The Dark Side of George S. Patton

Most Americans know of General George S. Patton through the Oscar-winning movie Patton, a box office hit that won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture of 1970. (The actor George C. Scott won and refused an Oscar for his magisterial portrayal of the general.). Overall, critics liked the film, believing that it portrayed Patton warts and all. Pauline Kael, the great American movie critic, was in the minority, however, believing that the film lacked a soul as well as a point of view. The film was fatally flawed, Kael thought, as it could be enjoyed by both liberals and conservatives during the height of the Vietnam War, as President Richard Nixon (whose favorite film it was) was beginning "de-escalation." Liberals could like the film as it showed America's military establishment as blood-thirsty and savage, while conservatives could like it as it showed a general who knew how to get things done, unlike Vietnam generals like William Westmoreland who had made a botch in Vietnam by not being blood-thirsty enough. However, the real George S. Patton was a far more controversial -- and troubled -- character than he was portrayed in the film.

A reading of his grandson Robert H. Patton's family memoir, The Pattons: A Personal History of an American Family (Crown, 1994) reveals that George S. Patton, Jr. (or George III in the family chronology; Junior was the son of George S. Patton II; his son was George IV and his grandson George V) likely was dyslexic and suffered from bipolar disorder. This created a sense of inferiority in the young Patton and engendered emotional instability. He was not a good student and had to be tutored to read, a skill that came late to him. His mood swings were prodigious, and during the interwar period of 1918-1941, Patton was hellish to live with for his wife and children as he lusted for combat.

As a cavalry major, Patton has to share the ignominy of putting down the Bonus March in Washington in 1932 along with his superiors, Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur and MacArthur's aide-de-camp, Major Dwight David Eisenhower, a friend of Patton's. The pompous and egotistical Patton, who had redesigned the U.S. Army cavalry saber based on European designs, twice rushed the crowd of unarmed veterans and their wives and children at the head of his mounted horse. The U.S. Army's cavalry force was still bifurcated into horse and armor, with horse cavalry enjoying a higher status. Tanks also were on hand to quash the crowd, who had come to the District in the depths of the Great Depression to lobby Congress for an immediate payment of the World War I bonus promised to veterans of the "Great War".

Part of the crowd targeted in the second charge included former private Joe Angelo, who served as Patton's orderly during World War I. The veteran won the Distinguished Service Cross for saving Patton's life during the war.

MacArthur, and Patton himself, believed that the veterans were "Reds" -- communists. This must be understood in the context of the times, best encapsulated by the philosophy of one of John Steinbeck's characters: "A communist is somebody who wants 25 cents an hour when we're paying 15." That MacArthur's won intelligence service estimated that only three of 26 leaders were communists didn't deter MacArthur from labeling the March as a communist conspiracy to overthrow the government. "Pacifism and its bedfellow communism are all around us," MacArthur declared about his fellow World War I vets.

Patton, an anti-communist, shared MacArthur's distaste for "Reds". With a penchant for pre-battle speeches, Patton counseled his troops, "If you must fire do a good job -- a few casualties become martyrs, a large number an object lesson. ...When a mob starts to move keep it on the run. ...Use a bayonet to encourage its retreat. If they are running, a few good wounds in the buttocks will encourage them. If they resist, they must be killed." In World War II, Patton would encourage his troops to take no prisoners and to murder surrendering enemy troops in cold blood.

MacArthur was ordered by President Herbert Hoover to allow the Bonus Army to retreat, as he didn't want any violence. Thomas Hardy, the great English novelist and poet, wrote that character is a man's fate, and for both MacArthur and Patton, their character -- and ultimate fate -- informed their behavior in one of the more shameful episodes of U.S. history.

Like he would in Korea almost 20 years later, MacArthur ignored a direct order of the President of the United States. Hoover, his commander-in-chief, has ordered MacArthur not to pursue the Bonus Army outside of the District of Columbia. When the Bonus Army retreated to its main encampment in Anacostia, Virginia, MacArthur had his troops, spearheaded by Major Patton's horse, attack the veterans. The regular Army troops burned the Bonus Army's encampment to the ground. The flaming ruins sent up smoke against the sky and the monuments of the District and would become an indelible image of the Depression.

After the attack, which had come in defiance of civilian authority, Joe Angelo tried to meet with Patton. In his pompous, Biblically inflected rhetoric, Patton announced, "I do not know this man. Take him away and under no circumstances permit him to return. The incident influenced the New York Times to run an article with the banner headline, "A Calvary Major Evicts Veteran Who Saved HIs Life in Battle."

The Founding Fathers wanted no standing army as it was felt that the officer class of a professional army would inject itself into politics. From the first days of the Republic through the beginning of the Cold War, when an army was needed, it was raised, and when the threat was over, it was disbanded. Officers of the regular Army who exercised command of these civilian armies were then reduced in rank in order to quell their ambitions. George S. Patton, who had been promoted to full colonel during the First World War, then reduced in the "permanent" rank of captain in the regular Army after the Armistice (he was promoted to major the very next day) hated such a regime. The Founding Fathers were proved right, as can be seen in the injection of George W. Bush's military commanders into politics, criticizing the press and asking for retribution of the corporate world against attorneys who defend Guantanamo Bay detainees.

General George S. Patton's diaries, which were published after his death, reveal that Patton was an anti-Semite, and not just akin to the garden-variety, country club anti-Semite that was common in America up to and through the Second World War. According to Leonard Dinnerstein in his book Antisemitism in America, (Oxford Univ. Press, 1995) Patton would not allow Jewish chaplains at his headquarters. (p.139). In light of the fact that the U.S. was engaged in unconditional warfare with the genocidal Nazi regime that had singled out "World Jewry" for liquidation, and the fact that as a commander of a corps and later an army, Patton had many Jewish soldiers, including staff officers, under his command, such as refusal is unconscionable.

Raised in a family with a pronounced belief in the paranormal, Patton was one of those WASPs who believed in the superiority of the "Nordic" race, which was encapsulated in the theory of the "Aryan" by Madame Blavatsky of Theosophy fame. The concept heavily influenced Herr Hitler. To underscore the absurdity of such thinking, the Nordic race as Patton envisioned it did not include the Irish, even though he himself was descended from the Scots, another Celtic race which is genetically indistinguishable from the Irish, as the tribes who settled Scotland emigrated there from Ireland! Semites, and particularly Jews, were beyond the pale to Patton, whose family emigrated from Scotland to the Southeastern United States and fought in both the War of Independence and the War Between the States, taking a rebel stand in both wars.

Patton at the end of World War II disparaged the Jewish inmates of Hitler's death camps who had been re-interned in Displaced Person (DP) camps maintained by the U.S. Army in the Allied Zone of Occupation. He also expressed the injudicious opinion that the United States fought the wrong enemy, meaning that he would rather have had the country allied with Hitler's Germany for a fight against Stalin's Soviet Union. It was a common sentiment among reactionaries and isolationists before the War. That Patton would dare express such political sentiments underscores emotional instability. His boss, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, was of the belief that an American soldier should have NO political opinions at all, let alone express them. Eisenhower, courted by both Democrats and Republicans for both the 1948 and '52 campaigns, didn't declare his party affiliation until he was already on his seemingly unstoppable advance towards the Presidency.

Joseph Bednersky, in his book about anti-Semitism in the U.S. military, The 'Jewish Threat' (2002), revealed that Patton's egregious anti-Semitism actually affected the U.S. Army's policy toward the Jews. In November 1942, after the Allies had pushed the Axis powers out of Morocco in the North African campaign, Lieutenant General Patton, commander of the 7^th Army, asked General Eisenhower to maintain the Vichy regime's anti-Jewish laws in Morocco. The laws were modeled after Nazi Germany's Nuremburg laws, themselves inspired by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the American Southeast. A man of vastly poor political judgment, Patton believed the Jews were involved in a conspiracy to "take over" Morocco, and this conspiracy justified the maintenance of the anti-Semitic laws on the basis of cultivating the favor of the Arabs. Even more egregiously, Patton persuaded General Eisenhower to prevent the release of Moroccan Jews held in forced labor camps. (After the War, while Military Governor of the U.S. Occupation Zone, Patton would be similarly obsesses with a "Jewish conspiracy".)

To put this development in a historical context, after the liberation of western Tennessee during the Civil War, Major General Ulysses S. Grant had issued an order banning Jews from the area of his command on the grounds that they were war profiteers and black marketers. The ukase was immediately overturned by the Lincoln administration.

Contemporary historians addressing World War II and such Allied horrors as strategic bombing (including firebombing as well as the Atomic Bomb) increasingly resort to the moral authority engendered by the Jewish Shoah (Holocaust) to justify the war, which but for these appeals, would likely be considered a folly not unlike World War I. Contemporary historians justify World War II due to its role in stopping the Holocaust, even though the Allied involvement in the war did practically nothing to stop the destruction of European Jewry and the extirpation of their culture and society.

The fact of American policy is that Eisenhower, influenced by his subordinate Patton, recommended to his chain of command that the anti-Semitic laws be kept in place and that the internment of Moroccan Jews continue. His recommendations were vetted by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Despite contemporary misconceptions that the U.S. always was philo-Semitic and excessively pro-Israel, a level of anti-Semitism would continue be an undercurrent of American policy in the Middle East during the war years and, in lesser form, be part of American Middle East policy at least through the Six Day War of 1967.

With the Nazi regime defeated in 1945 and Germany in ruins, Bendersky claims that Patton's anti-Semitism "set the tone for army policies and behavior" toward the Jewish survivors of Nazi death camps anguishing in DP camps in the American Occupation Zone. Patton denounced Jewish DPs as "animals" and "a sub-human species without any of the cultural or social refinements of our time."

President Harry S. Truman's envoy, Earl Harrison, toured the DP camps in 1945. He reported that, "We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them."

Truman ordered Eisenhower to improve the conditions of the DP camps, and he duly passed on the order to Patton. Furious, the four-star general, Ike's successor as Military Governor, wrote in his diary, "Harrison and his ilk believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals."

In the movie Patton, none of these events made the final screenplay, which garnered Oscars for Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North. The movie did show perhaps the most infamous event in Patton's career, his slapping of a shell-shocked soldier In the movie, there is one soldier-slapping incident portrayed, but in real life, there were actually two such incidents. After the second incident, Patton reportedly made an anti-Semitic remark, claiming that "battle fatigue" was a fake concept created by the Jews (a reference rooted in the perception in the first half of the 20th Century that there was a predominance of members of the Jewish faith in the psychiatric profession). After making this injudicious remark, some witnesses claim that Patton wept.

Seen in this context, theater commander Dwight D. Eisenhower's subsequent removal of Patton from command, which took place long after the incidents, might be interpreted as concern with Patton's own mental health, and that the brilliant, high-strung general himself was perceived as possibly suffering from battle fatigue. This would also explain why he was subsequently returned to command after what could be seen as a "rest." Churchill had had to relieve Major General Richard O'Connor of his command of the Western Desert Force after his spectacular success against the Italians in Libya, in order to give him a respite from combat. (O'Connor was appointed General Officer Commanding-in-Chief British Troops in Egypt.)

General Patton's grandson Robert entitled the final chapter of the memoir of his family, which covers the end of the war and Patton's death from injuries sustained in a car accident, "An Ironical Thing," Patton told the New York Times in 1994 the that the General's "unforgiving" anti-Semitism was "part of the deep insecurity my grandfather felt throughout his life."

During a brief trip back to his native California in June 1945, Patton gave an original copy of the 1935 Nuremburg laws that he had illegally smuggled out of Germany to the Huntington Library, for safe keeping. Patton told the Library to keep the transaction a secret, and no official record of the transaction. The document also was not to be made available to the public or to researchers during the General's lifetime. The Huntington Library retained Patton's purloined copy of the Nuremburg Laws even after Patton's family directed the Library to turn it over to the Library of Congress with any and all of Patton's papers in their possession. The Library refused. (In 1999, the Huntington Library permanently loaned its copy of the laws to Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center.)

Patton returned to Europe to assume the post of Military Governor of the US Occupation Zone in Germany, replacing Eisenhower., who has been named Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army. Under the Morgenthau Plan, which intended to break up a rump of Germany into two separate countries and create an international zone out of its Ruhr industrial plant, the country was to undergo "de-Nazification", the purge of former members of Hitler's Nazi Party. Eisenhower proposed the dismantle of the former Nazi Germany bureaucracy, a move opposed by Patton. Once again resorting to politics, Patton publicly stated that de-Nazification would weaken the western sector of Germany under the control of the US, the UK and France, and invite an invasion by the Soviet Red Army, already occupying the Eastern part of Germany.

Patton, a true anti-Semite, blamed the Jews. (U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, the author of the plan to "pastoralize" Germany so that it would be an agricultural country with little industry that could never again wage war, was a Jew.) The General wrote in his diary that the Jews were "a virus...[spreading] a Semitic revenge against all Germans."

Sadly, despite his greatness on the field of battle, it can be speculated that, like Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War, had Patton lived, he likely may have humiliated himself and been sacked. As it was, Patton was considering resigning from the Army (resignation would cost him his pension, as opposed to retirement) to protest developments in post-War Germany. Patton believed that Germany should be strengthened, not weakened, to serve as a bulwark against the Soviet Union.

MacArthur, an even greater strategic and tactical commander than Patton with the lowest casualty rate of any of the top commanders during World War II, was more politically savvy than was Patton, but his ambitions were wrecked by defying civilian authority, as represented by President Harry S Truman. Truman, a former artillery captain with extensive combat experience during the First World War and a keen student of history, was not fond of generals (George Marshall was the exception to the rule). Like General Edwin Walker nearly a generation later, who resigned from the Army rather than being cashiered for proselytizing extreme-right wing propaganda to his troops, Patton's career may have ended ignominiously.