George Patton & the Third Army | “You Wonderful Guys”
Every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he’s not, he’s a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are. The real hero is the man who fights even though he’s scared.
- George S. Patton, Jr., 1944, the cleanest part of his famous “Third Army speech” I could find -
The dull hum of aircraft filled the morning air. German soldiers looked up from the French town of St. Lô, expecting to see a few enemy fighters bearing down on them. Their hearts froze in their chests as nearly a thousand bombers emerged from the clouds. They had heard of the devastation wrought by their enemy on the Fatherland’s cities, but St. Lô was only a tiny provincial settlement far from the Paris metropolis. In minutes, their world was aflame as Allied bombs exploded around them and tore flesh and metal apart in equal measure. The panzer division holding St. Lô was nearly annihilated in the first of three waves, and little was left as the sun reached its noon height. Then, the survivors heard engines approaching from the north and east in the direction of the Normandy beaches. Tanks and half-tracks bearing white stars swarmed through the town, finishing off the defenders and ripping open the Nazi left flank that had held the Allies back for over a month.
The Third United States Army is one of the best-known units of the Second World War. From the opening move on St. Lô in August 1944 to the war’s end nine months later, it liberated an area of Nazi-occupied Europe roughly the size of Afghanistan. Its soldiers were the best-trained men in the US Army, its officers and NCOs among the most professional in American military history, and its record of battle remains unsurpassed in enemy casualties inflicted and land covered. Most of the credit is due, of course, to the soldiers in tanks and trucks, but even the proudest of these would point to their commander as the man who made the Third Army such a terrifying weapon of war: General George S. Patton, Jr.
“Never tell a man how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
George Patton was born into a family with a long history of military service. He learned their stories from a young age and always intended to follow in his ancestors’ footsteps. He was known to be a happy, carefree child who struggled in math and reading because of dyslexia but excelled in history and science. On graduating from West Point in 1909, he began to craft a gruff and foul-mouthed persona that, he believed, was proper for a leader in those days. Three themes dominated Patton’s early service in the Army. The first was his molding into an exceptional military commander, much of which was due to General John “Blackjack” Pershing, his commander in the 1916 Mexican Punitive Expedition. The two men worked together in perfect harmony, with Pershing leading by example and Patton watching and learning everything from the importance of speed and supplies to the power of a commander’s presence on the battlefield. Patton knew that excellence in his work was the key to promotion and success, and Pershing was the best example of the day. He even modeled his physical appearance on his friend and mentor right down to his immaculate uniform and stern visage or “war face” that greeted everyone he met.
Patton loved to move fast. As a cavalryman, he learned to ride and played polo regularly, and he bought one of the first American-made automobiles shortly after graduating from West Point. Unlike many higher-ranked officers in those days, Patton believed that autos would revolutionize warfare and embraced their use—though he mourned the loss of prestige his beloved cavalry would suffer as a result. His armored cars played a decisive role in ending Francisco “Pancho” Villa’s raids on American towns along the Mexican border. During the First World War, he almost single-handedly built the US Army’s Light Tank School, writing training manuals and devising maneuvers with only a young lieutenant as his aid. Patton loved training and seeing the men he led grow into the best soldiers they could be, and he pushed them as hard as he pushed himself. He became the expert on mechanized warfare in America during the interwar period. Books on the subject filled his library, including—fortunately—Infantry Attacks by the German Great War veteran Captain Erwin Rommel, and Patton added new and innovative tactics into his training regimes.
Few generals can claim never to have been defeated in combat, but Patton was one of them. In many ways, his worst enemy was not the Germans or Italians but his own mouth. His use of “colorful metaphors” was legendary; he once quipped that “you can’t run an army without profanity, and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.” Patton cursed fluently in every situation, even at home, and it certainly made an impact on those who heard it. His language shocked Army wives at social functions, and even his second daughter, Ruth Ellen, was reprimanded at school while in the fifth grade for her vivid use of profanity. (When confronted by her mother, Ruth Ellen blamed her father for teaching her the words.) Teachers and cocktail party attendees may have shuddered at Patton’s words, but his soldiers loved them—one wrote later that he “cussed beautifully”—and so did most of his fellow generals. Douglas MacArthur’s language grew more coarse after meeting Patton in the First World War, Dwight Eisenhower let occasional barbs go between the two friends, and the famously soft-spoken Omar Bradley chuckled as he cursed ill-disciplined soldiers in North Africa. But Patton’s tendency to say whatever was on his mind would eventually get him into plenty of trouble.
“Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.”
When the Second World War began in September 1939, General Patton was serving as deputy commander of the 2nd Armored Division. As tensions rose with both Germany and Japan, America began to mobilize and modernize its armed forces, and Patton played a key role in developing its armored warfare doctrine. A 1940 training exercise in Georgia and Florida brought him to the attention of George Marshall, the Army’s Chief of Staff, who knew that Pat-ton would play a key role if war ever came. Patton’s longtime friend, Major Dwight Eisenhower, asked for a place in his division and hoped to serve alongside him on the battlefield. But Marshall had other plans for this officer.
Patton’s obsession with training and emphasis on keeping contact with the enemy (or, as he put it, “holding them by the nose and kicking them in the balls”) spread quickly throughout the US Army. At Fort Knox, KY, General Adna Chaffee drilled his I Armored Corps using Pat-ton’s training model, as did General Walter Kruger with the newly-formed Third Army in Houston, TX. Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war, Patton took command of the I Armored Corps and forged it into the best-performing unit in the entire Army. He departed the United States with his corps that fall as part of Operation Torch and landed in French-controlled Morocco in November 1942. The general took on an additional role as Morocco’s military governor and reported to Dwight Eisenhower, his subordinate-turned-superior in North Africa.
General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps, though weakened by a defeat at El Alamein in Egypt, struck a devastating blow to the II US Armored Corps in February 1943 at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia. Eisenhower knew the corps needed a commander who could inspire—or terrify—the demoralized soldiers and sent Patton east to take the job. After twelve days of harsh but necessary training and discipline, he turned II Corps around, beat Rommel at El Guettar, and opened the road to Allied victory in North Africa. His old command, the I Armored Corps, then arrived and merged into the Seventh US Army to drive alongside Bernard Law Mont-gomery’s Eighth British Army toward Tunis and what remained of the Afrika Korps.
Patton certainly had a high opinion of himself and was eager for military glory. General Montgomery, to that point the shining hero of victory for Great Britain, shared these traits in spades. Both Eisenhower and his successor in the Mediterranean command, British General Harold Alexander, had to balance these two prima donnas’ competitive urges when planning an attack on the island of Sicily to knock Italy out of the war. Alexander gave Montgomery the prime position in the landings and relegated Patton to a supporting role, causing furious anti-British outbursts at the latter’s headquarters. But Patton did his job, and the Seventh Army protected the Eighth from German and Italian flanking attacks in the campaign’s early days. When Montgomery slowed his advance at Catania, Patton leapt westward toward the city of Palermo on the island’s far corner. He wanted to clear its defenders and, perhaps, beat the British to Messina, the port opposite Italy’s “toe” and the campaign’s final objective. He ended up achieving both goals and greeted his British competitor with a smirk in Messina’s town square.
But success came with a price for the general his men now called “Old Blood and Guts.” On two different occasions in August 1943 during the drive from Palermo to Messina, Patton had visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals, where he encountered men suffering from “shell-shock”—what we now call PTSD. In what some of his defenders justified as attempts to encourage the men to shape up, he barked at them harshly and called them “cowards.” But then he went too far—he slapped both in their faces with his gloves, threw one bodily out of the hospital tent, and threatened to shoot the other one himself. Even Patton’s closest friends knew he had gone too far. The retired General Pershing criticized him publicly, thus ending their long friendship, and Eisenhower ordered him to apologize to the soldiers, to eyewitnesses in both hospitals and to the entire Seventh Army one unit at a time. A chastened Patton obeyed and also gave his superior a letter expressing his remorse the next time he saw him.
The reaction to the “slapping incidents” varied wildly. General John Lucas, who was with Patton in one hospital tent, remarked that his actions were harsh but justified. Most soldiers shrugged the stories off as Patton just being “Old Blood and Guts,” and one division cheered his name endlessly and refused to let him speak when he appeared before them to deliver his apology. But the press and, when the stories broke in America, the public were utterly apoplectic. Patton had always been adversarial toward reporters, and some embellished the incidents beyond all journalistic standards, but the damage was done. Newspapers howled for his dismissal, but Eisenhower refused. One of his associates, Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, reminded him of Abraham Lincoln’s words when reporters demanded he remove Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man—he fights.” Eisenhower did take the Seventh Army away from Patton and sent him on a tour of several Mediterranean sites: Corsica, Sardinia, Malta, and Egypt. The Germans, who respected (or feared) Patton’s ferocity in war and could not believe the Americans would be so foolish as to punish him for such a triviality, watched his movements very closely. They assumed he was preparing his next campaign in the war, perhaps in the Balkans. This was part of Eisenhower’s plan, and though his friend endured harsh rebukes in the press and a difficult period “in the doghouse,” so to speak, he still had a job for George Patton.
“Always do everything you ask of those you command.”
In December 1943, with the Italian campaign underway and the Russians grinding Germany’s armies to pieces on the Eastern Front, General Courtney Hodges’ Third Army got word it would be leaving for Great Britain. Planning for the cross-channel invasion of France to open a second front was underway at SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces, and it would be the largest amphibious operation yet attempted in the war. Many Mediterrane-an veterans held key posts at SHAEF with Eisenhower at the top, Montgomery commanding all Allied ground forces in the invasion, and Bradley heading up the US Army component. Conspicuously absent was George Patton, and Third Army soldiers speculated about his role in the coming battle on the long trans-Atlantic voyage. On arriving in southern England, they began working up to full readiness alongside soldiers from the United Kingdom, Free France, and Canada. Everyone knew that cracking Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall” would be difficult, but with summer approaching they were ready to get into action.
So was General Patton, now stationed in East Anglia far from the soldiers training for the attack. Eisenhower had given him command of the First US Army Group, or FUSAG, com-prising twelve divisions that would storm ashore at the Pas-de-Calais, the closest point on the French coast to the British Isles. But FUSAG existed only on paper and was the war’s greatest deception operation. Eisenhower knew the Germans were watching “Old Blood and Guts,” and his men set up wooden tanks and trucks that looked real from a distance and then leaked false reports to the press of Patton’s role in the coming attack. His war record in Tunisia and Sicily loomed so large in the collective German mind that they concentrated large units in Calais and held them there even after the Allies breached the Atlantic Wall in Normandy on June 6, 1944.
The Third Army did not participate in the early stages of Operation Overlord and arrived in Normandy in July. The Allied advance had bogged down in the difficult countryside and around the stubbornly-defended city of Caen. SHAEF needed someone to break the enemy flank and get the front lines moving, and Patton was the man for the job. His arrival in France in a cargo plane laden with supplies was inglorious at best, but his mood brightened when General Bradley summoned him to his field headquarters and described Operation Cobra to him. Allied planes would carpet-bomb the German forces defending St. Lô in western Nor-mandy to allow his new command, the Third Army, to break out and sweep toward Paris. Bradley watched his former superior grow almost giddy as he left his “doghouse,” and Patton ended the meeting promising to keep his head down and his mouth shut—he had learned his lesson.
Despite his harsh demeanor and foul language, George Patton was a deeply religious man. He believed—and said many times while in the “doghouse”—that God was preparing him for a great task. Now he had his chance and got to work as soon as he arrived at Third Army headquarters. The officers he met had heard many stories of “Old Blood and Guts” and were surprised to learn he cared deeply about them and the men they led. He still had plenty of fire in him, but he seemed more at peace with himself in this new job. Of course, Patton’s “war face” and salty language returned in his famous “Third Army speech” given to most units in the days before Operation Cobra. He spoke in heroic terms of glorious victory after harsh fighting and, in words that are mostly unrepeatable in a family-friendly podcast, reminded the men he called “you wonderful guys” that he would be with them in the field all the way, maybe even to Berlin.
The Third Army’s drive across France is one of the greatest military campaigns in history. It’s thunderous beginning after the bombing of St. Lô quickly gave way to massive traffic jams around the crossroads at Avranches, which Courtney Hodges later described as “pushing two hundred thousand men and forty thousand vehicles through what amounted to a straw.” But once the army was out of Normandy and in the open French countryside, Patton drove them ever forward. He rode with his men in a Jeep or tank, stopping to visit the wounded in field hospitals (where doctors quietly shielded shell-shocked patients from his glaring eyes) and even directing traffic personally whenever two units needed to use the same narrow French road. The Germans reeled back at the onrushing Third Army, which moved so quickly that bat-talion commanders sometimes got lost after driving right off their campaign maps.
Patton’s speed got other Allied armies moving as well. General Hodges, now command-ing First Army, raced to keep up with his old unit and secure the flanks against an enemy counterattack. Even the cautious Field Marshal Montgomery pushed through to take Caen and then move east—he would not let Patton get too far ahead of him this time. By mid-August, the Americans and British had driven the Germans into a “pocket” around Falaise, and Eisenhower ordered Patton to move north and Montgomery south to seal them in. The Third Army turned immediately and drove toward a demarcation line at Argentan, but Montgomery took his time and let his old rival come to him. Patton reached Argentan and then asked Bradley for permission to continue, but SHAEF ordered him to stop, and more than a quarter-million Germans escaped the Falaise pocket. Soldiers outside Patton’s headquarters could hear him shouting that his old friends, Bradley and Eisenhower, had become politicians more interested in keeping Montgomery happy than winning battles. When the British finally captured Falaise and only fifty thousand Germans, the Third Army resumed its drive toward Paris. As it approached the “City of Lights,” the garrison commander, General Dietrich von Choltitz, disobeyed Hitler’s order to destroy its monuments and instead surrendered his entire division. Patton made a chivalrous gesture of his own and allowed General Philippe Leclerc’s 2nd French Armored Division to liberate their beloved capital.
The Allies had landed a second force in southern France in the late summer, and General Eisenhower now commanded millions of soldiers from almost a dozen countries all driving toward one objective: the Rhine River, Germany’s last natural defense. The Allied armies advanced in a “wave” at roughly the same speed, meaning that the slowest units set the pace. Patton bridled at SHAEF tolerating Montgomery’s slow-and-steady approach to war and fumed whenever fuel supplies for the Third Army ran low. He once shouted at a supply truck driver delivering rations, “I’ll shoot the next man who brings me food. Give us gasoline; we can eat our belts!” Patton even dipped into his own pockets to buy fuel for his army, and soldiers often drove their tanks until they ran dry and then fought the Germans hand-to-hand where they stopped. But logistics reared its ugly head in the European Theater of Operations. Until the port of Antwerp in Belgium was cleared of mines in late October 1944, all supplies for the eight Allied army groups came from Normandy, where the road network had been largely destroyed before Operation Overlord. It took time to get food, ammunition, and gasoline to the armies in eastern France. Together with another delay in Montgomery’s area of operations, a botched effort to liberate the Netherlands that resulted in ten thousand Americans killed or captured, the Allies knew they could not cross the Rhine before winter. Victory would have to wait until 1945.
Like Germany’s fighting capacity, Adolf Hitler’s mental state was rapidly deteriorating, especially after the July 20th attempt on his life—in which Patton’s old adversary Erwin Rommel was implicated. But the Führer and his Wehrmacht summoned enough strength for one last shot at victory in the West. Germany would attack through the Ardennes Forest on the Franco-Belgian border where its panzers had broken through the Allied lines and raced for the Channel coast in 1940. This time they would drive on Antwerp and cut Eisenhower’s supply lines, then negotiate peace with the Western Allies and turn to confront the onrushing Soviet Red Army. The plan was solid, and Germany had enough men for the operation (thanks in part to veteran troops escaping Falaise months earlier). Panzers hit a weak point between two of Bradley’s armies in mid-December and pushed a bulge into the Allied front. It seemed that Germany might be on the verge of a miracle but for two American units: the 101st Airborne Division’s elite paratroopers and the battle-hardened “wonderful guys” of the Third Army.
The 101st had dug in around the tiny Belgian village of Bastogne and was soon surrounded by the Germans. They held the line in the bitter cold on the frozen ground against vicious attacks. One hundred miles to the south, Patton was approaching the Rhine when Bradley summoned him to a conference at Verdun with other SHAEF commanders. General Eisenhower laid out the situation in a cheerful tone that somewhat belied the serious situation and asked if anyone could hit the German flanks and relieve Bastogne. Montgomery demurred, and Brad-ley then called on Patton. The Third Army had some of the best intelligence officers in the war, and Patton had three different plans to shift his axis of advance in his pocket. He told Eisenhower he could attack the German flank with two divisions in two days—in fact, his men were already moving. Impressed with how well Patton had trained his men, Eisenhower ordered all other armies to hold fast and gave his friend whatever gas and other supplies he needed.
But SHAEF’s master of war could not give the Third Army good weather, and clouds had shrouded the sun over the battlefield for weeks. Patton and his men needed clear skies for the artillery and, more important, air support from Allied fighter bombers. The general’s war diary, printed after his death in War As I Knew It, included a comment about his asking God for good weather. He even summoned an army chaplain, Father James Hugh O’Neill, to discuss the Almighty’s stubbornness in helping the Allies. According to O’Neill, Patton commented, “I am a strong believer in prayer. There are three ways that men get what they want: by planning, by working, and by praying.” He then asked O’Neill to write a prayer and distribute it to everyone in the Third Army. The chaplain followed orders and included it in a training letter distributed as the army turned north toward the German flank. And, by grace or fate, the skies cleared on December 20th, the first of the two-day advance. Allied planes strafed the Germans mercilessly as the Third Army crashed into the enemy and drove on Bastogne. The 101st’s be-leaguered paratroopers saw relief on the horizon on Christmas night and were back in friendly territory the following morning.
“It is foolish to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”
The Third Army entered Germany in March 1945, and Patton memorialized the historic movement by urinating into the Rhine River. SHAEF wanted to drive forward to join hands with the Russians as far east as possible, and Eisenhower often ordered armies to bypass heavily-defended German cities and let Allied bombers reduce them to ashes. One of these orders involved Trier, the oldest city in Germany, which SHAEF planners believed would require four divisions to secure. Eisenhower chuckled to himself when he got a message from Patton that read, “Have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?”
These moments of levity were rare as the war’s horrific cost became real to Allied soldiers in Germany. They met hundreds of thousands of homeless families streaming toward their lines fleeing the Russians or found themselves forced to guard masses of surrendered soldiers happy to be free of their Führer. When the Third Army liberated two concentration camps, Ohrdruf and Buchenwald in central Germany, the Americans were beyond words and became physically sick at the gruesome sights of Nazi barbarism. Patton, Bradley, and Eisenhower all visited the camps, and “Old Blood and Guts” went white as a sheet at Ohrdruf, totally unprepared to witness man’s inhumanity to man. He immediately suggested that Eisenhower get reporters and US government officials into the camps to document the Nazis’ genocidal crimes. Then he had another idea. He had learned that some Nazi officials in nearby towns had claimed ignorance of the Holocaust, so Patton ordered that they be marched through the camps to see what happens when good people remain silent in the face of evil.
Both Patton and Montgomery hoped to be first into Berlin, but this honor went to the Soviets in a political decision at SHAEF. The Third Army crossed central Germany and ended the war in Czechoslovakia, where they met the Red Army outside Prague. With the Third Reich in ruins and Patton’s great task fulfilled, he found himself out of sorts amidst the worldwide celebrations. His new job was to be military governor of Bavaria, for which he was sadly ill-suited. (His reputation denied him the chance to transfer to Douglas MacArthur’s Pacific command.) He also went home on a goodwill tour to sell war bonds and saw his wife and children for the first time in three years.
To put it bluntly, George Patton was bred for war and hated peace. He yearned for a new enemy but faced an old one instead—his own mouth. Official Allied policy in occupied Germany barred former Nazi Party members from government service. Patton initially agreed with this plan but soon found himself swamped with administrative problems. American soldiers did not know how to maintain Bavaria’s civilian infrastructure, and the only German experts were ex-Nazis. So he defied Eisenhower’s order and kept low-ranking party members in their posts. Even worse, a reporter asked him about de-Nazification and he replied that most Nazis had joined the party the way Americans became Republicans or Democrats. This comment drew a sharp rebuke from General Eisenhower. Patton’s rhetoric also grew more anti-Russian, which made some sense as suspicions grew about postwar Soviet intentions, and he seemed eager for yet another war. His colleagues were shocked when he exclaimed in a staff meeting that the Allies ought to be rearming their former German enemies to defeat their Russian allies. And, bizarrely for someone who had seen the terrors of Buchenwald with his own eyes, Patton began to spout antisemitic tropes about Jews and world communism in language that was only slightly less profane than Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Historians offered many possible reasons for Patton’s increasingly-erratic behavior ranging from a mental collapse to an ancestral white supremacist attitude. Personally, I think the best explanation comes from one of the general’s favorite books: “For every kind of beasts, and of birds, and of serpents, and of things in the sea, is tamed, and hath been tamed of mankind: But the tongue can no man tame.”
Enough was enough, and Eisenhower stripped Patton of his command. He became the administrator of the US Army’s research institute documenting the war and filled his days writing letters to his family, hunting with his beloved bull terrier Willie, and traveling across Europe to visit old and famous sites. But nothing stirred his passions like war, and it was gone—like the Third Army, most of whose veterans had gone home and been discharged from service. He considered retirement himself, but it was perhaps grace or fate that spared him from fading isolation in a world at peace.
During the Third Army’s race across Normandy, Patton had said gravely that “the best end for an officer is the last bullet of the war.” His end was not to be like that of Caesar but Alexander or Napoleon. On December 9, 1945, he and his chief of staff were driving near Spey-er in western Germany to go hunting. Glimpsing burned-out cars on the road, Patton said, “How awful war is. Think of the waste.” Minutes later, a US Army truck collided with his car. The other passengers suffered only minor injuries, but Patton’s head slammed into a glass partition separating the front and rear seats. The blow broke his neck and left him paralyzed. He spent the last twelve days of his life in the hospital with his wife Beatrice at his side in agonizing pain from large fishhooks inserted below his cheekbones to ease pressure on his neck. “This is a hell of a way to die,” he breathed shortly before the end.
An Army honor guard brought George Patton’s body to the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial outside Hamm, where he was buried on Christmas Eve. He initially lay in a row with other Third Army casualties, but as visitors flocked to the site its administrators decided to move him. Today, Patton rests facing many of the “wonderful guys” he had led in triumph to defeat Nazi tyranny in a simple soldier’s grave marked with a white cross.
What is there left to say about George S. Patton, Jr.? Plenty, and even a double-length podcast barely scratches the surface of this complicated hero’s life. I am indebted to the late Carlo d’Este’s book Patton: A Genius for War, as well as lessons from Dr. Thomas Connor at Hillsdale College in writing this episode. Joe and I will get into many topics I couldn’t cover next week—Patton’s competing in the Olympics, his belief in reincarnation, an incident where he stood on a car shooting into the air, and maybe more. As always, please send me your questions; you can probably tell how much I enjoy talking about General Patton.
This season is about heroes, and with its end in sight, I wanted to tell you, our wonderful audience, about one of mine. Of course, there is always the disclaimer about not admiring everything in our heroes’ lives, and some of Patton’s words and deeds were utterly reprehensible. I consider General Patton to be a personal hero for three reasons. First, he strove for excellence in every part of his life, something I try to do as a teacher and podcaster. Second, he reminds me that even great men and women have flaws—and some have big ones. I could tell you stories of how my own words jeopardized my career, and my list of flaws is extensive. But third, and most important, even flawed heroes like George Patton can inspire others to acts of courage and greatness. I try to do this as a history teacher, and you can do the same in whatever circumstances grace or fate places you. We may not destroy a monstrous tyranny like George Patton and the Third Army did, but we can be heroes for each other every day.
