Posted on 04/27/2006 6:26:15 PM PDT by spanalot
Was General Patton's death the result of a traffic accident or was he the victim of an assassination plot? (By Stalin)
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Your critique of Patton is most interesting. But wasn't Ulysses "The Bulldog" Grant faulted for the same reasons, mainly spending lavishly on casualties for the sake of victory? There is indeed much to be debated.
Please talk some more about Patton's political ambitions (all speculation being wiped out by his death). Would Patton have succeeded in electoral politics, given his martial temper?
"what are you smoking? Patton was not in a position to initiate action against the Russians "
And what major campaigns do you have under your belt -?
Thanks, but I'll go with Patton's assessment.
"I remember reading that Patton was injured by a Czech "debris gun" as his injuries were inconsistent with the accident. "
This will be in the TV show too.
"It was a political impossibility given the American people's mindset in 1945."
Only if you read the NY Times or worked in the State Dept.
"As for Patton being given free rein against the Russians: he would have lost. Badly. "
Ah yes , but you forget we had perfected the ancient art of "A-Bomb"
"Stalin never attacked US forces so he didn't really "turn" on us "
Do you realize how many thousands of US soldiers were kidnapped byt Stalin and never returned?
Thanks, but I'll go with Patton's assessment.
Military history has been an interest of mine for many years. I've read damn near everything concerning Patton, Montgomery, Bradley, Eisenhower, Churchill, etc.. WWII history is my major interest. Next WWI, Korea, and Vietnam. I'm a Vietnam era Marine ... who served while a Canadian citizen. I'm a U.S. citizen now ...
"I remind you that it took four years and $2 billion to build TWO weapons (really three, one was consumed in testing), and the scientists who worked on it were not even certain it WOULD WORK WHEN FIELDED. That is not to say that because the ones used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved the concept that every bomb churned out afterwards would work, or work as effectively. "
Your argument is as long as it is flawed - the bomb did work, we were threw the learning curve, and we certainly did build many more bombs in a very short time THAT WE FAILED TO PUT TO GOOD USE.
I recall seeing a filmed interview with Gerd Von Rundstedt after the war. He was in England maybe still in prison and was being interviewed by historians.
I remember one question in particular. They asked him who the Germans considered the best allied general. He instantly said "Patton was the best", then he said Montgomery too. He then listed some others including a couple of Russians.
It struck me that the Germans knew better than anyone who was the best.
"Long term, the result would be that the US would have conquered the world, and we would all be living in a fascist dictatorship with its capital at Washington DC."
What are you doing on Free Republic. Excuse me, but I think those countries that were enslaved by Stalin such as Poland, Ukraine, the Balitcs, etc would tell you to take your esteemed opinion and shove it.
Your the only fascist - and a Stalinist one at that.
http://mailgate.supereva.com/soc/soc.history.war.world-war-ii/msg38413.html
Here are some gory bits of info on his final days. Ialso read that PAttons wife hired a detective as she was not certain of the events surrounding his death.
Very interesting! Do you have the neurologist's report? I would like to know what he found.
He found that Patton was hurt really bad and paralyzed. Also that pneumonia killed him. I think the guy was a nurologiest
As I recall it, the Pattons of California (I want to say Marin County, but I'm not totally sure) were well-known supporters of political candidates, and were, in fact, the driving force behind California ordinances in the 1930's and 40's that, in all but the word, set up a regime of segregation in California. This might have, post-War, clung to Patton if he had run for office.
Patton's father had previoulsy run for public office unsuccessfully in the 1920's/early 30's (not sure of the date). There is reason to believe that he would have attempted to succeed where his father had failed.
The other side of the family (the Ayer's - Bea Patton's family), were also very politically active in Massachusetts, and more or less had the Mass. congressional delegation in their pocket. However, the Ayer's got themselves into trouble with the labor movement in New England with their anti-union stand, with Patton even going as far as to accuse the organizers of being "Bolsheviks".
Some believe this is where Patton began to form his ideas about the Russians and communism in general. That situation got extremely nasty (and violent!), and Georgie got involved. That perhaps would also have stuck to Patton post-War, if he had decided to run.
Patton's aide-de-camp (Charles Codman) very often took opinion polls, and scanned personal letters to the General from soldier's families back home to gague the political viability of a Patton run for office. Codman later claimed that he did this as a way to "butter Patton up" and to feed the man's ego, but many have doubted whether or not Codman would have devoted the effort necessary to do this without Patton's knowledge, or, a direct order.
Codman, unlike most aides-de-camp, was not only Patton's go-fer, he was Patton's fixer, and in the dynamics of Staff politics, it was usually left to Codman to soothe "the old man's savage fury" when something had not gone right within the Army. Codman spent the majority of the war fetching luxury goods, food and wine for Patton and helping to sharpen the General's political instincts, or more often, blunt his bull-headed attempts to enter the political fray, as needed. Codman, despite being a qualified artillery officer, was really Patton's social director, and was selected as aide-de-camp when Patton realizeed that the way to get himself some room to maneuver was to play the political game within the Allied command. Codman was the man designated to pin down the how-to's and why-fore's in that regard.
The Codman family was also politically well-connected in Massachusetts.
When Patton was relieved of command in 1943 after the slapping incidents (and worse! - there are also credible reports of massacres carried out by American troops) in Sicily, it was generally agreed that should Patton decide to resign his commission and go home, that he most likely WOULD have run for office and made life impossible for those who "put him into that position"; i.e., Ike, Bradley and Montgomery. Patton's good friend, Gen. George Marshall himself, talked Patton out of resigning altogether.
I would hardly consider Montgomery to be "a great general" in the same way that one would call Guderian, Rommel, or MacArthur "great".
Montgomery, tactically, knew only two moves: the straight-ahed thrust to fix the enemy, and the hook behind his flank, and neither without obvious superiority in men and weapons. Alamein was not so much a great victory of British arms as it was Monty being able to take advantage of a Rommel at the end of an extended supply line and with practicaly no tanks.
Whenever Monty took on Rommel in anything approaching an even fight, Monty came out on the short end every time. I will not even get into the debacles at Montgomery's hands concerning Sicily, Caen, and Market-Garden. Montgomery, despite his strengths as a command (great organizer, beloved, fighting spirit), was a creation of the press. He was a lousy tactician.
As for Ike keeping his sanity, I even call that into question. After the Normandy landings, Ike had two options in taking the fight to Germany; the broad front (which would entail huge numbers of infantry which were not available and cause all sorts of supply problems), or the narrow front (a strike straight into Germany by a thrust of concentrated armor).
When faced with this choice, Ike punted. Because to favor one general (Monty or Patton) or approach over another was too difficult a choice to make, apparently. I always thought that a general's job was to shorten the war by making the enemy pay as quickly and efficiently as possible, with as little loss to his own army as practicable. Apparently not.
He opted for the broad-front approach and lengthened the way by ensuring supply difficulties and a lack of concentration of force in places where it would have done the most good. This approach led directly to the misery of the Hurtgenwald fighting (3+ american infantry divisions chewed up -- over 100% casualties -- for nothing), which then begat the Battle of the Bulge (the Germans attacked the thinned-out Ardennes sector, from which troops had been pulled and fed into the Hurtgenwald fighting).
"We basically could have told Uncle Joe to get out of town by midnight."
Had that been possible, it would have been done, would it not? And the entire Cold War would have been avoided, complete with the misery of Korea, Vietnam, the killing fields of South East Asia, Angola and Afghanistan? If it were that "easy" to have kicked the Russians from Eastern Europe in 1945, someone would have done it. The fact of the matter is, the Russians had material and panpower superiority to stand against a Western alliance that simply ran out of troops and whose home populations had been at war too long and wanted their men home.
The Western alliance was made up of democratic nations, whose populations were listened to, and not a totalitarian regime like the Russians. The civilians in the West could make their governments to stop fighting, the Russian government didn't have to worry about that little detail.
"The fact that we paid a huge price for the first atomic weapons is basically meaningless. After we knew they worked we could have built a large number in a short time. I know because I personally heard Dr. Edward Teller say so."
I don't care if you were Doctor Teller's proctologist, the fact is that after Hiroshina and Nagasaki there were no more bombs, and would not have been any for several months and perhaps a year. Only then would the "mass production" of enough enriched uranium and plutonium been avaialbe for the large-scale (one or two a month) bombing the "yeah, but we had the bomb" crowd thinks would have turned the trick against the Russians.
Russia was NOT Japan. Russia would have shrugged off a few atomic weapons and thrown a massive army at the Western allies that would have swept them all the way back to the Normandy coast.
"The reason Stalin knew he could behave the way he did was because he knew he had such influence in our government and we wouldn't stop him."
No, the reason was simple mathematics and political accumen. The British, after fighting since 1939, were exhausted and would have fallen had it not been for the Empire. The British had no more soldiers.
France did not exist. It had been a defeated nation in 1940, and was, in effect, defeated again when the Allies ran across France on their way to Germany. The French had no soldiers, no government and no economy to speak of. The French were not going to fight, and had no reason to, given the treatment DeGaulle had received at the hands of the Allies.
That left the United States. And the United States,too, had run out of soldiers, and was operating at the extreme end of a 4,000 mile supply line.
Simple math: no soldiers + no reliable allies+ unsustainable supply lines = Russian victory in Europe.
Seems to me we're lucky Uncle Joe decided to stop when he did.
Elvis took out JFK... http://home.pacbell.net/hrwhite3/
If you consider mass-murder of civilian populations "good use" of an atomic weapon, then I would think you need a psychiatrist.
If it was such an effective weapon, they why, tell me, when it was used, was it not used on military targets instead of civilian ones?
Answer: after LeMay's firebombing campaign there simply were no obvious military target left to hit. The weapon was used to terrify Japan into surrender. If you call terrorism a "good use" of an atomic weapon, then perhaps you should run for President of Iran.
Japan was all but defeated by August of 1945. It was starving, had very little fuel, and it's industries were deprived of raw materials. There was no Japanese merchant marine to supply the home islands with these things, and no Japanese navy to secure the supply lines for those merchant vessels. Japan would have starved fairly quickly.
What made Japan a stil-fearsome enemy, however, was the Kamikaze,and this frightened American planners and military men even more than the prospect of a direct invasion of Japan.
We, basically, countered Japanese terror (the Kamikaze) with our own greater terror (the Atomic bomb). I don't call that "an effective weapon", I call that disgusting.
Patton's Photographs: War As He Saw It (Hardcover)
Will have to add that to my list.
But I have the General's great-grandson in one of my classes this semester. He looks like his great-grandpa.
And my two cents...my great-grandfather fought under Patton's grandfather during the Civil War. I still have my great-grandfather's pass, signed by Gen. Patton (C.S.A.), to cross Confederate lines to get home to his ailing Mother.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.