Immediately he applied to Pershing to be taken on his staff, but the general had all the aides he was authorized. Patton managed to talk his way into going anyway, essentially because Pershing liked his company—and there was, of course, sister Nita too.
Patton at once made himself indispensable—carrying messages, seeing after the clerks, the mess, logistics, newspaper reporters, the animals, automobiles, and anything else that needed tending, including Pershing’s hankering for engaging conversation on the trail. There were more than five thousand cavalrymen on the hunt for Pancho Villa, most on horseback but some in motorcars, as well as six flying machines for dispatch and reconnaissance—the first use of American aircraft on an actual combat mission.h
Pershing’s party took the train from El Paso to Columbus and started to track down Villa from there. It was Patton’s opinion that finding and punishing Villa was not going to be easy. His men had fought well at Columbus and the Mexican terrain was hard on U.S. troops. There were few roads, no maps, and no water for the first hundred miles, Patton told his father. “They can’t beat us, but they will kill a lot of us. Not me,” he added.
The punitive expedition was doomed to failure from the start; Pancho Villa simply had too many places to hide in the vast canyons of the Sierra Madre. Bands of Villistas would frequently ambush American convoys or pick off lone soldiers, then vanish into the murky wastes of the mountains. On March 30, 1916, the Seventh Cavalry killed about thirty Villistas in a gunfight near Guerrero, but other than that it was maddening between the boredom and the bugs, snakes, rats, tarantulas, nighttime cold, sleet, rain, and snow, daytime heat, dust, and high winds (“the windiest place in the world,” Patton said)—they were on the edge of the Great Chihuahuan Desert at 4,000 feet of altitude with Mexicans taking potshots at them all the time.
Patton was constantly nagging Pershing to let him ride out on search missions; one of these, in early May, led to a famous incident that got Patton headlines in newspapers across America. Patton was part of a party from the 13th Cavalry that raided the San Miguel Ranch in search of Villa’s top lieutenant, General Julio Cárdenas. They did not find Cárdenas but they did find his wife, baby, and, nearby, his uncle who, Patton wrote in his diary, “was a very brave man and nearly died before he would tell me anything.”
A week later, Patton was sent by Pershing to the town of Rubio to purchase corn for the headquarters staff’s horses. After doing so he decided on his own to return to the scene of the previous raid to see if he could catch General Cárdenas unawares. He had at his disposal ten armed men from the Eighth Infantry and two armed guides in three open touring cars.
Patton gathered the men around him and explained his plan, which was to surround the rancho where they had previously found Cárdenas’s wife and child so that no one could leave without being seen. The raid was carried out at straight-up noon on May 14, and resembled, according to one historian, “a Mexican-American version of the gunfight at the OK Corral.”
Patton approached the rancho from the front on a low rise from which his automobile could not be seen from the compound until he was relatively near it. Then as he topped the rise he gunned the motor and before anyone inside the rancho could react he and his men were out brandishing weapons. Outside the house were four men skinning a cow, who did not stop, even with the guns, but kept at their task as if nothing were happening.
As he rounded the corner of the walled patio, Patton was startled to see “three armed men [dash] out on horseback.” Patton hollered “Halt,” but instead the three shot at him, the bullets hitting the wall about a foot over his head and spattering him with adobe chips. One of the armed horsemen rode right in front of Patton, who was about to shoot him with his pistol but suddenly remembered something Dave Allison (the old lawman in Mineral Wells who had gunned down the Orasco gang) had told him: “Always shoot the horse of an escaping man.” Patton did this and the horse fell with a broken hip; when the rider rose with his pistol, Patton and others of his party shot him “and he crumpled up.”
The second man was on the verge of escaping when he was brought down in a hail of rifle bullets from the Americans, including Patton. The third man, witnessing this, had reentered the patio and was trying to escape on foot when he was spied by one of Patton’s men and brought down at a distance of nearly three hundred yards. Wounded, he was approached by one of the guides and drew his pistol and fired but missed, then the guide “blew out his brains.”
During all of this activity the four men skinning the cow had continued resolutely at their task. They stopped, however, long enough to identify for Patton the corpses of General Cárdenas and his aide, a colonel in Villa’s army, and a private.
They slung the bloody corpses over the hoods of the motorcars and strapped them down like grisly hunting trophies. When they returned triumphantly to Pershing’s headquarters, the general let Patton retain Cárdenas’s fancy silver mounted saddle and saber, and the newspaper reporters went into a frenzy over finally having a story worthy of the name. Across the country, headlines lauded Patton as a hero, including the New York Times, which blared: “Dramatic Fight At Ranch—Lieut. Patton and Ten Men Killed Three Bandits—Peons Kept Skinning a Beef.” He wrote Beatrice, “I have at last succeeded in getting into a fight … I have always expected to be scared but was not nor was I excited. I was afraid they would get away.”
A few days afterward, outside his tent, he shot two rattlesnakes with his pistol and was teased for not killing them with his saber. He told Beatrice that it was improper to use a saber while on foot, and added, “You are probably wondering if my conscience hurts me for killing a man, it does not. I feel about it just as I did when I got my first sword fish, surprised at my luck.”
On May 23, after seven years of service, he was at last promoted to first lieutenant. Not long after, Papa Patton had decided to run for the Senate as a Democrat from California, while at the same time campaigning for President Wilson. Patton despised Wilson as “that unspeakable ass,” without “the backbone of a jellyfish,” who had left the army unprepared for a major war that he was sure the United States would be drawn into in Europe despite Wilson’s denials.
THE PUNITIVE EXPEDITION against the elusive Villa seemed to take on a life of its own, with mountains of supplies arriving in Dublán and daily cavalry patrols returning empty-handed. Boredom set in and Patton began reflecting that he was thirty-two years old with no prospects in sight for the greatness he expected to achieve. He worried about losing his hair and kept trying on his cadet uniform to see if it still fit. His father lost the Senate race, which depressed Patton even more—he had thought that having a father in the Senate would be good for his career.
Pershing, meanwhile, pursued Nita with ever growing ardor. In early 1917 he traveled to Lake Vineyard to ask Papa Patton for her hand, but was met outwardly with “grave doubts” over the twenty-seven-year difference in their ages. What Patton Sr. kept to himself was that he did not think Pershing “was good enough” for his daughter because, among other things, Pershing’s father had been a brakeman on the railroad.38
Both Mrs. Patton and Nita were “set on it,” however, and Pershing left with the understanding that he and Nita would be married soon. There the matter stood until, on April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I, precipitating the dispatch of more than two million American soldiers into what was at the time the most terrible conflagration in world history—and the bittersweet end of the hopes of marriage between Nita Patton and General John J. Pershing.
* Patton used the walking stick, or cane, to bang on the sides of his tanks during maneuvers to let them know it was him outside.
† He was Robert Patton, the eldest, a former navy officer and alcoholic who died of excessive drink.
‡ Because the official orders remained to be cut before his death, the promotion was not awarded.
§ A decade later Colonel George S. Patton and his brother Colonel Waller Tazewell Patton were disinterred and reburied
together, covered by a Confederate flag, in a midnight ceremony attended by many old Confederate soldiers, illegally in their uniforms, as well as his son George S. Patton II, then in the uniform of a VMI cadet.
ǁ A number of Confederate officers and soldiers went to Mexico or to Central or South American countries after the war. Most returned but some stayed, most famously in Brazil, where there remains today a large colony of the descendants of Southern Confederates who successfully colonized there.
a Today it is the site of the widely respected Caltech.
b Robert Patton notes in his excellent book The Pattons a most un-bluestocking side of Beatrice, such as the time when, on a cruise along the Nile at the age of eleven, she “bribed their Egyptian boatman with ten dollars to bring her to a local tattoo parlor where she hoped to receive a tattoo just like the boatman’s: a full-rigged ship across the chest.” Frustrated in this attempt, she then surreptitiously snapped the big toe off a two-thousand-year-old mummy during a tour of a recently discovered ancient tomb and kept it in a jelly jar for a souvenir.
c Spelling continued to be a frustration for Patton, as is evident in his diaries and correspondence. His misspellings have been maintained in quotes and excerpts throughout this book.
d A five-passenger Stevens-Duryea listed at $1,750—about $45,000 in today’s money.
e Including the great American Indian athlete Jim Thorpe.
f Some biographers, as well as the eight Swedes in the competition, insisted the bullets must have passed through previous holes, which is possible, but rules were rules.
g In 1912 the cavalry saber was still considered a potent weapon in the arsenal of small arms throughout the armies of the world.
h These were Curtiss JN-2 “Jennies,” all of which crashed within the first month—two in the first week.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CHAMPION OF VERA CRUZ
By the end of March 1918 the Germans were attacking ferociously all along the northern part of the nearly five-hundred-mile Western Front, in some instances pushing the Allied armies back for scores of miles in hopes of winning the war before the Americans could arrive in force. Then, in July, a final frenzy of 800,000 Germans lunged out of their trenches along a seventy-mile front from Reims to Arras in northeastern France in a desperate attempt to overrun the Allied lines, capture Paris and the vital Channel ports, and force the Allies to sue for peace.
The chief of staff of the famous U.S. 42nd “Rainbow” Division was one of the most remarkable and gifted officers ever to grace the U.S. Army. He was Douglas MacArthur, a strikingly handsome thirty-eight-year-old colonel considered by many to be one of the bravest officers of his day; in the scant six months since Americans had been in the war he had already won the Distinguished Service Cross and three silver stars. His commanding officer said of him: “MacArthur is the bloodiest fighting man in this army. I’m afraid we are going to lose him sometime.”
The Rainbow Division was among the first American fighting units to arrive in Europe. So far it had bloodied itself down to nearly half its original fighting strength of 27,000 men, creating commensurate German losses along the way. “I cannot fight them if I cannot see them,” was the way MacArthur put it to a general who was reluctant to let him go to the front.
Since mid-February 1918 the 42nd Division had been almost constantly in combat, at first under the command of the French army then, beginning in June, under direction of the American commander in chief, General John J. Pershing. Its infantry regiments had distinguished themselves in a long series of battles to break the so-called Hindenburg Line, a position heavily fortified by the Germans. At battles such as La Croix Rouge Ferme (Red Cross Farm), they engaged the enemy hand to hand and pushed him to the banks of the Ourcq River.
To knock out the deadly German machine-gun nests, MacArthur, who spent much of his youth on the Great Plains where his father was an army officer during the Indian wars, reverted to the Indian tactic of sneaking his men forward in twos and threes and crawling on their hands to surprise the enemy with the bayonet and hand grenade, instead of ordering an upright charge. “It was savage and there was no quarter asked or given,” according to MacArthur. “It seemed to be endless. Bitterly, brutally … a point would be taken, and then would come a sudden fire from some unexpected direction and the deadly counterattack. Positions changed hands time and again. There was neither rest nor mercy.”1
The village of Sergy, for example, had been won and lost eleven times in a single day until by dusk on July 29 the Americans of the 42nd had wiped out the Germans to the last man and were left in control of its grisly smoking ruins.
MacArthur was an astonishing contradiction in the army and in his life—dedicated, innovative, courteous, charming, and, as already noted, brilliant, absolutely fearless, and “unquestionably … the most gifted man-at-arms this nation has produced.” He was also arrogant, eccentric, abrasive, flamboyant, imperious, and the most “baffling, exasperating soldier [who] ever wore a uniform”—this last according to his biographer William Manchester.2
As a combat officer, for instance, he adorned himself in a rakish, unorthodox style, removing the metal band from inside his hat crown so that the crown perked up and sat on his head in a jaunty manner. He wore highly polished boots, riding breeches, and long wool scarves knitted by his mother, which he threw about his neck in the manner of a British aristocrat. He also carried a riding crop (or “swagger stick”) but, oddly, never a sidearm or weapon of any sort.
He was a natural leader and basked in the esteem his troops held him in for going out on dangerous patrols. But he also incurred the hostility of some influential staff officers in Pershing’s headquarters, including a bright young colonel named George Marshall who was the commanding general’s chief tactical planner, and who did not enjoy being second-guessed by staff officers at division level.
In any event, after the Battle of Sergy, MacArthur began reconnoitering beyond his forward outposts along the Ourcq River and heard strange noises coming from the German lines—the sounds of many truck engines and “vehicles on the move.” There were explosions and other indications that the enemy was withdrawing. MacArthur reasoned that if he pressed the Germans now he would catch them in the midst of a retrograde movement—a tactical retreat—and they would have to run, leaving behind all of their great piled-up storage dumps and supplies with nowhere to make a stand until they reached the Vesle River nearly ten miles away, an enormous Allied gain.
There was no time to wait, MacArthur decided; he would take it on himself to organize a night attack without asking headquarters. He told the regimental commanders of the 42nd to move out in columns abreast with one battalion in line of battle, the next battalion in support, and a third battalion in reserve. He phoned for the artillery to open a barrage. It was 3:30 a.m. when they crossed into no-man’s-land.
As usual, MacArthur was forward with a coterie of runners, riflemen, and aides on what would become an unforgettable journey.
“The dead were so thick in spots we tumbled over them,” MacArthur wrote afterward. “There must have been at least 2,000 of those sprawled bodies. I identified the insignia of six of the best German divisions. The stench was suffocating. Not a tree was standing. The moans and cries of wounded men sounded everywhere. Sniper bullets sung like the buzzing of an angry hive of bees. An occasional shell-burst always drew an angry oath from my guide. I counted almost a hundred guns of various size and several times that number of abandoned machine guns.”
As he moved deeper into the grim wastes of no-man’s-land the sights became even more macabre. “Suddenly a flare lit up the area for a fraction of a minute and we hit the dirt, hard. Just ahead of us stood three Germans—a lieutenant pointing with an outstretched arm, a sergeant crouched over a machine gun, a corporal feeding a bandolier of cartridges to the weapon.”
MacArthur held his breath waiting for the machine gun to open on them, but instead there was only a stony silence, punctuated by the distant cries of
the wounded. They waited, frozen on the ground, until MacArthur’s guide lay down the grenade he was about to throw, pulled out a flashlight, and scanned it over the Germans.
“They had not moved,” MacArthur said. “They were never to move. They were dead—all dead—the lieutenant with shrapnel through the heart, the sergeant with his belly blown into his back, the corporal with his spine where his head should have been.” MacArthur said they left them there, “gallant men dead in the service of their country.”
The soldiers of the 42nd pursued the retreating Germans until just after dawn. MacArthur crossed over no-man’s-land to visit his flanking regiment, the old “Fighting 69th” from New York City with its famous chaplain Father Francis P. Duffy and commander Colonel William “Wild Bill” Donovan, who would go on to head the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the next war. Duffy had just returned from the sad duty of burying Sergeant Joyce Kilmer, one of America’s foremost young poets, who had been shot through the brain that morning reconnoitering a machine-gun nest. The burial took place, MacArthur noted, “under the stump of one of those trees he had immortalized.”*
MacArthur sent the regiments forward again but went himself to his division headquarters, where he found the corps commander Lieutenant General Hunter Liggett, as well as his commanding officer Major General Charles T. Menoher. MacArthur explained what he had done but soon felt so drowsy—he hadn’t slept for four days or nights—that everything began to black out. He slumped into a chair and within a few moments was sound asleep.
“They told me afterward,” MacArthur wrote years later, “that General Liggett just looked down at me and said, ‘Well I’ll be damned! Menoher, you’d better cite him.’ My fourth Silver Star.”