Gorgeous George

By LANCE MORROW

THE PATTON PAPERS, 1940-1945

by MARTIN BLUMENSON 889 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $17.50.

A 1943 radio broadcast in the U.S. called George Patton "a rootin', tootin', hip-shootin' commander whose chief ambition is to meet Marshal Rommel in a personal tank battle, just the two of them, squared off in a duel to the death." Patton encouraged that flamboyant image until finally he threatened to degenerate into self-parody. He once presented a speaker to his troops by saying: "Men, I want to introduce to you the noblest work of God--a killer!" With his ivory-handled pistols and magnificently bloodthirsty battle speeches, his dashing tank tactics and the almost sinister boyishness with which he rushed into combat ("L'audace, toujours I'audace"), he was probably war's last romantic. "I love wars and am having a fine time," he wrote to his wife Beatrice during the Sicilian campaign. "When it cools off, I am going to have a closeup of the Greek temples."

Bawdy Doggerel. Pattern's private war-years papers reveal a much more complicated character than his comicbook legend suggested. He was an American original--a brilliant actor who played the aristocratic warrior or the cussing, jingo-spouting brute, depending on his audience. He once admitted to his aide that he practiced ferocious expressions in the mirror, but he despaired of ever having what he called "a real fighting face." He believed in the natural superiority of Americans in general and himself in particular; the ugly side of that self-confidence was a streak of contemptuous racism, reactionary smugness and brutality toward those he regarded as slackers.

Patton's ambition may have driven him to subdue much in his nature that was civilized, charming and gentle. He was a military scholar with uncanny intuitive gifts. He tried to be a poet, though the results were usually doggerel and sometimes bawdy: "In war just as in loving,/ You've got to keep on shoving." He could combine callousness--slapping shell-shocked soldiers, for example --with great tenderness for his men. He would sometimes weep and kiss the foreheads of soldiers killed in battle. He was remarkably observant, sometimes with a grisly poetry: "Saw a lot of dead Germans yesterday frozen in funny attitudes. I did not have my color camera, which was a pity, as their faces were a pale claret color." Gradually he crystallized his personality into a hard, violent mask. "My private opinion," he wrote in 1945, "is that practically everyone but myself is a pusillanimous son of a bitch."

Martin Blumenson, who served in Patton's Third Army Headquarters during World War II and later as a scholar in the Army's Office of Chief of Military History, has done a superb job of editing Patton's diaries, letters, memos and speeches. He has also skillfully stitched them together with explanatory narrative. The first volume, published in 1972, covered Patton's life from 1885 to 1940 --his service under Pershing in Mexico and France, his long wait between wars, his crusading in behalf of armored warfare. The present volume begins in 1940 and ends with Patton's death in 1945 in a car accident in Germany.

From boyhood onward, Patton possessed a disconcertingly literal sense of his own destiny. On a dangerous plane flight in North Africa in 1943 Patton wrote in his diary: "We nearly hit several mountains, and I was scared till I thought of my destiny, and that calmed me." He could not die, he believed, until he had achieved his "mission," something immortal. In that, he was somewhat disappointed. Patton was a swashbuckling and inventive tactician. Yet his indiscretions--the slapping incident on Sicily, his undiplomatic opinions--persuaded Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall that however effective Patton was as a field officer, he was potentially unstable. Blumenson speculates that a subdural hematoma (a blood clot in the brain) suffered during a polo match may have caused his occasionally unbalanced behavior.

Patton's diaries and letters are full of shrewd, petulant and uncharitable observations. Toward Eisenhower, Patton was often privately savage, especially when he thought Ike was being too cozy with the British. He noted that Eisenhower had started wearing suede shoes, "`a la British." To his wife Beatrice he wrote that Ike "spoke of lunch as 'tiffin' and of gasoline as 'petrol.' I truly fear that London has conquered Abilene." Because Eisenhower said he regarded himself as an Ally rather than specifically an American, Patton said he was "damned near to being Benedict Arnold."

I Am a Genius. Churchill, Patton wrote after meeting him at Casablanca, "speaks the worst French I have ever heard, his eyes run, and he is not at all impressive." Montgomery, he thought, "was small, wonderfully conceited and the best soldier in this war." Harry Hopkins "was like a pilot fish for a shark [F.D.R.]," and King George "is just a grade above a moron, poor little fellow."

Although Patton admired Omar Bradley, he referred to him as "Omar the Tentmaker." Of General Mark Wayne Clark he was almost invariably contemptuous and jealous. Patton's constant theme throughout the war was a kind of bewildered disappointment that men he regarded as his inferiors were surpassing him. "I can't see how people can be so dull and lacking in imagination," he wrote. "Compared to them, I am a genius. I think I am."

Early in his life, Patton spoke of winning a war so that the grateful nation would invite him home as a dictator. Eventually he understood that he was not suited for politics, but maybe it is just as well, as he did not return from the wars. He might not have known what to do with peacetime, and the nation might not have known what to do with Gorgeous George. sbLance Morrow

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