PATTON: A BIOGRAPHY (11 page)

Despite taking G—3 from him, Patton’s commanding officers consistently rated him an outstanding officer, although one noted that he was “invaluable in war . . . but a disturbing element in time of peace.”
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Patton took this as high praise, but doubtless it was not intended that way. In any case, it was an uncannily perceptive appraisal.

In May, soon after he lost G—3, Patton was transferred to the Office of the Chief of Cavalry in Washington, D.C. It was yet another staff job, but it also put him front and center in the great debate of the interwar American cavalry: How far should mechanization go? In the war between the horse and the machine, which should win? It was a wrenching issue for Patton, who loved horses and honored the traditions of the cavalry. His heart was with the animals and the men who rode them into battle, but his head was increasingly with the machines. Moreover, he believed that an infantry monopoly on armor would squeeze the cavalry ultimately into irrelevance. By the beginning of the 1930s, Patton found himself cajoling his fellow cavalrymen into opening their minds to the new machines. He told them that only cavalrymen could use light tanks the way they should be used— as the mechanized equivalent of horses, for mobility over rough terrain. He argued that the tank was here to stay and that if cavalry did not get control of the new weapon, cavalry would be permanently sidelined. But just as he began to prevail on his colleagues, Congress, laboring in the throes of the Great Depression, pulled the purse strings tighter. A short-lived experiment called the “Mechanized Force,” combining personnel from the cavalry, infantry, and artillery branches to operate tanks, armored cars, and other vehicles, ended just months after it had begun. Salvaging what he could with the shoestring budget he had, Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur ordered all three service arms to continue experimenting with mechanization as best they could. This meant that the infantry kept its handful of tanks active, and the cavalry did the same with its few armored scout cars. But equipment was so scarce that meaningful unit maneuvers could not be conducted.

Patton left the Office of the Chief of Cavalry during the summer of 1931,    then took time off with his wife and children at Green Meadows, the grand home Beatrice had purchased for them on the banks of the Ipswich River in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. In September, he enrolled in the Army War College, at the time based in Washington. Only the most outstanding officers were selected for this, the army’s ultimate institution of higher learning. Patton emerged from the college a “Distinguished Graduate” in June 1932. His growing academic distinction, as well as his unflagging passion for books, demonstrates that the adult Patton had come to terms with his dyslexia. However, he was never entirely free of the disability. Throughout his career, Patton made it his practice either to speak spontaneously or to learn the text of his speeches by heart. Reading a full-length speech aloud in public still presented too many chances for embarrassing failure.

In July, Patton was assigned as executive officer of 3rd Cavalry, at Fort Myer. Three weeks into his new job, he found himself embroiled in the first of several ugly episodes that would mar and even threaten his career. America’s veterans of the Great War were entitled by law to a cash payment—a so-called bonus—payable in 1945. The problem was that, by 1932,    the Great Depression had put many veterans out of work. A grassroots veterans’ movement developed to demand from Congress immediate payment of the bonuses, and, in May, 15,000 to 20,000 “Bonus Marchers” descended on Washington in a demonstration designed to shame the legislators into releasing the bonus money. The members of the “Bonus Army,” which included Patton’s heroic orderly Joe Angelo, camped in the city and just outside of it, at Anacostia Flats, Maryland. Although the House of Representatives passed a bonus bill on June 15, the Senate voted it down. By then, the Anacostia Flats camp had grown into a sprawling array of tents, crates, and shacks, a squalid “Hooverville” (as similar Depression-era shanty towns were dubbed) skulking in the shadow of the Capitol dome.

On July 28, after the Senate rejected the bonus bill, rioting broke out in the city. President Herbert Hoover ordered Douglas MacArthur to clear the marchers from Pennsylvania Avenue and the downtown area, but not to cross into the Anacostia camp. MacArthur ordered the 3rd Cavalry to ride into the city and await the 16th Infantry. As executive officer, Patton was not expected to lead men in riot duty, but the promise of action was too great a lure. He rode at the head of 217 men and 14 officers. While the regiment waited behind the White House, Patton rode out alone along Pennsylvania Avenue to assess the situation. He was cheered by some of the thousands of Bonus Marchers who lined the street. They recognized him from newspaper photographs that had appeared during World War I and even into the 1930s. Others jeered and hooted. Whether they recognized George S. Patton or not, they knew the uniform of a high-ranking officer when they saw one.

At about 4:00 P.M. the 3rd Cavalry and 16th Infantry formed up, and the cavalry led the infantry down Pennsylvania Avenue. It was not a pretty picture: helmeted, armed with carbines and drawn sabers, a cavalry unit of the United States Army was acting against former soldiers of that same army on a principal street of the capital of the world’s oldest democracy. In response to agitation from the crowd, Patton and his men cleared the way by menacing rowdy Bonus Marchers with the very sabers their executive officer had designed. Those who refused to move were struck on the rump with the flat of the weapon. Patton personally administered several such blows. The avenue was quickly cleared.

This accomplished, MacArthur personally ordered Patton to cross the Anacostia River and clear the Flats. It was a violation of the president’s direct instructions, but MacArthur, fearing that “Bolshevik” elements among the marchers would foment a full-scale insurrection, refused to accept the chief executive’s order. Accordingly, Patton and the Third Cavalry cleared the Hooverville on the Flats. In the process, some tents and shanties caught fire. The cause of the conflagration has never been determined, but the Bonus Marchers believed it had been set as part of the army’s deliberate assault.

The government’s ugly response to the Bonus Marchers forever stained Herbert Hoover’s already troubled presidency. For his part, MacArthur was wholly unapologetic, claiming he had done what he did to protect the city and the government. Patton was not so sure. The idea of marching against former soldiers, including some he may have led in battle and one, Joe Angelo, who had saved his life, was “most distasteful.”
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Nevertheless, Patton believed with MacArthur that an insurrection was imminent, and he later defended his actions by claiming that they saved lives and property. As for the public, many Americans would long remember the image of a spit-and-polish United States military officer lashing out with his saber at unarmed men who had served their country and were now jobless, hungry, and unable to support their families.

Except for the Bonus March incident, the Great Depression hardly touched the Pattons. Indeed, throughout his three-year tour of duty at Fort Myer, Patton led the life of a country squire, playing polo and riding to the hounds—and doing both with a reckless abandon that dared injury or death. Promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army on March 1, 1934, Patton was transferred to the Hawaiian Department once again, as G—2, in spring 1935. The same hunger for dangerous adventure that drove him to ride so hard and so recklessly prompted him to sail to his Hawaiian post from Los Angeles aboard his new yacht. Acting as skipper and navigator, commanding an amateur crew, and with Beatrice a passenger, Patton set out on May 7 and arrived in Honolulu on June 8. (The children would arrive later by regular passenger liner.)

The sailing had been exhilarating, but, once he arrived at his new post, the exhilaration quickly faded. Patton was G—2, intelligence officer, a position he did not much care for. This time, even the tropical surroundings did little to make him feel good about turning 50 with no new war in sight. He began drinking to excess. His ardor for Beatrice cooled suddenly and deeply, and he earned a reputation as a local lady’s man. To his wife, he made little secret of his liaisons, and if she pressed the matter, he became by turns sullen and even verbally abusive. In truth, the affairs generally meant little to him—with the exception of a relationship that developed between him and his niece Jean Gordon, the beautiful dark-haired daughter of Beatrice’s older half-sister and a close friend of the Pattons’ own daughter, Ruth Ellen. Jean was 21 years old when she apparently fell in love with Patton.

One of Patton’s regular assignments during this period was to purchase horses for the army. He relished the duty, and he often took family members along on buying trips. Beatrice, Ruth Ellen, and Jean Gordon were to accompany him to the big island of Hawaii, where he was to purchase mounts from Alfred Carter, who ran the 500,000-acre Parker Ranch. Beatrice fell ill before the trip, and Ruth Ellen decided to stay home to look after her mother. Patton and Jean traveled alone together, and a passionate affair reportedly developed. Ruth Ellen and a few others who knew both Jean and Patton subsequently denied any romance. Jean, they said, loved Patton as an uncle, and he, in turn, loved her as a niece or even a daughter. But, in later years, Patton boasted of the affair, and it is certain that Beatrice believed the two were intimately involved.

The grim fact was that life in the Patton household had become, more often than not, sordid, and on at least one occasion, Patton took the sordidness outside the family. During the Inter-Island Polo Championship in August 1935, Patton exploded at Walter Dillingham, a local manufacturing magnate and captain of the Oahu team, which was playing against the army team, captained by Patton. Dillingham collided with Patton, who cursed him as “an old son of a bitch,” then continued: “I’ll run you right down Front Street.” It was behavior not befitting what Patton deemed himself to be: an officer
and
a gentleman. As soon as the chukker ended, his commanding officer, Hugh Drum, relieved Patton of his captaincy and barred him from continuing to play. Only a protest to Drum by Dillingham and the captain of the Maui team restored Patton. They would not play, they said, if “George” did not return to the field.
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On June 12, 1937, Patton, Beatrice, and their son George sailed the family yacht from Honolulu back to Los Angeles, arriving on July 12. They sold the craft, then traveled to their Massachusetts home for an extended leave. During this time, while Patton was out riding with Beatrice, her horse kicked him in the leg, fracturing it in two places. The injury laid Patton up for six months, during which time he developed phlebitis—a blood clot condition—which nearly killed him. Even after he was out of immediate danger, there were serious questions about his ability to resume active duty. In 1938, army physicians decided to assign him to limited administrative duty for a time in the Academic Department of the Cavalry School at Fort Riley, Kansas. It turned out to be a salubrious assignment and a much-needed tonic for Patton’s physical as well as emotional health.

CHAPTER 6

AFTER SIX MONTHS OF LIGHT DUTY, HIS LEG fully recovered, Patton was promoted to regular army colonel and, on July 24, given command of the 5th Cavalry at Fort Clark. For the middle-age trooper, it was a kind of second youth or, at least, a return to the Wild West range riding he had enjoyed at the Sierra Blanca outpost during the Punitive Expedition of 1916—1917. Not only was Patton able to enjoy roughing it in the saddle, he quickly established connections with the Texas equivalent of Washington’s social elite: the prosperous ranchers in the countryside surrounding Fort Clark. He was as happy as he could be—in the absence of a war.

Patton had a reputation not only as one of the army’s ablest and most “colorful” officers, but also, quite possibly, thanks to his marriage with Beatrice, as its wealthiest. And that aspect of his notoriety was about to cost him. Colonel Jonathan Wainwright, who would earn grim fame in the coming war as the commander of doomed Bataan, was going broke as commanding officer of Fort Myer. The army’s showplace installation, which most officers considered a plum assignment, made inordinate social demands on senior commanders, who were expected to finance endless entertainment expenses from their own pockets. Wainwright’s pockets were empty, and he requested a transfer. The army turned to what it knew were the deep pockets of Patton. In December, Major General John Herr personally called at the Patton home to tell him that he was being reassigned to Fort Myer. Patton had enjoyed Fort Myer, but the
real
army, he felt, was at places like Fort Clark. To Herr he could only reply Yes, sir, but to Beatrice he vented his wrathful disappointment. “You and your money have ruined my career,” he snapped at her, and the two argued bitterly as they packed for the trip east.
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The Fort Riley and Fort Clark interlude had been a tonic to the Pattons’ often turbulent marriage. Reassignment to Fort Myer brought not only a return of discontent, but an intensification of it. Dark as Patton’s mood was, the posting adjacent to Washington, D.C., hardly “ruined” his career. On the contrary, it gave Patton an opportunity to come within the orbit of George C. Marshall, who, in the spring of 1939, became the acting chief of staff, the army’s senior officer. Patton and Marshall were both stationed at Fort Myer, and when Marshall’s on-post house was being repaired and repainted, Patton invited him to share his family’s house for the duration of the work. Marshall accepted the invitation, but it was certainly Patton’s record as a leader of troops, not his hospitality, that moved Marshall to ensure his eligibility for promotion to brigadier general. Eligibility, however, was one thing, and actual promotion another. Commanding a cavalry regiment was a colonel’s job. As along as that job was his, Patton would remain a colonel, and as long as peace prevailed, commanding a regiment would probably be his job. Then, on September 1, 1939, two momentous events occurred. George C. Marshall was permanently and formally elevated to Army Chief of Staff, and, after counterfeiting a Polish assault on a German border radio transmitter, the armies of Adolf Hitler invaded Poland, beginning a new world war.