George S. Patton

He grew up on 128 acres of family land in what is now San Marino, California, an estate his grandfather Benjamin Davis Wilson — the second mayor of Los Angeles — had planted in vines. As a child he could not learn to read or write, and got there late. What he absorbed instead was ancestry. The family held that 16 barons who signed Magna Carta stood in the line, and Patton believed he had served in earlier armies himself, a Roman legionary once and a soldier killed under Napoleon. He failed mathematics in his first year at West Point and repeated it, then graduated 46th out of 103 in June 1909. He fenced, designed the Army's last cavalry saber, and took fifth in the 1912 Olympic modern pentathlon.

Before the fame there was a Cadillac and a Colt. On May 14, 1916, in Mexico, he took ten soldiers and two guides out in three cars, killed Julio Cárdenas and two of his guards, and gave the U.S. Army its first motorized attack. The next war made him a tank officer: he built the American Expeditionary Forces' light tank school, and on September 26, 1918, machine guns caught him at Cheppy. The Seventh Army, the Third Army and the drive across France belong to BriefHistory. What is left over here is the twelve weeks after the shooting stopped.

As military governor of Bavaria he ran the camps holding Jewish survivors of the German camps, and he wrote down what he thought of them. He refused Jewish chaplains at his headquarters. He resisted Eisenhower's order to move Germans out of their houses to make room for displaced Jews, and kept the survivors behind wire. After a Yom Kippur service with Eisenhower he recorded that the worshippers were the greatest stinking bunch of humanity he had ever seen, that the memory made him lose his lunch, and that Jews were a subhuman species. He told reporters that denazification was like throwing out everyone who had ever been a Democrat or a Republican. Eisenhower took Bavaria from him on September 28, 1945, and the Third Army on October 7. Martin Blumenson, who edited his papers, concluded that he had become delusional.

On December 9, 1945, driving out to shoot pheasant near Speyer, his Cadillac hit an army truck. Everyone else walked away. Patton's head struck the glass partition behind the driver, breaking his neck at the third and fourth cervical vertebrae and paralyzing him from the neck down. He spent twelve days in traction, was told he would never ride again, and called it a hell of a way to die. Pulmonary edema and heart failure finished it on December 21. He lies at the Luxembourg American Cemetery among the soldiers of his own army. In 1970 George C. Scott played him in front of an enormous flag, won the Academy Award and refused it. That version has outlasted the diaries.

George S. Patton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• M1913 Cavalry Saber invention
  The last sword the U.S. Army adopted, and still called the Patton saber 1913
• AEF Light Tank School company
  Built from nothing in France, beginning November 1917 1917
• Desert Training Center company
  The California and Arizona ground where he prepared armor for North Africa 1942
• Relief of Bastogne mission
  The Third Army turned 90 degrees in winter and drove north into the Bulge 1944
• Through a Glass, Darkly other
  A poem on reincarnation and the wars he believed he had already fought 1922
• War As I Knew It book
  Assembled from his papers and published after his death 1947

• June 11, 1909 aged 23 Graduates West Point 46th of 103 after repeating his first year He had failed mathematics.
• 1912 aged ~27 Finishes fifth in the modern pentathlon at the Stockholm Olympics Judges scored one pistol shot a miss. Patton said it had gone through an earlier hole.
• May 14, 1916 aged 30 Leads the U.S. Army's first motorized attack, in Mexico Three cars, twelve men, and Julio Cardenas dead at the Rubio ranch.
• September 26, 1918 aged 32 Wounded leading tanks at Cheppy in the Meuse-Argonne His orderly, Joe Angelo, got him out and later received the Distinguished Service Cross.
• August 10, 1943 aged 57 Slaps a second hospitalized soldier in Sicily The first, Private Charles Kuhl, had been struck on August 3. Eisenhower sidelined him.
• August 1, 1944 aged 58 The Third Army becomes operational at noon in Normandy
• September 28, 1945 aged 59 Relieved of the military governorship of Bavaria The Third Army command went nine days later, on October 7.
• December 9, 1945 aged 60 A car crash near Speyer breaks his neck Everyone else in the vehicles was barely hurt.
• December 21, 1945 aged 60 Dies in his sleep at Heidelberg of pulmonary edema and heart failure

• Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890–1969
  34th President and Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II. relieved him of command
• Omar Bradley 1893–1981
  Senior World War II commander and first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. former subordinate, later his superior
• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. chief of staff who protected him
• Francis Ford Coppola b. 1939
  Director and producer whose landmark films helped define the New Hollywood era and modern American epic filmmaking. wrote the film that shaped his reputation
• Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964
  Commander who led major Pacific campaigns, oversaw Japan’s occupation, and became central to the Korean War controversy. the other theater's difficult general