Books: The War Lover

PATTON: ORDEAL AND TRIUMPH by Ladislas Farago. 885 pages. Obolensky. $9.95.

The Brittany farmland had been bombed, strafed and shelled all day. Its rough-stone houses were now rubble, its fields aflame and littered with dead cattle. Looking down on this devastation, General George Smith Patton Jr. suddenly raised his arms to the sky. “Compared to war,” he cried, “all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it!”

Such chilling scenes have built up a widespread misunderstanding of Patton that not even eight earlier and more friendly biographies could knock down. As this ninth attempt makes clear, the impression that he was a callous killer is no less deluded than Patton’s own self-image. He absolutely believed that he was the “reincarnation” of an archetypal fighting man wHo had once “battled for fresh mammoth,” had fought in a phalanx against Cyrus the Persian, on Crécy’s field in the Hundred Years’ War, in all the great campaigns since.

Dueling Rommel. Patton saw his life as one long joust with the world. In peacetime, he trained himself for war as a medieval knight training for battle. He was a ferocious competitor in the pentathlon, in which he finished fifth in the 1912 Olympics, and polo, in which he was a seven-goal player. In his last year at West Point, he thrust his head into the line of fire during a sharpshooting exercise. “I just wanted to see how afraid I’d be,” he explained, “and to train myself not to be.” When war came, Patton’s revolutionary theories of seemingly reckless advance (“Let the enemy worry about his flanks”) often proved to be the best way not to spill blood but to spare it. Besides, if he had had his own way, World War II would have cost but one casualty: it would have been just a duel between Field Marshal Rommel and General Patton. “The armies could watch,” he said. “If I killed him, I’d be the champ. If he killed me-well, he won’t.”

This biography by Ladislas Farago. a military chronicler and World War II intelligence officer, is the longest, hardest and most informative look yet at George Patton. Yet it is painfully under-edited and overwrought. And Farago’s digressions into higher political issues, coupled with perhaps the most illegible campaign maps ever printed, serve only to slow down the pace of Patton’s breakneck “war of movement.” More damagingly, the author has not fully marshaled his own conclusions on the contentious general.

Paper Army. At one point, Farago declares that Patton’s “combination of dash and daring on the one side and enormous professional skill and savvy on the other qualified him even for the Supreme Command, which was eventually denied to him through the failure of his superiors to recognize and appreciate the intrinsic and overwhelming value of such a combination.” But at another, he concedes that Patton’s trigger temper and lack of political sophistication probably disqualified him for higher responsibilities. Patton botched his proconsul duties, first as the ruler of French Morocco in 1942-43, and later as Military Governor of Bavaria. He gave Eisenhower no choice but to ease him out.

Ike put him in command of the “15th Army,” literally a paper unit preparing a war history. George Patton had already warned his wife, just before the German surrender, that “peace is going to be hell on me.” His death in an auto accident only three months after losing the military governorship and only seven months after the armistice may have seemed to him to have come too late rather than too early. “The proper end for the professional soldier,” George Patton liked to say, “is a quick death inflicted by the last bullet of the last battle.”