“He is in a sea of mud, really awful,” Patton told his diary. “He fears that tanks can’t move, due to mud, but I told him to do it with his infantry. I want to hit Rommel before he hits us, also to help Eighth Army, which attacks tomorrow night.” What Patton didn’t know, however, was that the Germans had already taken the bait and moved the Tenth Panzer Division into the gap at Maknassy.
The next day, Patton rode to his various divisions, urging them on. After retiring he was awakened at midnight by Bradley with news that his son-in-law John Waters was safe, captured. Patton’s aide Dick Jenson wrote to Beatrice, “If the General gets any more good news I think we will have to sit on him to keep him down. I think the hex is over.” On March 21, while pushing General Ward to attack the Maknassy Heights, Patton closely escaped death himself when a salvo of large German artillery shells exploded on a hillside where only moments earlier he had been standing.
Continuing the push two days later, Terry Allen’s First Infantry Division ambushed a battle group of tanks and infantry of the Tenth Panzer Division. The battle raged from morning throughout the afternoon, during which American artillery and M10 tank destroyers demolished several dozen enemy tanks and slaughtered a large number of infantry before the Germans retreated in disorder. It was a significant victory not only because it set up a further American offensive to clear all of the Tunisian Eastern Dorsale of Axis units, but also because it was the first American victory against the German army.
On March 26, the attacking British Eighth Army drove the Germans from the forts of the Mareth Line. Four days later—disgusted with Ward’s lack of progress—Patton moved a substantial portion of Ward’s armor to the First Infantry Division for a lightning strike down the El Guettar road, which would threaten the left flank of the retreating Afrika Korps. Both Patton and Bradley attached their aides to this force not only because it was short of staff officers but also to give the aides some combat experience. “There will possibly be a big tank battle in the morning,” Patton wrote Beatrice. “We are trying to cut Rommel off and he don’t like it.”
The American attack was almost immediately bogged down and Patton was furious. He called Ward and told him to assault the Axis positions at Maknassy and, if necessary, to take casualties “up to twenty-five percent,” adding, “Goddamn it! I want that hill in front of you. Get off your ass; get a pistol in your hand, and lead that attack yourself.”
“I feel quite brutal to order people to take such losses, especially when I personally am safe, but it must be done,” Patton told his diary that night. “Wars can only be won by killing and the sooner we start the better.”
The next day, April 1, Patton received one of the great shocks of his long, shock-filled career. “Dick Jenson was killed this morning,” he wrote Beatrice. “It was my fault in a way,” he said, and told her what had happened. Jenson was at the forward command post with Omar Bradley when twelve Junkers 88 fighter-bombers came. Everyone jumped into a slit trench, but a 500-pound bomb landed just on the edge near Jenson and killed him instantly. “It was concussion that got [Dick]. He was not mangled in any way,” Patton wrote, brokenhearted.
“We brought him to the cemetery here at Gafsa and will bury him at 4:00 p.m.,” Patton continued. “Gaffeyǁ and I went out to see his body wrapped up in a shelter half. I knelt down and kissed him on his forehead. He was a great character and loyal, long-suffering friend. I shall miss him very much. I feel very sorry for Echo [Jenson’s mother]. I cut a lock of his hair and sent it. I will send all his trinkets as soon as I can find them.”
While Patton grieved over Jenson’s loss, his offensive with the First Infantry Division had broken through the German and Italian defenses and was rolling on out of the mountain passes and into the Central Plain. Alexander at last gave Patton a chance to wedge his forces between the two German armies in Tunisia and cut them off.
But before doing so Patton paid respects to his fallen aide. “Stiller, Sgt. Meeks, Sgt. Mims and I went to the cemetery at 1600. Dick was wrapped in a white mattress cover. We had a squad and a trumpeter, but did not fire the volleys, as it would make people think an air raid was on. The Corps chaplain read the Episcopal service and he was lowered in. There are no coffins here, as there is no wood. He was a fine man and a fine officer. He had no vices. I can’t see the reason that such fine men get killed. I shall miss him a lot.” Patton’s biographer Carlo D’Este has written: “Like nothing else he had ever experienced, Dick Jenson’s death haunted Patton for the remainder of his life, and served as a constant reminder of the awesome responsibility of being a commanding general. Correspondents calling on him in Gafsa after the funeral found him still in tears.”11
As the fighting moved on, so did Patton. He set up new headquarters in Constantine (founded by Trajan in A.D. 200 or 100, he noted) and had lunch at the mess of U.S. Army Air Corps general Tooey Spaatz. Afterward, he reflected that “Men … are too damned polite. War is very simple, direct, and ruthless. It takes a simple, direct and ruthless man to wage war.”
Before leaving Gafsa, Patton had once more visited Jenson’s gravesite and took a picture of it to send to his mother. “I picked some nasturtiums in the yard and I went to the cemetery to tell Dick goodbye,” he wrote. “There are more than 700 graves there now.” Patton later received this in reply. “You gave him the happiest years of his life,” wrote Mrs. Jenson. “After his father’s death, you took his place, and his admiration and affection for you were unbounded. I quite agree with you that he should not be moved from Africa.” She said she wanted Patton to keep Jenson’s personal belongings “with undying gratitude for making it possible for him to do all the things he wanted to do.”
IN CONSTANTINE, PATTON WAS relieved of II Corps, which was no surprise, and Bradley took his place. His new job was to plan for and lead the American forces in Operation Husky, the amphibious invasion of Sicily to knock Italy out of the war. George Marshall telegraphed: “You did a fine job [with II Corps] and further strengthened confidence in your leadership.”
The campaign for North Africa concluded successfully for the Allies shortly thereafter. Rommel had gone back to Germany before the end, but in mid-May some 250,000 Axis troops surrendered, and more than 40,000 had been killed. The Allies counted nearly 60,000 dead, but North Africa was free of Germans and Italians—a major turning point in the war. Meanwhile, Patton had become even more bitter over Eisenhower’s insistence that U.S. forces cooperate with and even serve under the British.
“So far this war is being fought for the British Empire and for postwar considerations,” he wrote in his dairy. “No one gives a damn about winning it for itself now.” It was too true. The British, and to some extent the Free French, were planning the war politically to reclaim the North African empires that the Axis had conquered. To Patton’s dismay and disgust, the wily British general Harold Alexander was placed in charge of ground forces in the Sicilian operation.
For his part, Patton had led the corps for forty-three days, fought several successful battles, commanded 95,800 men, lost twenty pounds, and gained a third star “and a hell of a lot of poise and confidence, and otherwise I am about the same.”
THE BUGABOOS THAT BEDEVILED Patton in North Africa plagued him in Operation Husky as well. Alexander, still mistrusting the American army in combat, had given Patton a secondary role in the Sicilian campaign. Patton’s forces—initially consisting of the nearly 96,000 men of his two North African corps, but soon to become nearly triple that number and designated the Seventh U.S. Army—were to protect the left flank of Montgomery’s Eighth British Army as it landed upon Sicily’s southern shores. They would then march up the coast to capture Messina, the capital of the Italian province of that name and the jumping-off point for an invasion of greater Italy.
Patton had learned not to question Eisenhower on matters of British control; it became a sore point with the Allied commander. Instead Patton outwardly welcomed the chance to participate in any operation that contained a role in it for h
imself, and privately he waited to seize any opportunity to expand that role into one of overwhelming importance. “This is what you get when your Commander-in-Chief ceases to be an American and becomes an Ally. The U.S. is getting gypped,” Patton groused to his diary.
After weeks of preparation for Operation Husky, the planning had become a royal mess concocted by the various entities involved. For one, the U.S. Navy was reluctant to use ships in what it saw as a risky situation in range of Axis fighters and bombers. To make matters worse, nobody could decide where to land the two armies. At last Montgomery cornered Ike’s deputy Bedell Smith in a North African air force officers’ latrine, where he steamed up the lavatory mirror with his breath and drew an outline of a convincing assault plan. Eisenhower endorsed it, breaking the impasse.
With motorcycle escorts, blaring sirens, and other hoopla of his exalted rank, Patton meanwhile darted from unit to unit of his command delivering a pep talk for the upcoming operation. On Memorial Day, he laid out for the troops what might be deemed the Patton philosophy of war: “We must remember that victories are not gained solely by selfless devotion. To conquer we must destroy our enemies. We must not only die gallantly, we must kill devastatingly. The faster and more effectively you kill the longer will you live to enjoy the priceless fame of conquerors.”
Around that time, Patton got word that his son, George IV, like his father before him, had flunked mathematics in his first year at West Point. And, like his father before him, he wrote that he planned to take the reexamination and return to the academy next September to repeat his plebe year.
“I am naturally distressed by George’s failure but apparently he came by his mathematic ability very naturally,” Patton wrote his brother-in-law Frederick Ayer, “and I now feel convinced he will wind up at least a lieutenant-general, that is, if he continues to follow so accurately in my footsteps.”
HUSKY KICKED OFF IN THE EARLY morning hours of July 10, 1943, with a thunderous naval bombardment. Watching from the deck of the cruiser Monrovia, Patton was convinced that the Italians “must be scared to death”—though he himself recorded an anxiety similar to that of “before a polo match.”
After the initial shelling the First Infantry Division waded ashore and took the German-Italian airfields at Gela, led by Lieutenant Colonel William O. Darby and his force of Army Ranger Battalions. The next morning the Germans and Italians counterattacked, but after initially penetrating the division’s perimeter they were smashed by naval gunfire during a fierce battle that included paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division.
Guns blazing, Patton could no longer stand being on the ship. Accompanied by several aides, he waded ashore at 9:30 a.m. to inspect the battlefield. They arrived at Darby’s command post in Gela to witness an Italian armored counterattack; from a rooftop they watched enemy tanks roll across a plain straight toward him. When Patton saw a navy forward observer standing in the street below with a radio, he hailed him, “Hey, you with the radio!”
Pointing to the tanks Patton shouted, “If you can connect with your Goddamn Navy, tell them for God’s sake to drop some shellfire on the road!” Soon large-caliber shells from the cruiser USS Boise were blasting the Italian tanks into junk metal. Before leaving the Rangers, Patton ordered them to “kill every one of the Goddamn bastards!”12
According to biographer D’Este, that day marked the beginning of the deterioration in relations between Patton and Omar Bradley, which, until then, had been good. Patton, it seems, had countermanded an order Bradley gave to the First Infantry Division, and though he later apologized he apparently told Eisenhower that Bradley was “not aggressive enough.” When asked about it by Ike, Bradley responded that the remark was “an unforgivable slur.”13
During the early days of fighting, the Italians and Germans committed such an inordinate number of atrocities and tricks that “there are more enemy dead than usual,” Patton wrote Beatrice. On July 16, Patton told her, “The enemy has been booby-trapping his dead, which has made our men very mad. Yesterday I drove over some of our battlefields and smelled dead men for ten miles. The [Germans and Italians] have now pulled the white flag trick four times. We take few prisoners.”
FOLLOWING THE SUCCESSFUL LANDINGS, Alexander essentially allowed the American and British armies to develop their own operations with the general understanding that the Americans would be the “shield in the left hand” protecting the Eighth Army, whose right hand contained “the sword”—pointed at Messina, the main strategic objective in Sicily. Alexander bungled an opportunity, however, when he issued orders that forbade Bradley from moving quickly up Highway 124, a main artery, to encircle and obliterate the German defenses at Enna. This error caused excessive delays to Montgomery’s plans for taking Messina and gave Patton his chance. After writing Beatrice that “Monty is trying to steal the show,” Alexander’s dithering allowed Patton to march swiftly across the northwest face of Sicily to capture the city of Palermo, the country’s major port on the Tyrrhenian Sea. This he did on July 21 to a wild reception by thousands of cheering, flag-waving, disillusioned Sicilians shouting, “Down with Mussolini!”
Declaring that future students “at the Command and General Staff School will study the campaign as a classic example of the use of tanks,” Patton described for reporters how his army had marched 200 miles over crooked roads, killing or wounding 6,000 Italians and capturing another 44,000. If anyone in the United States had failed to know who General George Patton was before, they certainly knew it then; he was the leading subject of newsreels across the land, his face plastered on every newspaper in the country.
WITH MONTGOMERY STILL SLOGGING it out in the eastern hills of Sicily, Patton cast his gaze on Messina, which the British initially intended to gloriously and victoriously capture. A wrinkle, however, had developed in the form of savage German resistance to the British Eighth Army. Realizing that he was bogged down, Montgomery visited Patton in a conference to discuss strategy. He utterly astonished the American commander by proposing that Patton’s Seventh Army take Messina if the Eighth Army could not break free.
Despite this, Patton suspected that Montgomery was being disingenuous and meant somehow to trick him into not getting to Messina first. Patton quickly regrouped his army, turned the II Corps 90 degrees to the right, and began a march toward Messina on the north Sicilian coastal highway. Along the way, he sent a note to Major General Troy Middleton, one of his division commanders, saying, “This is a horserace in which the prestige of the U.S. Army is at stake. We must take Messina before the British. Please use your best efforts to facilitate the success of our race.”14
The “race” had slowed to a walk, and then a halt, as the Germans ferociously resisted the American advance, giving way only at the expense of immense bloodshed. To counter this, Bradley ordered his division commanders to maneuver the enemy out of their positions rather than assault them frontally, until Patton stopped Bradley on the road with the following exhortation: “I want you to get to Messina just as fast as you can. I don’t want you to waste time on these maneuvers, even if you’ve got to spend men to do it. I want to beat Monty into Messina.” Bradley was “shocked” and “sickened,” and he ignored the order, refusing “to waste lives merely for the sake of winning a meaningless race.”15
Still, Patton was all over the battlefield, ordering, cajoling, suggesting. At one point he encountered a column of troops stuck in a holdup on a bridge while a local farmer tried to budge two stubborn mules pulling his wagon. Patton roared up in his jeep, pulled one of his ivory-handled pistols, and shot both animals behind the ear, then ordered his men to throw the carcasses off the bridge. It might seem to be an example of Patton’s cruelty, but he was more concerned for hundreds of his men to run the risk of being strafed by the Luftwaffe than he was with the mules.
To slow the Allies, the Germans blew up bridges behind them and sowed thousands of land mines. Bradley and Patton dreamed up what they called their “end run” tactic, a night amphibious lan
ding to leapfrog behind the German lines utilizing U.S. Navy landing craft that had originally carried the men to the beaches. By August 16, with the British still stuck miles from Messina, the end-run amphibious landings had combined with an almost superhuman effort by Lucian Truscott’s Third Division and others and together the American troops entered Messina. Hitler, at last having learned a lesson from the mass surrender of his troops in North Africa, had allowed the German forces in Sicily to evacuate.a They would fight again another day.
At 10:30 a.m. the next morning, Patton and Truscott—accompanied by aides and escorts—triumphantly entered the city. Patton was resplendent in his brown gabardines and shining helmet liner. The sirens on his jeep blared, its “three-star pennants gleaming in the sunlight,” as the convoy entered the piazza in the town’s center. About an hour later the first units of the British column “clanked into the city.”16
For his part, Omar Bradley was fuming that Patton had ordered this circus-like atmosphere to stoke his own ego while Bradley’s men were stuck in the hills “to watch helplessly as the last of the Germans fled the city.” He later said, “I was so angry … that I was half tempted to enter the city and greet him on a street corner when he arrived.” The rift between the two former friends was complete.17
The monthlong campaign of what Patton called “one of the fiercest sustained battles in history” had been a smashing success; at a cost of 24,850 Allied casualties (5,837 of these killed in action) some 20,000 Germans were dead and approximately 150,000 Italians were lost. More important, the defeat caused the already shaky Italian people to rise up and overthrow the Fascist regime. Mussolini fled to Germany and the Italians surrendered—which might have ended matters, but the Germans had no intention of giving the Allies a foothold in Italy from which they could bomb and even penetrate Germany easily from the south. Many months of terrible fighting lay ahead along the boot of Italy, but Patton would not be connected with it. Another shoe was about to drop that would stain the fabric of his illustrious career.