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. Thats 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 didnt 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 Veterans 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, Pattons strategy and vision were vindicated.
The film opens by reviewing details about the automobile accident that ultimately claimed Pattons 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 Roosevelts administration and Americas 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 FDRs 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 films narrator says. Hes 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 Pattons 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. Weve got to get rid of this whole romance that you get shot in the shoulder and then suddenly, youre a hero and you get a purple heart. Youre not a hero. Youre 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 Ive found since the films release is that Pattons 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.
Theres 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.
Orlandos original film Silence Patton was released by Sony Pictures in 2018, but the book The Tragedy of Patton: A Soldiers Date with Destiny, explains, was the product of a lifetime of passion and study for the subject. The book and the film detail Pattons warnings about the coming Cold War, but the book takes a deeper dive into Pattons 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!
Yes!............
By allowing the Russians to get to Berlin first, they had a head start in divvying up Europe.
Also they had snatched some rocket scientists that allowed them to get their space program going................
“So why didnt the allied leadership allow Patton to have his way?”
Because they weren’t idiots.
People that actually think this was possible is one of the fastest ways of identifying a moron.
The allies didn’t “allow” - let’s be blunt, there was little they could do. The Italian campaign had hit a stalemate and it took until 1944 for D-day, while the Russians were already hammering in Poland.
There was no way to prevent the Russians getting to Berlin first.
Orwell, you magnificent bastard!
I read your book!
It an FDR fan and I wasnt here when he made his decision. But I remember my relatives who where. They all fought and they all supported ending the War when it was ended.
Roosevelt set us up for Pearl Harbor and for the Soviets takeover of much of Europe. Yet he is lionized.
Ike, Bradley et al thought very highly of him as a field general but that's about it.
No.
The Soviets had overwhelming force. They had better tanks. They had so much artillery that they had ‘artillery traffic jams.’ The only advantage the allies might have was in the air, and the Soviet Air Force is not be underestimated.
Both armies were exhausted, but Soviets didn’t care - a benefit of being a dictatorship.
Turning around and attacking the Soviets would have played well at home which had been thoroughly propagandized with pro-Soviet media.
All in all any attack on the Soviets would have probably ended up with the Soviets on the Rhine.
The western half of Russia was in ruins.
They could not feed themselves.
They could not build trucks or jeeps to transport their army.
We could have effectively cut them off in Europe and secured Eastern Europe from Communism.
No. The fact is, there was no support at all among the US public for one more day of war. In fact, support had started to wane about invading Japan, which is another reason (for all the right ones) Truman decided to drop the bombs.
In Europe, the US & Br. had nowhere close to enough troops to prevent the Red Army from rolling through Germany and France. There would have been strong resistance, but futile ultimately without the bomb-—but even then, as a colleague of mine in the USAF wrote in “Hollow Threat,” even as late as 1946 we only had a total of about 100 bombs and NO long range delivery systems that could get them deep into Russia in other than suicide missions.
Truman, then Ike, played Europe brilliantly by stalling until the European nations could join in NATO (which still would have been rolled over in a conventional war) and until we had enough long-range delivery systems to make an atomic threat possible. Patton would have gotten us in the wrong war at the wrong time-—a war we won really without firing a shot thanks to Reagan.
America was unified in WWII for one reason only: the American Left wanted to save Stalin. The Left was for war with Germany from June 22, 1941. Pearl Harbor on December 7th allowed the Left to go after Germany and resupply Stalin. The war with Japan was just incidental to the Left.
As it turned out, the Left shot their own foot. With Lend-Lease to Stalin, Russia was able to defeat Germany all by itself and Normandy only prevented Stalin from taking all of Europe.
“Roosevelt set us up for Pearl Harbor and for the Soviets takeover of much of Europe.”
Good King FDR would NEVER have done that.
Honest Walter Cronkite would have investigated and told us so if he had!
Definitely need the /s.
>In fact, support had started to wane about invading Japan
The Left was never interested in Japan. Pearl Harbor was just an excuse to attack Hitler after his invasion of Russia. See #13
No. They were tired of war. With millions dead in Europe, WWIII was unthinkable.
True, but the left in America was largely irrelevant at that time.
Perhaps, but the United States had a Pacific Front with a looming invasion of the Japanese homeland. Resources were more needed there than fighting the Russians on the Polish frontier
There is one factor you are missing: the US was not Nazis.
The brutality of the Nazi occupation of Russia doomed Germany. The Russians liked nothing better than getting rid of Stalin. Given half a chance the Russians would have let us do the job. But we gave no impression we wanted to except for Patton.
American troops could have kept the Russians out of many areas that ended up behind the Iron Curtain without a war with the Sviet communists. we had an Air Force pound them to nothing and the atomic bomb. The main reason the Russians had a prayer of winning over Germany was that we destroyed the German industrial base, tied down millions of troops in the west, and took out the German air force. Stalin only advantage was just willingness to sacrifice millions of Russian soldiers.
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