Word: pattonism
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...PATTON PAPERS...
...radio broadcast in the U.S. called George Patton "a rootin', tootin', hip-shootin' commander whose chief ambition is to meet Marshal Rommel in a personal tank battle, just the two of them, squared off in a duel to the death." Patton encouraged that flamboyant image until finally he threatened to degenerate into self-parody. He once presented a speaker to his troops by saying: "Men, I want to introduce to you the noblest work of God-a killer!" With his ivory-handled pistols and magnificently bloodthirsty battle speeches, his dashing tank tactics and the almost sinister boyishness...
...Patton's ambition may have driven him to subdue much in his nature that was civilized, charming and gentle. He was a military scholar with uncanny intuitive gifts. He tried to be a poet, though the results were usually doggerel and sometimes bawdy: "In war just as in loving,/ You've got to keep on shoving." He could combine callousness-slapping shell-shocked soldiers, for example -with great tenderness for his men. He would sometimes weep and kiss the foreheads of soldiers killed in battle. He was remarkably observant, sometimes with a grisly poetry...
Martin Blumenson, who served in Patton's Third Army Headquarters during World War II and later as a scholar in the Army's Office of Chief of Military History, has done a superb job of editing Patton's diaries, letters, memos and speeches. He has also skillfully stitched them together with explanatory narrative. The first volume, published in 1972, covered Patton's life from 1885 to 1940 -his service under Pershing in Mexico and France, his long wait between wars, his crusading in behalf of armored warfare. The present volume begins in 1940 and ends with...
From boyhood onward, Patton possessed a disconcertingly literal sense of his own destiny. On a dangerous plane flight in North Africa in 1943 Patton wrote in his diary: "We nearly hit several mountains, and I was scared till I thought of my destiny, and that calmed me." He could not die, he believed, until he had achieved his "mission," something immortal. In that, he was somewhat disappointed. Patton was a swashbuckling and inventive tactician. Yet his indiscretions-the slapping incident on Sicily, his undiplomatic opinions-persuaded Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall that however effective Patton was as a field officer...