The way he explained it later to Beatrice was that he was standing up between the targets during the shooting to see what the sound of bullets whizzing past him would feel like. He was merely testing his courage under fire, he explained, and the targets were large, so that it would have been a fluke for a rifleman to miss one entirely. It was a very Patton thing to do.
IN DECEMBER 1911 Patton at last received the assignment he had originally wanted—a position with the other branch of the 15th Cavalry Regiment that was at Fort Myer, Virginia.
Fort Myer is the most elite post in the U.S. Army, in no small measure because of its proximity to Washington, D.C., and the political emoluments dangling there. Land that once belonged to George Washington and that was later bequeathed to Robert E. Lee’s wife, Fort Myer has stood next to Arlington National Cemetery since the Civil War. It was home to the oldest regiment in the army (the Third U.S. Infantry Regiment: “The Old Guard”) as well as the official residence of the army chief of staff, the U.S. Army Band, the Honor Guards of all three services, and Black Jack, the riderless horse used in state funeral processions.
Because of the high caliber of its polo team, Fort Myer featured the best horsemanship in the country by officers from some of the nation’s best families. Washington was a relatively small town at that time, and the officers of Fort Myer were much in demand as escorts to royalty and to national presidents and their families. They often attended balls in various exclusive clubs in Washington, Georgetown, Chevy Chase, and the Maryland and Virginia Hunt Country. More important, they were often in direct contact with such big-name figures as the secretary of war, army chief of staff, War Department staff, U.S. senators and congressmen—all of the movers and shakers that could be useful to a young officer such as George Patton, who was clearly on the make. Washington, as Blumenson describes it, was “where, in the interest of advancing his [Patton’s] prospects, he could exercise his fatal charm on those who counted and those who made the decisions.”
Patton arrived at Fort Myer with all the trappings of an aristocratic army officer of the day: a stable of fine horses, expensive dogs, and shotguns. If anyone had any doubts, George Patton soon demonstrated that he was no poseur by starring on the Fort Myer polo team and riding in various foxhunts, steeplechases, and hell-for-leather point-to-point races in the Virginia piedmont country. With both the Patton and the Ayer heritages hovering over them, George and Beatrice quickly made friends among the horsey set as well as among the doyens of Washington’s high society who inhabited the fashionable parts of the city and its suburbs.
The new officers’ quarters were a great improvement over the shabby facilities that George and Beatrice shared at Fort Sheridan, and they were able to employ a maid and a chauffeur. One day Patton was out riding on one of the many equestrian trails in and around the post when he had the good luck to encounter Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who was enjoying his daily ride. The two joined and in no time Patton’s youthful charm had won him a lifelong friend who would prove invaluable later in his career, during World War II, when his very presence in the army was in jeopardy.
IN MARCH 1912 two interesting things occurred in Patton’s career. First, he was assigned to be quartermaster for the First Squadron, 15th Cavalry Regiment. That might not seem an assignment that a man like George Patton would enjoy, but in his case it came as a compliment as it was in order for him to have more free time to practice and play polo. Second, and far more important, he was being talked about to represent the army, and the United States, in the upcoming Fifth Olympiad to be held in Stockholm, Sweden, in July.
There was an event known as the modern pentathlon that—astonishing as it may seem—encompassed all of Patton’s best skills (which few others in the United States possessed collectively). In the ancient Olympics the pentathlon was conceived as a martial event that consisted of spear throwing, wrestling, and the like. But the modern version, conceived as a test for a young officer carrying a message through hostile territory, featured these five sports: fencing, swimming 300 meters, horseback steeplechase 5,000 meters, pistol shooting 25 meters, and distance running 4,000 meters. Patton was good at all of them: he’d learned distance swimming and shooting on Catalina Island, had been on the track and fencing teams at West Point, and was, of course, a first-rate rider.
In May an invitation was offered and Patton accepted, thus becoming the first army officer to represent the United States in the modern pentathlon. There were no other American competitors nor, in that era, were there Olympic trials, and athletes trained on their own hook. In Patton’s case, according to his daughter, “He started his serious training in May 1912 and it was hard on everyone. He went on a diet of raw steak and salad; according to Ma, he was unfit for human consumption.”31
Patton put himself through a brutal training regimen in the five weeks he had before sailing to Europe, and when on June 14 the entire Patton family boarded the SS Finland, which carried most of the American Olympic competitors,e he used its training facilities, including a canvas pool on deck for swimming practice.
There were forty-two contestants in the pentathlon, including eight Swedish officers. Pistol competition was first and Patton had scored a near perfect 197 out of a possible 200 in practice the day before. He was right on target to repeat it when, “surprisingly, even inexplicably,” two of his bullets missed the target entirely and he came out number 21 of his forty-two fellow shooters.f
Despite this dreadful beginning, next day at the Royal Tennis Club he finished third in fencing, handing the ultimate victor, a Frenchman, his only defeat. By then there were only twenty-nine competitors, the rest having dropped out.
The steeplechase began at 11 a.m. July 11, with riders starting at five-minute intervals on a course marked with flags a little over three miles in length with twenty-five major jumps and fifty smaller “obstacles” (ditches, logs, low fences, etc.). Patton and two Swedish riders were judged with “perfect” performances, but the Swedes finished ahead in time and Patton came in third.
The foot race was held two days later with the remaining competitors, now down to fifteen, lined up in front of the Royal Boxes. The contestants would run separately at one-minute intervals along a roughly two-and-a-half-mile course that began on the regulation track but quickly left the stadium into heavy woods, across rocks and steep precipices, and into a forest with a swamp six inches deep in mud before finishing back in front of the Royal Boxes. For Patton it was the most grueling ordeal of the event. At the end he was fifty yards ahead of the closest Swedish competitor when, according to the Los Angeles Times, “He stopped almost to a walk as the Swede brushed by, and when [Patton] finished he dropped into a faint.”32 He had finished third.
In the final competition next day, swimming, he placed sixth. Overall, Patton’s standing in the Fifth Olympiad’s modern pentathlon was 5, a very credible showing, made somewhat bittersweet by the knowledge that in each event he had been near the top—except in pistol shooting where he was twenty-one of forty-two, and that is what cost him a possible win.
After the Olympics, Papa Patton took the family on a leisurely tour of Germany where they visited Berlin, Dresden, and Nuremberg, indulging themselves in delicate German candies, desserts, and other confections, which Patton had denied himself all through his training. Yet despite all the first-class accommodations and antique scenery Patton had other things on his mind.
In particular, he was determined to improve his swordsmanship and had discovered through inquiries at the Olympic games that the best swordsman in Europe—nay, the world—was a Monsieur l’Adjutant Clery, master of arms and instructor of fencing at the famous cavalry school at Saumur, France. He was the longtime European champion with the foil, the dueling sword, and the saber.
Patton immediately departed the family tour and journeyed to Saumur where he set up a rigorous schedule of personal instruction by M. Clery in the dueling sword and the saber for two weeks, after which time he rejoined the family for the transatl
antic crossing. Upon his return, Patton presented a noteworthy report to the U.S. Adjutant General in which he observed that the French cavalry’s practice of fighting with the sticking point of the saber was both superior and safer than with the slicing edge, as American cavalry did. “It is argued that Americans being a country of axmen the edge comes more natural but from what I saw and what I was told … [it is] La pointe … toujours la pointe. It gives the advantage of reaching the enemy at least a yard sooner than ours does, of presenting only a third of the (friendly) human as target, and of instilling the desire to speed up and hit hard.”
In the days to come this newfound understanding of swordsmanship was to mean a good deal to George Patton’s career.g
UPON HIS RETURN TO FORT MYER Patton indulged himself in equestrian pursuits—flat racing, foxhunting, steeplechase—and buying more and better horses. In early 1912 he was detached to the Office of the Chief of Staff General Leonard Wood, where he often served as an aide to Secretary of War Stimson. At the request of superior officers he also prepared military papers such as a lengthy assessment of the latest in the eternal series of wars in the Balkans, which he compared with various campaigns of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
At the same time he waited almost breathlessly for some explosion that would bring the United States into the conflict in Mexico, and in his spare time he focused on improvement of swordsmanship for U.S. troops. He wrote to Aunt Nannie about an article he had produced for the Army & Navy Journal: “It is about the sabre and I hope it does some good in educating these [troops] to get over thinking they are all occupied in a carpet-beating contest every time they get hold of a sword.” In a cavalry charge, Patton continued, “the point will always beat the edge. It gets there first.”
The article so impressed Secretary of War Stimson that he ordered the Springfield Armory to manufacture twenty thousand cavalry sabers matching precisely the model Patton designed and showed in his paper. These would become known as “Patton Sabers,” enhancing the already burgeoning career of the young second lieutenant.
In June 1913, doubtless at his own behest, Patton was ordered to return to Saumur for advanced instruction in swordsmanship with an eye toward earning the title Master of the Sword. This in turn would lead to Patton’s opening the army’s first course of instruction in swordsmanship at the Mounted Service (Cavalry) School at Fort Riley, Kansas. Thus far, Patton was doing all the right things to ensure advancement in the army.
At the end of summer, when he was finished with Saumur and M. Clery, and brandishing his new title Master of the Sword, Patton and Beatrice, who had accompanied him, took a tour by motorcar across Brittany to Saint-Malo and across the ominous hedgerows of Normandy to Caen. To Beatrice’s astonishment, George told her he had fought there before, “in an earlier life,” when the Roman legions came to conquer two thousand years ago, and that he would fight there again. Three decades later George S. Patton would renew his acquaintance with these hedgerows on a much less genial basis.33
At Fort Riley Patton became the U.S. Army’s first Master of the Sword. He went through two years of advanced instruction at the Mounted Service School as well as instructing students himself in swordsmanship. Realizing that captains and majors attending his classes might resent being taught by a low-ranking second lieutenant, he opened his discourse this way: “Now gentlemen, I know many of you outrank me and how hard it must be to take instruction from a man you must regard as a little damp behind the ears. But gentlemen, I am about to demonstrate to you that I am an expert in the sword, if in nothing else, for at least fifteen years, and in that respect I am your senior.”34
He then opened a package on the table before him and produced the two little wooden swords he and his sister Nita had played with at Lake Vineyard, brandishing them in the air to gales of laughter by his class.
Patton satisfactorily completed the Mounted Service School’s first course of instruction in the summer of 1914—the same summer that a Serbian nationalist assassinated Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, touching off World War I—and was selected to attend the second course, another feather in his cap.
Then, on February 28, 1915, at Lake Vineyard, Beatrice gave birth to Ruth Ellen Patton. While it wasn’t the boy Patton had hoped for, he telegraphed her from Fort Riley “D-E-L-I-G-H-T-E-D.” At the same time he unsuccessfully went through back channels seeking a leave of absence to get into the European war on the side of the French, being told by General Wood: “Don’t think of attempting anything of the kind … We don’t want to waste youngsters of your sort in the service of foreign nations.”
Not to be done in, Patton managed to pull enough strings to get himself reassigned to the Eighth U.S. Cavalry at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, on the Mexican border. This was a wild, untamed land of violent men, some of them wanted, and volatile relations with various Mexican armies operating just across the border. It came as close to war as possible without actually being in one, and Patton felt right at home, a man convinced that his moment had come—or at least was coming.
The United States had been moving toward war with Mexico for several years and, as tensions heightened, the War Department began organizing a force of some five thousand troops to guard the border from Texas to Arizona, commanded by Brigadier General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. He was a hard-charging, no-nonsense general who had received his nickname after commanding the all-black Buffalo Soldiers of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry.
Patton’s job was to patrol with two cavalry troops a hundred-mile stretch between the remote outposts on the Texas end of the border that lay within the bleak 5,000-foot Sierra Blanca Mountains. There at a town called Mineral Wells he met and befriended some of the rowdiest men of the West. (“I get along with them well as I usually do with that sort of people.”) One was a man named Dave Allison, “a very quiet-looking man with white hair and a sweet face. He alone killed all the Orasco bunch [a notorious bandit gang] five of them about a month ago, and he kills several Mexicans each month. He shot Orasco and his men each in the head at sixty yards. He seems much taken with me and is going hunting with me.”
In between his hunting (deer, ducks, foxes, rabbits, and antelope), Patton chased down several false alarms of bandit gangs or Pancho Villa’s army—each instance causing him to become almost beside himself at the lost opportunity for putting his saber fighting theory into practice against actual humans. (“We were all disgusted at not finding the Mexicans. It was fine to see how pleased the men were at the prospect of a fight. I had great hopes of seeing how my sabers would work but better luck next time.”)
At some point, during this period in Mineral Wells, Patton had an embarrassing incident with his pistol that nearly unmanned him. The Colt Model 11 .45 semiautomatic had become the standard sidearm of the U.S. Army. But unlike a revolver, which is fairly simple, the automatic can be tricky sometimes, as Patton found when it went off unexpectedly. He had been wearing it “in his trouser fly—like all the local gunmen did … and that in sitting down or moving around he had somehow triggered it off and it had shot a hole right through his trouser leg and into the floor.” Being a man of action, Patton immediately switched to a Colt .45 Model 78 single-action ivory-handled revolver, which remained his sidearm of choice from then on.35
At Christmas 1915 Beatrice came out to Fort Bliss when Patton’s duties afforded him no leave and went to Mineral Wells, where she moved into the only house in town for rent. She roughed it, even with the babies along with their nurse. She and Patton hunted together, riding thirty miles one day along the Rio Grande and sleeping under the stars. (“We got thirteen duck most of them mallard and B. killed two of them besides a quail and a pluver [plover] so she had a fine time.”)
During this period of his career, Patton seemed to lead a charmed life. His attractive twenty-nine-year-old unmarried sister Nita came to Fort Bliss with Beatrice. She was “a tall, blond Amazon with enormous capabilities of love and loyalty and great good sense.” At a dance o
n the post she was introduced to General Pershing who had recently lost his wife and three daughters in a tragic fire in his quarters in San Francisco. The two were instantly attracted to each other.36 Eventually they would become lovers, which of course put Lieutenant Patton in Pershing’s spotlight as well.
BY EARLY 1916 PANCHO VILLA had turned murderous against Americans after President Woodrow Wilson refused to sell him guns and ammunition. His people kidnapped sixteen American mining engineers off a train and burned them alive. They murdered and mutilated an American ranch manager and kidnapped and raped his wife. Gathering strength as it moved north toward the border, Villa’s army left in its wake a horror of looting, hanging, burning, and raping, before at last it staged an attack on the sleepy border town of Columbus, New Mexico, about a hundred miles west of El Paso, killing eighteen Americans. At last Wilson ordered Pershing to organize a punitive expedition into Mexico to run Pancho Villa to ground.
Patton was thrilled almost beyond words until it was announced that his Eighth Cavalry Regiment was not going on the expedition. This, he said, was because Pershing insisted his officers and men maintain a state of good physical fitness, and the colonel commanding the Eighth was rotund. “There should be a law killing fat colonels on sight,” Patton wrote sourly to his father.37