughter of a relative by marriage. In due course, young Patton married her and made her Massachusetts home his own.

Both Patton’s and his wife’s families would leave fortunes that enabled them to have a lifestyle far above that afforded by a military man’s salary. It is also the Ayer family--mill owners during the bitter Lawrence, Mass. strikes of 1912--whom Hirshson blames for Patton, the son of a Populist Democrat, descending into a lifelong hatred not only of organized labor but also of people of Jewish and Italian descent.

Hirshson’s telling of Patton’s early years, while more detailed than other studies, breaks little new ground. He highlights familiar milestones: Patton’s graduation, by the skin of his teeth, from West Point in 1909; his competing in the Olympics in 1912 in the modern pentathlon, finishing fifth. But Hirshson also shows the special relationships that Patton had with top U.S. military leaders.

In 1915, with war breaking out in Europe, Patton was posted to Ft. Bliss, Texas. It was the back of beyond. But the commanding officer was Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing, who, with Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa causing problems, mounted an expedition into Mexico. Patton was chosen as one of Pershing’s aides. Sent out to forage for food, he surprised Villa’s chief bodyguard and three other armed men, killing them and bringing them back to camp strapped across the hood of his car.

It was Patton’s first taste of combat and his first taste of notoriety. Pershing liked him, promoted him and later chose him to join the first American unit sailing for France in the spring of 1917. Patton asked to be posted to command the new light tanks, of which the U.S. Army had none at the time: His 195 volunteers practiced tank warfare with their only vehicle, a broken-down truck.

Promotion, Hirshson relates, came rapid-fire. Within a week of being notified that he was promoted to major, Patton was promoted again to lieutenant colonel. Patton’s 304th Tank Brigade went into action Sept. 12, 1918, in a driving rain near St.-Mihiel. Fuel shortages plagued the American tanks. During the fighting, Patton was all over the battlefield, defying an order to remain in his command post. One of his officers said: “George Patton was always there on the front lines, never in the rear with the Red Cross. That was one of the secrets to his greatness.” At the Meuse-Argonne, Patton was shot by the enemy as he led an infantry charge up a hill. While in the hospital he was promoted to a full colonel’s rank. He was not yet 33 and received the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroism.

Upon his return to the U.S., posted to Camp Meade, Md., Patton was joined by Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower, another early proponent of the tanks. Both watched as Congress slashed away at military strength and budgets. Patton hated peacetime. “One year ago today we were in the battle of St.-Mihiel and having a fine time,” he wrote his father. “Now I am in the dust and have hay fever and a hell of a time.” Besides the endless socializing and the polo ponies that he enjoyed, Patton read books on military history and the lives of great commanders.

Perhaps it was then that he began to fear he’d never have a chance to test his mettle in a great cause. Still, Hirshson shows, Patton believed in his destiny. In 1922 he wrote a poem titled “Through a Glass, Darkly,” in which he depicted his previous existences as a soldier: “a Greek opposing the Persian king Cyrus; a soldier in a Roman legion; an Englishman fighting the French at Crecy in 1346; a cavalryman with Napoleon’s marshal, Joachim Murat; and finally a tanker in the Great War.”

Patton’s father, before his death in 1927, told his son that an invisible hand was guiding him, preparing him for something special. That “something special,” Patton believed, would be the greatest war in history. But by the mid-1930s, nearing the age of 50, Patton still waited. He made a round of assignments to Cavalry posts. Commanding Ft. Meyer’s largely ceremonial 3rd Cavalry Regiment, he did his best to cultivate the new Army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, socially. It didn’t work. The general’s wife, Katherine, called George down for his filthy language at her dinner table.

The partying and the polo were about to end, however. The world was about to change forever, and so was the sleepy peacetime Army where Cavalry still meant horses.

In the summer of 1940, Patton was ordered to Ft. Benning, Ga., to take command of the 2nd Brigade, 2nd Armored Division. He was back to the tanks for good. He stepped up his studies. A month later, Patton got his first star as a brigadier general. Two months later, he was given command of the 2nd Armored Division. Though his commanding officers thought of tanks as foxholes on wheels, moving at the walking speed of an infantry division, Patton knew they had to move swiftly and strike deeply into the enemy’s rear. “Hold them by the nose and kick them in the ass,” was Patton’s motto.

Patton pushed his soldiers harder than anyone. “Hard in maneuvers, easy in war,” he said. With America thrown into World War II by Japan’s attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Army expanded its tank forces to two corps of three armored divisions each. I Corps was commanded by Patton. Time magazine described him as “tough, profane, gimlet-eyed.” By the summer of 1942, Marshall sent Eisenhower to London as commander of the European Theater. Patton was tapped to help plan the invasion of North Africa, Operation Torch, and command a part of it.

Success was anything but assured in the landings on the Moroccan coast, but, as Hirshson describes, Patton took Casablanca three days after landing. Elsewhere in North Africa, the British and Americans had it much rougher. After the debacle at Kasserine Pass, Eisenhower sent Patton to replace the commander there. Unlike that general, Patton was everywhere it was dangerous. And along with the new job came a third star.

Thus was born, by the war’s end, the legend of “Old Blood and Guts” Patton. He was 60 and had feared he would never get the chance he had studied and trained and lived for: to command men and machines in a great war.

In Sicily, of course, he blotted his legend when he slapped the faces of two GIs sent to hospitals with shell shock. As a result he was sidelined in England and denied all but a supporting diversionary role in the D-Day landings. In time, however, his old friend Eisenhower gave him the 3rd Army and turned him loose on the Germans. Patton would then be Patton, breaking through the German lines and sending his tanks dashing 20, 30, even 40 miles a day until they ran dry of fuel.

Even as his forces smashed the last of the German lines, deep inside the Fatherland, Patton looked at the approaching Soviet armies and suggested that he should be given new orders to take Moscow. He would not die gloriously in war, but tragically after a car crash in 1945, after being relieved of command again for failure to clean the Nazis out of the Bavarian postwar administration he oversaw.

The legend, however, would outlive the man, and his name would become synonymous with dash and daring. Even Patton himself could not have hoped for a better ending.