Posted on 11/10/2020 5:43:42 AM PST by Kaslin
General George S. Patton wanted to keep going!
Instead of halting the American advance and playing nice with Russia at the end of World War II, Patton wanted to stave off future threats. That’s why the American general was poised to have U.S. troops move in and occupy Berlin, Prague, and other parts of Eastern Europe. So why didn’t the allied leadership allow Patton to have his way? And, why was Patton effectively silenced before he could address the American people?
Robert Orlando, a filmmaker, author, entrepreneur and scholar, addresses these questions in a new book titled “The Tragedy of Patton” and an accompanying film titled “Silence Patton.” Although he was vilified in his time, here on this Veteran’s Day, it should now be evident that Patton was prescient in his warnings about the Soviet Union and strategically forward looking.
“Patton is best thought of as the antihero of the Second World War,” Orlando said in an interview. “He could be daring and highly imaginative on the battlefield, but he lacked the tact and diplomatic grace of his contemporaries and this had some real political consequences. But Patton was also the kind of general the allies needed to get the rough work done on the ground. He was outspoken about the conduct of the war and eager to identity the Soviet Union has the next great threat to American democracy. Only a few years after his very suspicious death, Patton’s strategy and vision were vindicated.”
The film opens by reviewing details about the automobile accident that ultimately claimed Patton’s life on a road in Mannheim, Germany on Dec. 9, 1945, seven months after the war ended in Europe. Everyone else involved in the accident walked away, but Patton died before he could go home to America to give his version of events that led to the end of World War II. Orlando steers clear of any conspiracy theories, but does make the point that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and America’s top military brass were concerned about what Patton might say about the Soviet threat and how the American public might react to his comments.
“There would have been people in FDR’s administration who would have detested George Patton,” Paul Kengor, a Grove City College political science professor, and author, says in the film. “There was the fact that Patton thought the Soviets were the threat, or at least the future threat post war. The FDR administration has a bunch of people who were in some cases outright Soviet spies, Soviet sympathizers, dupes who were soft on communism.”
The film also explores the complicated relationship Patton had with Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander.
“Eisenhower recognizes the value of Patton on the battlefield,” the film’s narrator says. “He’s a master strategist, a determined tactician and a hard driving commander.”
Eisenhower is quoted as saying, “In pursuit and exploitation there is a need for a commander who sees nothing but the necessity of getting ahead. The more he drives his men, the more he will save their lives."
Victor David Hanson, a senior fellow in military history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, provides insight into Patton’s view of warfare and what needed to be done to transform the American army into a lethal fighting force.
“Aggressiveness, brutality, killing is not innate in our democratic DNA and we have to learn to be killers. We’ve got to get rid of this whole romance that you get shot in the shoulder and then suddenly, you’re a hero and you get a purple heart. You’re not a hero. You’re only if before you got shot in the shoulder you went out and shot a bunch of Germans or you blew up a panther tank.”
Unlike other generals, Patton was an “aggressive thruster,” Hanson explains.
But unlike some of the other generals, Patton did not smoothly transition over to diplomatic and political settings, the film explains.
“The qualities that made Patton successful on the battlefield, unflinching nerve, audacity, fearless candor, were the very ones that made him a nuisance when the fighting was over,” the narrator explains. “Off the battlefield Patton is a liability, he lacks diplomacy and his actions by some accounts are insubordinate.”
At the heart of film, is the question of whether in retrospect Patton was right to preempt Soviet troop moves across Eastern Europe.
“The Allied troops were within 200 miles of Berlin and were held back from capturing the capital to let Soviet troops move in,” Orlando says. “Patton felt that this made what became known as the Cold War inevitable. He said it often, and loudly enough that he was relieved of his command and silenced. What I’ve found since the film’s release is that Patton’s behavior, character and performance on the battlefield is looked at not through the lens of history, but is retrofit into the standards of today, forgetting that the 1940s were an ugly, challenging time for the Allies and that Patton was uniquely up to the challenge.”
Orlando is the president and director of Nexus Media, a Princeton, New Jersey based filmmaking studio. A complete list of the cast and crew for “Silence Patton” is available here.
The film explains how Patton was horrified by how Soviet leader Joseph Stalin brutalized German civilians and went to his grave seeing an opportunity to free the people of Eastern Europe.
There’s one quote from Patton that echoes from the beginning to the end of the film and that resonates into today.
“Tin-soldier politicians in Washington have allowed us to kick the hell out of one bastard [Hitler] and at the same time forced us to help establish a second one [Stalin] as evil or more evil than the first.”
Orlando’s original film “Silence Patton was released by Sony Pictures in 2018, but the book The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldier’s Date with Destiny, explains, “was the product of a lifetime of passion and study for the subject.” The book and the film detail Patton’s warnings about the coming Cold War, but the book takes a deeper dive into Patton’s religious convictions and in the words of Orlando “showcases a man obsessed with fulfilling his military legacy for God, country, and his intense drive and ambition that places him in the pantheon of our greatest generals!”
You have a pessimistic view of the world, good guys always lose. I never said we should have purposefully gone to war with the Soviets, I said that we should have seized more territory in Eastern Europe in order to keep the communists from grabbing so much. I am arguing with good proof points that we had obvious military damages that would’ve kept the communists m from retaliating. America had a massive advantage in manufacturing, economic power, naval power, and we were at the time the only possessor of goddamned nuclear weapons.
Did you ever get to use your own lunch money to buy things to eat at school?
The German did not have the B-29 Superfortress either.
Thanks to leftist saboteurs in America we will never know.
Totally.
Why didn’t England declare war on Russia when they invaded Poland?
Because the fix was in.
Why wasn’t Poland freed after the war?
Because the fix was in.
Why did we leave China after the war and allow the Russians to move into there and North Korea?
Because the fix was in.
A cynic would think that you are simply projecting your own cowardice on other Americans. I have to admit that so am a cynic and so I think that you are the one that lacks courage and fortitude and think that other Americans are as equally lacking.
Stalin would never have had a chance without Lend-Lease. We promoted it publicly at the time as being for Britain, but very large amounts went to the USSR, frankly to the detriment of our own troops.
Why?
I used to think that was true. You should read the contemporary reports about Japan from the American field commanders. IF we had permitted a surrender that would have allowed them to keep their emperor, as Forrestal proposed, they would have surrendered without the nukes.
Why did we insist, drop the bombs, and then let the Japanese keep their emperor?
Exactly right.
The German reverses at Moscow occurred before the US entered the war.
Stalingrad occurred before lend-lease reached the front, but the arrival of lend-lease allowed Stalin to throw all his reserves into Uranus.
It would have been more even and a much longer war without lend-lease.
My strategy would have been to let Germany and Russia annihilate each other while defeating Japan, and then invade Germany and undefended Siberia in 1946, armed with atomic bombs. The war ends by 1947 in the Urals, Hitler, Stalin and Mao dead.
Exactly the correct strategy, as noted by Hoover in his forbidden book, only published in 2010.
FDR wanted Germany obliterated and Europe weakened to make way for USSR and Communist supremacy.
Sorry, Herbert, not J Edgar.
“By allowing the Russians to get to Berlin first, they had a head start in divvying up Europe.”
For starters that agreement had been made at Yalta in February.
The Pacific war was still raging. The first test of the atomic bomb was months away and we had no idea if it would actually work. A conventional invasion of Japan would result in an estimated one million casualties and we didn’t want all of them to be American. We wanted Russia to share in the carnage. So you don’t alienate them over Berlin.
“But what if the US had not supplied the USSR with so much material that helped enabled it (despite Stalin’s absurd programs executing military leadership) to become an advancing army, getting to Berlin first? “
Then Stalin’s choice would have been to do what we feared, which is to arrange a separate peace with Germany. And that would have freed up 3 million German troops to join the battle against us on the western front.
“War could have ended months earlier had Patton been given fuel to continue pushing once the breakout occurred in France as Germany was on the ropes. Instead they diverted resources for market-garden.”
A shortage of resources isn’t what stopped Patton. There were supplies. Patton simply moved so fast there was no way to get them to him.
The logistics plan included a portable fuel pipeline that would follow the front but Patton moved faster than it could be built. So Patton created his own 5,000 truck convoy, the Red Ball Express, to run gas and ammo to his army. That worked until the distance from the depots to the front became too long. The supply trucks were running out of gas and breaking down.
Paul Fussell's essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" ought to be required reading. Fussell had been combat infantry in Europe.
"When the atom bomb ended the war, I was in the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, which had been through the European war so thoroughly that it had needed to be reconstituted two or three times. We were in a staging area near Rheims, ready to be shipped back across the United States for refresher training at Fort Lewis, Washington, and then sent on for final preparation in the Philippines. "My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu. (The earlier landing on Kyushu was to be carried out by the 700,000 infantry already in the Pacific, those with whom James Jones has sympathized.)
I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act.
"When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that “Operation Olympic” would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. The killing was all going to be over, and peace was actually going to be the state of things.
I do not agree with this either/or conclusion, as I believe it would have been possible to provide the USSR with enough help for them to push Germany back, but not so much that they become such as advancing army that they took Berlin first. However, there was a possibility of Stalin making peace with Hitler, which would be bad for allies.
correct Pelham - Stalin’s cannon fodder saved a number of American, British and French lives.
How was it possible to give only so much to “push Germany back” but not to take Berlin? From the moment the Russians won Kursk, they were going to take Berlin.
It comes down to logistics.
US supply lines were stretched near breaking by the spring of 45, and most captured Channel ports, roads and rail lines were wrecked. As the US Army moved east to fight the Red Army those supply routes would then be extended into and through defeated, occupied countries with destroyed infrastructure and sullen/hostile citizens, refugees and Heer/SS units wandering about.
We could’ve hurt the Soviets by cutting Lend-lease, but by mid-45, the Red Army’s resupply issues were mainly being satisfied by domestic industry.
Manpower would have been another challenge. The defeat of Nazi Germany meant priorities for men and munitions were shifting to the endgame in Japan. There would have been no guarantee the UK would be willing/able to assist, the French “Army” was marching up and down the boulevards of Paris, and settling old scores. There was speculation that German soldiers/formations could be enlisted to fight Communists, but assuming the troops could be ‘de-nazified’, they would have to be equipped, trained, provisioned and integrated, which would take time and resources away from US units. Some of these soldiers had been fighting since 1939 and were exhausted. Some were die-hard SS.
By mid-45 the US Army was facing manpower shortages of its own: the number of able-bodied men available for the draft was shrinking dangerously. The US had been a Draft Army since 1940. US casualties in Europe were high, but paled by comparison to the Pacific, and the upcoming invasions. Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been costly and the American public were tired of war. Selling the concept of fighting the Red Army, who had been an ‘ally’, to the US public would have been problematic. Using the defeated German army to assist (especially as wide spread atrocities came to light) would have been a significant challenge.
Patton was a brilliant maneuver commander, but even he understood the logistic challenges he would face. He’d led the Breakout the previous summer, executed a number of local raids prior to the cessation of hostilities, but didn’t (and likely wouldn’t) have the resources to secure his supply lines, garrison his zone of occupation and conduct offensive operations to seize/hold ground from the Red Army.
Short of horses, men and the hay to feed them, Patton’s planners were hobbled by logistics. Heading east would likely never moved beyond arrows on the map.
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