General Patton: a Soldier's Life

by Stanley P. Hirshson, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2002, 688 pp., $34.95.

General George S. Patton Jr., an inspirational leader and outstanding tactician, has intrigued and confounded his biographers for more than a half-century. Now, using untapped archival materials from both the United States and Britain, government documents, family papers, and oral histories, Stanley P. Hirshson, a City University of New York history professor, creates a portrait of Patton that provokes some very mixed reactions to the author's interpretation of well charted territories of knowledge concerning Patton.

Like many reappraisals of controversial figures that typically challenge traditional views through new evidence or by highlighting a less considered perspective, the author has failed to avoid the passion of any discussion of George S. Patton Jr. He sets the book's tone in the preface by rejecting the work of previous Patton biographers, asserting their research was incomplete and even questionable. Hirshson fails to identify the scholars he claims to challenge.

Hirshon's Patton has a longer rap sheet than usual. The book opens with a recount of atrocities committed in Sicily by troops under Patton's 7th Army Command. He blames Patton's fire-eating oratory to his troops for creating a mindset among his men that allegedly facilitated such acts. He traces Patton's childhood, hard-won West Point education, performance in the 1912 Olympics, an influential marriage, affairs, and flirtations, and tireless social climbing--all tilled ground by other military historians.

The heart of the book focuses on the Patton's World War II career and accomplishments, revealing the driving ability behind his greatest triumphs and failures. Patton's popular image as a giant of armored combat, for instance, is tempered by the revelation that he expressed some doubts about tank warfare prior to the battle for France in 1944. There is also plenty of material concerning Patton's turbulent relationships with other allied commanders.

The author contradicts the charge, perpetuated by the 1970 movie starring George C. Scott, that Patton was relieved as 3d Army Commander for politically insensitive remarks about the Soviets. In fact, Hirshson argues Patton's refusal to dismiss former Nazis from government positions in post-war Bavaria culminated in his removal. The incredible implication is that Patton was pro-Nazi. There is little doubt that failure to remove Nazis was a factor in Patton's relief from duty. However, documented evidence also notes that anti-Soviet remarks, as well as Patton's comments to the press that "Nazis were about the same as democrats and republicans," summed up to a combination of reasons for Patton's transfer to 15th Army.

This book is not going to change anyone's mind about General Patton. While many of the arguments the author makes are thought provoking, they often appear to be based on emotional judgment, such as "after he married Beatrice Ayer, daughter of a wealthy patrician family, Patton gradually embraced the Ayer's attitude toward labor, race, and ethnicity." He supports his assumptions drawing on insignificant comments that today appear to be politically incorrect.

The book has some flaws that better editing might have avoided. Gander Airfield is located in New Foundland, not Nova Scotia. Robert L. Thompson was the driver of a two-and-a-half-ton truck not a quarter-ton truck. In addition, it is regrettable that more research was not paid to Patton's accident and subsequent death. The author would have benefited from consulting with Horace "Woody" Woodring, Patton's driver, who is still alive, and Robert L. Thompson, the driver of the truck who died in June 1994. Woodring's account of the accident has remained essentially unchanged for nearly 60 years. Eyewitness descriptions from two of the four participants in the accident would have produced a more complete understanding of the collision, which caused the death of the ranking American general in the European Command.

This is a well-written and interesting book whose virtues are obscured by its unbalanced summary of Patton's human foibles. However, faults and failings cannot obscure the strengths of the most unique American soldier of this or any other century.

DENVER FUGATE

Radcliff, KY

COPYRIGHT 2003 U.S. Army Armor Center
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group