The Yanks Are Coming! (24 page)

Patton's success and flamboyance had made him one of the most publicized and celebrated generals in the United States. But his slapping of two nerve-addled soldiers, in separate incidents in August 1943, when he was visiting wounded GIs (always an emotional experience for him), cost him the full confidence of his commander, General Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was frank with journalists about the incidents but equally frank about how it wouldn't help the war effort if reporters publicized them and cost Eisenhower one of his best fighting generals. The reporters agreed, and Patton made a round of apologies to his men at large and to the soldiers he had slapped. As he waited for his next assignment, he sat in a metaphorical doghouse. The press's silence on the slapping incidents was broken in November 1943. Patton, amid the clamor of the press and public, was unrepentant, telling Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “I love and admire good soldiers and brave men. I hate and despise slackers and cowards.”
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He had no fear of reporters or public opinion, because his motives were pure and he was certain setbacks were temporary; in the end God would protect him and guide him to what he had to do.

“FARTHER AND FASTER THAN ANY ARMY IN THE HISTORY OF WAR”

For the nonce, Patton was kept occupied moving around Europe, his presence a feint to keep the Germans guessing where the United States might deploy its most successful general. In reality, Eisenhower had made no decision to deploy him at all, bypassing him
for command of American forces in Italy (which went to General Mark Clark) and in Britain (which went to General Omar Bradley). What Eisenhower eventually had in mind for Patton, in January 1944, was to command the Third Army. After the Allies had stormed and secured the beaches at Normandy, Patton—under the eminently stable and trustworthy 12th Army Group commander General Omar Bradley—would be the tiger unleashed to drive the Germans out of France. Patton took the Third Army and formed it in the Patton style with deportment, drill, duty, and discipline. His officers were taught to encourage their men; to lead from the front; to keep plans aggressive, simple, and direct; to be ready to seize opportunities; and always to kill the enemy in big bleeding bunches. With Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Patton believed that war means fighting and fighting means killing; and an officer should make damn sure that it is the enemy that does the dying. He treated his officers as the gentlemen he expected them to be and spoke to the men as the profane, no-nonsense man of war he knew inspired confidence: a foulmouthed, jocular but intimidating coach to fire up their fighting spirit.

At the end of July 1944, nearly two months after the Allied invasion of France, General Patton charged into battle, liberating Avranches, Normandy, from the Germans and then leading the breakout into Brittany and toward the Seine and Loire Rivers. In a 14 August diary entry, Patton noted, “In exactly two weeks the Third Army has advanced farther and faster than any Army in the history of war.” His strategy was simple:
“L'audace, l'audace, toujours l'audace
.
”
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By the end of the month, the Third Army was stalled, not because of lack of aggression or success, but from a lack of gasoline, which could not reach it swiftly enough from the supply depots. Patton believed he was only two days from plunging into
Germany, but Eisenhower gave priority to supplying Montgomery's advance toward Antwerp and the Rhine. On 8 September 1944, Patton wrote to his wife, “God deliver us from our friends. We can handle the enemy.”
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As German resistance to Patton's drive intensified after he crossed the Moselle River, the general told reporters, “Whenever you slow anything down, you waste human lives.”
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But optimism was growing that the Germans were near defeat. One prominent doubter was Patton, who expected, when few others did, the December 1944 counteroffensive that became known as the Battle of the Bulge; and it was Patton who swiftly delivered—in an extraordinary shift of direction on snow- and ice-slicked roads—three divisions at lightning speed to break the German attack and rescue the 101st Airborne Division surrounded at Bastogne.
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Patton judged the relief of Bastogne as “the most brilliant operation we have thus far performed and is in my opinion the outstanding achievement of this war.”
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In March 1945, he courted controversy again when he sent a detachment of about three hundred soldiers on a daring mission behind enemy lines to liberate American prisoners of war from a camp in Germany, among whom there might be—he wasn't sure—his son-in-law, John Waters. The mission almost succeeded, but its failure led to press criticism that he had risked men's lives for the sake of his son-in-law—an accusation that roused Patton's contempt. If the liberation of the American prisoners had temporarily failed, Patton's Third Army nevertheless rounded up more German prisoners of war than any other—nearly a million men—and was the first to break open a concentration camp.
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At Buchenwald, another concentration camp liberated by the Third Army, Patton was physically sick. “Honestly,” he wrote his wife, “words are inadequate to express the horror of those institutions.”
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Patton gloried in war but was nevertheless appalled by aspects of this one—the concentration camps; the Allied bombing of German civilians in their cities; the fact that Eisenhower was content to let the Communist Russians into Berlin. Patton was promoted to full general in April 1945. His armies entered Czechoslovakia, but, at Eisenhower's orders, were not allowed to liberate Prague. On 9 May 1945, the war in Europe ended with Germany's unconditional surrender.

Patton wanted a transfer to the Pacific war, and when that looked unlikely, dreamt of fighting the Russians, his putative allies, perhaps with the assistance of the Germans, his recent enemies, whom he considered excellent soldiers and whose people he quickly came to admire (the horrors of the concentration camps aside). As a peacetime administrator of part of Bavaria, he ruled with a lenient hand and thought the United States should look to reconcile with the Germans, not punish them further. He opposed denazification. He thought most Nazi Party members were not ideologues but had merely joined the party because they felt it was necessary.
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They were needed now for efficient administration; to dismiss them would only increase the suffering of the German people. He opposed the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, which appeared to him as vindictive victor's justice, or, in his own words, “not cricket.”
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He also expected his death—not because of ill health, but because he had a premonition that this was his fate, and odd occurrences (a Polish Spitfire pilot firing on his plane, a near fatal collision with an ox cart, a traffic accident) seemed to underline it. Especially after Japan's surrender, Patton believed he had outlived his usefulness. His duty was done, and his days therefore numbered. In October, he left the Third Army. His new assignment was command of the Fifteenth Army, which was not really an army at all, but a unit
formed in Bad Nauheim to gather documents to write a history of the European war.

On 9 December 1945, an Army truck collided with Patton's car, leaving him with paralyzing, and eventually fatal, injuries. He died on 21 December 1945. In 1943, Patton had spoken at an Armistice Day service honoring American dead, saying, “I consider it no sacrifice to die for my country. In my mind we came here to thank God that men like these have lived rather than to regret that they have died.”
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These are words that apply most dramatically to the life of General George S. Patton.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

GEORGE C. MARSHALL (1880–1959)

M
arshall was born in Pennsylvania and his father hailed from Kentucky, but most of his bloodlines were Virginian, dating back to the colonial era. John Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the United States, was a distant cousin. His family was Episcopalian and prosperous, though a bad investment by his father made for tighter economic circumstances by the time young George reached the age of ten. His upbringing was small town; his pleasures largely rural; his terrors academic, for he was an outdoorsy boy, did not like to study, and entered public school at the age of nine humiliatingly unprepared by his previous tutors: his one good subject, as befitted his proud Virginian blood, was history.

Against his parents' wishes, Marshall wanted a military career. His path to that goal would not pass through West Point. His father doubted he had the smarts, and his father's politics—he was a conservative Democrat in a Republican state—did not look promising for winning a congressional appointment. Marshall's elder brother had gone to the Virginia Military Institute, as had earlier Marshalls, and though VMI graduates were not, at that time, guaranteed commissions, he decided that would be his route. His brother's and father's doubts about his intellectual capacity (his brother said that if he went to VMI he would disgrace the Marshall name), and his mother's self-sacrificing generosity (she sold two family properties to pay for his tuition), made him determined to succeed.

Academically, he passed muster, managing to stay in the top half of his class. Where he excelled was in military training and leadership, graduating as first captain, the highest-ranking cadet. Tall but light, he also played on the football team his senior year, and, almost as important, he met the woman who would become his wife, Elizabeth “Lily” Carter Coles, whose Virginia bloodlines matched his own, though her people had never left the state or descended into trade (she was a doctor's daughter; Marshall's father was a businessman).

“A MAN WHO WAS GOING TO BE CHIEF OF STAFF OF THE ARMY ONE DAY”

Bearing a recommendation from the superintendent at VMI and from New York senator John Wise (a native Virginian, VMI graduate, and Republican ally of President William McKinley), Marshall strode into President McKinley's office without an appointment (covertly attaching himself to a father and daughter who had one)
and strode out with an invitation to sit the examination to become an officer in the United States Army. He received his commission in January 1903, married in February, and reported for duty at Fort Myer with orders to join the 30th Infantry in the Philippines. Before the end of the year, he was back stateside, if not yet reunited with his wife, whose health was considered too fragile for the Philippines and, at least initially, for the Oklahoma Territory. He was stationed at Fort Reno. It was here, of all places, Marshall endured “the hardest service I ever had in the army,”
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mapping the southwestern desert of Texas. The expedition, launched in the scorching heat of June 1905 and lasting until the end of August, left him sunburnt and thirty-five pounds lighter than when he started.

The formerly less-than-studious Marshall applied to the Infantry and Cavalry School (or Army School of the Line, as it was soon to be called) at Fort Leavenworth, hoping that additional training would advance his prospects for promotion. He aced the qualifying examination, and in August 1906 entered the school. No student worked harder than Marshall. In 1907, he was promoted first lieutenant and finished his first academic year at Leavenworth at the top of his class. After his second year, he was one of five officers invited to stay and become an instructor. In the Philippines, he had taken to riding as a form of exercise and a relief from the tedium of the tropics, when he wasn't fording crocodile-infested streams. At Leavenworth, riding became his chief recreation. Horses and dogs and the habits of a Virginia gentleman became his own on the plains of Kansas.

In 1910, he finished his tour of duty at Leavenworth and, given leave, took his wife on a tour of Europe. The intervening years until the United States entered the First World War were spent as a typically itinerant officer moving from one post to the next—from New
York to Texas, Massachusetts to Arkansas, Washington to the Philippines to California and elsewhere—but Marshall had already impressed his superiors with his talents as a staff officer, a man who was expert and expeditious at organizing and training troops and drawing up plans for field exercises. Indeed, another young officer serving in the Philippines, Hap Arnold, after watching First Lieutenant George Marshall issuing orders during a training exercise, “told my wife I had met a man who was going to be chief of staff of the army one day.”
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Other officers, including generals, were nearly as flattering, marking Marshall out as an exceptional officer—Lieutenant Colonel Johnson Hagood going so far as to say, in an efficiency report on Marshall, that “he is a military genius. . . . and if I had the power I would nominate him to fill the next vacancy in the grade of Brigadier General.”
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Such excellence came at a price. Marshall literally worked himself into the hospital from exhaustion at age thirty-three. But he learned his lesson. He tried to establish regular work hours that allowed him to ride in the morning, play tennis in the afternoon, unwind before bed, and take the occasional hunting trip. He managed it with no loss of efficiency.

Little more than two months after the declaration of war on Germany, Captain Marshall, now assigned as staff officer to General William Sibert, commander of the 1st Division, shipped out for France. When General Pershing criticized Sibert's management of the division before Sibert's staff officers, Marshall leapt to his commander's defense and, to the astonishment of everyone, gave Pershing a subordinate's equivalent of a tongue-lashing—and did so in such a way that Pershing respected him for it, and eventually appointed him to his own staff. Marshall, like any officer worth his salt, craved a field command, but General Robert Bullard, who took
over for Sibert, recognized “Lieut. Col. Marshall's special fitness is for staff work and . . . I doubt that in this . . . he has an equal in the Army today.”
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As a staff officer, Marshall helped plan the American attacks at Cantigny and at Saint-Mihiel and throughout the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
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Marshall, with his tremendous grasp of logistics and tactics, was so successful that he earned the nickname of “the wizard.”
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Brigadier General Fox Conner, Marshall's immediate superior on Pershing's staff, had another name for him, telling Dwight Eisenhower that Marshall was “nothing short of a genius.”
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After the war, Pershing asked Colonel Marshall to become one of his personal aides, a position he held until Pershing's retirement in September 1924.
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