General George S. Patton, Jr., Man Under Mars
DODD, MEAD, $3.00
HERE is a curious book in which the author unconsciously paints his subject in the conflicting colors of his own emotions. War’s alternate fascination and repulsion control him and distort the picture he would present.
Mr. Wellard modestly contends that “newspapers condition the way wars are run and their ultimate results.” Perhaps; but his book goes far to prove that a war correspondent may be the least capable of men when it comes to an “interpretive study" of an army commander. The correspondent is with, but not of, the army. He sees its commander rarely, and under conditions least conducive to calm analysis. The fitful insight he gets into the working of a vast military machine, or into the conduct of war itself, gives him only the wisdom of a little knowledge. Witness Mr. Wellard’s condemnation of the plan for the conquest of Sicily and his didactic statement that “the Sicilian Campaign demonstrated that an amphibious operation was no longer any more hazardous than a land operation" — Normandy, for instance?
In interpreting Patton the soldier, Mr. Wellard does not miss, as indeed he could not, the amazing qualities of that leader — the general “who fought his battles with the strategy of the ‘impossible’”; the success of movement and of surprise; the ability “to live off himself.”But those are things many commanders have striven to accomplish, the brilliant, the more difficult feats in the art of war. To explain Patton’s mastery of them, the author has little more to offer than his insistence on the general s “violent passion for war" — an explanation that goes no deeper than Lee’s battlefield reflection: “It is well that war is so horrible, else we should grow too fond of it.”
Of Patton the man, Mr. Wellard understands still less. The West Point days are drawn from data from a single classmate. The author misses completely the building of an athlete, horseman, swordsman, and sailor by virtue of character, not through natural gifts. The book swings violently from spleen to praise, and back again. Patton was, in fact, a man of parts in the true meaning of that old phrase; but simple withal, unswerving in his consuming devotion to his mission. The author attempts to interpret such a man in the light of the Jekyll-Hyde reactions which he himself sustained from war. Even Patton’s poetry (and here the author would have us count him a sure critic) both attracts and repulses him. So it is not out of character to find him summing up the slapping incident, with all its best-forgotten national hysteria, thus; “In the philosophy of history, it was more significant than the success of a prosaic campaign” — the Sicilian Campaign, which destroyed an army and gave us our first foothold in Europe!
Before the end, the fascination overcomes the repulsion. The author is caught up and carried along, in the sweep of Patton’s great campaigns on the Continent, to full, albeit reluctant, praise. But the spleen returns: Winfield Scott is branded “an obscure general,” and George Patton is hurled from Mr. Wellard’s heaven to his hell — “from the front pages of newspapers to the footnotes of history books”!
One would like to read those “footnotes.” For here was a man who devoted his life to his belief that America would need his sword (and God knows she did); who served his country as few men have served her; who typified the warrior, facing foursquare to all obstacles — a quality of moment in peace as in war.
SHERMAN MILES