At the
end of World War II, one of America's top military leaders accurately assessed
the shift in the balance of world power which that war had produced and foresaw
the enormous danger of communist aggression against the West. Alone among U.S.
leaders he warned that America should act immediately, while her supremacy was
unchallengeable, to end that danger. Unfortunately, his warning went unheeded,
and he was quickly silenced by a convenient "accident" which took his life.
Thirty-two years ago, in the terrible summer of 1945, the U.S. Army had just
completed the destruction of Europe and had set up a government of military
occupation amid the ruins to rule the starving Germans and deal out victors'
justice to the vanquished. General George S. Patton, commander of the U.S.
Third Army, became military governor of the greater portion of the American
occupation zone of Germany.
Patton was regarded as the "fightingest"
general in all the Allied forces. He was considerably more audacious and
aggressive than most commanders, and his martial ferocity may very well have
been the deciding factor which led to the Allied victory. He personally
commanded his forces in many of the toughest and most decisive battles of the
war: in Tunisia, in Sicily, in the cracking of the Siegried Line, in holding
back the German advance during the Battle of the Bulge, in the exceptionally
bloody fighting around Bastogne in December 1944 and January 1945.
During the war Patton had respected the courage and the fighting
qualities of the Germans -- especially when he compared them with those of some
of America's allies -- but he had also swallowed whole the hate-inspired
wartime propaganda generated by America's alien media masters. He believed
Germany was a menace to America's freedom and that Germany's National Socialist
government was an especially evil institution. Acting on these beliefs he
talked incessantly of his desire to kill as many Germans as possible, and he
exhorted his troops to have the same goal. These bloodthirsty exhortations led
to the nickname "Blood and Guts" Patton.
It was only in the final days
of the war and during his tenure as military governor of Germany -- after he
had gotten to know both the Germans and America's "gallant Soviet allies" --
that Patton's understanding of the true situation grew and his opinions
changed. In his diary and in many letters to his family, friends, various
military colleagues, and government officials, he expressed his new
understanding and his apprehensions for the future. His diary and his letters
were published in 1974 by the Houghton Mifflin Company under the title The
Patton Papers.
Several months before the end of the war, General Patton
had recognized the fearful danger to the West posed by the Soviet Union, and he
had disagreed bitterly with the orders which he had been given to hold back his
army and wait for the Red Army to occupy vast stretches of German, Czech,
Rumanian, Hungarian, and Yugoslav territory, which the Americans could have
easily taken instead.
On May 7, 1945, just before the German
capitulation, Patton had a conference in Austria with U.S. Secretary of War
Robert Patterson. Patton was gravely concerned over the Soviet failure to
respect the demarcation lines separating the Soviet and American occupation
zones. He was also alarmed by plans in Washington for the immediate partial
demobilization of the U.S. Army.
Patton said to Patterson: "Let's keep
our boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and
strength to the Red Army. This is the only language they understand and
respect."
Patterson replied, "Oh, George, you have been so close to
this thing so long, you have lost sight of the big picture."
Patton
rejoined: "I understand the situation. Their (the Soviet) supply system is
inadequate to maintain them in a serious action such as I could put to them.
They have chickens in the coop and cattle on the hoof -- that's their supply
system. They could probably maintain themselves in the type of fighting I could
give them for rive days. After that it would make no difference how many
million men they have, and if you wanted Moscow I could give it to you. They
lived on the land coming down. There is insufficient left for them to maintain
themselves going back. Let's not give them time to build up their supplies. If
we do, then . . . we have had a victory over the Germans and disarmed them, but
we have failed in the liberation of Europe; we have lost the war!"
Patton's urgent and prophetic advice went unheeded by Patterson and the
other politicians and only served to give warning about Patton's feelings to
the alien conspirators behind the scenes in New York, Washington, and Moscow.
The more he saw of the Soviets, the stronger Patton's conviction grew
that the proper course of action would be to stifle communism then and there,
while the chance existed. Later in May 1945 he attended several meetings and
social affairs with top Red Army officers, and he evaluated them carefully. He
noted in his diary on May 14: "I have never seen in any army at any time,
including the German Imperial Army of 1912, as severe discipline as exists in
the Russian army. The officers, with few exceptions, give the appearance of
recently civilized Mongolian bandits."
And Patton's aide, General
Hobart Gay, noted in his own journal for May 14: "Everything they (the
Russians) did impressed one with the idea of virility and cruelty."
Nevertheless, Patton knew that the Americans could whip the Reds then
-- but perhaps not later. On May 18 he noted in his diary: "In my opinion, the
American Army as it now exists could beat the Russians with the greatest of
ease, because, while the Russians have good infantry, they are lacking in
artillery, air, tanks, and in the knowledge of the use of the combined arms,
whereas we excel in all three of these. If it should be necessary to fight the
Russians, the sooner we do it the better."
Two days later he repeated
his concern when he wrote his wife: "If we have to fight them, now is the time.
From now on we will get weaker and they stronger."
Having immediately
recognized the Soviet danger and urged a course of action which would have
freed all of eastern Europe from the communist yoke with the expenditure of far
less American blood than was spilled in Korea and Vietnam and would have
obviated both those later wars not to mention World War III -- Patton next came
to appreciate the true nature of the people for whom World War II was fought:
the Jews.
Most of the Jews swarming over Germany immediately after the
war came from Poland and Russia, and Patton found their personal habits
shockingly uncivilized.
He was disgusted by their behavior in the camps
for Displaced Persons (DP's) which the Americans built for them and even more
disgusted by the way they behaved when they were housed in German hospitals and
private homes. He observed with horror that "these people do not understand
toilets and refuse to use them except as repositories for tin cans, garbage,
and refuse . . . They decline, where practicable, to use latrines, preferring
to relieve themselves on the floor."
He described in his diary one DP
camp, "where, although room existed, the Jews were .crowded together to an
appalling extent, and in practically every room there was a pile of garbage in
one corner which was also used as a latrine. The Jews were only forced to
desist from their nastiness and clean up the mess by the threat of the butt
ends of rifles. Of course, I know the expression 'lost tribes of Israel'
applied to the tribes which disappeared -- not to the tribe of Judah from which
the current sons of bitches are descended. However, it is my personal opinion
that this too is a lost tribe -- lost to all decency."
Patton's initial
impressions of the Jews were not improved when he attended a Jewish religious
service at Eisenhower's insistence. His diary entry for September 17, 1945,
reads in part: "This happened to be the feast of Yom Kippur, so they were all
collected in a large, wooden building, which they called a synagogue. It
behooved General Eisenhower to make a speech to them. We entered the synagogue,
which was packed with the greatest stinking bunch of humanity I have ever seen.
When we got about halfway up, the head rabbi, who was dressed in a fur hat
similar to that worn by Henry VIII of England and in a surplice heavily
embroidered and very filthy, came down and met the General . . . The smell was
so terrible that I almost fainted and actually about three hours later lost my
lunch as the result of remembering it."
These experiences and a great
many others firmly convinced Patton that the Jews were an especially unsavory
variety of creature and hardly deserving of all the official concern the
American government was bestowing on them. Another September diary entry,
following a demand from Washington that more German housing be turned over to
Jews, summed up his feelings: "Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau and
Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still working. Harrison (a
U.S. State Department official) and his associates indicate that they feel
German civilians should be removed from houses for the purpose of housing
Displaced Persons. There are two errors in this assumption. First, when we
remove an individual German we punish an individual German, while the
punishment is -- not intended for the individual but for the race, Furthermore,
it is against my Anglo-Saxon conscience to remove a person from a house, which
is a punishment, without due process of law. In the second place, Harrison and
his ilk believe that the Displaced Person is a human being, which he is not,
and this applies particularly to the Jews, who are lower than animals."
One of the strongest factors in straightening out General Patton's
thinking on the conquered Germans was the behavior of America's controlled news
media toward them. At a press conference in Regensburg, Germany, on May 8,
1945, immediately after Germany's surrender, Patton was asked whether he
planned to treat captured SS troops differently from other German POW's. His
answer was: "No. SS means no more in Germany than being a Democrat in America
-- that is not to be quoted. I mean by that that initially the SS people were
special sons of bitches, but as the war progressed they ran out of sons of
bitches and then they put anybody in there. Some of the top SS men will be
treated as criminals, but there is no reason for trying someone who was drafted
into this outfit . . ."
Despite Patton's request that his remark not be
quoted, the press eagerly seized on it, and Jews and their front men in America
screamed in outrage over Patton's comparison of the SS and the Democratic Party
as well as over his announced intention of treating most SS prisoners humanely.
Patton refused to take hints from the press, however, and his
disagreement with the American occupation policy formulated in Washington grew.
Later in May he said to his brother-in-law: "I think that this
non-fraternization is very stupid. If we are going to keep American soldiers in
a country, they have to have some civilians to talk to. Furthermore, I think we
could do a lot for the German civilians by letting our soldiers talk to their
young people."
Various of Patton's colleagues tried to make it
perfectly clear what was expected of him. One politically ambitious officer,
Brig. Gen. Philip S. Gage, anxious to please the powers that be, wrote to
Patton: "Of course, I know that even your extensive powers are limited, but I
do hope that wherever and whenever you can you will do what you can to make the
German populace suffer. For God's sake, please don't ever go soft in regard to
them. Nothing could ever be too bad for them."
But Patton continued to
do what he thought was right, whenever he could. With great reluctance, and
only after repeated promptings from Eisenhower, he had thrown German families
out of their homes to make room for more than a million Jewish DP's -- part of
the famous "six million" who had supposedly been gassed -- but he balked when
ordered to begin blowing up German factories, in accord with the infamous
Morgenthau Plan to destroy Germany's economic basis forever. In his diary he
wrote: "I doubted the expediency of blowing up factories, because the ends for
which the factories are being blown up -- that is, preventing Germany from
preparing for war -- can be equally well attained through the destruction of
their machinery, while the buildings can be used to house thousands of homeless
persons."
Similarly, he expressed his doubts to his military colleagues
about the overwhelming emphasis being placed on the persecution of every German
who had formerly been a member of the National Socialist party. In a letter to
his wife of September 14, 1945, he said: "I am frankly opposed to this war
criminal stuff . It is not cricket and is Semitic. I am also opposed to sending
POW's to work as slaves in foreign lands, where many will be starved to death."
Despite his disagreement with official policy, Patton followed the
rules laid down by Morgenthau and others back in Washington as closely as his
conscience would allow, but he tried to moderate the effect, and this brought
him into increasing conflict with Eisenhower and the other politically
ambitious generals. In another letter to his wife he commented: "I have been at
Frankfurt for a civil government conference. If what we are doing (to the
Germans) is 'Liberty, then give me death.' I can't see how Americans can sink
so low. It is Semitic, and I am sure of it."
And in his diary he
noted:, "Today we received orders . . . in which we were told to give the Jews
special accommodations. If for Jews, why not Catholics, Mormons, etc? . . . We
are also turning over to the French several hundred thousand prisoners of war
to be used as slave labor in France. It is amusing to recall that we fought the
Revolution in defense of the rights of man and the Civil War to abolish slavery
and have now gone back on both principles."
His duties as military
governor took Patton to all parts of Germany and intimately acquainted him with
the German people and their condition. He could not help but compare them with
the French, the Italians, the Belgians, and even the British. This comparison
gradually forced him to the conclusion that World War II had been fought
against the wrong people.
After a visit to ruined Berlin, he wrote his
wife on July 21, 1945: "Berlin gave me the blues. We have destroyed what could
have been a good race, and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages.
And all Europe will be communist. It's said that for the first week after they
took it (Berlin), all women who ran were shot and those who did not were raped.
I could have taken it (instead of the Soviets) had I been allowed."
This conviction, that the politicians had used him and the U.S. Army
for a criminal purpose, grew in the following weeks. During a dinner with
French General Alphonse Juin in August, Patton was surprised to find the
Frenchman in agreement with him. His diary entry for August 18 quotes Gen.
Juin: "It is indeed unfortunate, mon General, that the English and the
Americans have destroyed in Europe the only sound country -- and I do not mean
France. Therefore, the road is now open for the advent of Russian communism."
Later diary entries and letters to his wife reiterate this same
conclusion. On August 31 he wrote: "Actually, the Germans are the only decent
people left in Europe. it's a choice between them and the Russians. I prefer
the Germans." And on September 2: "What we are doing is to destroy the only
semi-modern state in Europe, so that Russia can swallow the whole."
By
this time the Morgenthauists and media monopolists had decided that Patton was
incorrigible and must be discredited. So they began a non-stop hounding of him
in the press, a la Watergate, accusing him of being "soft on Nazis" and
continually recalling an incident in which he had slapped a shirker two years
previously, during the Sicily campaign. A New York newspaper printed the
completely false claim that when Patton had slapped the soldier who was Jewish,
he had called him a "yellow-bellied Jew."
Then, in a press conference
on September 22, reporters hatched a scheme to needle Patton into losing his
temper and making statements which could be used against him. The scheme
worked. The press interpreted one of Patton's answers to their insistent
questions as to why he was not pressing the Nazi-hunt hard enough as: "The Nazi
thing is just like a Democrat-Republican fight." The New York Times headlined
this quote, and other papers all across America picked it up.
The
unmistakable hatred which had been directed at him during this press conference
finally opened Patton's eyes fully as to what was afoot. In his diary that
night lie wrote: "There is a very apparent Semitic influence in the press. They
are trying to do two things: first, implement communism, and second, see that
all businessmen of German ancestry and non-Jewish antecedents are thrown out of
their jobs. They have utterly lost the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice and
feel that a man can be kicked out because somebody else says he is a Nazi. They
were evidently quite shocked when I told them I would kick nobody out without
the successful proof of guilt before a court of law . . . Another point which
the press harped on was the fact that we were doing too much for the Germans to
the detriment of the DP's, most of whom are Jews. I could not give the answer
to that one, because the answer is that, in my opinion and that of most
nonpolitical officers, it is vitally necessary for us to build Germany up now
as a buffer state against Russia. In fact, I am afraid we have waited too
long."
And in a letter of the same date to his wife: "I will probably
be in the headlines before you get this, as the press is trying to quote me as
being more interested in restoring order in Germany than in catching Nazis. I
can't tell them the truth that unless we restore Germany we will insure that
communism takes America."
Eisenhower responded immediately to the press
outcry against Patton and made the decision to relieve him of his duties as
military governor and "kick him upstairs" as the commander of the Fifteenth
Army. In a letter to his wife on September 29, Patton indicated that he was, in
a way, not unhappy with his new assignment, because "I would like it much
better than being a sort of executioner to the best race in Europe."
But even his change of duties did not shut Patton up. In his diary
entry of October 1 we find the observation: "In thinking over the situation, I
could not but be impressed with the belief that at the present moment the
unblemished record of the American Army for non-political activities is about
to be lost. Everyone seems to be more interested in the effects which his
actions will have on his political future than in carrying out the motto of the
United States Military Academy, 'Duty, Honor, Country.' I hope that after the
current crop of political aspirants has been gathered our former tradition will
be restored."
And Patton continued to express these sentiments to his
friends -- and those he thought were his friends. On October 22 he wrote a long
letter to Maj. Gen. James G. Harbord, who was back in the States. In the letter
Patton bitterly condemned the Morgenthau policy; Eisenhower's pusillanimous
behavior in the face of Jewish demands; the strong pro-Soviet bias in the
press; and the politicization, corruption, degradation, and demoralization of
the U.S. Army which these things were causing.
He saw the
demoralization of the Army as a deliberate goal of America's enemies: "I have
been just as furious as you at the compilation of lies which the communist and
Semitic elements of our government have leveled against me and practically
every other commander. In my opinion it is a deliberate attempt to alienate the
soldier vote from the commanders, because the communists know that soldiers are
not communistic, and they fear what eleven million votes (of veterans) would
do."
His denunciation of the politicization of the Army was scathing:
"All the general officers in the higher brackets receive each morning from the
War Department a set of American (newspaper) headlines, and, with the sole
exception of myself, they guide themselves during the ensuing day by what they
have read in the papers. . . ."
In his letter to Harbord, Patton also
revealed his own plans to fight those who were destroying the morale and
integrity of the Army and endangering America's future by not opposing the
growing Soviet might: "It is my present thought . . . that when I finish this
job, which will be around the first of the year, I shall resign, not retire,
because if I retire I will still have a gag in my mouth . . . I should not
start a limited counterattack, which would be contrary to my military theories,
but should wait until I can start an all-out offensive . . . ."