Patton, George S.

(1885–1945)

Army General

Gen. George S. Patton was considered to be the outstanding American tactical commander of World War II by his German opponents. He was also the most controversial and colorful member of the Allied high command, a paradoxical figure who combined medieval chivalry with an expert grasp of the latest military technologies.

Patton's character derived partly from his family heritage. His father descended from Virginia generals serving in both the American Revolution and the Civil War. Patton's maternal grandfather, Benjamin Wilson, was a Tennessee millionaire and founder of the California orange industry. Growing up in southern California, the future general experienced both southern aristocratic and western influences. Young Patton got to know his father's business partner, former Confederate partisan John Mosby. He decided early to become a soldier, a rare choice for a cultivated rich boy. Thanks to his father's politicking, Patton was admitted to West Point after a year at the Virginia Military Institute. He graduated in 1909 with future Army generals Devers, Eichelberger, Simpson, and John C. H. Lee.

Patton, a skilled equestrian, chose to serve in the cavalry. Although delighting in cavalry exercises and polo, Patton was a serious military intellectual. He read military historians and thinkers ranging from Herodotus and Thucydides to G. F. R. Henderson and Liddell Hart. Patton mastered sailing well enough to captain a yacht across the Pacific and earned an aviator's license in 1928. Understanding how ships and airplanes operate helped Patton later master how ground, sea, and air forces interacted in war. He cultivated powerful political friends such as Henry Stimson and Senator James Wadsworth, who later became a congressman. While courting favor from those above him, Patton also displayed an intense concern for the soldiers he commanded.

Patton won Gen. John J. Pershing's favor while serving in Mexico. As America entered World War I a year later, Patton became the American Expeditionary Forces' leading tank commander. Despite spending only a short time in combat with his tank brigade, Patton impressed future Army chief of staff George Marshall. He won a wartime (brevet) promotion to colonel by Armistice Day, his 33rd birthday, then reverted to his prewar rank of captain.

In 1919, Patton began a crucial friendship with Dwight Eisenhower. Despite major contrasts in personality and background, the young officers became friends because both believed armored vehicles and airplanes were vital to winning future wars. Both men were also protégés of the interwar Army's leading military intellectual, Gen. Fox Conner. Like Conner, they championed the policy changes necessary to combine arms and new technologies in armored, amphibious, and airborne warfare. Although Patton and Eisenhower were compelled by interwar Army service politics to mute their commitment to combined arms, they continued to help and encourage each other.

During the interwar period, Patton was generally restless and unhappy; the onset of World War II cured his misery. Gen. George Marshall appointed Patton to choice armored training assignments, where he shined from 1940 to 1942. Appointed commander of the North African invasion Western Task Force under Eisenhower in the fall of 1942, Patton executed this amphibious invasion of Morocco with skill and low casualties. After U.S. II Corps was mauled and humiliated by the Germans at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, Patton took command to swiftly revive its morale with victory at El Guettar in March 1943. Eisenhower then assigned Patton to plan and administer America's role in the amphibious invasion of Sicily.

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