The Star Halfback

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Last week SHAEF correspondents were telling another anecdote about unpredictable Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. An Allied officer had asked Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower where in Germany Patton might be. "Ike's" reply: "Hell. I don't know. I haven't heard from him for three hours."

George Patton was sitting in his headquarters van, his high-polished cavalry boots cocked on the glass top of his desk, his long-fingered hands relaxed in his lap. He listened now & then over his command radio to battle reports. They were good. His tankmen were rampaging around, deep in Germany, on the loose and on the prowl, raiding and rolling on. Patton could turn off the radio and turn on one of his favorite topics of conversation: the Civil War battle of Fredericksburg. Willie, the General's white bull terrier, snuffed sleepily on the rug.

Where General Patton might be in the next three hours he himself did not know. If Patton got a hunch--and Ike Eisenhower gave him the green light--he might peel off with a tank column for Berlin, or Leipzig or Berchtesgaden, at a moment's notice. If Patton's wildest dream came true, he would find Adolf Hitler in a German tank and slug it out with him. But for the moment, dreams aside, Patton had reason for calm and happy reflection. He was having the time of his action-choked, 40-year Army career.

His armor-heavy Third Army was performing brilliantly all the tricks he had worked hard to teach it. Some of Patton's men were fighting in Kassel, the important road-junction point of central Germany. They were less than 180 miles from Berlin. Patton had already come that many miles, in less than seven weeks--through thick fighting and across the Rhine. His 4th Armored Division was busily engaged in its specialty: spearheading a typical Patton flanking movement. One of its miles-long columns was only 152 miles from Berlin.

Fire and Movement. Patton's tankmen were carrying out his prime rule of battle: fire and movement. If they were stopped they did not dig in. They moved around the obstacle and kept firing. Back of them Patton's armored infantry units were sweeping up cities such as Frankfurt am Main and Wiesbaden, gathering a rich bag of prisoners--one day more than 8,000, another probably 10,000. That pleased Patton: he is proud that his Third Army has captured more Germans than any other U.S. outfit in this drive. Casualty reports were coming, and they were low; Patton is proud of his Army's small percentage of killed and wounded. The reports on ground taken and held came in--one day: 950 square miles of Germany. That made the total 8,790 square miles, more than any other U.S. Army had fenced in.

The Germans seemed to be scattering before Patton's attacks. They had reason to fear him. He had consistently out-slicked them, mauled them, beaten them. The Germans had always put more men and guns opposite Patton's outfits. Now there were fewer German men and guns. One reason: Patton's Third and Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch's Seventh Army had rung up one of the big victories of the war in the Saar-Palatinate cleanup, had removed more than 150,000 Germans who might now be blocking Patton's path.

Now Patton was playing his favorite role. He was the swift, slashing halfback of Coach Eisenhower's team. His quarterback, General Omar N. Bradley, had set up a climax play and had called Patton's signal. Halfback Patton had had superb blocking from Lieut. General Courtney Hicks Hodges' First Army. Now the star open-field runner was ripping into the secondary defense.

Basically it was the same play on which Patton had sped to a touchdown in the Battle of France, after the First Army had opened up a hole for him in the Saint-Lo breakthrough. There, as at the Rhine, it had been Quarterback Bradley's precise timing and teamwork that had shaken Patton loose to do his spectacular stuff. Now, as he had after Saint-Lo, it was Halfback Patton who captured the headlines. He was definitely in nomination for Public Hero No. 1 of the war in Europe.

Speed & Daring. George Smith Patton Jr., third in three generations to bear the name,* is fast becoming a legend. The U.S. public, always more interested in the ballcarrier than in the blockers who open a hole for him, liked Patton's flourishes, his flamboyance, his victories.

The Patton legend extends into other armies. There are "Patton men" in the U.S. First, Seventh, Ninth and Fifteenth Armies, who believe Patton's aggressive spirit and swift movement should set the tone and pace for all U.S. arms. Some try to imitate him. Keener appraisers do not undervalue Patton's fiery leadership, his dash and imagination as an army commander. But they believe that George Patton is in exactly the right job now, running his army at the front rather than a team of armies from group headquarters.

The reserve British regard Patton's elan and peacock-strutting brilliance as "great style," even compare him with his colorful antithesis--cautious Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery. The French, Dutch, Belgians regard Patton with vast confidence. Even the Germans help to glorify him. Some enemy officers & men consider it more honorable to have had to surrender to "Bloody" Patton's Third Army.

Long forgotten by Europeans and by most U.S. soldiers in Europe is that emotional storm of 19 months ago in which Patton literally gave the back of his hand to a soldier sitting on a hospital cot. The U.S. has not forgotten the episode--but it has begun to misremember it, to transmute it into the Patton legend. The U.S. newspaper with the largest circulation--the tabloid New York Daily News--a few weeks ago editorially referred to him as "Patton, who . . . slapped a soldier . . . for going in the wrong direction from the front."

In slim, big-chested Patton, hero-worshiping Americans had a candidate to fit the mass idea of what a Hero General should be--the colorful swashbuckler, the wild-riding charger, the hell-for-leather Man of Action, above all the Winner.

Out of the Past. Cavalryman Patton gallops along in a tradition of military men Americans have always cheered--Phil Sheridan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, James Elwell Brown Stuart, the men who used their cavalry as Patton uses his armor, like a saber. Patton is a modern version of Jeb Stuart's scout and raider: Confederate Colonel John Singleton Mosby.

The resemblance between Pistol-Packing Patton of the lacquered helmet and Two-Gun Mosby (see cut), who rode to battle in a scarlet-lined cape, with a brilliant plume in his campaign hat, is no mere coincidence. Colonel Mosby lived until 1916. He was a friend of Patton's father, whose own father had died with his Confederate boots on in the Battle of Cedar Creek. Colonel Mosby was the boyhood idol of George Patton, who made up his mind at age seven that he was going to be a U.S. Army officer.

The resemblance between Patton the ardent athlete, the nimble fencer, the expert horseman and Patton the hard-cussing, harddriving, hard-working maker of war is also more than coincidental. Patton the Man and Patton the General are inextricably the same.

George Patton, individual, can be engagingly attractive--urbane, almost courtly in manner, quiet in speech. Reputedly one of the Regular Army's wealthiest officers, he has a high social polish. He and his wife, Beatrice Ayer Patton, both have ample means, and in peacetime enjoy social life at their California ranch and handsome farm at Hamilton, Mass. In moments of ease Patton mixes a heady conversational cocktail of military erudition that might range from the 6th Century B.C. precepts of Sun Tzu to the tactics by which George Patton took the citadel at Metz.

George Patton, General, is a dazzling mixture. The oldest field commander of any Allied army in Europe (he will be 60 next Armistice Day), Patton is still tigerish in action. On the field he shouts orders in a high-pitched voice. He can rawhide a private or a lesser general with a flow of profanity that is perhaps the richest in all the hard-swearing U.S. armies. A moment later he can be gently lifting a wounded man from a tank, calming him with soothing words.

Drama and Corn. Patton the General is also Patton the Actor. Showmanship is instinctive in him. Like all practiced actors he can manage a deft touch of corn or a flight of oratory. He fits his act to his audience's mood. Example : his greeting to a Negro battalion arriving at his battle front--"I don't give a damn what color you are so long as you get out there and kill those sons of bitches in the green suits."

Patton's sense of the dramatic is coupled with a sound sense of battle. The Gen eral's troops may be hopped up to believe they can make their way to the Russian front in two quick jumps, but Patton does not fool himself. There is no more enthusiastic and optimistic battle planner, but as the action develops, he is quick to see what he can and cannot do. His advanced forces get their noses bloodied now & then, but they do not get them cut off.

Day & Night. Impatient of routine and red tape, Patton habitually asks and gets the impossible from his supply men. During the winter bog-down on the Saar front, the Third's tanks floundered in the greasy mud. Someone recommended "duck bills"--metal flanges to be welded to tank treads to give them wider grip. Patton tried to get them, "through channels," and finally got 168 duck bills-- enough to equip one tank. Next day four companies of the Third's ordnance mechanics, about 1,000 men, were set to work on scrapped treads and other material. Patton wanted duck bills. His order was typical: work any number of hours a day the job will take--not to exceed 24. Six days & nights later, the Third had duck bills on 250 tanks.

The General inspires hot loyalty. No other U.S. Army in Europe has higher mo rale, higher unit pride. Third Army men do not call Patton "Old Blood & Guts" (that nickname came from such fervid advice to trainees as: "Rip their belly buttons; spill their guts around"). To his own men Patton is "The Old Man" or "The Big Guy"--and they say it respect fully.

A favorite story with his officers is how the General stopped the rain after the Rundstedt breakout last December. Rundstedt's offensive was blessed by soupy days at its start. No planes flew. Tankmen, called on to drive 80 miles in a night, could not find the enemy in the endless drizzle. By the third day Patton, who can be reverent and blasphemous in the same breath, called one of the Third's chaplains. The reported conversation:

Patton: I want a prayer to stop this rain. If we got a couple of clear days we could get in there and kill a couple of hundred thousand of those . . . krauts.

Chaplain: Well, sir, it's not exactly in the realm of theology to pray for something that would help to kill fellow men.

Patton: What the hell are you--a theologian or an officer of the U.S. Third Army? I want that prayer.

The General got his prayer; it was printed on thousands of small cards with Patton's Christmas greeting on the reverse side. On the fifth day of rain and Rundstedt it was distributed to the troops. On the sixth day the sun shone, and the Third proceeded to its warlike harvest.

Men & Medals. Patton is a great morale-booster: he distributes medals lavishly, builds up rivalries among his units. The 4th Armored Division is his pace setter, the one that is always sprung through for open-field running. It has a dazzling record. It cut off the Brittany peninsula, plunged through the Loire valley with only air protection on its flanks. In the Battle of the Bulge it raced to the rescue of Bastogne, went on to help carve up the German advance. In the Saar-Palatinate cleanup it sliced through in parallel combat columns, scored one of the big victories of the west.

This crack division has had three crack commanders. First was doughty, 57-year-old Major General John S. Wood, who took a pounding as his tank bumped over Brittany, then rumbled 400 miles across France. Patton's grey-haired, hard-as-nails chief of staff, Major General Hugh S. Gaffey, took it over in December. Soon after the Rhine crossings, Gaffey was made a corps commander. Now the 4th is run by dark, handsome Brigadier General William Hoge, who seized the Remagen bridge intact while he was with the First Army, then captured whole the Main River bridge at Aschaffenburg in his first east-of-the-river task for Patton.

The Third's other armored divisions challenge the 4th's dash and sometimes perform feats that would be textbook nightmares. Two Patton armored divisions once crossed each other at a right angle road junction in the midst of combat, but only the Germans were confused. Patton's forces have run right off their tactical maps, and have had advanced maps, gasoline and ammunition parachuted to them (see SCIENCE).

Strikes & Pauses. Patton has had much success in fooling Germans. Few U.S. generals know the German military mind as well. Patton has studied Germans diligently from Africa northward, from Normandy eastward. When Patton moves swiftly, as in the Rhine crossing, it is because he knows the Germans expect him to pause. When he pauses, it is most likely because he knows the Germans are set for him to strike.

Patton also knows his enemy's weapons and, among others in the field, has been defender of the highly maneuverable U.S. Sherman tank v. heavier German tanks. Last week the General apparently had a clinching last word in the tank argument. He could say: look where ours are, and look where theirs are.

In Europe this week the Patton legend was still growing, its newest a song composed by Americans liberated at the Ziegenhain Prison Camp. After the General's 6th Armored Division had rolled up and turned them loose, the Yanks set their theme song to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. It began:

We're a bunch of Yankee soldiers living deep in Germany,

We're eating soup and black bread, and a beverage they call tea. . . .

And it ended, triumphantly:

Come and get us, Georgie Patton, so we can come rambling home.

* His 20-year-old son, now at West Point, is the fourth.

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