Patton Preferred

by SHERMAN MILES

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War As I Knew It, by George S. Patton, Jr., is the first personal narrative of an Army Commander in the late war the most picturesque and probably the most brilliant of them all. And for good measure, the Navy’s counterpart, Admiral Halsey, simultaneously tells his story. Decades hence, historians will turn to such narratives in drawing the true picture of those who won our war. If their hard-earned victory finally results in a reasonably durable peace, we shall all the sooner come to a just appreciation of them. But the issue of peace is no longer in their hands. Secretary Marshall serves today as a statesman, not as a soldier. While time is with us we might do well to consider our past commanders, for at least they gave us a respite from war and made ultimate peace possible.

Of those leaders, none repays attention more than General Patton — “a man of parts,”as I once heard him describe a lesser figure. There was little in his full life, of mind or body, into which he did not wholeheartedly enter. Student, horseman, author, sportsman, sailor, and above all and at all times soldier, he was a man to mark. He writes on war — war as he “knew it.”He might well have said, war as he had both lived it and studied it, for it never ceased to absorb him, from childhood to death. In the short time allotted him after the Surrender, he felt compelled to record for his friends (he did not write for publication) not only his amazing campaigns but also the lessons which even the last of them had taught him. He recounts “episodes that stand out in my mind as occasions on which my personal intervention had some value.”Need one add that all those interventions were vigorous?

So the reader will find in Patton’s book many pages of pure military tactics and the art of command, “tricks of the tool’s true play,”which he may, if he likes, leave to the generations of soldiers who will study them. Patton believed so implicitly in the importance of his profession that his editors are quite right in including his various military notes in the published volume.

The Atlantic Monthly is publishing a series of Patton letters. Their readers will welcome in his book some sixty pages of similar letters from Africa and Sicily. In both groups there is little on his campaigns, but they a afford great insight into his powers of observation and the breadth of his mind. They are delightful travelogues written by a man who had both opportunity and discernment.

The meat of the book, though, is Hatton’s “brief account . . . hastily written” of his campaigns from the Invasion in Normandy to the Surrender. In its rapid jumps from subject to subject it reveals as its source the diary he kept throughout the war, and it presents some difficulties in following the course of military operations. But the interest never flags. Personal comments and humor enliven it.

There is little the sensation seekers will find in it. Patton opposed Montgomery throughout. Patton believed in the eastern line of attack, Montgomery in the more northern — a strategic question, dependent on many factors about which military minds will wrangle for generations. Patton was the embodiment of speed and audacity: Montgomery of caution and preponderant strength. But even concerning Montgomery he indulges in no violent or unrestrained criticism. At the most he condemns Montgomery’s proposal for a general retreat, at the height of the Battle of the Bulge, as a “disgusting idea “!

Towards Eisenhower there is the impression of constant respect and no bitterness even when the Supreme Commander’s orders killed his soaring plans. Bradley appears in the picture (except in one incident) as the sympathetic and sustaining chief. They thought alike — “Bradley, as usual, had been thinking the same thing. It was quite remarkable . . . how often the same idea struck both of us.”In character they complemented each other to form an almost perfect team. One notes Patton’s restraint (doubtless not in words but in action) towards his subordinates. The popular conception of his ruthlessness is not on this point, sustained. For example, there is the incident of a division commander who ordered a withdrawal from a hill contrary to Patton’s instructions. Patton intervened, insisted that a counterattack be made the following dawn, and left. He adds: “Once, in Sicily, I told a general, who was somewhat reluctant to attack, that I had perfect confidence in him and to show it, I was going home. I tried the same thing that day, and it worked.” His only comment on that division commander was: “He is the quietest man under fire I have ever seen” — and he retained him throughout the war.

There are numerous instances in which Patton gives full credit to his subordinates. The first conception of the Palatinate campaign he attributes to his Chief of Staff. Of the air commands that supported his army he speaks frequently and with a deep sense of what his troops owed to them. To him, war was never two-dimensional. Here was “one of the best examples of armor and air cooperation I have ever seen.” At another time his praise goes to the close air support that covered his advancing infantry.

He is also often quite frank about himself. Although he had foreseen the possibility, four days before it occurred, of the great German drive that resulted in the Bulge, yet the day after the enemy attacked he directed that his best armored division be engaged, to prevent its being “moved to the north by higher authority. The fact that I did this shows how little I appreciated the seriousness of the enemy attack on that date.” Speaking of the disposition he made of an armored division in the Battle of the Bulge, he says: “From later observation I think this was a mistake . . . one never knows.” And of a minor reverse during that battle he writes: “ This was probably my fault. I remember being surprised at the time at how long it took me to learn war.”He who had been hard at it for forty years!

The personal glimpses of the man show through in many pages. “I joined the column of the 90th Division . . . and walked in ranks with them for some hours. At that time the efficiency of this division was extremely dubious.” — “I never recall getting into a plane with more reluctance, because I had been assured by all the Staff that if the Germans failed to shoot me from above, the Americans would gel me from below as they were triggerhappy. ... It was one of the few days, in fact, that I had a premonition of impending death. It failed to materialize.” — “Perhaps some day I shall figure out the number of miles I drove and flew trying to direct the campaigns of the Third Army. I’ll bet it was about a million.” — (In France): “I always had a very funny feeling at such times. The plans, when they came into my mind, seemed simple, but after I had issued the orders and everything was moving and I knew I had no reserve, I had a feeling of worry and, as usual, had to say to myself, ’Do not take counsel of your fears.’ . . . When the race was on, my fear left me.” — (In the Eifel): “All during the meeting [with Eisenhower] I kept thinking about Nelson the night before the attack on Calvi in Corsica, when he discovered the French were twice as numerous as he thought they were, but failed to report it to his chief for fear the attack would be called off.”

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PATTON’S great idea was for a rapid advance of his army through Metz, the Siegfried Line, across the Rhine, and into the Frankfort Gap. As of late August he says: “I felt at this time that the great chance of winning the war would be to let the Third Army move. ... It was my belief then, and still is, that by doing this we could have crossed the German borders in ten days. ... It was my opinion that [the rejection of his plan] was the momentous error of the war.”

As ihe years go by, many will agree with him, and many disagree. But his fame will not stand or fall on that issue, for his was a most versatile mind in which many plans germinated. Before the invasion he writes: “It became quite evident that the Third Army would land on the Cherbourg Peninsula or else in the vicinity of Calais. Personally, I favored the latter place, because, while the landing would have been expensive, the subsequent price would probably have been less.” And in late August he proposed his “Plan A,” not for an eastern advance but for a turn to the north, through Beauvais, paralleling the Seine. Of this he says, “In the space of two days I had evolved two plans, wholly distinct, both of which were equally feasible. . . . One does not plan and then try to make circumstances fit those plans. One tries to make plans fit the circumstances. I think the difference between success and failure in high command depends upon the ability, or lack of it, to do just that.”

Nor was he so absorbed in his eastern thrust that he neglected his rear. His flanks had often to look out for themselves, watched only by his air support (“It was love at first Night between the XIX Tactical Air Command and the Third Army ”'. But his rear was another matter. Patton, the embodiment of the offensive, nonetheless ordered the attack on Brest and Lorient as he began his first advance, and even at the height of his drive through France agreed that those none too successful operations should continue, though they cost him an army corps.

In the account of his first great feat of arms, the break-out from the Cotentin Peninsula, there are vivid glimpses of Patton’s personal drive in forcing the Sienne and Sélune rivers, in the “impossible” but successful passage of two army corps through Avranches, and in the great sweep that trapped the Germans in the Falaise pocket. He writes that his troops “could easily have entered Falaise and completely closed the gap, but we were ordered not to do this. . . . This halt was a great mistake.”

From Falaise to the Bulge was the period of the war on which controversy will ever rage between the Bradley-Patton school and that of Montgomery. Patton, though never doubting that he was right, does not attempt to appraise in his book the many factors that induced the Supreme Commander to support Montgomery’s northern advance, through the diversion of supplies necessary to sustain the Third Army’s rapid thrust. “Monty had won again,” is Patton’s way of putting it. Yet, though lack of supplies and fall rains impeded the troops, nothing stopped them. Never was their great offensive spirit allowed to die. There, indeed, was supreme leadership.

It was during this period that Patton resorted to an official prayer for fair weather. (“Chaplain, are you teaching me theology or are you the Chaplain of the Third Army? I want a prayer!”) And In a letter of instructions to his generals he interpreted his orders to “assume the defensive” as embracing operations rarely, if ever, associated with that detested phrase. With what he had, or could beg, borrow, or steal (he “officially” regretted the stealing), Patton forced the Moselle and took Metz by assault, a fortress that had not been so carried since A.D. 641. In the end, after hard fighting he was where he had conceived that his first great drive should have taken him, all set for a break-through to the Rhine.

But the Battle of the Bulge intervened. On the morning of the fourth day of that battle Eisenhower called Bradley and Patton into conference. Before leaving his headquarters for that meeting, Patton called in his staff and, in an hour and a quarter, “planned three possible lines of attack.”As his army was then engaged on a front totally at variance with the direction of any of these lines and at a considerable distance away, it is almost incomprehensible that sound plans could have been made in so short a time. Yet on the basis of that rapid planning, Patton undertook to attack within three days (“it caused a ripple of excitement”) and did it. He insisted on attacking with three divisions only, not the six that Eisenhower wanted him to have, because he believed it better to attack with three, and gain surprise, than wait “until some days later” for six, and lose surprise.

Bradley did not, during the series of battles that followed, “inject himself into the operations of the Third Army, as he might well have done, since that was the only unit he had to command. On the other hand, I always informed him of what I was going to do, and profited by consultations with him and his Staff.”In reading Patton’s account of those three weeks of incessant struggle, first to relieve Bastogne, then to hold the corridor into it (“only 300 yards wide”), and finally to wipe out the entire Bulge, one realizes how serious was the situation and how desperate the fighting. Even Patton, in the midst of it, noted in his diary (the only time he ever made such a statement): “We can still lose this war.” Yet in his narrative one looks in vain for any boasting.

When he comes to his Palatinate campaign his modesty is such that the reader feels a distinct disappointment. For it was, unquestionably, one of the most brilliant campaigns of the war. In ten days Patton’s army cut through the rear of the Siegfried Line, surrounded or destroyed two German armies, captured 100,000 prisoners, and liberated 10,000 square miles of territory. Patton gives it only a few factual pages. But his pride in his army shines forth in his general order to the troops: “History records no greater achievement in so limited a time.” And he quotes with relish a colleague’s congratulations “on surrounding three armies, one of them American!”

Then followed his surprise crossing of the Rhine, without artillery or air preparation and “with a total loss 28 of men killed and wounded.” Though he makes no point of it, Patton’s feat must have given him great pleasure when compared with Montgomery’s crossing, a little later, supported by air-borne divisions, naval contingents, and thousands of planes and guns.

I am told that Secretary Stimson was highly amused when Patton’s Rhine crossing dispatch suddenly came in. The Secretary’s operations officer reported to him, somewhat hesitantly, that, in spite of our having given everything we had to Montgomery to support his crossing, Patton had done the trick unaided!

So the Third Army swept on through Germany and into Czechoslovakia, with Patton even pushing his troops to the check lines laid down by the Supreme Command and wondering why the Germans kept up so senseless a struggle. Day by day the German prisoner list grew. The troops welcomed Allied prisoners they released, looked with amazement at the Germans’ hoard of captured bullion and loot, and turned in horror from their torture camps. Patton and his men had in the end their triumphal march, in the springtime, through country largely untouched by their war.

Patton, the soldier, can best be summed up in one of his own sentences: “In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.”