PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY

by Alan Axelrod

  “Don’t be fatuous, George,” an irritated Eisenhower responded. “If you try to go that early, you won’t have all three divisions ready and you’ll go piecemeal. You will start on the twenty-second and I want your initial blow to be a strong one! I’d even settle for the twenty-third if it takes that long to get three full divisions.”3

  But Patton insisted that he could make an effective attack on the twenty-second. Some of the British officers present at the conference laughed. Others nervously shuffled their feet and, realizing Patton was dead serious, straightened in their chairs.

  More than any other single point in his career, this was Patton’s defining moment. He proposed to turn almost an entire army 90 degrees to the north, force-march it through ice and snow 40 miles or more, then, without rest, commit it to a counterattack against an enemy tasting victory for the first time in many months.

  Patton appreciated Eisenhower’s fear that an attack by three divisions “was not strong enough,” but “I insisted that I could beat the Germans with three divisions, and if I waited [to get more divisions into the effort], I would lose surprise.”4 It was part and parcel of Patton’s firmest conviction that war was about opportunity, not perfection.

  Despite his misgivings, Eisenhower approved Patton’s proposal, and the time of the attack, by III Corps, was fixed at 0400, December 22. “On the twenty-first, I received quite a few telephone calls from various higher echelons, expressing solicitude as to my ability to attack successfully with only three divisions. I maintained my contention that it is better to attack with a small force at once, and attain surprise, than it is to wait and lose it.”5

  Patton strode to the map and fixed his eyes on Bradley. “Brad, the Kraut’s stuck his head in a meatgrinder.” Thrusting his fist into the map, he ground it into the bulge. “And this time I’ve got hold of the handle.” 6 This was a metaphor for his proposed strategy. He wanted to allow the Germans to drive another 40 or 50 miles into the bulge, then he would aim his attack well to the northeast with the objective of pinching off the entrance to the bulge, which was also the avenue of retreat. He would then attack the trapped Germans mainly from the rear. Like Patton’s proposal during Operation Cobra to effect a deep envelopment in order to bag every German north of the Loire, he wanted now to trap and destroy as much of the German army as possible in the Ardennes. Like his earlier proposal, however, this one was rejected as well. Bradley was less concerned about killing large numbers of the enemy than he was about preventing those already in the bulge from overrunning Bastogne, which the 101st Airborne Division and other U.S. units were holding on to so desperately. Bradley understood that the town commanded a major road junction. Whoever held it had access to the points farther west. Therefore, Bradley directed Patton’s proposed counterattack squarely on Bastogne.

  Even Patton seemed to appreciate that, under the circumstances, this more conservative approach made some sense. Instead of using all his resources against the base of the bulge, Patton ordered Millikin, with three divisions, to relieve the German siege. He would, however, reserve Eddy’s divisions, when they arrived, for use farther east, to seize the handle of the meatgrinder.

  With the priority of the attacks having been settled, Patton threw himself into the complex task of managing the movement of more and more men into the Ardennes while Millikin, as Patton had promised, made his attack early on the morning of December 22. Patton choreographed the entire operation via telephone, the receiver to his ear all day.

  Throughout the fall and winter of 1944, the weather in northern Europe was the worst in 20 years, and some of the most severe conditions prevailed during Millikin’s attack. He had a front 20 miles wide through which he advanced and fought in heavy snow and frigid temperatures. If the weather made going on the ground difficult, it rendered support from the air impossible, which seriously threatened the American counteroffensive. At Bastogne, the surrounded 101st Airborne continued grimly to hold out. On the morning of December 22, a party of two German officers and two noncommissioned officers, under a white flag, approached with a surrender ultimatum. The message was brought to the acting division commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe. Surrounded and pounded as the 101st was, McAuliffe nevertheless initially assumed that the Germans were coming to surrender to him. When he was told that, on the contrary, they were demanding that the 101st surrender, McAuliffe laughed and said: “Us surrender? Aw, nuts!” The singular American expletive “Nuts!” was conveyed to the Germans as McAulliffe’s reply to their surrender demand.

  The “Nuts!” story quickly spread throughout Third Army and into enduring legend, but Patton knew that it would take more than a gesture of defiance, no matter how magnificently laconic, to save Bastogne. He was becoming frustrated at having to fight the Germans and the weather too. Without air support, a breakthrough was nearly impossible. Back in November, during another siege of bad weather, a frustrated Patton phoned the Third Army chaplain, Monsignor (Colonel) James H. O’Neill, and asked him if he had “a good prayer for weather.” Patton was hardly a conventionally pious man, but he took religion seriously and believed he had a very personal relationship with God, to whom he often prayed. Patton believed God was on his side. A weather prayer would serve simply to remind Him of that fact. Discovering that no standard weather prayer existed, Chaplain O’Neill wrote one himself in the space of an hour:

  Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.

  Patton had liked it and saved it, and he now ordered it printed on 250,000 wallet-size cards, which were distributed to the soldiers of the Third Army. On the reverse side of each card was a Christmas greeting, which O’Neill had composed on Patton’s behalf:

  To each officer and soldier in the Third United States Army, I wish a Merry Christmas. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We march in our might to complete victory. May God’s blessing rest upon each of you on this Christmas Day.

  G. S. Patton, Jr. Lieutenant General Commanding, Third United States Army

  As Patton explained to O’Neill, he was a strong believer in prayer. There are three ways that men get what they want; by planning, by working, and by praying. Any great military operation takes careful planning or thinking. Then you must have well-trained troops to carry it out: that’s working. But between the plan and the operation there is always an unknown.

  That unknown spells defeat or victory, success or failure. It is the reaction of the actors to the ordeal when it actually comes. Some people call that getting the breaks; I call it God.

  God has His part, or margin in everything. That’s where prayer comes in.7

  On December 23, the weather broke sufficiently to allow, at long last, massive Allied air strikes, as Millikin closed in around Bastogne. “A clear cold Christmas,” Patton wrote in his diary, “lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing Whose birthday it is.” Then, on December 26, Patton received a call from Hugh Gaffey, commanding one of Millikin’s divisions. Gaffey reported that he could break through to Bas-togne and make contact with the 101st by a rapid advance. It was, of course, risky. “I told him to try it,” Patton recorded in his diary. “At 1845 they made contact, and Bastogne was liberated. It was a daring thing and well done. Of course they may be cut off, but I doubt it. . . . The speed of our movements is amazing, even to me, and must be a constant source of surprise to the Germans.”8

  Patton was proud of Gaffey, proud of the Third Army, and proud, too, of Chaplain O’Neill. When the weather broke, Patton exclaimed, “Hot dog! I guess I’ll have another 100,000 of those prayers printed.” He then summoned O’Neill, told him he was “the most popu
lar man in this headquarters. You sure stand in good with the Lord and soldiers.” As O’Neill recalled, Patton then “cracked me on the side of my steel helmet with his riding crop. That was his way of saying, ‘Well done.’”9 Patton also decorated O’Neill with the Bronze Star, making him the only U.S. Army chaplain to receive the honor for writing a prayer. It was a gesture that would not be out of place in today’s army, in which religious faith plays an increasingly visible role.

  Meanwhile, the fighting continued, as the Germans simultaneously persisted in menacing Bastogne while fiercely resisting attempts at encirclement, but by December 29, Patton was confident enough to write to Beatrice: “The relief of Bastogne is the most brilliant operation we have thus far performed and is in my opinion the outstanding achievement of this war. Now the enemy must dance to our tune, not we to his.”10

  As successful as the counteroffensive had been, Patton wanted more. He wanted to keep attacking to prevent the Germans from withdrawing from the bulge. Once again, he found himself up against what he deemed the excessive conservatism, even the timidity, of both Bradley and Eisenhower, who were allowing too many of the enemy to escape. They feared driving the troops beyond endurance, but Patton believed that, in the clutch, war was all about driving troops beyond endurance, forcing them to find the strength to achieve a rapid victory. Yet once the threat to Bas-togne had been vanquished, the other commanders, especially Eisenhower and Bradley, lost the momentum that had been created by the crisis.

  Patton’s gloom deepened in February, when Eisenhower transferred the principal thrust of the collective Allied offensive from the American army to the British under Montgomery. “You may hear that I am on the defense,” he wrote to Beatrice on February 4, 1945, “but it was not the enemy who put me there. ... I feel pretty low to be ending the war on the defensive.” From Eisenhower, Patton sought recognition and praise, but received none. When he met with Ike in Bastogne on February 5, he came away “surprised when Eisenhower failed to make any remark about my Bastogne operation. ... So far in my dealings with him, he has never mentioned in a complimentary way any action that myself or any other officer has performed. . . . He had on his new five stars—a very pretty insignia.” Turning to Beatrice by way of letter, Patton sought a sympathetic ear. He bemoaned the fact that “too many ‘safety first’ people” were running things. “I don’t see much future for me in this war.”11

  CHAPTER 13

  The Final Advance

  AFTER THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE, Patton wrote to his son, George, about leadership : “I have it—but I’ll be damned if I can define it.” This was not bragging or pride. It was a statement of fact about his own nature. “It” was not an achievement or a skill; “it” was simply an irreducible element that could not be accounted for. In any case, publicly, Patton gave all the credit for victory to his officers and troops, telling the press on January 1 that the relief of Bastogne “sounds like what a great man George Patton is, but I did not have anything to do with it. . . . The people who actually did it were the younger officers and soldiers. When you think of those men marching all night in the cold, over roads they had never seen, and nobody getting lost, and everybody getting to the place in time, it is a very marvelous feat; I know of no equal to it in military history ... I take my hat off to them. . . . To me it is a never ending marvel what our soldiers can do.”1

  By the middle of February, as Third Army closed in on the Rhine, Patton’s post-Battle of the Bulge let-down began to lift. Whereas on February 4, he had whined to Beatrice about being forced to end the war on the defensive, on February 10, he responded with defiance when, through Bradley, Eisenhower asked how soon Third Army could go on the defensive and yield more troops to Montogomery’s 21st Army Group. Patton replied to Bradley that he would resign before he would relinquish the offensive at this point in the war. Bradley conveyed Patton’s ultimatum to Eisenhower, who backed down to the extent of permitting Bradley (and, therefore, Patton) to assume a posture of what he called “aggressive defense.” As Patton noted, “I chose to view it as an order to ‘keep moving’ toward the Rhine with a low profile.” Indeed, Patton pressed the attack, albeit very quietly. “Let the gentlemen up north learn what we’re doing when they see it on their maps.”2

  On leaving Luxembourg, Third Army moved through the Eifel sector of Germany’s West Wall, the formidable defenses of the Siegfried Line. The terrain, stubbornly defended, was heavily forested, rugged, and cut up by the Moselle, Our, and Saur rivers. Of the fighting and progress through the Eifel, Patton wrote to Beatrice on February 14: “Some times I get so mad with the troops for not fighting better and then they do something superb. The forcing of the crossing of the Sauer and Our Rivers . . . was an Homeric feat.”3

  On February 14, Patton and his aide, Charles Codman, left for a few days of relaxation in Paris, where Patton took time to spend an evening at the Folies Bergere, which (he recorded in his diary) “is perfectly naked, so much so that no one is interested.”4 Patton also went hunting with Ike’s chief of staff, Bedell Smith, bagging three ducks, one pheasant, and three hares, and then talked Smith into backing his request for more troops to use in his low-profile offensive. Patton managed to persuade Bradley to return the 10th Armored Division to the Third Army; however, Bradley conspired with Patton to keep Eisenhower and the rest of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) in the dark. He cautioned Patton to stay off the phone for the next few days until it was too late for

  SHAEF to recall the division. If he was unavailable to receive an order, he could neither obey nor disobey it.

  Patton advanced on the principal city of the Eifel, Trier (which, he observed with pleasure, had once been captured by the Roman legions). It fell to the 10th Armored and an infantry division on March 1. Shortly after this, Patton resumed answering the telephone and soon picked up an order to bypass Trier. He sent a message in reply: “Have taken Trier with two divisions. Do you want me to give it back?”5

  Soldiers of the 6th Army Group had been fighting just west of the Rhine since November. At last, on March 7, 1945, elements of the 9th Armored Division under Brigadier General William M. Hoge, captured an intact railway bridge at Remagen and quickly crossed the Rhine, establishing a bridgehead on the east bank. The Third Army finally reached the Rhine on that same day, at Coblenz, but the Germans had left no bridges intact here. Although Patton was disappointed that his was not the first army to cross the Rhine, he was pleased that at least an American army had beaten Montgomery across. Patton’s engineers set to work bridging the Rhine and, during the night of March 22, Patton stealthily slipped a division across the river—a day in advance of Montgomery, whose much-trumpeted crossing had been delayed by the overly elaborate preparations he made. “God be praised,” Patton recorded in his diary on the twenty-third. He immediately composed Third Army General Orders 70, addressed to the “officers and men of the Third Army and to our comrades of the XIX TAC [Tactical Air Command],” tallying their achievements from January 29 to March 22, including the capture of Trier, Coblenz, Bingen, Worms, Mainz, Kaiserslautern, and Ludwigshafen; the capture of 140,112 enemy soldiers; and the killing or wounding of 99,000 more, “thereby eliminating practically all of the German Seventh and First Armies. History records no greater achievement in so limited a time. . . . The world rings with your praises. . . . Please accept my heartfelt admiration and thanks for what you have done, and remember that your assault crossing over the Rhine . . . assures you of even greater glory to come.”6

  The day after writing this exultant general order, Patton recorded in his diary: “Drove to the river and went across on the pontoon bridge, stopping in the middle to take a piss in the Rhine, and then pick up some dirt on the far side.”7 Picking up the clod of dirt was in emulation of William the Conqueror, who, in 1066, stumbled as he disembarked at Pevesney, then rose up with a fistful of English earth and led his army to the Battle of Hastings. As to Patton’s other act, urinating in the Rhine was without doubt a crude gesture
, but no less a figure than Winston Churchill would repeat it on his own arrival.

  Although Patton and the Third Army had not been the first across the Rhine, he expressed himself quite accurately when he told his soldiers that the world rang with their praises—and it rang with his as well. Once again, Patton was in the limelight and hailed as a great general. And once again, it was at this moment that he chose to gamble on yet another controversial action that risked his reputation.

  During the Tunisian campaign, Patton’s son-in-law John Waters had been captured. Until early 1945, he was held in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Poland, but (according to intelligence Patton received), as the Soviets approached, he was transferred west to a camp at Hammelburg, Germany. Hammelburg was believed to hold 5,000 POWs, including 1,500 Americans, many desperately ill, all near starvation. Patton decided to launch a rescue mission.

  Patton discussed the matter with Manton Eddy. Hammelburg lay well within enemy-held territory, and Patton wanted to detach a 4,000-man armored combat command to do the job. Eddy persuaded him that a much smaller highly mobile detachment, just 306 men and 10 medium tanks, 6 light tanks, 27 half-tracks, 7 Jeeps, and 3 motorized assault guns, would be better suited to a hit-and-run raid. Reluctantly, Patton agreed. Captain Abraham Baum was assigned to command the detachment, and Patton asked (but did not order) his aide Alexander C. Stiller, who knew Waters and would be able to recognize him, to go along. Stiller hopped into Baum’s Jeep. His presence would raise serious questions about Patton’s motive. Was he risking 306 men (307, including Stiller) to liberate 5,000 Allied POWs, including his son-in-law? Or was he risking them to liberate his son-in-law, who incidentally happened to be in company with 5,000 other prisoners?