PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY

by Alan Axelrod

  In a run characterized by speed and coordination and employing the advance-attack-advance-and-attack-again formula, Patton consummated the transformation of Bradley’s modestly conventional Operation Cobra into a spectacular breakout. Recognizing this, Eisenhower wasted no time in releasing Patton’s name to the press, and, immediately, the pages of every paper in the nation were crowded with accounts of how, in just two weeks, Patton had led a massive advance from the Cotentin peninsula, through Normandy, pursuing and encircling thousands of Germans while liberating a huge expanse of France, from Brest in the west to some 250 miles eastward. To Beatrice, Patton wrote on August 16: “I supposed you had guessed it. We took Brittany, Nantes, Angers, LeMans, and Alencon and several other places still secret.” He did complain, however, that what he ungrammatically called “the fear of they” had “stopped us on what was the best run yet ... I feel that if [I were] only unaided I could win this war.”2

  As Patton pushed east, the Seventh U.S. Army, now commanded by Alexander Patch, together with Free French units invaded the Riviera in the south of France on August 15. On August 16, Hitler at last gave his permission for German withdrawal from the Argentan-Falaise pocket, just as the Canadians finally reached Falaise. Pursuant to Montgomery’s request, Bradley ordered Patton to send troops north, beyond Argentan, and link up with the Canadians, thereby pinching off the pocket. Patton responded quickly, ordering Hugh Gaffey to lead an attack on August 17. However, Leonard Gerow, commanding V Corps, objected to Gaffey’s plan and delayed the attack until the eighteenth, once again giving the Germans another precious day to make good their withdrawal. The pocket was not closed off until August 21. Although some 50,000 Germans became casualties, more than 100,000 exploited the dithering among Allied field commanders and withdrew intact. There would be no decisive double envelopment of the enemy, no second Cannae.

  Patton did not waste time mourning lost opportunities. Instead, he sent Haislip from Dreux to the Seine. His intention was for Haislip to cross the river, then proceed downstream to keep the Germans from crossing. If their retreat had not been intercepted at Falaise-Argentan, it could be blocked at the Seine. But, yet again, higher command intervened, allowing Patton to send just one of Haislip’s two divisions across the Seine on August 19 while the other had to drive downstream along the comparative safety of the near bank. This made Patton’s drive less risky but also far less effective in its ability to cut off the German retreat. The Allied victory at Normandy was thereby diluted. Patton took risks not for the sake of risk, but to expose his forces to the enemy as decisively and as briefly as possible. As he saw it, the enemy you fail to kill or capture now, you will have to fight later and closer to his homeland, for which he will fight all the more fiercely.

  In a journalistic haste to publicize Patton, the news media erroneously credited the liberation of Paris to him and his Third Army. In truth, the First U.S. Army under Hodges, together with an American infantry division and a French armored division (under Jacques Leclerc), liberated the City of Light on August 25. Patton, during this time, gave Haislip’s XV Corps to First Army and, with Walker and Eddy, crossed the Seine southeast of Paris at Melun and Fontainebeau, then crossed the Yonne River at Montereau and Sens. The sheer speed of this advance allowed Patton to secure the key bridges before the Germans could blow them. Patton turned over the bridges at Mantes and Melun to First Army, which was driving north into Belgium. With Third Army, Patton then resumed his eastward drive, taking in quick succession Troyes, Reims, and Chalons. He set his sights on crossing the Moselle River between the old fortress towns of Nancy and Metz, which would put Third Army within just 100 miles of the Rhine. Patton desperately wanted to be the first Allied commander to cross that fabled river.

  If the Germans could not stop Patton, Allied logistics could—and did. On the Meuse, at the end of August, Third Army outran its gasoline. Germany lay just beyond reach, its vaunted Siegfried Line, the country’s main western defensive wall, was virtually unmanned. Given 400,000 gallons of gasoline, Patton told Bradley, he could be in Germany within two days. “It is terrible to halt,” he wrote in his diary on August 30, “even on the Meuse. We should cross the Rhine in the vicinity of Worms, and the faster we do it, the less lives and munitions it will take. No one realizes the terrible value of the ‘unforgiving minute’ except me.”3 Patton suspected that Bradley, Montgomery, and others envied his show-stealing advance and that they were deliberately withholding gasoline from him. It is true that Eisenhower had decided to divert a significant portion of precious fuel and supplies to Montgomery, who was intent on neutralizing the launch sites from which V—1 buzz bombs and V—2 rockets were being sent to terrorize London and other English cities. Stopping the slaughter of civilians seemed to the supreme Allied commander an important priority, but Patton was not so sure. He argued that, with sufficient gas, he could deliver a decapitating blow to Germany that much faster.

  This dispute over priorities aside, the overriding fact was that Allied logistics had not kept pace with the combat forces. Huge quantities of gasoline (and other supplies) were being stockpiled on the coast, but could not be transported inland fast enough or in sufficient quantity. Eventually even the suspicious Patton realized that the problem was less a matter of clashing egos than it was a failure of logistics.

  Perhaps Patton could have reconciled himself to this. However, on September 1, he recorded in his diary: “At 0800 we heard on the radio that Ike said Monty [Montgomery] was the greatest living soldier and is now [promoted to] Field Marshal. I then flew up to the Command Post and worked on administrative papers for the rest of the day.”4

  Patton had expanded the modest Operation Cobra into an advance that encompassed the entire French theater. In only a month, he had led the Third Army in the liberation of most of France north of the Loire and had brought that army now within spitting distance of Germany itself. And now Montgomery was being hailed as the greatest living soldier?

  Patton, who had achieved so much, found the exhilaration slipping away from him, the elation short-lived. It was not just the personal pain of Montgomery’s elevation over him, but the very real loss of momentum in a drive, his drive, that had brought ultimate victory within the Allies’ grasp. Everything was changing for the worse. The beautiful, clear, dry weather of summer—ideal attacker’s weather—gave way to unseasonably early rains, ice storms, and snow in the fall of 1944. The pause forced on Patton by a shortage of supplies and what he saw as Ike’s misplaced sense of priorities, including his maddening adulation of Montgomery, had given the Germans time to man their last-ditch defenses guarding the “West Wall” of the homeland.

  Patton was resupplied during the second week in September, and he renewed his drive, but with the grim knowledge that the going would now be much harder and much slower. Nancy fell to him on September 15, and Metz, a fortress both formidable and venerable, was largely neutralized by the middle of November, although the last fort of this fortress complex did not surrender until days before Christmas.

  These gains were important, but it was Hodges’s First Army, not Patton’s Third, that crossed into Germany first, on September 12. Now everyone was eager to breach the Rhine, which was strategically important, to be sure, but even more important psychologically. The Rhine was mythic country for the Germans, the sacred river of the heartland, and to cross it would surely signify to them the beginning of the end. Field Marshal Montgomery came up with Operation Market-Garden, a bold but poorly conceived plan to cross the lower Rhine through Holland. Although the American units involved in the operation attained their objectives, the British units found themselves in an impossible situation and were cut to shreds. Operation Market-Garden ended in an Allied retreat.

  Patton was hardly pleased by the failure of Market-Garden, even though it was his rival’s brainchild. Third Army was not bogged down—it continued to advance—but it moved slowly, painfully, and at significant cost in blood. By the end of September, the flow of supplies declined again,
and Patton was forced to accept what higher command called the “October pause.” The idea was to conserve ammunition and other supplies until Montgomery could open the port of Antwerp. There was logic to this. The port of Antwerp would unload supplies much closer to the advancing Allied armies than the ports along the channel. But, as Patton saw it, his supplies were once again being diverted to serve Montgomery’s needs. With ammo strictly rationed, Patton was forced to do what he most hated: assume the defensive.

  Because he was depressed, Patton assumed that the same low feeling would probably steal over his troops, who, like him, were used to being on the attack. To prevent this, he toured throughout his area, making encouraging speeches and talking personally with small groups of soldiers. He stressed the importance of maintaining morale, which meant getting good food, as many hot meals as possible, and getting mail from home in a timely manner. Patton was always especially concerned to provide daily changes of socks, because he knew that dry socks were the only way to prevent trenchfoot, an infection as disabling as any wound. The soldier, he often said, was the army, and Patton never let his frustration over dealing with higher command distract him from looking after his men. When a reporter asked him if he still thought “the corporal is the most important man in the army,” Patton replied: “The private first class.”5

  It was early November before Bradley gave Patton authorization to resume attacking. But unremitting rain, flood, and mud slowed progress to a grim crawl, even as Jacob Devers led elements of the 6 th Army Group to positions along the Rhine, from which Patton and the Third were still distant. Between November 8 and December 15, Third Army had advanced no more than 40 miles, inches compared with the summer sweep through France, but they were inches paid for in blood. Grisly and dispiriting as this progress had been, Patton now looked forward to his major attack through the Siegfried Line, thence to the Rhine, and on to attack and take the great city of Frankfurt. He made preparations to move his headquarters east, but instead of feeling exhilarated, as he always did when contemplating a great operation, Patton found himself worried. It was that sixth sense of his. Toward the end of November, he noted in his diary that “First Army is making a terrible mistake in leaving the VIII Corps [under Troy Middleton] static” on the western border of Luxembourg, southeast of a town called Bastogne, “as it is highly probable that the Germans are building up east of them.”6

  Everyone in Allied command had the same maps, but no one except Patton seems to have sensed danger near Bastogne. Bradley’s idea was to retain this area as what had been called in World War I a “quiet sector,” a place for green units to be introduced “gently” into combat and for war-weary units to get some rest. As for the Germans, their army, to all appearances, was pretty well finished. At least, this is how Patton’s fellow generals saw the situation. The enemy, however, saw things very differently, and Patton, who had just slogged through some of the hardest fighting of the war, who had seen and felt the level of resistance the “beaten” German army could still muster, was uncannily capable of seeing the situation through enemy eyes.

  CHAPTER 12

  90 Degrees to the North

  BY DECEMBER 1944, THE ALLIED ARMIES WERE firmly in the grip of what Ike Eisenhower called “victory fever,” an affliction Eisenhower knew to be as intoxicating as it was lethal. Patton, however, proved to be immune. He was keenly aware that you are not beaten until you admit de-feat—advice he repeatedly gave to his own officers—and that this was as true for the enemy as it was for his own men. On December 16, Hitler launched Operation Autumn Fog, an all-out offensive against Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, First U.S. Army, covering the Ardennes in Luxembourg, near the town of Bastogne. The attackers on that foggy morning surely did not fight like men who believed themselves beaten.

  Perhaps it was the effects of victory fever that caused Bradley and others to interpret the assault as a mere “spoiling attack,” the military phrase for a “demonstration” or harassment of little consequence. After all, how could the Germans have any real punch left in them? In contrast to Patton, who always positioned his headquarters as far forward as possible, Bradley, at this stage of the war, maintained his headquarters in Luxembourg City, rather far from First Army’s main position. He therefore could not see for himself evidence of the German buildup. Moreover, Bradley chose not to inspect the VIII Corps situation personally, and he even decided it was safe to travel to Versailles, where he was scheduled to discuss plans with Eisenhower. The miserable weather during this period made flying impossible, so Bradley had to be driven. It was evening by the time he reached Versailles, and, here, far from the Ardennes, he finally received word of a major German offensive, which had forced a massive bulge into the VIII Corps sector. Bradley picked up the phone and ordered Patton to send an armored division to Middleton’s aid. Having resumed the eastbound offensive in his own sector, some 40 miles south of Bastogne, Patton protested that parting with a entire division now would weaken his effort. Bradley’s insistence, however, clicked with Patton’s own intuition of the situation around Middleton’s corps at Bastogne, and he had the division moving within the hour.

  The next day, December 17, Patton did not wait for further orders from Bradley, but prepared a massive and rapid reinforcement of the Ardennes. He summoned John Millikin, in command of III Corps, and told him that he would probably be called on to move north to lead a counterattack against the German offensive. He advised Millikin to prepare his corps and to make himself familiar with the ground.

  Patton was often accused of being impulsive. In terms of his emotional makeup, the accusation was justified, but, where his profession was concerned, he was a careful planner who believed in advance preparation. Once an operation was under way, Patton focused on action, typically an unremitting combination of advance and attack. However, he always took care to distinguish between haste and speed. For him, haste characterized spontaneous or at least inadequately planned operations. Thorough preparation made haste unnecessary and enabled speed, an operation carried out swiftly as well as efficiently. A big part of conducting operations at high speed was preparing for them in advance. Patton was proactive rather than reactive and wanted, wherever possible, to choose the time and place for battle instead of letting the enemy dictate these terms. Good preparation helped to ensure that unfolding events would not steal the march on the commander’s will and initiative. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and the others responsible for the success of the first Gulf War put this Patton principle into action in 1990—1991. The lightning war that was Operation Desert Storm had been preceded by the meticulous preparation of Operation Desert Shield.

  When Bradley returned from Versailles to his Luxembourg headquarters on the morning of December 18, he summoned Patton, together with his top staff. The men of Lucky Forward were on their way within 10 minutes of Bradley’s call. When they arrived, Bradley took them to a map and showed them the bulge. It was now clear to him that the Germans intended to break through to the Meuse River and, ultimately, to advance against Antwerp, the recently hard-won port through which much of the Allied supplies and troops were now flowing.

  This was a major crisis, and it quickly cured every case of Allied victory fever. Bradley asked Patton what he could send and when. Without hesitation, Patton replied that he could send three divisions immediately, one starting off at midnight, the next at first light, and the third within 24 hours, all led by Millikin. Additionally, if Jacob Devers, who was south of Patton’s position, could cover XII Corps, Patton could send that entire corps, under Manton Eddy, as well. It was a remarkable promise to make. What it meant was that a very large portion of Third Army, which was heading steadily eastward, was to be turned on a dime, 90 degrees to the north, and marched at full speed into desperate battle. Executing such a complex turn, with about 250,000 men, their vehicles, and equipment, in winter, during ice and snow storms, and at very high speed, wagered the highest possible stakes. Any massive object, whether it is an 18-wheeler semi or a 250,000-man ar
my, has momentum and inertia. It resists sudden stops, starts, and changes in direction. Bradley was skeptical, but he needed what Patton was offering, and he responded by asking Patton to meet him at Verdun on the nineteenth for an 11:00 A.M. conference with Eisenhower.

  After preparing himself in conference with his key staff as well as the principal field commanders, Millikin and Eddy, at 7:00 A.M., Patton conferred with his full staff at 8:00 A.M., then set off for Verdun. Eisenhower, whom Patton had earlier accused of lacking “the stuff,” rose brilliantly to the occasion. After his intelligence officer opened the meeting by painting the Ardennes situation in the darkest possible terms, Ike rose and cleared the air. “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity to us and not of disaster,” he declared. “There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.” This prompted Patton to break out with “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the___go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ‘em off and chew ‘em up.” In his account, Eisenhower chastely substituted one long, one short, and one long blank for Patton’s favorite expletive: sons of bitches. The remark broke the tension, and everyone present grinned, but, just so there would not be any misunderstanding, Eisenhower countered that the enemy “would never be allowed to cross the Meuse.”1

  Ike turned to Patton and “said he wanted me to get to Luxembourg and take command of the battle and make a strong counterattack with at least six divisions. The fact that three of these divisions exist only on paper did not enter his head.” By this time, the three divisions in the Ardennes had been decimated by the German attack. Eisenhower continued, asking Devers how much of the defensive line he could take over while XII Corps was diverted to the north. “Devers made a long speech on strictly selfish grounds and said nothing,” Patton complained to his diary, adding that “Bradley said little.” Finally, Ike turned back to Patton: “When can you attack?” On December 22, he promised, with three divisions: the 4th Armored, the 26th, and the 80th.2