General Patton's War Letters: From Sicily, England, and France

[Headquarters 7th U.S. Army, Palermo] November 12, 1943
I have taken your advice and I am writing up some accounts of various incidents I have noted, and as soon as I get them completed will send you a copy, as I am deeply appreciative of your interest in my literary efforts.
I will be very much obliged to you if you could secure for me, and have Bea send me through Cy Groninger, a 380 Remington automatic pistol with a box of high velocity shells. If they do not sell guns to civilians, you can probably induce Sherman Miles to authorize it.
if this cannot be found, please ask Bea to look in my gun box and send me my 380 Colt with some ammunition. The reason I specify the Remington is that I understand it is a much harder hitting pistol.
It is quite essential here at least to always go armed because, while people have not shot at me, except twice, there is always a chance that they may and it would be very embarrassing not to be able to reply. I hope this is not too much trouble.

[Headquarters 7th U.S. Army, Palermo] December 10, 1943
You will be surprised to learn that I am an LL.D. in Political Science; also a Companion of the Bath and probably a Red Star, but that last has not arrived yet.
However, be careful never to quote me, even in fun, as you can see from the Patton Incident that there are a lot of hatchet men around and you, as my brother-in-law, will always be thought to say what I say. This is particularly important about the cousins whom, since I accompany them in swimming, I must delight to honor. Speaking of swimming, this weather makes me shiver when I think of any more landings, but as Turenne said about his knees: “They would shake still more did they but know where I shall take them.”
From what people tell me who were at the conferences, Uncle Joe must be quite a man and much more able and intelligent than I, at least, had imagined him. He sort of stole the show. If I survive this business I think I will be a very interesting conversationalist unless we are all so tired of war that we want to talk horses. Personally, I never get tired of either.
Everybody and his brother visits Sicily and I have to feed them, so am ruining my digestion. The fine cigars you and Hilda sent me for Christmas are aiding me along the downward path, but I am taking very good care of myself and have found a mountain Hakte, where Hasdrubal defied the Romans, up which I walk three miles every day and do it in less than 45 minutes. It is a beastly bore, but healthy. I also ride in the Hall, and believe it or not, drink hardly at all.
I saw your friend Harry Hopkins and his boss the other day, as you will have read in the papers, and they were exceptionally nice to me.
As a matter of interest, I enclose my score sheet.

MILITARY OPERATIONS CONDUCTED BY LT. GEN. G. S. PATTON, JR.

From November 8, 1942, to August 17, 1943
I. Landed in French Morocco commanding Western Task Force of 32,000. Between 40,000 and 50,000 French troops capitulated November 11.
II. March 6, 1943 — assumed command of Second Corps, approximately 90,000 men — then occupied defensive position after some rough handling.
March 17 — commenced attack continuing 24 days, accomplishing mission with break-through at El Guettar and Faid.
III. July 10 — 7th Army completed Sicilian landing, using during campaign 170,000 men with additional 41,000 held in reserve in Africa. After 38 days’ continuous offensive action, terminated Sicilian campaign with capture of Messina.

RECAPITULATION OF THE THREE OPERATIONS

Total troops commanded by General Patton. 333,000

Enemy losses, killed and wounded 21,000

Enemy losses, prisoners 106,700

French troops subdued 50,000

Total enemy put out of action. 177,700

Total American losses 13,700

(or approx. 13 enemy for each American)

In addition the following enemy matériel was captured or destroyed: —

Guns 1,344

Tanks 333

Military Transport 2,995

[Headquarters 7th U.S. Army, Palermo] December 22, 1943
Thanks very much for your letter of November 24 concerning the “incident.” As you probably have surmised, most of the statements made therein are without foundation. However, there is a sufficient basis of truth to make some fire for a great deal of smoke. However, I am convinced that the Army and the President are both for me.
I have also received 38 letters, mostly from people whom I do not know, containing kind words of encouragement, and only about four of the other kind. In fact, one of the four wrote me a second letter saying that he had written the first, while drunk and apologized for having written it.
The facts of the case are such that I do not feel at liberty to write about them; however, after Bea has seen Mr. McCloy, she can probably give you the exact circumstances. All the talk about the nurse, the pistol, and so on is pure bunk.
My chief regret is that I am causing you and Bea and my other friends and relatives undue worry.

[Headquarters 7th U.S. Army, Palermo] January 14, 1944
The “incident” has given the stenographers hot bearings so I am typing this myself. I have had over two hundred letters from everyone from Frank Murphy down and only eleven were nasty and these by very ignorant people.
The Catholic Church has been very much on my side, as have the veterans and the war mothers. I think I could run for office on the strength of my misdeeds. I am not the first General to catch hell; Wellington had plenty of it, as did Grant, Sherman, and countless others.
I am quite worried over the reaction after the war. I have already met several quite intelligent men who say, “Now we will have no more wars,” and when you ask them on what they base that forlorn hope since the history of the world is the history of war, they smile and reply, “Things are different now.” Yet the avowed purpose of the Treaty of Vienna in 1815 was to see that that was the last war. Around 1700 B.C. the Hittites, Cretans, and Egyptians had a tri-party treaty to avert wars, and we learned about it when in 1914 some explorers discovered the Hittite capital and in the Library discovered the bricks with the treaty on them — yet before the mud had dried, the Egyptians and the Cretans had ganged up and destroyed the Hittites.
If we again think that wars are over, we will surely have another one and damned quick. “Man is WAR” and we had better remember that. Also, we had better look out for ourselves and make the rest of the world look out for themselves. If we try to feed the world we will starve and perhaps destroy America.
Our soldiers are coming to form in a wonderful way. The men who have been through it have developed a pride and discipline that is magnificent. You can tell a new outfit a mile off by the fact that they lack both pride and discipline, but due to association with the old men, they pick up very fast.
My own officers have been wonderful in their loyalty to me throughout the trouble. I told some of them that I might be on the skids and that if they wanted to leave me, I would help them to as good a job as I could. Not a man quit. I had to loan some of them recently and they all begged me to be sure and get them back, and two of them cried. So did I.
Did you read “My Thoughts on Christmas” by Bea? It is swell.
Lots of love and many thanks for your loyal support.

[Peover Hall, Knutsford, Cheshire, England] June 19, 1944
You will be relieved to know that I have a truck to sleep in. It is quite swell — like the cabin of a cruiser only you can stand up. There is a bed with an air mattress, a washstand, clothes closet, desk, map board, heater and 110-volt electric circuit, and a built-in radio; also a sort of canvas porch effect. The horrors of war are fast departing and the fear of booby traps has gone. It can also black out, and has a huge map board so one can work at night. It is made out of an obsolete truck body but runs well or at least well enough.
Well, I will have to go and walk five miles and run a little so as to be ready in case of need — to run after the Germans, not from them.

[Peover Hall] July 3, 1944
Your letter of June 15 reached me when I was moving from one Command Post to another. At the present time I am in one in the south of England which is supposed to be the finest Elizabethan house in England. It is really very fine, but what people did with such enormous places, I do not know. In addition to myself, the two Chiefs of Staff and Aides, there are 75 officers and about the same number of soldiers in the house and it is not crowded, or at least not very crowded.
However, we will not have to bother with it much longer as we have some very good news and are waterproofing our vehicles at the moment.
It is funny that I have never had any doubts about licking the Germans any place I meet them. The only question in my mind is being able to survive the lapses between campaigns when I always seem to get myself in trouble.

[Headquarters 3d U.S. Army,
Office of Commanding General]
La Bocage (near Le Mans)
August 18, 1944
Now that I can use Third Army paper, and having been removed from hiding, I can write you a slightly more interesting letter.
Since we started operating, practically three weeks ago, we have gotten a very good bag of prisoners and killed. It already mounts to more than one half of what we took in Sicily, and I think this is a meager estimate.
I have had quite a lot of fun personally, but still do not enjoy flying around the country in a cub plane. When one goes up in such a vehicle, one has exactly the feeling that a Bluerock must have on being discharged from a trap. You just wait to get hit; however, the shooting is very poor and we have not lost many planes. In addition to being shot down from above, there is some danger from being shot at from below, either by trigger-happy soldiers or else by Germans who are hiding out in the brush.
The other day, when I was driving between two corps, with only two peeps, some French people rushed out and said some Germans had just passed. We got out and pursued them, but beyond good exercise, had no shooting.
One of the doctors on my staff, Lt. Col. Charles Odom, had a narrow squeak yesterday. He was riding in a peep and had just stopped to answer a call of nature, but had not gotten out, when he felt a blow under his heart, followed by the almost instantaneous report of a gun. He unbuttoned his coat to see what it was and brought his hand out covered with blood. The bullet, which seems to have been a ricochet, as the nose was deformed, had hit him on the rib, followed the rib around, and lodged itself in his back muscle, so he is perfectly all right, except a little sore. On the other hand, another quite valuable officer stuck the upper half of his body out of a tank and got twenty bullets through his chest, with the natural results.
We have been going so fast that our chief difficulty consists in our inability to emulate Ariadne and keep our spiderweb behind us. Our supply people, however, have really done marvels and we have always had sufficient of everything.
The Germans are not doing anywhere as good a job on demolitions as they did in Tunisia and Sicily; in fact, we find hardly any bridges blown except those which we blew up by our Air Force in our efforts to cut off the enemy.
We have now gotten to a point where the Air and Ground Forces are working perfectly together, and much of our success is due to the fact that the tanks keep the enemy going so fast he can’t get off the roads, and when he is still on the roads, the fighter bombers shoot him up.
Naturally, for purposes of secrecy, we are usually 48 hours ahead of where the papers say we are, because we never release our locations until the German radio has published them.
The weather has been just as good as it was for the Germans in 1940 and also for them in Poland in 1939. In the last three weeks we have had about two non-flying days and today is perfectly lovely.
I sent Bea some notes on France which may be of interest to you. They have nothing to do with the war but simply with my reactions to France as it is today.
The part of France we are now in has suffered hardly at all except at the railroad stations, where we have bombed all the tracks, but these are being repaired very rapidly and actually we have train service a remarkably great distance to the front. This naturally facilitates our supply problems.

[Headquarters 3d U.S. Army,
Office of Commanding General]
La Chaume (east of Sens)
September 1, 1944
When you get to command several hundred thousand men, in fact nearly 450,000, you have a surprising amount of time on your hands because it is physically impossible to be at the front all the tune.
Yesterday, for example, I drove, flew, and walked for 5½ hours (most of it in a fast airplane) to get from one front to the other — that is, from the Meuse to Brest, and was unable to get back the same night. What I usually do is to go up to the front every second day except when things are tight, in which case I go up every day. I find that people get used to you if they see too much of you.
I am very impatient with my friends for not letting me go faster, as I am sure — although people do not agree with me — that the Boche has no power to resist. When you think of the trouble that happened at Verdun in the last war, and realize that we took it with two divisions this morning, you get some idea of what’s going on here.
We also captured thirty carloads of rations, German; thirty new 88 mm. cannon of the old model, and fourteen new 88 mm. cannon of the new model; some millions of gallons of gasoline, and other things too numerous to mention. Also 25,000 cases of liquor which, unfortunately, we have to give to the hospitals with the imminent risk of producing alcoholics among all the patients.
Up to date, our bag of German generals is bad. We have captured only four, and the Free French killed one before we could get hold of him. They are quite a good type but very sullen and also quite surprised that we do not cut their throats.

[Headquarters 3d U.S. Army,
Office of Commanding General]
S. E. of Châlons-sur-Marne
September 14, 1944
Since last writing you, we have been having quite severe fighting, which is still going on, but we have finally completely crossed the Moselle River, which, as you know, has throughout history been a great military barrier.
Yesterday afternoon I was up having a look around and happened to get in on a lovely tank fight which I could see and hear quite clearly from an almost perfectly safe place.
One of our battalions was taking a hill, covered with woods at the top, very much like the hill at Green Meadows. In the foreground were two German tanks burning brightly, while moving up the hill, firing with everything they had, were four of our tanks. I was close enough to hear the squeal of the bullets and to easily tell the difference between the high staccato cackle of the German machine guns and the more moderate barking of our own.
The place I was looking from had some fine wild plums in it, so I combined business with pleasure and ate so many plums that I had the stomachache.
Another thing which may interest your medically inclined disposition is that the death rate in this Army from people who have been sent to the hospital is only 2 per cent, which is lower than it would be for an entire group, totaling 400,000 men, at home.
On the other hand, the death rate of the German prisoners, or American prisoners first treated by the Germans, is around 4 per cent. While this is low, it is double that of the people we get at first. The doctors tell me this is due first to the fact that the Germans have no blood plasma and no penicillin; and second, to the fact that in most cases the German prisoners, and the American prisoners treated by the Germans, have gone longer unattended than is the case with our wounded. Of course, the 2 per cent does not include those killed on the battlefield nor those who die on the road to the hospital.
The doctors also tell me that the Germans, when they use blood infusions, use raw blood with the crudest known methods. This is a surprise to me and to all of us, because we thought the Germans were very skillful in such things.
Of course, do not mention the above proportions as it might lead to the incorrect idea that the Germans are not being well taken care of. Any man who gets into a hospital is treated the same as any other, no matter what his previous condition may have been.
We are now having quite a large number of surrenders by organized groups of Germans. The largest so far was 20,000 men who came in at Orléans. I think a few more such surrenders will crack the people in front of us.

[Headquarters 3d U.S. Army,
Office of Commanding General]
Étain
October 4, 1944
While the papers are somewhat reticent on the valorous deeds of the Third Army, we have had up until the day before yesterday some very vicious fighting. On the 30th we almost had a bad accident. One of the divisions got hysteria and decided they were beaten and got permission from one of the Corps Commanders to retreat. Fortunately, I found out about it, went up, and had a counterattack, with the result that in about two hours we killed 700 Germans in one place and an undetermined number in the woods.
Next day, I went to see this division and it had completely reversed itself and was full of ferocity and had forgotten all about the day before when it was on the point of retreating.
Of course, don’t mention to anyone that an American division thought about retreating; in fact, in the Third Army we have never given up a foot of ground that we have taken.
Right now, we are having an assault on a German fort outside of Metz. It is one of the old Vauban type forts, much reinforced recently, and the funny thing is that we took it with tanks, which is probably the only time in the history of war that a fort has been taken with tanks. When I say taken, I am a little optimistic because we have about a third of it and the Germans have the rest.
These forts arc unlike anything you have ever imagined. They are more like rabbit warrens. There are a few holes on top through which they shoot and all the rest is underground.
What you do in assaulting them is to blow a hole through the wire with long tin tubes full of dynamite and then send tanks through and using tanka at about 50 yards range, shoot the eye slits out of the gun positions. This is not as easy as it sounds, as these turrets have ten inches of cast steel with very small apertures. I am hoping to get near enough to pour some cans of gasoline down the cracks and then throw in hand grenades. I think that should have a very excellent effect on the Germans inside.
The weather is as bad as it could be for offensive operations. It rains every morning, beginning about five o’clock and stopping about eleven o’clock. It then clears up and makes the ground as slippery as grease, so it is very hard to use the tanks, and it also slows up our truck movements bringing in supplies.

[Headquarters 3d U.S. Army,
Office of Commanding General]
Nancy
December 7, 1944
Replying to your letter about fighting conditions here, we are doing better than we have a right to expect, but not as well as I should like.
It has rained every day, except four, since about the 20th of October, and it is raining right now. The result is that whenever a tank leaves the road, it not only digs in but bellies. However, we can still get forward. On the other hand, our slow rate of speed, due to this mud, causes more casualties in the tanks than normally takes place, as the Germans can hit them when they go slow.
There was one perfectly swell fight — a picture of which I sent to Bea — in which there were five Panther tanks apparently resting themselves in a sort of hollow when one of our medium tanks came down the road and spotted them. I was there shortly after the fight, and from looking at the tracks it seemed to me that this medium tank hit two of the Panthers at about 125 yards. He then charged into the remaining three and got them all at a range of around 40 yards.
During this fight, the American tank was hit several times and every man in it was killed except the Lieutenant, who was wounded. He was immediately decorated by me. It was one of the linest feats of arms I have ever seen.
The other day I went to a regiment in t he front line near Merzig for the purpose of having a look around. I asked the Colonel to take me to a forward observation post. We drove about a half mile and then dismounted at a woods, as he said it was safer to walk.
We started down a straight road exactly a kilometer long, towards a large brown house. As we approached the house I noticed an enemy pillbox about 250 yards away looking straight down the road, and from this pillbox protruded the muzzle of some kind of gun, either a 20 mm. or a machine gun. I asked the Colonel if the pillbox was occupied, and he said that he thought it was.
In addition to this pillbox, there were about forty others who could see us, but for some unknown reason none of them fired until we reached the house.
About five minutes after we got there, the enemy dropped a concentration known as TOT, that is, all the shells arrive at the same time. This was a concentration of about 50 shells and hit about 75 yards from the house. The only result it produced was to flush two large deer who came galloping by the house.
Personally, I am opposed to observation posts in houses, because if the enemy starts shelling you and the house collapses, you fall so far, especially when the place of observation is on the third floor.
Going back, I decided that I would not walk up the road but went up an apple orchard that seemed extremely sparsely populated with trees.
Since this episode, which was about four days ago, we have made several crossings over the Saar River, and have broken through the first half of the Siegfried Line. I hope we will get through the second half.
The few remaining Metz forts are surrendering due to lack of salt, lack of water, and lack of guts. Just why they hold out at all is a mystery to me since they can do no good and simply get themselves killed. The one we took yesterday had 22 officers and nearly 600 men, a hundred of whom were wounded and had had no medical treatment for many days. They were in a bad state. All of them were lousy.
We hope that the remaining t wo will see the error of their ways this morning. (Just took another, same reason.)
The colonel commanding the fort which surrendered yesterday was very mad when he found that he had not been containing us, since we were using Metz as a resting area and practicing firing with captured German and Russian artillery against the fort. This is a perfectly safe thing to do as the forts seem to be out of artillery ammunition and can fire only machine guns.
These forts are not at all what a fort should be. They consist of a pile of dirt about 10 acres in extent with a 30-foot concrete ditch, about 60 feet wide, around them. This ditch is in turn guarded by a high iron fence with a spiked top, and the bottom of it is full of barbed wire. The inhabitants of the fort live just like moles in concrete tunnels.
When they want to shoot at you, they grind up a thing which looks like a mushroom. This mushroom is a steel cupola which is about 10 inches thick with a gun or machine gun inside of it. After they have fired as much as they please, they grind it down again so that it is not visible.
We have had 2000-lb. bombs bounce off the top of these forts. However, I think that a serious bombing would destroy them. However, our troops are so close that we do not dare to use the heavies and the lights do not carry enough weight.
P.S. Just fell and hurt my coccyx. It hurts like hell. We assault anew in the morning. I will sit on a ring I guess.

(To be concluded)