Books: Five-Star Legend

LUCKY FORWARD (424 pp.)—Robert S. Allen—Vanguard ($5).

George Patton, able General and chronic martinet, stood on the steps of a medieval English manor and sounded off to his staff: “… I mean business when I fight. I don’t fight for fun and I won’t tolerate anyone on my Staff who does. . . . Ahead of you lies battle. … It is inevitable for men to be killed and wounded in battle. But there is no reason why such losses should be increased because of the incompetence and carelessness of some stupid son-of-a-bitch. I don’t tolerate such men on my Staff.”

Neither incompetent nor careless, and by no means stupid, Robert Sharon Allen of Pearson & Allen’s Washington Merry-Go-Round was Patton’s G-2 operations executive (i.e., military intelligence officer) in the ETO campaigns. He came home minus his right arm, sporting a rash of ribbons and a Patton commendation for “superior performance.” No shrinking violet, Allen has let his publisher spread the commendation on the jacket of Lucky Forward, his raucous, truculent history of Patton’s Third Army. In a not very roundabout way, the author is made to shine in the reflection of Patton’s glories, for, according to Allen, “Patton never made a move without first consulting G2. In planning, G-2 always had the first say.”

George the “Greatest.” Were George Patton alive, he would surely relish what Allen has to say in Lucky Forward: 1) “. … Patton was the greatest battle commander produced in this country since the Civil War”; 2) Patton would have ended the European war months sooner had not SHAEF stymied the Third Army every time it got rolling; 3) had Patton’s plans not been upset by higher headquarters, the Germans could never have mounted their Ardennes campaign; 4) many of the Third Army’s great victories were won only because Patton, sometimes with General Omar Bradley’s help, attacked when SHAEF wanted him to defend.

Many a Third Army veteran will read with some surprise that hard-riding General Patton was “a hero to his men” and that he was generally called “Georgie.” To most combat men, he was “Patton,” their general and a good one, but they were seldom taken in by the publicity Patton courted. Most line troops resented his flashy, self-designed uniforms, sardonically muttered “our blood and his guts,” when they heard his pre-battle exhortations. No Third Army infantryman could have written such stuff-&-nonsense as this: “An attack might appear suicidal, but if ‘Georgie’ ordered it, it was accepted as a sound and tenable mission.”

Former foot soldiers, who regarded even a regimental headquarters as a soft spot, may also find it hard to understand Allen when he writes: “Tailors and bootmakers in neighboring towns were deluged with rush orders for smart battle jackets and combat boots . . . high-geared action, hard-hitting competence, and breezy cockiness became HQ Third Army’s fixed character and tempo. It moved, talked, and fought, fast, tough, and hard.”

George Could Have Done It. Allen’s charges against SHAEF and British Field Marshal Montgomery are heated and serious, but military men and plain readers alike will be apt to notice a lack of documentation for Author Allen’s conclusions. Says Allen of the Falaise gap: “The trap was set. All that remained was to spring it. … There was nothing to it.

“Except—SHAEF and its high-level politics.

“What the Germans could not do, SHAEF did. Third Army was sat down. Patton was ordered not to seize Falaise. . . . The real reason was Montgomery’s insistence that he close the gap. He demanded—and got his way—that Patton be halted from springing the trap he had forged. . . . During that time, the bulk of the trapped German armor escaped, to fight again and kill United States and British troops on other battlefields.”

Lucky Forward is peppered with similar charges, none of them convincingly sustained. Says Allen: “Patton was the sparkplug and dynamo of the war in the ETO. The full record of his genius and far-flung impact on operations still is entombed behind an official wall of jealous silence and so-called ‘classified documents.’ ”

Lucky Forward is likely to please only those who want to make a legend of Patton. Essentially it is a rewrite of Headquarters section reports into a kind of headline-writer’s jab-&-smash jargon. It is jerky, often ungrammatical, unblushingly awkward: “The enemy’s vitals had been pierced. An Armored poniard was stabbed squarely in the middle of his rear and athwart his main line of communications. . . . The enemy was beset from every quarter in a welter of triphammer blows, chaos, death, and destruction. On the ground and in the air he was mauled and ravaged from every side. . . . Third Army’s eviscerating dagger remained pinned and unblunted in their lacerated flank.”

This kind of runaway lingo often leads Historian Allen into exaggerations. Where a few casualties were inflicted on a German combat patrol, Allen recalls that they were “mowed down.” A minor attack became a powerful counterattack, prisoners are credited to the wrong division and the negotiated surrender of a distant enemy division is described as if the enemy troops laid down their arms at the mere sight of Patton’s men.

Many a Third Army officer felt that there was discrimination against the Third Army in the distribution of supplies, especially gasoline, and knew that the Third could have kept advancing at times when it was halted by higher headquarters. What the reasons were was not always clear and is not entirely clear yet, and Allen does nothing in Lucky Forward to clarify matters. Even rabid Third Army veterans will probably not be satisfied with Colonel Allen’s charge of simple jealousy in higher places. The Patton legend does not need to be increased by decreasing the services, the skills and the patriotism of men who worked beside or above him.