Patton: The Glory of War and its Limitations

Toogood Reports ^ | 28 September 2003 | Nicholas Stix

[mrustow]

"Das Geheimnis Pattons ist die Vergangenheit," says a captain in the German high command. "Patton's secret is the past." The secret of the man and the movie.

I rented the 1970 film, Patton, last week, and saw it three times with my son. A fellow’s got to get his money’s worth. It made quite an impression on yours truly, though I’m not so sure about Richard, who is three-and-a-half years old, and is currently much more passionate about James and the Giant Peach.

The moment Patton opens, you know this will be like no other war movie. General George S. Patton Jr. (1885-1945) stands before the biggest American flag I have ever seen, wearing a highly buffed, black helmet and a uniform suggesting the 18th or 19th century, weighed down with medals domestic and foreign, bearing not one but two ivory-handled revolvers, and holding a riding crop. As a bugler plays reveille, the camera focuses on each feature in turn. And then Scott lets loose with the now famous monologue, which was actually the last thing the filmmakers came up with.

"Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country…!"

Atten ... tion!

Consider the time. Patton was made in 1969; America was mired in a highly unpopular war in Vietnam, the draft was about to be ended, and America was preparing to pull her fighting men out of the first military defeat in her history. And here was this spirit from the past, saying that "Americans love to fight," and "will not tolerate a loser"!

Early in Patton, we hear the sound of distant trumpets, as in 1943, the general surveys the ancient battlefield where Carthage (modern name, Tunis, in Tunisia) was burnt to the ground by the Romans in 146 B.C.

Patton is standing near the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, where over 1,000 American G.I.s were butchered in their first encounter with the German Wehrmacht, in the form of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps. "I was there," he tells his assistant. In 146 B.C.

Is he mad or is he teasing? The answer is, a little of both.

He quotes part of a lush, romantic poem on the eternal warrior – he is the poet. An American poet-general? We are dealing with a man singular in the annals of 20th century American warfare. "I hate the 20th century," the old "cavalry horse officer" remarks.

Through a Glass, Darkly
George S. Patton, Jr.

Through the travail of the ages,
Midst the pomp and toil of war,
Have I fought and strove and perished
Countless times upon this star.

In the form of many people
In all panoplies of time
Have I seen the luring vision
Of the Victory Maid, sublime.

I have battled for fresh mammoth,
I have warred for pastures new,
I have listened to the whispers
When the race trek instinct grew.

I have known the call to battle
In each changeless changing shape
From the high souled voice of conscience
To the beastly lust for rape.

I have sinned and I have suffered,
Played the hero and the knave;
Fought for belly, shame, or country,
And for each have found a grave.

I cannot name my battles
For the visions are not clear,
Yet, I see the twisted faces
And I feel the rending spear.

Perhaps I stabbed our Savior
In His sacred helpless side.
Yet, I've called His name in blessing
When after times I died.

In the dimness of the shadows
Where we hairy heathens warred,
I can taste in thought the lifeblood;
We used teeth before the sword.

While in later clearer vision
I can sense the coppery sweat,
Feel the pikes grow wet and slippery
When our Phalanx, Cyrus met.

Hear the rattle of the harness
Where the Persian darts bounced clear,
See their chariots wheel in panic
>From the Hoplite's leveled spear.

See the goal grow monthly longer,
Reaching for the walls of Tyre.
Hear the crash of tons of granite,
Smell the quenchless eastern fire.

Still more clearly as a Roman,
Can I see the Legion close,
As our third rank moved in forward
And the short sword found our foes.

Once again I feel the anguish
Of that blistering treeless plain
When the Parthian showered death bolts,
And our discipline was in vain.

I remember all the suffering
Of those arrows in my neck.
Yet, I stabbed a grinning savage
As I died upon my back.

Once again I smell the heat sparks
When my Flemish plate gave way
And the lance ripped through my entrails
As on Crecy's field I lay.

In the windless, blinding stillness
Of the glittering tropic sea
I can see the bubbles rising
Where we set the captives free.

Midst the spume of half a tempest
I have heard the bulwarks go
When the crashing, point blank round shot
Sent destruction to our foe.

I have fought with gun and cutlass
On the red and slippery deck
With all Hell aflame within me
And a rope around my neck.

And still later as a General
Have I galloped with Murat
When we laughed at death and numbers
Trusting in the Emperor's Star.

Till at last our star faded,
And we shouted to our doom
Where the sunken road of Ohein
Closed us in its quivering gloom.

So but now with tanks a'clatter
Have I waddled on the foe
Belching death at twenty paces,
By the star shell's ghastly glow.

So as through a glass, and darkly
The age long strife I see
Where I fought in many guises,
Many names, but always me.

And I see not in my blindness
What the objects were I wrought,
But as God rules o'er our bickerings
It was through His will I fought.

So forever in the future,
Shall I battle as of yore,
Dying to be born a fighter,
But to die again, once more.

(Note the similarities to German Romantic notions, as well as to Nietzsche’s notion of an “eternal return of the same,” and later, Mick Jagger's lyrics to "Sympathy for the Devil." In the movie, Scott quotes only the poem's highlights.)

Patton refers to himself as a “prima donna,” but as director Franklin Schaffner, scenarists Francis Ford Coppola (yes, before he became Hollywood's greatest active director, he was its greatest active screenwriter!) and Edmund H. North, and star George C. Scott portray him, “megalomaniac” is more like it. Before heading in to battle, as he stands before his mirror, his Negro soldier-valet carefully placing his begoggled helmet on his head, he more closely resembles a Roman general (or Il Duce) than a modern officer. And in a notorious, true incident, upon encountering a shell-shocked soldier, he slaps the man silly, threatens to shoot him, and is almost cashiered by Ike. But he was our greatest 20th century field commander.

(The valet is played by a trim, youthful-looking, fifty-year-old Jimmy Edwards. Unfortunately, Edwards (Home of the Brave, Bright Victory, The Member of the Wedding, The Manchurian Candidate), whose career was limited by racism, died of a massive heart attack before the film's release. He went through hell, paving the way so that the likes of Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington could become screen icons, while he was forgotten.)

The making of Patton clearly influenced Coppola, when the latter made Apocalypse Now. At one point on a battlefield, Patton smells the smoke of spent gunpowder and says, "I love it, God help me, I do love it. I love it more than my life." This scene clearly anticipated the scene in Apocalypse Now, where Robert Duvall's Lt. Col. Kilgore famously says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like ... victory."

In Patton's brutality, his talk of never giving up an inch of land (Hitler said the very same thing.), in his contempt for civilian authority, in his joy at killing, he comes across as a fascist or Nazi, which is how he was often depicted at the time. Amazingly, the movie is able to glorify this man, while maintaining a posture of cold sentimentality towards him. Schaffner loves Patton, but without illusions. Patton wasn't "larger than life" - no one is - he WAS life, or at least the martial, intellectual, and aesthetic lives, in all their fullness.

General George S. Patton Jr. had a sense of destiny; his purpose in life was to do great things on the field of battle. And as he observes, only once in a thousand years, do the heavens so align that a soldier has such an opportunity to change history.

Fortunately, in the movie as in life, Patton had humble, ordinary Joe – at least as Bradley tells it – Gen. Omar Bradley (the last five-star, General of the Army, in the history of the U.S. Army) as a counterweight. Bradley is played by Karl Malden with a restraint and self-effacing humor that perfectly contrast Patton/Scott's bravado.

Jerry Goldsmith's score has just the right blend of the elegiac (distant trumpets) and the pompous yet playful (fanfare of horns and flutes), corresponding to the tempers of Patton's personality.

While almost three hours long, Patton does not flag, and could easily have been longer.

The DVD, which came out in 1997, has a lovely documentary on the making of Patton, as well as Jerry Goldsmith's rousing score. However, I do not believe the claim of the movie's late director, Franklin Schaffner, that he did not make Patton in response to the anti-war movement. Producer Frank McCarthy was a retired general, and many generals felt that the media lost Vietnam, the original “quagmire,” for us. Recall that it was Walter Cronkite himself - Uncle Walter - who portrayed an American victory against the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive, in January, 1968, as a defeat, and thus turned the tide of domestic support against the military. In Patton, the media is depicted in despicable terms – if Patton wanted to be sure something leaked out, all he had to do was tell reporters it was "off the record" – and one reporter is shown personally insulting him.

Schaffner’s Patton will evoke different reactions from different observers. For instance, during the German occupation, he complains to reporters that Truman had stopped the war too early. We’d been fighting the wrong guys, and needed to march on to Moscow, since we were going to end up fighting the Russians, anyway. The problem with politicians, he said, was that they were always ending wars too soon, leaving the soldiers another war to fight.

Patton’s criticism of our de-nazification policy proved his undoing, and resulted in his being removed as commander of the Third Army, and placed in the military equivalent of purgatory. A few months later, in Germany, he died as a result of a car accident, at the age of 60.

Some people thought him mad, for wanting to fight the Russians (and for believing we should have been fighting them, rather than the Germans), but millions thought he was right. The notion that we were fighting the wrong guys echoes today among those who suggest our enemies are the Jews of Israel, rather than radical Islam. As for Patton’s notion of premature peace, that sounds great in theory, and today evokes Gulf War I, when we chased Saddam out of Kuwait, but let him escape back to Iraq. Many people forget, however, that liberating Kuwait alone was the deal that George H.W. Bush had cut, in order to put together the so-called coalition that fought Saddam at the time. In practice, the desire to tie up all loose ends would have an army always advancing, until it was ultimately vanquished, or its soldiers rebelled against, and shot its generals.

Patton: "For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade.... A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting."

America’s empire, er, nation-builders, would do well to hearken to that warning, though I’m sure they won’t. But then, even Patton contradicted himself – a general that does not know how to make peace, will be brought low, one way or another.

The conflicts that Patton had with desk generals in World War II, have if anything taken over military life in the intervening years. While cooler heads must prevail at the top – recall General MacArthur’s desire, during the Korean War, to nuke Manchuria – the American military seems to have little room today for great battlefield commanders. It is increasingly run by lawyers and desk generals. (Remember the time our boys had Mullah Omar in their sights, but the lawyers said no?) We won in Iraq through an overwhelming advantage in men and materiel, against a woefully inferior opponent. Had we been up against one of history’s great military machines, such as Hitler’s Reichswehr and Luftwaffe, we would have lost.

Just as Patton was unable to savor his success, so too George C. Scott, the rare actor who could carry a film on his shoulders, was unable to build on his success as Patton. After a series of brilliant performances culminated in his well-deserved Oscar for Patton, Scott, a violent drunk, went downhill until his death in 1999. He still got steady work, but the work was largely undistinguished. But for one moment, he tasted of that perfection that comes when the stars align, and a great role is delivered into the hands of just the right actor at just the right moment in his career. It was George C. Scott's destiny to play Patton.

And what of America’s destiny? Is it to crush one enemy after another, and reshape the world, a la the neo-conservative (and Patton’s) vision? Is it, alternatively, to pull all of her troops out of every foreign outpost, and renounce her longtime ally, Israel, a la the paleoconservative vision; or failing that, to bring about the paleoconservative nightmare, causing all of world Islam to join against her in a holy war, and destroy her through a thousand September 11s?

I don’t see either vision or nightmare as America’s destiny. Although America is the world’s great power, a program of endless wars would bankrupt our economy and lead to revolution or the collapse of our political system. Americans will not tolerate a garrison state. And if such a state did not collapse from within, it would call forth a grand alliance of nations – likely making for strange bedfellows, as did our World War II alliance – whose militaries are not crippled by bureaucrats, lawyers, and feminists.

But since America is the world’s great power, she cannot proceed from paleoconservatism’s Switzerland fantasy. And since we are Number One, we will automatically have enemies – Islamic nations and terrorist organizations, and the opportunistic Europeans and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) who carry water for them – simply because of that fact. And the oceans framing America no longer protect her from attack. Isolationism is not an option.

Meanwhile, trying to act as though we were not the most powerful nation, and seeking to live out the fantasies, beloved by feminists, that we could win wars either by pushing buttons from a distance, or by using emasculated fighting men as social workers, is what led Osama bin Laden to conclude we are a paper tiger.

And so, we must take a constructive course that protects our vital interests, and makes our enemies fear us. Foreign affairs has always been, and always will be, the state of nature, the war of all against all. That state can be seen in terms of individual nations, or of blocs of allies and enemies. And so, we must periodically take the war to some of our enemies, to keep them from our doorstep, and so that others may see what lies in store for them, should they underestimate our resolve. But we must also be disciplined in our war making.

All glory may be fleeting, but there is no date set in stone for the demise of America.

[johnb838]

Perhaps the Iraqi military was no match for ours this time around, but it was far from defenseless.

In any case I have to believe that Ol' Blood & Guts would have appreciated our headlong rush to overrun Baghdad, Tikrit, and points north. No army has EVER gone so far, so fast. And moving a column is inherently a low-tech business.

[gatorbait]

In the forward De'Este says forget about the movie "Patton" as it was deeply flawed and mainly because the Technical Adviser was General Omar Bradley, who absolutely hated Patton.


Exactly,Bradley was damned clerk .If your really want a nasty little book, read Bradley's "autobiography,"A General's Life".

He and Ike were playing bridge the night the Bulge began and neither of them seemed to clue in on what was happening..

[91B]

Nice doggie, but not what I had in mind.

[johnb838]

What Gives?

I'll tell you what gives. The reconstruction of Japan was led by Douglas MacArthur. The reconstruction of Germany was led by George Marshall. 'Nuff said.

[mrustow]

I had never heard of Plevna, so I googled, and found the following article, which supports Patton's argument about the foolishness of digging in, and building a fortified position.

Plevna is a striking example of the futility of the purely passive defence, which is doomed to failure however tenaciously carried out. Osman Pasha repelled three Russian attacks and practically held the whole Russian army. It remained for the other Turkish forces in the field to take the offensive and by a vigorous counterstroke to reap the fruits of his successes.

Brittanica article on the 1877 Battle of Plevna

[gatorbait]

P.S. Rooney probably makes in one week, what Patton made in an entire year. It's a funny, old world.


Georgie was independently wealthy and weathier still with Bea. He could have bought and sold Andy Runny and not have missed the pocket change, then or now.

[archy]

Nice doggie, but not what I had in mind.

I figured not. There was also a WWII Aircraft Carrier [The Cabot?] that picked up the name after the Japs had repeatedly claimed her as sunk, and I was getting ready to check on that and grab a pic for posting when you posted the pic of the original and gave the game away.

Now I don't guess there's a [Gray] Ghost of a chance of keeping the secret....

-archy-/-

[archy]

I had never heard of Plevna, so I googled, and found the following article, which supports Patton's argument about the foolishness of digging in, and building a fortified position.

But even more so of the foolhardiness of attacking said prepared opositions, particularly after having received intelligence reports that the defenders have augmented their long-range single-shot rifles with new Winchester repeating rifles.

The Russians gclosed to within a couple hundred meters of the final firing positions, and then the real slaughter began. For days.

-archy-/-