Gen. Patton vs. A Polite Society… When Life and Death Was on the Line

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Victor Davis Hanson is a historian and classicist who has written extensively about George S. Patton, with the general being a key figure. In his book The Soul of Battle, Hanson argues that the real immorality in war is not the use of great force to inflict punishment, but the failure to exercise moral authority at all. Here’s Victor Davis Hanson, and this came from a talk he gave at Hillsdale College, which sponsors this show. All of our history stories are sponsored by the great folks at Hillsdale College.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: George Patton was resented by most of his peers because he was from one of the wealthiest families in America, Mount Wilson in L.A. That was his grandmother Wilson, the Wilson family. His father was the City Attorney of L.A. and owned a thousand acres in Pasadena. He was fabulously rich on his own family side, and then he married into the pharmaceutical company Fedwick Air’s big empire. So when the image of American officers was Omar Bradley and Eisenhower and Lucian Truscott and Wade Haislip, all of these great people from the hinterland of America, here came Patton from California, playing polo with his own yacht and a stable of horses all during the Depression. He had been in the 1912 Olympics. He came in fourth. He might have won the pentathlon. He claimed that he was such a good shot that each time he shot, he put the bullet right through the prior hole. The judges didn’t understand that, and he may have been right. But if you follow his career through the twenties and thirties up until Pearl Harbor, it was characterized by absolute brilliance. He was the first person to see that the Christie tank in 1919 had the best suspension and the Americans should go for it, and yet we didn’t do it, and that was the model that the T-34 rushing tank adopted. He designed the U.S. Cavalry Saber, and in this entire process he developed U.S. armor tactics 1940 in war games in Louisiana.

00:02:41
Speaker 3: He captured the senior General U. Drumm.

00:02:44
Speaker 2: You may have seen The Dirty Dozen? That old movie about how they played dirty? That was basically based.

00:02:51
Speaker 3: On Patton’s war maneuvers.

00:02:52
Speaker 2: Well, how he went on a four-hundred-mile goose chase, they thought, and ended up capturing the Red General.

00:02:58
Speaker 3: He was on the Blue Team. He did that two times.

00:03:01
Speaker 2: Then he went down and got into Indio, out in the middle of nowhere, and set up an entire desert warfare complex and taught Americans with inferior Lee tanks the elements of armor, pursuit, and breakthroughs. The point I’m making is that when Pearl—and he was 55 and he was still not a brigadier general—people hated him because he was drank too much. There were periods in his life when he womanized. He played polo. As I said, he was accident prone. He lit a gas limp to look at his eye and it blew up and burned his face. He accidentally stabbed himself, he broke his.

00:03:49
Speaker 3: Leg. He got phlebitis.

00:03:51
Speaker 2: He was always—and of course he died in a freak accident as well. So he was known as Injury Bone, reckless, rich, ostentatious, and yet he spoke French, Red German, and was highly educated. The point I’m getting at is that he enunciated, or he articulated, a worldview of war, and it was similar to his contemporaries like LeMay and Ridgway, and also very Sherman-esque. He was a big admirer of William Tecumseh Sherman, and he basically said that democracies are therapeutic societies and we don’t train people, thank God, to kill people, but there are people in the world who do, and when they do, they need people like George Patton, who’s part of and yet not part of a democracy that understands the evil mind and can make soldiers for brief periods of time have the training and the courage and the fortitude to stand up to the Hermann Göring Division or Fokuff One pilots or U-boats. And that was his principle. And then you would kill these evil people and you were protect the innocent. And he said that, and we don’t like people to say that. When Colin Powell said, “What’s your strategy for the first Gulf War?” he said, “We’re going to find Saddam’s army, we’re going to cut it off, and then we’re going to kill it.” And people got very angry.

00:05:16
Speaker 3: “Why did he have to say, ‘kill it’?”

00:05:18
Speaker 2: At the end, that therapeutic alternative is deeply ingrained, and it’s very hard for societies like us to mobilize against.

00:05:26
Speaker 3: These perceived threats without these types of people.

00:05:30
Speaker 2: So when we were ready after Pearl Harbor to fight, the obvious choice for our first engagement was George S. Patton. Right before Pearl Harbor in October, he was promoted to major general, a two-star general. And yet when we had Operation Torch, the November 1942 landings in Northwest Africa, he was not chosen to lead the entire project of Torch. He was given just the Western Command, 30,000 troops. The most incompetent, useless general in American history, Lloyd Fredendall, was. And Eisenhower wrote a report and said, “He looks like a general, he breathes fire, he’s our man.” I’ve never been more impressed. He would swagger around, he would pound his fist, and he didn’t know anything. And the result was, as you know, the worst defeat in American history really was, or at least the most humiliating, the Kasserine Pass, where Rommel destroyed an entire brigade: 3,000 missing, 400 dead, 600 tanks. Just Fredendall, where was he? Fifty miles back, dug in in a bunker, probably drunk. When it was time to take over Second Corps, everybody thought Patton would get his chance, and yet Eisenhower asked General Harmon to do it, who turned it down, saying, “This is pretty embarrassing.”

00:06:48
Speaker 3: “Patton deserves it.” So Patton took over immediately. At the Battle of El Guettar.

00:06:55
Speaker 2: He won the first battle Americans had won in World War II.

00:07:00
Speaker 1: Listening to Victor Davis Hanson tell the story not just of General George S. Patton, but about how democracies continue to be able to defend themselves against evil while enjoying the fruits of Western civilization. When we come back, more of Victor Davis Hanson here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, as we approach our nation’s 250th anniversary, I’d like to remind you that all the history stories you hear on this show are brought to you by the great folks at Hillsdale College. And Hillsdale isn’t just a great school for your kids or grandkids to attend, but for you as well. Go to Hillsdale.edu to find out about their terrific free online courses. Their series on Communism is one of the finest I’ve ever seen. Again, go to Hillsdale.edu and sign up for their free and terrific online courses. And we continue with Our American Stories, and with Victor Davis Hanson telling the story, if not just George S. Patton, but, well, The Soul of Battle and particularly how a genteel society and Western democracies themselves can survive and thrive when life and death are on the line. Let’s continue with Victor Davis Hanson.

00:08:35
Speaker 2: He wanted to continue ahead of Second Corps. You had thought that too many people had died in North Africa needlessly without giving Patton the main responsibility for the invasion of.

00:08:47
Speaker 3: Sicily, Operation Husky. And yet we deferred.

00:08:51
Speaker 2: To General Montgomery. Montgomery was a great general in a set piece, but he was not a pursuer. He didn’t pursue. So what did Patton do? He went all the way to northwest, to Palermo, then made another right turn, broke orders and got to Messina before Montgomery, and of course didn’t get there in time to trap the Germans. But he became very famous after that. And you think that at that point everybody knew that Overlord was being planned in conjunction with the Italian invasion, that he would get a supreme command. He slapped two soldiers quite despicably. He went into a hospital. He was mad because the absentee rate of soldiers for what we would call post-traumatic stress syndrome was known then as shell shock. There were three officers who watched the first slapping incident. The person had malaria when he was slapped. The second one, two weeks later, he had some ailment. Whether it was a fever or it was just stress.

00:09:47
Speaker 3: We don’t know, but he slapped him.

00:09:50
Speaker 2: In this period, one of his armored companies was on a bridge. There was an Italian farmer with two mules.

00:09:59
Speaker 3: They were being strayed.

00:10:00
Speaker 2: They didn’t want to run over the mules. It was a very narrow bridge. Patton went up, put, took out his three-point-fifty-seven and right hand, and he had a forty-five Colt the other and shot these two mules and had him thrown over the bridge, and this was considered terrible. Think of this therapeutic mindset. Here you have a whole column stopped, and the papers and journalists are angry that Patton shot two mules and threw them over the bridge to facilitate the company getting out of a strafing attack. But in that was a very important point, though, because he obviously should have been given one of three possible appointments. What I’m getting at is that there’s a pattern here of somebody that has undeniable, experienced preparation and natural genius, who understands the horrific nature of war and bothers the people that command him, and yet sequentially, or time and time again, when he has not given a billet or an appointment or a promotion befitting what he’s earned on the battlefield, people die. And yet the way that the system or the therapeutic society justifies that is…

00:11:16
Speaker 3: “That he slapped a soldier.”

00:11:18
Speaker 2: Germans, of course, were bewildered by this. I mean, it is a little mythical that Germans knew a Patton. I don’t think the movie is quite right that he was canonized by the Germans. Mostly after the war, they sort of changed the reviews. They call him a cowboy and kind of reckless. But the point I’m making is that it is true that a number of German intelligence officers wouldn’t believe that somebody of his talent would be relieved for slapping a couple of soldiers when German officers killed 25,000 soldiers in World War II, shot them for cowardice, or had them ordered shot. And so Patton is symbolic of a problem that all Western societies deal with since the Greeks, that the advent of civilization is a wonderful thing. It creates leisure, it creates material wealth, luxury. It’s civilization. It’s not tribalism, it’s not barbarism. But in that process we become tame. And yet the world around us is not tame, and we don’t quite know how to justify using violence against people who want to kill us. And so from time to time we see these fossilized memories of our past and we bring them out of the proverbial closet and we say, “Help us, Curtis LeMay.” The B-29 program doesn’t work. I know it’s safe for our flyers at 30,000 feet, but the bombs are going off, falling off-target. “Well, you go down 5,000 with napalm, that’ll cure it.” “Oh my God, you’re going to burn people alive.” “I’ll get rid of the industry.” “Our Matthew Ridgway. I’m going to let them come in and then I’m going to surround them with napalm and I’m going to blast them, and it’s going to be winter, and they’re going to regret they ever went into Korea.” “Our Sherman, this is the plantation of Howell Cobb. This is the guy who said that 250,000 Confederate soldiers were superior to us. Burn his plantation.” “Oh, wow, he burned.” He burned a Southern plantation. And so, when we see somebody like Patton, and you can see it throughout our culture, it’s just not military.

00:13:21
Speaker 3: That was what made John Ford famous.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: That if you’re Ethan Edwards in The Searchers and you want to find a small girl, and you’re dealing with some pretty tough Native American tribes, you want somebody with a dubious past. We’re not quite told what he was—maybe a Quantrill raider, John Wayne—and you don’t know whether he’s going to kill Natalie Wood or not, but…

00:13:42
Speaker 3: He has the skills that both ensure that.

00:13:44
Speaker 2: He’s going to bring her back. But as you remember, once she’s back, he opens the door and walks out. You don’t want a guy like that there anymore than you want Gary Cooper in High Noon to stay around after he’s done what you have to do: shoot four people in the street. You don’t want The Magnificent Seven in the village anymore. I remember that famous Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen said, “Well, I guess they’re happy,” and he said, “They’ll even be happier when we leave.” And I’ll just finish by saying that this is not a new phenomenon that we sometimes misdiagnose talent throughout all aspects of American society. When pre-civilized Greece was making this transition to the city-state, especially to radical democracy, there were people who saw the same phenomenon. One of the great minds of the Western literary canon, Sophocles, in a series of plays, he looked at this archetype of the oligarchic aristocratic class that had all of these anti-democratic skills, and by every measure of talent and courage and bravery they excel, and yet they all end up badly because to reward them for those very characteristics would be a referendum on your own society. And I think that’s a dilemma we all have to appreciate, not asking us to change our views, but to every once in a while look in the corners and when we see dark people, maybe they’re not so dark after all. So it’s hard, it’s very hard to see that it’s not the generals. The generals are representations of us, and there were people coming out of the Depression who were impoverished that didn’t have the luxury to be therapeutic. And so Patton was the most popular general. The reason he was so successful was he had broad public support. The parents of the soldier he slapped wrote a letter and said that, “I think it was wrong what you did, but, Boy, we’re not going to criticize you.”

00:15:47
Speaker 3: “You’re saving lives. I just don’t think that would happen again.”

00:15:50
Speaker 2: So the general today, and I think General Petraeus was a very good general, but it’s more of an intellectual with a Ph.D. rather.

00:15:57
Speaker 3: Than a blood-and-guts type of person.

00:16:00
Speaker 2: Now I’m quoting the 7th century B.C. poet Hesiod that the most powerful of all human emotions is envy, what they call phthonos. And it’s true that the more successful person—that’s what Greek ostracism, the democratic culture, created—ostracized somebody, not because he did something wrong, because everybody knows who he is. So we don’t like people who do things that we can’t in a democratic, pluralistic society. And so these people who show us and remind us of that, they’re pretty scary people. But you can see that this person has certain obnoxious characteristics and certain skill sets that bring results. And you can guarantee that after we are the beneficiaries of the results, it’s going to be persona non grata.

00:16:45
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the editing and production by Greg Hengler, and a very special thanks to Hillsdale College for providing the audio of this remarkable talk of Victor Davis Hanson’s, which is not just about General Patton, but how in the end, let’s face it, we need our bad guys who can inflict harm on enemies trying to kill us. And nobody does a finer job of this than Victor. And also, Hillsdale College again sponsors.

00:17:16
Speaker 3: Of this show. You hear the name again and again.

00:17:18
Speaker 1: Go to their website and sign up for any and all of Victor Davis Hanson’s classes. They’re terrific—his lectures on just about everything, and their latest on Communism is a tour de force as much, of course, as it is a mini-documentary. I took it with my daughter and it was fabulous. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. Again, that story and history of Communism is simply terrific. The story of General George S. Patton and the need for bad guys to fight the fight against other nations’ bad guys. Here on Our American Stories.