The movie, “Brass Target,” (with George Kennedy as Patton) speaks to an assassination of Patton. However, it wasn’t related to his anti-Soviet mindset or plans, but rather regarding a train-load of stolen gold. Not a good movie, but topical.
The other side was, of course, that we had just spilled oceans of blood and spent enormous amounts of treasure to free Europe from a horrible tyrant...and the Soviets came in and essentially enslaved many of the very same people (specifically including the Poles, who were the first victims in the war), with little difference to those people other than having their occupiers/oppressors flying a different flag. Stalin and the USSR were even bigger threats than Hitler and the Nazis - and anyone with even a modest knowledge of human nature, strategic affairs, logistics, etc. could see the threat of the Soviets to the entire Western World from a mile away (and, clearly, Patton was among the crème de la crème of such people on the entire planet).
Anyone retrospectively saying words to the effect of “how many casualties did we have during the Cold War?” as an argument **in 1945** for not pushing the USSR back is assuming that policy-makers had a fully-functional crystal ball - i.e. it is an absurd argument. The simple fact is that Patton saw the immense carnage of WW2 and, being the strategic genius that he was, he saw a repeat of the same (but against an extremely heavily-armed enemy with immense strategic depth) only a few years later - and wanted to pro-actively avoid beginning such a war in a state of unpreparedness like we at the outset of WW2 - he even worried that we could lose such a conflict. One of his maxims in training before WW2 (and justification for pushing his men to the limit before combat) was “a pint of sweat will save a gallon of blood” - evidence that he sought to minimize casualties and suffering both on an individual and a national/civilizational level). Also, consider that he had lived through the inter-war years, during which the West disarmed and left itself incredibly vulnerable to the Germans and Japanese...and that there were plans to basically completely demobilize after WW2 was over (which we pretty much did - thus displaying great weakness of spirit and materiel which led to the Nork/Soviet gambit to invade South Korea...an issue with which we’re STILL dealing). Not much that happened in the next 20 or more years would have surprised him very much, except WRT the policy effects of nukes (which pretty much no one could have foreseen) - such was his depth of knowledge and his analytical skills.
There is simply no way that anyone could have foreseen that the Cold War would play out with only proxy fights and no direct US-Soviet battlefield conflict. Based on all of History up to 1945, it would have been obvious to ANY strategic thinker that we and the Russians would have mixed it up no later than the 1960s or ‘70s - NO ONE knew the effect of nukes on strategic thinking, or that there would be so many of them that we and they could literally destroy civilization in 1/2 hour. Given what was known then about Soviet aggressiveness and power vs. the utter inability of Western democracies to do anything but try to wish away threats until they just about came marching down the streets of your capitol city, it seems to me that Patton’s view was correct - knowing what we did in 1945, it would have been the smarter long-range move to have gone after the Soviets while we had a fully mobilized economy and the best-trained, best-equipped military that had ever existed on the planet, at least to push them out of Eastern Europe. The Soviets had been bled white, and were in no shape to successfully fight another big war, let alone against an enemy with our resources that could have fought them not merely in Europe, but in Asia as well. OTOH, given what is known now, that would have been an immensely costly crime of epic proportions (but, again, no one had a working crystal ball).
Whether it was possible for Patton to have convinced our leaders and the public of the need/desire to fight the Soviets then vs. at some undefined, uncertain moment in the future is a question that History has already answered in the negative. He might, had he not had his accident, have opened the eyes of a lot of people here as to the nature and goals of Stalin and the USSR, and thus possibly prevented the Korean War and maybe led us to bankrupt them 10 or 20 years earlier, but that’s all speculation. But the fact that on this issue he was not taken seriously speaks volumes about this particular sub-issue.
But Patton proved wrong wasn't he? There was no great US-USSR war. We didn't suffer another half million kids killed let alone the civilian toll such foolishness would have entailed. We worked it out through diplomacy, messy as it was and ultimately bankrupted them 40 years later thanks to President Reagan. Given the choice, I would think that was the much better option. Besides Truman along with Ike and the rest of the generals were not going to buy into a speculative theory of some trigger happy General. They knew the casualties it would entail. But Patton did serve his purpose ; he was a great field general and a great tactician. But that's about it
The other side was, of course, that we had just spilled oceans of blood and spent enormous amounts of treasure to free Europe from a horrible tyrant...and the Soviets came in and essentially enslaved many of the very same people (specifically including the Poles, who were the first victims in the war
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This quote is gold. We freed “our” allies. The Brits, French, Belgium, western Germany, Holland and Norway ARE America. Toss in Italy and Greece and what was left was Gypsy’s as far as most Americans were concerned. We sacrificed the Poles.
Who in Iowa was going to have his sone die for the Ukraine or Bulgaria?