Word: pattonism
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...Patton Papers...
GENERAL George S. Patton Jr.'s legendary profanity, his flashiness in an era of drab sameness, and his ability to win battles enthralled his own generation and continues to tantalize our own. His career is usually remembered with the reflection that he slapped two shellshocked soldiers in Sicily in the summer of 1943, but the controversy surrounding the incident can scarcely account for the enduring, almost mythic, interest in Patton. A daunting number of authors have attempted to analyze the Patton mystique and have succeeded only in chronicling their own bewilderment with the complex character of George S. Patton...
...Most of Patton's biographers come to the task with one set point of view or another, and Charles M. Province, author of The Unknown Patton is no exception. The President of the George Smith Patton, Jr., Historical Society, he is a self-appointed apologist for his subject. He notes in his introduction that "although there are no notes, exhaustive research was undertaken for this book," and while this is apparently so, it is manifested in a particularly disappointing manner. Province sculpts his book from a mass of quotations linked by his own commentary, rarely stopping to place the reader...
While Province may regard himself as a Patton scholar, his book is marred by various biographical inaccuracies (or at the very least, editorial bungling) which leads one to question the qualifications he brings to his task. For example, Province has the following to say about Patton's proposal to his wife-to be, Beatric Ayer...
...January 3, 1909, George Patton wrote to Frederick Ayer, recalling the circumstances of his proposal...