War as I Knew It

by George S. Patton

  We developed later a system known as the “Third Army War Memorial Project” by which we always fired a few salvos into every town we approached, before even asking for surrender. The object of this was to let the inhabitants have something to show to future generations of Germans by way of proof that the Third Army had passed that way.

  I went to bed rather late and noticed that I had failed to wind my watch, which was run down, so turned on the radio to get a time signal. Just as I turned it on, the announcer reported the death of President Roosevelt. I immediately informed General Eisenhower and General Bradley, and we had quite a discussion as to what might happen. It seemed very unfortunate to us that at so critical a period in our history we should have to change horses. Actually, subsequent events demonstrated that it made no difference at all.

  On the thirteenth, Bradley asked me to leave the 65th Infantry Division in its present position until the following Sunday in order to facilitate certain operations being undertaken by the First Army.

  I visited Colonel Allen in the hospital, as he had been recaptured when we took Weimar. His right arm had been shot off just below the elbow. He gave me some very interesting information. The surgeon who operated on him used the last ether in his possession to put Allen under, but it was insufficient and toward the end he gave him brandy and some sort of chloral drug. Allen said he saw at least eighty Germans operated on without any anaesthetic at all except chloral and cognac; there were no sanitary arrangements, no soap nor water, and the doctors and nurses were literally wading in blood. Many of the men were dragged into the operating room by the hand, as there was a shortage of stretchers. The surgeon who operated on him was an Austrian, and, during the few days Allen was in the hospital, repeatedly gave false information as to his state of health, because the Germans, having discovered that he was a colonel, were very anxious to get him to Army Headquarters for interrogation. The surgeon finally told Allen that if the worse came to worst he would help him to escape and keep him hidden in the hills until we came up. Allen was a very sporting character and the only request he had was that he be left on duty at Army Headquarters, which request was granted. He did an extremely good job until the end of the war.

  On April 14, the XX and XII Corps, due to the armor which assisted them, were on the stop line running along the Mulde River from our northern boundary near Hochlitz to the vicinity of Zwickau, thence through Plauen and Hof, then generally parallel to and east of the autobahn to Bayreuth.

  Lieutenant Graves1 and I flew to Mainz to be present by invitation of General Plank, of Com Z, at the opening of the railway bridge over the Rhine, which had been built by my friend and former classmate, Colonel Frank Hulen. Hulen, it seemed, was much depressed because he had built the bridge in nine days, twenty hours, and fifteen minutes, which, according to him, was some twelve hours longer than Caesar had taken to build a similar bridge. We pointed out to him that Caesar did not build a railway bridge. After appropriate ceremonies I was asked to cut the red tape, in lieu of a red ribbon, to open the bridge, and was handed a pair of scissors. However, my romantic instinct prompted me to ask for a bayonet with which I cut the tape. We then got on a flatcar and drove across the bridge in the first train to pass over it. Personally I was much more worried for fear the bridge would fall down than I usually am in a fight. On returning, Hulen showed us some of the equipment he had made for the purpose of building the bridge. One item was a huge crane capable of lifting a whole bay at once, which, I believe, he called a “Moby Dick.”

  1Later Captain F. P. Graves, Jr., Aide to General Patton.

  On returning to Headquarters, I found that General Gay, Colonels Pfann1 and Codman had visited another slave camp north of Weimar, Buchenwald, which was apparently much worse than the one at Ohrdruf. I immediately called General Eisenhower and suggested he send senior representatives of the press and photographers to get the horrid details. General Eisenhower not only did this, but also got Congressmen to come over. This was the camp where we paraded some fifteen hundred citizens of Weimar to give them a firsthand knowledge of the infamy of their own government. In honesty, I believe that most of them were ignorant of much that had gone on there.

  I was unable to get any information as to what was to happen after I got on the stop line, except that I was told that, in the opinion of the Twelfth Army Group, I did not have sufficient supplies to go farther, in spite of the fact that I knew perfectly well I had.

  I was informed by higher headquarters that a correspondent named Driscoll,3 4 with the Third Army, had written an article stating that the Third Army was held up by the First Army. Apparently people are getting touchy. In briefing correspondents once a week I always refused to answer questions about other armies or to discuss them in any way, as I felt the Third Army could stand on its own feet and needed to make no excuses to anyone. I had Major Quirk5 in and issued instructions that no article making a comparison of the relative merits of the various armies shall ever go out.

  On April 15, the three corps (XII, XX, VIII) were practically on the stop line and I flew to Weimar and visited what I then thought was going to be my next Command Post. It was the home of the former local Gauleiter, who had been responsible for the slave labor and all the general nastiness in that vicinity. Here General Walker presented me with a toy boat for a grandson, and I took it without hesitation, for it had unquestionably been stolen from someone else by this German bandit.

  I then visited, in company with General Walker, the Weimar slave camp, Buchenwald. This camp was in the vicinity of a factory largely engaged in the construction of parts for the V-l bomb and of artillery caissons, and is a monument to the accurate bombing of our air force, because they completely eliminated the factory without putting a single bomb in the camp, which was contiguous.

  In addition to the workers in the factory, a large number of political prisoners were assembled at this camp and fed eight hundred calories a day, with the result that they died at the rate of about one hundred each night. I walked through two buildings, each with four tiers of bunks on a side. The bunks were at right angles to the gangway and were built so that they sloped slightly toward the front, and so that the fecal matter and other refuse left by the prisoners trickled down under their chins onto the floor, which was at least three inches deep in filth when I went through. Strange to say, the smell was not particularly bad; it was rather more musty than putrid.

  The inmates looked like feebly animated mummies and seemed to be of the same level of intelligence. If a sufficient number did not die of starvation or if, for other reasons, it was desirable to remove them without waiting for nature to take its course, they were dropped down a chute into a room which had a number of hooks like those on which one hangs meat in a butcher shop, about eight feet from the floor. Each of these hooks had a cord of clothesline thickness with a grommet at each end. One grommet was passed through the other and the loop put over the slave’s head, while the other grommet was fastened over the hook and the man was allowed to hang there until he choked to death, except that if he took too long they had a club, very like a large potato masher, with which they beat out his brains. This club must have been considerably used because it was splintered on one side.

  One of the most horrible points about this place was that all these executions were carried on by slaves. There was a further devilish arrangement of making the various groups select those who had to die. Each racial group had a certain number of men who represented it. These men had to select those from their group who would be killed locally, or sent to camps like Ohrdruf, which were termed “elimination camps.”

  In this camp there was a number of allegedly eminent physicians whose professional rectitude had been so completely destroyed that they had been persuaded to perform some very abominable experiments on their fellow inmates. One case was reported in which eight hundred slaves had been inoculated with anti-typhus vaccine and then inoculated with the typhus bug. Of the eight hundred, some seven hundred died, and the expe
riment was considered unsatisfactory. Colonel Odom asked some of these doctors if there was anything he could do for them. One said yes, that he was making a very interesting experiment on a human brain and needed some carbon black. The human brain, apparently, was still alive.

  From the execution room in the Buchenwald set-up there was an elevator, hand operated, which carried the corpses to an incinerator plant on the floor above. Here there were six furnaces. The corpse was placed on a loading tray similar to those used in the 155 mm. guns and, at the command “Ram home!” the end of the tray hit against the stopper on the door and the body shot forward into the oven, where it was shortly burned up. The slave in charge of this took great pride and kept rubbing his hand on the floor and then showing me how clean it was.

  When I got home, I found that Bradley had been trying to talk to me on the scrambler telephone, which was out of order, so Gay had told him in the clear that I would see him in the morning.

  One of the interesting things to be seen in flying over Germany is the large number of swimming pools. Practically every little town has one. I think it must have been in line with their health movement.

  It was also noteworthy that, whereas in France all the main electric power lines were completely destroyed, after we crossed into Germany proper, and particularly after we got east of the Rhine, the main power lines were not destroyed or, if so, were demolished at only one or two points.

  On April 16, in company with Colonel Harkins, I flew to Wiesbaden, where I met General Bradley, and later Hodges and his G-3, and we got the new plan, which was, in effect, a change of direction to the south for the purpose of attacking the so-called “Redoubt.” In order to effect this change, the VIII Corps remained in place and reverted to the First Army, at the same time broadening its front both to the north and to the south. We selected the VIII Corps because it was quicker for it to expand both ways than it would have been to put in another corps, which would have to expand twice as far on one side. The expansion to the south was as far as Hof; and on the north to the former boundary of the XX Corps. To do this we turned over the 76th Division of the XX Corps to the VIII Corps, and also the 4th and 6th Armored Divisions.

  The XX Corps Headquarters and artillery, and the 80th Division, were pulled out and came to the south, with their left boundary on the right boundary of the XII Corps in the area which had been heretofore occupied by the XV Corps of the Seventh Army. They picked up the 71st Division from the XII Corps, which also side-slipped to the right, and an additional division from the rear was to come up eventually.

  In addition to this, we got the HI Corps under General Van Fleet, with elements of that corps and other troops from the Ruhr Pocket. The III Corps was to take over the general frontage heretofore occupied by the XXI Corps (Major General F. W. Milburn) of the Seventh Army.

  We also picked up the three armored divisions in addition to the 11th; namely, the 13th (Major General John Millikin), which had seen action, and the 16th (Brigadier General J. L. Pierce) and 20th (Major General Orlando Ward)—both virgin divisions. I was glad to get them, as I felt we should get these green troops into battle, after all the training they had had, before the war ended.

  The Third Army was to attack in a southeasterly direction parallel to the Czechoslovakian border, with the Danube River splitting the zone between the XII Corps on the north and the XX Corps in the middle. The Seventh Army was to attack straight south, and the First and Ninth Armies were to remain on the defensive.

  On the way back, we flew over von Rundstedfs Headquarters at the town of Ziegenburg, sixteen kilometers west of Bad Nauheim, which had been bombed by our fighter-bombers just before we crossed the Rhine. The effect produced by these bombings was remarkably good. I am continually amazed at the efficiency of the fighter-bombers, particularly their ability to pick out isolated motor transport and hit it.

  We had the four Corps Commanders in and explained the new set-up. They were all perfectly confident of their ability to side-slip, change direction, and do whatever was necessary. General Weyland, who was always present when any decision was made in the Third Army, was equally confident of his ability to support any activities in which we might become engaged. Middleton, as usual, was the perfect soldier and suggested that he consult with General Hodges and find out what front line the latter desired him to take, and also the time at which the transfer between armies should be effected. At lunch, after the meeting, I sat next to General Eddy and was somewhat alarmed at his apparent lack of life, because usually he was extremely talkative and cheerful.

  Late in the afternoon, General Williams, myself, Colonel Codman, Colonel Odom, and Lieutenant Graves flew to Paris, where I had a long talk in the hospital with Colonel Waters, whom I found much improved. I saw him again on the morning of the eighteenth before flying back.

  At breakfast that morning, General Hughes and I were each reading a copy of The Stars and Stripes. I was looking at the right-hand column describing the activities of the Third Army when Hughes reached across and pointed to the center column in which it stated I had just been made a full General. While I was, of course, glad to get the rank, the fact that I was not in the initial group and was therefore an “also ran” removed some of the pleasure. When the initial list of names came out, Sergeant Meeks, who heard it over the radio, came to my room and said, “Good God, General, they are making all the troop clerks.” Codman secured for me the last set of four stars in Paris and I dispatched my three-star set to General Keyes, who was promoted to Lieutenant General in the same list.

  On the nineteenth, we had some radio commentators and some experts from the Secretary of War’s Office. The latter were quite interesting.

  General Canine, Chief of Staff of the XII Corps, called up with the depressing information that General Eddy was in such a physical state that he would have to be relieved from command and sent home. He had been a very fine Corps Commander and I hated to see him go. Also, he had been with me almost since the initial landing in Africa and had probably commanded larger units of combat troops longer than any other general. I was prevented from going to see him that day because General Bradley sent for me to go to Wiesbaden for a conference with General Eisenhower, so I told Canine to carry on in General Eddy’s name and I would get a new Corps Commander when I saw Generals Eisenhower and Bradley. The names I suggested were Gaffey, Harmon, and Irwin.1 It was decided that neither Gaffey nor Harmon could be spared at the moment, so the choice was between Irwin, my candidate, and Wyche, whom General Eisenhower suggested. I believe he suggested Wyche, not only because Wyche was senior, but also because Irwin was a classmate of his, and Eisenhower leaned over backward from promoting a classmate. I eventually secured the selection of Irwin on the ground that he had had more combat experience,

  since he had not only fought continuously on the Continent, but had also been through the Tunisian Campaign.

  1Major General S. LeRoy Irwin, Commanding General, 5th Infantry Division.

  General Eisenhower stated that he was anxious for us to start in the direction of Linz as soon as possible, but that, owing to the failure of the British to make sufficient progress, it might be necessary for him to send a corps up there. He said he did not wish to get overextended until the situation in the north cleared up, and therefore I was to get ready to go, but was not to go until I received permission.

  C-47

  On the twentieth, we sent the Army C-47 to General Eddy’s Headquarters for the purpose of flying him to Paris, and I flew there in a Cub to tell him good-bye. His trouble was such high blood pressure that it was considered practically fatal..1

  After seeing Eddy off with great regret, I flew to the Headquarters of the XX Corps at Schloss Weissenstein. This was the most magnificent and most hideous building I had ever seen. It was built around 1700 and is full of murals and gigantic plaster statues of overfed females.

  *He was operated on in the United States and entirely recovered.

  There is also a collection of really gr
eat paintings. In one room, the inlay in the parquet floor is silver. Another room is all solid gold enamel. General Walker had an uncanny capacity for choosing excellent Command Posts for himself. The stable at this chateau was built in a semicircle directly across from the main door. The saddle room, where apparently people congregated while getting ready to take off, had some excellent murals, and was more luxurious and better furnished than many drawing rooms at home. The stables were also remarkably modem and in a good state of repair. There were over twenty box stalls. Apparently the Weissensteins had been a hunting family.

  From here we flew to the Headquarters of the III Corps at Reidfeld. Just before we got there, I noticed some tracers coming by the right side of our plane which, at the same instant, dove for the ground, very nearly colliding with a plane which looked like a Spitfire. This plane made a second pass, again firing and missing. By this time I was sure we were being attacked and decided that, since there was nothing else to do, I would try to get a picture of the assailant, but was so nervous I forgot to take the cover off the lens, so the picture was a blank. On the third pass, our attacker came in so fast and we were so close to the ground that he was unable to pull out of his dive and crashed, to our great satisfaction. While Codman and I were engaged in hedgehopping to avoid this belligerent gentleman, four other planes were circling over us, but did not engage in the attack.

  The XV Corps of the Seventh Army, which had sideslipped from its area to that of the XXI Corps, Seventh Army, was having considerable difficulty in clearing the front of our III Corps, which had come in behind it. I told the III Corps to infiltrate forward through the XV so that it could be on the starting line and ready to take off on Sunday, the twenty-third.