Word: tanked
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Where General Patton might be in the next three hours he himself did not know. If Patton got a hunch-and Ike Eisenhower gave him the green light-he might peel off with a tank column for Berlin, or Leipzig or Berchtesgaden, at a moment's notice. If Patton's wildest dream came true, he would find Adolf Hitler in a German tank and slug it out with him. But for the moment, dreams aside, Patton had reason for calm and happy reflection. He was having the time of his action-choked, 40-year Army career...
...field he shouts orders in a high-pitched voice. He can rawhide a private or a lesser general with a flow of profanity that is perhaps the richest in all the hard-swearing U.S. armies. A moment later he can be gently lifting a wounded man from a tank, calming him with soothing words...
...Night. Impatient of routine and red tape, Patton habitually asks and gets the impossible from his supply men. During the winter bog-down on the Saar front, the Third's tanks floundered in the greasy mud. Someone recommended "duck bills"-metal flanges to be welded to tank treads to give them wider grip. Patton tried to get them, "through channels," and finally got 168 duck bills- enough to equip one tank. Next day four companies of the Third's ordnance mechanics, about 1,000 men, were set to work on scrapped treads and other material. Patton wanted duck...
This crack division has had three crack commanders. First was doughty, 57-year-old Major General John S. Wood, who took a pounding as his tank bumped over Brittany, then rumbled 400 miles across France. Patton's grey-haired, hard-as-nails chief of staff, Major General Hugh S. Gaffey, took it over in December. Soon after the Rhine crossings, Gaffey was made a corps commander. Now the 4th is run by dark, handsome Brigadier General William Hoge, who seized the Remagen bridge intact while he was with the First Army, then captured whole the Main River bridge...
Patton also knows his enemy's weapons and, among others in the field, has been defender of the highly maneuverable U.S. Sherman tank v. heavier German tanks. Last week the General apparently had a clinching last word in the tank argument. He could say: look where ours are, and look where theirs...