Some British accounts of his talk omitted the Russians others focused on his jovial brutality.Įxasperated with what seemed like another of Patton’s indiscretions, Eisenhower was ready to order him home-until Chief of Staff George C. Then, performing the innocuous job of offering greetings at the opening of an English “Welcome Club” for servicemen in Knutsford six weeks before D-Day, he remarked that until that evening “my only experience of welcoming has been to welcome Germans and Italians to the ‘Infernal Regions’”-and he went on to predict the “evident destiny of the British and Americans, and of course the Russians, to rule the world.” He said he hoped that the war would come to “a quick conclusion, and I will get a chance to go and kill Japanese.” Subtlety was lost on Patton. The embarrassment cost Patton, the engine of the Sicilian campaign, a prized command on D-Day in Normandy. General “Ike” Eisenhower, his commander, covered it up until the press was about to break the story. In army hospitals in Sicily in 1943 he had slapped two GIs whom he accused of malingering. Patton was never a role model for Sunday schools, and could be trouble even when the going was good.
You are up shit creek and that’s the truth, Oh! Lord. Advocating relentless pressure on the enemy, Patton urged unrhapsodically:įor in war just as in loving, you must always keep on shoving,įor if you’re dilatory in the search for lust and glory Whether or not he practiced the German mode of war, Patton, who wrote martial verse all his life, penned a rude rhyme in 1944 that roughly paralled Brandenberger’s principles. As bespectacled General der Panzertruppen Erich Brandenberger acknowledged in ironic self-congratulation afterward, “Patton had given proof of his extraordinary skill in armored warfare, which he conducted according to the fundamental German conception.”
Whatever the initial momentum, the operation had to succeed quickly. Patton below the southern flank of the surprise German thrust, the high command under Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt realized the hazards of the Bulge from the start. Eisenhower confessed, “I didn’t get frightened until three weeks after it had begun, when I began to read the American papers and found…how near we were to being whipped.” On the enemy side, with Lieutenant General George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge CloseĪt a presidential press conference a dozen years after the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge, President Dwight D.
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