General Patton Biography

George Patton came from a virzhin family famous for military traditions. From an early age, he admired the heroes of the Civil War in the United States, especially the cavalry generals, both those who led the confederates and those who led the regiments of the northerners into battle. He graduated from a military school in the West Punt in the city of more than a quarter century, George Patton was destined to return to this land and stay on it-after the war, grateful French erected a monument to the commander of the US Army in the city of Avransh in Nizhny Normandy, who was released thanks to the onslaught of the soldiers of General Patton.

The Second World War began for him in the year in early November, Major General Patton commands the Western operational group of troops landing in Africa. In early March, Patton’s exploits overshadowed by the episode, which was bloated by screamers, when, during a visit to the hospital, a military general beats the servant’s face, taking him as a simulator that deviates from hostilities.

In the spring of G., it seemed again a forgotten case in the hospital in Sicily, and the affairs for the general take a nasty turnover. He is even preparing to submit a report on the dismissal from the Armed Forces. Despite the Schumih, who again rose around Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, highly appreciating his qualities as a commander, with the words: “At the end of July, overly sharp statements about the unreasonable policy of the Allies regarding Germany at a press conference on September 22, this was the“ gift ”of the Supreme Chief of the Military Commissariat of the glorified general, so The result of the last three years of his life - the life of a man who loved and knew how to fight.

Patton’s credo as a strategist was an offensive. Thus, his science looked simple - all its essence came down to the following: you need to advance, advance and advance, and when you do not know what he never gave to his soldiers to retreat. If the tankers complained about the lack of gasoline, he said to them: “Come out from your tanks, pick up the machine guns and stamp forward, but don’t stop - do not stop in any case.” The general hated when the supreme command forced him to move on to defense, because he always believed that, defending, any commander himself gives the enemy the initiative, while attacking the enemy, forces him to think only about one thing - his own salvation.

On the pages of his memoirs, Patton more than once and does not talk about the inadmissibility of stomping on the spot and, recommending the commanders to take the strategy of the steam rink, repeats the phrase: “All you need is to grab the enemy as soon as possible by the nose and put on the back of the head,” that is not binding the enemy by battle and, bypassing the flange, hit the rear.

General Patton speaks with irony with regard to the construction of defensive structures, considering them absolutely useless and noting that neither the Chinese wall, nor the ancient Romans in England on the orders of Emperor Adrin, a fortified line, nor the Magico line built on the border with Germany before the Second World War, did not save these countries from the invasion.

Like Germany, in turn, the construction of the Siegfried line did not give little use - the soldiers of the Third Army of the United States overcame its strengthening on the most difficult site. General Patton himself chose it, because he believed: the weak spirit of the defenders of impregnable fortresses nullifies the efforts of the builders and allows the advancing with the battle to take the most powerful fortifications.

Patton considered the best defense the attack, and the best wall was a runaway fire on the move from all types of weapons. The general himself in his notes - and he kept a diary since July G. The main opponents were, of course, the Germans, but often, especially in winter, the weather was much more troublesome. However, the headquarters of the command of allied expeditionary forces often became the source of the most powerful grief.

More than once, the general with great bitterness remarks: “And again I had to ask the authorities of permission to win.” Patton never refused the conviction that it was possible to end the war in Europe “before snow in the Ardenneis” - that is, back in November - December G., meanwhile, the end of the war as a whole six months earlier would save millions of lives of American, English, Russian, Italian and German soldiers.

Someone will probably call Patton with a dashing cavalry shirt, recklessly tearing forward at the head of their “cavalry”, who do not want to reckon with anything and with anyone, unable to look into the future and see the processes in all their diversity and difficulties. There is an excellent illustration of the injustice of such a judgment. In November, General Patton in this way showed himself a wise and far -sighted politician; It’s just that his policy was noticeably different from the more smoothed and more compromise policy of the commander in chief.

Without a doubt, if the allied troops, instead of Dwight, Eisenhower, George Patton, the whole history of the Second World War, and with it the history of post -war Europe and, probably the whole world, would have started along a different path.However, he could not be in the place of Eisenhower. Even on the site of Omar Bradley, who received from Patton in April G.

President Roosevelt and General Marshall needed a sharp and flexible general Eisenhower, and Eisenhower was also a sharp and flexible Bradley. But, in spite of everything, the American army could not do without General Patton, especially when the moment came to plug the holes that arose as a result of the miscalculations and errors of the command. So, in March, Patton was sent to a breakthrough, and he, according to Eishauer himself, coped with the task perfectly.

In December, this is when the other generals were sitting and silently silent, and the Supreme Commander -in -Chief repeated something like a spell: “It is very good that the Germans broke through, it will now be easier for us to break them.” Patton, without hiding the irony, immediately suggested letting the Germans to Paris. However, at that moment when he pronounced these words that seemed to many frivolous, when nothing had yet been decided by his chiefs, the two divisions of the Third Army were already nominated for new positions, and the third was waiting ready to collapse on the Germans who completely did not expect such a turn of the Germans.

Not only the enemy, but also their own - mainly the authorities - sometimes turned out to be taken by surprise by the swiftness of General Patton. Sometimes he almost prayed that the Supreme and even Bradley, with whom Patton, according to his own statement, coincided with his eyes on many things, did not learn about the bold maneuvers of one or another unit of the Third Army and would not order the advance.

As Patton admits more than once, sometimes he had to drive his bosses, to occupy, and even this was how this happened in the summer and in February G. as is often the case with bright figures, outstanding personalities, the sulships, expressed in the deprivation of the patron of the commander of the third army, became the reward for the labors. The war in Europe has already ended, and no longer had to plug the holes.

Contemporaries and associates of Patton, especially the French, sometimes compared the general with Napoleon.

However, for us, living in Russia, it is more correct, probably, to draw another parallel and compare the defeats of the American general, the real father of the soldiers, who was ahead of his time of the commander of the first half of the twentieth century with our glorified Generalissimus and the great governor of the second half of the 18th century. Despite the differences, there are also many similarities between them.

This is the swiftness of the movement of their troops, and the rate on the offensive, and dislike from the authorities, and much more. Even the result of life is very similar in something. Like the Suvorov, deprived of Honored Triumph, Patton could have done more, it is better to serve his country and his government. His departure from life was the result of a tragic accident. Patton, who was not killed by bullets and shells of the Germans in two world wars, got into a car accident in the vicinity of Mannheim in the south-west of Germany and died in the hospital of the city of Heidelberg exactly forty days after his sixty years.

He felt still full of strength and, no doubt, hoped to serve his country - as the general himself put it, to work out his bread. However, the last words of the notes of Patton are full of bitter foreboding that he will not be able to do this. He wrote: “No matter how sad I am aware of the fact that my last chance to work out my bread is lost, this is obvious.

At least I always made a maximum possible when God gave me a chance. " General Patton committed a lot of great things, which, as he knew how, spoke in his memoirs, who first saw the light in G., as a translator of his work, I express the hope that the reader would not regret the time spent, having read the book that George Patton knew and which we almost did not know at least from which he knew her.