Patton’s tanks were supporting the U.S. 28th and 35th Infantry Divisions, about 27,000-strong, both of them green National Guard outfits from Pennsylvania and Kansas–Missouri, respectively—including future president Harry S. Truman’s artillery battery with the 35th. Their role in the offensive was to move in a northerly direction through the Argonne Forest and the narrow valley of the Aire River past the towns of Varennes and Cheppy toward Charpentry, about ten miles distant—the first day’s objective.
The Meuse-Argonne Campaign, the planning of which was carried out by Colonel George C. Marshall, involved first secretly replacing hundreds of thousands of French troops at the front with American divisions in what was then considered a “quiet” part of the line (despite being in the Verdun sector where in 1916 a million soldiers had fallen in battle).
The day before the offensive was to open, Patton reconnoitered the area where his tanks were to go, dressed in the blue uniform and helmet of a French soldier so as not to give away the deception and wrote this to his wife that evening: “I will have two battalions and a group of French tanks in the show … We go up a stinking river valley which will not be at all a comfortable place in a few hours,” he said, referring to the upcoming artillery barrage.
AS PATTON AND HIS ENTOURAGE reached the scene of the foul-up, about three hundred yards from Germany’s infamous Hindenburg Line that ran through the village of Cheppy, the fog lifted and it became immediately apparent to Patton what had gone wrong. One of his lead tanks had become stuck on the precipice of a long, deep, wide trench. It was an old German combat trench, but it made an excellent tank trap because none could cross it without falling inside. It required the tankers to dig furiously and then level out a cut or breach on either side of the trench so that the tanks would not simply drop into the pit but could also crawl out of it.
Men had been sent to do this, but when Patton found them cowering at the bottom of the trench he did not hesitate to resolve the situation. Here, during the next few hours, according to biographer Carlo D’Este, “the legend of George S. Patton the warrior was born.”
He appeared on the parapet of the excavation, pointedly exposing himself to the “intense enemy gunfire that came from the front, flanks, and sometimes from the rear,” according to the official report, and looked down. Earlier the men in the trench had begun hacking at the walls but each time a shell burst nearby or machine-gun bullets kicked up dust, they jumped back inside for cover.
The situation was developing into a catastrophe. More tanks had begun to arrive and a colossal armored traffic jam was in the making. Worse, as the fog lifted, German spotters got the range and enemy artillery began furiously shelling these valuable targets.
“To hell with them, they can’t hit me!” Patton roared, ordering the soldiers out of the trench to resume work. (Later he wrote to his wife that he “had probably killed one of them” who refused to obey by hitting him over the head with a shovel.) Patton stormed over to a company of stalled American tanks waiting for the obstacle to be cleared and personally began removing shovels and picks that were strapped to their sides. With enemy bullets pinging and ricocheting off the tanks, he ordered the Americans out of their vehicles to assist in the excavation and continued to march atop the parapet of the trench as soldiers with shovels were being shot down on all sides, exhorting the men and ridiculing the Germans’ marksmanship with a flood of horrible profanity.
Colonel Patton, who only a year earlier had been Lieutenant Patton, was the commanding officer of the First U.S. Tank Brigade, consisting of approximately 140 tanks. They were French-built machines, so-called light tanks that Patton, an old cavalryman, preferred to the much larger, heavier (and less maneuverable) armored vehicles being built in England.
Patton’s tanks were made by Renault, the French automobile company. A 50-hp engine could propel them about 4.5 miles per hour, and their revolving turret was armed with either a 37mm cannon or a 9mm machine gun. The two-man crew consisted of a driver, who sat below, and the gunner/tank commander (the only one who could actually see out) who gave steering directions to the driver by kicking him in the back, head, or shoulders.
WHEN THE ENEMY TRENCH was at last made fit for passing Patton ordered his tanks forward, telling them to silence the German machine guns. Then he went back to the reverse slope of another small hill where more than a hundred American soldiers had been shrinking against the enemy fire when the fog lifted, having become separated or lost from their units. As the armored vehicles began to clear the crest of the low rise ahead Patton told these fugitives to form up and follow him behind the tanks. “Let’s go get them,” he shouted. “Who’s with me,” and he began walking forward, cursing and waving his walking stick over his head.*
Most of the men rose up enthusiastically and took off after Patton, but when they, too, cleared the crest of the hill they were met with a furious hail of enemy machine-gun fire that killed and wounded many, and everyone flung himself to the ground. The fire came from nearly every direction; the Germans, it seems, not wanting to tangle with the tanks, had gone to ground and let them pass by unmolested—and the infantry as well—before opening up. Many of the Americans were thus shot in the back and lay in sad, promiscuous heaps upon the ground.
Patton later wrote to his father that he had been trembling with fear and at that point “felt a great desire to run” when amid all the firing an apparition suddenly appeared before him in the clouds above the German lines, he said—a kind of panorama of his heroic ancestors who had died in American wars from the Revolution to the Civil War. They spoke to him in soothing tones, which calmed him, Patton wrote, and, saying aloud to himself, “It is time for another Patton to die,” he rose up and again shouted for volunteers to go forward into “what I honestly believed was certain death.”
“Six men went with me,” he said, “five were killed and I was wounded, so I was not much in error.”
Patton and his little entourage, including his orderly Private First Class Joseph Angelo, plunged into the maelstrom headlong, but every dozen steps or so one of the soldiers would fall to the ground after being struck by German bullets, until at last there was only Patton and Angelo moving in the ghastly and dangerous landscape “like Don Quixote and his faithful servant Sancho Panza,” according to biographer Martin Blumenson.
At one point Angelo said to his boss, “We are alone.”
“Come on anyway,” Patton replied, but a few seconds later he was struck in the thigh by a bullet and soon collapsed to the ground.
What was Patton thinking, marching into such danger? It certainly wasn’t what his headquarters superiors expected of him; in fact, they would have been horrified, if not furious—Patton was the commander of the First U.S. Tank Brigade.
It was nearly inconceivable that a field officer of Patton’s stature would expose himself in such a reckless manner but it was neither the first time nor the last. His explanation for it, gleaned from letters he wrote over time to his wife, father, and other family members, seems to indicate some abstract and almost perverse need to prove his nerve or bravery under fire. That he had led the five men with him to their deaths seems not to have occurred to him. What was more important to Patton was to demonstrate to himself that he was not a coward, but fearless and/or bulletproof.
Having now disproved the latter, Patton and Angelo lay in a shallow shell hole as bullets and shrapnel skimmed overhead and kicked up dust in the drying mud. Angelo sliced open Patton’s trousers and saw that a German machine-gun bullet had entered his left thigh and come out his buttock near the rectum, “leaving a hole the size of a teacup.”2 The orderly dressed the wound with his own first aid kit and also one he took off a dead soldier lying near.
By then the Germans had maneuvered into a railroad cut about fifty yards distant, where they set up a machine gun. They were so close that Patton and Angelo could hear them talking. Sometime within a half hour Patton’s sergeant, who had been frantically looking for his commander, came scrambli
ng and panting into the shallow shell depression, where he further attended to the wound. Patton then ordered him to find Major Serano Brett and tell him he was now in command of the brigade, but also said that no attempt to remove him should be made until the enemy machine guns ahead were silenced.
An hour passed, possibly more, and Patton remained half in shock but conscious during the ordeal with the enemy machine guns constantly sweeping the battlefield. At one point Patton told Angelo to go out and find his tankers and tell them where the German guns were located. As more U.S. soldiers came up Patton’s tanks began maneuvering with the infantry to knock out the German emplacements. When another company of Patton’s tanks came up, he once again told Angelo to go out and tell them about the enemy emplacements. Meantime, word got back to the communications squad and a pigeon was released with a message that Patton had been wounded.3 During this time, Patton said, “One of my tanks [sat] guarding me like a watchdog.”4
Finally, at about 1 p.m., tanks and infantry managed to silence most of the enemy guns so that Patton could be rescued. He gave his last order sending a lieutenant in search of Major Brett, who had not yet been located. Then he was placed on a stretcher and evacuated to an aid station two miles to the rear, an experience, Patton said, that “was not at all pleasant.”
For his actions that day—personally breaking up the tank logjam under fire, and directing the attack on the machine guns after being badly wounded—Colonel George S. Patton, age thirty-two, received the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest award for valor.
GEORGE SMITH PATTON JR. was born November 11, 1885, at Lake Vineyard, his family’s 1,300-acre winery and citrus estate in what is now Pasadena, California, in the shadows of the 10,000-foot San Gabriel Mountains. Like George Marshall, Patton came from a long line of illustrious ancestors who settled in Virginia in the 1700s after arriving from the British Isles.
His great-grandfather Robert Patton immigrated to America from Scotland in 1750 and became a successful merchant in international trade. He settled in Culpeper, Virginia, then moved to Fredericksburg and married Anne Gordon Mercer, daughter of Dr. (Brigadier General) Hugh Mercer, a close friend of George Washington’s who was mortally wounded at the Battle of Princeton during the Revolution—“the first of the Patton ancestors to combine erudition and valor in his bloodstream.”5 (Bayoneted and left to die by the British, General Mercer told an aide who rushed up to carry him away to instead follow the Continental Army, saying, “It needs your services more than I do.”)
Their son John Mercer Patton, one of seven children, was in turn a physician, lawyer, and U.S. congressman, and for a time governor of Virginia. He married Margaret French Williams and fathered twelve children, including seven sons all of whom but one† became Confederate officers during the Civil War.
A story some historians use to point out the strain of obstinacy in the Patton family stems from an incident that took place in the first decade of the nineteenth century. John Mercer Patton threatened in a letter to his father “to kill himself by cutting his throat” because his father insisted that he go to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania instead of studying law. Several days later came the reply: a package containing “a freshly honed straight razor and a note that said: ‘Go ahead. Your devoted father.’ ” In the end he became both a doctor and a lawyer and famously wound up writing the Virginia Legal Code.6
Four of his sons, including Patton’s grandfather the first George Smith Patton, graduated from the Virginia Military Institute. He was second in his class, which was also filled with various ancestors of George C. Marshall, and afterward studied law with his father before marrying the wealthy Susan Thornton Glassell, whose family claimed to descend from George Washington’s great-grandfather, as well as from several of the English barons who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. The union of George S. Patton and Susan Glassell produced nine children including, in 1856, Patton’s father, George Smith Patton.
This George Smith Patton cut a rakish, elegant, romantic figure in antebellum Virginia society, well known for his wit, wisdom, and repartee. A fervent believer in secession, by the eve of Fort Sumter George S. Patton had become the commander of H Company of the 22nd Virginia Regiment, and he and many of his brothers, sisters, and cousins moved into the magnificent Patton ancestral home, Spring Farm, in Culpeper, where they prepared for war.
The matriarch of the Patton family and owner of Spring Farm was the widow of John Mercer Patton, the former Margaret French Williams, who had a hatred of Yankees that was almost obscene. (During the war she is said to have cried upon learning of the wounding of one of her sons but afterward said it was only because she had no more sons to send to the fight.) After the war had ended, the story goes that she was riding from church one Sunday with a former Confederate colonel and inquired if he had said “Amen” when the minister prayed for the president of the United States. When the answer was affirmative, she lashed him across the face with her buggy whip.7
To say that the Civil War was unkind to the Patton family is a vast understatement. Waller Tazewell Patton was the first of the Patton boys to die. A VMI graduate and lawyer, “Taz” was badly wounded at Second Manassas but recuperated in time for the Battle of Gettysburg where, as the colonel commanding the Seventh Virginia Infantry, he was shot through the mouth at the stone wall during Pickett’s Charge. He lived long enough to write a note to his mother reaffirming his love for her, and “my God and my Country,” before dying on July 23, 1863, at the age of twenty-nine. The two youngest brothers, Hugh Mercer and James French Patton, were both lieutenants and both wounded but survived.
May 15, 1864, became a kind of Patton watershed in the Civil War when no fewer than four Pattons, including some attending VMI, clashed with the Union Army in the Shenandoah Valley at the Battle of New Market. The VMI cadet corps—mostly fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds—were called out to fight for the Confederacy.
Colonel George S. Patton, Patton’s grandfather, now commanding a brigade, managed to extract his cousin Colonel George Hugh Smith’s 62nd Virginia Regiment from a Union trap, then turned to face and repel a Federal cavalry attack on his flank.
Although the Battle of New Market was a Rebel victory, this particular Patton’s luck ran out on September 19, 1864, at the Battle of Opequon, also known as the Third (last) Battle of Winchester, when Federals under Philip Sheridan attacked and crushed the army of General Jubal A. Early.
That spring the Patton family had been forced to move owing to the presence of Federal armies in northern Virginia; they chose the home of John Mercer Patton, the Meadows, in Albemarle County in central Virginia, near Charlottesville. There, Susan Patton received a letter from her husband, George, saying he would be on a train with the army of General Early whose tracks passed nearby the Meadows’ garden.
His son George Smith Patton, then a boy of eight, poignantly recalled his father in a memoir dictated the year of his own death in 1927: “He got off and stayed with us for several hours … then the last train with flat cars loaded with artillery stopped for him. I remember seeing a soldier on a car giving him a hand to get aboard and as the train moved out he was leaning against a gun and waved us goodbye. I never saw him again.”8
By then George S. Patton had become the commander of “Patton’s Brigade” and his promotion to brigadier general was approved by the Confederate Congress.‡ Patton’s men were in the thick of the fighting and as usual he was in their midst when the fatal bullet struck him. He lingered alive for a few days at the home of Mary Williams, a cousin by marriage, before expiring on September 25 at the age of thirty-one.§
SEVEN MONTHS LATER THE WAR WAS OVER and the Pattons were thrown into the direst poverty. With no income and all the family savings gone, they had almost starved during the winter of 1864. Susan Patton had gone to Goochland, north of Richmond, to care for her blind father who, like most Virginians, had lost everything to the Confederate cause. All livestock had been driven away by the depred
ations of the Yankee general George Stoneman and his cavalry.
The state was utterly devastated; railroads, bridges, waterways, and other infrastructure were wrecked. Administrative offices such as the postal system had collapsed and Richmond had burned to the ground. Land had gone fallow; fences were trampled down, fields were choked with weeds, homes were in a state of decay. Tens of thousands of Virginia’s men were dead or maimed and with emancipation there was no one to work the fields. Four years of war had left people destitute; trade had virtually ceased during the conflict and remained stagnant afterward. Confederate money and bonds were worthless and most families had sold off what gold, silver, or furniture they had to buy food or other necessities. The stench of death and privation lay heavily across the state.
The Patton family next moved in with other Pattons, who were trying to maintain a corn patch and truck farm in a river bottom, but there was little or no future in Virginia for now, if ever. Then Susan Patton received a letter from her brother Andrew Glassell, an attorney who had made his way to California before the war. It contained money for their passage to that mysterious and faraway place.
They pooled what little they had and sold it, save for Susan’s dead husband’s “sword, saddle, gold watch, and bible,” and boarded a steamer for Panama, where they crossed the fever-plagued isthmus and boarded a ship for Los Angeles. As George Patton’s sister put it nearly 150 years later, “There was nothing left for them in the ruins of their politics and their plantations—and their way of life.”9
They must have been an extraordinary-looking party, the Pattons: the beautiful thirty-one-year-old widow and her four children, her blind father, as well as her brother the gallant Commander William Glassell, who was dying of tuberculosis contracted in a Union prison camp after being captured during the Battle of Charleston Harbor. Nevertheless, they arrived in California just before Christmas 1866, to a warm welcome from not only Andrew Glassell and his large family but also other Patton cousins, including Williamses who had also immigrated to the new American frontier.