Patton's greatness as a field general was his mobility, and he achieved mobility by assassinating, or murdering if you will, all Germans who tried to surrender or who had been taken POW. He was a commander of armored forces, and mobility is the key to the success or armor.
As a politician, which generals inevitably are going to dabble in, being "stupid sons-of-bitches" according to Harry S Truman*, Patton was a terrible bust. I bring this up to remind the audience that generals will get involved in politics, which is why 1.) we should involve foreign entanglements and maintaining the congressional-military-industrial complex that empowers a meddling military, and 2.) wars should be short affairs so as NOT to provide fertile breeding ground for the military & their political aspirations.
The best defense against having generals meddling is to avoid war, and the need for a large military. If we have to have a Patton, and let him loose to commit war crimes, then again, the war should be short, not an open ended, eternal "War on Terror" as justified by former-General "Colon" Powell until his will was waylaid by infectious diverticulitis of the soul from bathing in the cesspool that was the first Bush 43 Administration.
Associated Content wouldn't let me post the entire article, as some of what I wrote about had already been published by your humble narrator, anonymously, on the Internet Movie Database. Here are the juicy bits I left out:
The movie biography Patton, which reportedly was President Richard Nixon’s favorite film, won the Oscar as Best Picture of 1970. The cinematic Patton, no matter how dark, stands as a whitewash of the real man. Patton’s diaries, which were pub-lished after his death, reveal that Patton was an anti-Semite. In the movie, there is one slapping incident, but in real life, there were actually two such incidents.
After the second incident, Patton reportedly made an anti- Semitic remark, claiming that "battle fatigue" was a fake con-cept created by the Jews (a reference rooted in the percep-tion in the first half of the 20th Century that there was a predom-inance of members of the Jewish faith in the psychiatric profession). After making this injudicious remark, some
witnesses claim that Patton wept.Seen in this context, theater commander Dwight D. Eisen-hower's subsequent removal of Patton from command, which took place long after the incident, might be interpreted as con-cern with Patton's own mental health, and that the brilliant, high-strung general himself was perceived as possibly suffering from battle fatigue. This would also explain why he was subse- quently returned to command after what could be seen as a "rest." (In the North African theater, British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill similarly had given General O'Connor a rest.)
One of the more controversial episodes of Patton's career was when he gave a speech to American G.I.s at a "Welcome Club" in Knutsford, England in mid-April 1944. Having been relieved of his command in Italy after the soldier slapping incidents, Patton was positioned as the head of fictitious com-mand, the "Quicksilver Army Group," as part of Operation Fortitude, a disinformation campaign to confuse the Nazis.
The Allies wanted to convince the Nazis that they were going to invade Europe at Calais, France and not Normandy. By positi-oning the man the Nazis believed was the Allies' greatest gen- eral at the head of this fictitious Army, the Allies did indeed help confuse the Nazis as to their actual intentions.
Still under consideration to be used as a commander in the invasion of Normandy (though his recklessness and unrelia- bility made it impossible to appoint him as overall head of the invading force; that command went to Omar N. Bradley), Patton had agreed to give a speech at Knutsford on the condition that there were no reporters present.
At the event, he was reported as saying that "...the British and the American are two people separated by a common language. Since it is evident destiny of the British and Americans rule the world, the better we know each other the better job we will do."
The speech, as reported by the press, became a major incident as Patton had failed to mention the Soviet Union, one of the Allies fighting the Nazis in Europe. Patton swore he did men-tion the Russians, and Bradley backed him up on this. The Sov-iets were outraged, and Ike, the Allied Supreme Commander, wrote to Patton saying, "I am thoroughly weary of your failure to control your tongue and have begun to doubt your all-round judgment, so essential in high military positions."
From the Pentagon, General George C. Marshall, the overall commander of the U.S. Army under Commander-in-Chief President Franklin D. Roosevelt, told Eisenhower that he would back him up if Ike chose not to use Patton in Normandy. In a letter, Marshall told Eisenhower if thought Overlord would work without Patton, "all well and good." If not, "then between us we can bear the burden." Ike decided not to give Patton a command on D-Day, and so the brilliant general remained at the head of his phantom army.
Patton believed that British reporters or even his own comman-ders had set him up. Patton wrote back to Ike, saying, "You probably are damn fed up with me...but certainly my last alleged escapade smells strongly of having been a frame-up in view of the fact that...the thing was under the auspices of the (British) Ministry of Information."
Historian Anthony Cave-Brown argues the "Knutsford Affair" was manufactured as part of the Fortitude deception campaign. It is known that the Allied high command, as part of Fortitude, had gambled not only with Patton's reputation but his career by
keeping him as the head of a phantom army when his skills as an experienced battlefield commander and brilliant strategist could have been exploited at Normandy, so they were certainly not above that kind of manipulation.Patton was put into action shortly after Normandy as the com-mander of the Third Army. As Third Army commander, Patton ordered the killing of German soldiers in the act of surrendering or taken prisoner because he said they could not be trusted. When Eisenhower reprimanded Patton for ordering his troops to kill P.O.W.s, Patton responded "If you order me not to, I will stop. Otherwise, I will continue to influence troops, the only way I know, a way which so far has produced results." Ike then informed Patton to continue any way he saw fit, but to be cau-tious lest the murder of prisoners boomerang against him.
On his part, Patton did not believe killing prisoners was wrong as he believed it saved his solders' lives.
"Some fair-haired boys are trying to say that I kill too many prisoners. Yet the same people cheer at the far greater killings of Japs. Well the more I killed, the fewer men I lost, but they don't think of that."
Referring to the fact that American soldiers and Marines fighting the "purple-pissing Japs" (as Patton so eloquently put it in his famous address to the troops on assuming command of the Third Army) took no prisoners. Giving no quarter was the modus operandi on both sides of the Pacific War, similar to the Esatern Front where the German Armies and their Axis allies were fighting to the death against the Soviet Red Army.
Patton was convinced that he was doing no wrong in calling for the calculated, cold-blooded murder of the enemy. Killing "Kraut" soldiers in the process of surrendering and the bloody dispatch of prisoners eliminated logistical problems that would otherwise have slowed down Patton's Third Army, which some-times advanced at the rate of 60 miles a day.
Eisenhower, who was given the overall Allied command in Europe as he was a masterful politician, was wary about Patton's killing of P.O.W.s as such a practice could be seen as antithetical to a democracy based on the rule of law.
The movie Patton also fails to mention one of the most controversial incidents in Patton's military career, when he diverted troops to liberate a German P.O.W. camp housing his son-in-law. As recounted in the book Raid: The Untold Story of Patton's Secret Mission, Patton sent a mobile force of about 50 vehicles and approximately 300 men to liberate the camp, which was approximately 100 kilometers (60 miles) behind enemy lines. With no air support and no additional ground support, the task force liberated 300 American officers, including General Patton's son-in-law, Captain John Waters, and 1,200 enlisted men.
This semi-suicide mission was not authorized by Patton's chain-of-command and is seen by some contemporary historians as indicating that Patton was emotionally unstable, particularly when considered in light of his two slapping incidents and his anti-Semitism.
Ike, who had know Patton since 1918 and considered him a friend, respected his military genius and leadership abilities but was wary about his inability to control his emotions. Cautiously, Ike had appointed Major General Lloyd Fredendall to command the army in North Africa instead of Patton in 1942, then had to replace Fredendall with Patton when Fredendall proved inad-equate. At the time of giving him the appointment, Ike cau-tioned Patton about avoiding "personal recklessness", and he counted on the presence of Omar N. Bradley to be a calming influence on the mercurial general. Conscious of why Bradley was assigned to him, Patton insisted that Bradley -- who had earlier commanded his own corps -- be assigned as Deputy Corps Commander. Bradley essentially was there to ensure that Patton didn't say or do anything untoward, and in tandem, they proved a great success.
By the second half of 1944, Bradley was in command of the First Army, the great force that invaded France on D-Day. Patton, free of Bradley's calming influence, was on his own as head of Third Army when he launched his foolhardy raid. The raid was uncalled for as Waters and the other prisoners were not in any danger; it likely was influenced by paranoia on Patton's part rooted in his own orders to his troops to kill German prisoners.
In an interesting sidelight, when Patton's Third Army overran its supply lines, Eisenhower (who as a military commander and as a man, allegedly disliked African Americans, though he backed up the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Educa- tion desegregation decision with military susasion in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957) decided to send the Red Ball Express in to supply Patton's tank army, a situation portrayed in the 1952 film “Red Ball Express“. The Red Ball Express, a transportation outfit manned by African Americans (though their officers were Caucasians), became famous during the war for braving the odds to supply Patton.
In 1979, director Budd Boetticher, at a symposium at UCLA, revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense pressured Universal to alter the film's portrayal of race relations and to emphasize an upbeat, positive spirit. Commenting on the
studio's whitewashing of history, Boetticher said, "The army wouldn't let us tell the truth about the black troops because the government figured they were expendable. Our government didn't want to admit they were kamikaze pilots. They figured if one out of ten trucks got through, they'd save Patton and his tanks."
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