The Generals Read online

  In the summer of 1902, eight of the Banning-Patton-Ayer children had formed a company of players they called the Eight Cousins and staged a play, Undine, for their families and their guests. Beatrice Banning Ayer, one of Georgie’s distant cousins by marriage, played the guileless Undine, a water spirit; Georgie played Kuhlborn, her terrifying uncle. It was love at first sight for them both.

  IT HAD LONG BEEN DECIDED by Georgie Patton that he would become a great soldier in the footsteps of his slain grandfather and other family heroes whose exploits his father regularly touted. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point was the obvious path to becoming an officer in the regular army, but there were pitfalls from the beginning—not the least of which was the fact that Papa Patton was a prominent Democrat.

  A congressman could appoint a candidate to West Point but was entitled under the rules to have only one cadet from his district at the academy at any given time. Unfortunately, the Pattons’ local congressman had already appointed a cadet the previous year. The best bet for Georgie then became California’s Senator Thomas R. Bard, who could appoint a cadet from the state at large. Bard, however, was a Republican and it thus fell on the senior Patton to pull out every stop in persuading this political rival to nominate his son to West Point.

  Letters of recommendation from the most eminent Californians inundated Bard’s office, nearly all of them stressing Patton’s martial ancestry: “If ‘blood tells’ in boys as it does in colts, you will always be proud of having nominated [him],” wrote a prominent Los Angeles doctor.

  Georgie’s uncle George H. Smith informed the senator, “If inheritance counts, the young man ought to have all the qualifications required in a soldier.”

  “If blood counts for anything, he certainly comes of fighting stock …” wrote a well-known Los Angeles judge.

  In return, Senator Bard acknowledged that Patton Jr. “possesses a strain of blood which ought to result in a successful army career,” but nevertheless insisted that Georgie “present himself for examination in competition with other applicants for my recommendation.”

  Here was the rub: Papa Patton was well aware of his son’s deficiencies in certain academic areas—in particular mathematics, languages, and of course his abysmal spelling. They cast around for prep schools but finally decided on VMI, where generations of Pattons had been educated. The school prided itself on having a curriculum similar to West Point’s, and a military program even more strenuous than that at the celebrated military academy. A year at VMI seemed to be the logical entrée for prepping for West Point. Thus, in the autumn of 1903, seventeen-year-old Georgie Patton once and for all dropped the “ie” from his nickname and entered the forbidding, gray fortress-like facade of the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

  CADET PATTON TOOK TO the harsh military routine as if it were a normal way of life. Unlike many of his classmates, he seemed to thrive on the starkness, austerity, and hazing—and like George Marshall he accepted his place as a “rat” with magnanimity if not actual appreciativeness.

  He was delighted, for instance, to learn when being fitted for his uniform that the tailor was the same man who had fitted not only his father but also his grandfather, fifty years on. Upon taking his measurements, the tailor looked in his book and informed George Patton Jr. that he was exactly the same uniform size as both of those stellar VMI graduates.24

  Cadet Patton was genial, but not particularly close with his classmates. He was, in fact, a kind of snob in the way that only people who have spent any time in Virginia can appreciate. If there is anything approaching a self-acknowledged American version of aristocracy it will be found among the so-called First Families of Virginia—more so (in their estimation) even than among descendants of the Mayflower. From the time he began to talk and listen it was stressed to George Patton Jr. that his ancestors were among the top of these FFVs, as they have come to be known. In truth, the Patton ancestors, with a few notable exceptions, were not ranked particularly high in the pecking order of the landed Virginia gentry, but the fact that his grandfather had died for it certainly raised them a notch or two.

  In letters home to his father, Patton expressed dismay when he discovered that certain of his fellow students were not “gentlemen,” in the sense that he grew up understanding the term. Their values, he noted, as well as their manners, were different. While he nevertheless treated them as equals, he knew the distinction and did not hesitate to say so in private.

  In his academic courses he struggled as he always had but persevered with hard study and ranked in the top third of his class. He went out for the football team and, like George Marshall before him, accepted a bid to join the KA fraternity in secret, since it was not permitted for cadets to be members. Beatrice wrote him to join her family at Thanksgiving dinner in Boston, but cadets were not allowed off campus; instead he spent Thanksgiving at the home of the VMI commandant then, afterward, ate figs while sitting on the grave of Stonewall Jackson.

  The romance with Beatrice was humming right along, but why a young woman from Boston with such immense wealth and high social standing would have fallen for a California boy and expatriated southerner who claimed he wanted to become a soldier has become a topic for conversation from then until now. For Christmas she sent him a fox head tie pin and inquired as to how “Kuhlborn” was doing, receiving this in reply: “As to Kuhlborns self there is little to say except that owing to his immortal nature he lived through football season and did not break even a single bon[e] and that he is now devoting more time than he should to making a polo team (for above all things he is desirous of an early and glorious death).”25

  Robert H. Patton, who naturally has had extraordinary access to Patton family lore, attributes his grandmother’s infatuation with George Patton to a “quirky streak” and asserts that she was drawn to the kind of “self-mockery and drama” contained in his reply to her letter.b

  Patton managed to get through his year at VMI with respectable grades and an excellent military rating and on May 24, 1904, he was at last accepted into West Point, which prompted a remarkable letter from his father, “to my boy,” telling him, in part: “From that day eighteen years ago when you first saw the light of this world you have been a comfort and a joy to me—and now that we have come to a new point of departure I feel neither regret, nor fear, nor doubt.” The letter goes on to caution him about selfishness and self-seeking, predicts the First World War or something like it, and prophesies that “Providence shall throw upon you the great responsibility by which you may quit yourself like a man. If you do this it matters not whether you achieve the fleeting applause of the unthinking multitude or not. You will have fulfilled your destiny—and played nobly your part in the drama of life.”26

  West Point, however, was far more of an ordeal for Patton than VMI. He considered the latter school harsher in its military discipline and again bemoaned the dearth of “gentlemen” among his classmates. But the academic work at West Point was harder, especially in mathematics and science and of course his old bugaboo English. He went through the daily grind but no amount of extra preparation could overcome his dyslexic tendency to transpose letters, revert to phonetics, or confuse numbers. It is almost heartbreaking when he asks his father in a letter, “Is my spelling still as bad as it was? I hope not for I heare WP is getting strict about that.”c

  He went out for the football and fencing teams with little success in either, a worrisome burden on his ego and mushrooming ambition. He had already set his sights at becoming cadet adjutant by his senior year, second in rank only to first captain. “I have lived 19 years but … amount to very little more than when I was a baby,” he told his father as Thanksgiving approached. “I am fare in every thing but good in nothing. It seems to be that for a person to amount to some thing they should be good in at least one thing. I some times fear that I am one of these darned dreamers … who is always going to succeed but never does,” adding that if that were the case “it would have been far more me
rciful if I had died ten years ago than to be forced to live—a failure.”27

  At least on paper the romance with Beatrice was going well but it had to have been hard on Patton that she was coming out in Boston’s winter debutant season while he was cooped up a plebe at West Point with no off-post leave privileges. He wrote her, “Really the fact that you liked my flowers well enough to wear them [at your coming out party] gives me a great deal more pleasure than they could possibly have given you, so instead of your thanking me I should be grateful to you.”

  Patton at last got to see her on March 4, 1905, when the West Point cadet corps marched in the inaugural parade of President Theodore Roosevelt. That evening he got to dance with Beatrice at the inaugural ball. “I had the finest time in the world,” he told her. He invited her in June to the graduation dance at the academy, but that turned out not to be necessary. On June 3, during a track meet, he was in the lead but tripped over the seventh hurdle and finished last and on that same day was “turned out” (failed) in his French class. The next week he failed math and was “turned back” academically, a full year. It was the unkindest blow. He would have to start all over again.

  ALTHOUGH BEING “TURNED BACK” was a tremendous disappointment, it undoubtedly saved George Patton’s career. By the end of October, of 155 cadets in the class of 1909, he stood 14 in mathematics, 37 in English, number 1 in drill regulations, and had accumulated but one demerit. He achieved this by dint of terrific study and a prodigious memory so that, especially in math, he managed to memorize by rote the solutions to entire problems. On the football team he played third string but broke a bone in his arm that finished him for the season. When promotions were announced that spring he was named second corporal for the upcoming year, meaning that only one cadet in his class had scored higher in military science and conduct.

  The next year was more of the same. Patton passed all of his subjects at about the middle of his class except for military bearing at which he excelled, when he entered his junior year as cadet sergeant major, the highest-ranked military office for the second class. Beatrice remained a romantic figure in his life and being an upperclassman he was now afforded more opportunity to see her on holidays. He went out for the 1907 football season and made the team but never got into a game.

  He wrote in a notebook he kept: “Characteristics of a cavalry leader 1. Indomitable courage 2. Quick perception of right moment to attack 3. Capacity of inspiring confidence in troops,” adding, “always work like Hell at all things and all times.” In something at least prophetic and at best a minor miracle, when promotion time rolled around Patton was selected adjutant of the West Point Cadet Corps for his senior year, the position he’d aspired to ever since he’d been a first year plebe. Once more he went out for the football team but early on again broke a small bone in his arm, which put him out of action for the season.

  Except for his tribulations on the football field, by that time Patton at last had become the athlete he always wanted to be. He was an accomplished swordsman on the fencing team, especially with the broadsword, as well as a stellar rider/jumper on the equestrian team. Not only that, but at the Annual West Point Field Day he also broke the school record in the 220-yard low hurdles, won the 159-yard high hurdles, and was second in the 220-yard dash.

  By then he was revealing his deepest thoughts in his letters to Beatrice, many of them philosophical musings on war, peace, battle, and dreams of battle. At one point he told her, “Perhaps I said things though true that sound rather strange. But I am rather strange too, I fear.”

  In January 1909 he asked her to marry him; or rather, he asked her father’s permission to ask her, which was given hesitantly, but magnanimously, considering that Frederick Ayer was eighty-six years old and could not but be dismayed at the prospect of his youngest daughter going off to who knows where with a lowly second lieutenant in the army. Even Ayer could not help being impressed, however, when upon a sparkling Sunday morning with the family gathered on the terrace of Avalon in Prides Crossing, who should come ascending the twenty-six stone steps to the spectacular mansion overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic on the rocks below, riding on a large white charger, but Lieutenant George S. Patton Jr. When he reached the terrace, he clattered up toward Beatrice, who was seated in a chair, and proceeded to have the horse bow in front of her, doffing his cap in a sweeping flourish. Ayer told him this in a letter: “All right. You let me worry about making the money, and you worry about getting the glory.”28

  As far as career choice Patton, who rode as though he was born in the saddle, had concluded that “cavalry as mounted infantry is the arm of the future,” in the army, and chose that branch above all others—not the least because his academic record was such as to exclude him from the more elite branches, such as engineers.

  Blumenson writes that, judging from remarks about him in the West Point magazine, his class Furlough Book, and the West Point yearbook, Patton’s classmates regarded Patton “with some ambivalent emotions. They accepted him generally with affection and admiration for his sincerity, candor, and fairness. They smiled in condescension over his naïve earnestness and enthusiasm. They believed that he tried too hard, had too much spirit, and they were uncomfortable with his excessive concern for future glory.”

  Upon graduation Patton had hoped to be posted to Fort Myer, Virginia, right across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., with the 15th Cavalry. Instead he was relegated to Fort Sheridan, Illinois, a rather bleak outpost near Chicago, where a part of the 15th was stationed. His duties were menial but typical for a new second lieutenant: guard duty, stable duty, and duty at the post stockade, rifle and pistol practice (at which he attained the grade of “expert”), and occasional maneuvers. He was scheduled to marry Beatrice at the end of May and worried over the quarters they had been assigned on the post. He went into Chicago to shop for furnishings—chairs, sofas, lamps, and carpets.

  In the first week of March 1910, a little of the Patton legend was put on show when his horse threw a conniption fit while he was drilling a formation of his troops. The horse suddenly began bucking fiercely and threw the surprised Patton off, but he immediately got back on. The animal began to buck again, reared, and fell down on the ground. But Patton stayed on, “[standing] across him” after he had gotten his leg out from under the animal, so that when Patton got the horse up he would be in the saddle. As the horse arose, however, it suddenly jerked its head back cracking Patton in the face and opening a nasty cut above his eye that “bled like a stuck pig.”

  Instead of going to the infirmary, for the next twenty minutes Patton continued drilling the men with the blood “running down [his] sleeve.” No one there could help but take note of the young lieutenant with blood all over his face and uniform, patiently drilling the troops when by all rights he should have had the cut looked after. It was good, tough stuff, the stuff of which legends are made, and those cavalry troopers saw that the story got around.

  The wedding on May 26, 1910, was one of the most graceful occasions of Boston’s social season, being concluded at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Beverly Farms. There the bride and groom—in his elegant army dress blue uniform—emerged beneath a phalanx of crossed swords held high by Patton’s West Point classmates, who also wore full dress. The reception was held at Avalon, with special trains bringing guests from Boston. It featured a full orchestra that played on the terrace.

  Beatrice’s wedding dress had been her mother’s of white handmade lace and trimmed in orange blossoms from Lake Vineyard “brought on the train by the Pattons in a box of wet cotton.”29 She cut the enormous wedding cake with her husband’s sword, which was followed by army cheers and a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by the orchestra. The next day, the couple entrained for New York and the bridal suite on the SS Deutschland that would carry them to a monthlong honeymoon in England, where Patton poked around Cornwall, home to the legendary King Arthur—“People talk of him as if he were still here,” he said.
/>   THE FIRST DAYS AT FORT SHERIDAN could not have been easy for Beatrice, who was reared in an excess of luxury. But between her drive to make a good wife and the marital bliss right off a honeymoon she seemed cheerful and happy in her letters home. Patton slowly but steadily advanced in the estimation of his military superiors, working his way to commanding officer of a machine-gun platoon and acting commanding officer of his cavalry troop. He began to salivate with news of trouble along the Mexican border—the current revolution was possibly in danger of spilling over into the United States. “There may be no war,” Patton wrote Aunt Nannie, adding, “God forbid such an eventuality.”

  With assistance from the Patton and Ayer families he purchased a string of polo ponies, an expensive automobile,d as well as several fine thoroughbreds for both flat racing and steeplechases, which he could board at the Fort Sheridan stables for free. He wrote Aunt Nannie: “We had a polo match Saturday and I won a cup a foot high. It is very pretty.” At night he began translating articles from French military journals into English, taught himself how to type, and started writing military papers for distribution within the army—the first one entitled “Saddle Drill.” A recurring theme in these papers was to “attack, push forward, attack again until the end,” which would one day become a Patton trademark.30

  In March 1911 Beatrice gave birth to a girl, Beatrice Smith (later changed to Ayer) Patton, of whom George soon wrote to Aunt Nannie at the end of the month, “The accursed infant has black hair is very ugly and is said by some dastardly people to resemble me which it does not because it is ugly.” Again he added: “The Mexican trouble seems dormant for the moment but … it is not for long. We shall cross the border yet. I feel sure of it.”

  Some of Patton’s biographers seem to take his remarks about the baby being ugly as made seriously instead of playfully, but that hardly seems the case. From this it has been extrapolated that Patton was terribly jealous of the baby for having “intruded” on his marriage with Beatrice—but hard evidence of this is difficult to come by. Once, a neighbor, the wife of a colonel, came to Beatrice to ask if things were all right in her marriage because her husband had informed her that Lieutenant Patton that day was observed “standing on the rifle butts in between the targets” on the rifle range during a firing exercise. It has been intimated that this behavior demonstrated that Patton was despondent, even suicidal, over the arrival of the child, but that hardly seems the case either.