My personal view of Patton - from what I have read and seen over the years - was that he was a great general but like all great men, he had his faults. I watched the movie back when I was a kid and I didn’t get it then the uproar over the slapping incident. However, looking at it now - with what I know and connecting other information to Patton - the Communists hated him. And the press back then was just as liberal as they are today, only back then Soviet Russia was our ally. The press did what it could to tarnish his stars and he helped them to a certain degree. I consider him one of our greatest generals and put him up there with MacArthur, Black Jack, Sherman, Lee, Jackson, Halsey, Nimitz.
It wasn’t the slapping incident and such that concerned my grandfather, but rather that he led from the rear and rode around in staff cars and ate fancy dinners. He thinks as a strategist he was effective, but the heroic vision of him was completely overblown. Just an opinion from a man who fought under him.
Just a thought from someone who doesn’t really have a right to an opinion:
A lot of people think that Patton was a shameless self promoter - something like Custer (without being as stupid as Custer was...) and that he had some issues with impulse control. My father’s opinion is that Omar Bradley was every bit the soldier Patton was, learned all his tricks, etc., without ever developing his problems.
Also, Patton had some stupid ideas. He liked the Sherman tank and thought its only fault was that it needed a second coaxial MG in the gun mantlet. He thought that tanks should be used against infantry and that AT guns and Tank Destroyers were for use against enemy tanks. It could be argued that he got a lot of tankers killed with those beliefs. At good reference would be the book “Death Traps” by Belton Y. Cooper.
Wholeheartedly agree. There’s a cool anecdote in a recent book (uh, sometime in the past four years or so) from Eisenhower’s son (the one who served on his father’s staff in WWII); troops training in England were being observed by Ike, Ike’s kid, Patton, and whomever else was around, and Patton jumped down, grabbed a soldier’s rifle, laid on the ground, and showed him and all around how they were to do it. :’) He was a hands-on guy, he understood war inside and out, and unlike the way he’s generally (heh) portrayed, followed orders even when he argued against them, because he knew the importance of discipline in the chain of command. He probably had a few, uh, slightly unorthodox ideas regarding discipline of course. :’D