Army & Navy – COMMAND: Death & the General

In the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg (a former German cavalry barracks), General George Smith Patton Jr. was fighting for his life. His neck had been broken in an auto accident when he was on his way to shoot pheasants. He fought with the same tenacity with which he had fought his enemies. He was mending so well that medics took off the elaborate traction apparatus and put their 60-year-old patient in a plaster cast. There was talk of flying him home. Then a respiratory infection set in. Last week—twelve days after his accident—George Patton died in his sleep.

Thus ended the career, but not the legend, of the most spectacular, most controversial U.S. field general in World War II.

Twice George (“Old Blood & Guts”) Patton had been stripped of his command. The first time was after a public furor in the U.S. over his slapping and abusing a shell-shocked soldier in a Sicilian hospital. (Technically, he remained head of the Seventh Army, but it was a phantom Army with no divisions.) For the old war horse, that was a bitter period. One day he visited Fifth Army headquarters before Cassino, borrowed Mark Clark’s Packard, and in this conspicuous vehicle rode recklessly up to the front lines. When he could ride no farther he got out and walked, erect, though mortar shells were bursting all around. More than once, Patton had said that he wanted to die on the battlefield. Man in Armor. A cavalryman by training and by temperament, California-born George Patton was the medieval man on horseback—in mechanized armor. Even before his country was at war, he wanted to joust with Nazi Erwin Rommel—each contestant in a tank. “The two armies could watch,” said he. “I’d shoot at him, he’d shoot at me. If I killed him, I’d be the champ. If he killed me—well he won’t.”

Swearing, swashbuckling, he drove his troops ruthlessly to victories in Africa, Sicily, France and Germany. Some of his men caught his spirit; some hated him. But nearly all admired his military achievements.

The second time he lost a command was last October, when “Ike” Eisenhower yanked him out of the Third Army command which had made him Military Governor of Bavaria; he had belittled the differences between Nazis and anti-Nazis, likening them to those between Republicans and Democrats. He got the Fifteenth, a paper Army doing paper work, compiling a history of European campaigns.

In that history, whoever writes it, the roaring campaigns of George Smith Patton and his tanks across France and Germany must make an honorable chapter. Along that route, among Third Army dead at Hamm in Luxembourg, George Patton was laid to rest.