What Patton achieved was 'monumental'

Kyt · Nov 12, 2007

Err, I'm not sure whether I would agree completely with this article, but as always, members should make up their own minds

http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/NEWS01/711110308/1026

Though Gen. George S. Patton Jr. is known for a rough, tough, profanity-spewing, flamboyant image, his greatest accomplishments were as a trainer of troops.

Patton's development of the Desert Training Center is a testimony to his training abilities - as is the gallant performance of the troops who went through the facility, said retired Army Lt. Col. Carlo D'Este.

He's a noted World War II historian and author whose books include the biography "Patton: A Genius for War."

During World War I, Patton essentially built and trained the U.S. Tank Corps from scratch in France, "when he was the only one who knew what an armored tank was," D'Este said.

Just before coming to the desert, Patton had made great strides in creating a training regimen for troops at Fort Benning, Ga. Though a California native born in San Gabriel, Patton was "as new to the desert as anyone else" by the time he came west to build the Desert Training Center, D'Este said.

There was no training guide for desert warfare for Patton to follow, but "he had a plan for how to harden the troops," D'Este said.

Patton scouted the desert of southeastern California and western Arizona by airplane - which he piloted himself - and by ground in early March.

Within three days, he decided on the training center's ultimate location.

Patton brought in desert locals and an expert on the Gobi desert.

"He did what he typically did throughout his life when he was thrust into a new situation - he learned everything he could about it," D'Este said.

The area's harsh conditions - temperatures approaching 120 degrees during summer days; near freezing on winter nights - were perfect for Patton's purposes: hardening U.S. soldiers.

In one of the mountain ranges within the Desert Training Center, about 250 rifle pits, depressions created by soldiers that shielded them behind rock, still can be seen.

They're textbook Patton on how to take a defensive position in a pass, said federal Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Rolla Queen.

"You can literally go out in the desert and follow Patton's manual on training chapter by chapter," he said.

Patton took a hands-on approach. Upon encountering a soldier whose truck had broken down, Patton crawled underneath with the driver to see what the trouble was, D'Este said.

Patton set up a speaker system that broadcast music throughout the camp system.

He installed microphones in his office and tent to deliver messages to his troops with the flick of a switch - chastising an officer, praising a private.

"He insisted on living out there," D'Este said. "He could have lived in Indio - his wife was there, she had a little house, and he barely saw her."

Though the Desert Training Center was largely his brainchild, Patton would not stay there long. By July 1942 he'd been called to head the Army's Western Task Force in North Africa. His exploits in North Africa and Sicily, his race across France after D-Day and his performance at the Battle of the Bulge became the stuff of legend.

Following the end of World War II, Patton was seriously injured in a car crash while still in Germany on Dec. 9, 1945. He died less than two weeks later.

Patton's imprint on the Desert Training Center and how it would operate stayed behind even after he headed overseas to fight, D'Este said.

"In that amazingly short time, from April to July (1942)," D'Este said, "what was accomplished out there really was almost monumental."
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liverpool annie · Dec 4, 2008

Kyt said: ↑

Err, I'm not sure whether I would agree completely with this article, but as always, members should make up their own minds

http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071111/NEWS01/711110308/1026
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I love this ...... what an epitaph !!

Profane, impetuous, and flamboyant, Patton was easily the most colorful of the United States Army's commanders in the west, and its leading genius in tank warfare. Behind his showmanship and audacity lay the imaginative planning and shrewd judgment that made him one of the great combat commanders of World War II
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Forrest C. Pogue
Author of The Supreme Command

liverpool annie · Dec 4, 2008

I've always been interested in the death of Patton ..... everybody has a theory .... but I find this interesting ...... and thought provoking !

The factual circumstances of Patton's death are plain enough. While on an inspection tour with his driver and Major General Hobart Gray on December 9, 1945, Patton's car swerved to avoid hitting a heavy US Army transport truck that had turned in front of them. Patton's driver, attention momentarily diverted away from the road by a remark that Patton himself had made, belatedly noticed the truck in front of them, and swerved the General's car to avoid a head-on collision.

None of the others involved in the accident were hurt, and all were able to walk away from the accident. Not so General Patton. He had suffered a broken neck, and the prognosis was paralysis from the neck down. From this point the General recovered rapidly at the military hospital in Frankfurt, making such good progress that until the afternoon of December 19th, his doctors were seriously considering moving him to Boston. But that afternoon his breathing difficulties increased dramatically and suddenly. On December 20th he suffered breathlessness and pallor, and Patton, who had had a prior history of embolism, died in his sleep on December 21st at 5:50 P.M.30

28 Agoston, op. cit., p. 27.
29 This fact is adequately appreciated by Mayer and Mehner, Das Geheimnis, p. 156.30 Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph, pp. 787-794.

The fact that Patton alone of all the victims of the automobile accident suffered serious injuries, plus the fact of his recovery and then sudden decline in a military hospital, have fueled various conspiracy theories. One of these, that Patton knew of the Soviet shooting of American, Canadian, and British prisoners of war and threatened to expose the Allied knowledge and cover-up of the affair, was revealed by a Ukrainian defector with close ties to the Soviet KGB, who alleged that Patton's accident was no accident, and that the KGB had been behind it. Another version is similar, but has the OSS or other Allied entity performing the 'accident" and subsequent "medical complications."

If there is any truth in the idea of a conspiracy behind the ironic death of America's most decorated and celebrated general officer of the Second World War, then the explanation is likely to lie in the more esoteric and arcane secrets he and his intelligence officers uncovered in Thuringia and at the Skoda Works in Pilsen. Having performed a preliminary assessment of the second and third generation weaponry Kammler's scientists had begun to research, the OSS specialists who arrived at these sites must have immediately realized the material would require the tightest security and highest classification then possible, beyond that even of the Manhattan Project, not least because what was uncovered would give lie to the emerging Allied Legend of nuclear technological superiority. Patton was a potential threat to the security of this operation and a risk to the continued secret American development of Kammler's technology in conjunction with Operation Paperclip.31

If there is truth to the conspiracy theories of Patton's incongruous death, then of all the theories, this would seem to be the most plausible motivation and explanation for the murder of America's famous general.

Patton, and his famous mouth, had to be silenced
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THE STRANGE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GENERALS

Jerome · Mar 13, 2009

I found this in a '43 local paper on Thursday - and is from the soldier in question who was slapped by Patton. Don't know if anyone has seen this before but here goes.

war hawk · Mar 13, 2009

Jerome said: ↑

I found this in a '43 local paper on Thursday - and is from the soldier in question who was slapped by Patton. Don't know if anyone has seen this before but here goes.

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I can't even read it.:banplease:

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What Patton achieved was 'monumental'

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