Okla-homey
12/21/2007, 08:22 AM
http://aycu02.webshots.com/image/37241/2005073143213899419_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005073143213899419)
December 21, 1945: "Old Blood and Guts" dies
On this day, 62 years ago, General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S. 3rd Army, dies from injuries suffered not in battle but in a freak car accident. He was 60 years old.
Born in California, he was the grandson of a Confederate officer (VMI Class of 1852) who commanded the 22d Virginia Infantry under "Stonewall" Jackson. Grandfather Patton was killed at the battle of Winchester. Patton's dad, was born in Charleston (now West Virginia), and was a member of the VMI Class of 1877.
After graduation, papa Patton taught at VMI for one year; studied law and became a prominent attorney in Los Angeles, where he was also active in politics. His son George Jr. was born in 1885. He started his military career at VMI, but later transferred to West Point. Patton graduated from the US Military Academy in 1909 near the bottom of his class. Patton almost certainly suffered from dyslexia.
http://aycu12.webshots.com/image/37691/2005065823023454155_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005065823023454155)
Cadet Patton
http://aycu25.webshots.com/image/39424/2005016496428471865_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005016496428471865)
Training for the 1912 Olympics
He represented the United States in the 1912 Olympics as the first American competitor in the modern pentathlon. He did not win a medal. He went on to serve in the infant Tank Corps during World War I, an experience that made Patton a dedicated proponent of tank warfare.
http://aycu37.webshots.com/image/35156/2005054876307152775_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005054876307152775)
Major Patton in France in 1918.
He was an unusual professional officer to say the least. His speech was profane, but he was intensely religious. He also believed in reincarnation and that he had been a soldier for a few thousand years. He loved his soldiers, but that love might be best described as "tough love" because he beleived the best way to keep them alive was to win quick victories through iron discipline and aggressive action which spilled a lot of enemy "blood and guts." Thus, his nickname.
http://aycu15.webshots.com/image/39214/2005003717091325193_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005003717091325193)
A letter written to the father of a man who received a battlefield commission just five days before his death in combat.
In 1943, as commander of the U.S. 7th Army, he capped a hard driving amphibious invasion of Sicily by capturing Palermo.
Along the way, Patton's mouth proved as dangerous to his career as the Germans. When he berated and slapped a hospitalized soldier diagnosed with "shell shock," but whom Patton accused of "malingering," the press turned on him, and pressure was applied to cut him down to size.
He might have found himself enjoying early retirement but for the intervention of General Dwight Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander) and General George Marshall (Army Chief of Staff) on his behalf. After several months of inactivity, he was put back to work following the succesful invasion of France in June 1944.
And work he did. During the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944, Patton once again succeeded in employing a complex and bold strategy. Patton's tankers and motorized infantry met the German thrust into Bastogne with a powerful Allied counterattack, thus relieving the beleagured US paratroopers barely hanging on in the city. Patton's offensive drove the Germans east and back across the Rhine.
http://aycu24.webshots.com/image/37743/2005058086457920145_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005058086457920145)
Driving towards Bastogne amid the ice and snow of the coldest Eurpopean winter in a hundred years.
In March 1945, Patton's army swept through southern Germany into Czechoslovakia like (to use one of his phrases) "like crap through a goose." Patton was stopped from securing Czechoslovakia by Allied headquarters, out of respect for the Soviets' postwar political plans for Eastern Europe.
Patton had many gifts, but diplomacy was not one of them. Shortly after the war in Europe ended, while stationed in Germany, he criticized the process of "denazification," the removal of former Nazi Party members from positions of political, administrative, and governmental power.
Patton stated his opinion, if Germany was to rebuild itself and defend itself from Soviet incursions, the policy of barring ex-nazis from any position of authority would greatly slow the process. He was right of course, since everyone with any experience in running things had to have been a Nazi party member in pre-1945 Germany. Problem was, you couldn't say such a thing because it simply wasn't PC.
His impolitic press statements questioning the policy caused Eisenhower to remove him as U.S. commander in Bavaria. The last straw was when he told Ike; who was beginning to undertstand the Sov's where quickly becoming an enemy on the eve of the Cold War; if Ike would turn him loose, Patton could put a few million former German soldiers, who were unemployed and in need of work, back in uniform, and along with the powerful US forces still in Europe, could kick the Russians back behind their pre-war border. He added he could even make it look like they started it.
Patton was promptly transferred to the 15th Army Group. In December of 1945 he suffered a broken neck in a car accident and died on this day less than two weeks later.
http://aycu06.webshots.com/image/36165/2005040565231696736_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005040565231696736)
At his request, he was interred among his former soldiers in a European US military cemetery.
http://aycu36.webshots.com/image/36755/2005054756085056959_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005054756085056959)
Patton's son, George S. Patton III was himself a fine officer. rising to the rank of major general (two stars) he served three combat tours in Viet Nam. In retirement, he died from complications from hip surgery in 1980.
Transcript of the actual Patton pep talk given in England in May 17, 1944 on which the opening scene of the motion picture about him is based. Caution: bad language.
Men, this stuff some sources sling around about America wanting to stay out of the war and not wanting to fight is a lot of baloney! Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward; Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost and never will lose a war.
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you, right here today, would be killed in a major battle.
Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the same, or get the hell slammed out of them.
The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honour, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood.
All through your Army careers, you've been bitching about what you call "chicken-sh_t drills." That, like everything else in the Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is instant obedience to orders and to create and maintain constant alertness! This must be bred into every soldier. A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son-of-a-b_tch will sneak up behind him with a sock full of sh_t! There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on his job - but they are German graves, because we caught the bast_rds asleep!
An Army is a team, lives, sleeps, fights, and eats as a team. This individual hero stuff is a lot of horse sh_t! The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about f__king! Every single man in the Army plays a vital role. Every man has his job to do and must do it. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of a shell overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? What if every man thought, "They won't miss me, just one in millions?" Where in Hell would we be now? Where would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be?
No, thank God, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job, serves the whole. Ordnance men supply and maintain the guns and vast machinery of this war, to keep us rolling. Quartermasters bring up clothes and food, for where we're going, there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the guy who boils the water to keep us from getting the G.I. sh_ts!
Remember, men, you don't know I'm here. No mention of that is to be made in any letters. The USA is supposed to be wondering what the hell has happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army, I'm not supposed even to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. I want them to look up and howl, "Ach, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-b_tch Patton again!"
We want to get this thing over and get the hell out of here, and get at those purple-p_ssin' Japs!!! The shortest road home is through Berlin and Tokyo! We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they have or ever will have!
There's one great thing you men can say when it's all over and you're home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I shovelled sh_t in Louisiana."
http://aycu29.webshots.com/image/36908/2005078431577739141_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005078431577739141)
December 21, 1945: "Old Blood and Guts" dies
On this day, 62 years ago, General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S. 3rd Army, dies from injuries suffered not in battle but in a freak car accident. He was 60 years old.
Born in California, he was the grandson of a Confederate officer (VMI Class of 1852) who commanded the 22d Virginia Infantry under "Stonewall" Jackson. Grandfather Patton was killed at the battle of Winchester. Patton's dad, was born in Charleston (now West Virginia), and was a member of the VMI Class of 1877.
After graduation, papa Patton taught at VMI for one year; studied law and became a prominent attorney in Los Angeles, where he was also active in politics. His son George Jr. was born in 1885. He started his military career at VMI, but later transferred to West Point. Patton graduated from the US Military Academy in 1909 near the bottom of his class. Patton almost certainly suffered from dyslexia.
http://aycu12.webshots.com/image/37691/2005065823023454155_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005065823023454155)
Cadet Patton
http://aycu25.webshots.com/image/39424/2005016496428471865_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005016496428471865)
Training for the 1912 Olympics
He represented the United States in the 1912 Olympics as the first American competitor in the modern pentathlon. He did not win a medal. He went on to serve in the infant Tank Corps during World War I, an experience that made Patton a dedicated proponent of tank warfare.
http://aycu37.webshots.com/image/35156/2005054876307152775_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005054876307152775)
Major Patton in France in 1918.
He was an unusual professional officer to say the least. His speech was profane, but he was intensely religious. He also believed in reincarnation and that he had been a soldier for a few thousand years. He loved his soldiers, but that love might be best described as "tough love" because he beleived the best way to keep them alive was to win quick victories through iron discipline and aggressive action which spilled a lot of enemy "blood and guts." Thus, his nickname.
http://aycu15.webshots.com/image/39214/2005003717091325193_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005003717091325193)
A letter written to the father of a man who received a battlefield commission just five days before his death in combat.
In 1943, as commander of the U.S. 7th Army, he capped a hard driving amphibious invasion of Sicily by capturing Palermo.
Along the way, Patton's mouth proved as dangerous to his career as the Germans. When he berated and slapped a hospitalized soldier diagnosed with "shell shock," but whom Patton accused of "malingering," the press turned on him, and pressure was applied to cut him down to size.
He might have found himself enjoying early retirement but for the intervention of General Dwight Eisenhower (Supreme Allied Commander) and General George Marshall (Army Chief of Staff) on his behalf. After several months of inactivity, he was put back to work following the succesful invasion of France in June 1944.
And work he did. During the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944, Patton once again succeeded in employing a complex and bold strategy. Patton's tankers and motorized infantry met the German thrust into Bastogne with a powerful Allied counterattack, thus relieving the beleagured US paratroopers barely hanging on in the city. Patton's offensive drove the Germans east and back across the Rhine.
http://aycu24.webshots.com/image/37743/2005058086457920145_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005058086457920145)
Driving towards Bastogne amid the ice and snow of the coldest Eurpopean winter in a hundred years.
In March 1945, Patton's army swept through southern Germany into Czechoslovakia like (to use one of his phrases) "like crap through a goose." Patton was stopped from securing Czechoslovakia by Allied headquarters, out of respect for the Soviets' postwar political plans for Eastern Europe.
Patton had many gifts, but diplomacy was not one of them. Shortly after the war in Europe ended, while stationed in Germany, he criticized the process of "denazification," the removal of former Nazi Party members from positions of political, administrative, and governmental power.
Patton stated his opinion, if Germany was to rebuild itself and defend itself from Soviet incursions, the policy of barring ex-nazis from any position of authority would greatly slow the process. He was right of course, since everyone with any experience in running things had to have been a Nazi party member in pre-1945 Germany. Problem was, you couldn't say such a thing because it simply wasn't PC.
His impolitic press statements questioning the policy caused Eisenhower to remove him as U.S. commander in Bavaria. The last straw was when he told Ike; who was beginning to undertstand the Sov's where quickly becoming an enemy on the eve of the Cold War; if Ike would turn him loose, Patton could put a few million former German soldiers, who were unemployed and in need of work, back in uniform, and along with the powerful US forces still in Europe, could kick the Russians back behind their pre-war border. He added he could even make it look like they started it.
Patton was promptly transferred to the 15th Army Group. In December of 1945 he suffered a broken neck in a car accident and died on this day less than two weeks later.
http://aycu06.webshots.com/image/36165/2005040565231696736_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005040565231696736)
At his request, he was interred among his former soldiers in a European US military cemetery.
http://aycu36.webshots.com/image/36755/2005054756085056959_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005054756085056959)
Patton's son, George S. Patton III was himself a fine officer. rising to the rank of major general (two stars) he served three combat tours in Viet Nam. In retirement, he died from complications from hip surgery in 1980.
Transcript of the actual Patton pep talk given in England in May 17, 1944 on which the opening scene of the motion picture about him is based. Caution: bad language.
Men, this stuff some sources sling around about America wanting to stay out of the war and not wanting to fight is a lot of baloney! Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle. America loves a winner. America will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise a coward; Americans play to win. That's why America has never lost and never will lose a war.
You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you, right here today, would be killed in a major battle.
Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all of us. And every man is scared in his first action. If he says he's not, he's a goddamn liar. Some men are cowards, yes, but they fight just the same, or get the hell slammed out of them.
The real hero is the man who fights even though he's scared. Some get over their fright in a minute, under fire; others take an hour; for some it takes days; but a real man will never let the fear of death overpower his honour, his sense of duty, to his country and to his manhood.
All through your Army careers, you've been bitching about what you call "chicken-sh_t drills." That, like everything else in the Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is instant obedience to orders and to create and maintain constant alertness! This must be bred into every soldier. A man must be alert all the time if he expects to stay alive. If not, some German son-of-a-b_tch will sneak up behind him with a sock full of sh_t! There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on his job - but they are German graves, because we caught the bast_rds asleep!
An Army is a team, lives, sleeps, fights, and eats as a team. This individual hero stuff is a lot of horse sh_t! The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about f__king! Every single man in the Army plays a vital role. Every man has his job to do and must do it. What if every truck driver decided that he didn't like the whine of a shell overhead, turned yellow and jumped headlong into a ditch? What if every man thought, "They won't miss me, just one in millions?" Where in Hell would we be now? Where would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be?
No, thank God, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job, serves the whole. Ordnance men supply and maintain the guns and vast machinery of this war, to keep us rolling. Quartermasters bring up clothes and food, for where we're going, there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the guy who boils the water to keep us from getting the G.I. sh_ts!
Remember, men, you don't know I'm here. No mention of that is to be made in any letters. The USA is supposed to be wondering what the hell has happened to me. I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army, I'm not supposed even to be in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the goddamn Germans. I want them to look up and howl, "Ach, it's the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-b_tch Patton again!"
We want to get this thing over and get the hell out of here, and get at those purple-p_ssin' Japs!!! The shortest road home is through Berlin and Tokyo! We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by showing the enemy we have more guts than they have or ever will have!
There's one great thing you men can say when it's all over and you're home once more. You can thank God that twenty years from now, when you're sitting around the fireside with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the war, you won't have to shift him to the other knee, cough, and say, "I shovelled sh_t in Louisiana."
http://aycu29.webshots.com/image/36908/2005078431577739141_rs.jpg (http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2005078431577739141)