The Generals

by Winston Groom

  PATTON HAD PERFORMED brilliantly in the Sicilian conquest. Everyone said so, from President Roosevelt to George Marshall to Ike, each of whom wrote letters of high praise.

  Patton, however, remained in Sicily, headquartered in a palace, worried about his army, his future, and his weight. He began walking two miles a day for exercise while having sumptuous lunches, teas, or dinners with local gentry that he often recorded for Beatrice’s edification: “The other day I had tea with a very fat Bourbon Princess who has a black beard which she shaves. She talks bad French at the top of her powerful lungs, yet when she was young she must have been quite lovely.”

  In the meantime, Patton was losing his army right out from under him. With the war raging as the Allies slowly climbed up the Italian boot toward Rome, Eisenhower was ordering away Patton’s divisions piecemeal to join Mark Clark’s Fifth Army on the Italian mainland. Patton was appalled at the American tactics, which pitted nine U.S. divisions against eight of the Germans. He did not see how the Allies, without a clear superiority in manpower, could advance “at any speed at all” with the Americans on the attack and unable to rest their men, while the Germans—in the mountainous terrain favoring defense—could rest theirs constantly.

  BETWEEN HIS OFFICIAL DUTIES, which included receiving American dignitaries, Patton passed the days speculating in his letters and diary on what the army next had in store for him. Then, on August 20, a brigadier general from the Armed Forces Surgeon General’s Office showed up with a personal and secret letter to Patton from Ike. It began: “I am attaching a report which is shocking in its allegations against your personal conduct.”

  Ever since his days at West Point, Patton had been a bellicose figure. He had always and genuinely loved his troops, but at the same time he despised inefficiency, laziness, and especially cowardice, which he considered the ultimate sign of weakness in a soldier. Patton was convinced that cowardice was the fault of the commanding officer, who either himself was a coward or permitted such behavior through dereliction of duty.

  During the Sicily campaign he had encountered the perfect setup to raise his legendary temper to the boiling point—and beyond—when, during a temporary stalemate in the action, he entered a field hospital tent to hand out medals and encountered a man suffering from “battle fatigue” or “shell shock.” Patton did not believe in shell shock, despite the fact that its symptoms were well known in military medicine. He lost his temper, accosted the soldier, slapping him across the face, and ordered him out of the ward, shouting, “I don’t want any yellow-bellied bastards like him hiding their lousy cowardice around here, stinking up this place of honor.” As if that were not bad enough, a week later Patton discovered another shell-shocked soldier in a hospital ward and waved his ivory-handled pistol in his face, saying, “You ought to be lined up against a wall and shot,” even threatening to do it himself. He also slapped this soldier across the face.18

  Doctors at the hospitals had filed formal complaints against Patton that Eisenhower was duty-bound to deal with. Instead, Ike ordered the complaints locked away in his top-secret files and wrote a stern letter to Patton ordering him to make a full report of the incidents, and to apologize personally to the doctors, nurses, and soldiers involved as well as to his entire army. Adding to Patton’s humiliation was information in the report that the first soldier Patton slapped had chronic dysentery, malaria, and a temperature of 102 degrees; the second soldier’s best friend had been bloodily wounded next to him, was on sleep medication, and even though the twenty-one-year-old boy begged the unit medical officer not to, against his wishes he had been ordered evacuated to the hospital where Patton found him. Ike’s letter closed with this admonishment: “I assure you that conduct such as described in the accompanying report will not be tolerated in this theater no matter who the offender will be.”

  Patton was mortified and chagrined, but not beyond words. That night he told his diary: “Evidently I acted precipitately and on insufficient knowledge. My motive was correct because one cannot permit skulking to exist. It is just like any communicable disease. I admit freely that my method was wrong [and] I shall make what amends I can … I feel very low.”

  It is a court-martial offense in the U.S. Army for an officer to strike an enlisted man—let alone for a three-star general to strike a buck private—but reporters who learned of the incident decided by mutual agreement not to reveal it. The furious Eisenhower was poised to relieve Patton of command but was dissuaded by Marshall, who told some fellow officers at the War Department, “Georgie’s in trouble again. He’s always in trouble. But I’m not getting rid of Patton. He was solely responsible for Sicily.”

  PATTON SPENT A GREAT DEAL OF TIME in the coming days justifying his actions even as he was personally delivering the ordered apologies to those involved and to his army, division by division. When he reached the last of the divisions, Truscott’s Third Division, the men who had captured Palermo and Messina, “Patton’s audience sensed that he was about to make a statement of apology. Before he could do so, they began a spontaneous chant, ‘No, General, no, no, no, General no, no,’ with increasing persistence.” Patton tried again to start his apology but each time he was cut off, “No, General, no, no, no,” and stood there on the stage, erect as the Washington Monument, the tears rolling down his cheeks as the chant reached its crescendo, “No, General. No, no, no!” and followed him, ringing in his ears as he turned smartly and exited the stage to his waiting car, “No, General. No, no, no!”19

  He called in the second soldier that he had slapped and explained that he had “cussed him out in the hope of restoring his manhood.” After telling the soldier that he was sorry, Patton told him that “if he cared, I would like to shake hands with him.” They shook. Two days later Patton met with the first soldier and made more or less the same explanation. They also shook hands.

  To Beatrice he wrote, “I have been a passenger floating on the river of destiny. At the moment I can’t see around the next bend, but I guess it will be all right. Once in a while my exuberant personality gets me in a little lame with Devine Destiny, which seems to have the trait of believing the worst of everyone on insufficient evidence.” He wrote to Eisenhower, “I am at a loss to find words to express my chagrin and grief in having given you, a man to whom I owe everything, and for whom I would gladly lay down my life, cause for displeasure with me.”

  Eisenhower meanwhile wrote to George Marshall, without mentioning the slapping incidents, that “Patton is preeminently a combat commander … He is a one-sided individual and particularly in his handling of individual subordinates is apt at times to display exceedingly poor judgment and unjustified temper. But his outstanding qualities must not be discounted.” He added that they could not afford to lose those qualities, unless he ruins himself.

  FOR FOUR LONG MONTHS PATTON languished in an anguished limbo while the war went on around him. “I have joined the army of the unemployed,” he wrote Beatrice. “I seem destined to either fight like hell or do nothing … I would serve under the Devil to get into a fight … apparently I am a man of deeds, not words. Except when I talk too much.” He called in his staff and said, “Gentlemen … if you can find a better job, get it. I will help you all I can. You may be backing the wrong horse, or hitched your wagon to the wrong star.” No one left him, which moved Patton very much.

  Patton had been feeling very low when, unannounced, Jimmy Doolittle paid him a visit. The 12th Air Force commander and famous raider of Japan had become close with Patton when he was in North Africa, and he’d heard that his friend Georgie might need some bucking up.

  When he arrived over the airfield Doolittle identified himself to the control tower and asked for permission to land and pay his respects to the general.

  When he landed, Doolittle found Patton waiting for him in his jeep with the three stars of a lieutenant general adorning the hood, wearing his famous ivory-handled revolvers and polished helmet liner. Patton, his face beaming like a harvest moon, rushed t
o Doolittle when he climbed down, threw his arms around him, and burst into tears, exclaiming, “Jimmy, I didn’t think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me!”20

  Not long afterward, Patton became the subject of a major story in the Reader’s Digest entitled “Old Man Battle,” and he wrote a poem called “God of Battles” that was published in the Woman’s Home Companion. On November 11, he had been overseas for a year and four days when his staff celebrated his birthday. He was fifty-eight years old. To his son, George, now repeating his plebe year at West Point, he wrote, “It is getting pretty cold here and we have no fires in the palace, so we dress and undress fast. I wish I could find out what we are going to do and when, but nobody knows a damned thing.” Then the other shoe dropped.

  The columnist Drew Pearson got wind of the slapping incident and, after confirming it with several sources, published a sensational story about the affair that blew like wildfire through the national media. Eisenhower was of course chagrined because the press intimated he was trying to sweep it under the rug. Congressmen and senators were inundated with angry letters calling for Patton’s dismissal.

  While a surprisingly large number of the letters were also supportive of Patton, he remained in what he considered the doghouse. “Regret trouble I am causing you,” he cabled Eisenhower. To his diary on November 25 he said, “Thanksgiving Day. I had nothing to be thankful for so I did not give thanks.”

  ON DECEMBER 7, PEARL HARBOR DAY, President Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, and Roosevelt’s top aide Harry Hopkins appeared at Patton’s headquarters in Sicily after their big Allied conferences in Cairo and Tehran. It was a cordial meeting during which Ike told Patton he was certain he would be ordered to England to get an army. McCloy told him the same. Harry Hopkins took Patton aside and said, “Don’t let anything that s.o.b. Pearson said bother you.” These were gratifying reassurances but still nothing was definite.

  Then, on January 18, Patton was informed by his orderly Sergeant William Meeks, who had heard it in a radio broadcast, that Eisenhower had announced Omar Bradley would lead the cross-Channel invasion. It came as a severe blow, even though Patton must have known that he was never seriously considered for the job. “I had thought that I might get this command,” he told his diary. “It is another disappointment, but so far in my life all the disappointments I had have worked out to my advantage.”

  Four days later, a cable arrived ordering Patton to England, where he would serve under Omar Bradley. “Well, I have been under worse people and will surely win,” he wrote Beatrice.

  * The B-25 “Mitchell” was named after the late General William “Billy” Mitchell who had lobbied so hard for improvements in American airpower that he was court-martialed for insubordination and suspended from the service. In 1925 he had predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor almost exactly as it occurred sixteen years later.

  † From 1943 onward the Doolittle Raiders held annual reunions traditionally drinking a toast in special silver cups with their names engraved on them. When a raider died, his cup was placed in the raider’s cabinet upside down. In 2014, the last two raiders drank their final toast, sharing a bottle of fine brandy bottled in 1896, the year of Doolittle’s birth.

  ‡ The pistols were rescued by Patton’s loyal aide-de-camp Richard Jenson, son of a childhood sweetheart of Patton’s back in California. In time Patton “came to cherish [Jenson] as deeply as his own son.”

  § This was a night action preliminary to the main attack in the morning.

  ǁ General Hugh J. Gaffey, a member of Patton’s staff.

  a In the course of a week the Germans evacuated 40,000 of their own soldiers, 70,000 Italians, 10,000 vehicles, and 200 guns plus tanks, ammunition, fuel, and other supplies.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “I SHALL RETURN”

  For about three weeks, MacArthur’s Philippine army battled the invading Japanese, but they were outmanned at every turn. Major General Jonathan “Skinny” Wainwright, a hard-drinking former West Point first captain and cavalryman with 28,000 ill-trained, ill-equipped Filipino troops and 3,000 U.S. regulars, was no match for the Japanese general Masaharu Homma’s landing force of 43,000 well-trained and well-equipped soldiers. But Wainwright’s defense was ferocious, including the last large-scale cavalry attack in modern warfare. “We lost more than a few of our first class fighting men,” Wainwright lamented, “and a number of fine horses—including my Little Boy, who took a bullet through the head.”1

  To spare historic Manila from destruction by bombing or attack, MacArthur declared it an “open city.” On Christmas Eve, 1941, when it became apparent that the Japanese could not be thrown back into the ocean and that they were preparing a giant pincers movement to trap MacArthur’s army, he invoked the dictates of War Plan Orange. The army thus withdrew into the mountainous jungle of the Bataan Peninsula, from which it was to fight until the U.S. Navy arrived with reinforcements and supplies.

  It took MacArthur’s army two weeks to fully invest Bataan, where War Plan Orange drew five defensive lines. He knew the terrain well, since he had surveyed it as a young first lieutenant. At each line the American and Filipino troops gave a magnificent account of themselves. Provisions—enough food, ammunition, equipment, and spare parts—for an army to defend Bataan for up to six months had been stored in Manila, and much was being hastily trucked into Bataan.

  Unaware of Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s “Europe First” policy, MacArthur was so sure that relief for him was on the way—with U.S. carriers ferrying over planes—that he ordered his engineers to build thirteen air strips in remote areas to house them. He wired General Marshall: IF THE WESTERN PACIFIC IS TO BE SAVED IT WILL HAVE TO BE SAVED HERE AND NOW. But by then General Marshall had come to accept that the Western Pacific could not be saved—at least not now—though he was loath to impart this bad news to MacArthur. MacArthur cabled his superior that he needed several dozen P-40 fighter planes, adding, almost pathetically, CAN I EXPECT ANYTHING ALONG THAT LINE? The simple fact was that, after Pearl Harbor, Japan still had its full complement of sixteen battleships and eleven aircraft carriers while the U.S. Pacific Fleet had no battleships and only three carriers. There would be no victorious “March Across the Pacific” by the American navy at this time.

  From the onset, the fighting on Bataan was desperate and costly. One Filipino battalion attacked the Japanese line for an entire day, pushing the enemy back and blowing a bridge, but returning with only 156 out of the 655 men who had started out. Battles such as this went on day after day; military historians have lauded the Bataan retrograde as one of the finest withdrawal movements in the history of warfare. “Stand and fight, slip back and dynamite,” MacArthur wrote afterward. “It was savage and bloody but it won time.”2

  By New Year’s Eve the Americans had retreated deep into the peninsula. They at last blew the huge swinging bridge over the impassable Pampanga River, stranding themselves. By then, of Wainwright’s original army corps of 28,000, only 18,000 remained. The soldiers were in rags and slowly starving. A total of 80,000 troops were on Bataan, and by early January provisions were down to one month’s supply. MacArthur put the soldiers on half-rations. An old-timer sergeant in an antiaircraft battery remarked, “They’ll eventually get us, but they’ll pay dearly for their efforts.”

  The Japanese, nevertheless, were dissatisfied. General Homma had used more than half of the fifty-day deadline Tokyo had given him to secure conquest of the Philippines. His frustration was palpable. On January 9, his main attack had failed to dislodge the defenders and he ordered a banzai charge.* From a standing sugarcane field a thousand Japanese came dashing straight into American barbed wire and pointblank 75mm guns at midnight. The attacks went on without success until dawn, when the Americans counted several hundred bodies in front of them. However, most of the Americans agreed that people who would do that were an enemy to be reckoned with.

  MacArthur’s tenacious defense of Bataan ea
rned him hero status in the United States, upset the Japanese timetable for military conquest of the southwestern Pacific, and became “a universal symbol of resistance” against the Japanese. It also proved to be an inspiration for the Allies in Australia and elsewhere who were being hard pressed by Japanese aggression. From George Marshall’s office in Washington came disingenuous cables saying that “every effort is being made to send air and troop replacements and reinforcements.” Marshall, of course, knew this was impossible.3

  On January 10, MacArthur received a note from General Homma that began, “You are well aware that you are doomed.” It went on with some admiring language about the defense MacArthur had put up so far (“Your prestige and honor have been upheld”), but continued with the usual threats of annihilation and offer of peace “to avoid needless bloodshed,” if only the Americans would surrender.

  The Japanese had deviously driven into the Allied lines almost the entire population of the nearby province of Zambales, knowing that MacArthur would feed them. Thus, on January 11, he was forced to cut his soldiers’ rations again, halving the half-rations to one-quarter rations of a thousand calories a day; within the month men who had weighed 170 or 200 pounds were down to 150 and scarcely a python, pangolin, or monkey remained uneaten in the steaming jungle. At night they were treated to scathing radio diatribes by the Japanese propagandist “Tokyo Rose,” who aggravated starving American and Filipino troops by quoting from the New York Times about huge stores of food and supplies the United States was sending to Russia.