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Brilliant American war leader

21 December 1945

General George S. Patton Junior, commander of the United States Fifteenth Army, whose death is announced on another page, was one of the most brilliant and successful leaders whom the war produced. It was he who led the American attack on Casablanca, forged his way through to effect a juncture with the Eighth Army near Gafsa, commanded the Seventh Army in Sicily, and then swept at the head of the Third from Brittany to Metz and onwards.

George Smith Patton, a cavalryman by training and instinct, became a tank expert. Brave, thrustful, and determined in action, he was a remarkable personality, who taught his men both to fear and to admire him. At the same time he was a serious and thoughtful soldier. He was an early advocate of the employment of armour in swiftly moving masses to exploit the break-through, and was finally able, with the help of American methods of mass-production, to realize his theories in practice. A great athlete in his earlier days, he had also a taste for philosophy, literature, and poetry. He was the son of a California pioneer, and was born at San Gabriel, in that State, on November 11, 1885. Soldiering was in his blood for he was the great-grandson of General Hugh Mercer, who served under Washington, and his grandfather died in the Civil War. It was natural, therefore, that he should find his way to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1909. After great achievements on the track at West Point he was to be placed fifth in the cross-country run of the Modern Pentathlon (in the main a military event) at the Olympic Games of 1912. He was also to be known as a fine horseman and show rider and a crack pistol shot. He developed a flamboyant and emotional character for which his men found expression in the sobriquet ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’, but he was a born military leader.

Commissioned in the cavalry, Patton served first at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. A little later he went to France to study the sabre there and after his return served as Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1916 he was aide-de-camp to General Pershing on the punitive expedition into Mexico. Then, when America entered the 1914–18 war he, by that time a captain, went on Pershing’s staff to France, where, in November, 1917, he was detailed to the Tank Corps and attended a course at the French Tank School and he was present when the British tanks were launched at Cambrai. After this he organized the American Tank Centre at Langres and later the 304th Brigade of the Tank Corps, which he commanded with much distinction in the St Mihiel offensive of September, 1918. Having been transferred with his brigade to the Meuse-Argonne sector he was wounded on the first day of the offensive; for his services he was awarded the dsc and dsm and at the time of the Armistice was a temporary colonel.

Returning to the United States in early 1919, Patton in 1920 was given command as a permanent captain of a squadron of the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer. Then he was detailed to the general staff corps and served for four years at the headquarters of the First Corps area at Boston and in the Hawaiian Islands. After four more years at Washington he was ordered to Fort Myer, where, as a permanent lieutenant-colonel, he remained on duty with the 3rd Cavalry until 1935.

Patton received command of the 2nd Armoured Division in October, 1940, with the temporary rank of brigadier-general, becoming in the next year commanding general of the First Armoured Corps. While he was thus employed Patton learned that they might be required in North Africa. He therefore set up a large training centre in California, where he built up a coordinated striking force. At last his opportunity came and as commander of the Western Task Force he and his men succeeded in their swift descent in occupying Casablanca. He himself had a narrow escape, for the landing craft which was to take him ashore was shattered. Later, when the American Second Corps were in difficulties at Kasserine Pass, Patton was sent to retrieve the situation and, with timely British aid, not only did so but carried it on to Gafsa, near which it made contact with the Eighth Army. Thus it was that he was chosen to command the Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily. It was while he was visiting a field hospital in that island that, suspecting a soldier of being a malingerer, he struck him. The incident was reported and General Eisenhower made it clear that such conduct could not be tolerated; but Patton, who made generous apology, was far too valuable a man to lose when hard fighting lay ahead, and a little later he was nominated to the permanent rank of major-general.

In April, 1944, he arrived in the European theatre of operations, and he took command of the Third Army, which went into action in France on August 1. With it he cut off the Brittany peninsula, played his part in the trapping of the Germans and drove on to Paris. In October he had another of his narrow escapes when a heavy shell landed near him but failed to explode. Driving on relentlessly towards the German frontier, it fell to Patton to reconquer Metz, and in recognition of this victory he received the Bronze Star. His next outstanding performance was in late December when the Third Army drove in to relieve the First and helped to hold Bastogne. He was famous for the speed of his operations, but surpassing himself on this occasion, he surprised the Germans, and slowed down and eventually checked the advance of Rundstedt’s southern column. One of his most striking feats was when in the advance to the Rhine, he moved towards that river with his right flank on the Moselle. The Germans were apparently expecting him to force a crossing of the Rhine, but instead he suddenly crossed the Moselle near the confluence, taking the enemy ‘on the wrong foot’ and completely smashing up his array. In Germany his armoured divisions made the deepest advances of all, penetrating in the end into Czechoslovakia. A German staff officer, captured in the final stages, reported that his general had asked him each morning as a first question what was the latest news about Patton.

In April this year President Truman nominated Patton to be a full general. The Third Army occupied Bavaria last July, and in September Patton was ordered to appear before General Eisenhower to report on his stewardship of Bavaria. The summons was a result of Patton’s statements to a Press conference that Nazi politics are just like a Republican and Democratic election in the United States, and that he saw no need for the de-Nazification programme in the occupation of Germany. In October General Eisenhower announced that General Patton had been removed from the command of the Third Army and had been transferred to the command of the Fifteenth Army, a skeleton force.

Patton, in spite of many idiosyncrasies, which included the free use of a cavalryman’s tongue – ‘You have never lived until you have been bawled out by General Patton’ his men used to say – was a fundamentally serious soldier, offensively minded and bent on the single object of defeating his enemy. He affected a smart and sometimes striking turnout, and was insistent that those under him should also maintain a smart and soldierly appearance.