Man of War

Footnotes aside, Hirshson urges readers to compare his chapters “on the conflict between tankers and infantrymen in the 1920s and 1930s, on Patton’s failure to denazify Bavaria and on the loss of the Third Army and on the struggle over the Patton diary and movie with those in any other book.” Those obscure revelations hardly justify the eleven years that Hirshson, a history professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, spent on “General Patton: A Soldier’s Life.” They seem niggling attempts to downgrade Patton’s towering reputation.

Nevertheless, I waded through this heavy tome, and found it worthwhile for a pair of disparate reasons. Hirshson employs the vacuum cleaner style of biography favored by academic researchers who spew out whatever they find in their library boxes. That results in inelegant prose but also supplies new Patton anecdotes and trivia that delighted me as an unabashed admirer of one of the truly great military leaders in the nation’s history. More significantly, this new book teaches, however inadvertently, that irascible, indiscreet warriors are needed in times of trouble. They were necessary sixty years ago, and they may be today.

Stanley Hirshson clearly does not like George Patton, and has diligently sought out the general’s many critics (such as novelist John P. Marquand, whose ferocious unpublished attack on Patton even Hirshson labels “unduly critical”). Patton surely is “politically incorrect” for the twenty-first century, but he was also PI for the 1940s.

If the frequently shortsighted George C. Marshall had had his way, the Allied cause would have been deprived of Patton’s brilliant leadership because he had slapped two soldiers hospitalized with battle fatigue–and columnist Drew Pearson made it a cause célèbre. Only the good sense of Patton’s old friend (and often sharp critic) General Dwight D. Eisenhower saved him from being sent home after the slappings.

If Hirshson had his way, Patton would never have been available for the relief of Bastogne that ranks high in American military annals. Apart from his finding that Patton was not really dyslexic but just a very poor speller, the author appears to value as his greatest revelation the allegation that Patton’s ferocious speeches arousing the warrior spirit in American draftees led to the murder of enemy POWs in Sicily. Even though Hirshson fails to connect such a commonplace wartime atrocity convincingly with Patton’s rhetoric, he still would have sacked him.

Hirshson also dwells on Patton’s anti-Semitism as unacceptable in a war against Hitler. The general’s remark during the furor over the slapping incident, overheard by a reporter and included twice in this book (which would have benefited from more robust editing): “There’s no such thing as shellshock. It’s an invention of the Jews.” He described the visiting wife of President Roosevelt’s adviser Judge Sam Rosenman as “a very Jewy Jewess.” At war’s end, he confided to his diary his disgust with the poor personal hygiene of DP’s (displaced persons), “and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals.”

The anti-Semitism of Patton, scion of rich California aristocrats, was typical of his time and caste. It wasn’t the virulent Hitlerian strain. Greeting Jewish entertainers who came to Europe during the war, Patton had a wonderful time with Al Jolson and was rumored to enjoy a dalliance with Dinah Shore. The general wrote in his diary: “They have no shame nor modesty and will take all they can get.” He was speaking here not of Jews but of the British. The military historian S.L.A. Marshall wrote of Patton that he hated the Supreme Command, the First Army, the Jews, and, above all, the British.

WHAT REALLY SEEMS TO BOTHER Hirshson is that Patton was not liberal and did not oppose the economic conservatism of his fabulously rich in-laws, the Ayers of Massachusetts. He writes in the preface: “After the death of his father, a reform Democrat, Patton seemed to adopt the Ayer family’s attitude toward labor, race and ethnicity.” In fact, the elder Patton opposed women’s suffrage and ran to the right of progressive Republican Hiram Johnson in an unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate.

Nevertheless, Hirshson repeatedly returns to this theme, asking on page 705: “How did the son of a Wilsonian Democrat end up a right-wing conservative?”

Hirshson’s search into obscure sources found that United Auto Workers president Rolland Jay Thomas, visiting the war zone, was offended by Patton. “I have never heard a man use viler language in my life,” the union boss recalled to an oral history project years later. “You’re completely brutalized,” Thomas told Patton, concluding that the general, “if he had the opportunity, would be violently anti-labor.”

Actually, Patton was totally non-political and told friends he had never voted. His patron in Washington was Roosevelt’s secretary of war, the liberal Republican Henry Stimson. Patton was entranced by Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s leftist adviser (and accused Soviet agent). “Hopkins is quite a man,” Patton noted in his diary.

Hirshson’s vacuum sucks in much favorable comment about Patton, which the historian deserves credit for including in this meandering book. The general’s “generosity,” “brilliance,” and “daring” are noted by several sources. Patton discards the “school solution” taught at U.S. military colleges to voice this doctrine: “My flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not me. Before he finds out where my flanks are, I’ll be cutting the bastard’s throat.”

He was the U.S. Army’s foremost commander in Europe who should have and would have commanded at least a group of armies rather than just one army had it not been for his political incorrectness. When one-third of the German Seventh Army and segments of the Fifth Panzer Army escaped into Germany in the late summer of 1944, British general Brian Horrocks asserted “few Germans would have escaped if [General Omar] Bradley had not halted Patton’s northerly advance.” Beyond tactics, Patton, whose profane rhetoric so upsets Hirshson, was an incomparable troop leader. “The more I can excite my own people to be alert and kill, the fewer men I am going to lose,” he explained. In 1930, he had written: “Wars are fought with men, not weapons. It is the spirit of the men who fight, and of the man who leads which gains the victory.”

“Geez, he looks like a general!” exclaimed one of his soldiers as Patton boarded a troop ship en route to the invasion of Sicily. Tall, blond, handsome, athletic (he was a 1912 Olympian), wearing ivory-handled pistols, immaculately groomed in his stylized uniform, he was an awesome sight. He required his officers and men to wear steel helmets, neckties, and shined boots into combat and to wash their socks nightly (which radically reduced trench foot in Patton’s units).

Paul R. Allerup, who served in the Third Army for two years in Europe, recalled that three men were put in the stockade after their unpressed trousers did not pass inspection following the capture of the Erlangen tank center deep in Germany. Allerup added: “The Third under Patton was probably the cleanest, neatest army that ever fought a war. Patton saw to that. And I’ve always believed that was one of the reasons it was such a damn fine army. We hated the rules. But we never lost a battle.”

Fellow historian Douglas Porch, in a Washington Post review, says “the inescapable conclusion of Hirshson’s spirited biography is that we could have won in Europe without him.” Yes, but it would have been much harder, and, indeed, it would have been easier had he been used more fully. Much as he dislikes him, Hirshson is moved to write of Patton’s death in a European auto accident after the war ended: “Gen. Patton was sleeping forever in the Europe his military genius had helped free.”

AFTER I FINISHED reading this biography, I mentioned to a three-star Army general my conclusion that George Patton not only would be considered politically incorrect today but was politically incorrect in his own time.

My companion is an illustrious combat leader of the type brought to the Pentagon by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to replace the politicized generals of the Clinton era. He paused for a moment, then said simply: “Patton is my idol and role model.” With all the overwhelming U.S. technological superiority, that warrior spirit may yet be needed.

Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator.