Exuberance: The Passion for Life (36 page)

It isn’t Yeats, but the point is clear. Patton saw himself as a warrior first, last, and always. (The “always” was quite literal: he believed that, in previous lives, he had been, among others, a Roman soldier, a Viking, and a soldier in Napoleon’s army.) In a
blood-rousing passage written in his West Point notebook, he exclaimed: “
You have seen what the enthusiasm of men can mean for things done … you must do your damdest and win. Remember that is what you live for. Oh you must! You have got to do some thing! Never stop until you have gained the top or a grave.” The passion for winning extended to battles on the playing fields as well. To his son many years later, Patton wrote:
“You play games to
win
not lose. And you fight wars to win! That’s spelled W-I-N! … Pologames and wars aren’t won by gentlemen. They’re won by men who can be first-class sonsofbitches when they have to be. It’s as simple as that. No sonofabitch, no commander.” The leader, Patton believed, commanded by an “
all-pervading, visible personality. The unleavened bread of knowledge will sustain life, but it is dull unless seasoned by the yeast of personality.”

At its best, Patton’s personality served him and the United States well. His tactical brilliance and exuberance were legendary. General Dwight Eisenhower said of Patton that he was “
one of those men born to be a soldier, an ideal combat leader whose gallantry and dramatic personality inspired all he commanded.… His presence gave me the certainty that the boldest plan would be even more daringly executed.… George Patton was the most brilliant commander of an army in the open field that our or any other service produced.” But the separation between gainful exuberance and bloodthirst eroded over time. His remarks during World War II went from the merely reckless—“
This is a damn fine war,” he said, “I hope to God I get killed up front somewhere”; once, he jumped from his car shouting, “
Where are the damned Germans, I want to get shot at!”—to speeches that were unhinged, indefensible, and arguably at least in part responsible for the slaughtering of prisoners of war under his command. In August 1942 he gave a fiery speech to his troops: “
We’re going to go right in and kill the dirty bastards,” he exhorted them. “We won’t just shoot the sonsofbitches. We’re going to cut out their living guts—and use them to
grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.” He was no more circumspect in a speech delivered not long after: “
We’ll rape their women and pillage their towns,” he said, “and run the pusillanimous sonsofbitches into the sea.”

At some point, Patton ceased to inspire his men to greatness and instead quite possibly inflamed them to wanton killing. Intemperate behavior disintegrated into the unpardonable. He was forced to apologize publicly for slapping a shell-shocked soldier, and later, after his behavior became increasingly erratic and his speeches even more inflammatory, Eisenhower relieved him of his command of the Third Army. Exuberance had shifted into deranged hatred and zealotry.

General Sir Alan Francis Brooke, the chief of the British Imperial General Staff, believed that Patton was a “
dashing, courageous, wild and unbalanced leader, good for operations requiring thrust and push but at a loss in any operation requiring skill and judgment.” Dwight Macdonald denounced Patton as “
an extreme case of militarist hysteria.” “Compared to the dreary run of us,” he added, “General Patton was quite mad.” S.L.A. Marshall concurred: “
I think he was about half mad. Any man who thinks he is the reincarnation of Hannibal or some such isn’t quite possessed of all his buttons.” Patton’s biographer Ladislas Farago said much the same: “
I am convinced,” he wrote, “that he was, if not actually mad, at least highly neurotic.”

Mad or not, Patton was an uncommon leader who used his passions both well and ill. When he died in December 1945, the
New York Times
gave a sense of his complexity: “
He will be ranked in the forefront of America’s great military leaders”; a legend, he was “a strange combination of fire and ice. Hot in battle … a profound and thoughtful military student.” He was not, they said, “a man of peace.”

Neither was General Billy Mitchell, the military aviation pioneer
whose much ridiculed and seemingly grandiose visions of the future of airpower turned out to be correct. His advocacy for a separate branch of the military dedicated to the tactical use of airpower led directly to the formation of the United States Air Force, but his dream was realized at the cost of his career. His exuberance about the possibilities of flight hardened into what critics perceived as fanaticism, and his volatile temperament gave them the cause they needed to prevent his ideas from being put into action. It is unclear, however, given the intransigence of his opposition, that another temperament would have been as effective or persuasive.

Mitchell, the son of a U.S. Senator, was the top combat airman of World War I, having, in a single campaign against the Germans, commanded nearly fifteen hundred aircraft. He believed, contrary to his superior officers in the Army and Navy, that airpower would make Navy battleships obsolete; his enthusiasm was absolute and his public statements were commensurate with his enthusiasm. To prove his point, he ordered his pilots to sink the reputedly unsinkable former German warship
Ostfriesland;
it took them only a few minutes. Mitchell had made his point, but few wanted to hear it and fewer still appreciated his attitude. “
Those of us in the air,” he wrote, “knew we had changed the methods of war and wanted to prove it to the satisfaction of everybody.”

Mitchell vociferously and repeatedly made his arguments for air supremacy and the need to equip the United States with a modern air force. His passions lay in the future, while those of most in the military were bound up in the armies and navies of the past and present. His love for flight was matched by his disdain for the “older services,” an unrelenting attitude that antagonized and ruffled many. “
Napoleon studied the campaigns of Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan,” he commented. “The navies draw their inspiration from the Battle of Actium in the time of the Romans, and the sea fight of Trafalgar.” But, he said, in the development of
airpower “one has to look ahead and not backward, and figure out what is going to happen, not too much what has happened.”

The future of defense was in the air, Mitchell proclaimed over and over. “
The competition will be for possession of the unhampered right to traverse and control the vast, the most important, and the farthest reaching element of the earth, the air, the atmosphere that surrounds us all, that we breathe, live by, and which permeates everything.” His fierce exuberance about airpower was influenced strongly by his sense that the stakes were high, but many felt that his certainty of belief was arrogant. Mitchell believed that those who took to the air were a special breed, a belief that got no argument from pilots but incited a great deal of resentment in others. “
Bold spirits that before wanted to ‘go down to the sea in ships,’ now want to go up in the air in planes,” he wrote. “The pilots of these planes, from vantage points on high, see more of the country, know more about it, and appreciate more what the country means to them than any other class of persons.”

The pilot was not only privy to a view of the country that others could only envy, he was also of a select breed that called for a different disciplinary standard. “
The old discipline, as conceived and carried out by armies and navies throughout the centuries,” maintained Mitchell, “consists in the unhesitating obedience by a subordinate to the orders of his superior.… With the aviator, however, the keenest, best educated, most advanced kind of man has to be selected.” Unhesitating obedience may suffice for the average man—it was only, after all, “within the last generation that most of the men composing armies could read or write”—but not for the aviator. Indeed, according to Mitchell, “
[t]he [Army’s] General Staff was trying to run the Air Service with just as much knowledge about it as a hog has about skating.”

These sentiments, heartfelt and publicly expressed, were provocative and meant to be. Mitchell was incapable of keeping his
concerns and enthusiasms to himself. In 1925, however, he went too far for the military to look the other way. After the air arm had a series of flying accidents, which occurred in the context of a consistent pattern of underfunding, Mitchell gave a prepared statement to six reporters. He said, among other things, “
I have been asked from all parts of the country to give my opinion about the reasons for the frightful aeronautical accidents and loss of life, equipment and treasure.… These accidents are the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the Navy and War Departments.” He was court-martialed, of course, on charges of “conduct to the prejudice of good order and military discipline and in a way to bring discredit upon the military service.” He was tried and convicted of insubordination and sentenced to a five-year suspension from active duty without pay or allowances. He resigned from the Army in 1926 and died, essentially in exile, ten years later.

Perhaps a less passionate man, or a less ambitious one, would have been able to bring about change in a less tumultuous manner. Probably not. The strength of Mitchell’s convictions gave them a prominence they would not otherwise have had, and it is unlikely that his provocativeness alienated many people not already likely to be alienated. Certainly he was controversial. Certainly he was an enthusiast who crossed over the line into crusaderhood, if not fanaticism. But he was right on vital fronts. He was correct about the centrality of air power to the national defense; he predicted, in 1924, that the Japanese would one day bomb Pearl Harbor and then the Philippines; he rightfully and passionately warned that Alaska and the Pacific would play critical roles in military strategy. He predicted traveling into interstellar space. Time bore him out. In 1947 the U.S. Air Force was created; Mitchell was posthumously awarded a special Medal of Honor and promoted to the rank of major general.

Mitchell, like Patton, was a complicated, enthusiastic, and angry man. Alfred Hurley, in his book
Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power
, speaks of this complexity: “
He erred in believing that the realization of his vision would justify his tactics. Those tactics included his denial of the integrity of an often equally dedicated opposition, his substitution of promises for performance, and his failure to sustain the kind of day-to-day self-effacing effort that builds any institution, whether military or otherwise.” But, Hurley concludes, “
Americans might well regard Mitchell as one of the extraordinary men in their history, one who employed some remarkable gifts and unusual energy in trying to alert his countrymen to the promise of aviation. Indeed, every age has had its crusaders—men like Mitchell whose relentless insistence on the correctness of their beliefs ultimately destroyed them. In the interim, however, their zeal also sustained them in combating the antagonism of the shortsighted.” Mitchell’s was a passionate life in pursuit of reason, but few saw it that way at the time. A more temperate man would have been less grating, but he would not have been Billy Mitchell.

It is obvious that not all exuberance is tethered to reality, nor is it always put to the common good. Strong passions, like fire, can civilize or kill. Daedalus, believing he was according his son the freedom of the air, made him wings of wax and feathers and taught him how to fly. He warned Icarus of the dangers of the sun’s heat, but, writes Ovid, the son

Icarus brought daring to the air and found joy and death; Daedalus brought caution. Both count. Daedalus lived, but Icarus is the stuff of legend. “
Who cares that he fell back to the sea?” asked Anne Sexton: “See him acclaiming the sun and come plunging down/while his sensible daddy goes straight into town.”

The raptures of the air and sea can lead to peril. In 1965, the
Gemini 4
astronaut Ed White spent nearly half an hour somersaulting, floating, and space-walking outside his spacecraft. He was so euphoric that his fellow astronaut Gus Grissom, tracking him from Mission Control in Houston, worried about his safety. The astronauts Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton give their account of what happened next: “
‘Gemini Four,’ Gus called in a stern voice,
‘get back in.’
[Crew mate James] McDivitt called to White, still frolicking outside. ‘They want you to get back in
now.’
Ed White didn’t want to return to the cockpit. ‘This is fun!’ he said exuberantly. ‘I don’t want to come back in, but I’m coming.’ ” The diver and adventurer Hans Hess has written of the seductiveness of deep-ocean exploration. Below a depth of 160 feet, he says, a “deep sea intoxication” occurs. “
One loses all misgivings and inhibitions. The abyss below becomes a pleasant walk. Why not? A little bit further—why not? And then suddenly comes the end, without one even being aware of it. Death catches the diver in a butterfly net whose mesh is so soft that it closes in on him unnoticed.”

Most strong enthusiasms are of no danger, and they add color not only to the lives of those who hold them but to those in their presence as well. Several years ago I was asked by
Nature
to review
Eccentrics
, a captivating book by David Weeks and Jamie James that discusses at length the enthusiasms of notable eccentrics—a woman who collected 7,500 garden gnomes, for instance, and a
nineteenth-century man who, having been expelled from both Westminster and Harrow, spent £500,000 on alcohol in less than twenty years and kept, at one time, two thousand dogs, which he fed Champagne and steak. At one of his dinner parties he dressed in full hunt regalia and rode on the back of a bear; the latter, perhaps not surprisingly, was less amused than the guests and ate part of his rider’s leg. In a tale for our materialistic times, the authors also recount the story of a man who moved to Sherwood Forest, dressed up in green, carried a longbow, and called himself Robin Hood. Prior to taking up his new identity he had, appropriately enough, earned his living by installing automatic cash-dispensing machines.