[In the following excerpt, Blumenson presents a eulogy for Patton through the words of others.]

"I can't decide logically if I am a man of destiny or a lucky fool, but I think I am destined . . . I feel that my claim to greatness hangs on an ability to lead and inspire . . . I am a genius—/think I am. "

—November 3, 1942

If from some unearthly place George S. Patton, Jr., observed the human scene after his death, he no doubt smiled cynically. He had been removed from the post he cherished above all, command of his beloved Third Army, and banished in disgrace to the lowest depth of the dungeon. Then in a single bound he regained his fame and surpassed it. How quickly after his fall from grace had his achievements been resurrected and acclaimed!

In large measure the timing of his death determined the status accorded him. It was too soon after the war for him to be forgotten, too soon for him to spoil irretrievably the reputation he had earned. He was lucky in this too, for he had ever been alternately the hero and the goat.

After his accident had he died at once, the upsurge of emotion would probably have dissipated. He would, very likely, have shot up like a rocket and, to use his phrase, come down like a stick.

But he lingered as he fought for his life in the hospital at Heidelberg, and the sympathy swelled. The long waiting gave people pause, provided them perspective on his accomplishments, and permitted them to reconsider his importance.

Who else could have whipped the prewar army into fighting shape as he did? Or won so convincingly at Casablanca? Restored the American soldier in Tunisia? Triumphed so handsomely in Sicily? Exploded the breakthrough into the pursuit to the German border? Saved Bastogne? Who else?

Even his protest over the Occupation now seemed warranted, for after his departure from the scene, as the lines of the cold war began to be drawn, the policies changed.

Americans came to believe that Patton had been badly used. And when he died, there was a sudden and sincere grief. From all over the world came characterizations of his greatness.

"He inscribed his name in the annals of military history by bold and brilliant leadership."

"Our most gallant soldier."

"The greatest general America has known."

"The greatest soldier of this terrible war."

"The greatest general of all times."

"Essential to the nation."

"There will never be another like him."

"No man ever meant so much to me."

A staff sergeant struggling with the English language and with the unfamiliar task of setting down his thoughts, after writing a hopelessly inarticulate letter, signed his name and added quite simply, "I love him."

From London: "His personality is more firmly fixed in our minds than any other military commander of the late war, and therefore his memory will remain with us and our children for generations."

"He came to us fellows in the 12th Evac. Hospital and he told me in plain words, 'Don't you loose that leg, I need you.' But I left him down. I had to loose it. I did love him as a leader, and I believe that every man under him did."

"I will never forget the feelings of the men in my battery when, after reaching the Rhine, we were informed the division was being transferred to another Army. They were afraid the General thought they were not good enough for him."

"The fondest memory I have of the war just finished is the thought that I was a member of the Third Army. In the earliest days of the Ardennes, we green troops were fighting with desperation, and in the darkest moments of the worst hours, the news came that we were in the Third Army and that help was coming. It would have warmed your heart to see the hope that came with that simple announcement. The Third Army meant the 'old man,' and he meant hope, success, and victory . . . I feel that I am a better man because of the General, and . . . he will be a source of strength for the rest of my life."

"[He] held . . . all the lore and wisdom of America's past and stood face forward. Germany never terrified him, Russia never mystified him, the future came to him as nothing strange . . . Out of the mud of vilification a great man and soldier has arisen. It's a shame that death should have been necessary to clarify his true value and virtue."

Brigadier General B. G. Chynoweth, a friend of 37 years, to the Editor of the Washington Post:

I have never known a man more single-minded in preparing himself for battle leadership . . . He experimented with and cultivated the art of the spectacular just as earnestly and purposefully as he developed his mastery of weapons, tactics, military history, and battle psychology.

You state that "Patton the man never lived up to Patton the soldier." I fear that it was not your privilege to know Patton the man. The man who deliberately and continually courted every form of personal danger, in peace and in war, in order to crush out of his own heart any vestige of the fear which he knew to be the greatest of all enemies in war . . .

You state that he "was made for no other purpose than for war." Please let me inform you that he was also made for friendship, for kindly affection, and for sympathy with the underdog. I have never known a friend upon whom one could count more surely for disinterested help in time of trouble . .

This soldier and man has passed on, leaving in the lives of his friends and in the service of the nation a vacancy that cannot be filled except through a reflection upon his heroic example.

On Sunday, December 30, at a memorial service in the Church of Our Saviour, San Gabriel, California, Bishop W. B. Stevens said something that many had failed to notice:

General Patton was at heart a child, like most great men. His impetuousness and his occasional impatience were manifestations of a childlike character.

On the same day, the Reverend W. F. A. Stride spoke at a service of remembrance in St. John's Church, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts:

"Those whom the gods love die young." And that is applicable to George S. Patton. For he had in him a quality of intrinsic youth, despite his more than sixty years . . .

We know and have smiled over his habit of carrying two revolvers, of swearing and swashbuckling. All this flamboyance of his . . . was in fact a token of his unfaded youthfulness. And he used it all, and perhaps developed and exaggerated it . . . to be a better leader of men.

"I have never heard such singing by choir and congregation," the Reverend A. Abbott Hastings wrote Beatrice; "it was most triumphant and convincing."

On Sunday, January 20, 1946, at the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul on Mount Alban, in Washington, D.C., the George S. Patton, Jr., Tank Corps Post Number 19 of the American Legion held a memorial service. Colonel Harry H. Semmes delivered the address:

We . . . are here to lay our modest sheaf of green bay and yellow broom upon the tomb of the man who was our comrade and friend through many years . . . I see him riding the outside of a tank into battle at San Mihiel. . . He lies next to me in a cot in an evacuation hospital in a roofless church near the Argonne forest . . .

George Patton, your old comrades-in-arms and friends, both living and dead, salute you. A thousand years of unborn Americans will look down on what you have done and find it good.

The tributes continued long after his death—bills in the Congress to award him posthumously the Medal of Honor, to promote him to five-star rank, to provide a Patton national monument; measures in state legislatures to authorize suitable memorials; innumerable avenues, public squares, and buildings named for him all over the world; statues erected, plaques placed, poems written. As late as 1972, a new Patton Museum was dedicated at Fort Knox.

All this made evident the persistent and tenacious hold he exerted over the imagination.

Someone had written to Beatrice in December 1945: "Great persons never really die." And in 1972, Livorno M. Ruberto, former army mess sergeant who cooked for generals in Europe during the war, confessed, "I still can't think of Patton as being dead, a man like that. I expect to turn around and still see him standing there."

Why did his reputation continue to grow and elicit increasing respect over the years? He had become a myth and had entered into American folklore. Like Davy Crockett, he was half real, half god. An entire subculture arose about him, spreading invented and exaggerated tales of his fabulous feats and incomparable courage.

Max Lerner once wrote during the war:

I suspect that what we ask of our commanders is that they live up to the image we have formed of them—which means, I suppose, the picture we have of ourselves in their places.

Patton filled the bill. First and foremost, he conformed to one of the most persistent traits of American national character, an identification with the man of the West. From Daniel Boone to Wyatt Earp, from the Virginian to Matt Dillon, Americans cherished the self-reliant fighter handy with a gun. Two-gun Patton, wearing his .45 Long Colt Single Action revolver and his .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver in matching holsters, personified the image to perfection. In the American mind he was a throwback to the cowboy folk hero.

Hardly less important was his childlike nature. In his attitudes and appearance he seemed to be a perpetual adolescent, an eternal juvenile, rash, impetuous, boyish. "He is so very young in spirit," Codman remarked. He was

a real and literal enfant terrible—enfant. . . in his candor, intuitiveness, shrewdness, and unawareness; terrible in the intensity of his convictions, his self-discipline, and all the Spartan virtues. And a marvelous Thespian gift.

This too Americans understood and admired. He was always, no matter his age, the figure of youth.

He was also a winner, and his single-minded obession with victory thrilled and reassured Americans who had been disillusioned at the end of the last war. Triumph in World War I had slipped away and somehow been betrayed, no one quite knew how. This time, with Patton exerting the will to win, things would be different. The belief in Patton's invincibility continued long after the war was over, even when the United States became involved in southeast Asia. If only we had Patton, they said.

And so he was idealized and idolized. The characteristics he displayed to the public fitted the American preconception of the dashing military leader. He made his countrymen glad that he existed. He was unique.

"Most generals are just names-in-the-paper to most civilians," Mrs. Edgar M. Whiting of Winchester, Virginia, wrote him in April 1945, "but you seem to stand out from them as a very real and heroic person—which you are."

The postmaster of the municipality of Patton, in Cambria County, Pennsylvania—the only place so called in the United States—received thousands of letters during the war from people all over the country who asked to have a postmark of his name.

All his life he worked to attain and project the picture of the fighter. His aide Codman related that on their first morning in Normandy he knocked on the door of Patton's trailer. Pattan had just finished shaving and was standing before the mirror.

"Codman," he said, "I wish to hell I had a real fighting face."

"I should have thought it was a reasonable facsimile," Codman replied.

"No, no, no," he said impatiently, "you are either born with a fighting face or you are not. There are a lot of them in Third Army, Paddy Flint, Stiller, and many others. Having practiced for hours in front of the mirror, I can work up a fairly ferocious expression, but I have not got, and never will have, a natural-born fighting face."

The posturing and swaggering, all the things that Patton did to enhance his public image, were efficacious, and the press portrayed him, according to Codman, as "a kind of two-dimensional colored cartoon of a swash-buckling, sulfur-breathing, pearl-handled 'superman' packaged in tinsel and labeled Old Blood-and-Guts." Even the term Blood and Guts was his own coinage, struck off in the 1930s, when he described his qualifications for the post of Commandant of Cadets at West Point, an appointment he wanted and never received.

Yet "the much advertised exterior trappings—themselves quite good" were, Codman thought, relatively minor characteristics.

Once after Patton watched a group of soldiers at bayonet practice, he gave his approval but thought the men could do better. Pointing to a shredded dummy, he said,

That's a German. You don't hate him enough. You're all too gentlemanly. Just because you've been brought up not to kick your grandmother in the ass, don't think he hasn't, because he has—they all have. They are the lowest so-and-so's and so-and-so's that crawl the earth, except perhaps the Japs, but we won't have to worry about them until next year. For the present just keep hating Germans. They are — — and damn fine soldiers. Get mad and keep mad all the time. After all, your outfit comes from a part of the country that has produced fighters.

Where did the outfit come from? Codman later asked.

"I haven't the slightest idea," Patton said. "That was just Speech Thirty-three."

The language was fine and in character, but the admission at the end indicated his occasional boredom with the role of the tough guy he had assumed.

One night when Patton was unable to sleep, he wrote to Dr. P. P. Johnson of Beverly, who had saved his life in the 1930's. In the course of his rather long letter, he described the landscape in North Africa to the doctor who was an amateur photographer.

Next to Hawaii, this is the most vividly colored country I have ever seen. In flying over it the contrasts between the vivid greens of the grass fields and the bright red of the plow fields is almost startling. Then, too, at this time of the year, the almond trees add a touch of almost fairy-like loveliness to the whole scene.

Patton then went on to say: "This sounds like very poor writing for a soldier, so I will change." It was unseemly to him for a fighter to have thoughts so unmasculine as those. So he continued in a vein he believed to be more representative of the fighting spirit, better barracks talk.

The other day, I went on a pig hunt with a gentleman called "The Glaoui," who rules some 3,000,000 other gentlemen of color in this vicinity. He is sixty-eight years old and still supports four wives and twenty concubines with considerable success . . .

On the hunt upon which he took me and on which we killed 14 wild boar . . . we passed over about a hundred miles of country where he had fought as a young man . . . One place he showed me an olive orchard where, as the results of his efforts, the dead were so thick the jackals got sick.

This was much more like the warrior he was supposed to be.

Patton's cousin and boyhood friend, Arvin H. Brown, once wrote to him:

Your poem, A Soldier's Burial, is a beautiful thing. It reflects the depth of your feeling and understanding, that you so often try to conceal by a studied pretence of being something other than your own great self—or so it seems to me.

He yearned to be tough and made himself so against his inner reality. That long struggle had its costs. Not only did he succeed in making himself a caricature of the image he wished to project, an exaggerated version of what he aspired to be, but in the process he came close to killing the gentle soul within himself. Toward the end of his life, little remained except the violence. He was emotionally drained by the lifelong struggle to make himself into something fundamentally alien to his being.

If Patton had, as doctors later suspected, a subdural haematoma, a phenomenon that exerts subtle physiological changes affecting personality, temperament, outlook, and behavior, he probably also benefited from it, for it produced on occasion a hardness of attitude, a coldness of spirit, a ruthlessness of will. Aside from his mastery of the military skills of his time, Patton's unique strengths—his driving energy, unconquerable will power, obsession to attack—were, in some part at least, probably attributable to his likely medical condition.

His insatiable ambition contributed. Always an overachiever, he overextended his physical, mental, and emotional capacities. In the relaxation that came with the end of the war in Europe, he felt that few appreciated his accomplishments. Bitterness, resentment, and jealousy marred the latter months of his life. This was in part a consequence of the waning of his own powers and, as Father Stride noted, "the disillusion and reaction that follow a supreme effort."

Ultimately Patton came close to collapse because of his internal dilemma. He loved the solitary pursuits rather than team play, and he could take part in polo and in war only by putting on an ardor, recklessness, and brutality that were fundamentally false to him. His profanity on the polo field was legendary, but it took that to make him play.

In the end he paid a price. His inner turmoil eventually distorted his balance and his view of the world. Thus, a strange and fulminating Patton emerged during the Occupation, a disturbed and at times near-paranoid man who was dreadful in the private thoughts he committed to paper.

Why did he drive himself with such unflagging intensity? Apart from those impulses from the recesses of his libido, some of the pressures no doubt originated in his childhood and came from his parents, who overwhelmed him with love but also with subtle yet iron expectations of his future. His father's letters, overflowing with devotion, irresistibly urged him to conquer himself and the world.

Patton probably suffered in his childhood from a mild form of dyslexia, a reading disability that transposed letters of words and accounted for his erratic spelling. No doubt for that reason he stayed home longer than most children, went to school only when he was eleven years old. During his preschool years, his father read to him, taught him numbers, and inculcated in him a sense of history and a love of literature. And perhaps Mr. Patton compensated for his own feelings of inadequacy—after all, what had he done compared to his own father, the first George Smith Patton, who fought and died gloriously in the Civil War?—by planting in his son the seeds of obligation to perform and excel, to be great in the mold of the classical heroes of antiquity.

Thus Codman could note about Patton:

His standards, values, and preoccupations antedate the technique of present-day publicity. For what seems to have escaped most contemporary journalists is the fact that General Patton is not a contemporary figure.

To be sure, he has contributed to the science of warfare professional proficiency of the highest modern order. More significant, however . . . he brings to the art of command in this day and age the norms and antique virtues of the classic warrior. To him the concepts of duty, patriotism, fame, honor, glory are not mere abstractions, nor the shopworn ingredients of Memorial Day speeches. They are basic realities—self-evident, controlling . . . In the time of Roger the Norman or in ancient Rome, General Patton would have felt completely at home.

Sitting in his father's lap and listening to his father declaim Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Patton learned the ancient and noble virtues. These he was brought up with, and these he had to live up to. Nor did he escape when he went off to college. The brooding presence of anticipated glory on the part of his family during his early boyhood accompanied him. Throughout most of the time he was at VMI and West Point, Aunt Nannie or Mama was staying, boarding, nearby.

His failure at the end of his first year at West Point only stung him to greater effort. Forty years later Fletcher still remembered "that disconsolate caydet"—Patton—"crushed by the news of being turned back; and I can feel again my sympathy and sorrow for the sensitive spirit so rebuffed."

Patton gritted his teeth and determined to show them that he was and could be, in fact as well as in fantasy, better than they. The notion that he was destined to be great, implanted at an early age, had to come true or his life would be meaningless and a disappointment to those who loved him. So he became the unconscious extension of their desires and unknowingly a victim of their innocent pressures.

He thus forced himself into an image that became second nature and was nevertheless false to his basic disposition.

It was exactly that which tickled the fancy of the public. Behind the supposedly perfect exterior, everyone suspected there was more. As Harold V. Boyle said, the public was familiar with the dominating figure with the high-pitched voice who used profane language unmatched anywhere in the army. This blood-and-guts figure was presented to the world with tongue in cheek, while he tried to conceal the military scholar, philosopher, and poet.

"What kind of man was George?" Hazen H. Ayer asked: he was tough, demanding, and rough, frequently unreasonable, often emotional, sometimes volatile and capricious. Critical, he was more than sensitive to criticism. He was vain, even childish. Yet so thoroughly was he an actor that one never knew for certain whether a statement or an act was genuine or for effect. The revolvers and helmet were trademarks and part of the show. But under that brash exterior was a soft-hearted, sensitive man, a profound student of history, an intelligent mind, a dedicated professional soldier, brave, generous, and religious.

If indeed he bore a cross passed to him by his parents, he carried another in the form of his marriage to a rich, talented, and adoring woman. She devoted her life to him. Until her death in 1953, when she fell from a horse as the result of an aneurysm, she nourished and enhanced his career and his legend, supporting him in private as in public, collecting his papers, lecturing on his achievements.

Precisely because she did all this, he was impelled to excellence. He had to prove that she had been right to marry him, right to overcome her father's initial reluctance to let her give up her mansions for army quarters. He had even to show that he was as good as her father, a great captain of industry who had amassed enormous wealth and power by his own endeavors.

This too drove him to dreams of personal glory. His complete conformity to the system—he was never a rebel—argued for his thorough identification with his country and its armed forces. Honor, duty, country in the West Point motto were more than words to him, and patriotism, as Codman noted, was more than an abstraction.

As a matter of fact, Patton was an incurable Romantic in the nineteenth-century sense, and therefore a figure out of the past. Despite his love for the heroes of antiquity, his immersion in the sentimental chivalry of Walter Scott—what Codman called "the straight moyen-age quality which permeates every thought and action"—he was more truly imbedded in Kipling, in the historical period between the French Revolution and the atomic bomb, when nations using citizen soldiers fought total wars for total victories.

Napoleon was the first of the great national leaders. Born in Corsica on the fringe of metropolitan France, rising to power through his own efforts, he dominated his contemporaries. A dashing, charismatic leader, he was an individual, never a team player submerging his personal aspirations in favor of the organization. He used the new conditions of his time, applied them to the art of war, and crushed his enemies on the battlefield. As emperor he personified France, a solitary figure at the head of the nation which fought the impersonal coalition of states under Britain. He was defeated only when he met Wellington who was endowed with much the same Romantic qualities of leadership.

It was no accident that Patton sought to emulate Napoleon, adopted his aphorisms of warfare, and tried, like Napoleon, to gain total victory. Born in the far west, in California, rising to prominence through his own sustained efforts, Patton stood out from his contemporaries. He was always an individual, frustrated by the exigencies of team play, and he came to embody the colorful, charismatic qualities of the lonely leader. He too became the hero figure, the Romantic Geist, the superman, the splendid soldier who single-handedly conquered.

The era of warfare inaugurated by Napoleon came to an end with Patton. He was the last of the Romantic warriors. He was the final nineteenth-century figure in military history.

If he had a single overriding disappointment, it was his failure to attain political preferment like Napoleon, to grasp political power as an adjunct of military success. Early in his life Patton spoke of winning in war so that a grateful people would elevate him to dictatorship. In his later years he realized, although he was at a loss to explain it, his unsuitability for a political post. He was aware of vague deficiencies on his part that made high public office unlikely for him. He understood that Eisenhower was more in tune with the times and had a much better chance to be catapulted from the military to the Presidency.

Younger than Patton, charismatic in his own right, Eisenhower grasped the passing of the old order, recognized the Tightness of his role as supreme manager of a coalition effort. Unlike Patton and MacArthur, who represented the earlier tradition of Pershing, Eisenhower personified the new type of leadership required in the twentieth century.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Army War College course of instruction followed the Pershing precept. Pershing had resisted adamantly what he saw as attempts on the part of his allies to submerge American aspirations and interests. And his message to those who followed him was: for God's sake, don't fight alongside allies.

Ironically, in World War II the United States found itself a member of a coalition, a partnership that sometimes required America to put aside temporarily its own national aims in the greater interest of winning the war and, it was hoped, the peace.

Eisenhower was brought up in the same Pershing outlook, yet was flexible enough to understand that it was outmoded; he accommodated to the new conditions. Patton, like MacArthur, resented the need for a new tradition in World War II. Eisenhower, Patton felt, always overcooperated with the British, but MacArthur never even tried—his headquarters in the Pacific was thoroughly an American organization in the older fashion.

It was significant, but no accident, that a group of younger commanders came to outrank Patton. Eisenhower, Bradley, Clark, Handy, all received four stars before he did.

Yet Patton emerged supreme, not in the manner of Marshall who put his stamp on the strategy and conduct of the global struggle; not like Eisenhower who superbly managed coalition forces; nor like Bradley who was balanced and calm in his management of American forces; nor like Stilwell who gained the sympathy of his countrymen because his mission was doomed from the start; not like Clark who became enmeshed in and associated with a secondary theater; and certainly not like MacArthur who remained an austere and awesome figure, somewhat remote and appearing sometimes to be hardly human.

Among Americans, Patton probably most resembled Admiral William Halsey, who was impetuous, colorful, and difficult to keep in check.

Among his contemporaries, Patton probably came closest to Rommel, who led his troops in combat and shared their dangers and who in the end seemed to repudiate Hitler, not because the Fuehrer was evil but because he was losing the war.

Patton sought instruction from Alexander the Great, Scipio, Caesar, Saxe, Murat, and a host of others, but most of all from Napoleon. Like Nathanael Greene in his military intuition, like Winfield Scott in his flamboyance, like Sherman in his tenacious focus on the objective, like Grant in his stubborn dedication to fighting, Patton once said:

It seems to me that the hardest thing a general has to do is to make up his mind and then be undeterred from the accomplishment of his fixed purpose by any gruesome rumors that less stouthearted people thrust upon him.

He modeled himself on Pershing, who always remained in his mind his principal mentor. In appearance and manner, in his insistence on discipline, in his method of judging individual and unit performance, in his expectations of loyalty, he tried to be like Pershing. Harbord, Hines, Summerall, and Malin Craig were also his teachers, and Fox Conner, Paul Malone, and André Brewster contributed to his formation as a military man.

Like Pershing, Patton was a cavalryman in his military origins. He believed fiercely in the mobility that characterized the operations of this branch of service. He used the tank in both World Wars like the horse, stressing reconnaissance and movement, the envelopment and the pursuit, all based on the advantage of speed.

But he went beyond. In the Second World War he admitted the efficacy of other virtues. He adopted the concentrated strength of fire provided by the artillery, the capacity for sustained action provided by the infantry, and the wide-ranging, yet close support provided by airplanes. He fused these combat arms—armor, motorized infantry, self-propelled artillery, and tactical air—into a fighting organization that fundamentally incorporated the mobility of the cavalry. Swift, surprising thrusts and long, lightning strikes, reinforced and backed by power, became his battlefield trademark.

In conception this was no more than the blitzkrieg instrument fashioned by the Germans. Yet no one used this combination more effectively than Patton. What enabled him to do so was his proficiency in handling large units. He had schooled himself to a thorough knowledge of the elements of war.

Quite apart from his understanding of soldiers, he knew intimately the weapons and equipment at his disposal, what they could do and how they were best employed. He estimated terrain and area, distances and roadnets at a glance. He could place in his mind's eye without effort the ground accommodations needed by troop units. He could tell whether troops were well trained and ready for combat. The sureness with which he, grasped a tactical situation and the deftness with which he moved to handle it were like a fine surgeon's diagnostic perception and instant action.

Yet he fumed too over shortages of men and materiel that plagued him in Europe. It was inconceivable to him that in a war largely determined by logistics, the greatest industrial nation in the world had to deny him the necessary means—gasoline and ammunition, as well as manpower—to triumph rapidly.

He was a doer rather than a thinker. Although he devoted much thought to his profession, he was a field soldier, a man of execution. He delighted in the work of training, practicing, and perfecting troop units and formations. He loved to employ all that was available to him in a practical manner for concrete results. A craftsman, an artisan, he shaped his materials superbly to his tasks and to the exigencies of an ever-shifting battle scene. He refined and improved processes and methods, adapted and fashioned doctrine, but contributed nothing to military theory or philosophy. He was a tactician rather than a strategist, and he was interested always in the immediate problem at hand.

If he was somewhat cavalier about the details of what the engineers or signalmen were up to, he could be so because he was always attuned to the qualifications of his subordinates. A large part of his success in the exercise of command came from judging constantly, if subconsciously, the performance of those under him. He was an expert evaluator of individuals—his corps commanders, his staff officers, all who served him. If on occasion he tolerated mediocrity, it was because, pragmatically, he had no other choice. Or because he felt that he could inspire the mediocre to perform above their capacities.

To everything and everyone he touched, he imparted his burning impatience to attack, his blazing desire to overwhelm the enemy. This was the essence of his generalship, and all that he did in study and preparation was for the supreme moment of meeting. Then his drive and his will, as well as his sixth sense of anticipation, triggered a near-faultless implementation of what his imagination and his mastery of the art of war had projected.

What Patton had above all as a military leader was, in Devers' words, "that power to make soldiers follow him anywhere." It was already manifest in the First World War, and it became legendary in the Second.

According to Codman:

I have seen or heard of none . . . who can even remotely compare with General Patton in respect to his uncanny gift for sweeping men into doing things which they do not believe they are capable of doing, which they do not really want to do, and which, in fact, they would not do, unless directly exposed to the personality, the genius . . . of this unique soldier who not only knows his extraordinary job but loves it. Here in France, as in Sicily, an entire Army, from corps commander to rifleman, is galvanized into action by the dynamism of one man.

That was the essential quality of his greatness. And everyone had his own personal testimony on how Patton did it.

Hal C. Pattison:

1 well remember the day at Arracourt in September 1944, when the German attacks started against us, and we of CCA [4th Armored Division] were in a nip and tuck situation. For at least six hours that day the Army Commander was there, not interfering, just there "to hearten the driver."

William H. Wolfe: "When I left your organization, I left something behind I've never been able to replace."

John M. Devine:

Like everybody else who has served under you, I feel that working for you is enough of a reward in itself. To get a citation . . . from you is almost too much. Whether or not I get the medal is immaterial.

Codman:

I know of no one living who equals the boss in one respect, namely, as regards that amazing capacity for instant Tightness and lucid anger. It's a rare and invaluable quality . . . You can't fake it. You either have it or you haven't.

Master Sergeant John L. Mims, Patton's personal driver from September 1940 to May 1945, marveled at the alternating periods of commotion and calm. He knew well the intensity of Patton's anger. How anyone could raise so much hell and then be so nice immediately afterward remained a mystery to Mims, and he wondered whether Patton rehearsed the screaming in order to have his troops more scared of him than of the enemy.

What endeared Patton to his men above all, Mims thought, was that he was fair and square. If he made a mistake or if he discovered that he had treated someone unjustly, he apologized—no matter what the man's rank or station. Patton never used his stars to cover his errors.

His flair endowed the frequent monotony and discomfort of military duties with excitement, glamour, and magic. Major General I. D. White, in command of the 2d Armored Division in the latter part of the war, wrote:

The training which the division received and the esprit which was built up in it while under your command has endured and will continue as long as it remains a unit. Over half of us have been with the division since its days at Benning, and you may be sure that the maneuvers, the parades, and the other events of those times bulk as large in our memory as do our travels and campaigns since coming overseas. They are a proud part of the division history, and every new man learns of Louisiana, Carolina, Benning, and the Pee Dee [River] as quickly as he learns of Morocco, Sicily, the St. Lô break-through, and the Siegfried Line.

Brigadier Charles Dunphie joined the II Corps in Tunisia as assistant chief of staff and liaison officer between Alexander's and Patton's headquarters. "My first meeting with Patton," he recalled,

on arrival, was typical. He said that so far he'd only met one British officer that he really liked, and he wasn't wholly British, but that he hoped I would change his views; that I had his full authority as a member of the staff to "call anyone a son of a bitch" if I wanted. I became very fond of him indeed, and I know that it was mutual . . .

He was, of course, a born leader, a great personality, and surprisingly, a very tender hearted man . . .

Although he gave his chief of staff and me the shortest orders I've ever heard on which to work out a plan, he gave out the plan superbly well at a conference and answered all the questions.

I have no doubt that he personally made II Corps into a first-class formation in an amazingly short time.

He was in all respects an extraordinary man, Betty South found. The captain of the Red Cross Clubmobile crew of about 25 girls attached to the Third Army headquarters, she recorded her impressions of Patton as follows:

I looked at the great Third Army field commander proposing the toast. His magnificent, tall figure . . . excited my admiration, but I was surprised at the thin, high-pitched voice that so poorly matched his striking looks and impressive bearing. The brick-red face, with its round, receding forehead sparsely framed by silvery-white hair, magnetized me chiefly because of the eyes. For in those blue eyes there was an intensity that burned with whitehot heat. There was arrogance unspeakable there, authority unrelinquished even to his superior officer, the Supreme Allied Commander, whom he was toasting.

In the depth of those eyes there was breath-taking boldness, utter fearlessness, naked daring, headlong defiance, proud contempt. Sparks of haughty aloofness, rude scornfulness, indomitable willfulness flew from his eyes to sear all about him in the room. Stark egotism and love of glory leapt out from behind the thin lashes, mixed with the immeasurable assurance and unshaken confidence in his own ability that unceasing hard work, personal fortune, and social position bestowed upon him. Belief in himself, proved by his superb feats of generalship, was supreme in George Patton's eyes. While he was speaking, his eyes were keen and shrewd, so telescopic it required no small amount of courage to stand his gaze. The tremendous surge of vitality and life that came from him exhilarated everyone present.

Yet. . . while we were still in the drawing room, I had furtively watched this great general, fascinated to be so near him, and I saw a tired, aging man, a sorrowful, solitary man, a lonely man, with veiled eyes behind which there was going on a torment of brooding and introspection. I saw a showman, aware of the necessity of drama. That General Patton battled with many different conceptions of himself I was sure.

And then when I met him and had my turn of conversation with him, I sensed the sandy, shallow places of his being, as well as the stormy depths. I tried earnestly to grasp the meaning of a man who could knock the camera from the hands of an accredited reporter and kick it to pieces, and the man who had picked up a GI in his arms and wept over him because he had fallen from a pole while doing his job of stringing wire to the general's mobile war van.

I was not altogether successful in keeping my poise as I watched the general's gentle, twinkling eyes, full of infectious humor when something amused him, change abruptly to flashing, angry blazes at something else which displeased him, and back again as quickly to frank, guileless, simple honesty. His agility in leaping back and forth between vulgar and shocking profanity and cultured, gentlemanly speech bewildered me. I was particularly hardpressed to know what to do or say when he turned tearful eyes to me and spoke about God and prayer.

That evening at Patton's house in Luxembourg City, where Eisenhower was a guest, Betty South found Patton's conversation "a marvelous display of tact, diplomacy, and flattery."

When Eisenhower said he was surprised to learn that American troops were disappointed because he was unable to review their unit and had to cancel the scheduled inspection, he added, "Hell, George, I didn't think the American GI would give a damn even if the Lord Himself came to inspect them."

Patton immediately replied, "Well, I hesitate to say which of you would rank, sir."

All the Red Cross girls at the headquarters were close to Patton because his niece Jean Gordon was a member of the group.

The age of Patton's younger daughter and the child of Mrs. Patton's half sister, who was an invalid, Jean Gordon had lost her father at an early age and spent many of her school vacations with the Pattons. She was a bridesmaid in the weddings of both Patton girls.

Betty South said,

Jean was a lovely young woman of great charm, intelligence, and sensitivity. I think it was a happiness for General Patton to have a member of the family with him. She understood and loved him. Although she was modest and unassuming, she had the same background of wealth, social position, and culture, as he did . . . She spoke fluent French and they often spoke it together. At home in any situation, she graced his table when he entertained important guests. She had a delightful sense of humor and was as witty as he was, and as interested in as many things, including horses, sailing, and history.

In the rather austere and lonely life he led during the war, she was a bright, warm touch, a feminine touch I am sure he needed and appreciated . . .

Our work of driving the doughnut and coffee trucks to Third Army units in combat was hard, rough, and dirty. General Patton's dinners were enjoyable affairs for us, a bit of glamor and elegance, excitement. . . We dressed in our Class A uniforms, wore white gloves, white scarves, dress pumps, and perfume (which he liked very much).

"Don't worry about Jean," Patton wrote to Beatrice in some exasperation on March 31, 1945. "I wrote you months ago that she was in this Army . . . I have seen her in the company of other Red Cross [girls], but I am not a fool, so quit worrying."

The girls had Patton to dinner several times—in Nancy, Luxembourg City, and on the shores of Tegernsee not far from Bad Tolz. Jean Gordon invariably called him "Uncle Georgie," but no one else dared.

According to Betty South:

He was always easy with us, affable, charming, gracious, humorous, and witty, and friendly. He teased the girls about their various love-affairs. We respected and admired him and liked him. But we never forgot who he was. This was the result, I think, of two things: the general's own sense of dignity and decorum, and the fact that we were just a little bit afraid of him . . .

We were cautious with him. We seldom saw the vulgar, tough aspect of the general, but we knew the famous temper (even experienced it a few times), and the aristocratic arrogance and disdainful manner in which he could behave, also the quick tongue that could cut you to pieces . . .

His great ego sometimes repelled us but more often it amused us, for he was like a little boy boasting. However, we were never sure whether it was safe to laugh. Sometimes he purposely said or did things to confuse us, and we were uncertain as to whether we should agree with him, be impressed, or laugh

He was no "palsy-walsy" type of older man chucking the Red Cross girls under the chin or pinching our fannies. He was first, last, and always General Patton . . .

The thing I liked best about him was his wonderful sense of humor, his great wit. He could laugh at himself and make all of us laugh. The thing I liked least was the arrogance . . . He was such a fine man and so accomplished, and was so often gentlemanly, gracious, warm-hearted and kind, that I was disappointed to find that streak of snobbishness and arrogance in him.

Once after dinner, they persuaded him to sing.

To hear General Patton sing "Lily from Picadilly" was a treat no Broadway first-nighter ever has had. He beat time with the finger on which he wore a coiled-snake ring, and composed his own lyrics which Tin Pan Alley probably would have found unusable. At these moments he was a very lovable elderly gentleman.

He could and did recite poetry by the hour, with exuberance or sadness, real or faked, not usually his own lines but rather those of the masters. Very often he embodied the charm and the humor of a lyric—perhaps of his own composition—that he had sent to some senior members of Pershing's headquarters in 1918:

You never can tell about a woman,
Perhaps that's why you think they are so nice
You never see two alike at any one time
And you never see one alike twice.

You are never very certain that they love you
You are often very certain that they don't,
For a man may argue still that he has the strongest will
But a woman has the strongest won't.

After the war was over, the girls became even more a part of his entourage. When Codman wrote to Patton in September 1945, he closed with: "Very best to yourself and to Gen. Gay, George [Murnane], Francis [Graves, his new aide]—in fact the whole household—not forgetting Sgt. Meeks, the ladies of the Croix Rouge, and Willie."

Betty South returned to the United States in October, Jean Gordon a month later. When Betty learned of Patton's death, she telephoned Jean to express her sorrow. Jean said, "I think it is better this way for Uncle Georgie. There is no place for him any more, and he would have been unhappy with nothing to do."

Jean took her own life in New York early in January 1946, little more than two weeks after Patton died. Some thought she did so in despair over her uncle's demise. Others believed she was hopelessly in love with a young married officer.

Whatever she had been to Patton before the war, during the conflict, and afterward, she helped to sustain and support him. Immediately after the war was over, when he had apparently achieved his destiny, and had no place to go in the army, he needed all the help he could get.

He wanted recognition and honors, applause and adulation, awards and decoration. He wanted to go fishing, hunting, to visit the commands, take part in ceremonies and reviews, to relax and enjoy himself. He felt he had earned all the tributes. Emotionally, mentally, and physically tired by his supreme effort during the war, as well as by the continual struggle with himself, he was on the verge of collapse. He was all used up, and his self-control was about to crack and come apart.

And instead of getting the things he wanted in the aftermath of the war, he entered a world he never understood, a place of continuing problems that refused to stand still and give him what he desired—comfort, a sense of well-being, contemplation of his successes, conversation with old friends.

During the immediate postwar months of the Occupation, he could see that transportation was restored, that water was available again, that sanitation was practiced, that food was distributed, that heat was provided, that housing was rehabilitated. But the subtle nuances of political dialogue were beyond him. What did he care about German political parties? Why couldn't everyone forget the war and Nazism, and settle down to building a Germany that resembled his conception of America?

The older and simpler precepts that applied to an innocent America in his early California years shaped his view of the cosmos and society. His outlook was essentially white and Protestant, and he saw no reason why the virtues of that ethic should not apply universally, even in Bavaria.

The world was supposed to be an ordered entity, where class, wealth, and breeding conferred special privileges automatically on certain favored individuals. As for the rest, so long as everyone was dignified, clean, neat, and did his job well, he was entitled to respect—like Sergeants Mims and Meeks, one white, the other black.

But the times had changed, and he was an anachronism.

Although combat soldiers usually shield their wives from knowledge of the dangers they face, Patton constantly noted—in his diary and in his letters to his wife—his brushes with death, the close calls, the falling of a shell nearby, the near accident. Was he boasting that he disdained the safety of a rear-echelon headquarters? Probably to some extent. His preoccupation with death was no doubt a manifestation of his childishness. But, more important, he was always searching for evidence of his destiny, marking, as it were, his viability. Would fate permit him to attain the destiny he hoped awaited him?

In the end he missed the top rank of five stars. He was never a field marshal or a general of the armies, like Marshall, MacArthur, and Eisenhower during the war, like Bradley who was promoted in 1950 after serving as U.S. Army Chief of Staff and then as the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

But he gained something more than that, far more important to him—enduring fame as a fighter. Like Horatio Nelson, he was a hero in the grand manner.

Undoubtedly, as I. D. White remarked, he loved war. But not the death and destruction. The concentration camps and the ruined cities sickened him, and the losses of his soldiers hurt him. Even the bodies of the enemy, no longer an abstraction of warfare, saddened him.

He loved the excitement of war, the responsibility of war, the prerogatives of his position, and, most of all, the opportunity that war presented to use the skill, leadership, and courage required by his profession—in the same way that a surgeon loves his calling but not the disease, illness, and injury he treats.

"All his life," Codman said,

General Patton has been obsessed with an almost neurotic aversion to suffering and cruelty in any and every form. It is this quality—so difficult, nay, impossible to square with the business of war making—which sheds light upon some of the contradictions . . . of the General's character . . .

When you come right down to it who, other than the enemy, is scared of him? Not his staff, nor his household, nor his drivers and orderlies. Not his dog, at whom in public he thunders and in private croons a kind of baby talk. Not the exhausted division commander whom the general has brought back to his own quarters, patted on the back, put to bed, and, a day or two later, sent off refreshed, rejuvenated, re-charged . . . Certainly not the tanker or the rifleman up front to whom the name of Patton means the captain of the winning team, a captain who demands much, but nothing that he himself has not done or is not prepared to do. No, other than the congenital shirker, the phony, and the misfit, I can think of no one under his command who has reason to be unduly scared of the General. His gift for leadership is based not on fear but rather upon a dynamism of total dedication and communicable humanity . . .

I have never heard the General tell a really sacrilegious or dirty story or encourage the telling of one. Alcoholic intake? Except on very rare occasions, an average of one whiskey-and-water before the evening meal, and possibly (when and if available) a glass of wine with it. The fair sex? Any serious interest on the General's part in any woman other than the members of his own family would be news to me.

A thoroughbred, Patton was high-strung. He often lost his temper but never harbored a vicious grudge and was immediately sorry for an unseemly outburst and more than willing to make amends. A bundle of conflicting tensions, he was always somewhat of a mystery. Whatever the paradoxes that surrounded him and were part of him, whether accidental or of his own making, there was one unresolved problem—as Codman said, "the reconciliation of the fighting soldier and the gentle man."

Most historic figures had a single great moment when they achieved what no one else was capable of.

Patton had several such moments, and thereby made himself indispensable to the Allied victory in World War II. No one else could have done so well, if at all, what he did during the training period in the United States, during the landings near Casablanca, during the aftermath of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, during the invasion of Sicily and the subsequent drive to Messina, during the weeks when he catapulted the breakthrough in Normandy into the breakout and pursuit to the German border, during the days when he turned his Army toward Bastogne.

Those were his great moments, and they demonstrated his military genius. They would have been impossible without the force of the man himself. That is the legend of Patton.