The Generals Read online

  For Susan Patton, Los Angeles was a rude, un-American kind of place, only sixteen years free of Mexican rule, populated mostly by Mexicans, Indians—some of them hostile—and a clique of Spanish landholders right out of the age of Zorro. With its strange Mediterranean climate and barren hills, California was the antithesis of the verdant fertile farmland of her native Virginia, but Susan eventually acclimated and started a small school for girls until, as her granddaughter put it, “Up from Mexico came the knight in shining armor—and that he was to anyone who ever knew him.”10

  He was Colonel George Hugh Smith, first cousin, beloved friend, and VMI classmate of the late George S. Patton. A native Philadelphian whose family had resettled in Virginia, Smith had secretly been in love with Susan for years and for that reason had remained a bachelor. A lawyer by trade, he refused to take the loyalty oath when the war ended and went to Mexico where he engaged in cotton growing and surveying for a living, before ultimately returning to the United States via California.ǁ

  Smith joined Andrew Glassell’s law firm and began a courtship of Susan that resulted in their marriage in 1870. He adopted her four children and brought them up as his own. According to his step-granddaughter he was much beloved and regaled the children with heroic stories of their dead father. By all appearances they led a happy, successful, if not wealthy life until 1883 when Susan died of cancer at the age of forty-eight.

  By that time her son twenty-seven-year-old George Smith Patton II was a well-established lawyer and political figure in Los Angeles. Like his father before him he had attended VMI, which offered free appointments to the sons of alumni who had fallen in the Civil War. He became an outstanding student, first in his senior year and the ranking cadet officer in the class of 1877. It was said that when he went out riding one day in White Sulphur Springs in his cadet uniform, a former Confederate general mistook him for his father.11

  Back in Los Angeles he studied law with his stepfather and uncle and passed the bar exam and joined the firm, which also placed him among the most eligible young bachelors in town. In 1884, a year after his mother’s death, he fell in love and married twenty-three-year-old Ruth Wilson, daughter of the fabled Benjamin Davis “Don Benito” Wilson, a former mountain man out of Tennessee who had become one of the wealthiest landowners in California.

  Don Benito’s story is a book in itself, as he rode, trapped, explored, and fought Indians with the likes of Kit Carson, John C. Frémont, and Jedediah Smith. He was “a tenacious warrior who feared neither man nor beast,” slaying grizzly bears and Indians alike who crossed his “frightful temper.” He also married well, taking for his bride, in 1844, Ramona Yorba, the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the wealthiest estate holders in Southern California.12

  That marriage was cut short by Ramona’s tragic death at the age of twenty-one, but in 1853 Wilson married Margaret Short Hereford, an Alabama-born widow of a doctor, who gave him two children. One of them, Ruth, married George Smith Patton and became the mother of George Smith Patton Jr.—the subject of this story—and the other, Annie, “a lifelong spinster,” became Patton’s beloved Aunt Nannie.13

  DON BENITO WILSON HAD BEEN instrumental in the California revolution, conversion to U.S. territory, and eventual statehood in 1850. In 1851 he was elected mayor of Los Angeles and was later a two-term California state senator. At one point he held more than fourteen thousand acres in and around Los Angeles County, including a sheep ranch that is today the campus of UCLA. But it was Lake Vineyard, Wilson’s residence amidst thirteen hundred acres of well-tended grapevines and fruit orchards, that he cherished above all else.a The home was of the large “raised hacienda” style with steep front steps, a slate roof, and a long, wide veranda surrounded by fruit and flower trees as well as towering pines and eucalyptus.

  Don Benito had also gained a reputation as one of California’s leading horticulturists. In 1873 his combined harvest produced 75,000 gallons of wine and 5,000 gallons of brandy. Some 600,000 oranges and 75,000 lemons were produced and it was estimated that at least as many remained on the trees unharvested. A decade later the San Gabriel Wine Company had become one of the largest in the world, capable of turning out 1.5 million gallons a year. In any event, from the mid-nineteenth century on, the Wilsons were high on the list of frontier aristocracy in the state of California.

  Don Benito passed away in 1878, so young George Smith Patton Jr., born seven years later, never got to know his legendary mountain-man grandfather. Still, Patton Jr. was regaled with enough heroic stories from Hugh Smith about his gallant Confederate grandfather to put notions of a military career into his head at an early age. Among Hugh Smith’s friends was John Singleton Mosby, a member of the prewar Virginia gentry who had served as a major under the Confederate cavalry leader J.E.B. Stuart until, in 1863, he was promoted to colonel and founded the 43rd Virginia Regiment of partisan rangers, in which he spent the rest of the war infamously harassing Union forces in Virginia with tactics that bordered on terrorism. (Once he captured a Union general by entering his tent at night, waking him with a slap of saber on his bare behind, and roaring, “Have you heard of Mosby?” When the response was affirmative, he again roared, “I am Mosby!”)

  Mosby had come to California as an attorney for the Southern Pacific Railroad company and had business with the Glassell-Smith-Patton law firm. He and the young “Georgie” Patton, as he was known, would play on the lawns of Lake Vineyard for hours, reenacting Civil War battles with Georgie playing Robert E. Lee atop his Shetland pony Peach Blossom and Mosby playing himself.

  On chilly nights, by the great fireside at Lake Vineyard, George Patton Sr. would read to the children from classics such as Pope’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, which Georgie came to know almost by heart, as he did the Bible, which was also read daily. Moreover, Papa Patton frequently read aloud from Plutarch’s Lives, Caesar’s Commentaries, biographies of Napoleon and Alexander the Great, the poetry of the English Romantics, and Shakespeare.14

  His father did not believe in formal education for young children, but thought they would be better rounded by roaming in the wilds and at the same time fed a steady diet of works by the great writers, such as Kipling, who was frequently recited to Georgie and his sister, Anne (also known as Nita), by another family friend, retired major Arthur Thompson, formerly of His Majesty’s Royal Lancers, who had served in battle at the notorious Khyber Pass on the North West Frontier of India.

  The Patton children’s early tutor was their Aunt Nannie, Ruth’s sister, who soon revealed a terrible secret: Georgie was “slow to learn,” in reading, writing, and mathematics, and showed few signs of improvement. What is known now through medical examination of his correspondence is that Patton was dyslexic, a condition then unknown, and even today much misunderstood. The most apparent affliction of dyslexia is an inability to spell, reversing some letters or spelling phonetically, and a confusion of numbers in math. Patton got by with a terrific effort at memorizing things, but his poor spelling plagued him all his life. He once joked about it as a grown-up saying to someone who had questioned his spelling, “Well, any idiot can spell a word the same way every time. But it takes imagination to spell it many different ways as I do.” Once he famously told his troops, “I have trouble with the AB and—what do you call that other letter?”15

  As Patton biographer D’Este points out, dyslexia brings with it a wide variety of other difficult symptoms that include self-contempt, impulsiveness, mood swings, obsessiveness, and hyperactivity. At one time or another, D’Este says, “virtually every symptom of dyslexia described above applied to Patton. During his plebe year at West Point he would write to his future wife Beatrice Banning Ayer, ‘I am either very lazy or very stupid, or both, because it is beastly hard for me to learn and as a natural result I hate to study.’ ”16

  All of that notwithstanding, Nannie also captivated Georgie and his sister by reading to them from exciting and powerful works such as Beowulf, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Wash
ington Irving’s The Alhambra, and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in addition to Ivanhoe and other heroic tales by Sir Walter Scott—and this was not to mention children’s adventure books such as Lee in Virginia. Patton liked to tell a story, perhaps apocryphal, about himself. When he was young he used to kneel and pray with his mother, who kept pictures of God and Jesus on the wall by her bedside. It wasn’t until he was a teenager that he found out they were actually etchings of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.17

  Aunt Nannie (Annie Wilson) was three years older than Georgie’s mother, and since their early childhood she had established herself as something of an eccentric. In part by virtue of being the eldest she was able to dominate Ruth in ways large and small. Growing up at Lake Vineyard the girls had been privately tutored in languages, literature, and the piano. While Ruth seemed to thrive in the placid, bucolic atmosphere, Nannie felt restive. According to her distant nephew Robert H. Patton, she feared staying at the ranch would turn her into “a cross, unloved, unloving old maid.” Earlier she had told her diary that she would not marry since “the kind of man I would marry, and could love, I am afraid would never care for me.” She went on to predict that rather than settle for the love of someone “less worthy,” she would instead adore “my ideal” from afar, “and never have him care a bit for me.”18

  It has been someplace noted that the deadliest trap is the one you set for yourself, which seems precisely the case with Nannie Wilson when George S. Patton Sr. came calling on her sister Ruth. Nannie found him fascinating, highly intelligent, witty, and extremely handsome (“a splendid talker, he is so smart and well read”). She could not see how he could possibly fall for her little sister who was not nearly so well read and pretty as herself. So she hovered on the periphery, not as a tiger stalking prey but more like an aloof observer wanting to be part of the party but content to wait outside.

  Not as a wholly “detached” observer, however. When on December 10, 1884, Ruth wed George Patton and the couple prepared to board the train for their honeymoon in New Orleans, who should they find waiting on the platform, baggage packed, but sister Nannie, intending to accompany them on the trip.

  Talked out of proceeding, that night as she sat to write in the diary she’d kept every day since childhood, Nannie recalled an entry of seven years previous: “My youth is slipping by fast and I am beginning to feel old already … Oh I wonder if I shall always go on this same way!” Then she closed the book without writing a word and never resumed it. As her distant nephew would observe a hundred years later, “Nannie was well on her way toward becoming a very strange woman.”19

  Nannie would be a looming presence in the Pattons’ lives over the years, especially from the moment little Georgie was born, when she immediately assumed the role of surrogate mother. He was a large “almost painfully beautiful” child, Nannie said, “curly golden hair, big blue eyes, a lovely nose and sensitive tender mouth.”

  THROUGHOUT HIS YOUTH GEORGIE PATTON’S pursuits revolved around horses, guns, and the military—especially the latter, when he would dress up in a blue uniform and march around the house and grounds brandishing a homemade wooden sword. On the blade he had prophetically carved “Lt. Gen. G.S. Patton.” He learned to ride (his mother was an excellent horsewoman) on the same McClellan saddle that his grandfather had been killed on, and even reckoned that a dark stain around its pommel was actually his grandfather’s blood. At about the age of ten his father gave him an English saddle and two blooded horses, Marmion and Galahad, whom he sometimes slept next to in the Lake Vineyard stables.20

  When he was old enough to lift the .22 rifle that his father bought him, he used it to prove his marksmanship by knocking oranges off of fence posts. Around that same time he got a sixteen-gauge double-hammer shotgun for shooting quail, and when he reached age twelve his father scrambled to come up with enough cash to buy him a twelve-gauge hammerless Lefever, one of the best-built and most expensive American shotguns of the day. When it came to engraving its hard leather case Georgie later wrote he made his father “leave the Jr. off so that he could use it if he wanted to.”

  Money, in fact, had become a problematic subject at Lake Vineyard as the nineteenth century came to a close. Following the death of Don Benito Wilson, management of his estate, including the properties, vineries, and citrus groves, fell to his son-in-law the sybaritic James de Barthe Shoub, while Wilson’s stepson George Patton Sr. continued his practice in the law.21

  But Shoub turned out to be a profligate spendthrift and idler who squandered his own property and the great winery through inept speculation and nearly threw the Wilson/Patton fortune into bankruptcy as well. Patton Sr. found it necessary to leave the practice of law and his post at the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to see to affairs at Lake Vineyard and the other vast Wilson properties, which were intermittently plagued with agricultural diseases and drought. While the Pattons were far from indigent, they were at times “land poor,” and cash was not easy to come by. “Papa never economized so far as his family were concerned,” George Jr. wrote in 1927, “but would get nothing for himself.”22

  That never stopped them, however, from living the lives of American aristocrats. The Pattons’ cousins the Bannings were a wealthy clan who made their fortune first in stagecoach and freight transportation and later in shipping. They owned, among other things, most of Santa Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California. The Pattons had a “cottage” there, and during the long summers the Patton children played with the Bannings as well as with the Ayer children, who were also distant relatives—the scions of a great New England textile fortune.

  Georgie had learned to swim at the age of eight in the waters of the Greenbriar at White Sulphur Springs in (now West) Virginia on a trip “back east” with his father. But on Catalina he sharpened his swimming skills to an extent that would one day win him a place on the 1912 U.S. Olympic team. In Catalina’s rocky hills Georgie and other youngsters were taken by his father to hunt mountain goats that were in danger of overrunning the island. On his first hunt he shot and killed five of these. When Georgie was thirteen, Papa Patton had a sailboat built for him, which led to his enduring fascination with sailing and boats.

  The two of them often sailed around the island, stopping to hunt, fish, and camp for the night in some of the many craggy coves. Patton later recorded in a lengthy paper entitled “My Father as I Knew Him and of Him from Memory and Legend” that “[Papa] hated both hunting and sea fishing but he went even when I was a grown man.”

  With such constant attention being lavished upon him, one might be tempted to conclude that Patton had been spoiled. That he was doted on is without question, but from Patton’s letters and writings he seems to have appreciated the affection for what it was and returned it in full measure. He was precocious to be sure, and hogged the limelight even with all of his self-deprecation.

  His father, while not particularly stern, was acutely tuned to instruct young Georgie in the manner of an aristocratic Virginia gentleman, which he was, or had been. He missed no occasion to point out his son’s shortcomings, such as the time when at age eleven Georgie returned from a mountain goat hunt. The other children had each killed one but Georgie boasted that he had “killed several,” after which his father took him aside, saying, “Son it would have been more like a sportsman not to have mentioned the extra goats.”

  IN 1897, WHEN HE WAS ELEVEN, Georgie’s parents decided to send him to the Classical School for Boys, a private institution in Pasadena run by the Clark brothers. The subjects taught were arithmetic, algebra, geometry, English, grammar, composition, declamation, as well as the languages and literature in Greek, Latin, French, and German.

  But the curriculum leaned most heavily on the teaching of history. As Martin Blumenson, editor of The Patton Papers, explains it: “They taught history [as a] long conflict and clash between the personal ambitions of men—Persians, Romans and Greeks for the most part—who made good or bad decisions, who li
ved properly and righteously, or improperly and meanly; men who contributed to their nation’s welfare and progress or who betrayed human hopes by reason of base motivation or weak character.” It was in this realm of history that Georgie Patton flourished.

  Despite his atrocious spelling and punctuation, Georgie even at his young age would avidly analyze the battles of the ancient world, dissecting the strategies of Alexander the Great or the Greeks at Marathon, or probe the tactics of Sir Walter Scott’s Black Knight versus the Normans.

  The brothers Clark emphasized character, patriotism, and self-sacrifice just as Papa Patton always had. Georgie took these virtues to heart from an early age, making such notations in his schoolboy notebook as: “John Alden was a weak character and timid as is shown by his not having told Standish at first that he was in love with Priscilla,” or, “[On Themistocles] He was egotistical and had a right to be. He was unscrupiolos in ataining his ends and did not hesitate to decieve his best friends,” adding perceptively that “Cimon[’s] ideals were greater than Themistocles but he was not.”23

  Georgie also found time for pithy asides unconnected—or at least ancillary—to his lessons, such as, “The common people of ancient times were very ignorant, as is the case with many in modern times also.”

  Or, “A pair of the least fly-catcher, the bird which says chebec, chebec, and is a small edition of the peewee one season built their nest where I had them for many hours each day under my observation.”