In the introduction to this book—a book written by General Pattom from the diary he personally kept until four days before his fatal' automobile accident—Douglas Southall Freeman writes, "It is to be hoped that General Patton will be among the first to attract a competent biographer and that others will leave him alone. He was a man to win, to intrigue and sometimes to enrage his fellow-commanders." He was also a man to dismay those around him who were conscious of American ideals; and Patton, himself, who in all fairness was not one to hide anything about himself, is characteristically blunt and peppery about disclosing in his book the causes for their dismay.

For example, the general makes no secret of his race prejudice even against troops he commanded in battle. Noting the arrival in the field of a Negro tank battalion, he writes, "a good many of [the] lieutenants and some* * * captains had been my sergeants in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry* * * I expressed my belief at that time, and have never found the necessity of changing it, that a colored soldier cannot think fast enough to fight in armor." It is also plain that his famous inability to see the difference between Nazis and anti-Nazis in Germany and Democrats and Republicans in the United States was not a case of a man trained to fight finding himself in the unnerving position of being required to talk, but was instead an honest reflection of a whole complex of thought in him.

Nothing unnerved Patton. The general was convinced we will have to fight another war, and the only sorrow he expresses in his repeated references to "the next war" is over the fact that he would be too old to get in on it. Of the statement which cost him his command of the Third Army, he writes,

My language was not particularly politic, but I have yet to find where politic language produces successful government* * * my chief interest in establishing order in Germany was to prevent Germany from going communistic. I am afraid that our foolish and utterly stupid policy in regard to Germany will certainly cause them to join the Russians and thereby insure a communistic state throughout Western Europe.

No, nothing unnerved Patton, not even his own ignorance. "Any man who says he has battle fatigue," writes the general who slapped an enlisted man suffering from that medically recognized wound, "is avoiding danger and forcing on those who have more hardihood than himself the obligation of meeting it." And in another place he notes:

I am convinced that, in justice to other men, soldiers who go to sleep on post, who go absent for an unreasonable time during combat, who shirk in battle, should be executed; and that Army Commanders or Corps Commanders should have the authority to approve the death sentence. It is utterly stupid to say that General Officers, as a result of whose orders thousands of gallant and brave men have been killed, are not capable of knowing how to remove the life of one miserable poltroon.

The book is hastily written and has no plan beyond the chronological one of a man paraphrasing a diary. The style is summed up by Mr. Freeman as follows: "General Patton used words as he employed fire—to get decisive results quickly." The first section is devoted to an unenlightening description of the general's sight-seeing in Africa, Italy and Sicily where, incidentally, surveying the poverty from the front seat of a command jeep, he discovered "it would be a mistake in my opinion to try to raise them [the Sicilians] to our standards, which they would neither appreciate nor enjoy." The bulk of the book concerns the Third Army's campaign in Europe and is heavily laden, for the layman's taste, with technical data about corps and division movements—details of chief interest, at present, to military students and biographers. But the general does prove—even to those of us who are ignorant of battlefield tactics—that he must have been a superb field commander. His admirers claim he was the best field commander America has produced since Stonewall Jackson—and the General's non-professional readers will be inclined to go along with that statement after reading this book.

The general took frank and chronic delight in contemplating his own deeds and commands and weighting his pages with statements like this: "I was very proud of this idea because it was my own." He also reveals himself as an intractable, impetuous and aggressively opinionated subordinate, and it is quite apparent he would have been fired out of his job long before he actually was if his superiors had not regarded him as something on the order of an indispensable man for a shooting war. All the way up the line, the brass had to put up with a lot from Patton, and he has great gusto in relating exactly how much they had to put up with. "There was no trouble about the boundary, since they [the Sixth Army Group and the Seventh Army] took the one we proposed," he writes, typically, "and there was no trouble about the railroad, since I refused to share it."

His opinion of Montgomery was bitterly low. He accuses Eisenhower of making "the momentous error of the war" in drawing supplies away from his own army to feed Montgomery's efforts against Germany in the north, writing in conclusion:

Had I been permitted to go all out, the war would have ended sooner and more lives would have been saved. Particularly, I think, this statement applies to the time when, in the early days of September [1944], we were halted, owing to the desire, or necessity, on the part of General Eisenhower in backing Montgomery's move to the north. At that time there was no question of doubt but that we could have gone through and on across the Rhine within ten days. This would have saved a great many thousand men.

There is one other fact that emerges about Patton in this book. He had a remarkable ability to subdue his own fears. He was perfectly willing to sacrifice not only his life but his career and reputation to his duty to his nation's flag. He was more than willing. He was impetuous to do it, and I share Mr. Freeman's hope that he will find a competent biographer and that others will leave him alone. There is much in his career to inspire future generations usefully; there is almost as much, should incompetent or unscrupulous hands take hold of it, to inspire them dangerously.