Could General Patton Have Prevented the Cold War?

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!”

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.

WRT the central issue here, there are definitely 2 sides. First, no one was much in the mood to fight more, let alone with a country that was viewed as our ally at the time. I remember being in class in the very early ‘80s with a professor who was a ETO veteran (it was a foreign policy class, and we were in the midst of discussing the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis). Someone asked about this issue, and he stated very specifically that everyone he knew was incredibly relieved that they weren’t going to get shipped off to Asia, after we dropped 2 nukes, and that “if some sonofabitch told us to fight the Russians, we’d have mutinied.” Note that he was also an ex-State Dept. employee and decidedly liberal...so I don’t know how much his politics colored that story.

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.

“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.

Decision to let Soviets take Berlin was made in Yalta.”

This. Near the end of the summer of 1944, the Germans had essentially nothing between the 500,000 men of Third Army and Berlin. Had we had the guts to support a thrust by Patton and 3rd Army into Germany, complete with some diversionary attacks, bombing raids and a massive airborne assault on Berlin, I firmly believe that we could have ended the war by October of 1944. Even if that effort had not been successful, the war would still have ended much sooner because IF the Germans would have been able to defeat it (and I don’t think that they could have, not at that moment in time), they only would have been able to do so by pulling large numbers of troops from elsewhere, leading to faster allied progress on other fronts (not the least of which would have been from the Russians).

Our failure to hand this mission to the best field commander that we had in WW2 was a strategic error of monumental proportions.

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