The Generals

by Winston Groom

  When, on August 19, Bradley learned that Patton was pushing to the Seine he was “fit to be tied,” according to Major Alexander Stiller, a member of Patton’s staff. Stiller recorded a scene in which Bradley stormed into Patton’s headquarters to announce it had been decided at an Allied joint conference that Patton should not go to the Seine, but instead leave an escape route for the Germans in the Falaise Pocket.

  “General P told General B that since he was already to the Seine River, in fact had pissed in the river that morning, what would he want him to do—pull back?”

  Bradley had information that the Germans in the Falaise Pocket were very strong and “didn’t think General P would be able to contain them.” He ordered Patton to leave the Germans an escape route in the east.

  Patton then asked Bradley if he ever knew him to give up a piece of ground he had taken. Bradley said, “No—but this was different.”

  Patton responded that he “could and would hold it, if General B would agree.”

  After some more back and forth, Bradley finally relented and said that Patton could close the escape route if he would hold it.

  More than 50,000 Germans were trapped in the pocket and eventually were either killed and wounded or captured along with an enormous amount of heavy equipment and weaponry. It is estimated that 10,000 to 15,000 Germans died. Eisenhower, walking over the battleground two days later, described it as “one of the greatest killing fields” of the war. “It was literally possible,” Ike said, “to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead flesh.”4

  The Battle of the Falaise Pocket broke the back of German resistance in Normandy and opened the way for the liberation of Paris. Patton’s lightning-like thrusts thrilled readers of U.S. newspapers and listeners of American news broadcasts; the Washington Star opined that his generalship in the campaign “vindicate[ed] a man who may be short on diplomacy but whose qualities as a fighting officer are beyond dispute.”5

  Of his part in the Falaise operation Patton told Beatrice, “I could have had it a week ago but modesty via destiny made me stop.”

  NOW THE ARMY WAS TAKING so much ground that Patton was forced to fly in an army Piper Cub to visit his foremost units. “I don’t like it,” he said. “I feel like a clay pigeon.” On August 17 he took time to write to George Marshall in Washington, summarizing his exploits thus far as well as reassuring him that he had made no statements or newspaper interviews and would continue that policy in the future. He closed by thanking the chief of staff for his “many acts of forbearance.”

  On August 19, Patton spent the day with the French general Koechlin-Schwartz, an old friend from World War I days, who remarked on Patton’s tactics of allowing his armored forces to roam around without infantry support. “Had I taught twenty-five years ago what you are doing,” the Frenchman said, “I should have been put in a madhouse, but when I was told that an armored division was headed for Brest, I knew it was you.”

  The next day a regimental combat team of Patton’s 79th Division crossed the Seine—the first crossing by an Allied force. The liberation of Paris had begun. Third Army had been operational in France for three weeks and had inflicted 108,000 casualties on the Germans—killed, wounded, and missing. They themselves suffered 15,029.

  At every town and village they passed, Patton’s army was cheered. The locals tossed flowers and apples and offered wine. “It will be pretty grim after the war,” he wrote Beatrice, “driving one’s self, and not being cheered. I am convinced that the best end for an officer is the last bullet of the war.”

  The next day he reported to his dairy, “We have, at this time, the greatest chance to win the war ever presented … if they will let me move on.” Patton wanted to jump ahead with three armored divisions and six infantry divisions into eastern France before the Germans could reorganize themselves. He believed they could be in Germany in ten days.

  With Paris saved, Patton continued to pressure Bradley for pushing quickly into Germany. But Montgomery was having difficulty overcoming stubborn German resistance to the north and kept complaining to Eisenhower that the British needed more time. Patton’s Third Army was advancing so quickly it was running out of its supply line, which remained in large part back on the beaches of Normandy.

  When he returned to his mobile headquarters the day after Paris fell, Patton informed his diary, “I found that a flock of Red Cross doughnut girls had descended on us.” It was no ordinary flock, however, for among its number was none other than the beautiful and talented Jean Gordon, the niece Patton had had an affair with in Hawaii before the war. He had been alerted to her presence in France by a letter from Beatrice, which has not survived, so Mrs. Patton’s express warning to her husband will never be known. However, Patton had replied, “The first I knew about Jean’s being here was in your letter. We are in the middle of a battle,” he added, “so I don’t see people. So don’t worry.”6

  By then, Patton’s army was ranging all over central-western France, fighting battles and gobbling up terrain sometimes at seventy miles a day. They held a front of nearly three hundred miles, from Brest at the far tip of the Brittany peninsula to Verdun on the Meuse east of Paris—and all the old, bitter battlefields of World War I in between. As a measure of the hard combat encountered that week, the Third Army’s total casualties since beginning operations in France rose to 24,860, including nearly 3,000 men killed, while inflicting approximately 152,000 German casualties during the same time period, including 19,000 killed.

  A radio announcer in the United States gave this description of Patton: “A fiction writer couldn’t create him. History itself hasn’t matched him. He’s colorful, fabulous. He’s dynamite. On a battlefield, he’s a warring, glaring comet.”7

  Patton continued to agitate for cracking Hitler’s Siegfried Line (the German defensive position roughly along the Franco-German border) and pressing quickly into Germany. On August 30 Patton went to Eisenhower’s headquarters to present his case. “I had to beg like a beggar,” he complained, “for permission to keep on the line of the Meuse.” But Ike turned down his request to push on out in front of the British and First Army. Patton told his diary that night that Eisenhower’s staff was letting Montgomery “overpersuade” Ike, “a terrible mistake.”

  DURING THIS PERIOD, the Third Army became notorious for “scrounging,” or scavenging, particularly for gasoline, of which it was severely short. Officers and men of Patton’s army were alleged to sew on the patches and other identifying insignia of other units in order to purloin caches of fuel from their dumps, or even hijack tanker trucks making deliveries. In one instance, according to Patton, “a colored truck company [stole] some for me by careful accident” and, fortuitously, his army captured more than a million gallons at a German fuel dump. “It is poor gas but runs a hot engine,” he said, meaning that higher-octane American gas would have to be used to start the tank. “If they would give me enough gas,” he continued, “I could go anywhere I want.”

  Patton’s chief of staff wrote in his journal that the feeling around headquarters was that the lack of gasoline was a plot by Eisenhower and his staff to stop Patton’s Third Army from continuing to advance. Worse, some thought that it was in order to placate the British, who wanted in on the glory but remained stuck against stiff German resistance in the Pas-de-Calais and Antwerp and were still trying to ferret out the launching sites for the V-1 and V-2 rockets that were terrorizing and destroying London.8

  Still, the shortages prevailed, prompting Patton to tell Eisenhower that if he just had enough gas he could “rupture that goddamn Siegfried Line. I will stake my reputation on it.” When Ike laughingly deprecated the value of Patton’s reputation, Patton reminded him, “That reputation is pretty good now.” Nevertheless, he got no gas and Eisenhower told him to go on the defensive at the Moselle until Montgomery and the British could catch up.

  A furious Patton did as ordered, but soon he picked a fight with the Germans in the fortified city of Metz on t
he Moselle, which had been such a disagreeable bone in the Allies’ throat during World War I and, according to Patton, had last fallen to an outside power when Attila the Hun sacked it in A.D. 451.§ As Patton’s army approached Metz it was nearly undefended, but with the capture of Nancy the Germans decided to make a stand. Metz was a tough nut to crack, ringed by no fewer than thirty-three separate forts and protected by moats, stone walls, and difficult terrain features.

  Patton was first told that Metz could be taken by a battalion, but that proved to be an error. A second battalion was thrown in, then a third, and so forth until elements of an entire corps were engaged at a steep price. Third Army’s casualty report for the ten days since it had advanced from the Meuse to the Moselle rose to 26,402. German casualties increased to 186,000, including 26,000 dead and 850 tanks destroyed or captured.

  During that time, Patton visited the grisly boneyard of Verdun, where the remains of more than 100,000 unknown soldiers are interred, and adjacent Fort Douaumont, which he pointed out “epitomizes the folly of defensive warfare.”

  Meanwhile, Patton held a press conference for Third Army war correspondents in which he deliberately blued the air with profanity hoping to make himself “unquotable.” Referring to the town of Pannes, which he had recently visited, he remarked that it was where he was shot during the Meuse-Argonne campaign of 1918. “I ought to remember it,” he said. “I was shot in the ass there.” Asked to what he attributed his successful advances Patton responded that his army always arrived at the enemy’s defensive line “three days before the Germans thought we would.”

  Answering a question about the lack of gasoline, Patton told the reporters he could have crossed the Moselle River four days earlier before the Germans got their defenses organized, but added that it didn’t make much difference. “I never cared where I killed the bastards,” he said.

  As to future operations, he told the startled newsmen that he intended to go through the Siegfried Line “like shit through a goose.”9

  He continued to put himself in danger with constant visits to the front and he ordered every section of his staff to send someone there each week in order to avoid the scorn of troops who perceived so-called château generals—an allusion to the British high command of World War I who rarely, if ever, visited the front lines and knew little about what their men were going through.

  ON SEPTEMBER 20, Patton decided to give up capturing Metz, acknowledging it wasn’t worth the price in dead and wounded. Then, three days later, he got one of the harshest shocks of his career—Eisenhower was going to take away Patton’s XV Corps and one of his armored divisions as well and order him back on defense along the Moselle. Patton was nearly apoplectic but gritted his teeth. After consulting with his remaining corps commanders, he came up with his “rock soup” plan. This involved setting up a defensive front as well as a series of points along the front where he would attack in hopes of breaking through.

  The rock soup plan was a Patton invention based on a Depression-era scam that worked roughly as follows. A hobo with a tin can containing several polished stones goes to the back door of a residence and asks the lady of the house if she will give him some water so he can make “rock soup.” She complies, but inquires as to the recipe for rock soup. The hobo then asks if she might give him a carrot or two and a potato, then proceeds to light a fire and boil the soup, which he describes as delicious. When she comes back out to see about the soup, the hobo tells her all that is needed is a piece of meat to put in the soup, and so on, until the hobo has acquired from her all the ingredients he needs for a proper soup.

  Patton’s version of the rock soup plan was to start a battle, and then tell headquarters it looked like a big breakthrough if only he could have reinforcements and supplies. He did just that, and as the battle expanded Patton continued to go back to headquarters with tempting promises and lengthy lists of requests—air strikes, gasoline, ammunition, more men, more guns, and so on. Patton’s idea was based in the knowledge that superior officers are naturally reluctant to deny an engaged commander the resources he needs to win a battle.

  The Third Army casualty report for the week of September 24 listed 45,130 U.S. troops killed, wounded, or missing, with 4,541 of these dead. German casualties rose to 216,100, with 30,900 killed and 1,200 tanks captured or destroyed. An important difference was that Third Army received 43,566 replacements that week and the German army received none for it was fighting for its life in the east against the Soviets.

  Patton interpreted the order to go on the defensive as enabling him to attack across the Moselle and establish secure “defensive” bridgeheads on the other side. These were costly operations that spent lives, but Patton was determined that when the defensive directive was rescinded he would be able to cross the river quickly and in force to get at the enemy at the Siegfried Line.

  In the meantime, Patton visited some more of his old haunts from the First World War. He went to Gondrecourt on a mission to find General Marshall’s housekeeper but was told the family had moved out of the battle area. He went to Chaumont, which had been AEF headquarters in 1918 when he was running the staff for General Pershing. From there, Patton’s party went to Bourg, where his tank brigade headquarters was located.

  Patton’s opinion of Lorraine, the province where they fought then, as now, was highly disrespectful. It and its neighboring province Alsace had been seized and taken by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War that ended in 1871. The French had since conducted an almost sacred crusade to have the provinces returned to France.

  Now that such a prospect was at hand, however, Patton wrote facetiously to George Marshall in Washington that he hoped, at the conclusion of the war, Alsace-Lorraine would be deeded permanently to the Germans, as all it did there was rain, fog, flood, and freeze, and the most valuable thing any of it citizens owned was the manure piles they kept outside their front doors.

  Moving on, Patton was inspecting frontline troops on September 28 when to avoid going over a high mountain in mud on foot he chose to drive down a road that was under direct enemy observation. “They must have practiced on the road,” Patton said, because no sooner had they turned down it than the Germans opened up with a salvo of four 150mm shells from their heavy artillery. The first salvo missed widely, the second was “near enough to be uncomfortable,” the third threw rocks and mud all over them, and in the fourth a 150mm shell landed two feet from the left running board. Luckily it was a dud, or General Patton’s story would have ended there.

  Unfazed, Patton decided that during the first week in October he would attack Fort Driant, an early twentieth-century French fortification that was part of the Metz defenses five miles south of the city. He had abandoned one attempt at Metz, but now it became a necessity. Fort Driant was heavily fortified by the Germans and commanded the valley of the Moselle, through which the Third Army would have to pass when the “defensive” order was rescinded. Army Air Force Thunderbolts and other fighter-bombers made the initial attack, but as most of the fort was underground little damage was done. An infantry assault that followed was withdrawn after heavy casualties in hand-to-hand fighting.

  In the week to come, several more assaults were made; each was repulsed with many Americans killed or wounded. Disgusted, Patton decided to abandon the attack on Fort Driant since the ammunition supply had also become nearly exhausted and the casualties too high. Instead he would leave a force to contain the fort and bypass it. American casualties for the week rose to 52,698, with 5,131 of these killed.

  Patton was appalled that they were now in a vicious war of attrition. He blamed Supreme Headquarters for not supplying his army so that it could go on a mobile offensive, which he insisted would produce far fewer casualties than the present static condition of the battle. Instead, Ike invited Patton to his headquarters in Liège, Belgium, to have lunch with King George VI of England.

  When he returned to his headquarters at Nancy, Patton was nearly killed by a huge German railroad gun that emer
ged from a tunnel and began lobbing 11-inch shells that blew out all the windows in his residence and demolished the house across the street. When Patton heard someone “hollering in French,” he dressed and went out to help rescue a husband and wife trapped in debris.

  ON NOVEMBER 2 THERE WAS GOOD NEWS. Bradley told Patton that the British and the First Army would be ready for the next attack November 10—which was to take the Siegfried Line some sixty miles to the east. He asked when Patton could go and was told, “Twenty-four hours from when you say go.” Afterward he told his diary, “I feel 10 years younger.”

  The next day, he hosted Marlene Dietrich and her acting troupe for lunch, followed by a show of “Very low comedy, almost an insult to human intelligence.”10

  On November 7, Patton wrote Beatrice, “We jump off in the morning with ten divisions. The weather is so vile we will get no air support.” (He’d been promised three hundred bombers to destroy the forts at Metz.) “I know the Lord will help us again,” he told his diary. “Either He will give us good weather or the bad weather will hurt the Germans more than it does us.” When the artillery barrage opened at 5:15 next morning, Patton described the sensation as “like the slamming of doors in an empty house—very many doors all slamming at once. All the eastern sky glowed and trembled with the flashes of the guns.”11

  At dawn, the skies began to clear and fighter-bombers arrived to take out enemy command posts. The attack rolled forward across the Moselle, which residents told Patton was swollen higher from the rain than at any time in its history (records show it had last been that high in 1919).

  Nearly all the first day’s objectives were taken, but the flooded countryside made for difficult going; all but one of the bridges they had built over the Moselle and Seille rivers had been either swept away by rushing water or blown up by the Germans. Roads were a sea of stranded trucks tanks, jeeps, ambulances, and other equipment.