Word: pattonisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first time in my 43 years of military experience that I have had to do anything else but attack." It was a permissible exaggeration: the Korean situation was fantastically different from Walker's World War II battle experience, passed entirely as a corps commander under the late George Patton, hard-riding master of the armored attack. Walton Walker's career under Patton did not begin until 48 days after Dday. The Normandy invasion had been preceded by tremendous planning and mountainous buildup; Walker's XX Corps (and the rest of Patton's Third Army) was held...
...Patton once said admiringly to another officer, as Walker was passing by: "There goes a fighting son-of-a-bitch." Patton himself had been described as a "purebred gamecock with brains," and he felt that Walker had satisfactorily absorbed his own battle philosophy. This was expounded in such Pattonisms, usually decked with profanity, as: "Never take counsel of your fears." "Don't worry about your flanks, let the enemy worry about them." "The way to get out of enemy fire is to advance...
...savagely contested; Walker directed one himself, under fire on the riverbank. Within days, the XX Corps lanced through the battleground that had been dismally fought over for years in World War I-Reims, Epernay, Chateau-Thierry, Verdun. Walker pushed on across the Meuse, but with the enemy in rout, Patton ordered him to "sit down" 40 miles short of Metz. The Third Army, which needed 450,000 gallons of automotive fuel a day, was almost...
Said General Patton in his memoirs: "I directed General Walker to stop fooling around . . . and go in and take it." Walker did. It was the first time in the era of gunpowder that Metz had been taken by storm...
Slashing Envelopment. During the Battle of the Bulge, in which most of the Third Army was pulled out of line to carve a spectacular corridor north to isolated Bastogne, the XX Corps' principal job was to hold the whole of Patton's depleted former front. Walker did it by mining and wiring in depth, plus aggressive patrolling. When the Bulge was erased, Walker was thirsty for action-and he got it. In a roaring campaign he cleaned up the Saar-Moselle triangle, seizing the key German stronghold of Trier, then took a leading part in the Third Army...